#From enacting violence on the bad guys seeing as he spent so much of his life being the weak one. It's insane

[the-eeveekins]

I love G-Witch's ending. While I do wish the journey had been longer, that we had gotten more time with the characters and the world, I would not change that destination. I still want it to end with Suletta saving her family at Quiet Zero.

"It's too happy, no one died!" I actually love this! Gundam has 45 years of bittersweet and occasionally downer endings. We can have one ending that is almost unambiguously a happy one. People always talk about finding non-violent solutions, about solving problems peacefully. And in a Gundam first, Suletta does that. She solves a violent situation with non-violence, and just this once, everybody lived!

"That was accomplished with bullshit space magic though!" Look, setting aside the fact that Bullshit Space Magic has been a part of Gundam since the original (and is often MORE bullshit in UC), this show is called The Witch From Mercury. If there was any Gundam series where Bullshit Space Magic saving the day and solving the problem is thematically appropriate and should not be an issue, it's this one.

"The bad guys lived and escaped jail!" I'm fine with this, especially since every good character survived too. And it's not like they didn't suffer any consequences. Miorine dissvolved the Benerit Group. Their empire is gone, along with their wealth and power. They may be free (for now), but they're definitely miserable. With Shaddiq's help, Miorine exposed the SAL's crimes, and considering the precarious position they were in previously, it's likely there was a major shake-up. The power structures in space were completely shaken up and changed, and much of it's power was transferred to Earth.

"What about Shaddiq?" Look, I definitely understand the contextual issues with Shaddiq being the only martyr. But in the show itself, Shaddiq accomplished his goals. He got to see the Benerit Group dissolved and their assets placed in the hands of Earthian companies, all without further violence. He secured the freedom of the women working for them, and importantly, they all now work for Miorine in her efforts to improve Earth and make reparations for Spacians. And as a last gift and blessing to Miorine and her new family, he took the fall for Quiet Zero while he was at it. Shaddiq may be imprisoned unlike the former BG members, but unlike them, he is a happy and satisfied man.

It's rare for the main characters in Gundam to enact massive, systemic change for the better, especially permanently. Amuro, Kamille and Judau did not change the world in any significant fashion. Their world was still mired in conflict after their reapective conflicts, to the point that Amuro dies in a later conflict and Judau gets so sick of things not changing for the better that he abandons Earth and later the solar system. Yet there is a lot of criticism that Suletta & Miorine didn’t solve all of Ad Stella's problems, that they did their part and peaced out. But their part was destroying the immediate threat of Gundams and Quiet Zero, they dismantled the Benerit Group power structure and put it in the hands of Earth and they exposed the SAL. They made huge changes to the world and they didn't stop. Miorine is still using her company to make amends for the BG's crimes and improve the lives of Earthians. Suletta has built a school on Mercury and is now building one on Earth. Even if they're not going to be fighting on the front lines, they're still fighting to make their world a better place.

That's not to say the ending is perfect. I don't think Nika should have spent 3 years in jail because of a guilty conscience and because Martin is a snitch. I don't think you should ruin the thematics of Suletta facing down and battling Quiet Zero by herself, but the part of me who loves to see giant robots fight wishes there could have been a way to involve the Demi-Barding, Pharact and Schwarzette in more action during the end. If not at QZ, then earlier in the series.

I personally believe a lot of the criticism of the ending boils down to preference, and people not preferring how G-Witch chose to end things, rather than those things being objectively bad. I think a lot of fans struggle to accept that G-Witch was trying to do something smaller, something different, and they still can't let go of wanting it to be something it never tried to be. Did it do what it wanted to do perfectly? Definitely not. It forgot what it was at points in S2 and I'd argue it actually cooked too good with it's background details, making people want more of something it never set out to do. But ultimately it was never trying to be a 50 episode war epic focused on the wider world. It was about these two girls and their families.

Suletta & Miorine's scene together in the wheat field on Earth is perhaps one of my favorite scenes in anime. Maybe in any media. I wouldn't trade that moment for anything short of their actual wedding.

[shokuto]

A really underrated aspect of Spider-Man's origin is the search for Uncle Ben's killer. There's a small window of time where it looks like he's going to kill this man who murdered his father when he finds him. There's a spider on his back whispering "get him" and he's listening.

[sometimesrosy]

Rosy that's fantastic news for your book!! I'm really happy for you. And just seeing "bellarke consum their love and even have grandkids" makes my heart full. Bob and Eliza said tthey were disappointed that 1/the charaters couldn't have kids in the end and that 2/ there was no hope. I totally agree with their interpretation of the end. Some people said the ending was super cool, and inkeeping with the whole show, and somehow hopeful. HOW WAS IT HOPEFUL?? the human race gets wiped out...

People said the ending was “super cool?” How?

Wait. I need to wrap my head around that. What are they looking at that seems super cool?

I actually don’t have a problem of the concept of transcendence that they worked on all season, nor Cadogan, the fake-spiritual, love-your-fellow-man-but-also-sacrifice-them-because-they-mean-nothing cult leader who favored his daughter, used his son, tossed his exwife into the apocalypse and killed Becca because she had power and knowledge beyond him.

Like, that could have been super cool if they’d kept him the villain, the antagonist, but instead they made him the protagonist who was, somehow, right about transcendence as if it wasn’t just another fucking doomsday cult that wanted humanity to end. I mean, it WAS just another fucking doomsday cult that wanted humanity to end, and the aliens vacuumed up humanity and allowed for no dissent. Here, have your perfect happy transcendence...but your body dies, the world ends, and humanity is gone. That is EXACTLY what ALIE did, and she was a villain. Perhaps a well meaning villain, but a terrifying villain.

How did the SAME story, get switched around to being some sort of victory for the state of humanity? How did the end of humanity, no chance to continue on, because they removed their ability to have children and carry on?

Why couldn’t they just fucking stay on The Ring if that was going to happen. At least they could have a small community up there.  But no. Without the info that our heroes brought, they wouldn’t have reached transcendence. 

That wasn’t transcendence. It was judgement day. Transcendence means you have worked your way to a higher state, and yes, it might be condescending and elitist, but you at least worked for it. And it wasn’t really a judgement day because they just took everybody, despite the fact that those idiots were fighting for no fucking reason. It was a PUNISHMENT day for Clarke, one of the only people who was actually TRYING to be better and do better. 

What was cool? The way the aliens brought back the people they cared for? Yes, that was cool. It wasn’t them of course, but some people would be impressed by the alien dressed up in the costume of their fav. I could see that being considered super cool. But honestly... that’s a story line that would have worked better in season 3 and in fact DID work remarkably well in season 3 when Lxa showed up in the COL. And it was ACTUALLY her, not some facsimile.

Was it cool to take away the agency of the hero of the story who we’ve been following for 7 years? Was it cool to erase the personality and motivation of our dual protagonist? Ok. So lets say you didn’t love Clarke or Bellamy. Octavia’s character was erased and she didn’t have a thing to do until the final battle, and then she got a romance that frankly made me uncomfortable but that’s taste. Echo was erased and she didn’t have a thing to do until the final battle. Raven was also erase although she got to be the one to convince the aliens that they weren’t totally awful beings. That was cool, but it seemed like a patch put on top of a story that had failed. The story being about how Clarke saves humanity, and Bellamy saves Clarke, which has been THE STORY FOR SIX YEARS. We spent six years building up a team with these two heroes who have been through so much shit and made the CHOICE to be the good guys, and in the end, Bellamy gives his power over to a charismatic obsessive leader (also happened in season 3 with Pike who was a great character and FAR better than Cadogan and actual sympathetic awful villain who thought he was saving his people while doing evil.) And Clarke actually becomes THE BAD GUY, who loses her sense of reason and commits violence due to loving too much-- a really tired, misogynistic storyline. Give women power and they go crazy. The hysterical woman. THIS DOES NOT FIT WITH CLARKE GRIFFIN. Also, we saw her go through that trauma of fear for her daughter, and she DID NOT GO CRAZY. Ruthless, yes. And then she worked through what she had done and recognized she was wrong and promised not to do that again. I honestly don’t know why she did it again.  Even if Bellamy betrayed her again, it didn’t make sense that she couldn’t work through it.

They had to keep the two characters apart in order have that ending happen. Why? Because Clarke acts as the center to Bellamy and Bellamy acts as the Center to Clarke. This season is the story of the FAILURE of the duo protagonists of the show. They separated them and broke them individually, and this meant they were unable to save the universe. 

Is it cool to make a show about heroes and then destroy them in the last season? But frame that destruction and the end of humanity as a VICTORY and positive ending? Maybe if you hate those characters and humanity and think there’s no hope for us anyway, so lets just burn it down.

Oh wait. I’m trying to figure out what’s SUPER COOL about that ending.

The purple sparkly aliens. Ok. How is that cool? That there’s actually an omnipotent alien out there that has the ability to just snap a whole race of people out of existence or into their big ole stew pot of consciousness.

1. Why? 2. How? 3. Where did that power come from? 4. Who are they? 5. What do they get out of erasing races and basically eating them?

Okay, putting aside the questions about how these omnipotent gods aliens came to be... is it possible they can be see as “super cool?” Let me go through.

1. Omnipotent aliens going through the universe, deciding when life forms were “ready” to be judged and then either wiping them out totally, or wiping them out totally but accepting their consciousnesses into their massive consciousness where they don’t want any “bad” lifeforms, which makes them now a higher lifeform but not at all what they once were. 

Cool/Not Cool. I dunno. Kind of seems like some sort of puritanical god who willy nilly decides if people are worthy of heaven. Will He, Nil He. That’s what that means. If we’re gonna get aliens at the last minute, I want aliens. I want to know who they are and what’s up with them. THAT’S the story. Those alien guys. Instead, the story was about the flotsam and jetsam at the end of humanity, either getting swept up into the god-form in the sky or being pounded to bits on the rocks. The heroes of our story have no say in what happens. They’re toast either way. Oh you mean we can be erased into nothing or erased into your hive mind? The only way this is cool is if you like nihilism. Which, yeah, some people do. NONE of their struggle over the past six years meant a damn thing. None of it. Their beliefs, their sacrifices, their mistakes, their heroism. It al reduces down to whether those sparkly purple aliens like them or not. That’s some bullshit. 

Not cool. 

2. Cadogan. Cult leader from the first apocalypse who conned the bulk of his followers and left them shady shelters that let them die. Kept the good stuff for his “best” followers. Paternalistic, obsessive, ruthless, megalomaniac framing his leadership and personality as “Love for Humanity,” while discarding every human who he deemed unworthy. Including his own family. Actually. Pretty cool.  AS A VILLAIN. Ending up at his cult colony in space hundreds of years later with thousands of years of development in time dilation. Cool. They’re creepy but make some bit of sense. Ok. Waking him up and then making him this fucking GURU who preaches love for humanity but sacrifices 99.9% of humanity all so that he can reach his mythical transcendence which is really the eradication of all humanity.... well, that’s actually cool. AS A VILLAIN. But somehow in the last season, Cadogan turned out to be the one who was right all along, and the story seemed to accept HIS concept that transcendence was the best thing that could happen to them, because humanity sucks and they always fight so they should be erase by paternalistic omnipotent gods. CADOGAN’S choices were the ones that were enacted. Bellamy gave his will to Cadogan and made CADOGAN’S choices, not his own. Never before in all the seasons did Bellamy “need it all to make sense.” He fucking KNEW it made no sense and he didn’t want to make those choices any more. And he did it to be a better person and make better choices and keep his family safe. The excuse they used for our hero to side with Cadogan did not fit. CADOGAN became the protagonist in the second half of the season. CADOGAN made all the choices that furthered the story. Our heroes were reduced to either brainwashed followers or ineffective, hysterical messes, our really not wanting anything to do with anyone’s salvation and just interested in their love life. It left Raven, Echo and Octavia to scramble around in the end and try to convince the purple sparkly gods not to erase them out of existence, just erase them and swallow them. :/ Cadogan as protagonist bringing humanity to “transcendence.”, Our supposed heroes as useless flotsam and jetsam floating around on the wreck of humanity whose choices and actions make no goddamn difference.

NOT COOL.

3. Character Storylines

Clarke’s storyline. NOT COOL. Bellamy’s storyline. NOT COOL. Octavia’s storyline. S.A COOL. S.B NOT COOL. Raven’s storyline. COOL. Echo’s storyline. S.A COOL. S.B NOT COOL. Murphy’s storyline. SUPER COOL. Emori’s storyline. SUPER COOL. Indra’s storyline.  COOL. Hope’s storyline. S.A COOL S.B NOT COOL. Jordan’s storyline. NOT COOL.  Diyoza’s storyline. COOL Gabriel’s storyline. COOL. Madi’s storyline. NOT COOL The grounders. Fucking morons. You really shouldn’t make a whole culture’s choices based around being absolutely too stupid to be allowed to live. EVEN when you get past xenophobia and learn about who they are and why they do things. NOT COOL. The culty people. Cool set up and world building. The society was dumb and had too many plot holes. MIDDLING SHEIDHEDA. NOT COOL. pointless plot device just used to make everyone forget everything they learned from 6 seasons. CADOGAN. COOL AS A VILLAIN. But he was the protagonist. So the ruination of the entire show and universe they created. NOT COOL.

SEASON A COOL OVERALL.  SEASON B NOT COOL. TOTAL SEASON NOT COOL

I think if people think the ending was supercool, they’ve never heard of a deus ex machina, and how that’s a BAD ending that is really just a cheat because you can’t figure out a way to get out of the story mess you made. 

I really hate post apocalyptic fiction that ends with no hope for humanity. JR kept telling us there was hope. I mean narratively, not in interviews, although he did that too, and in the last half season, he switched it around so they wouldn’t have hope, not even just our heroes, but all humanity. It was a bait and switch I did not appreciate. And I’m not talking about ships, I’m talking about the essential genre of the show. 

PS. thanks. I love my book and I hope someone picks it up so you all can read it. It also has elements of Han/Leia and another couple, Brashen/Althea from the Live Ship Traders book by Robin Hobb. They are, however, less traumatized than the characters in The 100. 

[jazy3]

Thoughts on Grey’s Anatomy: 17X16

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

I really liked this episode! I loved the scenes between Meredith and Bailey and Meredith with her kids. So precious! I think Meredith is the perfect person to take over the residency program now that Richard has too many jobs as Bailey says! I think she is really going to shine in this new role. In the past I thought her and Alex might wind up running the hospital with him as Chief of Surgery and her as Residency Director. While that won't happen because Justin Chambers' exit, I think it will be great to see Meredith step up and take on the role. Ultimately, I want to see her operate again and be a badass, but since she’s still recovering, I think having Meredith take this on while she recovers from COVID is a great idea.  

I’m glad that we got to see Maggie and Winston disagree on something and work through it in this episode. While I think Winston did overreact a bit when Maggie was upset and a bit reluctant about the wedding planning and said that everything felt like a compromise I'm glad that they showed the two of them disagreeing and working through it because up until now they've been portrayed as the perfect couple. I loved the scene where Maggie and Winston talked about the wedding and then it was revealed that Maggie had arranged for her Dad and Winston’s Grandmother to fly in for the wedding. That was very sweet and they got the actor that previously played her Dad back!

I also really liked the patient that Maggie, Helm, and Richard treated. I felt so bad for her when she told them that her husband had died and her dog had ran away and that she wasn’t good with people. I suspected she was pretending early on because of her loneliness. I was so sad about the missing dog for the whole episode and I was ecstatic when they found him! I’m more of a cat than a dog person, but pets are family. I am also glad that we got to learn more about Helm in this episode and that she appears to have left her Meredith obsession behind. That was funny the first few times they brought it up, but then it just got weird and annoying.

Especially after both CeCe the matchmaker and Carina talked to Helm about it and told her she needed to move on and find someone that could love her back and then she went right back to being obsessed with her. That’s been her whole personality for the past three seasons. Now in this episode we learn that she likes to cook, that she makes a mess when she cooks, and that she likes to watch the news. I think Helm moving in with Levi and Jo is a good thing, but he definitely should have cleared it with Jo first and they for sure need a bigger place.

I really liked the scene with Link and Jo. I like that he called her out on the fact that she obviously wanted to adopt Luna and told her she should stop doubting herself. I was surprised and disappointed that Jo’s adoption application was denied. She's clearly formed a bond with Luna and she was ready to have kids with Alex prior to his departure and she was close to Val prior to her death. I’m curious as to why her application was denied and why she failed the background check. I hope we get a follow up to that because she would be a great Mom to Luna and I want to know what happened there.

When we found that out my first thought was, “That’s illegal!” because here in Canada and in Ontario specifically to the best of my knowledge you can’t discriminate against someone and reject their adoption or foster application because they are a single parent, have had mental health issues in the past, stole a car while homeless or lived under an assumed name while fleeing domestic violence provided they meet the other criteria such as being able to provide a safe loving home and can prove that they are financially stable and have a good support network in place.

I was confused as first, but then my friend Amy and I were talking about it and I realized that I was applying my own context to another situation. Having the right to adopt and not be discriminated against is something that the women’s, gay rights, and disability rights movements here in Canada have fought very hard for. A lot of changes were enacted in the 2000’s and 2010’s to make it easier for people from all walks of life to adopt and foster. In fact, in many cases social services will look for prospective parents who share a child’s background or history because they will be able to relate to the child in a way that a parent without that experience might not be able to.

That’s not to say that everything is perfect and that discrimination and unfair treatment doesn’t happen. It does. People can be sneaky about it. But you do have recourse here. You would be able to contest the discrimination. I’m not familiar with adoption laws and policies for Washington State where the show is set so it’s possible that this kind of discrimination may still be legal there or there may not be specific policies addressing it. If anyone does know I would love to know more as what I’m saying is based on the experiences of people that I know here in Ontario. I do think that Jo will eventually get custody of Luna. They've spent a bunch of time setting this up and dropping hints about this storyline so it would feel hollow to have it end like this. It would also put Jo back in a dark place which she just got out of for the umpteenth time.

I’m interested to see where they go with Amelia and Link’s storyline around him wanting more children and Amelia not wanting anymore. Couples getting together and then realizing at a later point that they feel differently about having children or having more children in this case is a real thing that happens. Amelia and Link started off as casual sex partners which progressed into something more serious when Amelia found out she was pregnant. They've become this beautiful family and it turns out they are a great match, but because they didn't start out with marriage and kids in mind there are bridges that they have to cross at some point. I'm glad that Link is voicing his desire to have more kids down the road now so that they can talk about it.

I totally get why Amelia doesn't want more kids. After what happened with Christopher and Ryan and then Owen, Betty, and Leo and then with Meredith's kids I get why Amelia doesn't want more children. It's a lot of work, she's been through a lot, and getting overwhelmed could impact her sobriety. Link is a good guy and way more sensitive around this topic that Owen ever was so my hope is that they'll talk it out, Amelia will share her concerns, Link will understand, and he'll fulfill that need for more kids by spending more time with Leo or Meredith's kids.

Also real talk, Owen was an absolute asshole to Cristina and Amelia when they didn’t want kids and straight up said that there was something wrong with them because they didn’t want to be with something who treated them poorly and kept trying to force them to have kids that they didn’t want. While it’s great that he gets it now and was able to offer some words of wisdom to Amelia in this episode and be supportive it doesn’t make up for or change the fact that he was god awful to both of his ex-wives because they didn’t want kids and he did. He knew Cristina didn’t want kids long before they got married and he married Amelia without ever talking about his desire to have children and just assumed she wanted that too.

He should really call Cristina and apologize because what the hell? I think it’s the difference between perception and experience. Before when he wanted kids but didn’t have any he was in love the idea and couldn’t understand someone not wanting that. Now that he has two kids he realizes how much work that is and why someone might not want that especially if they are dealing with other issues that could be impacted by having more children. I really enjoyed the patient storylines this week. I had previously read a study about what Amelia is working on and how doctors and scientists have now determined that there are two types of patients who appear brain dead. 

The kind that actually are where their body is still alive but no one’s home and the kind we see in this episode where their body is still alive and they are still in there, but can’t communicate in traditional ways, but can communicate through thinking about different things to answer yes or no questions. There is a special kind of machine that is needed to scan for this and they are expensive but they’ve proven that hospitals make the costs back within a year because the machines allow them to determine which patients are actually brain dead and which can still make decisions and answer questions about their care.

Something I didn’t like about this episode was that Levi chose Nico over Dr. Mason Post the hot Vaccine Doctor. I was really rooting for them to get together and for him to start something new with someone who might actually treat him well and I was so freaking disappointed wand pissed off when Levi showed up at Nico’s place and got back together with him instead of going over to Mason’s. I’m Team Mason all the way! He's a gem. He's attractive, funny, smart, direct, and kind. He's everything Levi deserves in a partner after the nonsense Nico has put him through.

I liked Nico and Levi when they first got together, but after Nico revealed that he lied about being out to his parents their relationship went downhill fast. He's treated Levi like crap ever since and his one-time apology doesn't fix that or do anything to address the way he's acted or fix his and Levi's relationship problems. I hope Mason returns next season, Levi winds up with him, and Nico goes off to work for the Mariners as he was supposed to originally.

My only other complaint is that Meredith and Hayes didn't have any scenes together this week, but it looks like they'll have scenes in the finale so I'm happy about that. My favourite moment of the episode was when Amelia told Owen that Tom had moved to Boston to help Jackson with the changes he wanted to make and Owen thinking that he had been fired said that he hated that there was one more thing he had to like and respect about the guy. I'm not an Owen fan in general, but that line cracked me up! I’m really looking forward to the finale! I’m excited that based on next week’s promo Meredith and Hayes will have scenes together and hopefully we’ll be getting some movement on the world's slowest moving slow burn storyline!

I swear to god glaciers move faster! People have gotten engaged, broken up, gotten back together, and moved to Boston in the time that Meredith was on that beach while Hayes worried about her from afar. So, I'm excited for that. I'm also excited for Maggie and Winston's wedding and to know why her Dad and his Grandmother are objecting. I hope to see Jo adopt Luna and I'd love to see some father-daughter scenes with Richard and Meredith.

Until next time!

[clmcl]

Dramione fanfics rec (2018-2019)

Hey, guys, this is just some fics that I like. I have a similar list here if you are interested or in need of a good dramione. I don´t read much angst so these are mostly fluffy. They´re not all published in 2018-2019 but I discovered them these years. I hope you all enjoy:

An Unexpected Malfoy  by RiverWriter : Once upon a time Hermione Granger literally ran into Draco Malfoy in a bookshop. His mother sees a connection between her son and the muggleborn that she can't ignore and determines to get to know the girl. An imagining of how things could have gone if Hermione had been taken under the wing of the Malfoy family. WIP

The Troublesome Thing About Time by LadyKenz347 : Draco Malfoy has just arrived from twenty years in the future and insists on speaking to his wife, Hermione Granger. The only problem is that the Draco Malfoy she knows is still the snarky, button-pushing boy upstairs-and not the man in front of her now. COMPLETE.

Diamond Heart by artemisgirl:  When Hermione approaches Draco Malfoy proposing a fake relationship between the two of them as part of a scheme, he's eager enough to participate - the potential benefits outweigh any costs on his time. But as it all progresses, Draco finds himself wondering what it would be like if what was 'fake' was real. COMPLETE.

The Alkahest by Shadukiam : The Marriage Law, once enacted, has the power to destroy Hermione's perfectly normal life. Luckily, she and Ron are already planning to obey the horrific law together as a team... Until a Malfoy-shaped wrench gets thrown into the works. WIP.

The Silk Thread by LoverGurrl411 :  Dumbledore's dead, the ministry's desperate and crumbling around them, and war is on the horizon-but the only war that truly matters has yet to begin: the war of hearts. In between silence and hatred lies a twisted desire that will either consume them, or help them survive Voldemort's rise to power together. Marriage Law Fic. AU Seventh Year. WIP (one of the few angst).

The Family Business by Nova5621 : Scorpius Malfoy is convinced his parents are secret agents. Fancy formal wear, stashed weapons. I mean, look at how they met! COMPLETE.

A Secret Admirer by DragonLady37 :  "Who does that belong to?" Lucius asked, his tone harsh. Draco's fingers tightened around the piece of cloth as he turned to his father. He kept it tightly in his fist. "My soulmate," he growled. "You've found her?" his mother asked, hand over her mouth, tears shining in her eyes. "Finally?" DRAMIONE, AU, Veela Fic. COMPLETE.

Draco's Bad Day by Maloreiy :  Draco is having a bad day. In fact, every day is a bad day because he's been trying (unsuccessfully) to convince himself he's not in love with Hermione Granger, who is engaged to Ron (the prat) Weasley. Except that all of a sudden she's not. And Draco's about to have more good and bad days than he had ever expected. WIP.  

Howl For Me by Kittenshift17:  The Ministry enacts a Marriage Law, magically pairing couples who'd never in a million years agree to even speak, let alone wed. Paired off with Malfoy, Hermione has to suffer the added indignity of the Ministry banning all contraception and forcing fertility treatment and aphrodisiacs on them all. Draco's secret makes it worse. WIP.

Drastic measures by hbsj: Draco's mother had a plan: Draco would marry Astoria and make perfect little heirs to the Malfoy line, he wasn't necessarily happy about it but he knew he couldn't get what he really wanted anyway so what the hell, right? Hermione did NOT agree with the plan and would literally do anything to thwart it, will she succeed? A fun/dirty five-part Dramione, rated M for smut and language. COMPLETE.

His Veela Heritage by RiverWriter : His entire world shifted and he was suddenly certain that his life was no longer really his own, it belonged to her. He could only hope she'd forgive him, could only hope she'd accept him. Because he was a veela and Hermione Granger was his mate. The only woman who had any chance of truly making him happy was the same girl he'd spent half a lifetime tormenting. Karma was a bitch. COMPLETE.

Veela For A Day by tammyfait69: 8th year fic. Pansy gets her hands on a Veela lust potion & plans to lure Draco into her bed. When her plans go to pot, & Draco gets doused with the potion instead, he becomes irresistible. What will Draco do when half his class is trying to get down his pants? Why, turn to the brightest witch in his class of course. Will Hermione help or jump him herself? COMPLETE.

A Fear of Wolves by I'm All Teeth:  "Do not stray from the path again. There are terrible monsters in these woods that would like nothing more than to devour delicious little girls like you. Run along to your grandmother's house and pray stop for no one." Fairy Tales, retold. COMPLETE.

In the Arms of Her Dragon by Wolf Blossom:  "Why're you crying?" Draco whispered, sitting down beside Hermione in a deserted Great Hall. Looking up at him with puffy eyes, she admitted what happened earlier at the Gryffindor Tower. Without a moment's hesitation, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and said: "Come on, you're spending the night in the Slytherin dungeon. With me." WIP.

The Worst Date Ever by MotherofBulls:  Hermione loses a bet to Draco and now has to let him take her on "the worst date in the history of the world." His words. Hermione is in for a night full of crappy pub food, a rented children's choir, and casual violence. But at some point in this rubbish heap of an evening, Hermione finds that there's more to Draco than she thought. COMPLETE.

The Trouble With Veelas by hiddenhibernian:  Draco just wants to make Hermione happy. Unfortunately, telling her he is a Veela and she is his mate would achieve exactly the opposite, so he has to find another way. Nothing else in Draco's life has gone according to plan, so he ought to have known it would only go downhill from there... Veela!Draco. COMPLETE.

Shallow Draco by MykEsprit:  When Draco Malfoy is cursed to see only inner beauty, he finds Hermione Granger to be the most beautiful woman in the world. How utterly predictable. Dramione. One-shot. COMPLETE.

She was Beautiful by longdistance: What if Draco had other reasons for bullying Hermione so badly in school? What if her life had depended on it? This is a story of what happens when they meet again eight years after the war. He'll begin work on healing the wounds he created. COMPLETE.

A Season of Miracles by StoriesForTheMature: Hermione must tell Draco that he is the father of a suddenly motherless child. Will he refuse his new role as a father? Not if the miracle of Christmas has anything to do with it! COMPLETE.

Who Could've Thought That by Lerysakon: "Enlighten me, Granger, as to why you are being referred to as Professor Granger." Sorting. A new professor. The children make new friends. And Hermione has something to reveal – who is this mystery man of hers? COMPLETE.

Second Time Around by Neko-Tenchi: Draco fell in love with Hermione after it was already too late. Then a contraption of Dumbledore sets Draco back in time to his first year of Hogwarts with no memories of the future, but all his future-self's instincts, feelings and love felt towards Hermione. How will he do things the second time around. Time travel story with a twist: Draco Edition. WIP.

Her Number One Fan by Peanutbuttertoast1: Hermione leaves England to start a new life...only to return to find that the world has moved on in more ways than one...and her heart is touched by an unexpected encounter with her #1 fan! COMPLETE.

What Lynx Us Together by BirdsOfAFeather92: Draimione soulmate with a twist. What happens when its voluntary? WIP.

Lines by FlyingWorldOtter: Wizards were gathered in large numbers, because when matched, a fine magical line would connect your heart to your soul mates' heart. Once you had found the person at the other end of your line you would then hold hands and a golden glow would appear around the hands and personalized rings representing the couple would appear on their finger. WIP.

Fated by Hanako A: Hermione has always thought of herself as a rational creature. However the magic of her blood won't be denied, and there's nothing she can do to stop her fall. COMPLETE.

A cornucopia of noncoincidences by muffin_reverie: She was leaving her position as a Healer for good, or at least she thought she was.“I reckon you may want to reconsider that thought about not having to heal anyone ever again.” Ron awkwardly shifted on his feet.“Because you may have just broken Draco Malfoy’s nose with your knuckles.” COMPLETE.

A Game of Chance by TheLastLynx: Hermione barely registered Harry calling out after her to let in someone he was apparently waiting for. So when she rushed out, deep in thought, she smacked straight into the tall person standing just outside the door. ‘Careful there, Granger,’ someone with a pleasant baritone said, chuckling under his breath. ‘No need to hit on me.’  Hermione’s head snapped up. The pointy face of Draco Malfoy looked down on her, something like humour brightening his pale eyes. She raised her chin, ignoring the heat in her cheeks. ‘Don’t flatter yourself, Malfoy.’COMPLETE.

A Theo-logical Dilemma by LightofEvolution: “Draco, Miss Granger is yelling at the dog in the tea room. What did he do?” Narcissa asked. “Maybe he ate her reports?” he suggested, knowing it wasn’t true. A little story about Hermione, Draco, and a black Labrador with a very human pedigree. COMPLETE.

All This Time by GirlwhoLived: It's 2007. Hermione has a job at the Ministry, a posh flat and even a new kitten. She is happy and content with what her life has become. And then Ronald Weasley appears on her doorstep. Three years ago he broke her heart and disappeared without a word. But now he has returned with every intention of winning her back. But Ron is in for one hell of a surprise. Hermione got married a year ago. To none other than Draco Malfoy. WIP.

All You Want by SenLinYu: Eighth Year at Hogwarts was supposed to be Hermione’s. And it is, just not in the way she expects. Omegaverse fic. COMPLETE.

Amateur Cartography by worksofstone: That one-night stand with Draco Malfoy was a mistake. Hermione doesn't make mistakes, or at least she isn't supposed to. She's working hard at her Ministry career, however frustrating and pointless her job may be, and she's also got to live up to everyone's expectations as Hogwarts's most famous Muggle-born and a top-tier War Hero. So, why is she still sleeping with Draco Malfoy, ex-Death Eater and infamous pureblood? And why isn't she certain that she wants to stop? COMPLETE.

Bond by HalfwayThrough: Years into the war, Hermione is trapped for an entire night between a broken wand and a Death Eater. The consequences of which will affect everything. WIP.

Calla by RiverWriter: She had been missing for more than ten years. But then she had dark magic cast on her in the Department of Mysteries, and that insidious curse did more than just injure her physically. It revealed a secret, a truth. Hermione Granger could finally be recognized as the girl she’d been at birth: Calliope Nott. WIP.

Dangerous by sunalso: Life is, at last, safe and stable for Hermione. She knows who she is and who she loves. Until something starts to follow her in the dark and she finds she might not know herself at all. WIP

Business Partners by Debboluh:  Andromeda Tonks approaches Hermione with an idea to start an orphanage and community center for children and families who have been affected by Voldemort’s werewolves, other extra-magical children and families are more than welcome! But what secret is their potions master hiding? And will Hermione ever find out? Draco's mood swings are giving Hermione whiplash, first he doesn't care and then he offering his own house!? COMPLETE.

Okay, I got tired. That´s all I´ll probably do another next year (or a part 2 this year).

[pretentiouspidgeon]

I went to see the Prince of Egypt musical and I am disappointed

Like a lot of people I absolutely love the movie so of course I had to see the musical. It got stellar reviews and was highly recommended and it honestly makes a mockery of the film.

The whole musical is about redeeming Ramses. 

If they’d just gone all they way and made him the main character it might have worked better than it did (it’s close, he gets at least as much scene time as Moses and some parts seems more about Ramses) 

The musical is even more focused on the sibling relationship than the film. Every time there’s a scene with Moses it cuts back to Ramses so that they’re constantly mirroring each other. The show is about them and that whole exodus thing is just kinda happening at the same time.

I had some apprehension because of the dialogue, but I was truly thrown off when they ruined Moses confronting his father about the child murders. They truly make it out to seem as if the Pharaoh was forced to make a difficult choice, but he did it for the good of his people and he tries to live with it every single day. just no. In the musical the royal couple are also clear with each other about where Moses comes from and the family openly holds it over him that they “saved him from a life in poverty”, direct quote. As if they’re not the ones keeping people in poverty and enacting the child slaughtering that led Moses to them.

Tzipporah is introduced dancing in a belly dancer outfit which continues to be her costume. Moses and Ramses jokes about their bossy wives. Jethro invites Moses stay with him, not because he helped his daughters but because ~he feels it’s meant to be~ while Tzipporah unsuccessfully argues that she was almost forced to be a bedslave and doesn’t want him there.

Two things I did like aspects of. I liked that the musical actually spent time on Moses’ guilt about the dead of the first borns. I didn’t like how they made it to mirror how his father ‘had to live with the guilt’ as well. Not the same situation. I also liked how the burning bush was done with multiple voices, but it got like 2 seconds of time between some scenes showing ~the heavy burden of the crown~ being passed to Ramses. Yeah, Ramses inheriting is given more weight than Moses accepting the task G-d gives him.

Cause Ramses is really the good guy main character. He almost immediately agrees to let His people go, if it means Moses will stay with him, but it’s hindered by his evil wife and high priest. He really wants to do what Moses is telling him to, but the political situation is rendering him “powerless” (yes there’s made a reference to him being exactly like a slave!) Even after the death of his son he doesn’t want to enact revenge and only follows Moses because the High Priest makes him. And then they make up. I am not kidding. Ramses decides to ‘end the legacy of violence’ and Moses tells him that he’s sure he’ll be a great Pharaoh and they sing and Moses really wants to stay, but Ramses tells him that he should go lead his people. yeah.

The whole conflict and dynamic is shaken when Ramses isn’t a powerful villain. ...and why the Plagues then..? It’s so weird how that is a thing that just happens while these guys are just trying to calmly work things out.

The actual villain is the High Priest, but he’s still played as a background character. And even with this played up they left out Playing with the Big Boys Now!

They also completely butchered the Plagues. They were much more focused on the many generic musical numbers they had added instead. I’m so sad.

There were so many bad choices made. I regret spending money on this.

[bbclesmis]

The inside story of the BBC adaptation of Les Misérables... by the man who sexed up War and Peace

On a summer’s morning in a park outside Brussels, one of European literature’s most wretched characters is having a laugh. In Victor Hugo’s gargantuan 1862 novel Les Misérables, the naive young Parisian seamstress Fantine is dealt a rotten hand: she loses her wealthy boyfriend, her daughter, her job, her hair, her two front teeth and her life – all within the book’s first act.

If you are one of the 130 million people to have encountered Fantine in the world-conquering stage musical (or 2012’s big-screen incarnation of it, in which Anne Hathaway enacted the character’s misery through an Oscar-winning outpouring of tears), you will know her as a figure of abject tragedy.

Yet here she is in the Belgian sunshine, as played for the cameras by Lily Collins – the 29-year-old daughter of musician Phil – bonnet off, flirting on the lawn with her lover, Félix (Johnny Flynn), while her giggling girlfriends lark about on a swing, like a Fragonard painting come to life.

In her pale empire-line dress, hair plaited with flowers, she looks almost bridal: untroubled and in love. Later this month, you’ll have a chance to meet this unfamiliar Fantine for yourself, in the first episode of the BBC’s lavish new six-part series. With a screenplay by Andrew Davies, it attempts to show us an aspect of Hugo’s classic we’ve never seen dramatised before; one that is, well, less miserable.

Until last year, the director – 50-year-old Tom Shankland, best known for the lost-child drama The Missing – was ‘one of those few people in the universe who didn’t know much about the musical or the film’, he says. But after receiving Davies’ screenplay, he plunged into the novel and found a story bristling with ‘so much life and drama and violence and tragedy that the label “costume drama” just can’t contain it’.

Setting out to make a version that would ‘bring a level of 21st-century psychology to the realm of 19th-century melodrama, keeping one foot in then and one foot in now’, his spiritual guide would be David Lean, who, in cinematic masterpieces such as Lawrence of Arabia, proved ‘so brilliant at judging when to be intimate and when to be epic. I think that was always going to be the game with Les Misérables: how not to lose our heroes against this vast historical canvas.’

It’s day 79 of the 89-day shoot and sitting in front of a monitor – headphones clamped to his ears, an approving smile on his face – Davies is the first to admit to being no fan of the musical. ‘I hated it,’ he tells me, ‘couldn’t bear it.’ Yet when he first read Hugo’s book six years ago, he was struck by a sophistication that, he felt, no adaptation had come close to capturing.

In the sprawling saga, set in a nation discombobulated by Napolean’s defeat at Waterloo, Davies says he found ‘such a lot of resonances with our time now. There are the haves and have-nots, the extreme strata of society in terms of riches and poverty. I thought how good it would be to show that on television.’

At the moment we join the narrative, in 1815, he says, ‘France thought it’d had a revolution, now it’s got a monarchy again and it’s back to the bad times. So while people like Fantine can have fun for a bit, they are always in danger of dropping through the cracks. There is no safety net, no welfare state. If you take one wrong step, you’re f—ed, basically.’

To anyone else, the prospect of reducing Hugo’s 1,500-page leviathan to six hours of primetime drama would have been daunting. But to Davies – who, at 82, is British television’s undisputed doyen of the literary adaptation, as the brains behind such memorable series as 1995’s Pride and Prejudice, 2005’s Bleak House and, in 2016, War & Peace – it was an itch that just had to be scratched. ‘I felt it had never been done properly before,’ he says. ‘But then I always think that. “Hmmm, you need my version of it.”’

His first step towards reclaiming the story from the musical (‘a very partial version of the book, more concert than drama’) was to introduce the viewer to Fantine not when she is plummeting into the abyss, but, as Hugo does, before she has the slightest inkling of her fate. ‘As for Fantine, she was pure joy,’ writes the author early on. ‘Her magnificent teeth had clearly been given her by God with one purpose only, and that was to laugh.’

During a break in filming, Collins, towelling dressing gown now slung over her dress, tells me she spent her childhood summers in Switzerland (‘where I would dream in French’) and begged the filmmakers for an audition the moment she heard the project was in the pipeline – with Davies’ emphasis on this happy phase of Fantine’s story part of the appeal. Not only did it free her from the spectre of Hathaway’s portrayal, it also deepened her sympathy for the character. ‘Because you get to see just how in love she was with Félix; it heightens the heartbreak.’

The result contributes to a telling of Les Misérables that the bullish Davies suggests may rank as ‘the most psychologically satisfying version there has been so far of the book’. Having set out to improve upon the musical, he now finds himself wondering if, in places, he’s also surpassed the novel. ‘We tell Fantine’s story more fully than I think Hugo did,’ he says. ‘We’ve explored the Javert and Jean Valjean relationship more deeply, too.’

If Fantine is the book’s emotional heart, then the intense cat-and-mouse struggle between Jean Valjean – the convict who serves 19 years’ hard labour for stealing a loaf of bread before rehabilitating himself as the mayor of Montreuil – and Inspector Javert, his jailer-turned-stalker, is its moral centre. While the lawman is a monstrously rigid incarnation of the unbending principles of justice, Valjean, who works his way back from brutal to beatific, represents the possibility of grace.

As Javert, David Oyelowo, the British actor who made his name in BBC drama Spooks and forged a Hollywood career with such acclaimed performances as Martin Luther King in Selma (2014), was the first cast member to sign up for the new Les Misérables, on which he also served as executive producer.

‘Partly why I really wanted to play Javert is that, having read Andrew Davies’ script and then the book, he remained enigmatic to me,’ Oyelowo says, speaking over the phone from his Los Angeles home about a character often dismissed as more archetype than man.

‘I didn’t see him as a simplistic villain, but as a very complicated human being. I felt there was a lot of work for me to do in order to explain some of what one might call his malevolence, his drive, his ambition and especially his attention towards Jean Valjean. I found something primal in his fastidious, continuous, inexorable need to get hold of this man.’

Back on set in Belgium, I spot that man – or at least the actor who plays him, Dominic West – loitering in his breeches outside Vilvoorde prison. With its brick-vaulted ceiling and cracked paintwork, the abandoned 18th-century building south of Brussels is an atmospheric kind of place. Shankland says it has a ‘melancholic aura’; a production assistant says it smells of ‘dead rat’.

Inside, in a recreation of the book’s Montreuil bead factory, Collins’ Fantine is sitting with her fellow grisettes (among them Lily Newmark and Erin Doherty) at long wooden tables strewn with black beads, waiting for make-up designer Jacqueline Fowler to give them the once-over. This seems to involve her making sure they haven’t washed behind their ears. ‘I like to see sweat,’ she explains afterwards. ‘And neck hair. None of the girls have make-up on today; it’s a very natural, realistic look.’

Later, the costume designer Marianne Agertoft says that she, too, favoured a pared-down style, so historical pedants had better beware. ‘We’ve kept bonnets off the women quite a lot of the time, even at moments when they would have worn them then,’ she tells me. ‘Why? Because they can very much get in the way.’

Outside, West (also an executive producer), who slotted in Jean Valjean between shooting seasons four and five of American melodrama The Affair, admits he found Tom Hooper’s 2012 film of Les Misérables so ‘bloody awful’ that he walked out of the cinema before it had finished. So when he was first approached for the new series, he hesitated. ‘I thought, “It’s a musical, it’s been done, we’ve just seen the film and why do it again?”’ he explains, while Fowler (previously seen applying her make-up brush to the abs of Poldark’s Aidan Turner for his notorious topless scything scene) attends to his stick-on sideburns. ‘Then I read the book and it just knocked my socks off. Best thing I’ve ever read.’

West is similarly enthused by his character, whom he describes as ‘the greatest superhero in literature, a strongman who spends the whole time rescuing children and saving entire communities’. He treasures Valjean as an anomaly in television drama: a public servant celebrated as a figure of high moral standing. Isn’t it also pretty rare, I suggest, for West, a 49-year-old Old Etonian who sealed his reputation playing  a morally dubious Baltimore cop in The Wire, to be the good guy? ‘It is,’ he says. ‘I’ve played a lot of villains and I don’t want to do it any more. [Portraying] Iago and Fred West in one year was annihilating. To live with Valjean, as I have for six months, is invigorating: it opens your soul.’

Oyelowo acknowledges that there will be those surprised to see him cast in ‘the kind of role which, to be perfectly frank, even 10 years ago probably would not have been afforded me’.

Born in Oxford in 1976 to black Nigerian immigrants, he says, ‘Something I have found problematic with period drama over the years, in terms of what we have done in Great Britain, is to deny just how long people of colour have been part of the fabric of British life – and European life as well, as it pertains to Les Mis.’

To those viewers who struggle to reconcile him with Hugo’s ‘slimy spook’, Oyelowo would say, ‘I am sure a lot of French people think it’s not right to transpose Les Mis on to British culture, which is what we’ve done by having the characters speak English and talk in London or posh English accents. But if you are going to make something that doesn’t stink of mothballs, you’d better be speaking to the world that we live in. And I think the show that we have cultivated absolutely does that.’

For all that the series strives for contemporary relevance, it also remains an epic feat of historical reconstruction that required a roving six-month shoot across Belgium and northern France, a principal cast of more than 100 (which also includes Olivia Colman and Adeel Akhtar as the dastardly innkeeping Thénardiers, and Sir Derek Jacobi as the irreproachable Bishop of Digne), a tapestry maker, a horse handler and 3,000 extras.

For producer Chris Carey, the high point of the process – its literal pièce de résistance – was the episode at the barricades, inspired by the 1832 French uprising which, in Hugo’s words, ‘turned the centre of Paris into a sort of colossal, impenetrable citadel’. To shoot those scenes, says Carey (whose last production was the thriller Apple Tree Yard), ‘We used a real street in a real French town, Sedan in northern France, which looks how Paris looked pre-Haussmann. And we blew it up over the course of two or three weeks. You can imagine the complications of keeping the town happy and on side when you are running through the streets at 5am with bayonets and cannon firing.’ I can also imagine such an operation burning through the kind of budget of which most BBC dramas could only dream. ‘You can’t do that stuff on a shoestring,’ concedes executive producer Faith Penhale, ‘but I won’t tell you a figure.’

West gives a less guarded assessment. ‘In terms of American budgets, this is nothing. This whole series is probably costing less than an American pilot would cost,’ he says. ‘We do these things very cheaply, which is not a good thing… For what we have to do, it’s peanuts.’

Does he in turn receive a significantly smaller fee for a drama like this than for something like The Affair? ‘I couldn’t possibly tell you,’ he says. Perhaps because they’ve blown a sizeable chunk of the budget on the services of a certain Mr West? ‘No, they have not,’ he yelps, before offering an answer to my previous question: ‘Yes, I do, very much less.’

If money is in relatively short supply in Les Misérables, then so too is sex. One of the most curious aspects of Hugo’s book is that, although it was written by a man known for his erotic appetites (it is said that on the day of his funeral, on 31 May 1885, the brothels of Paris pulled down their shutters as a sign of respect to a valued client), sex scarcely gets a look in. ‘It’s odd,’ says Davies. ‘We had this sudden realisation when talking about it that both Javert and Jean Valjean appear to be virgins.’ You might have assumed that Davies, who has long since had a reputation for sexing up the classics, would set that right – he is, after all, the man who injected incest into War and Peace and whose Pride and Prejudice planted the image of Colin Firth’s Darcy in a figure-hugging wet shirt in the nation’s consciousness – but no.

‘I don’t have to have sex all the time in things,’ he laughs. ‘I’m an old gentleman now.’ And indeed, although Fantine is taken to bed by Félix more than once in the first episode, their scenes together are characterised by a coyness that borders on prudery. In fact, the only real nudity to speak of in the drama’s first hour – which opens with jaw-dropping aerial views of the battlefield of Waterloo, a grim patchwork of uniformed corpses and dead horses – is a disarming shot of Valjean’s bare bottom. ‘Yeah, when I leave prison I get stripped off and thrown my old rags, so we thought it was a good excuse to get my ass out – somebody did, anyway,’ West tells me with a wolfish grin. ‘Let’s hope they can CGI it all right.’

Talking of ideal forms, before I leave the set I ask Davies if at any point in the process he felt the story of Les Misérables had already found its perfect expression in Hugo’s pages, and that the act of wrestling it on to the screen was always doomed to feel like a succession of compromises? ‘No,’ he says, with unwavering confidence. ‘It’s just finding its perfect medium now. If TV had been around at the time Victor Hugo wrote, I believe he would have made it as a six-part television show.’

Les Misérables starts on 30 December, at 9pm, on BBC One

Benjamin Secher, The Telegraph, 08.12.2018

[queen-of-deans-booty]

Bedtime Stories- Part 2

Pairing: Dean x Reader

Word Count: 2,322

Warnings: Typical Supernatural violence, language, angst, blood, you know the usual

Author’s Note: I do not own anything from Supernatural. All credit goes to their respective owners. Any and all comments on these are appreciated. I really want to hear what you guys think about this one!

Feedback is the glue that holds my writing together.

Tags at the bottom

Another attack under your watch. Another person in the hospital, hurt, because you, Sam and Dean couldn’t figure it out fast enough. You were still clueless as you were yesterday so as hard as you tried, you couldn’t figure out what you were hunting.

You decided to visit the newest victim, Julie Watson, who was attacked in the woods with her boyfriend, Ken, who died. You were walking down the hallway with the brothers when you saw two real deputies walk out of the room Julie was in. You bit your lip, knowing that if they saw you in what you were wearing they might ask questions and that wouldn’t be good for you.

You and the brothers turned to each other and started whispering, to make it look like you were just there to visit someone. The deputies didn’t seem to notice you and walked past you without a second glance. You let out a sigh of relief before breaking apart and walking into Julie’s room. She looked like a mess and you hated that she was in so much pain of losing someone she loved.

You could feel her pain.

Dr. Garrison from when you saw Kyle, was talking with a crying Julie.

“Please, please,” she pleaded.

“Shh. Hey, we need to observe you while the drugs still might be in your system.” Dr. Garrison stated.

“I have to go. I have things to do, arrangements I need to make!”

“It can wait. Now you need to rest. Stay. I'll be back in a few minutes,” Dr. Garrison said, turning around before spotting you. “Ah, Detectives.”

“Dr. Garrison.” Dean nodded as a greeting.

“What the hell is going on here? My whole town is going insane.”

“Trust me, we’ll let you know as soon as we do.” You promised him even though that was a lie. Dr. Garrison nodded and sighed, leaving you and the Winchesters to talk to Julie.

“Hi, Miss Watson? We just need to ask you a few questions.” You said gently, showing her your ID badge, Sam, and Dean doing the same.

“Do we have to go over this again? Now?” You hated how broken she looked.

“We'll try to be brief. Miss Watson, can you tell us how you got away?” Sam said, getting right to the point.

“I didn't eat as much as Ken did, so I wasn't as out of it. And, when the old woman was... carving up Ken, I shoved her, and she fell. Cracked her head on the stove,” she paused to take a few deep breaths, to take this all in. “She's dead, right? I-I killed her?”

“Do you have any idea why she'd do this to you?” Dean asked.

“No! One minute she was a sweet old lady and the next she was, like, a monster.” Julie explained. You bit your lip and knew that Ken and Julie were attacked in the woods. When you replay her words in your head over and over, this story sounds familiar.

Two people, a male and a female, walk through the woods to find a little cottage with a sweet old woman inside, asking them if they’d like to come inside for sweets. They trust her and then she turns on them, eating them both.

You weren’t big on childhood stories but this sounded like… no, it can’t be… that was only a story… right?

“Can you remember anything else?” Sam asked, snapping you out of your thoughts.

“Um, yeah, did you find a little girl there, by any chance?”

“A little girl? At the house?” Sam asked, confused. You were confused by this detail but it still didn’t deter you from your suspicions.

“I thought I saw her outside the window. She, she just disappeared. Just vanished, into thin air.” Julie explained. Sam and Dean looked at each other but you stared at Julie, trying to piece her story together.

“This disappearing girl—what did she look like?” You asked.

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, every detail does,” Sam said from behind you.

“She had this dark, dark hair and really pale skin. She was around eight. She was a beautiful child. It was... odd to see her in the middle of something so horrible.” Julie said with a sigh. You knew she was tired and you nodded, backing up a bit.

“Thank you for your time,” You walked away, Sam and Dean following you out of the room. “I think I might know what is going on here but we need to see that house.”

“You got it,” Dean said, leading the way to the car. Since the crime scene was known to the public, Dean already knew where to go. When you got there, your suspicions were further solidified. You got out and sighed, running your hand through your hair.

“Wanna tell us what you’re thinking, sweetheart?” Dean asked, walking next to you.

“Yeah, in a minute. Let’s just see if there is sulfur anywhere outside before I say anything.” You said, walking off to the right side of the little cottage. Sam and Dean walked the other way and when you met back in front of the house, it turns out all three of you were empty-handed.

“Alright, no sulfur, then let’s try EMF inside,” You suggested, walking inside the crime scene. It was still a little bloody but your theory was looking pretty good at what was going on. Sam was waving the EMF around, trying to figure out if the little girl was a spirit or not.

“Anything, Sam?” Dean asked.

“Yeah, it's going nuts. When I went over here by the window... There's definitely a spirit here.”

“Who stood outside the crime scene and watched,” Dean commented.

“Looks like,” Sam shrugged.

“Okay, here is my theory,” you said, making the brothers look at you. “Fairy tales.”

“Oh that's—that's nice. You think about fairy tales often?” Dean teased you.

“I’m serious Dean,” You said.

“Wait, I know which one you’re talking about,” Sam said, taking a step to you.

“Would someone like to enlighten me?” Dean asked, hating the feeling of being out of the loop.

“Dean, come on. A guy and a girl? Hiking through the woods? An old lady tries to eat them? That is Hansel and Gretel. Now that I think about it, Kyle and his brothers, they were construction workers. They built houses. They were attacked by the Big Bad Wolf.”

“Three Little Pigs.” Dean voiced your thoughts.

“Exactly.”

“Wait, I thought these things ended happily?” Dean asked, confused.

“Well, the newer versions fit for children and bedtime stories, yes. But the originals? Hell no,” You said, making Sam take over.

“See, the Grimm Brothers’ stuff was kind of the folklore of its day. It was full of sex, violence, and cannibalism.” Sam added to your thought, making Dean sigh.

“So, you think the murders are uh, what? A re-enactment? That's a little crazy.”

“Crazy as what? Demons and ghosts and shit?” You pointed out.

“Touché. Then how is the creepy little girl involved?”

“Um... Well, she must've been here for a reason. I'm willing to bet you top dollar she was at the construction site too.” Sam said.

“We gotta do research now, don't we?” Dean groaned and you and Sam both nodded. He sighed and finished up with what he was doing at the cottage before walking back to the car to head to the library. Now that you knew what you were dealing with, the question now is how can you stop it?

You, Sam and Dean split up to figure out what exactly you were dealing with. You went with Dean to the library and Sam went around, going to police stations and trying to see if he could uncover anything. You hoped that Sam was having good luck with this because you and Dean spent the past six hours in the library, coming up with jack shit.

“God damn it! I am going out of my mind!” Dean growled in frustration, closing the book he was reading.

“Don’t worry, we will figure it out. We always figure it out. Let’s take a break and go see if we can find Sam.” You suggested and he agreed with you. You shut down the computer you were using and put the books back where you found them before exiting the library.

You found Sam walking towards you guys and when you met, you knew he found something but you didn’t know if it was good news or bad news.

“So?” Sam spoke first.

“We checked every record they had. Found the usual amount of violent childhood deaths for a town this size.” Dean informed him and you three began walking to the park that was across the street.

“Okay,” Sam sighed.

“Wanna know how many how many were little girls with black hair and pale skin?” Dean asked his brother.

“Zero.”

“Zero! You wanna know how many how many little girls with black hair and pale skin that have gone missing? Right again. Zip. zilch, nada. Tell me you've got something good because we’ve totally wasted the last six hours.” Dean said with a sigh. You three walked into the park and strayed from the trail.

“Well, you ever hear of Lillian Bailey? She was a British medium from the 1930s.”

“She got a thing for fairy tales?” You asked Sam.

“Nah, trances. See, she'd go into these unconscious states where, um, get this, her thoughts and actions were completely controlled by spirits.”

“A ghost puppet master.” You said.

“You think that's what this kid is doing? Sending wolfboy and grandma into trances, making them go kill-crazy?” Dean asked.

“Could be. You know, kind of like spirit hypnosis or something.”

“Trances I get, but fairy tale trances? That's bizarre even for us.” Dean said, still skeptical. You and the brothers stopped walking when you found a bullfrog in front of you, croaking as if it wasn’t bothering anyone.

“Yeah, you're right. That's completely normal.” Sam said with an eye roll, looking at his brother.

“Alright, maybe it is fairy tales, totally messed-up ones, but fairy tales. Hey, you wanna be the princess that kissed the frog?” Dean joked, nudging your shoulder.

“Hell no.” You immediately said, looking away from the frog and to Dean.

“Hey. Check that out.” Sam said, pointing to a house across the park. You and Dean looked in that direction and didn’t notice what he was pointing at until you saw a pumpkin sitting on the porch.

“Yeah? So, what, it’s close to Halloween,” Dean said, walking with you and Sam over to the house.

“You remember Cinderella? With the pumpkin that turns into a coach, and the mice that become horses?” Sam pointed out.

“Dude, could you be more gay?” Dean asked and Sam gave him the biggest bitch face Sam has ever given him.

“Sam, this is just a pumpkin. I mean, I’m not dismissing your theory or anything but how can you go off of just a pumpkin?” You asked, ignoring Dean’s earlier comment.

“Let’s find out, shall we?” Sam said, walking to the front door and got on his knees. He started to pick the lock and you and Dean blocked him from anyone that could see him. He got the door open soon and you walked in behind them, shutting the door.

“Well who knows, maybe you'll find your fairy godmother?” Dean teased his brother. Sam rolled his eyes and Dean smirked, knowing it bothered him. You split up from the brothers, walking to the kitchen, on alert for anything that might happen in the house.

Dean and Sam split up as well, trying to find anything out of the ordinary. Suddenly, you heard a noise come from inside the kitchen and you took your gun that you always had from behind your back and held it in front of you. Sam and Dean joined you when they heard the noise as well.

“Help I'm in here!” A female voice said from inside the kitchen. You opened the door with your gun raised and saw a teenage girl handcuffed to the oven.

“It's okay. We're here, we're here. We got you.” Sam said, immediately rushing to the girl to help her. He took out his lock pick kit to unlock the cuffs.

“You have to help me. She's a lunatic.” The teenage girl panted.

“What happened?” Dean asked while you checked the kitchen out for anything wrong.

“My stepmom, she just freaked out, screamed at me, beat me. Chained me up.”

“Where is she now?” Sam asked as he worked.

“I don’t know.” You sighed and looked out the kitchen door to see a little girl with black hair and pale skin looking at you.

“Dean, Sam,” You said, catching the attention of the brothers. They saw the little girl, just as she was walking away. You followed her, keeping your gun out. This must be the little girl who Julie was talking about earlier. You walked into the living room where you saw the little girl go but she walked out of sight. You rolled your eyes, not in the mood for this bullshit.  

You walked through the house, looking for the little girl. When you walked into the dining room and didn’t see her, you knew something was up. You heard a creak come from behind you and you turned around, seeing the little girl there, staring at you.

“Who are you?” You asked but didn’t receive an answer from her. She continued to start at you until she started flickering like a spirit does. She vanished from sight, leaving a red apple in her place. You looked at it and picked it up, knowing what this meant.

Red apple meant Snow White. The wicked step-mother poisoned the apple which in turn, poisoned Snow White. Was this little girl poisoned by her mother?

Series Rewrite Junkies:

@helllonearth @amyisabellal @deanwnchstr​ @caseykitten6​ @roxalya19​ @quixoticcat​ @supernaturalblogging​ @notmoose45​ @crowleysminion​ @mina22​ @tahbehonest​ @oreosatmidnight​ @seninjakitey​ @flyonlittlewinchester​ @earthtokace​ @gingersnapped13​ @superrandomnatural​ @my-wayward-heroes​ @stevetrevorstardis​ @supernaturallover2002​ @teamfreewillsstuff​ @gucci-daddario​ @22sarah08​ @gh0stgurl​

[aion-rsa]

Black Lightning’s Khalil Continues to Shine in Season 4

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This Black Lightning article contains spoilers through Season 4, Episode 11.

Black Lightning is sauntering into its final few episodes with the confidence of a keyboard warrior in a woman’s twitter mentions. It’s casual in a way that’s both worrisome and impressive, and one has to wonder if they got it or if they just think they do. Coming into the season, I felt like the writers were ramping up towards a finale that would be explosive, but so much has happened already, the story has plateaued. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy watching, but I’m less invested than I hoped I’d be by this point.  Part of that is due to the fact that the Pierces can’t seem to lose, and that’s still the case in “The Book of Reunification: Chapter Two: Trial and Errors.”

Jefferson began the season grieving the loss of his best friend and grappling with the resulting guilt. He’d abandoned Black Lightning and was ready to let him go for good. But now that his powers have been taken away, he’s struggling with the idea that he may never be Black Lightning again. We’ve seen what Freeland is like without its hero, but that was before the ASA and Markovia. What would it mean for Jefferson to lose his powers for good? We could go into the series finale with the titular hero devoid of powers. And as unlikely as that is, it is the kind of choice that could pay off if the writers fully commit to it. Black Lightning has always shown up for Freeland; perhaps, in the finale, Freeland will need to show up for him.

Despite the fact that Painkiller still feels compelled to execute the Pierces, Khalil shows up for them. Khalil has been a force ever since his reintroduction in the backdoor pilot for his solo show, Painkiller. Last week, he recovered Tobias’ business ledger, giving him information that could exonerate the Pierces and take Tobias down. He discovered that Tobias has been paying the Looker beaucoup cash to mind-control people into framing Jefferson and Lyn. He offers to track Looker down and persuade her to admit to what she’s done. When Khalil finds the Looker, she tries to take control of him. Because she’s a meta who controls the mind, we’re able to watch them fight inside of Khalil’s mental landscape. It’s a cool action piece and a great way to visualize Looker’s powers from her perspective.

Jefferson, meanwhile, has to convince Detective Shakur to help him slip a serum into the FBI agent’s drink, in order to prove he’s under Looker’s influence. Shakur is hesitant to trust Jefferson at first but he comes around, and that faith is rewarded when the FBI agent ejects Looker’s silver liquid, and agrees to make things right… as much as he can. Jefferson having an ally in the PD has been crucial this season, though I’d hoped for more interplay between Chief Lopez, Jefferson, and Detective Shakur. When Lopez goes to Tobias for more firepower, she goes all in on meta-racism when he offers her meta-boosters instead. She blames metas for literally everything wrong with the world, and there is not enough time to unpack all of that, so hating metas real hard will just have to do. She could be formidable, but she’s just a mild annoyance at this point. I wanted more from Lopez, but I’m happy at least Shakur has proven to be a solid addition to the team, even if he remains skeptical.

Jennifer should be more skeptical, and generally…. smarter. She ghosts Uriah because she thinks he set her up with FPD even though that’s hella illogical, and TC helps her find some damn sense by confirming that someone else—Lopez, obviously—hacked him. TC also points out that her use of social media is what has been causing all this trouble, which everyone warned her about. Earlier in the season I talked about Lightning being on social media and how that could impact her, and now we’re seeing the ramifications of her choices. I like that Black Lightning took this route with Jen. What I do not like is how the show punishes her by having Tobias—by way of Red— kill Uriah.

Stop introducing characters solely to kill them in service of the leads, and stop using them as collateral damage to magnify the stakes. We are here, and we are invested. Now is the time to focus on the characters we’ve already spent time with and care about, it is not necessary to throw bodies at us to reaffirm the bad guys are bad. Tobias is ruthless, we get it. It is much more meaningful to see Tobias’ plans come together than watch him enact violence on yet another person—bruh ripped out a whole spine twp seasons ago, we. get. it. Though, it should be said that Tobias is an entire dumbass. He is a master planner and manipulator yet wasted the powers of mind control on framing Jefferson instead of using it to get one of the Pierces to try to kill the other, or one of their other loved ones, or… literally anything else. But I digress. The Pierces have been able to counter every move he’s made, and I’m hoping he has more in store.

Just when it seems there is a clear endgame for Black Lightning, the writers drop something new. Gambi and Anissa explain to Lauren how Tobias used her research and Monovista’s resources to do harm. When Lauren and Gambi search for the emitter, they find a large deposit of Promethium instead. It takes only small amounts of Promethium to power the direct energy guns, there is no telling what can be powered by the Prometheum that runs underneath Freeland. This could relate to whatever Tobias is planning or it could be nothing. But at this stage I expect there to be major implications of that discovery and I hope whatever it is, it shakes the show up!

Additional thoughts.

Ishmael should be issuing refunds! He hasn’t killed a single target except Lala who was caught slippin’ (and is technically still alive and encased in concrete). Why Tobias would then task him with killing Khalil, when he has yet to check a single box on his to-do, is beyond me. But Ishmael vs Khalil/Painkiller is a matchup I want to see.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Jefferson asks Lynn to get remarried and she lightly brushes it off. They have been more toxic than not over the course of the show, and it could be really powerful for either or both of them to choose themselves over their relationship.

The post Black Lightning’s Khalil Continues to Shine in Season 4 appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3fdL65V

[shinmegamitensei2]

i was gonna sleep cus i’m tired as shit but then my brain started blaring some thoughts in my head so now i can’t sleep, so now you guys get to hear me ramble angrily about privilege and intersections of it on my blog instead

warning: this is extremely long and at points starts to sound like “pwease weave the poow twans men awone we did nofing wrong uwu” but i promise there’s a point somewhere in here about how we gotta start thinking about what we say has consequences

just... i get so angry when privilege is conflated to “if you have it, you have every single facet of it and you always benefit from it” when that’s really not the case at all, and to treat privilege as a single card that is separate from, and consequently unaffected by personal experience, other VISIBLE aspects of identity and individuality, and so forth is a really flawed way of thinking

the way i see most people explain or treat privilege is whether you have, say, a “privilege card” and the more you accumulate, the more privileged you are and thus the more benefits society offers you as a result of your status over another person (say, a white cis straight man is far more privileged than a black trans gay woman)

this is it, a simplification of privilege, easily digestible and easy enough to regurgitate to other people to get them to understand on an elementary level what it means to have privilege - when you have it, you have benefits over another person because society deems you better than another person

but then the conversation stops there. it stops, and this simplification becomes a hard and fast rule rather than the beginning of an educational moment, and suddenly we have concepts such as self-determination of your identity means you can gain and drop privileges as you change and determine WITHIN YOURSELF who you are, rather than what society deems you as

and therein lies the problem: how do you gain or lose privilege? how does the concept of passing privilege factor into all this? what does it mean to pass, or to not pass, and can privilege be bargained, can it only be half-gained or half-lost, can it change on a whim?

the only times i ever see this brought up, it’s by some asshat who’s got some shitty opinions or is trying to defend the privileged group wherein exchanges of power usually do not happen on the level i’m trying to discuss (re: race and a white person whose family is predominantly european-white, although there is a lot to be said about someone who is white but also comes from a mixed family and the way that privilege can also be bartered based on perceived appearance versus the reality) but what i really want to look into, specifically, is the bartering of privilege gained and lost through identification as trans, nonbinary, or another gender unrecognized by mainstream society

because, like... it’s here, i feel like, where passing privilege becomes its most prominent (as well as sexuality and the culture surrounding it that has crafted a persona, either influenced by or influencing [or both!!] by homophobic caricatures of the past and present) and where we need to start having discussions, serious discussions, about how one passes not only affects their privilege, but also that we cannot and should not treat people specifically based on what privileges or disprivileges we believe they should be experiencing in their day-to-day lives, because... it doesn’t work that way

there’s such a monumental difference between people at different stages of passing, and what information they have about them that is on the internet, or among their friends and family, or to their bosses and coworkers or if it gets leaked in ways they didn’t intend or want people to see or know

i AM going to use trans men in this example, being one myself, because i don’t intend to try and explain anything using experiences that don’t belong to myself so as to not misrepresent anyone, so i apologize that this comes off as being really whiny and “wahhh stop treating transmasc ppl badly” because a whole lot of trans masc and trans men adopt misogyny and absorb toxic masculinity in an attempt to become masculine, in a world where manliness is often defined by how much you can reject femininity and the constant attempts to redefine masculinity in a way that doesn’t allow male predators to adopt it solely to hurt women I’M GOING ON A TANGENT ANYWAY

there was a point i wanted to make here, and it was specifically on the idea that, like... you cannot ever, possibly, expect a trans man who is completely untransitioned and is seen, societally, as a woman, to own any amount of male privilege that makes any real difference where it matters aside from an online community wherein anonymity is valued, but also in said community where that information (that they are trans, whether or not they mention they are untransitioned) may be open and ENCOURAGED to be posted online for the sake of engaging in these conversations in the first place

as opposed to a trans man who is fully transitioned, has spent several years being accepted as a man, having absorbed ideas about masculinity that may make him indistinguishable from other men and nobody questions his status as a man, and all of this is STILL contingent on the fact that nobody knows or SHOULD know that he is trans, as once that information comes out on a platform where people feel empowered to challenge him (not only including the internet, but in real life, where it is common and encouraged for men to engage in violence, especially where bigotry is concerned)

as opposed to any trans men who may be in between, too! a man who is taking T, whose voice is changing over time and where his neighbors may catch onto what’s going on and grow suspicious; a man who takes strides to act masculine where he can, but who is stifled in an environment where he could be abused or killed purely on account of transphobia; a man who does not WANT to take the steps required for society to fully “recognize” him as a man, and so may never be able to fully participate in presenting the way he wants

this is all transphobia, full stop. not transmisandry or whatever weirdo terms ppl are coming up with these days, but there is a lot to be said in how transness AFFECTS male privilege, and how that male privilege may be adopted, absorbed, and enacted depending on the way that society recognizes men, maleness and masculinity

trans masculinity, and the state of being a trans man, is not an experience shared by every trans man. trans men are not all the same - some are trans nonbinary men, some transition, some do not, some adopt abusive techniques and toxicity that comes built into the system that tells us what being a man is and what being a woman is (although i could also argue that in a lot of ways, to be recognized as a man without having homophobia and transphobia and misogyny thrown at you constantly is to HAVE to participate in these systems, but alas)

there is a wide variety of difference in all of these people, and how they are recognized on a widescale manner that makes any shred of difference outside of this website - which begs another question! where does privilege travel? can it disappear or appear depending on where you are? where you go? can you have privilege on tumblr, but then have it vanish when you leave this website?

there’s a distortion, a way we talk about privilege and the privileged folk, that makes it so damn difficult to discuss the finer and more important details about privilege, intersection, and how privilege is not the same for everyone. it CANNOT be the same for everyone, because passing privilege is not yet another token given to people just to show that they have it! and privilege is not a set of cards and coins that come separately and totally irrelevant of each other!

a trans man is pelted by misogyny, homophobia, as well as transphobia when he does not pass. just as cis men are pelted with these ideas, so too are trans men. and yes, they are misguided. they hurt women and gay people more than they hurt men and straight people, this much should be obvious to anyone. but these things - they are STILL internalized, and how they are internalized changes depending on who is on the receiving end, and in many ways these things are markers and indicators of how to and how not to act for men

i wanted to keep going on about this point and i think i have more to say but my end point with all this is just that privilege changes power depending on where you are, who you are, and on a moment’s notice depending on what information people have a hold of, and i know i did a not-great job of explaining this but also i’m just venting so whatever

another thought occurred to me, about something i was thinking about earlier today, and it’s about how we talk about this concept, and how we approach privilege and privileged people and people whose privilege may variably change

obviously tumblr’s a bad place to be. it’s polarizing, because a lot of people use it as a place to vent, and there’s a lot of gross and nasty people here (including highly-privileged folk and fucking neo-nazis for fuck’s sake) and having long and meaningful conversations here is pointless because it’s drowned out by the obsession and need for having notes yet lacking a cohesive way to spread posts and all proper additions to that post without someone losing some form of context along the way

(that fucking, pewdiepiekin post goin around is one such example, since it’s apparently a joke that OP has but everyone’s treating it as fact, and like obviously it’s hard to tell sarcasm on this website given how much weird shit we’ve seen, but also that it’s FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE to correct such a misunderstanding BECAUSE of the very nature of tumblr itself, go figure)

but that’s also why i think we gotta have this conversation, this like... talk that we can’t keep talking about shit the way we have been, especially in regards to social justice and conceptualizing it for the younger kids who USE this website, and like... we just gotta have a different way of approaching things now, because the more i watch idle chats where people gleefully and openly post screenshots of others making fun of them for minor shit or momentary fuck-ups that could be easily ignored because the person is still learning (ESPECIALLY IF THEY’RE LIKE 14) and otherwise give themselves a free pass to become openly vicious and in the name of coping or to share amongst their friends how pathetic they view some people

like ok not to be a liberal and i’d rather not be classified as such because i don’t lick the boots of the privileged or pull any of that devil’s advocate shit but this extremely hostile environment we’ve cultivated and continually defend because we think this website creates ANY sort of meaningful difference in the world and anything we do on this website has any sort of meaningful impact that is beneficial to us while also openly encouraging behaviors that mitigate and deny growth and learning from mistakes is honestly kind of fucking scary

this is in no way saying giving a pass or go on behavior that directly spreads violence like saying slurs and whatnot, but we’re also so, so very fucking vicious, and at some point, no matter what reason you have for saying what you do, the consequence is that your words and intents get hijacked and used out of context in a manner that forms high hostility in the first place

and it’s so, so hard to talk about here too, without going “well if you hate men hurr durr it’s ur fault everything on this site sucks don’t openly say you hate your oppressors hurr durr!” like that’s such an easy trap to fall into but i don’t believe that either, even if i’ve grown distasteful of openly expressing “i hate cis men” (because they terrify me and could murder me at a moment’s notice, both for thinking i’m a woman and for finding out i am trans) or “i hate straight people” (because they fetishize my gayness and shit!) and etc

i’ve got so many reasons why i could express those thoughts, but should i do it, and on a regular basis, consequences follow. consequences that destroy my cultivated and intended reputation as someone who is open and friendly and kind, because it is difficult to really PROVE that to someone who may be on the fence from allowing themself to be deprogrammed from societal teachings and ingrained and taught transphobia and homophobia and misogyny and racism and so on so forth

and i know not everyone is like that. not everyone WANTS to teach and to provide the resources for that and to help deprogram people. most people just want to vent, most people want to escape from the daily abuse and fear and vent their frustrations. i get that. but then where do we go from there, when we have such an absolute volume of people doing and saying this exact thing, in such a degree that such a climate becomes normal to be reactionary and to react to any level of ignorance with anger, no matter who it comes from?

i’m being so, so vague here, and i really do not want it to come off as protection of the poor soft privileged or what the fuck ever, i genuinely do not. i guess i’m just describing a time in my life where i was like that, where i openly enjoyed mocking people that i thought were beyond reprieve and “saving” and getting into fights and it was such a nasty attitude to be in because it led to me throwing people out of my life, throwing caution to the wind, destroying my reputation online and getting put on places like r/tumblrinaction and potentially k.i/.w/i./f./a/./r./.m//s for my actions

living that way endangered me, and not just because of who i am. living that way destroyed me, and it destroyed my way of thinking, too. it destroyed my moral system, it encouraged me to dehumanize others. it encouraged me to find new ways to rationalize violence as a way of “vengeance” and “retribution” for the damages society dealt me, as if that was any rational and correct way of approaching this situation

anger has its place. anger has its place in destroying the system we have now and rebuilding a new one. but we need to understand that our actions, no matter how justified, still have consequences, sometimes extremely unintended, and even unwarranted that we didn’t deserve, and just... i dunno

there is no easy solution to this. i don’t believe we’ll get anywhere by being nice to everyone all the time, just as much as i don’t believe we’ll get anywhere by developing such a community-wide but aimless anger that we develop as hostile an environment as we have on this website

i don’t know what we need, but it can’t be this

[britishchick09]

The Pillow Problem: A Wadlow Sibling Fan-Fic (part 1/2)

a new senpai fic has arrived! this one took a little over a week to write (march 26th to april 3rd) and it’s a sweetie-pie ;) enjoy!

senpai’s siblings have a pillow fight, which leads to a problem... will senpai and the sibs be able to fix it?

Betty Wadlow smiled as she bounced a little on Robert’s big bed. “I’m glad Mom and Dad are gone. We get to have a sleepover!”

“Where did they go?” Harold Jr. asked somewhat worriedly.

“They’re just on a dinner date.” Helen explained.

“And we’re all on our own.” Eugene added with a sly smile.

“Not completely,” Robert ducked into the room. “I’m here.”

“You’re part of the ‘all’ in ‘all of us’, you know.”

Robert gently closed the door and got into bed. “I know, but I’m watching over you all tonight. I’m taking care of you.”

“It’s still a sleepover,” Betty said. “You can have fun and take care of us at the same time!”

“I’m not that good at multitasking.”

“It doesn’t take much to do both at the same time. You’re still watching us while we have fun.”

“What should we do first?” Helen asked.

“Snacks!” Harold Jr. grinned.

“We did that a couple minutes ago.”

“Then more snacks!”

“We could sneak around the house.” Eugene suggested.

Helen crossed her arms as she looked at her younger brother. “Why would we do that?”

“Because no one’s home!”

“Robert’s home.”

“So?”

“He might not like it.”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t mind, especially since he’s snuck around a few times,” Eugene turned to Robert. “Right?”

Robert blushed for a moment or two. “I know you’re thinking of the hallway in high school.”

“I’m always thinking of the hallway incident. It was hilarious! Why did you think that you, of all people, would be able to sneak around in a-”

“I don’t want you sneaking around the house. ...Or talking about the hallway thing. Until Mother and Dad come home, this is my house and my rules. And one of those rules is ‘no sneaking’. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”

Helen grinned. “See? I was right.”

“Oh, you were right, alright.” Eugene scowled as he hit Helen in the back of the head with a nearby pillow.

“Hey!” Helen snatched the pillow and hit Eugene in the same way. “That’s what you get for wanting to break the rules.”

Eugene took the pillow. “And this is what you get for being fussy.” He hit her in the face.

“And this is what you get for hitting me with that-”

“Hey, hey, hey!” Robert raised his voice slightly before stating calmly, “No hitting each other with that pillow.”

Eugene frowned and ran out of the room (almost bumping into the closed door). He returned with another pillow and threw it at Helen. Robert gave him a glare.

“You didn’t say any other pillow!” Eugene pointed out. “Seriously, lighten up a little. We’re just trying to have some fun.”

“It looks like you’re enacting soft violence.”

“It is rather fun...” Helen admitted before throwing Robert’s pillow at Eugene.

Eugene caught it and went over to Helen, who stood up and grabbed the pillow he had dropped. They began pillow fighting, chuckling as they did.

“I wanna join in!” Betty jumped up and ran into her and Helen’s room, returning with two pillows.

Harold Jr. clapped his hands in excitement while Robert frowned at the scene.

“Come on, it’s fun!” Eugene said. “And it’s good exercise. You need that, don’t you?”

“Just in my legs,” Robert frowned even more. “And this isn’t leg exercise.”

“It can be...” Eugene gave a sly smile.

A moment later, he hit Helen with the pillow he was holding and she grabbed it, chasing him out of the room.

“That looks like good leg exercise to me,” Betty commented before asking Robert, “Are you going to join in now?”

“Of course not. It’s breaking the-”

“Because I will!”

Robert frowned as Betty ran out of the room. He was about to go after her when Harold Jr. toddled by.

“Wait for me!” he exclaimed, holding one of the pillows Betty had brought.

“Oh no, not you too.” Robert muttered as his baby brother left the room.

He buried his face in his hands and groaned a little, picturing all the trouble they could cause. He suddenly realized that he had to stop it (rather than stand there and think about it) and ducked out of the room in a hurry.

In the living room, the siblings were- as Robert put it- ‘enacting soft violence’. They hit each other with the fluffy pillows, laughing as they did. Harold Jr. wasn’t hit with any pillows and instead tossed them back and forth like a game of ball. Eugene and Helen were focused on each other while Betty played with whoever she liked.

“Catch!” Helen exclaimed as she threw the pillow a foot away from Eugene.

He grabbed it and smiled. “That wasn’t that bad. But how about this?”

The pillow was thrown two feet past Helen, who threw it half a foot farther.

“I got one!” Betty grinned as she threw her pillow up in the air and tossed it like a volleyball.

Helen caught it and tossed it to Eugene, who grabbed Harold Jr’s pillow.

“This one will take the cake!” he exclaimed before throwing the two pillows farther than Helen and Betty combined.

The pillows landed four feet away with a small ‘crash’. The siblings grew silent.

“You guys need to cut it-” Robert stopped with a slight gasp.

A vase was on the floor. A broken vase.

“...Uh oh.” Harold Jr. commented quietly.

Robert went over to the vase and crouched down to get a closer look at it. The siblings crowded around him, wanting to see the damage as well.

Robert gave Eugene an angry glare. “I told you not to have that pillow fight. And look at what you did.”

Eugene peered at the vase. “I broke a vase?”

“Not just any vase. Mother’s vase.”

“...Oh.”

“The one she got for her and Dad’s first anniversary.”

“...You mean-”

“The one she never wants us to touch. Ever.”

Helen and Betty looked at Eugene, who frowned as he suddenly realized what he had done.

“Well, you know what Mom always says: ‘Don’t pillow fight in the house’,” Eugene chuckled nervously. “...Right?”

Robert slowly stood up (with a little difficulty), keeping his eye on Eugene. “Eugene Harold Wadlow-”

“I’m sorry!” Eugene winced. “Please don’t kill me.”

“I- Why would I do something like that?”

“Because you look like you’re about to.”

Robert took a deep breath and ran a hand through his blonde hair, trying to calm himself down. “You need to fix this before-”

The siblings froze at the sound of a car parking in the driveway.

“Mom and Dad!” Helen and Betty exclaimed.

“Hurry, grab the vase and take it to my room!” Robert ordered the siblings. “I’ll distract them.”

The siblings were in a mad rush to grab the pieces, which they quickly took to Robert’s room. They closed the door just as the front one opened.

“Hello!” Robert greeted his parents with a (somewhat forced) smile. “How was the date?”

Harold took his jacket off as he said, “It was pretty nice. When we received our drinks, the waiter-”

“Would you like some coffee? I’m sure you need some to relax.”

“But we just had dinner.”

“You still need to relax, don’t you?”

Harold and Addie looked at each other and nodded as Robert went to the kitchen to brew some coffee.

“How did it go with the others?” Addie inquired. “Hopefully it wasn’t too difficult-”

“No, it was fine. Everything went well.”

“Really? Everyone was on their best behavior?”

Robert nodded. “Even Eugene was,” He turned around and muttered, “If he had just listened to me-” He brightened up as the coffee finished. “Coffee’s done!”

Harold and Addie sat down at the dining room table as Robert served them their coffee.

“Would you like some sugar with it? A dash of cream?” Robert didn’t let his parents answer and returned from the kitchen with a bag of sugar and the bottle of cream. “While you enjoy that, I’ll go and check on the others.”

“Thank you, sweetie.” Addie gave her son a smile.

“You’re welcome, Mother. ...And Dad, of course. I’ll be back soon.”

Robert went to his room and shut the door, turning around to see his siblings sitting on the floor. He sat down as quickly as he could as he asked, “Is it fixable?”

Helen examined two pieces of the vase. “Probably with some glue.”

“You got any?” Eugene asked.

“First of all, it’s ‘do you have any’, and secondly, no.”

Eugene sighed. “Then how are we going to fix this in time?”

“Glue!” Harold Jr. exclaimed.

“We know that, but from where?”

“Perhaps Dad has some,” Robert suggested with a smile before frowning. “...But we can’t ask him.”

“We can still look.”

“Oh, don’t you suggest sneaking again,” Helen glared at her slightly younger brother. “We’re still not doing that.”

“But it’s not Robert’s house anymore it’s-”

“Mother and Dad won’t approve,” Robert said. “And I still won't.”

Eugene sighed. “There goes our chances of fixing this.”

Betty smiled and put something on the floor. “And here they are again!”

Robert picked up the ‘something’. “Glue!” He looked at Betty. “How did you get this?”

“I had a spare in my pocket. You’d be surprised at what I can find in those things!”

“Let’s get to fixing this.” Helen said, putting the two pieces together.

“Puzzle!” Harold Jr. realized with a grin.

The siblings spent the next few minutes fixing the vase. Robert, Helen, Betty and Harold Jr. put the pieces together while Eugene had to glue them (as punishment for breaking the vase).

“There!” Eugene smiled. “The vase is fixed! ...And my hands are all sticky.”

Helen and Betty made a move to grab the vase, but Robert gave them a touch on the shoulder.

“Let me do it. This requires gentle handling.”

“I’m gentle!” Betty pointed out.

“Extra gentle.”

“...Oh. I don’t think I’m that gentle.”

Robert slowly took the vase, his fingers barely touching it. It suddenly shattered and fell onto the ground.

“...Wasn’t me.” was all Robert could say.

Helen glared at Eugene. “Eugene...”

“I didn’t do anything!” Eugene exclaimed. “I glued it perfectly.”

“There’s a little drip on one of the top pieces.” Betty pointed out.

“...Almost perfectly.”

Robert ran a hand through his blonde hair with a sigh. “How are we going to fix this? We can’t fix it with glue and I don’t know of any other options.”

“Buy one!” Harold Jr. piped up. “Go to the vase store!”

“There isn’t a vase store-” Helen was about to say.

“-But there is a ‘store’ store!” Betty grinned. “We can buy it from there!”

Robert went over to his dresser and grabbed a jar of money. He opened it as he sat back down, quietly counting the change he had. “Uh... I have... four dollars.”

“How much was the vase?” Helen inquired.

Robert shrugged. “I don’t know, but I hope this is enough.”

[dancewithmeplano]

The 20 best Dancing music Movies of all time

From pioneers like Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers to modern day YouTube-breakers like Important Lazer and M.I.A., electronic audio boasts plenty of visionaries willing to pour a great deal of love (and funding) to bringing their songs  to life.   Here, we have counted down 20 more of the very best dance videos ever — did your favorite make the clip?

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#20 Major Lazer –‘Pon De Floor’

Back in ’09 Big Lazer constituted of just Diplo and Switch, also Pon De Floor has been the single that introduced them into the world. In those days, Caribbean sounds   took center stage in the pair’s music — that was way before Diplo could begin calling on pop’s fine for toplines — therefore it made sense that the movie to their breakthrough hit was an ode into Jamaica’s dance style-of-the-moment: daggering.

The next calendar year, as a competitive fondness for the movement left a spate of broken penises in its aftermath, the Jamaican government would crack down on daggering by exposing all videos using “blatantly sexual content” out of television. The Pon De Floor clip stands as a bright, brash and odd reminder of that quite wonderful moment ever. (Fun fact: it was led by Eric Warheim of Tim & Eric celebrity.) [Katie Cunningham]

#19 The xx –‘Islands’

The xx’s self-titled debut album introduced us into a group that has been unshowy in each way. In the restraint of these songs to the extreme shyness of their early live shows, these Londoners weren’t going to provide us bombastic music videos.

It’s unsurprising, then, that the clip for Islands stands out of this list for its striking simplicity. The xx members attribute at center stage, however the focus is squarely on the dancers who move them around in an unbroken loop. The repeating sequence feels perfectly suited to the dreamy depression of the vocals, demonstrating you only require a single room and a wise conceit to create a captivating video.

There’s an additional bonus here also: viewing Jamie xx, who might still be the band’s shyest member despite his impressive solo victory, attempting to look invisible at the close of the couch. We visit you, Jamie. [Jack Tregoning]

#18 Avalanches –‘Frontier Psychiatrist’

What an unenviable job it must have been to attempt to build a visual variant of what you hear from an Avalanches song. The Melbourne group — who built their iconic debut album on samples, pinched from countless disparate sources — have been already collages inside themselves. How can you even start to place that right into a music video?

For Frontier Psychatrist American directors Tom Kuntz and Mike Maguire (who would go on to do those Old Spice advertisements) approached their job with the identical spirit of playfulness the Avalanches sewed to the song, assembling a variety behave filled with oddballs and right-fitting misfits that bring each little piece of the puzzle to everyday life. See it, remember why you loved it and try not to grin. [Dave Ruby Howe]

#17 Chemical Brothers –‘Elektrobank’

Spike Jonze — among those masters of ’90s audio movie with his crazy, cartoonish style — played it right for once for this improbably moving clip, essentially a brief film starring Sofia Coppola, fellow manager (Lost in Translation) and Jonze’s potential ex-wife.

Coppola plays with a gymnast who copes with private turmoil at a huge contest. The graceful performance (comprising a pro gymnast dual) is a lovely contrast to the Chemicals’ pulverising defeats and squelching sound, featuring The Prodigy’s Keith Murray. Much like Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice, what makes the clip memorable is its sincerity — no understanding satirical winks; it lets the beauty of the gymnastics function what they are. And also the melodrama is performed to the hilt; it might be an ’80s afterschool special.   [Jim Poe]

#16 Important Lazer & DJ Snake –‘Lean On’

1,535,399,281: that’s how many YouTube perspectives the movie for Lean On had last time we checked. That’s 1.5 billion eyes on Major Lazer’s handiwork, along with a figure equivalent to over 20-percent of the planet’s inhabitants.   Those numbers alone would probably make Lean On a reference in this record, but the viewcount isn’t all that’s important   about Diplo’s most prosperous minute  so far.

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In addition to being a great deal of fun, Lean On is significant because it demonstrated that dance fans   want to watch their own artists in music  videos — could it have been such a runaway victory if Diplo, Jillionaire, Walshy Fire, DJ Snake and MØ weren’t at the movie, cutting shapes in their mix of sportswear and Bollywood finery? Or in an even larger question,  would   Lean On have become the funniest tune of the year with this movie? [Katie Cunningham]

 #15 Justice –‘Anxiety’

There couldn’t have been a much better candidate to translate the frenzied, competitive seriousness of Justice’s Anxiety to movie than incendiary French manager Roman Gavras.

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Conceived when the French electro duo were at the height of their powers in 2008 as “a clip unairable on television for a course unairable on the radio” Gavras’ no-holds-barred depiction of a day in the life span of wayward French youths triggering forecasts of racial profiling and fetishising violence in the aftermath of the 2005 Paris riots. Wayward is a barely fitting description though, the themes of Anxiety stem the outlying suburbs/banlieues of Paris enacting casual ultra-violence and civil destruction where they go, all backed by the menacing whir of Justice’s creation.

Speaking to Flux on the controversy which the audio video created upon its release, Gavras appeared to relish his status as a provocateur — two decades ahead of the ginger genocide of M.I.A’s Born Free clip. “For a couple of months, I was among the most hated men in France, but it was fun. It was astonishing free promo…that you can only get that much media if you have intercourse with kids.” [Dave Ruby Howe]

#14 Huge Strike –‘Teardrop’

London filmmaker Walter Stern made his name working with The Prodigy in the 90s, when he helmed their inflammatory videos for Firestarter and Breathe. These credentials created Stern a somewhat unexpected option, subsequently, to choose one of Massive Attack’s most delicate songs.

The Bristol collective recruited Stern to deliver his arresting visual style for their 1998 single Teardrop, which Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja described as a “moment of light relief” in their brooding third album Mezzanine. It was Stern’s idea to coincide with the song’s dreamy atmosphere with shots inside a womb, as an individual fetus lip-synchs and also Elizabeth Fraser’s vocals.

The concept sounds unnerving on paper, but the extreme closeups create a strangely meditative mood that’s fantastic for Teardrop. In addition, it helps that the unborn baby is so obviously an animatronic version made from silicon rather than, you know, the true thing. The movie won a series of awards, also entered a life of permanent Rage spinning and also gave Stern a much-needed reprieve from filming mad Keith Flint. [Jack Tregoning]

#13 The Prodigy –‘Firestarter’

Even though most of dance music’s greatest stars seem painfully embarrassing on camera, The Prodigy were constructed for videos. The theatrical personas of both Maxim and Keith Flint were created for electrical onscreen performances, with perhaps the most populous of all occurring within the scummy ‘gator-infested flat of Breathe.

While other videos prompted more warmth for The Prodigy, there’s something starkly powerful concerning the Firestarter clip. Director Walter Stern shot the shameful action within a deserted London Underground tunnel, with Keith because the central star. The frontman’s unhinged shtick was at its most persuasive in the mid-90s, and he actually dialed it up here, holding the focus with his hectic charisma. Firestarter is really so much that the Keith Flint Show, in reality, that the involvement of Liam Howlett, Leeroy Thornhill and Maxim is limited to running at the shadows and giving quizzical looks.

The movie did figure out how to wake up controversy in the UK for giving children nightmares, with some TV channels carrying it off day rotation. Without doubt The Prodigy also discouraged a couple of people from adventuring through abandoned railway tunnels through the night. Nobody would like to fulfill a dance Keith Flint in the dark. [Jack Tregoning]

#12 Duck Sauce –‘Big Bad Wolf’

“It’s no Windowlicker,” the manager behind Big Bad Wolf defended when Rolling Stone proceeded in on 2011’s most head-turning movie. “This was disturbing.”

Duck Sauce’s most memorable clip might not be Aphex Twin-level weird, but it sure will push the envelope. In order to produce their movie tour de force, collaborators A-Trak and Armand Van Helden spent two days in their own hands and knees at green display jumpsuits, heads in the crotches of different guys. Lots of impressive post-production later and they came away with a classic boy-meets-girl story, only with some — err —unconventional sexual acts.

For the very best assessment of why Big Bad Wolf wants to go down with the greats, render it Kanye West: “You took a danger as an artist to piss from your mouth,” he allegedly told A-Trak over email. [Katie Cunningham]

#11 M.I.A. –‘Bad Girls’

When M.I.A. connected up with manager Romain Gavras to make a movie for her 2010 song Born Free, the collaborators created an incendiary short film. Over nine intense minutes, we watch a violent raid of an apartment block, with the officers targeting only residents with red hair. It was a provocative political statement, using redheads as a stand-in for oppressed and vilified groups, and both M.I.A. and Gavras recognized the consequent controversy.

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After the singer and filmmaker worked in 2012 on Bad Girls, they chose a much more celebratory tone. Mesmerised by YouTube videos of “Saudis drifting on two wheels” in the desert, they moved to Morocco to give it a try. The end result is bright, daring and bad-ass. On its release, Bad Girls sparked debate regarding its subversion of Arab stereotypes, while also delivering the visceral pleasure of M.I.A. cruising out the window of a car that’s practically airborne. Not a lot of pop videos combine style and material similar to this one. [Jack Tregoning]

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[wellmeaningshutin]

Short Story #95: The Fox.

Written: 4/12/2017                                                                Interwoven Week

The devil, or what Christianity would call the devil, was sitting at his kitchen table, watching the local news. The local news station was incredibly unreliable, especially since the reporters hardly even covered their bias, and spent a lot of time trying to strike fear and panic into their viewers, but this was the reason the devil enjoyed the news, it was one of his gifts to the world. Now, before we go on with this story, I will give the man another name, because it would be foolish to give him the Christian title, because Christianity was just another one of his lies. His name that he prefers to go by is the Fox, due to his earlier attempts to mislead us mortals, back when he would show himself to members of early civilizations in the form of a fox, solidifying himself in folklore.

Now, there is a good god, a great creator, and there is the Fox, a great deceiver. The creator lives in an afterlife, but it isn’t like a sort of heaven, its really just a shared consciousness with the creator, who does nothing to intervene in the life of its creations. It lives in a state of constant happiness and pleasure, sort of like if heroin took ecstasy. The only way for mortals to become a part of this creator is for them to live a happy life, with the exceptions for those who get born into overly terrible or privileged circumstances, who are able to reincarnate when they die, since they have little opportunity to either find happiness, or to be able to the different feelings of misery and happiness. To join into its consciousness, you have to face both good and bad emotions, but choose good in the end. Happiness, humor, confidence (not to be mistaken with arrogance), satisfaction, pleasure, these are feelings associate with our creator, and this is the only form it takes when it visits the world of mortals. However, the Fox serves as its opposite, and desires to lead people astray from the path of happiness, desires to get them to desire its emotions: misery, anger, hatred, arrogance, etc. The Fox lives among us mortals, and spreads lies and temptations to lead people away from the path of their creator, which only leads them, after death, into no sort of afterlife, just like falling asleep and never waking up, never dreaming. Banishment from existence. Its not as if the Fox were evil, its only that he serves as a litmus test, to see who belongs to live with the creator.

Misinformation and lies are the favorite ways for the Fox to test people, and he always makes sure to do it in a way that is imperfect, so that people can easily call these claims as bullshit, and go on to live happy lives. One of these tactics has been through creating false religions, in order to impose rules that would cause unhappiness and would find hatred that people only hide. Every religion that we know of is only one of his lies, and he becomes satisfied every time somebody uses his false teachings as an excuse to become a hateful person, and he is also satisfied when they are able to turn it around, and use it to find happiness and satisfaction, and go on to live with the nameless creator. The Fox becomes excited whenever he sees people claim that masturbation is wrong, that gay marriage is an abomination, that gender identity is something for people to get upset about, that other religions are wrong and evil, that the truth should be ignored in order to believe the teachings, but the thing that excites him the most is whenever wars or violence are enacted in the name of a false god. However, he also resembles the spirits of racists, teenagers who take up life choices they hate only to satisfy their parents, parents who feel the need to live through their children, people who seek out activities just so they can complain about them, people who can not see gray areas, people who are afraid of failure and either never try, or become upset when receiving constructive criticism, people who look for information that will support their opinions over information that would challenge them, people who only interact with people who think the same way and complain about people who act or think differently, people who prefer image over accomplishment, people who think that they are losing rights when others gain rights, people who refuse to think for themselves, people who have intense opinions on subjects they know nothing about, people who over generalize everything, people who spend more time trying to convince themselves that they are happy instead of trying to be happy, people who would rather be unhappy then have to deal with change, people who kick animals, people who think they are good and hate all of those that they think are evil, people who spend a lot of their time judging others, etc, etc, etc.

Now, the Fox was watching the morning news, drinking his coffee, when, all of the sudden, a report had come on the television, announcing that a young girl had killed a local priest, in the middle of his sermon, and that most witnesses were claiming that she may in fact be the Antichrist. “I think somethings wrong with me,” he said to his current companion, a white nationalist “journalist” who used the strategy of saying very awful things, while pretending as if they were factual or reasonable, “I have not gotten any pleasure from this. For some reason, something inside of me is upset about all of this.”

“Maybe,” said his companion, who had a Hitler youth styled haircut, “its because you’re not getting all of the recognition you need. You are the big evil, the real devil,” the Fox was annoyed by that title, “but somebody else is soaking up the spotlight. Somebody out there is walking around, claiming that they’re you, while you’re sitting around in this crappy house with your dick in your hands.”

“The house isn’t crappy, its actually pretty nice for the price of things.”

“It could be better though, I’ve been in way nicer places. It can always be better.”

“Shouldn’t you be happy with what you have? Right now your life isn’t going to get too much better, at least not for a while, so why not enjoy-”

“Look, under normal circumstances I would be fine with this place, but you’re the devil. Shouldn’t we be holed up in some luxurious mansion somewhere, wearing tailored, designer suits, snorting cocaine, driving around in exotic, foreign cars? Why aren’t we out there rolling in cash?”

“Why do you assume that I would live some decadent lifestyle?”

“Well, you’re the devil, right? And money is supposed to be the root of all evil, right? And you’re big Mr. Evil, so wouldn’t you have a ton of money?”

“Money isn’t inherently bad, but having a strong desire for it is. Being rich doesn’t automatically make you a bad person.” He was starting to wonder if his job was beginning to become to easy, but it had been worse than this before, right? He remembered the inquisitions he lead, the Crusades, the myths that menstruation made women impure, and, hell, even the rise of Mao, but for some reason these days seemed even worse to him, like there was something special about it.. “Maybe you just think money is evil because of all of the bad you would do if you became rich.”

“I wouldn’t do anything bad, I would actually do the opposite. If I was rich, I would make sure that I could spread the word of truth, I could wake up the docile Americans who refuse to believe the truths in life, like how if we don’t stop immigration, us whites will have our government taken away from us. How refugees shouldn’t be allowed into our lands, or our gene pools. How we must make sure to-” the guy kept talking, but the Fox stopped listening, he had heard this all before. The first place he had heard it was from his own mouth. Maybe he was just getting old, getting tired of the fact that he had to live in this world for so long, while the creator (in a way, his parent) was able to live in ecstasy for eternity.

“Look, I’m going to have to cut you off there. If you think that you’re such a good person, then why the hell are you hanging out with the devil? What sort of good person would spend all of their time with what they believe to be evil’s physical form?”

“Well, if you think about it, its just proof that I am truly pure of heart. Like, if a good person was truly a good person, then what would they have to fear of evil? Why would then run from it, unless they feared corruption?”

“There’s other reasons to-”

“And how could they become corrupted if they were actually pure of heart? See, self delusion is one of the biggest problems in our world right now, because plenty of people would rather keep images of themselves, then actually try to become what they want to be. Its like all of these shitty people who let society fall into moral decay, thinking its fine to let terrorists into our country, and to let mentally ill men walk around and pretend that they’re women, its insane, its fucked up. But, they will never accept how shitty that is, because they have to keep up their own delusions, and that’s what makes it hard for good Americans like myself. The truth I tell challenges them, it holds up a mirror that shows their true selves, that shows how the world really is, and they can’t handle it, so they burrow deeper to their beliefs, the cucks. No matter how many studies I bring up to show them that blacks are naturally predisposed to crime, or that women’s brains can’t process as much as men, they throw out buzz words like “Sexist”, “Racist”, “Homophobic”, whatever, just to shut down the discussion, just because they know that if I keep talking, their delusions could be destroyed.

“And that’s why I’m fine with being around the devil, because I know that there is nothing that you could tell me to lead me astray. I know the truth, and I am secure in my knowledge of it, because it is in no way built from delusion. Facts are on my side, and that will never change.”

“What if I told you that I already have corrupted you? What if I told you that it was impossible for you to be ‘good’, because your heart was full of hatred? Isn’t hatred evil, no matter how good the intentions are behind it? Shouldn’t it be a warning sign, that your beliefs are built on a foundation of delusion, because they are centered around the idea of your own superiority?”

“Nice try, but you can’t trick me. Like I said, I know the truth.”

“Okay, what about the fact that I’m a divine entity, and your just a measly soul trapped in a sack of meat? In what way are you able to resist me, when naturally I’m inherently more powerful than you are?”

“Well, your lies are easy to find, maybe I’ve found enlightenment, maybe its a message from God. Maybe you claimed that it was delusional for me to believe that my race was superior, and then you go on to say that you’re actually superior. Don’t you think I don’t know that trick? You accuse me of doing something, all the while you’re the one who is actually doing it. So, like, when I accuse you of doing it, you can just spin it around on me and say ‘You’re just accusing me of what you’re doing! Its obvious because you only accused me after I accused you!’.”

“You do know I invented that trick, right? Also, you claim that you had a message from God, but that’s impossible, because there is no actual God, at least in the way that you believe in him. Really, all it is is-”

“He.”

“What?”

“You said all ‘it’ is, when it should have been ‘all he is’. And that’s another way I can see your lies, because you’re trying to slip in political correctness.”

“Fuck does that have to do with anything? Its not even organic, it doesn’t reproduce, it has no sense of gender whatsoever. Its just a big mass of pleasure, of happiness and every other good feeling that has ever existed, its not the meddling fuckhead that you seem to believe in. It has no real interest in what you mortals do with yourselves, it only cares if you devote your lives to positivity or negativity. That’s it. The only diving thing that gives a shit about you guys is myself, and-”

“Do you really think that I’m that fucking stupid? I know for a fact that you’re evil and a big liar, so why would I believe you when you try to lie about what God is. I know that he’s not some amorphous blob of sixties sentimentality, I know that he is the true judge over all of us. He is wrathful, he knows right from wrong. He knows that being gay is bad, and that being a Muslim is worse. He would never accept any of the degenerates that only exist to be happy, because life isn’t all about that. You’re just trying to-”

“Okay, what about this? How do you know that your version of God is real, and not just one of my many great lies? If he was really supposed to be a champion of good, then why would he hate gays, why would he have destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, why would he allow the churches to worship men who drove out snakes that were never there in the first place, or… like, why hasn’t he done anything lately? Why has there been no sign of this God, but no stop to all of your lot who do shit in his-”

“Blah blah blah. Just more god damned lies out of the snakes mouth. I’m not going to bite into your apple sir, no I will not. You are free to keep talking though, because I find it very amusing.”

For a couple seconds, the Fox put his face into his hands. It was the first time in centuries that he had decided to tell the truth, the full truth, and nothing but the truth, but it was like he was trying to have a conversation with a brick wall. He wondered if his frustration was from keeping company with the people who fell for his tricks, who were so willing to devote themselves to hatred and bile, but he wasn’t fully sure. If he was around those that were actually good, would he end up leading them astray? It was something he never wanted to test, never wanted to find out, because if he had accidentally forced somebody away from the creator’s embrace, then it would be hard for him to deal with the consequences. He didn’t believe in entrapment.

“Okay,” said the Fox, calmly, “lets say that your religion is actually the right one, even though the chances of that are impossibly slim, since there are so many.”

“The chance is 100%, actually, because it is the true one. There is no chance, there is only fact. Right and wrong, these exist outside of probability, because the muddied knowledge of man is nothing compared to the divine clarity of God. Take Schroedinger's Cat for example,” the Fox was getting impatient, a rare feeling for him,”if you are aware of the thought experiment. Although, you are Satan himself, so I would be surprised if you didn’t know about it, since you seem to know a great many things. Now, the thought experiment, that lead to the cat both being dead and being alive at the same time, actually was devised as a sort of joke. It was made to point out how stupid it would be to apply quantum physics, which deals with incredibly small objects, onto a comparatively large object. However, people have heard of it, and even though its origins were farcical,” the last word was pronounced in a way that showed he thought of himself as highly intelligent for using it, “people continue to actually take it seriously. And there is the difference between the 100% truth, and your lies. See, I am aware, like Schroedinger, that the cat is either alive or dead, and the chance of that is 100%, because even if we cannot see it, the truth exists beyond ourselves. Even though I have seen no proof of God, the real God, I know that I am right in believing in his existence.

“And, if you think about it, the same people who bought the joke and think it to be reasonable that the cat was simultaneously dead and alive, they are the same people to buy into your lives. Because those same people are just the ones who would rather improve their self image, instead of trying to learn the real truth. They are the types of people that would rather quote thought experiments from quantum physics, just to seem like they have an understanding of the subject, just so that they could see themselves as intelligent. It doesn’t matter if they actually know anything on the subject, or even know that much about the cat exercise, because what matters is that other people see them as smart. And the same goes for social issues happening right now in America. People would rather think of themselves as good people, instead of facing the truths that would challenge that image. They don’t want to actually know. So then they start to pretend to be an accepting, compassionate person, while they let the white race fall from power to the minorities who literally mass rape women, who dilute the gene pools, who are intensely more violent than we could ever be, and they refuse to see these facts, these hard truths-”

“But,” said the Fox, through clenched teeth, “let me ask you another question. Yes, a good amount of what you said is correct, but when you talk about people being wrapped up in delusion, being so unable to accept any truths, spending most of their energy trying to make themselves feel better, feeding into their own arrogance and vanity, instead of learning the truth, building a cold, hard shell of delusion to protect themselves from the real world, how do you know that this doesn’t apply to you? And, since delusion can be so powerful, how can you say, in complete faith, that you know the truth, even if you were deluded you would also think that you knew the truth? What hard truths have you ever accepted? What information have you ever believed that changed the way you used to know things, that challenged and effectively changed your beliefs? How do you know that the people you insult don’t have the same exact opinion of you, and if you know they do, then what makes you ignore their assertions? The belief that they’re deluded?”

“Yeah, no shit they’re deluded, they believe-”

“No, you’re deluded. Sure, there are people on the other side of the political spectrum that are also deluded, but you are exactly the same.”

“You’re just trying to lead me down the path of evil, my friend, and I know that you’re just trying to gaslight me so that I’ll start to think the truth is a lie, and buy a lie for the truth. I know not to trust a word that comes out of the mouth of an evil man. I’m not foolish. Its just like, think of the big elections that happened, look at how many people bought into your candidate, how many people decided to listen to the lies of a known and blatant liar, a narcissist that could arguably be called psychopathic, a sore on the face of America, the embodiment of big business that tried to sell themselves as a hero of the people, somebody with a fraudulent charity, shady connections with the Russians, and was involved in a giant cover up where she called for the deaths of Americans, killed her own political opponents, and used the basement of a pizza parlor as a child sex ring. But I knew better, I knew that was just one of your tricks, and I voted for the real hero America deserves, the real man who would get things done, and change everything for the better. The hero of the people.”

“Okay, I’m not even going to touch on a lot of that, because you just took the words out of my mouth. Literally. That’s an opinion that I’ve spread around, and the worse part is, I can’t seem to find some way to prove it to you.”

“Damn straight.”

“So, I’m just going to ignore the bulk of that. There’s no point in it. However, I want to touch on the fact that you keep calling me evil, that you keep trying to say that I’m intentionally leading you astray, but I want to tell you that that’s all a load of bullshit. When I see ‘good’ people, or at least the happy and positive people that will be with the creator when they die, I leave them the fuck alone. I do not so much as bat an eye towards those people, because, and I am not lying when I say this, I am not an evil being. I do not try to make ‘good’ people ‘bad’, I only find the people who are inherently ‘bad’, and bring all of the ‘bad’ inside of them to the surface. I give them the opportunity to try to be understanding, loving, compassionate, happy, whatever, and I give them that by testing them, I hand them a lot of obviously fake bullshit and see if they believe it or not. Look, you white supremacists-”

“White nationalists, I’m not a supremaci-”

“Oh, fuck off. Its just the same thing under a different name, just like how ‘intellectually disabled’ and ‘retarded’ mean the same damn thing. You fuckers bitch and complain about what PC culture does, and then you go off and do the same damn things, and that goes into what I was trying to say. You white supremacists ate up every single fucking lie I fed you without batting an eye, not even looking at how sketchy the studies are, or how biased and borderline fabricated those reports are, you just ate it up without a question. And then you fuckers go around and talk about how everyone else is so bad, how everyone else is so deluded, when its all just a way to delude your selves, you focus on other people more than you focus on yourself, but you somehow think you’re different. If you were actually a ‘good’ person, you wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to hate others, you wouldn’t ignore context, you would actually check your sources and studies for accuracy to fact, instead of checking if they conform to your opinions. I don’t make anyone ‘evil’, I just bring it to the surface, I don’t let people hide it.

“And you know what?” He decide to add as an additional fuck you, “There are inherently evil people who are way better than you are. There are people with some really fucked up things inside of them, I’m talking child fucking and serial killing levels amount of fucked up, but they are able to keep it inside themselves, and no matter how hard I try to get it to rise to the surface, they cling desperately to the ideas of ‘good’, to the positivity that actually will bring them to heaven, and even though those people are monsters on the inside, you’re a thousand times worse than they are.”

However, his companion only burst out in laughter. “That’s a good one, trying to get me to believe that I’m worse than a pedophile! I gotta tell my Facebook group about that one. They’re gonna,” wiping a tear from his eye, “get a real kick out of that one.”

Then it hit the Fox, he suddenly realized why the present seemed so much worse than the past. His companion was holding, in his hands, a device that gave him access to an astounding amount of information, an access that wasn’t even possible thirty years ago, when the access that people had to correct information was limited, when people were illiterate, and mass communication didn’t exist. And even now, with all of these advances, the Fox realized, people actively chose to misinform themselves, people actively ignored the truth. So, realizing this, he felt somewhat satisfied, he realized that he was only annoyed because he couldn’t put a name to his frustration. With that weight off of his back, he joined his companion in laughter.

[dancewithmeplano]

The 20 best Dancing music Movies of all time

From pioneers like Daft Punk and the Chemical Brothers to modern day YouTube-breakers like Important Lazer and M.I.A., electronic audio boasts plenty of visionaries willing to pour a great deal of love (and funding) to bringing their songs  to life.   Here, we have counted down 20 more of the very best dance videos ever — did your favorite make the clip?

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#20 Major Lazer –‘Pon De Floor’

Back in ’09 Big Lazer constituted of just Diplo and Switch, also Pon De Floor has been the single that introduced them into the world. In those days, Caribbean sounds   took center stage in the pair’s music — that was way before Diplo could begin calling on pop’s fine for toplines — therefore it made sense that the movie to their breakthrough hit was an ode into Jamaica’s dance style-of-the-moment: daggering.

The next calendar year, as a competitive fondness for the movement left a spate of broken penises in its aftermath, the Jamaican government would crack down on daggering by exposing all videos using “blatantly sexual content” out of television. The Pon De Floor clip stands as a bright, brash and odd reminder of that quite wonderful moment ever. (Fun fact: it was led by Eric Warheim of Tim & Eric celebrity.) [Katie Cunningham]

#19 The xx –‘Islands’

The xx’s self-titled debut album introduced us into a group that has been unshowy in each way. In the restraint of these songs to the extreme shyness of their early live shows, these Londoners weren’t going to provide us bombastic music videos.

It’s unsurprising, then, that the clip for Islands stands out of this list for its striking simplicity. The xx members attribute at center stage, however the focus is squarely on the dancers who move them around in an unbroken loop. The repeating sequence feels perfectly suited to the dreamy depression of the vocals, demonstrating you only require a single room and a wise conceit to create a captivating video.

There’s an additional bonus here also: viewing Jamie xx, who might still be the band’s shyest member despite his impressive solo victory, attempting to look invisible at the close of the couch. We visit you, Jamie. [Jack Tregoning]

#18 Avalanches –‘Frontier Psychiatrist’

What an unenviable job it must have been to attempt to build a visual variant of what you hear from an Avalanches song. The Melbourne group — who built their iconic debut album on samples, pinched from countless disparate sources — have been already collages inside themselves. How can you even start to place that right into a music video?

For Frontier Psychatrist American directors Tom Kuntz and Mike Maguire (who would go on to do those Old Spice advertisements) approached their job with the identical spirit of playfulness the Avalanches sewed to the song, assembling a variety behave filled with oddballs and right-fitting misfits that bring each little piece of the puzzle to everyday life. See it, remember why you loved it and try not to grin. [Dave Ruby Howe]

#17 Chemical Brothers –‘Elektrobank’

Spike Jonze — among those masters of ’90s audio movie with his crazy, cartoonish style — played it right for once for this improbably moving clip, essentially a brief film starring Sofia Coppola, fellow manager (Lost in Translation) and Jonze’s potential ex-wife.

Coppola plays with a gymnast who copes with private turmoil at a huge contest. The graceful performance (comprising a pro gymnast dual) is a lovely contrast to the Chemicals’ pulverising defeats and squelching sound, featuring The Prodigy’s Keith Murray. Much like Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice, what makes the clip memorable is its sincerity — no understanding satirical winks; it lets the beauty of the gymnastics function what they are. And also the melodrama is performed to the hilt; it might be an ’80s afterschool special.   [Jim Poe]

#16 Important Lazer & DJ Snake –‘Lean On’

1,535,399,281: that’s how many YouTube perspectives the movie for Lean On had last time we checked. That’s 1.5 billion eyes on Major Lazer’s handiwork, along with a figure equivalent to over 20-percent of the planet’s inhabitants.   Those numbers alone would probably make Lean On a reference in this record, but the viewcount isn’t all that’s important   about Diplo’s most prosperous minute  so far.

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In addition to being a great deal of fun, Lean On is significant because it demonstrated that dance fans   want to watch their own artists in music  videos — could it have been such a runaway victory if Diplo, Jillionaire, Walshy Fire, DJ Snake and MØ weren’t at the movie, cutting shapes in their mix of sportswear and Bollywood finery? Or in an even larger question,  would   Lean On have become the funniest tune of the year with this movie? [Katie Cunningham]

 #15 Justice –‘Anxiety’

There couldn’t have been a much better candidate to translate the frenzied, competitive seriousness of Justice’s Anxiety to movie than incendiary French manager Roman Gavras.

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Conceived when the French electro duo were at the height of their powers in 2008 as “a clip unairable on television for a course unairable on the radio” Gavras’ no-holds-barred depiction of a day in the life span of wayward French youths triggering forecasts of racial profiling and fetishising violence in the aftermath of the 2005 Paris riots. Wayward is a barely fitting description though, the themes of Anxiety stem the outlying suburbs/banlieues of Paris enacting casual ultra-violence and civil destruction where they go, all backed by the menacing whir of Justice’s creation.

Speaking to Flux on the controversy which the audio video created upon its release, Gavras appeared to relish his status as a provocateur — two decades ahead of the ginger genocide of M.I.A’s Born Free clip. “For a couple of months, I was among the most hated men in France, but it was fun. It was astonishing free promo…that you can only get that much media if you have intercourse with kids.” [Dave Ruby Howe]

#14 Huge Strike –‘Teardrop’

London filmmaker Walter Stern made his name working with The Prodigy in the 90s, when he helmed their inflammatory videos for Firestarter and Breathe. These credentials created Stern a somewhat unexpected option, subsequently, to choose one of Massive Attack’s most delicate songs.

The Bristol collective recruited Stern to deliver his arresting visual style for their 1998 single Teardrop, which Robert ‘3D’ Del Naja described as a “moment of light relief” in their brooding third album Mezzanine. It was Stern’s idea to coincide with the song’s dreamy atmosphere with shots inside a womb, as an individual fetus lip-synchs and also Elizabeth Fraser’s vocals.

The concept sounds unnerving on paper, but the extreme closeups create a strangely meditative mood that’s fantastic for Teardrop. In addition, it helps that the unborn baby is so obviously an animatronic version made from silicon rather than, you know, the true thing. The movie won a series of awards, also entered a life of permanent Rage spinning and also gave Stern a much-needed reprieve from filming mad Keith Flint. [Jack Tregoning]

#13 The Prodigy –‘Firestarter’

Even though most of dance music’s greatest stars seem painfully embarrassing on camera, The Prodigy were constructed for videos. The theatrical personas of both Maxim and Keith Flint were created for electrical onscreen performances, with perhaps the most populous of all occurring within the scummy ‘gator-infested flat of Breathe.

While other videos prompted more warmth for The Prodigy, there’s something starkly powerful concerning the Firestarter clip. Director Walter Stern shot the shameful action within a deserted London Underground tunnel, with Keith because the central star. The frontman’s unhinged shtick was at its most persuasive in the mid-90s, and he actually dialed it up here, holding the focus with his hectic charisma. Firestarter is really so much that the Keith Flint Show, in reality, that the involvement of Liam Howlett, Leeroy Thornhill and Maxim is limited to running at the shadows and giving quizzical looks.

The movie did figure out how to wake up controversy in the UK for giving children nightmares, with some TV channels carrying it off day rotation. Without doubt The Prodigy also discouraged a couple of people from adventuring through abandoned railway tunnels through the night. Nobody would like to fulfill a dance Keith Flint in the dark. [Jack Tregoning]

#12 Duck Sauce –‘Big Bad Wolf’

“It’s no Windowlicker,” the manager behind Big Bad Wolf defended when Rolling Stone proceeded in on 2011’s most head-turning movie. “This was disturbing.”

Duck Sauce’s most memorable clip might not be Aphex Twin-level weird, but it sure will push the envelope. In order to produce their movie tour de force, collaborators A-Trak and Armand Van Helden spent two days in their own hands and knees at green display jumpsuits, heads in the crotches of different guys. Lots of impressive post-production later and they came away with a classic boy-meets-girl story, only with some — err —unconventional sexual acts.

For the very best assessment of why Big Bad Wolf wants to go down with the greats, render it Kanye West: “You took a danger as an artist to piss from your mouth,” he allegedly told A-Trak over email. [Katie Cunningham]

#11 M.I.A. –‘Bad Girls’

When M.I.A. connected up with manager Romain Gavras to make a movie for her 2010 song Born Free, the collaborators created an incendiary short film. Over nine intense minutes, we watch a violent raid of an apartment block, with the officers targeting only residents with red hair. It was a provocative political statement, using redheads as a stand-in for oppressed and vilified groups, and both M.I.A. and Gavras recognized the consequent controversy.

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After the singer and filmmaker worked in 2012 on Bad Girls, they chose a much more celebratory tone. Mesmerised by YouTube videos of “Saudis drifting on two wheels” in the desert, they moved to Morocco to give it a try. The end result is bright, daring and bad-ass. On its release, Bad Girls sparked debate regarding its subversion of Arab stereotypes, while also delivering the visceral pleasure of M.I.A. cruising out the window of a car that’s practically airborne. Not a lot of pop videos combine style and material similar to this one. [Jack Tregoning]

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