#I find it kind of funny being called these things now but these notions defined my high school experience in a really negative way

[skaruresonic]

Do you have any opinion about this post? It proposes that a key element of Shadow's characterization is loyalty, and the reason portrayals like SA2, '06, TMOSTH and Prime are beloved is because Shadow is loyal to something (I would add Forces as well), while others like Boom and IDW fall flat because he's only in for himself.

(some of the tags, of course, are all "sega take notes, everyone gets it but you", which is funny for multiple reasons)

I want to agree with it more than I do. The way it's worded makes it difficult for me to be fully persuaded, because it seems to be missing something.

I feel like the post is a bit over reductive. It's already an exercise in futility to try to boil Shadow down to one or two traits because he contains multitudes, nuances, and subtleties; it'd be like distilling Eggman down to "evil scientist" and then ignoring all the ways in which his manchild behavior molds his character archetype.

The others have limits on their loyalty. Sonic will help you out, but he’s not gonna kill a man for you. Shadow will. He doesn’t have that limit. If you are Shadow’s friend and you need him to kill for you, he will do it. Period.

Idk maybe it's just me but something about this style of analysis rubs me the wrong way. When people make declarative, emotionally-loaded statements about the characters that Sound Good on paper but don't hold up to close scrutiny. If you're going to assert something this lofty, you need to provide concrete examples. When did Shadow kill for a friend in the games? When did he express the willingness? Can you give me an example?

also lmao "Sonic's not gonna kill a man for you," Sonic will absolutely kill a man if he fucks around and finds out While I agree with the overarching idea that loyalty can be an important part of his character, if we're talking post-ARK raid Shadow... You kind of have to be honest about the brand of loyalty he possesses, because his loyalty looks very different from Amy's or Tails'. It's a specific, hardwon type of loyalty. It's begrudging. It's that "Pssh, what? I don't care. Feelings are for wussies" kind of loyalty, if anything. Like, it took Rouge dragging his unconscious ass home, a three-day-long fever dream, and her twisting his arm just to get her to begrudgingly call her "ally." You know what I mean?

On the other hand, I disagree with the notion that an overt lack of loyalty inherently makes him unrecognizable, since self-determination is an arguably equally prominent part of his character. In ShTH, you're just as free to ignore the wishes of your partner characters and go your own way. Cue the Fleetwood Mac.

Framing it as though loyalty is the linchpin on which his character rests risks defining Shadow solely through his relationships with others. Note that I'm not necessarily saying his relationships aren't important, just that they're not the most important. Agency and the right to determine his own destiny are vital parts of his character as well. He didn't just tell Rouge "And I will fulfill my promise to Maria; that's the only thing that matters to me now" in SA2. He first told her "Even if my memories aren't real, it's still me, Shadow."

...I'm not sure why OP decided to include Archie and X in their analysis, considering Archie and X are dead and have no bearing on Game!Shadow's character. Not sure what's meant by Shadow being "loyal" to Amy in MoSTH, either; I don't really have context for that since I didn't play it. If I had to guess, however, methinks OP may be mistaking Shadow doing something kind for Amy for friendship or loyalty towards Amy. You can do kind things for others without necessarily being "ride or die" for them.

This is where the post really loses me. Shadow's backstory doesn't need to be expanded upon at this point in the series; they've already dedicated at least three games and a handful of adaptations to his tragic backstory. We don't need to keep returning to the same well again and again. Surely we can do better than to navel-gaze. And the reasons why "he's like this" ought to be clear to anyone who's played the games, since they're fairly self-evident.

"But what about pre-raid Shadow?" I hear someone inevitably ask. Well, yes, Shadow displays obvious loyalty toward Maria, Gerald, and the ARK as a whole, but certain ShTH endings notwithstanding, it's not a blind sacrificial devotion. Regardless of his loyalty, he exercises the agency not to act like a mindless weapon in the hands of his creator. He possesses reason and more importantly, uses it. He still has enough presence of mind to seek to undo "all the evil the Professor has created" in SA2.

Even before the trauma of the raid and Gerald's programming went and deeply mucked up his sense of self, he was preoccupied with notions of self and identity, for understandable reasons. He wasn't purely a lapdog for Maria or the researchers. I feel like swinging the pendulum in the polar opposite direction and saying "Shadow is defined chiefly via his dedication to others" because it swung too far into "Shadow is a hyper-macho jerk" territory isn't a balanced stance to take.

Like this post is arguing from a Watsonian perspective, as though IDW!Shadow's jerkassness indicates some sort of internal selfishness, when the Doylist "Shadow was just written like shit in the book" will suffice. Shadow has a character outside of his relationships to others, just as Sonic and Eggman do. He's quiet, introspective, and in all honesty, he comes out with some hard-hitting lines sometimes. "This is the final voice of the last war machine," anyone?

Sorry if this reply is all over the place, I'm just writing down thoughts as they occur to me lol. Feel free to add your two cents.

[theloverstomb]

shoutout to any girls/women who have ever unironically and maliciously been called weird, creepy, scary etc

[patchun]

WBaWC Deep Dive: Part 2/2

In the game's preliminary description, ZUN describes it as "a shooting game that's darker than usual, full of animal elements, and just a bit aggressive."

Part 1 here.

Yachie Kicchou. Is this maybe the longest profile of any Touhou character? Yachie's profile gives us more information than anything else about the Animal Realm, so I'd highly recommend reading all of it before we continue. Scroll down and find her profile, then click "Expand." If you're on mobile, this will look pretty bad, so switch to the Desktop mode. While reading, keep this in mind: this profile seems to be just about the only instance of a perspective from a beast spirit. This isn't a neutral perspective, this isn't ZUN's perspective - this is the perspective of a beast spirit, though it doesn't seem to be Yachie's own perspective. I'll be giving my evidence of this later.

The Animal Realm, the ultimate survival-of-the-fittest world.

It's a world where the strong rule as they desire... or at least it was, until a few beasts that were just a little more clever and wily than others began to form organizations.

By now, a select handful of gigantic organizations dominate the world.

The thing about WBaWC is that it's very vague. ZUN does not come out and say "animal rights", he does not say "you should be a vegan", or anything like that. The only thing ZUN wants us to do, without a doubt, is to think about these things, in particular the power dynamic we currently have between humans and animals in the modern world. I mentioned previously the argument for humans to have moral rights because of sentience, and then because of intelligence - but there is another line of reasoning that is used frequently. "This is just the natural order. The survival of the fittest." Opponents of animal rights will say this. But ZUN makes it very clear here - this world no longer follows those rules at all. "It's a world where the strong rule as they desire... or at least, it was..."

Further in her profile, we learn that the beast spirits finally found peace when they gathered all the humans into one area like farm animals and made them into their slaves. So, ZUN begins the game by introducing three characters which cause us to question our notion of moral status, two of which (Urumi and Kutaka) are animals that humans mistreat on a massive scale today, and then, he flips it - puts humans on the other side - all to ask a simple question. "Do you like this? Are you happy with this?" When humans are the ones being dominated, are you satisfied?

Now, there are some really crucial lines here that indicate that this profile is not actually an accurate account, but rather, the situation as told by one of the lesser beast spirits.

Almost all of the animal spirits already have no chance of victory by themselves, and the only way to survive was to team up with one of these organizations and continue fighting as their slaves forever.

Even as everyone continues to fight to exhaustion, an organization can never be stopped.

Pre-Primate Spirit Garden. This is what indicates to me that this is not Yachie's direct perspective. This wouldn't be a beneficial narrative in order for her to maintain her status as a member of the ruling class.

The beast organizations' ruling classes created a shelter for the humans, so that they could continue to be used as ever-capable slaves without going extinct.

The shelter was called the Primate Spirit Garden.

Only when they looked over the Primate Spirit Garden, filled with humans who had no means of resisting, did each of the organizations forget about their conflict. The Primate Spirit Garden was a peaceful recreational facility for everyone in the Animal Realm.

The word here, "shelter" generally has a positive association, right? And look at the last sentence: a peaceful recreational facility for everyone in the Animal Realm? That doesn't sound right. Now, sure, this is interesting, but why am I bringing up that this profile is from the perspective of a beast spirit? What does that matter to our overall understanding of the situation? Well, because of this next line, also within Yachie's profile:

The human spirits intended to devote themselves to the divinity beyond the idols, but they actually came to worship the idols themselves.

As a result, it was only natural that these idols began to dominate the humans.

The idols took control of the Primate Spirit Garden, and the status of the human spirits plummeted to the bottom once again. In being dominated by idols, the Primate Spirit Garden became the most awful, out-of-control organization of all.

Because this, according to everything else I've read, is NOT an accurate description of what ended up happening. The word "dominate" here is particularly noteworthy - from the perspective of a beast spirit, who within this world only understand things from a lens of survival of the fittest, that is exactly what this situation appears as. The thing is, this is where the game's vagueness makes interpretation very difficult - but here's what we know. We know from Yachie's profile that the human spirits were miserable while being ruled by the beast spirits, so much so that they cursed their helpless existences and prayed to Keiki. And we also know this, from ZUN's SCoOW interview:

Q: What do the human spirits who summoned Keiki think of her?

A: The game doesn't mention even a word of that, after all. In that world, the human spirits are nothing more than "materials". Everyone's fighting to steal those materials from each other. Keiki doesn't think of them as anything but materials, either. The reason for that is because the humans in that world want to be that way. You could say they just wanted to become cogs in a better society.

These descriptions... don't really match up, right? You'd read Yachie's profile and assume that the situation got really out of control, that the humans were miserable. Even according to ZUN in the interview, it has gotten out of control to some extent, but... also according to ZUN, this is... what they wanted. So, all that to say, Yachie's profile is not an unbiased description. I thought that was pretty interesting, and it will be important to consider when we talk about the situation of the human spirits under Keiki.

But for now, let's go back to the beast spirit's story of what happened - humans were dominated by the idols and plummeted to the bottom once again.

Survival of the fittest - the law of the animal realm. It's what's natural. What's natural, according to the beast spirits, is good! There is actually a philosophical moral theory called "natural law", and it's kind of the basis for the survival of the fittest argument. But it's also usually used to argue against stuff like homosexuality, abortion, being trans, etc... so uh, I have yet to meet any actual philosophers who use that theory (though I'm sure they exist). In the end, natural law is kind of shaky - because you have to ask the question - if what is natural is what is good, then what exactly do we define as natural? For example, we can look at penguins and see homosexuality, does that mean that natural law can no longer be used to attack homosexuality? Vaccines aren't natural, right? Cars aren't natural, right? Modern technology isn't natural, right? So are these things morally bad? But that's the thing - those three things I said may not be """natural""" according to the general public, but how exactly are they not natural? Vaccines, cars, and modern technology, those things are all made from nature, one way or another. Homosexuality, even if it DIDN'T occur in "nature" occurs within humans for sure! And humans are natural! What we view as natural is fully dependent, more or less, on what we were taught to view as natural. At the end of the day, isn't everything natural? And this is where things get really funny, because in many instances, natural law has been used cynically to defend the status quo and oppression. People were taught that black people were lesser, so it was natural to have them serve us. They were taught homosexuals were unnatural, so keep believing in the church and giving us money. They were taught that animals are meant to be eaten, that's how it is in the wild, so factory farms are okay. These arguments tend not to say "the current power structure isn't natural, so we need to dismantle it" but almost always "the current way things are is the way things should stay." So when we look at Mayumi Joutouguu...

You may not like it,

But this is what peak performance looks like.

Unable to be harmed by anything spiritual, Mayumi and the other idols are invulnerable to the attacks of beast spirits, easily able to defend the humans from their attacks. In other words, in the Animal Realm... Mayumi Joutouguu IS THE FITTEST. Really let that sink in. The Animal Realm, where the strong rule over the weak. Mayumi Joutouguu is the peak of that strength - and yet?

"I shall liberate the human spirits (our prey)

from you accursed idols! Prepare yourself!

It's the law of the Animal Realm that the strong eat the weak!"

From Reimu(Wolf).

"The god of destruction who broke the laws of animal-kind!

Keiki Haniyasushin!"

And this is just two instances. On multiple occasions, Keiki is referred to as having somehow broken the natural law by the beast spirits. And I'm sure that's what the beast spirits believe, because, in Youmu's Otter ending:

"Youmu returns to the Primate Spirit Garden and finds Yachie and Keiki squaring off. Youmu is confused by this and asks if the two of them get along well. Yachie explains that there is no such thing as ‘getting along’ in the Animal Realm. Keiki is surprised by this, stating that she was willing to work with the beast spirits in the future. Yachie acknowledges Keiki as a worthy opponent, but she then states that Keiki must be removed in consideration for the struggle for resources. Keiki tells Youmu that the resources Yachie refers to are the human spirits. Youmu is disturbed by this. Yachie then points out that is another reason why Keiki doesn’t belong here. She states the animal spirits are resources too. In the Animal Realm, everyone is driven by selfishness. Yachie follows the natural order here. However, Keiki, who was summoned by the human spirits, had thought differently."

No longer is the natural law "survival of the fittest", but rather, "everyone is driven by selfishness." Natural law was only used as a justification for the power structures within the Animal Realm until the ruling class was displaced. This game, by and large, follows the narratives of the ruling classes, from the beast spirits to Keiki herself. In that way, the second half of the game is asking more questions about power than it is about animal ethics. It's likely that Yachie and the other beast spirit heads are the ones who present this narrative to the lesser beast spirits, who we have already established according to her profile earlier are miserable, "fighting to exhaustion as the slaves of the large organizations, which could not be stopped". Gives me some serious neoliberalism vibes, but because of the lack of structure in the Animal Realm, I don't think it would be easy to make a political comparison.

So yeah, it's really funny that Mayumi and Keiki aren't really breaking any rules. They're just the new fittest, and the beast spirit ruling class isn't happy with that.

Some side notes about Mayumi:

It's been predicted that the workforce of human and animal spirits will be gradually replaced by the more efficient haniwa, because they can be immediately repaired after they've been destroyed, they can't get sick, and they don't need any rest.

In the SCoOW interview, ZUN compares Mayumi and the idols to AI. He's kind of an old man about it, too, saying that the humans went from being slaves to the beast spirits to being slaves to technology. But if you recall, I mentioned labor when we talked about Eika, and I did so because, well... We don't really have any idea what kind of labor the human and beast spirits are doing, WBaWC is too vague, and doesn't give us much detail. But, ZUN presents this idea, and then describes the Primate Spirit Garden under Keiki as kind of an opposite extreme "dystopia". According to ZUN:

A real "civilization gone too far" situation, where it's becoming a dystopia in a really obvious way.

The way I see it, it's something where "they built objects to rule over the world with, and in the end came to be ruled by those objects." The same as AIs and the like.

But also remember earlier, where ZUN says that that's what the human spirits wanted. Here it's almost as if ZUN is kind of bringing up a WALL-E type situation, where humans will no longer have to work, and every need of theirs will be taken care of by their idols. A very old man thing to say, but what's funny is actually another line that was just a bit earlier in the interview about Mayumi and the haniwa.

Haniwa certainly are mysterious; you wonder why everyone was making them. Archaeology is quick to ascribe religious reasons to anything it doesn't understand, but if you think about it with today's moral values in mind, it might not seem that way. I've thought about things like that for a long time. Personally, I believe they made them just because they felt like it. That might not have been the initial reason, but the act of creation itself gradually became enjoyable, and they started making more variations. To fulfill their creative desires, you know?

Think about that for a second. ZUN has introduced a society with very little forced labor, and called it dystopian. But he has also just stated that he believes that the people who made haniwa worked on them because they wanted to. To be honest, I don't know if ZUN even realizes this.

Finally, Keiki Haniyasushin. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Taking a look at her profile, the main thing that stands out to me is this:

The idols she creates are excellent items that can gather faith, act as stand-ins, play with you, and decorate your home.

A very different description than what was given by the beast spirit, huh? Is this what Keiki thinks her idols are doing? Is it actually what her idols are doing, and the beast spirits simply see that as domination because they can't comprehend any other way? Or is this just a little joke? Or is it somehow all of these? WBaWC is too vague! I'm sorry, but I don't know! Without a human spirit perspective on this, we really just can't deduce that. All we know is that the human spirits for sure liked living under Keiki more than living under the beast spirits.

As for Keiki, I don't have all that much philosophical to say, but I did think these quotes from the Marisa endings were cool.

Marisa (Otter)

"Yachie then explains the story from the beast spirits’ perspective. Marisa thinks it would have been better if she was told this from the start. Yachie apologies, but she reasons that didn’t want to risk failure. According to her, if she revealed the plan to the humans, there would be a chance Keiki would hear about it. However, Marisa was unable to read Yachie’s true intentions from her words. It is suggested that Marisa just didn’t see Keiki as an evil god."

Marisa (Eagle)

To Marisa, Keiki didn’t seem like an evil god. She wonders why the beast spirits hated her so much.

While Reimu and Youmu viewed what they were doing as more like work, Marisa was just in it for the ride, and as a result, she had some interesting thoughts about Keiki when she reflected on what she had just done. Keiki is one of the few Touhou bosses to not recognize at all that she was doing something bad, because Keiki doesn't believe she was doing anything bad. It's mentioned multiple times that she planned to coexist with the beast spirits "so long as they started to respect human spirits". Which casts further doubt on the description of the haniwa in Yachie's profile, which almost made it sound like they were going around indiscriminately slaughtering beast spirits. Wouldn't that be unnecessary if they were invincible?

Keiki's relationship to human spirits could also be looked at as pet ownership, or more accurately, like animals at a zoo or preservation area, I think. Caring for their every need, protecting them from the cruel "survival of the fittest" world outside. I mean, I don't have a problem with pet ownership at all, but I do have a problem with people who own pets irresponsibly and don't try as hard as they can to meet their pets' needs. My cat is my son.

The last thing I'll say is this: Keiki is coming back. Probably in 17.5. This may not be news to those of you who have already looked into this, but let me inform you if not. Marisa (Wolf)'s Extra, after beating Saki:

Marisa: I got no idea what the politics of the Animal Realm are like...... But I can hardly imagine this family o'yours ruling it. There's no denyin' you guys are strong, but......

Saki: What is it?

Marisa: Keiki strikes me as the most dangerous person.

Somehow it seems like she can come at us with all her power again.

And in Reimu (Wolf)'s ending:

Afterward, Reimu learns that Keiki threw the Animal Realm into chaos through her idolatry. She had the feeling that not humans vs. beasts, not physical vs. spiritual, but a religious confrontation was approaching.

And in Youmu (Eagle)'s ending:

Later, Keiki Haniyasushin showed up on Earth. This wasn’t too surprising since Keiki was never a god of the Animal Realm in the first place. However, for some reason, it seemed eerily likely that the Animal Realm’s survival of fittest conflict would follow Keiki into the surface world.

And personally that makes me very excited. And we just got a game about markets?? Hm...

FINALLY. This game has heavy Buddhist themes, and I am no expert on Buddhism, but:

Saki Kurokoma, Prince Shoutoku's horse that was ridden around to spread Buddhism. I don't have much to say about this character, haha. But I figured you'd want to see her anyways, and it's my Buddhism segue.

As far as Buddhism goes, the "animal realm" is one of the realms of reincarnation. To go from the human realm to the animal realm is bad, it means you were probably a pretty selfish person. Which begs us to ask, what might these people have done in their past lives? Does that mean that they deserve the suffering in the unnaturally cruel Animal Realm of Touhou? And what does that say about the dynamic we have with animals in the modern world, the parallel to the Animal Realm? Well, in the (Buddhist) animal realm, according to some Buddhist teachings, you act only on instinct and only for selfish desire. This is because of the misconception that animals act only on instinct and for selfish desire, a theme that we've played with a bit in this exploration, and a theme that ZUN strictly opposes with the character of Kutaka. If you own any pets, you already know that this just isn't true. Just like with humans, animal behavior is complex, and to attribute it to pure instinct is accurate to a degree - but the thing is, you can do the exact same thing to human behavior (we're also animals). It's just another way of creating human exceptionalism, something this game is really challenging. Specifically, the Buddhist animal realm is not a place, though, it's just a cycle of reincarnation. It's not actually a hell, not even close, it just means you've been reincarnated AS an animal in the real world. And this isn't a negative thing inherently, but it is viewed as hellish because of how animals are treated, not only by humans, but also by other animals!

So, there's probably more to say here. When reading Yachie's profile you may say, "Everyone working to exhaustion as slaves to huge organizations owned by a select few? Wow, that sounds like corporate America!" and you'd be right, and there's probably something there, to be honest. But because the Animal Realm is extremely vague, it's difficult to make any connections like that.

I think there's probably deeper stuff to dive into. Like I said, I'm no expert on Buddhism, so someone who is may be able to find a meaning that I've missed here. But to conclude,

As ZUN said, if you look for something the game is trying to show you, you'll just find a world filled with satire and vague circumstances. But... if you look for what the game is trying to ask you... there's quite a lot.

What is the criteria for moral rights? Can we create a criteria that makes sense and only applies to humans?

What is our justification for our treatment of animals in the modern world?

How would you feel about it if that dynamic was reversed?

And well, we don't really get any answers. ZUN really just gives us two pieces of his personal view:

The survival of the fittest argument is bullshit.

Natural law is bullshit.

Our current relationship with farm animals is not healthy, and we need to create a more positive image for them outside of being just our tools for food.

Thanks for reading. Reblogs appreciated.

[brazenautomaton]

Fixing Afterlives: the Shadowlands

This is my “fixing stories” for WoW’s latest expansion, Shadowlands. Due to overwhelming popular demand, by which I mean @shieldfoss and @bhikshu I’ll go into why this is dumb and how they could have done something instead of choosing to do nothing.

I will work under similar constraints to my Heart of the Swarm rework. I magically became Creative Director of WoW just for Shadowlands, so I cannot alter any of the plot of BFA or Legion or anything that came before. The concept art is done and asset creation is proceeding and I can’t change the overall structure or aesthetics of anything, just how the story is implemented. 

Minute one, what you need to do to make this expansion work is sit down and figure out what it’s About. Now, a MMO expansion doesn’t really need a driving central theme, though it can help, and it’s allowed to be “a bunch of stuff that happened” because it needs random-ass side plot bullshit going on. But the tagline is “Brave the Beyond”, this is the AFTERLIFE, this is where we go when we die and the world of the soul -- we need to be dealing with things bigger than us, bigger than the concept of us. Fundamental and About something because they are mythic incarnations of what kind of life you can live and what kind of world exists. 

We’ll still have an About in the traditional sense though. It doesn’t have to unify everything, but it’s good to have a bit of a through-line to define the main conflict. And also, there’s a certain point where characters need to stop saying “The Jailer… speaks true…” and fucking tell us what he says and WoW passed it long ago. Our About is a central question about the Jailer, and the broader notion of Hell represented by the Maw: “Is it possible for someone to do something so horrific that they deserve infinite punishment?”

And it’s funny, you know, you see JJ Abrams talk about the “mystery box”, and when he explains it, it makes perfect sense: a mystery that is central to the story but is never answered because it represents infinite possibility until it is revealed. And told in that way, that makes sense, that can be very good! Except Abrams never does that, he always ends up having to reveal the contents of the mystery box which by his own logic can never end in anything but disappointment. So I can’t say we will have a mystery box, but we will have a central mystery that we know will never be answered: what did the Jailer do to deserve the Maw? All we know is it is incomprehensibly horrible. Like our mortal minds would literally be unable to process it, even trying to understand it would harm us. So this isn’t “nah he’s bad trust us” we need characters who DO know to really, really sell it. Emotional reactions of anger and revulsion and helplessness, and absolutely nobody whether opposed or allied with the Jailer can deny his evil or say it wasn’t that bad. When you ask Devos about it, Devos shudders in fear and disgust, but says it doesn’t matter. If the question was “how bad was the Jailer’s crime” then we’d need to know what it is; if the question is “is it possible to have ANY crime bad enough to warrant his punishment” then we don’t.

Minute two, you need to know how the Shadowlands works. Because they made it just another continent and that doesn’t make any sense at all. What kind of candy-ass warrior afterlife gives you one life and then your soul is destroyed? How does it make sense for characters to call you “mortal” when they die just as hard and in fact you are superior because you haven’t used your extra life yet? Fuck how are necromancers a thing in Maldraxxus, if your soul is obliterated when you die in the Shadowlands WHAT ARE THEY CALLING BACK?

So none of that bullshit. You don’t die in the Shadowlands, at least not without a lot of work. Souls are anima, and the tide of dead souls flowing into the realms of the Shadowlands is a flow of anima, because everything is anima. Anima is the force of significance and permanence.  Anima is what makes up shadow and substance, things and ideas. Anima is the weight of being About something, anything. You don’t die in the Shadowlands by having your body stabbed to death. You will continue to exist, slightly weaker. You die in the Shadowlands when there is nothing left to the concept of “you”. When you are utterly forgotten and what you are is “nothing”. This is how we get those Unraveling Soul Fragments in Torghast: they are souls tortured so much there is no longer a self there, just a concept of misery. That’s extremely, extremely evil. Is it possible to commit a crime so heinous it deserves infinite punishment? If not, is there a crime so awful that it would be unimaginable to inflict it even on its perpetrator?

We also have three major antagonists we need to know.

One of them is Sire Denathrius, who is just fucking perfect the way he is, we love you Denny.

One of them is Sylvanas Windrunner. Sylvanas needs to stay in character: an absolutely remorseless piece of shit with no sense of right and wrong but who does productive things because they benefit her and who is extremely cunning to know how to work an angle to her ends. She’s too smart to get lied to by the Jailer and she’s too smart to go Full Evil but not only is anything less than that completely fair game, she doesn’t get why you have a problem with it. She has allied with the Jailer because there is one thing she absolutely wants to do and only she can do and she can only do with the Jailer: she wants to break him out because in doing so the hold of the Maw is shattered and now anyone can escape. The Maw stops being a prison once the Jailer escapes. And she wants that because she knows she’s got a one-way express ticket to the Maw when she finally runs out of extra lives. She knows she is a selfish, terrible, murderous, monstrous person. Does that warrant infinite punishment? In her heart she is convinced it does, so she’d prefer to make the question irrelevant before she has to find out. She is sympathetic to the pain she is inflicting on others, because it is like the pain she has felt. But she won’t stop. She knew she endured it, so you can take one for the team.

The Jailer is super super super super evil. If we remake him to be obviously in pain and lashing out in fear, he won’t WORK. He needs to be ominous and menacing and say “your soul is mine” and that kind of shit. We will be able to generate sympathy for Sylvanas, we shouldn’t try to do it to the Jailer. He is the victim of the ultimate injustice, but also perpetrator of the ultimate atrocity. He’s not sorry at all. The fact that he has raised a philosophical question about the nature of punishment is just a nice side effect of him saying things to people to get what he wants, which is to break out and inflict tyranny and suffering. Sylvanas is not tricked by him into thinking he only wants freedom, she has a plan that has his true motives in mind. What dimension do we give him so he won’t be flat while still being completely one-dimensionally evil? He resents you. He doesn’t lash out and scream his emotions and say it’s not fair that you have what he was denied freedom. But he resents you. A little ribbon of resentment threaded through his speech to you. He’s subtly insulted by the fact you exist. He doesn’t merely relish your suffering, he relishes your failure, your realization of weakness. He doesn’t pull an Azmodan and say “okay well NOW this trap is inescapable despite you escaping the last twenty!”, he knows you’re probably going to break free of things and escape. But he doesn’t care that this trap didn’t catch you, catching you would just be a bonus. He cares that he hurt you and made you feel inferior and the inevitable doom encroaches just a bit more on you. That is the source of his sinister satisfaction and confidence. He doesn’t announce an ambush and say “now you will never escape and your soul is mine,” he announces it by saying how weak and stupid you are to fall for it.

His victory is inevitable because Death is inevitable. He doesn’t care what temporary victories you earn; he doesn’t bother trying to convince you they are only a setback. He’s going to have you eventually and you’re going to suffer on the way. What a fucking dick.

[bookaddict24-7]

I said at the beginning of the year that I would share my reviews more on my blog instead of just on Instagram and Goodreads. I’ve been reading a lot so far this year, so my reviews will be delayed on here.

Friend me on Goodreads here to read my reviews in real-time!

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107. Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston--⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Wow, this book had more of a punch than I anticipated! I think books like this one are super important--not just because of the content, but because of the audience it's geared towards. Young readers now are learning more and more about society than a lot of us did at their age, so I think it's perfectly fitting that a book like this one is out there for kids to devour. One of the things I liked the most about this book was the allegory of racism in a magical community. Usually in fantastical novels for kids (older ones, anyway), there's this belief that no matter what you look like, the moment you go to another magical place all of your worries about racism goes away because MAGIC. But in this one, not only did our MC have to contend with the racism in her normal life, she had to face more racism in her new life, just with a new title. So many of the actions taken against her by those around her, and the comments (like putting her brother on a pedestal because he was the star of the school and calling him the exception to the rule, or one girl actively telling her that "You can take the girl out of the ghetto, but not the ghetto out of the girl) really made me think that this poor kid went from one ignorant situation to another. Not only is she trying to find her brother and solve the mystery of his disappearance, but she also has to deal with racist and ignorant people around her. Imagine calling a child evil because of something they can't control. Imagine going out of your way to ensure that they fail. Imagine you or your child hearing the things this child heard while trying to just do her best in a system that's always been made to be against her, both in the human world and in the magic world. Imagine, imagine, imagine. Another thing I loved about this book was her resilience. She is brave, and smart, and has such a big future in this new world of hers. I'm so excited to read the rest of this series as it comes out. This book was POWERFUL and I highly recommend it. Not just for the young readers in your life, but I think parents and other readers would highly benefit from reading Amari's story.

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108. Mindy Kim & the Yummy Seaweed Business by Lyla Lee--⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Okay, this book was ADORABLE. I haven’t read a 6-8 book in a long time and I’m thankful to my friend on Instagram who recommended these books! Mindy has to deal with not only her grief about losing her mom and her dad’s busy schedule (as well as his own grief), but she’s also at a new school in a new State where she is the only Asian student. I’ve mentioned this in some of my most recent reviews, but I love that these important topics are being discussed in children’s books. We see moments of racism in this book where Mindy is left upset, even if she doesn’t fully understand just why certain comments and actions are so hurtful. And even if she doesn’t dwell on it, a parent reading this with their little one would notice and hopefully learn if they see their own behaviours mirrored in the actions of some of these adults. But we also see moments of kindness and love as a young girl tries her best to find ways to make her dad happy. Despite the heavier undertones in this book, there was an overall feel of sweetness and childhood innocence. The ability to apologize when you know you’re in the wrong, the innocence of emotions getting away from you, and the sweetness of a daughter loving her father. This was a great read and I highly recommend it for everyone, but especially the little ones in your life who will be entering situations where books like these and their lessons are really important.

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109. The Dead Zone by Stephen King--⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This one, I felt, held more of an emotional punch rather than a creepy feeling. I really enjoyed it! I loved the psychic angle and the MC proving the people who didn’t believe him or mocked wrong. Also, this was a King book that actually made me want to cry at the end. I didn’t give it a 5 because of some really slow moments. While I love that his stories always have a way of coming together at the end, certain scenes sometimes feel long, boring, or confusing. I’d recommend this for anyone who wants to read a King book that isn’t scary and if you’re a fan of 11/22/63!

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110. Takane & Hana Vol. 1 by Yuki Shiwasu--⭐️⭐️⭐️

This one took me a while to read. I found that I wasn’t really in the mood to read it every time I picked it up—which is so different from when I pick up a manga I really want to read. The story had some funny bits and the artwork was gorgeous, but it really bugged me how every new chapter re-introduced the love interest. Over and over and over again. I get it: he’s rich, arrogant, and an asshole. Can’t you trust us to remember these key personality traits? But it wasn’t even just that. We were constantly re-introduced to the premise of the story. I don’t know how common this is WITHIN the same volume, but I haven’t encountered it yet—and if I have, it wasn’t as annoying as this one. I’ll keep reading the story because I’m curious, but this first volume was a bit of a rougher read for me.

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111. You Have A Match by Emma Lord--⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

I think the thing with this book is that the cover tells a different story than what really matters in this book. Yes, there’s a friends to more relationship in this, but the main storyline is about two girls who find out they’re sisters and are trying to solve that mystery. This isn’t a romcom—the romance is a super side story to the main storyline. And to be honest, I really enjoyed it. I wanted to see why these two sisters lived their whole life separated. I enjoyed the process and the friendships created along the way. I felt for the parents, but at the same time, I felt more for the girls. There were instances where I wanted to yell at the parents because they kept putting the reveal off. This was enjoyable overall—a great summer read. Not particularly memorable, but it does what it sets out to do: makes you question the strength of friendships and what they can overcome. Also, Instagram.

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112. Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay--⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

When my friend raved about this book I was both excited and intimidated. I usually try to avoid hypes surrounding books because I go in with too-high expectations and a lot of the time, the expectations crush me while I’m reading. Thankfully, the hype is very well-deserved with this one. For me, the most important aspect of this book that stuck with me wasn’t the mystery surrounding the MC’s cousin’s death, but the character growth the MC himself experiences during the time of his investigation. Identity sounds like a pretty clear cut thing sometimes, but it’s a lot harder to know your own when you’re the child of an immigrant family. You live in a new country, get accustomed to new expectations and customs, and inevitably feel a culture shock when you’re re-introduced to the culture your parents grew up in. I saw myself so much in this MC. From my childhood to my current adult years, people have thought that they could define me and who I am simply because I say I’m this or this. But while others make a quick judgment, they don’t see the internal struggle. They don’t see you questioning yourself on whether you’re enough of this, or whether you’re enough of that. I think teenage me would have loved this book even more. The MC is constantly faced with criticism about his father choosing to move them to the States from the Philippines. The judgments and the preconceived notions of him and his family make him not only weary because he recalls how his uncle treated his father the first time he visited, but also wary because it sets him down this road of self-reflection. I haven’t read many (if any, unfortunately) books where a character goes to the Philippines. I’m so thankful to this book. I learned so much about the culture, the foods, and the struggles faced not just financially, but politically as well. I remember reading about some of the topics brought up in this book and it was extremely eye-opening. It’s so easy for us to look away because we have that privilege, but this book says, “No, look at me. I exist.” The MC, in his journey, also learns to speak up and use his voice. Not just against ignorant friends, but an annoyingly smug and verbally abusive uncle (who I hated to all hell). He also learns to listen. He learns that though not every story is perfect, they still have power. I think this is a great read for those who have one foot in two different worlds (hands and arms can be in other worlds, too). Especially if you’re trying to understand this part of you that wasn’t developed as you grew up. I’d also recommend it to readers who want to learn more about this struggle, learn more about a different culture that is more than its stereotypes, and/or want to read about a young teenager trying to come to terms with his grief and guilt.

___ Have you read any of these books? Would you recommend them?

___

Happy reading!

[padawan-jiejie]

Almost *TRoS SPOILERS*

Summary: Let’s just pretend that Reylo isn’t happening (sorry Rey, I ship you two but hey, for the sake of my emotions, leave for a sec, pls, thanx) and here you are getting lectures from Kylo only to fall in love with him and the ending takes place after The Rise of Skywalker where the bad shit magically handled itself and our fav depressed boy is coming back home...

Word Count: 2804

Pairing: Kylo Ren/Ben Solo x force-sensitive!reader

Warnings: !MyEnglish!, some angst towards the end, one swear word, me describing the Force + TRoS SPOILERS

A/N: I need a way to cope with my feels right now because I... No... Just... No... I can’t... I don’t manage... Not yet... Not now... Not ever... 💔💔💔 Also, I wrote this instead of sleep so... Might contain a lot of mistakes and inconsistencies... And it’s longer than planned so... Enjoy

You didn’t know what it was or how it was possible but ever since you could remember, it was there. This... feeling. No, not a feeling. Instinct? Sixth sense? Possibly. But not quite. Once you turned 19 it all started to make sense to you. You told your dad to leave you alone after an argument and he did so without any questions. The other day you wanted your friend to tell you what was happening that she’s so upset about and she explained everything even though normally it took a lot of effort to make her speak. Very unusual. You needed to reach for a book high on the shelf and it moved just for you to grab it. Once you were walking down the street and you saw kids playing. One of them sat down after a while to catch his breath and some other older boy was about to throw a ball at him with more strength then the sitting child could have handled. You immediately acted and pulled up your arm. You somehow managed for the ball to fly right above the boy’s head. It didn’t touch him although it was more than obvious it was supposed to end up in his face. These incidents began to be more and more frequent and your suspicion proved to be correct. You were indeed force-sensitive. You didn’t tell anyone though. You were a bit afraid of what the people in your environment would think and considering you didn’t really want to be part of the Jedi, you kept it secret. At least you tried your best. Until he came into your life.

You didn’t care how old you were, you stilled loved climbing trees and since you found a way of using some certain extent of the Force, you could climb higher and easier than ever. You enjoyed it. That day was no different. You came about your daily routine, helped your mom cook the dinner, studied for a bit and at the sunset, you went into your family backyard. As you were walking further from the house, taking in the scent of your favourite flowers, you sensed something. You could not quite put a finger on it and could not decide if it was good or bad. It intrigued you so you followed the feeling. That was when you saw him. A dark figure was standing in the shadows and you knew. It was him, this new mesmerizing notion you were experiencing.

You stopped in your trucks, looking him up and down. He was wearing a mask that would scare you if you wouldn’t feel him. He seemed dangerous if provoked but apart from that, there was something gentle about him.

You swallowed, took a deep breath and spoke up: “May I help you?”

There was nothing for a minute. No motion. No words. Then he stepped closer to you, revealing his whole posture.

“What is your name and how long have you been using the Force?” he asked with an unnaturally deep voice. This must have been Kylo Ren. Suddenly a wave of fear washed over you, but you tried to shake it away.

“Oh my... I... I’ve known about it for a while now and my name is Y/N.”

For a spare second, you were thinking, he was going to kill you, but then again, you didn’t sense anything. His demeanour and reputation sure were terrifying but he wasn’t intending on hurting you. If he did, he would have surprised you and wouldn’t wait for you to notice him. You knew that so you tried to stay calm, waiting for him to make a move. And he did. 

He removed his mask.

You just started in shock.

“I could show you the ways of the Force, Y/N.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

“Are you certain it’s not just what you want to believe in?”

“I am not. But I don’t need to be. You are a Sith. Why would I want to be a part of the Dark side?”

“I didn’t say I’d help you to become one of the Sith.”

You blinked. “What are you suggesting then?”

“You are very powerful. I can feel it. The fact that you’re using the Force powers without any sort of training is only a proof of that.” He was circling around you. “I don’t want you to be with the Sith. I don’t want to mentor you about what side of the Force to belong to. I just want to help you embrace it. The Force I mean, without prejudice.”

“I must admit, it sounds... interesting. But why? Why would you want to train me when I’m sure you have other more important things to do? Why me?”

Kylo stood right in front of you, looking straight into your eyes. Your gaze didn’t shift from his. That impressed him. “I do. But it doesn’t happen every day to find a case such as yours and I would like to make the most of it, not waste it.”

You nodded considering your options. There he was, the infamous Kylo Ren, offering you his guidance. He was genuine about it and although you hated to admit it, he was pretty handsome. Those were all pros of signing up for the deal but there were lots of cons.

“What would I need to do? I mean, what about my family? They don’t know I am force-sensitive and I don’t want them to know.” Especially not now when one of the most threatening people in the galaxy is involved. “And I am not faking my death nor am I leaving anywhere.”

“You don’t need to. It’ll be complicated but I can still teach you like this. I can come once in a while and let you practise on your own. I believe you’ll be a natural. As long as you stick to some rules.”

“When do we start?” came out of your mouth before you could stop yourself.

Kylo would come to you, stay for some time to show you Force tricks, see what progress you’ve achieved, talk to you about it, test you in some things and leave. At first, his visits were completely formal. He would rarely let you see his face, would never speak to you about himself and always kept you at distance. Both physically and mentally. But soon he would start to stay longer, talk more and reveal his face. It didn’t take long for him to be friendly with you to a point where you two would just lie down and watch stars together. You shared many theoretical and philosophical conversations and really got to know each other. Suddenly he wasn’t terrifying at all. It was no surprise when you began to develop feelings for him. At first, it started out as a crush you thought would fade. You thought it was a bit childish to feel this way about him so you pushed it aside as much as you could. But it all only escalated. The more time you spend with him, the more you wanted to see him, the more you wished for him to be there with you, the more you smiled around him and the more your feelings grew. You were not aware of it but Kylo felt similar. He found you extremely beautiful and attractive. You never failed to light up his day. You were a promising student and you didn’t let others define you. He admired that since he struggled with this and you always showed to him that all he needs to be is himself. That he is enough. You were smart, kind, compassionate and brave. You were a good person and a true friend. If only you knew, you meant so much more to him! He tried to suppress what he was feeling, but he couldn't. Therefore after one of your sessions, as you were stargazing he turned to face you.

“Y/N?”

“Yes, Kylo.”

“I need you to know something.”

That caught your attention. He seemed so vulnerable at that moment. “I’m listening. What is it?”

“Two things actually.”

You frowned but let him speak.

“My real name is not Kylo, but I guess you've figured that out.”

“I thought there was something just not quite right about it.”

“My real name is Ben. Ben Solo.”

“Ben? Hmm... Should I start calling you that?”

“If you want to.”

“I think I do. I kind of like it.”

He gave you a warm smile that could melt your heart in a second.

“And um, what was the other thing?”

“Well... I... just wanted to let you know that I appreciate you as a person and I need to tell you that... You mean so much to me, I don’t think you can imagine just how much.”

You were biting on your lower lip. Your heart was beating fast as you patiently waited for him to continue. Could he feel the same way about you as you did for him?

“I did not want to for us to become close but we did and I am glad. I also never thought that I would... that I would feel about someone the way that I feel about you. And... I don’t want to change it. Actually, I really really like you and not just as a friend.”

You blushed and didn’t know how to react so you just laughed nervously. “That’s funny. I... I mean that... You know... Haha... I’ve been falling for you for some time now so I think this is good news.”

Before you had any time to note what was happening his lips were on yours, your hands in his hair and you were passionately kissing under the stars that witnessed the beginning of your romance.

It’s been a couple of years since you first met Ben. You started out as strangers and ended up being lovers. Lately, you were, unfortunately, going through a little bit of a relationship crisis. Snoke was out of the picture but there was still the “Rey thing” waiting for it to be done and Ben would never take you with him anywhere and that was frustrating. You were realising what was at risk, you knew why he was doing what he was doing but you couldn’t help but want to be there with him. It was difficult and he wouldn’t listen to you.

So here you were. Sitting under an old tree, horrified, because you could feel it. There was a disturbance in the Force. It was strong and you didn’t like it. Something was terribly wrong and it was irritating you. It was so bad that you even yelled at your parents for no apparent reason this morning because you couldn’t just tell them: “Hey I am dating Kylo Ren and I am Force-sensitive all along and I feel as if I was about to lose the love of my life any moment so would you please stop asking what has gone into me” when all of this was kept a secret from them. You knew you’ll have to tell them one day but not now. Not when you couldn’t even focus on simple tasks, because all you wanted and all you needed was for Ben to come back to you. You needed to know was that he was safe and sound. This uncertainty was killing you.

Then you felt it. One second there was this tension and the other... It was all gone. Totally. Nothing. Blank.

You put your face in your hands and started crying. What was this all about? Did something happen to him? It must have...

The next couple of days you weren’t able to think straight. All you could think about was your Ben Solo. Where was he? What was the Force trying to tell you? How come this was even allowed?! It’s not like you didn’t have a life outside of your relationship with him - it was nearly impossible given that you two were a secret - but it wasn’t the same when you didn’t know what happened.

Your best friend took you out for shopping wishing that it would make you feel better but she had no idea what was actually keeping you from being your normal self.

“Okay so is this about a boy?”

“What makes you think so?”

“You weren’t with anyone as far as I know so I’m guessing that someone you were in love with didn’t want you back and now they’re with someone and you don’t want to accept that.”

“Ph... If only!”

“What is it then?” she put one arm around you.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not? I am your best friend. You can trust me. You know that.”

“I do but this is something I have to process on my own.”

“Well, if you ever need me, I am here.”

“Thank you.”

She wasn’t far from the truth and although not there yet, it still was nice to be at least a little validated. You still had someone really close. You desperately wanted to tell her everything and cry on her shoulder but you knew it was better this way. For now. You had to stay put until you’ll figure out what happened to your loved one. Little did you know all would be revealed soon.

For whatever reason, you’ve woken up that day and had the urge to visit the lonely and familiar places of the gardens in your backyard. You missed Solo dearly and thought that this could get you closer to him as you still had no answers.

Slowly, like a body without a soul, you walked to your and Ben’s favourite spot. The small field where you used to watch stars. You found it there when he was Kylo, not Ben yet. It made memories rise up to the surface.

Your body collapsed to the ground. You sighed, ready to start crying any minute when it hit you. This strong feeling. It was like a message. As if the Force was calling to you. You couldn’t believe it. There was nothing for weeks and now... It was stronger than before. You sensed him. It felt like Ben right here, right now.

You looked up and it was like a fairy tale. He was there. Ben Solo was there, walking towards you. Tears of happiness rolled down your face as you got up and ran to him. He started to run in your direction too, glad to see you after all. You collided, hugging each other in a tight embrace. Ben spun you around, put you down and kissed you deeply. You were kissing him back like you never did before and like there was no tomorrow. It was such a relief seeing him, touching him and knowing he’s okay.

“I love you so much, Y/N. I am so sorry for everything. But I am here now. Don’t cry, please, my love, it’s alright now.”

“I thought I lost you...” you said silently, unable to cope.

“You almost did but it doesn’t matter. I am alive.”

“Almost? W-wh-what happened?”

“I was technically dead but I’m not anymore and I will stay with you now. Forever. I’m not going away. I’ll give you all of the time you deserve and I couldn’t give you before.“ he whipped away your tears and lower his forehead to yours. He meant it. He just wanted nothing more but to be with you.

“You were technically dead? What? Ben, you bastard! What were you thinking?! I...  I love you, please, don’t do this to me! Ever!”

“Please, forgive me.”

“I already did, but don’t you dare to scare me like this again!”

“I’ll do my best, sweetheart.”

“Yes, you will, you little stupid, urgh!” you slightly punched his arm. He pulled you closer to him, not bothered by your actions, and you cried into his chest. You were incredibly happy you could embrace him again and let him comfort you.

You almost lost him. Almost. But not quite. He came back. He came back to you. He was here. He was here with you and for you. And he would stay this time. He was never going to leave. He was ready to love and cherish you until his last breath. After everything that he’s been through, he finally realised that the most important thing in his life was you and your love. He didn’t need anything else and he wasn’t going to risk it no more. He was yours and you were his and that is all the matters.

Almost... There’s going to be probably a lot of explaining to your family members about how this whole love came to be but those are only details! Let’s not ruin the bigger picture, shall we?

We shall.

[rumandtimes]

“Bossypants” by Tina Fey: A pre-view

Luigina Cecchina-Tarquina

Assoc. Lifestyle Contributor

When I picked up Tina Fey’s book, I knew little more of her reputation than as a female comedian. I expected a chuckle and some depiction of a woman’s take on the world of hollywood success — I would not have expected to come across a racist book that struggles to relay a single joke while recounting the life of a southern woman’s bygone teenage years, but then, what would one expect from a cast member of “saturday night live”.

For those who are even aware of Saturday Night: Live (SNL), it is common knowledge that Tina Fey, and saturday night live for that matter, are controversial figures in american media. It seems to be a split right down american society: people who find Tina Fey “L-O-L” funny, and people who find her humour unsufferable; people who tolerate the blatant racism of snl and 30rock as “satire,” and those who have had enough of the denigration, minstrels, slurs, and tropes for cheap comedic effect.

I know Tina Fey is a comedian — a clown — and sets out to prick peoples ears and widen people’s eyes. To quote another comedy critic, I do not seek to come off as someone wilfully misunderstanding humour and repeatedly not getting the joke.

Yet the illusion of that decision is for those who do not remember that Bill Murray had a sketch on snl, where he dreamed about “turning from ‘brown’ to ‘white’”, and the more recent habit of snl writers hiring minorities as comedians to attack themselves on the show with slurs, because it would look less objectionable than if the writers denigrated those actors or people themselves. In Tina Fey’s book, she states that “As a Greek,” she would “only date a ‘white’ man, such as a redneck” inexplicably fond of camouflage.

But to quote that same critic again, humour has a goal; It has an audience. When engineered to subvert expectations and play to the common denominator, jokes have a base which they are founded upon. If that baseline for the comedian or writer, like Fey, is a bedrock of deep-seated racism, which the comedian exploits rather than lampoons, it is no longer a humorous observation, but a cheap, racist ploy servicing an already receptive racist base.

Tina Fey saying she would only date in a certain imaginarily-defined group is racist. Full stop.

Fey going on to say she would date even the lowest, “redneck,” in that category, before anyone else in the world is not less racist — as Fey probably expected her statement to be received (by deprecating people of European-descent with ethnic slurs like “redneck” or “hillbilly” or “honche”, rather than solely praising their racist memes) — but it is more racist, as Fey is simultaneously using racism to make fun of her suitors, and again using racism to elevate even them above anyone and everyone else.

Not to “belabour the point,” as Fey would appreciate, or focus on one bad joke: but Fey’s joke is playing to long-festered notions of racism, colonialism, and rogue supremacism, which Fey buys into rather than challenges, where Fey herself puts (1) any “Aryans” above (2) rich Europeans, (3) Greeks above poor Europeans, and (4) poor Europeans above (5) the rest of the living world. It is inane — and stupid — but a strongly held delusion among groups (1) through (5), and probably strongest among groups (2) to (4).

Fey happily plays with this unholy flame of racism, undergirded by genocide in her native South, fuelled by the segregation in Fey’s own high school, and leaving embers of anti-marriage laws across the American East.

That is not to say racism, colonialism, genocide, holocaust, mob rule, political repression, et alia, are not to be joked about — they are the most popular comedic material in the United States (even if only in the United States). But these topics are deadly serious, and not as distant and abstract as we would like them to be.

There is a real possibility, given their frequency and recency, that anyone who read the first edition of Fey’s book, or attended same secondary school, committed a hate crime, using the exact same rhetoric Fey employs as a “joke.” Not only that, Fey never says it is a joke — there is no punchline.

The only reason I give Tina Fey the benefit-of-the-doubt and assume she was not serious about what she said is because the statements where so outrageous and absurd that someone would have to be insane to print them in sincerity, and equally as ungracious to print them even in jest.

Nonetheless, it was never expected to have to wrestle with these issues, which Fey has ill-managed, in a comedy memoir. Maybe if it had to do with Fey’s experiences or personal identity (as “German–Greek”?) it would have a more natural place. That is, if Fey had been the victim of racism, and condemned it, even through humour, that would be expected, cool, and fine. Fey calls herself “Greek,” but only tongue-in-cheek, and it’s apparent she doesn’t speak Greek. Fey calls herself “German,” but only in relation to being American, and it’s apparent she doesn’t speak German.

What we learn is not how Tina Fey suffered racism, but her experience in adopting racism itself. It offends the senses, and anchors the book.

While hardly intended to win over the intellectual crowd, some of Fey’s items over the years cannot be ignored. Conventional culture, and Fey herself, would seem to agree, after the firing of certain snl comedians and the pulling of certain 30rock episodes, that just went too damn far.

This puts Fey in the precarious position of defending her legacy of racist and baiting comedy, and that of her colleagues, as now she has been outed as admitting herself that she has crossed the line on several, several occasions. But does that mean that Fey is accommodated now that she has made a partial apology? Or is that the mere beginning of scrutiny now that critics have gotten their first concrete admission of her failure?

Fey, and many of her cultivation, say such racist things in order to just have meaningless fun, or in order to make fun of the racist. While Fey and the others may consider this to be in good fun, and an inclusive way to overcome racism, at the end of the day you have subtly racist comedians repeating the words of violently racist hate-mongers for the entertainment of an audience often apathetic to the realities of racism. That is to say, with such willingness to commonly, repeatedly, and recklessly embrace such a serious topic, they can miss the mark.

The impulse may be that racism is so at the heart of American culture and popular life that it is expected that a pop culture figure embrace it (similar to why comedians talk so much of ornery subjects such as politics), and that they should not be taken seriously as comedic plays on the feelings of the populace.

However, comedy is nothing if it does not play to the sentiments of the crowd, and the cover of the clown mask is a poor excuse for crude thinking. In Fey’s apology for racist comedy sketches on her show 30rock, she echoed a previous comedians apology, David Letterman, when she said that intent is less important than perception when that perception causes innocent people pain. In Letterman’s statement (on a different subject), Letterman also says it is not about intent but perception that forced his apology and goes so far to say that if you must explain a joke, it wasn’t that funny anyway, so there is no sense in defending it.

Elizabeth Xenakes Fey, or Tina, has been a supporter of progressive movements in the country, but it should not be overstated to what extent, nor should the virtue of this support be overstated. Fey’s famous endorsements of Barack Obama versus John McCain, and of Hilary Clinton versus Donald Trump, and moreover her critical statements of Sarah Palin’s alliance to both McCain and Trump, have been definitive to her identity as a good liberal and progressive person who supports women’s advancements.

Yet, so too did the majority or Americans. It is not a controversial stance to support the candidate that won the popular vote of a national election — and, sadly, many racist people, both aware and unwitting, also vote for so-called “progressive” candidates for different reasons, despite their problematic stances. That is to say, being a Democrat is not exculpatory of anything. It should also be noted that Fey endorsed Clinton over Obama in the primary, and refused to endorse Bernie Sanders (or Clinton) in the next primary, and Fey describes herself and her works as “neutral,” rather than progressive.

Fey’s most famous work in comedy, the impersonation of Sarah Palin wasn’t as scathing as one might expect of a true critic, but was in many cases humanising, and even flattering. Fey was not kind in undermining the Tea Party spokesperson, but Palin was made out to be an odd yet loveable figure, rather than a contemptible one: she was written off. As Fey’s alter ego said herself, ‘it would be egotistical for saturday night live (or anyone else) to believe that a couple of jokes swung the 2008 election.’

Tina Fey has many hard questions to answer for racist depictions in her sketches, television series, and book — and it is not so easy a dodge to say that she once ‘made fun of Sarah Palin.’ Another reviewer stated, “I don’t think Fey comes off as a bad person, I just don’t think she’s funny.” Tina Fey doesn’t come off as a good person, or a bad person, but just presents as an ordinary person, and whether you find Tina Fey (or mor importantly, any of her jokes) funny is a personal and indeterminable matter.

I watched a few of Fey’s “world-famous” skits for this review, and I admit I did mistake Sarah Palin for Fey in their cross-over cameo skit; And the moment I laughed the hardest (in fact the only moment I laughed through the skits) was during the VP Debate Sketch with her fellow southerner, Jason Sudeikis, where “Biden” repeatedly attacked Scranton, Pennsylvania as “the worst place on Earth” — so again, people react to comedy in an unpredictable way, as a basis of personal experience. I don’t think all of Fey’s jokes make it, yet no one can singularly define anything as “funny,” or not, but I do see her as a professional on screen. I don’t give a pass however on bad interest jokes, especially on the mere basis of not liking Donald Trump (who, remember, is also a television celebrity who has worked in comedy, and made jokes that were blatantly racist — and sexist).

Entering Fey’s book, “Bossypants”, with this pre-review (re-preview?) in mind, it introduces to me that this memoir may turn to places unexpected, and that just because it is a celebrity-text does not mean it will be a simple, casual, or homey, ride.

[a-crimson-lion]

Katsuki Bakugo And Minoru Mineta Are Funny For All The Wrong Reasons

In this essay I will

No, but seriously, this is a problem. Spoilers and all that jazz. Let's start with the obvious.

Minoru Mineta

Minoru is the poster child for this topic. He's a complete scumbag, but is kept around because he's funny, when in reality he'd probably be expelled somewhere down the line.

While he does have some funny moments, there's only a small amount that don't come from his perversions, which is highly concerning.

His brand of humor isn't particularly inspired either. Let's go through some of his moments.

Hero Costumes

Minoru flashes his thumbs up when he looks at Ochako's uniform, stating that he loves the school. This is less funny and more unsettling, but it gets a pass 'cause Minoru is still relatively new to viewers.

USJ

Minoru grapples onto Tsuyu's breasts twice. He gets dunked on the first time. He gets nearly drowned the second time. We laugh... but it's not because Minoru is funny. Seriously, dark humor is one thing, but Minoru's actions are just plain creepy and borderline sexual harrassment. The fact that he nearly has to die to get us laughing doesn't help matters (he's scum, but scum should face long lasting consequences, not temporary bouts of comedic violence).

Changing Rooms

Almost forgot about this one. Minoru tries to peep on the girls. Kyoka notices and skewers his eye. We laugh. Not because Minoru's funny, but because we're suppose to enjoy his suffering. Imagine if everyone DIDN'T bash him upside the head! (There would probably be content apathy if there wasn't at least a small outcry for reprimands, to be honest.)

Obstacle Course

Minoru clasps onto Momo's gym uniform to pass the Obstacle Course, and he has a nosebleed. Momo calls him the worst. Again, relying on the fact that "Minoru sux" in order to get a laugh. That's sad.

Class Rankings

Mina says it best: guys like Minoru are only endearing when they're stupid, or something along those lines. If they're stupid, that lowkey implies that he has the potential to learn better. But Minoru already knows a lot, which os MORE unsettling than the alternative. Now, common sense doesn't equal intelligence, but the fact that Minoru is considered smart when he continually makes the stupid decision to try and get some in horrible ways is just... the worst.

Swimming Pool

Minoru and Denki collaborate on getting a view of the girls in swimsuits. (Before you bring it up, yes, Denki is also a perv character, but unlike Minoru, he actually has more going for his personality instead of just having a running gag joke define 90% of his character. And the most Denki's done on his own is attempting (and failing) to flirt with other girls.) Denki and Minoru are shocked when the rest of the boys show up, and Denki is disheartened to find that the girls are wearing school-issued swimsuits. Minoru, of course, finds the scene nice nonetheless. This is less of a "HAHA!" moment and more of a "*groan*" moment.

Hot Springs

Minoru tries to violate the girls' privacy just so he can see them naked. Luckily Kota is there to stop him. He swats Minoru off the wall, leading him to fall pathetically back to Earth. And we never speak of it again. You see a pattern with his stunts yet? Also, Tenya did not deserve what he got at the end of that scene.

Provisional License Exam

Granted, this is where Minoru is at his least perverted, but he still finds a way to be annoying. "The hierarchy is falling!" Oh gee, it's not like you had a tragic backstory and underwent actual character growth which helped you grow as a person, Minoru. You being smug is doing nothing to help your character.

Before The Interview

In the anime exclusive season premiere of Season 4, Minoru starts creepily talking about a potential female reporters breasts, before he gets restrained by Mr. Aizawa. While most of us thank him for stopping the pervert's actions, keep in mind that this is the one of the few times Mr. Aizawa ever tries to actually do anything to curb Minoru's behavior. Then again, since Horikoshi likes Minoru and Katsuki, they basically get immunity from Mr. Aizawa's actual character.

Joint Training Arc Aftermath

Sometime during the JTA, Minoru ricochets off of Mina's chest. Mina (rightfully) calls him out at this, and we're later treated to a scene with Minoru in a straightjacket with his eyes forced open while Mina keeps an eye on him. Physical punishment will do nothing to Minoru; at this rate he'll develop an immunity. What he needs are concrete consequences that will actually get him to think about not being perverted.

Izuocha Reaction

This moment is... admittedly tame. After Izuku and Ochako share a fist bump in Chapter 256, Minoru makes this weird gremlin face while asking himself what's going on. It's harmless at first... until you remember that Minoru is a shameless pervert who has a vain physical infatuation with most girls, Ochako inclued. Minoru's reaction is basically an entitled Lv. 1 gamer looking at an experienced Lv. 50 and going, "Why the hell isn't that me?"

Of course, there are other moments where Minoru is perverted, but it isn't funny, a la he hopes to see Eri again in 10 years or something like that. I've heard he's been mellowing out a bit more in recent chapters, but I'll remain cautiously optimistic for now. The fact that his main shtick is that we should despise him, and therefore laugh at his karma, is... kinda sad. That type of thing could work for a villain or a really unlikable character, but the fact that Minoru is a supporting character who we see progress with his classmates with very little growth in his character? What a waste... Moving on, then.

Katsuki Bakugo

Ah, King Explosion Murder. Most of you will know how I despise him. And unfortunately, part of the reason is similar to why I don't like Minoru:

His AnGeRy BoI tantrums get old really quick. Let me explain.

Catchphrases

"DIE!" "I'LL KILL YOU!" "EXTRA!" If you've been paying attention to Katsuki, he says these things s lot. He's been letting go of "extra" recently, but he'll still spew the first two comments without hesitation. He probably doesn't mean it literally, but that doesn't warrant his excessive aggression. It's one of the worst character traits I've seen in a while to be honest, and it's heavily concerning that a 15 (now 16) year-old has this kind of mindset. The fact that it's played for laughs ("DIE!" or "GO TO HELL!" while Izuku states deadpan off to the side) isn't any more assuring.

Gremlin Face

Katsuki will do this for a multitude of reasons. His base appearance treads a fine line between pretty boy and disgruntled madman, but when Katsuki gets more pissed then usual, he goes full gremlin. The faces are somewhat funny out of context, but they're kind of petty in context.

Bus Ride

The kids call out Katsuki on the bus ride to the USJ. This is basically a way to tell the readers that Katsuki isn't much of a big shot anymore, but the fact that it ultimately holds no water later down the line is... disappointing. Within several chapters, people will be flocking to him, regardless of his garbage personality.

Eijiro's Analysis

Eijiro brings up how Katsuki should be all "DIE! DIE! DIE!" while they're fighting villains, to which Katsuki ironically responds in kind. It's a "Bakugo sux LOL" moment, but the fact that this is how likely most students see him and they STILL flock to him is just... wut? Plus, Eijiro was originally skeptical of Katsuki after the Battle Trial, and his sudden support of Katsuki here is... half-heartedly executed. And while Katsuki has shown that he treasures the relationship he has with Eijiro to a degree, it's pretty clear that Eijiro holds it in a much higher regard.

Less Than The Best

Gremlin face returns when Katsuki gets 3rd (and therefore not 1st) in the Sports Festival's Obstacle Course. Katsuki screams when he gets 2nd (and therefore not 1st) in the Cavalry Battle. It's "funny" now, but I fear for the day when this guy has to regularly do interviews and doesn't get the Number One Hero spot for the first few months (if he ever gets it at all).

Sore Winner

This is probably the one joke I can say is the least funny. Everybody remembers the whole Katsuki in bindings and acting like an animal bit, right? Yeah, no one is sane in this universe... And even if Katsuki's desire to reject the first place medal is understandable, he isn't exactly cordial about the whole thing (I mean, I'd be miffed if someone had be bound like that, but I doubt more growling is gonna get him out... the teachers need help). And then we still see him with the medal in his mouth sometime later, and Gremlin face show up when the class is talking internships. Where's the therapist again?

Teeth

Katsuki telling the germs in his mouth to die as he's brushing his teeth. It's only funny because of the absurdity of the notion. In reality, telling microscopic organisms to straight up die in such a threatening manner is hella concerning. See "Catchphrases" for why I still don't think this is okay.

Knife

One of the more tame jokes. Katsuki's good with knives, Ochako brings it up, Katsuki is offended. Honestly, I'd prefer more of this type of humor compared to... whatever Katsuki's doing right now.

I'll Kill Him

It's an exam, Katsuki, AN EXAM! This moment during the Provisional License Exam is only funny for a moment, because when you think about it, the purple dude has a point (even if he's still a stuck-up elitist) and Katsuki would have failed if Eijiro and Denki didn't follow after him. Still, does he think he can get away with saying he'll kill villains in the actual Hero world? Good gravy...

Stop Being Nice

This is a trend we've seen post-Deku vs. Kacchan 2. Izuku complements Katsuki or makes a remark about him. Katsuki proceeds to tell him to back off in some or fashion. If it's his winter costume, Katsuki will chew the speech bubble. He'll reflexively tell Izuku to get out of his way. When Izuku mentions Katsuki's technique, Katsuki will tell Izuku to stay away from him. I know some of Izuku's habits are borderline-stalking, but he's not being overtly creepy. And in a narrative where Izuku and Katsuki are supposed to be "good friends," this does a poor job of showing it.

Ninja Star

Katsuki looses his temper when Izuku brings up Blackwhip, and throws one of his head pieces at Izuku like a ninja star. Izuku gets injured, but the entire thing is played off like a nice joke. Except it isn't. Izuku wasn't about to spill anything about OFA when he talked about Black Whip; Katsuki's just stupidly jealous and annoyed when anyone like Izuku talks for too long about their achievements. It's basically telling readers that Izuku's gonna get shoved around for having pride in himself. That sucks...

I Win

The latest incarnation of Gremlin face, and Katsuki's stupid winner's complex in general. I've already talked about it in this post, but Katsuki's assertions in Chapter 257 were highly immature and disrespectful. All Might tells the boys about the OFA users and their short lives, how they weren't chosen ones but were still entrusted with the Quirk, hoping to pass it on and hoping to beat AFO. What does Katsuki say about them? They had lame Quirks; they were a bunch of nobodies. He goes out of his way to tell Izuku he'll lag behind while mastering the next Quirk while Katsuki ensures his victory. All if that "character development" and he still pulls stuff like this. How do I put this?

A few steps forward followed by long periods of regression is not character development, that's bad writing.

Katsuki's seemingly humorous outbursts would be terrifying in the real world. He's got serious issues and he needs help. His anger is no laughing matter. It'll hurt him, or rather, continue to hurt him. It's already hurt other people, and continues to do so.

TL;DR Katsuki and Minoru's one note humor is damaging to the narrative and to their characters, and unless it's properly addressed, it will continue to do so. Thank you for your time.

-Crimson Lion (19 January 2020)

[human-enthusiast]

Antagonist: Buggy (East Blue - And Before This Time Frame)

At first, I was still on and off about my decision on whether or not I would make an analysis on Buggy at all. My analysis pages aren’t necessarily about the villains of One Piece in general, but more towards humanitarian or misanthropic topics reflected in their world from ours. In the first few appearances, I thought I had nothing to go off from, at least in context of World Issues. But I started writing out his characteristics and anything known about his past that could reflect on it, and then I started writing on something to reflect later after writing out other analogies with other villains and their world.

Characteristics: 

Stereotypical behavior of a pirate

Narcissism: Blames others for his mistakes (Shanks)

Treats a majority of his     underlings as replaceable/worthless

Alignment: Chaotic Evil/Neutral Evil

Worthy Notes

He was one of the recognizable characters who witnessed Roger’s execution up front.

Before this, he knew him personally and grew close with his captain.

To me, he and Shanks are friends/crewmates that had similar circumstances but different outcomes - two sides of the same coin (Important Distinction).

Buggy is a character that I both dislike and love for various reasons. If there was a person, who had a striking resemblance to him (in both looks and especially personality), there is a 100% chance I would not get along well with him. The arrogance, laugh, and overall characteristics of a narcissist that gets his ass handed to him in nearly every encounter is annoying to the point of wanting to punch him personally.

However, he also handles many of his problems and the crazy reality that is their world with great comic relief like a majority of the characters. He himself has great one-liners and funny encounters that make him a great antagonist towards Luffy and an overall character of One Piece.

He’s one of the few designated antagonists of the East Blue Arc that popped up later, not only in the same arc, but in other arcs afterwards. Alvida does as well but she isn’t treated very much like an antagonist after Loguetown. More mild and laid back as Buggy’s vice captain, without straying from her original personality.

The thing about him from the beginning is how iconic of a character he is, mixed with some stereotypical personality traits as the main character’s villain. With the listed traits above, he actually isn’t the most original kind of villain under a broad definition.

I use the moral alignment chart for these analysis and/or characters because it’s one of the easiest ways to place and understand the foundation about them. For Buggy, he could go either way for being neutral or chaotic in the evil row. He does things for his own gain. But he also does evil acts because he is under the notion that he can with no other reason. Many of the East Blue antagonists are essentially like this.

Before knowing anything about Buggy later on, and even after, I would put him in the same boat as Krieg and Arlong. These are very chaotic pirates who also display typical pirate personas. Greedy, foul playing, captains without any remorse or care for others (although Arlong, towards fishmen and crew mates, tends to be an exception). They appear to not have an underlining motivation to be the way they are. Just regular, run-of-the-mill pirates.

But taking in consideration his past affiliations on being a cabin boy to Gol D. Roger, his attitude, in tune with Arlong’s, makes a lot of sense. 

The start of the Pirate Era sparked a grand affiliation to the massive sweep of pirate crews to take to the seas. A historically popular phenomenon done in a way that no other sailor accomplished the way Roger did: conquer the Grand Line. When an ever-changing event like this occurs, you have a mix of on-lookers who are changed by this. Characters like Luffy are filled with adrenaline. A need to seek adventure, making him the perfect predecessor for Roger’s Legacy, but in a way where he can call it his own.

Then there are characters like stereotypical, unnamed pirate crews, a majority of which mainly focus on the prospect of Roger’s treasure One Piece. They physically have nothing to tie them down, so they feel it necessary to pursue that challenge. This sparks greed or a search for infamy, something that actually connects to Ace’s motivation the most, but he has a more dynamic change that alters his motivations. Compared to others, this change is due to an instance where he is showed an alternate approach on life and dreams, a somewhat more healthy version. But when this alternate approach isn’t introduced to others, they are bound to the same mindset, installing more harm along the way. 

The known reactions are like two sides of the same coin. They’re broad chances of what someone will turn out in response to this freedom on treasure hunting and adventure seeking. And the two characters that are on those sides are Shanks and Buggy.

Personally, I find this to be an excellent coincidence. Now whether Oda intended for there opposing characters to mean anything significant is up for debate. But my interpretation proceeds them as the differing approaches when they (1) lose something significant in their life and (2) in retaliation against the unfair advantages life threw at them.

Buggy takes on the evil, greedy and infamy route in response to Roger’s execution.

As selfish as he is, Buggy did care very much for his past Captain. Most likely as a father figure of sorts considering he was rather young when he first joined as a cabin boy. He was able to make bonds with the crew mates, showing the more humanistic side of him.

In the events of Roger’s untimely sickness and later execution, I say it created an unfathomable emotional downfall on Buggy. In love and loss, it can have a negative influence on someone. He doesn’t seem to stray away from a greedy persona even with the Roger pirates. However, they acted as a sort of buffer, suppressing that intent need enough where it tends to affect only him.

With instances like Orange Town in Episode 5-8, his greed has an outward impact on the people and environment. I doubt he had any monetary reasoning for docking in the small town. There could have definitely been some looting, but that probably wasn’t their main purpose. It seems more along the lines of a power move.

Throughout his stay, he ultimately uses his Buggy Balls to obliterate different sections of the town, describing it as “his idea of fun.” Now whether because he lacked the resource or motivation, he never seemed to be this destructive as a younger cabin boy. He was still capable of violence and only doing so when needed.

He offers insight about the potential in taking on negative behaviors against the world, in combination of this obtainable freedom. He takes it with a motivation in the form of retribution.

Now how does Shanks play into this?

I said before that these two are like the sides of the same coin. And this is how far it goes:

They, literally and figuratively, were on the same boat. That being the Oro Jackson’s crew and witnessing first hand Roger’s execution.

Unlike Buggy, however, Shanks wasn’t affected in a downward spiral of vengeance. Where Buggy took on the active persona of a vindictive route, he took to Roger’s will. The concept of inherited will within One Piece is a powerful notion. Especially with how it plays into the influence of a character and the world around them.

Roger’s will is directed more towards the importance of adventure and unbridled freedom. Doing something for yourself and “destroying” the world in a round-about way.

He is the opposite of Buggy by choosing the path of piracy in leniency. He isn’t necessarily upright and morally good in all regards. Because I’m certain he could have done bad things. But his outlooks on life make him move forward from the past.

Meanwhile, Buggy is situated into his past persona, and possibly due to the loss of his captain, by striving to be the King of the Pirates. Buggy has a connection to it that many others wouldn’t have known about until around Sabaody and Marineford. This need with the title is one of the defining elements of being greedy to an unexpected turn in his life.

This plays in well with his narcistic attitude in blaming others for mistakes he’s made in the past. Specifically where he blames Shanks for “making” him accidently eat his devil fruit. While he does find a use in his powers, he remains to be bitter about it. A reaction like this shows a character that ties himself with things he wish were different, believing that acting on them in the future will somehow change it. And about the only way he finds some use in it is fulfilling his desire to be at the top. A familiar form that ties him to Roger in the past.

Of course, I’m not implying that Roger’s death sparked his greed, because it is quite obvious he was always like that. No, it’s more of he represents the expected type who find satisfaction in titles. The expected results of Roger’s last words that the world paints into perspective. Buggy’s the negative aftermath that people expect when the world changes.

Because in simplistic sense, change begets destruction.

Change creates numerous responses that guide people, and it can be interpreted in broad groups. The results of these events divide people and their motivations, creating a diverse but also destructive world within One Piece.

~~~~~~~~

[stereksecretsanta]

Merry Christmas, @dearericbittle!

Merry Christmas and Happy whatever Holiday you may celebrate! Hugs!

Read on AO3

*****

Oh Shit!

Oh Shit. Stiles takes a moment to revel in the fact that this is his oh shit moment. Not, oh shit, a dead body in the woods. Not, oh shit, werewolves. Not, oh, shit, Derek wants me to cut off his arm. Not, oh shit, kanimas, or hunters, or any other of bevy of supernatural fuckery. No, Stiles’ oh shit moment is walking past an alleyway and having his Derek Hale spidey tingle go off. His oh shit moment is seeing Derek Freaking Hale crouched in an alley trying to coax a completely demonic looking cat with a massive gash across it’s forehead out from behind a dumpster. Stiles assumes so that Derek can help getting Demon!cat treated.

Stiles oh shit moment is oh shit, I’m in love with this asshole.

Stiles would like to think that he is fairly self-aware but this knocks the wind right out of him. His stomach does a full loop-the-loop and his heart does a quadruple staccato for long enough that Derek looks up from his save the cat mission to meet Stiles’ eyes.

Derek’s eyes widen in apparent surprise before a grin spreads across his face. This does not help Stiles’ heartbeat situation, especially when paired with his recent oh shit revelation. The warm welcome fades on Derek’s features, replaced with a look of concern. Derek reaches out his arm as if to steady Stiles, though the only stumbling that is going on right now is emotional. Stiles rallies himself, before Derek can touch him - who knows how his traitorous body would react to that!

He gesticulates just a little too wildly with his hands, and bumbles further into the alley a little too dramatically before managing to get some words out of his mouth.

“Whatcha doin’, Sourwolf? You gonna put that poor cat out it’s misery with your teeth?”

Stiles cringes. It’s been years since any “rip your throat out with my teeth” jokes have really been appropriate or funny.

Derek has yet to speak any words but his eyebrows scrunch together in question.

Stiles takes a deep breath and shakes his head.

“Nevermind, Sourwolf. Weird kind of day. You ever learn something that kind of shifts your whole world view? Did you know that squirrels are behind the majority of  power outages in United States, Derek? Because, let me tell you, I did not.”

Derek shakes his head with what Stiles would define as fond eyebrows and proceeds to ignore everything that has come out Stiles’ mouth since “Whatcha doing, Sourwolf?”

“I tracked this little critter from near that bakery over on Main St. She’s bleeding and smells afraid. I’m having trouble getting her to trust me.” Derek’s voice stays soft and even while hes’s talking with Stiles. He’s crouched near the ground again and while his eyes are locked on Stiles’, his hand is reaching out towards the injured cat with feigned nonchalance.

Mirroring Derek’s tone of voice, Stiles asks, “What were you doing at the bakery?”

“Picking up cupcakes for Laura’s birthday dinner tonight.” He pauses, “You didn’t forget about that did you?”

Yes, yes Stiles had forgotten about that. In his defense, he’s been working nights the last week and days of the week are a nebulous thing when one is working the night shift.

Derek interprets his pause accurately. “Don’t worry about it. If you’re back on days, come over around 6 and we’ll feed you. Don’t worry about a present.”

Stiles is about to respond when he sees that cat has finally made her way to Derek’s outstretched hand and has deigned to be picked up.

Stiles thought that he’d gotten the whole loop-the-loop, crazy heart beat, oh shit moment stuff out of the way, that he’d managed to get a handle on it during his brief stint in the alley. But, no, he was a self-deluded idiot.

Seeing Derek cuddling a dirty, possibly mangy, blood soaked cat while whispering sweet nothings into her ear like she was a small child, disabused Stiles of the notion that he had any control over his bodily functions when it came to Derek Hale.

Stiles lived with his internal crisis for a few more seconds, until Derek stood up.

“I’m going to take this little beauty to see Scott. Will I see you tonight?”

Stiles mumbled what must have been some sort of affirmative because Derek said goodbye and left the alley.

When he got back to his baby, he collapsed in the front seat and banged his head against the steering wheel a couple times. He did not need this kind of complication in his life right now.

*******

Stiles can’t remember the last time he found himself banging frantically on Scott’s door. Probably high school sometime. With the distinct lack of big bads of the supernatural variety in the last few years, there hasn’t been much need.

Now, however, he finds himself banging on the door to the apartment Scott shares with Isaac, hoping the curly-haired menace is currently elsewhere. Don’t get him wrong, he’s square with Isaac now, friends even. It’s just, he’d like to have his mental breakdown in the presence of Scotty and Scotty and Scotty alone.

Thankfully, it appears Scott is home alone when Stiles walks in and collapses in flail of limbs on the couch.

“Scotty, my brother, my friend, my bro, my wolfy companion, the world as we know it is over.”

Completely unfazed by Stiles’ declaration, Scott sits on the coffee table across from Stiles and puts his hands on Stiles’ knees before speaking. With a gentle squeeze, Scott says, “The squirrels?”

“Yes, Scotty the squirrels. There’s an acronym. TSql. You know how I get about acronyms Tee-squill or The Squirrel Index.”

Stiles makes a concerted effort not to be sucked into an ADD fueled rant about squirrels and power outages before he can backtrack to what he came here to talk about.

“I’m in love with Derek Hale.”

This statement is greeted with complete silence. He risks a glance at Scott to see if maybe his declaration had somehow caused him to die of shock.

Nope, Scott is just looking at him with confused puppy dog eyes.

Finally Scott speaks. It’s slow, like he’s talking to a toddler or scared dog. “Are you okay?”

A noise Stiles can’t even begin to describe or categorize emerges from deep within his being. The gist of the noise was, “How can you ask me that? I don’t know. I don’t even recognize myself anymore. And when the hell did this happen?

Scott, blessed, wonderful, fantastic Scott seems to read his mind or possibly his noises. Maybe his noises are to Scott like Derek’s eyebrows are to Stiles. Aaand, that is a thought for another day.

“Well, it’s not the most terrible thing. I mean, Derek is a really good guy, You guys have been working together a lot lately what with working on the remodel plans for the house. Maybe it just happened naturally.” Scott says.

“Hmph. Naturally, you say.” Stiles pauses. Now Scotty is not always the brightest crayon in the box when it comes to analytics or plans or anything GPA related but Scotty has heart. When it comes to relationships and emotions, he’s usually right.

He things back to the first time they had to hit the road to visit some lumber distributor 3 hours away. The silence had started out extremely awkward. Stiles had fiddled with the radio and half-heartedly tried to comment on the passing landscape.

But then he had flicked the radio station through some kids station and Let It Go started playing. Somehow in the fraction of a second before Stiles was able to change the station again, Derek starts singing along. It’s under his breath, Stiles isn’t even sure if he realized he was doing it.

The ended up bonding over Disney leading ladies (not just princesses, thank you very much) for the next 2 hours. It seems like maybe that was the beginning of it all now that Stiles thinks about in a more calm state of mind. He should have figured it out when they gave each other nicknames. Derek is Elsa, Stiles is Mulan. And yes they actually call each other those names, unironically on occasion.  

“…earth to Stiles….” He comes back to the present with Scott’s fingers snapping in his face.

“Sorry. You’re right.” Stiles feels himself smiling a little as his heart does a weird happy lurch in his chest. “Shoulda realized after our shared love of all things Disney.”

Scott nods, “And a relationship built over the years based on trust, respect, and a terrible sense of humor.”

“Okay, okay. So not a surprise and probably not as life altering and world changing as I may have first thought. But, still…” Stiles trails off. His oh shit moment blindsided him so much that he hadn’t actually thought about what came next. Does he declare his love? Or maybe just ask Derek out of a date? Or just pretend nothing has changed? Or die of embarrassment when Laura finds out that Derek said no? Or yes - he’s not sure which would cause Laura to dole out the worse punishment.

Scott, again with his uncanny ability to read Stiles’ mind, says, “You know you don’t have to decide what to do right away. The question to ask yourself is, what do you want?”

“I don’t know what I want. I hadn’t really thought beyond hoping Derek doesn’t think I’m dying of a heart condition every time he walks in the room.”

“I hear you, buddy. I’ve got to go to work. Think about it.”

Scott grabs his keys and his wallet and is about to head out the door before he turns back towards Stiles, “You coming tonight?”

Already lost in thought, Stiles replies distractedly, “Yeah. I’ll probably just crash here until then. Ride over together?”

“Yeah, see you then.”

Stiles barely notices the door slam behind Scott. What does he want? He’d always imagined himself in a marriage with kids like his parents. Then werewolves happened and it was hard to imagine past the next week, much less into a future with kids. He’d had a few brief relationships during nursing school but no one he could picture a future with. Now, since he’d come into his spark and they’d managed to bind the nemeton? Not to mention, Laura back from the dead and taking her place as Alpha? Beacon Hills was stable. Nothing had come rampaging through and killing people in almost 3 years.

He hadn’t realized it, but he’d sort of been cruising through on auto-pilot just waiting for another shoe to drop the past few years. Not doing noher, just not really having any intentionality about anything either.

This oh shit thing, this being in love with Derek, maybe that made him think about a future. Stiles isn’t ready to picture being married with 2.5 pups yet. But, walking down the street, holding Derek’s hand for all the world to see, that he could imagine. Sharing curly fries at the diner or going to see a movie, cuddling together under a blanket on the porch swing - those thoughts made him feel warm all the way to his core. Just thinking about made his lips twitch towards a smile and his heart race in anticipation.

Ok, he now knows what he wants. Now, what to do about it, that is the million dollar question.

*******

He ends up bailing on Scotty and going over to the newly-remodeled (with his help!) Hale house early, hoping to catch Laura before everyone started piling in for her birthday dinner.

Luck must be on his side today because for the second time in one day the person he wants to see is home and alone.

He finds Laura in the garden out back singing to the vegetables, She claims it makes them taste better - and veggies can use all the help they can get in the taste department, so she sings.

She waltzes over to him and takes his hands to lead him a rousing dance through the tomatoes as she sings highly altered versions of the VeggieTales songs. Stiles knows better than to try and escape the song and dance so he bears up manfully until Laura ends her song in a fit a giggles.

“What brings you to see your favorite Alpha, today?” she asks when she finally catches her breath. She folds her legs under her gracefully sits in the grass as she asks her question.

Stiles sits beside her and takes a deep breath for courage.

“I’m here to give you your birthday present.”

A grin spreads across Laura’s face as she does gimme hands towards Stiles.

He swats her hands away playfully, before speaking, “Alas, not that kind of gift.” He smiles, “What is your absolute favorite thing to do in all the world?”

Stiles pauses for a moment but before Laura can respond, he adds, with a pointed look, “You actually favorite thing, not some sentimental drivel cause it’s your birthday.”

Laura blows a raspberry at him, “Fine. But only because you’re my favorite.” She wiggles her hands like she’s a puppeteer and cackles before saying, “Meddling”

Stiles gives an exaggerated nod. “Thus my gift to you. First - information no one else but Scotty has”

Her eyes light up and her grin widens.

“Then, I’m going to ask for advice. Now, in the spirit of birthdays, I’m allowing you to meddle. I ask in return, good faith advice, not advice to make me do what you think would be funniest.’

Her grin doesn’t fade but a hint of seriousness comes into her eyes. Stiles can tell she understands even before she nods her head.

Stiles looks down at his hands. He had decided to come and talk to Laura but he hadn’t really figured out how he wanted to start. Well, he figured it worked for Scotty so he might as well just try ripping the bandaid off.

“I’m in love with your brother.”

Laura didn’t do anything so ungraceful as gape like a fish but the phrase, you could have knocked me over with a feather came to Stiles’ mind as he watched her reaction.

Stiles forges ahead before Laura has a chance to reply. “Our pack being what it is, we don’t stand on werework tradition very often. But I was wondering if there was a traditional way to court a werewolf? A wooing ritual or something?

Stiles can tell Laura is trying really hard not to laugh - not out of meanness but out of the sheer ridiculosity of what he is saying. Stiles waves her off.

“I know. I know. I’m the last person to care about tradition. But, you know, Derek has had the best track record. First Paige died, then Kate, and Jennifer. Braeden wasn’t so bad but it also wasn’t so serious. I want Derek to know I’m serious and that he has a choice. If there were a traditional way of doing that, then that is what I’m looking for. If not, I’ll figure something else out.”

Laura scoots around so they are facing each other and practically mirrors Scott from earlier when she puts her hands on his knees before speaking.

“I don’t know if Derek feels that way about you, I don’t know what his reaction to you will be. But I do know this. He could never confuse your intentions with any of those who came before.” She sat up and put her hands back in her lap before continuing. “There is not a wolfy-wooing ritual per se. At least, not one that I am aware. But there is this nursery rhyme or poem kind of thing that our mom used to say to use about the one we would eventually fall in love with. Let me think for a second and try to remember it.”

Her brow scrunched slightly and he eyes drifted to the left as she thought, Okay. It went something like this: Each wolf is whole in itself but there are those who are created to walk beside in perfect harmony. A mate to write their name on your heart will make you safe by watching your back, give you peace by travelling beside you, bring you joy by smiling back at you, and join hands with you so will never be alone on your life journey. You know Derek has the Triskelion tattoo on his back and that can mean a lot of things. But he also has a Triquetra tattoo on his hip. It comes from this verse. The three points are behind, beside and in front of, joined together in the center, together forever. It’s not a ritual or anything but it might help you figure out what you want to do.”

The whole time Laura had been talking, Stiles paid rapt attention. He wasn’t crying by the end but he was certainly moist in the region around his eyes. He had an idea.

But like all great ideas, life interrupted.

******

It was about halfway through Laura’s birthday dinner. Everyone had had one plate of food and most of the wolves had had a second plate but no one had even mentioned cake yet.

Stiles noticed the cat first. He nudged Derek. “You didn’t tell me you brought that cat home.”

Derek turned towards Stiles, confusion clear on his face, fork with potatoes stabbed through on it hanging in the air halfway to his mouth, “I didn’t”

Stiles chuckles slightly and nods in the direction of the cat which is now in the doorway to the dining room. “Then she followed you home.

By this time, the rest of the table has quieted and turned to see what Stiles and Derek are looking at. The cat continues walking towards but with each step, she gets larger and larger until when she reaches the table it is but a small step to climb up on the table and continue walking down it’s center.

The cat, now roughly the size of a miniature pony, walks past Lydia and Jackson, then Erica and Boyd, and Scott and Isaac, and completely ignoring Laura and Stiles before she stops in front of Derek. All of the sudden there is a naked lady instead of cat sitting in the middle of the dining room table.

“Kind one,” she hisses, “You have saved my life this day. You have shown your worth. In the name of Samaoth, High Priestess of the Sable Court of Fae, you are granted a boon.” She waved her arm in a graceful arc around her head somehow managing not to have any other part of her body move a single muscle. You’d think the naked part would be the most eye catching part of the naked fae sitting on the table but it was more like a statue that didn’t really know how a human body worked. It looked right - sort of. But the more you looked, the more wrong you felt on the inside.

When her arm was in front of Derek one, it held a plain manila folder in it’s hand. Derek was just staring.

With a slight hint of impatience, Samaoth hissed, “Take it now mortal. Do as it says and you will be granted your heart’s greatest desire.”

Derek reached out and took the folder. Before his fingers had even fully closed on the edges, Samaoth had vanished into thin air. He didn’t quite have hold of it yet and the folder dropped to the table, relieving itself of a single piece of paper.

It was a simple piece of printer paper. Across the top it read, “Booking Confirmation for Sable Court Representative to the Greater Northwest Region Supernatural Symposium: Derek Hale, plus one.”

After about 30 seconds of stunned silence, every single person at the table began speaking at once.

*******

An indeterminate amount of time later, Laura’s alpha roar breaks through the cacophony of shouts coming from the rest of the pack.

Once everyone is quiet, Laura turns to Derek, who is still sitting in silence and staring at the innocuous looking piece of paper on the table in front of him.

Laura asks him, with slightly forced calm, “Der-bear, what’s going on?”

Derek opens his mouth. Nothing comes out. Stiles doesn’t even recognize Derek’s current eyebrow configuration.

Derek swallows and tries again. “Well,” he pauses, “there was this cat and it was bleeding and I took it to Scott to get fixed up.” He looks helplessly around the table. “It was a normal cat.”

The focused attention of the whole pack swings around to Scott. He shrugs sheepishly. “It was a normal cat.  I gave her stitches and left her in the kennel overnight. Though, it seems like she got out.”

Laura rolls her eyes. “Yeah, okay. Normal cat. Got it. Except your normal cat is apparently the High Priestess of the Sable Court of the Fae. Derek, what does the paper say?”

Derek looks at Laura and startles like he hadn’t thought to read past the bold heading. His eyes rapidly scan the paper. “Apparently the Greater Northwest Regional Supernatural Symposium is being hosted in Seattle this year at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, ummm, next weekend. Registration starts on Thursday afternoon at 4 PM. It has a confirmation number, address, phone number and whatnot and a link to app download and password to download the app for the symposium.”

Stiles decides that now is the time to speak up, “For those of us who are new to werewolfly culture, what exactly is the Greater Northwest Region Supernatural Symposium?

Laura sighs before she answers. “It’s going to be a shitshow, that’s what. Wolves aren’t usually invited. We’re too volatile or something. It is mainly run by the fae and other ‘more evolved’ supernatural beings. The get together to schmooze, make treaties and listen to presentations on things like ‘Kobolds and cleaning: an analysis of practices through the ages’ or ‘Pixies in the modern age: pesky or pragmatic?’ It’s pretty much a chance for the hoity toity of supernatural society to get together and bond over how superior they are to the rest of us. For a wolf to show up, and not even an alpha will be an insult to every single being there.”

Stiles feels the need to pipe in again, “Great. So this is the gist. Derek saves this cat’s life, he gets a boon - supposedly his greatest desire but only if he goes to this conference of supernatural one percenters. This is ridiculous!” Turning to Lydia, he continues, “Is this even possible? I thought we had a big do not touch sign over us after our last dealings with the fae.”

Lydia responds quickly, “You’re right. But, Samaoth didn’t seek us out. Derek sought her out - albeit unknowingly - so that may cancel the binding. Let me see if Illirial is available speak with us.

Lydia’s eyes turn milky white as she chants under her breath. The wolves can probably tell what she is saying but to Stiles it just seems like a low susurrus. After a few moments her eyes return to normal and she holds out her hand.

A moment after that a small hologram - Princess Leia style - appears in her hand. Stiles hates dealing with the fae. It makes his brain hurt. But they all owe Illirial and he seems to make an effort not to be purposefully obtuse when speaking with them.

His voice is slightly tinny when he speaks, “Greetings Hale Pack. It is a pleasure to be with you once more. For what reason have you requested my presence this day?”

As Lydia was the best at untangling the vagueries of fae speech, Lydia replied. “We call upon you as a friend, with no obligation attached, to ask of you some information. Under what circumstances might this be amenable to you?”

Illirial appeared to think about it for a moment. “As friends, it would be in my heart to give this information, if I am able. Perhaps one day I may come to you, with no obligation, for the same, until such time as we have shared information of equal value. If I am unable to share what you ask, we will speak of this no more and part again as friends.”

Lydia nodded and continued, “This is generous of you, Illirial. You confirm yourself as friend of the Hale Pack. What can you tell us of the Sable Court of the Fae? Specifically of the priestly order attached to it.”

“As you know, generally, the fae owe allegiance to either the Seelie or Unseelie court. This is balance, as it should be. You mortals may believe one to be good and one to be evil but we fae do not ascribe to that kind of moral judgment. Seelie and Unseelie merely are. WIthout the balance of the courts, the world would fall apart, in a most literal sense. But we fae, while bound to our courts, do have free will. In times when balance is threatened, the fae turn to the Sable Court. They are judge; they are arbiter; and if need be, they are executioner. The high priestess has final say in all decisions made by the Sable Court.”

When it was apparent the Illirial was done speaking, Lydia spoke again, “If the Sable Court High Priestess were to offer a boon, with an obligation attached, what should one take into consideration while deciding on a course of action?”

Illirial responded immediately, in almost a panic, “Only the recipient of the boon can make that choice. Only five times in our history has the Sable court been known to offer a boon. Each time the obligation was how the boon was revealed. While danger might abide within fulfilling the obligation, the Sable Fae are straightforward. There will be no hidden knives or truthful deceits as you might find with some of the other fae.”

Lydia nodded again and replied, “Illirial, the Hale Pack thanks you for the information you have shared so openly, which we acknowledge is beyond your natural state. That which we do not speak of will remain private and you may feel free to call upon the Hale Pack for an exchange of information equal in value to what you have offered us. Go with peace and the blessing of Mother Moon.”

Illirial bowed and vanished from Lydia’s hand.

Stiles turned back towards Laura to see how she would respond to this information and saw his Alpha was white as a sheet. All the blood had drained from her face and she looked like she was about to fall over.

“That’s who did it?” she asked.

Stiles startled. He didn’t know how but he’d forgotten that Laura had never met Illirial before.

Derek grabbed her hand. “Yes.” He looked like he wanted to fight the binding for a moment but then his features calmed. “You know we can’t even speak of how it happened. But yes, it was Illirial who brought you back from the dead.“

Stiles suddenly realized that it was probably the Sable Court that had dictated the binding of secrecy around that whole fiasco. Even now, it was hard to think back to that couple of months when the fae had descended on Beacon Hills. If he tried to pin down the memory too specifically, it would slide away like trying to hold fast to a thousand strings being pulled in all different directions.

Laura seemed to come back to herself. “I know Der-bear. I understand.

Derek stood up. “Well, I guess I better get packed to go to Seattle.”

Stiles made the decision in an instant and stood up as well. “Me too.”

“What?” Derek replied.

Stiles picked up the sheet of paper and waved in front of his face. “Plus one, Sourwolf. I’m going with you.”

He looked like he wanted to argue but was cut off when Laura said, “Good idea. I’ll book you both flights up for Thursday morning.”

*******

2 Days Later (aka Thursday)

Stiles settled into the first class seat Laura had sprung for with a wiggle of his hips. He turned towards Derek, still grinning, when he heard him groan under his breath.

“None of your groaning or sighing is going to ruin this for me, Derek. First class! I’m going to get a hot towel. And free snacks. This is awesome.”

“Sorry. I don’t mean to spoil your fun. It is pretty awesome.” Derek smiled but it didn’t reach his eyes - or his eyebrows.

Stiles turned serious for a moment, “Hey. Sourwolf, I know you don’t like not knowing what’s going to happen but your heart’s desire, that’s gotta be exciting to think about.”

Derek gave another half-hearted smile. “Yeah, I guess.”

“What do you think it will be?”

“I don’t know. I do kind of wonder about whether it’ll be something that I go, ‘oh, of course’ or if it will be something I didn’t even know I wanted. Or if Samaoth can somehow look into the future and know what domino to knock over now that will result in a chain reaction that will make me happy down the road.”

“Whoa there, Derek. That is a lot hamsters running around on their wheels inside your head.” Stiles pauses. “Seriously, though, would any of those options be a bad thing?”

Derek’s eyebrows morph into thinking position #2 and he is silent for a while.

This time, the smile on Derek’s face is genuine. “You’re right. We go to this conference. We come home and then I get my heart’s desire.”

Stiles heart does a little lurch at that. Right now, he knows what his heart’s desire would be: to build a life with Derek. He hopes that spending this weekend alone with Derek will help him think about what Laura said and decide how he wants to woo Derek.

Because Derek deserves ALL the wooing.

*******

Stiles flops on the bed as soon as they get to their hotel room. He blows out a frustrated breath and closes his eyes. Landing in Seattle had started off on the right foot. They had both fallen asleep on the flight and Stiles woke up with Derek’s head resting on his shoulder and their hands pressed together on the arm rest. However, it had all gone downhill from there.

Getting their luggage, getting out of the airport, and the ride to the hotel don’t bear mentioning beyond the word torture. But, then they had finally gotten to the check in desk and the finish line was in sight when Stiles tuned into what the customer service representative was saying:

“Mr. Hale and Mr. Stilinski, welcome to the Fairmont Olympic Hotel. I hope you enjoy your stay in Seattle. You have been booked in one of our honeymoon suites. This includes a complimentary bottle of champagne and chocolate covered strawberries. Please, just let room service know when you would like them delivered. Here is your room key.”

Derek quickly responded, “We were booked in the what?”

“The honeymoon suite, sir.”

“We are just here for a conference, A room with 2 doubles or 2 queens will be sufficient.”

“Sir, we are completely booked. There are no other rooms available.”

Derek looks like he wants to argue with her but instead puts on his big boy pants and says, “Fine. But, you can keep the champagne. I don’t drink.”

The woman’s smile brightens. “Thank you, sir. And please accept this voucher for a free spa treatment instead of the champagne.”

Derek stares at the woman until Stiles reaches out and takes the voucher. “Thank you ma’am. Have a wonderful day.”

So, the bed Stiles has just collapsed on is the bed he is going to have sleep in tonight. With Derek.

Now, apart from the initial freak out, Stiles thinks he’s dealt with his oh shit  moment like a completely mature adult. He listened to his heart, decided what he really wanted from the situation and is setting about figuring out how to get there while respecting the other person involved. But none of that mature adult thinking included having to share a bed with Derek Hale.

Also, until now he had somehow managed to not really think about the physical ramifications of being in love with Derek Hale. He didn’t think that Derek was asexual so that meant that somewhere in the future, if his wooing was successful, their would be sex. Sex with Derek.

His face burns just thinking about it. But also, his pants parts are also thinking about getting excited as well. Pants parts… Stiles groans internally. He’s not twelve anymore. If he can’t say the words he’s not mature enough to do the deed.

His brain spirals a bit as it starts to list all the names of things he needs to be mature enough to say. Penis. DIck. Cock. Asshole. Balls.

He is interrupted in his reverie by Derek clearing his throat. “I don’t know what you are thinking about right now but could you please not smell up the bed we both have to sleep in tonight with those thoughts?”

Stiles almost chokes on his own tongue. “Ye…YEa..yes. Sure thing. Sorry.”

He stands up and wipes his hands on his jeans. “I’m going to go to the bathroom.” He groans. “That just made it worse, didn’t it.”

Derek chuckles. “Yes, it did. Don’t worry about it. I’m just teasing. I am not sure that there is any smell you could make that could be worse than the airplane.”

Stiles felt his face heat up for a different reason. He knows Derek is just trying to make him feel better, but he thinks he maybe just gave Stiles a compliment or said that he doesn’t mind what Stiles smells like when he is aroused.

Stiles shuts down that train of thought immediately and goes to throw some water on his face in the bathroom. When he comes out Derek is sitting on the bed like he was waiting for Stiles.

Stiles jitters nervously around the room, touching everything and generally berating himself for not being able to act normal.

FInally, Derek speaks. “So, I know we don’t spend a lot of time with supernatural beings outside of our pack. There are some rules of politeness that it would probably be good for you to know.”

Derek talks for awhile and Stiles tries to remember all the protocol that Derek is telling him.

“Finally, with me not being the Alpha and you being a human spark, we will need to ramp up the appearance of our pack bond.”

“What exactly does that mean, Sourwolf?”

Derek stands up and walks towards Stiles. He stops just inside a normal human’s comfort zone for being a near another person. Derek looks Stiles in the eyes. They stand there for about 5 seconds that felt like 5 years before Derek reaches out and cups Stiles face, rubbing his thumbs over the apples of Stiles’ cheeks. He raises his eyebrows like he’s asking permission.

Stiles has no idea what is going on here but he really doesn’t care. Derek can do what the hell he wants to right now. Stiles nods.

Derek steps closer and leans towards Stiles, coming even closer.

Stiles closes his eyes. His heart is rabbiting out of his chest. He opens his mouth to gulp in air as he thinks he might be drowning. Surely Derek can tells what kind of effect he’s having.

Just when Stiles thought he might die of anticipation, Derek ducks his head and rubs his cheek on Stiles’ neck and shoulder.

Stiles lets out a high pitched squeaking noise. He realizes that Derek meant pack scenting. They needed to touch each other so the pack bond was more apparent in how they smelled.

Derek is still rubbing his face on Stiles’ neck when Stiles breaks. He lets out a almost hysterical sounding burst of laughter and sways backwards away from Derek.

“Stiles, are you okay?”

Stiles wheezes. “Yeah, of course. Scent marking. Pack bonds. Got it. That’s all.”

He knows he’s not making any sense but oh shit Stiles wants to climb Derek like a tree. I mean, he always know Derek was attractive but this kind of visceral physical reaction is a whole new thing.

Derek takes a step forward, confused eyebrows returning, and asks again. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Stiles begins to nod like a bobble head dolls, preparing to reassure Derek that he is indeed fine. Instead, he says. “No, nowhere near fine.”

Concern painting Derek’s features, he starts to talk but Stiles cuts him off.

“Scent marking makes sense now that you say it outloud. But seriously, before you saying it, it felt like you were going to do something completely different. I mean I know it makes no sense but I’ve been kissed a few times and I know what it feels like coming on. I mean I know that doesn’t make any sense but I don’t think my heart could take thinking you were going to kiss me and then you don’t but you’re still rubbing all up on me.”

Stiles knows he’s rambling. It’s the ADD and the stress but he can’t seem to stop himself. Finally Derek just slaps a hand over his mouth, forcing Stiels to stop.

Derek looks almost bewildered. “Is kissing me something you want?”

It’s Stiles turn to feel bewildered. “How do you just ask that? That’s a crazy kind of a question.”

Derek raises one eyebrow and says, “Stiles, answer the question. I’m not going to make fun of you.”

Stiles takes a deep breath and looks up at Derek, feeling shy for the first time in a very long time. His voice comes out like a whisper. “Yes. I think I do. I mean it’s a pretty recent development and I had planned on wooing you before i told you, but since you ask, yes, kissing you is something that I want.”

Derek is silent for awhile before Stiles eventually begs, “Come on, Sourwolf, put me out of my misery here, one way or the other.”

Derek looks up again, his face vulnerable in a way that Stiles isn’t sure he’s ever seen. “I’ll be honest, I’ve never thought of you in that way before. But now that you bring it up, it seems like maybe it could be worth thinking about. I don’t want to kiss you on an experient, with us wanting different things out of it. Maybe we could talk more about it when we get home and give me a little while to think it over.”

Stiles isn’t really sure how to process what Derek just said beyond it wasn’t no. Stiles smiles, a little hope seeping into his own thoughts on the matter.

“Yeah, Derek. That sounds good.” He looks helplessly around, not really sure how to start a different conversation and not really having any thing else to do in the hotel room.

Derek saves the day. “Look, they have registrations times in the morning as well as tonight. What do you say we go and see a movie tonight instead of sticking around the hotel? We can grab some dinner too.”

“Yeah. That sounds great.” This is not a date, Stiles repeats to himself in his mind over and over again. But at the same time, he can’t keep the goofy smile off his face..

*******

The not-a-date was amazing. Somehow, they had both been able to just have fun together and not get stuck dwelling on to kiss or not to kiss question. Stiles was floating on cloud 9 until they got back to the hotel room. More specifically, the bed.

Stiles and Derek have both changed into sweatpants and t-shirts and are standing on opposite sides of the bed, just staring at it and not getting in.

Finally, Stiles looks up and tries to school his face into a serious demeanor. “Now look here. I have already admitted to where I stand on the whole kissing question. I am a virile young specimen of a human being. This” he says pointing a finger around the bed, “is a no judgment zone. You ignore any bodily functions that may happen in this bed, because of how I feel about you.”

By the end of his speech, Stiles’ cheeks are burning and he doesn’t know why but he is having trouble catching his breath.

Derek blinks like an owl. “Feelings?�� He’s sounding a little breathless himself.

Stiles shakes his head in frustration. “Yes, Derek. Feelings! I thought we already had this conversation.”

Derek shakes his head. “No. We had a conversation about kissing. Not a conversation about feelings.’

“Yeah, well, for me there the same damn conversation. The feelings came first. Then the wanting to kiss you.”

“Oh.”

“What, oh?” Stiles bites out, beginning to feel annoyed. And embarrassed.

“In my experience, that’s not always the case. Not with Kate or Jennifer or Braeden.” Derek replies in a very small voice.

Stiles annoyance falls away and his heart breaks, just a little. Stiles walks around the bed so he can at least be near to Derek.

“I know we haven’t worked the whole feelings/kissing thing out but can I give you a hug?”

Derek doesn’t even reply. He just reaches for Stiles and wraps his arms around his entire torso. Derek practically collapses into the hug and Stiles does his best to channel everything he learned about hugs from his Mom and Mama McCall into this hug.

Stiles thinks this might be the longest he’s ever hugged anyone for and he doesn’t ever want to let Derek go. But eventually their arms naturally drop. Stiles puts his hands on Derek’s cheeks, and looks him in the eyes.

“Listen to me, Derek. I love being your friend. I love being your packmate. I love getting to spend time with you. Me being in love with you won’t change any of that if you don’t want it to. It’s like an A and an A+. Both are awesome. One is just a slight improvement over the other. I don’t want the A+ unless it is going to make you happy too. I’m here for the A no matter what you decide about kissing and feelings.”

Derek closed his eyes before he started speaking. Stiles can feel each movement of his jaw as he chokes out a response. “The last time I tried kissing and feelings together, I ended up having to kill her. I don’t know how to do this like a normal person.”

“Derek, look at me. Do you think that I know how to do this like a normal person either? There is no normal. There is just whatever we decide we want.”

In a barely audible whisper, Derek says, “I think I’d like to try this with you. But slowly. Definitely feelings, but maybe no more than kissing for awhile.?”

Stiles can’t imagine what the sheer joy that sweeps through him must smell like to Derek but Derek sniffs the air and a grin breaks out across his whole face, eyebrows and all.

Stiles is practically vibrating in place. “Can I kiss you now?””

Instead of answering, Derek leans forward and gently presses their lips together. Despite how chaste the kiss is, Stiles feels it to the very core of him. His heart is doing things he couldn’t eve describe and his knees are about to buckle.

Without thought, his arms wrap around Derek’s neck and his hips press forward. He stops himself short of grinding because that would not be taking it slow. But, as it is, he and Derek are touch from head to toe, wrapped in each other’s arms and more deliriously happy than Stiles knew was possible.

Derek ran his fingers through Stiles’ hair as he pulled away from their kiss. Stiles didn’t have scent to go by but he thought that Derek was just as happy as he was.

“Alright, lover boy or lover wolf? Is that a thing. It should be. Lover-wolf, let’s go to bed.”

“Not a thing. Don’t make it a thing.”

“Too late, lover-wolf, its a thing.”

They both climb into bed and Stiles stalls out for a minute but then he reaches out and takes Derek’s hand. By the time they fell asleep, Stiles had claimed the position of big spoon and had Derek wrapped in his arms.

*******

The first thing Stiles notices when he wakes up is that he is wrapped around a furnace. Then he realizes that furnace is Derek and his brain shorts out in pure bliss for a moment. But as soon as the warm fuzzy endorphins finish blazing through his system, he begins to take note of other things.

The muscles of Derek’s arm under his head. The roughness of the hair on Derek’s chest, where Stiles’ arm is rested. The tangle their legs have made. The insistent pressure of Derek’s hip bone against his rapidly hardening cock.

Stiles moans almost unconsciously as his hips jerk forward a few times, chasing that beautiful, wonderful pressure. It takes more willpower than he knew he possessed to stop and cant his hips away from Derek. Rubbing off on Derek after sharing one chaste kiss was not taking it slow.

Instead, Stiles scritched his fingers over Derek’s chest where they lay and was about to wake Derek up. Before he can get ‘good morning’ out of his mouth, Derek is on the other side of the room, wolfed out and panting like he just ran a marathon. His eyes are wide and wild - almost like he is somewhere else and not here in a hotel room with Stiles.

Stiles sits up in bed, not sure what just happened. “Derek, what’s wrong?” he asks, voice taut with false calm. He has to stay calm.

Derek hunches further into the corner of the room when Stiles speaks and doesn’t respond.

“Ok, Sourwolf. I’m going to get out of bed slowly. I’m not going to hurt you. You are safe.” Stiles keeps talking, low and calm, while he slowly walks towards Derek with his hands out.

Stiles stops just inside arm’s reach of Derek. He curses himself for his stupidity in what he is about to do. He takes one step closer to the frightened, wolfed out werewolf, not really sure what his next step will be. But when Stiles gets closer to Derek, Derek sniffs the air and that seems to break through whatever Derek had been experiencing.

He manages to pull back the shift and lurches forward into Stiles’ arms, pulling him into a desperate hug and burying his nose in Stiles’ neck. He is pulling in deep breaths of Stiles’ scent and trembling in his arms.

Stiles is at a loss but does his best to hold the man he loves through whatever’s happening right now. He ends up sliding to the floor so he hold Derek better as he is rocking back and forth.

He seems to be inhaling huge breaths of Stiles scent. When Stiles focuses enough to tell what Derek is muttering, he hears, “It’s Stiles. Stiles not Kate. Stiles is safe” over and over again.

Once he picks up what Derek is saying, Stiles heart breaks even more. He leans back a bit and tries to get Derek to look at him, “Sourwolf, your’re safe. I promise.”

Derek won’t be moved. “Need to smell you. Eyes can lie. Need to smell you.”

“Okay, Okay. At least come to the be…couch with me. We can be more comfortable.”

Derek shook the whole way to the couch and immediately curled back into Stiles’ space when they sat down.

It was almost an hour before Derek calmed himself down enough to unwind from Stiles. Stiles arms and legs were so cramped and he had to pee so bad he thought he might actually wet himself. He’d kind of thought they might have gotten through a few dates and make-outs before he was hit over the head with the ‘worse’ part of ‘for better or worse’. Not that he was thinking about marriage already. Oh shit! He might be thinking of marriage already.

“You gonna be okay if I go pee real fast?”

A ghost of a smile flashed across Derek’s face. “Yeah, I think so.” He paused, “But hurry, please”

Stiles peed the fasted he’d ever peed and went back to sit beside Derek.

He gets a good look for the first time since they moved to the couch. Derek’s face is pale and drawn with tear tracks streaking his cheeks. His eyes look hollowed out and exhausted. His whole body is hunched over like he is ashamed.

Stiles gently lifts Derek’s chin so he can look him in the face. “What happened?”

Derek opens his mouth like he was going to talk but instead ends up shaking his head. “I don’t know. I’m so sorry. Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you deal with that. You didn’t sign up for that. Just sorry.”

“Hey, hey. No. Before anything else, I am your friend and packmate. Which means I absolutely signed up for keeping you safe when you are terrified. I absolutely signed up for being there when you need me. The kissing and feelings has nothing to do with that. And I did sign up for that.”

Stiles thinks he must look strange because the way Derek is looking at him is like he’s never seen Stiles before. It almost makes Stiles embarrassed for how fierce he just was. But then Derek whispers, “Thank you.” And, that’s it. Stiles knows he said the right thing.

“Anytime. Though I do hope not all the time.” Stiles takes a moment to choose his next words very carefully. “If you don’t quite know what happened or don’t feel ready to talk about it yet, that’s okay. I’m not going to press. But I think you should consider talking about it. I mean, maybe with a professional. I’m always happy to listen but that was a really big reaction to I don’t know what. I am here for you and I will always be here for you. However, a professional might make it so you get better instead of just having support when it’s bad. I don’t know if I said that right or not.”

Derek’s voice is back up to normal volume. “You said it just fine. Maybe. I’d have to find someone supernatural. Maybe Laura knows of someone.”

Stiles is full to bursting with pride when Derek says that. The pink on Derek’s cheeks tells Stiles, he can probably smell that on him. He replies to Derek’s cheeks instead of his eyebrows like usual, “Yes, I’m proud of you. Get used to it, Sourwolf.”

*******

It takes awhile for them to finally get around to taking showers and getting dressed. By the time they are ready to leave the room, there is only about 15 minutes left of registration. Stiles is about to open the door when Derek grabs his hand and stops him.

He fumbles for his words for a moment before his eyebrows become determined and he looks up at Stiles. “So you know rank and protocol can be very important to supernatural beings.”

Stiles nods.

“As an unmated wolf representing a pretty powerful group, I will be considered fair game.”

“Fair game for what?”

“Wolves have a lot of behaviors surrounding smell because that sense is enhanced for us. For the fae, touch is very powerful. They can read auras, map bindings and relationships, heal or harm based on intention, enact treaties, and so much more. They understand enough about wolves to know not to touch a mated wolf without permission but an unmated wolf is fair game.”

“What are you saying? Cause it almost feels like you want me to be your mate so you don’t get touched too much while we’re here. And that feels like you are manipulating me because you know about my feelings. I don’t think you would do that so please tell me what you are saying.”

Derek looks horrified as he talks again, “No. Nonono. I just meant, maybe we could pretend to be mated. Maybe engaged to be mated or something. We wouldn’t smell right to other wolves but for the fae, they might believe if we were convincing enough.”

“I’m not sure that would be much better, Sourwolf. I don’t want you kissing me and touching me if you don’t mean it. That would be too heartbreaking for me.”

“What if we just didn’t say anything but did some of the stuff we’ve already done, just in public - holding hands, hugging, ummm, small kisses.”

Stiles thought about it for a moment. “Just make a promise. Don’t do anything with or to me that you don’t have feelings behind. I mean maybe you wouldn’t have thought to do it at just that moment except us being here but in general, it would make you happy to do it with me…”

Stiles huffs out a breath. That didn’t even make sense to him and he said it.

Derek takes a step closer. “I’d be happy to hold your hand all the time. Being surrounded by your scent is amazing. It’s like no matter what else is going on, no matter how crazy or dangerous things are, I can find peace if you are nearby.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yean, okay.”

Stiles turns to the door of their hotel room again, about to open it. And, again, Derek stops him. “Umm, before we go down there, can we do one more thing?”

Stiles tilts his head in inquiry.

“Can I kiss you again?”

Stiles’ breath whooshes out of him and his heart beats in that quadruple staccato as he nods his head.

Derek crowds him against the wall, boxing Stiles in with his whole body before he leans in and presses their lips together.

Stiles doesn’t know and really doesn’t care what to do with his hands. They flail up and land somewhere on Derek’s back as his legs give a wobble under him. Oh God. This is like a perfect moment.

Then, Derek opens his mouth just a bit and lets his tongue lick at Stiles’ lips. That sends a shock right to Stiles’ heart and feels warm through his whole body. Another lick and shock lands a bit lower. There’s nowhere for him to move that doesn’t involve rubbing against Derek.

This time, Derek rubs back and Stiles thinks he might die of sheer pleasure. He opens his mouth, letting his tongue meet Derek’s. At Stiles’ acquiescence, Derek growls, eyes flashing blue, and grabs Stiles’ hands. He slams them against the wall above their heads and presses hard into Stiles’ whole body.

Stiles whines and tries to reciprocate as much as possible but Derek has complete control over him. And, oh shit, does that work for him. HIs brain is rapidly dribbling out his ears, being replaced entirely by the pleasure of Derek pinning him to a wall.

All of the sudden Derek lets out a frustrated groan and Stiles’ front is freezing. Derek takes a step back, chest heaving and eyes blown wide. Stiles is sure he looks about the same. Maybe with a touch more confusion.

“Wha…why did you stop?”

Derek practically growls out his answer and his eyes flash blue again, “The first time I make you come, it won’t be pinned against the wall in a hotel room that smells like about 10 other people.”

Stiles thinks if he were five years younger, hearing Derek say that might have made him come untouched, standing against a wall in a hotel room. As is, he presses a hand against the base of his cock and squeezes his eyes shut for a moment before grunting, “If you don’t want me to come, then you should probably stop talking about it.”

Derek is flushed and beautiful and his eyebrows have gone a bit sheepish. “Yeah, for me too.”

Stiles puts his full weight back on his own feet (and not the wall, or Derek) and looks at the clock on the bedside table. “Aannd, we now have 5 minutes left to register.”

“Then we better hurry.” Derek smirks at Stiles and grabs his hand to drag him to the elevator.

*******

The rest of the weekend was amazing. It turns out being the Sable Court representative meant they had to show up at a few seminars, make sure everyone knew they were there to represent the Sable Court, and attend the Banquet on Saturday night. No one made treaties with the Sable Court so there was very little politicking to be done. Every so often folks with grievances would try to get Derek to settle it between. Derek made a point of never giving a direct answer but he did keep note of a few situations that had the potential to blow up and made sure to pass that information on to whatever being was the equivalent of their Alpha.

Mostly, Stiles and Derek got to wander around a beautiful hotel, holding hands and reveling in just being together. The banquet had been the highlight of the weekend. Derek grumbled the whole time that he didn’t want to dance. But Stiles eventually convinced him, leading Derek onto the dance floor with a mischievous grin on his face.

Stiles proceeded to do the Macarena to every song that the string quartet played. Derek’s sour face barely lasted one song, by the end of the second song, he was laughing, By the end of the third song, he even had some of the other attendees who were around his age trying to get the pace of the Macarena right to match Liszt’s Angelus.

Derek pulled him close, laughter still in his voice, “You are ridiculous. Now you’ve got the whole place doing it, can we go?”

Stiles felt a pang of disappointment. He’d thought they were having fun. He quirks a half-smile at Derek. “Not having fun?”

Derek pressed a hard, quick kiss to Stiles’ lips. “Do you have any idea how beautiful you are? When you laugh, the joy in your scent is all I can focus on. I just want to slam you against some vertical surface and kiss you until it is as much a part of my scent as it is yours..”

Stiles’ eyes widened and yep, his whole body was on board with that idea. His voice cracked when tried to talk. Finally, he got out, “Yeah, that sounds like more fun than this. Let’s go do that.”

Later that night, after a good amount of very awesome making out, followed by two long, separate showers that would have taken all the hot water had they not been in a hotel, Stiles and Derek found themselves lying in bed together again. The heat from earlier in the evening has been banked and they are cuddled together, completely boneless.

Stiles is almost afraid to break the perfect atmosphere by speaking but he does. “You know I went and talked to Laura before her birthday dinner? I asked her whether there were specific werewolfy mating rituals. Or a specific way I should woo you.”

Derek looks at him, slightly horrified. “You didn’t!”

Stiles grins. “I did. I told it was her birthday present - that I was voluntarily letting her meddle.”

Now Derek looks worried for Stiles’ sanity. “What did she say?”

“I made her promise she would take the piss or get me to do something stupid before I asked her. She seemed to get that I was serious. She told me about this quote about mates that your Mom used to tell you.”

This time Derek smiled and recited from memory, “Each wolf is whole in itself but there are those who are created to walk beside in perfect harmony. A mate to write their name on your heart will make you safe by watching your back, give you peace by travelling beside you, bring you joy by smiling back at you, and join hands with you so will never be alone on your life journey,”

“Yeah, that. I started out thinking I was going to try to take that quote and prove to you that I am your mate, through wooing. But I realized there is no way that I would be able to convince you I am your mate, if I am not. Instead, I’ve realized that I want to tell you how you are my mate. From there, it is up to you where we go.”

Stiles swallows. “Derek Hale, I know that I am always safe with you. If we are in danger, I know you will be there, making sure that we both get out alive. You also make me feel safe sharing who I am with you. You’ve never made me feel bad about myself or how I was feeling. They say peace isn’t the lack of conflict but rather it is an inner quality that allows you to maintain equilibrium even in the midst of conflict. Now, equilibrium is not something I am much talented at. But with you by my side, I can find that calm. I can find my way out of calamitous thinking. You make me feel grounded. You’ve got a wicked sense of humor when you choose to let it out and you are the most fun to be goofy around because you’ll pretend to be annoyed but I know you really love it.”

Stiles stops for a moment, and takes Derek’s hand before he continues. “I know this isn’t really taking it slow when it comes to the feelings side of kissing and feelings but I want you to know, I think you are my mate. I hope one day you will decide that I am yours”

All of the sudden, there is a cat on their bed. It begins to grow and then transforms into a naked lady, just as it had at Laura’s birthday party.

Samaoth greets this with a hissed murmur, “Kind one, your obligation is fulfilled and your boon is granted.”

Stiles feels sick. Derek looks like he is about puke. Derek rasps out, “Not like this. I don’t want it like this. You can’t make him feel like this and then expect it to be okay.”

Samaoth arches one eyebrow. “Make him? I did not make him. This was a boon of revelation not a boon of creation. Maybe a slight nudge so that you were in a situation that would encourage you to share your feelings with each other. But the feelings themselves, they are yours, and yours alone.”

The pit in his stomach closed up and he was able to breathe again. But before Stiles could speak, Samaoth continued, “You know, not having to attend this thing was wonderful. Would you be willing to attend as my representative every year, Kind one?”

Derek appears to still be reeling, so Stiles answers. “Perhaps we leave it open for you invite us each year, while we retain the right to accept or refuse as we are able.”

Samaoth nods, “This is acceptable. Enjoy your mate, Kind one.” Samaoth then disappeared into thin air between one breath and the next.

Stiles and Derek look at each other. Derek finally speaks, “That was exhausting. Can we just go to sleep and talk about it tomorrow?”

“Sure.” Stiles kisses Derek’s forehead gently and then whispers, “Sweet dreams, Lover-wolf.”

*******

Traveling home was almost as exhausting as traveling to Seattle in the first place. But at least Roscoe was waiting for them instead of a taxi.

When they had both climbed in, Stiles tapped on the steering wheel a couple of times to relieve the nervous tension.

“We haven’t really talked much about what Samaoth said. I thought we might at least talk about what we wanted to tell the pack when we get home.”

Derek nods. “That’s a good idea.” He pauses. “I think I should go first.”

“Okay.”

Stiles is confused when Derek starts how he does but listens without interrupting. “Kate liked to play sexual games. She was always pushing me further than I wanted to go. I think Friday morning happened because you used your fingernails to wake me up. She used to scratch me, until I would bleed. She would start soft, almost tickling and gradually get harder and harder until I would beg her to stop. She would only stop if I did something for her, like go down on her or play with her nipples.”

Derek takes a deep breath in and out through his nose. “I thought I loved her. I thought she loved me. I thought that was just how sex was. I didn’t know how bad she was until it was too late. You know the rest of the story. But I think she really messed up how I think about feelings and kissing as we’ve been calling it. I think you’re right. I probably need to talk to a professional to get it all sorted out in my own head.”

Stiles nods and makes an encouraging noise because it seems like Derek isn’t done talking yet.

“I want that with you. I want the whole thing: mates, married, growing old together, everything. The feelings are there. But I think I also need time to work out my own head before we go any further than the kissing.”

When Derek looks up at Stiles, his eyes are pleading with Stiles, like there was anything other than yes that Stiles would say to all that. “Derek, I am here for you, however you need. As long as we can talk to each other, it will be okay. I can’t promise to always do or say the right thing but I want this too. I want this in a way that is healthy for you. And in the mean time, kissing you is no hardship.”

To demonstrate, and because he wanted to, Stiles leans forward and kisses Derek, once on the lips, once on the forehead, and then once on each cheek.

Stiles leans back, and asks, “What do you want to tell the pack?”

“The truth.”

*******

Everyone is gathered at the Hale house when they walk inside, hand in hand. Laura squeals and jumps up to hug them both as soon as she notices. Scott grins and gives Stiles a thumbs up while everyone else takes a moment to catch up.

They sit down together in one of the love seats, Derek on Stiles’ lap.

Lydia starts of the friendly interrogation. “I’d ask how it went but it appears to have gone very well.”

Stiles is grinning and Derek has a soft happy smile on his face. They look each other in the eyes and both say, “Yeah,” at the same time.

Laura throws and throw pillow at their heads. “Stop being so sappy and tell us all about it.”

Derek throws it back at his sister and Stiles starts to talk. “The conference was a conference. Nothing exciting there except, we kind of both decided that we are mates.”

The whole room erupts in shouts and wolf whistles.

Once they settle down, Stiles continues, “Samaoth doesn’t like to go so she used this as an excuse to get out of it and give Derek his boon. Apparently, we have always been each other’s mates and might have figured that out on our own eventually but Samaoth’s boon was one of revelation. The time alone together, along with a small nudge from her, helped us to be able realize our feelings for each other.”

“Congratulations, guys,” Boyd says when Stiles stops speaking. The rest of the pack echoes the sentiment.

Derek nudges Stiles, “Can you tell them the rest too?” Stiles startles slightly. “You want to share that part?

“Yeah. I don’t know that I can say it again but they’re pack. It’s safe.”

Stiles smiles, pride and happiness leaking out everywhere. “Part of us deciding what it means for us to be mates is that we decided to take it really slow. Derek shared some things about what Kate did to him that have messed up how he sees the physical aspect of relationships. He’s decided to talk to a professional about to get things straight in his own head. We’re still mates, we’re just taking it really slow.”

Derek stared at his shoes the whole time Stiles was talking. His embarrassment is bright on his cheeks and the rest of the pack must be able to smell it.

Laura stands up from her seat and kneels on the ground in front of Derek so she can look him in the eyes. “I am so proud of  you. You have nothing to be embarrassed about. We all love you and want you to be happy.”

Erica yells from across the room. “What she said.”

Lydia replies, “I might have said it with more tact, but I agree too.”

Isaac, Boyd, Scott, and Jackson are quick to follow with their own reassurances.

There is a bit of awkward tension in the room like no one really knows what comes next, until Stiles declares, “It’s time for Frozen and a puppy pile.”

Derek smiles and says, “Yeah, that would be great.”

Three disney movies later, Stiles falls asleep with Derek sitting between his legs, back resting against Stiles’ chest. He’s never been so happy in all his life. Maybe he should be looking forward to his next oh shit moment.

The end.

[tiergan-vashir]

What about a cis woman who has androgynous features and hates it and herself for it? I'd give anything for a more feminine face and not look so flat chested. Is this dysphoria too? Do you have any resources for this sort of problem? It seems silly, but when I see trans women having things like facial feminization surgery or going on hormones and getting breasts that are nice, I wonder if a cis woman who experiences the same pain over her androgynous features is in the same boat..

Aww, anon. I’m so sorry to hear that you’re struggling this way. I wouldn’t say this is gender dysphoria as gender dysphoria is involves a persistent sense of unease and conflict between a person’s physical or assigned gender and the gender with which he/she/they identify.  You are a cis woman who identifies as a woman, but wishes she looked more feminine, which is very different.

I would assess how strong your feelings are and if it’s extremely severe, to the point that your distress causes you to be highly preoccupied with it and it is impacting your school, work, home, etc or and you find yourself hiding away, I would consult a therapist. You may have body dysmorphic disorder.If it’s not quite THAT extreme, the I would say that what you’re feeling and struggling with is still totally valid and far, far more common amongst folks than you might think.  Whether you realise it or not, as a woman you are bombarded all the time with powerful systemic, societal pressures to look, dress, and behave in a certain manner every day - and all of that can really destroy how people feel about themselves.

Shoving the rest of this under a cut for length.

Let me just tell you right now - my breasts are fuckin’ tiny.  I know I literally just asked for advice on binders a few days ago, but I’m an A cup at best. Probably smaller.  The slight, itty-bitty ‘cup’ shape on my flimsy bralettes probably give these non-existent knockers more shape than they really have.  Even though I’m buying binders and what not, on a lazy day, I could honestly just slap some pasties on these nip-nops and call it good. They’re that small.

This is amazing and awesome now that I’m busily trying to minimize their existence as much as possible.  I consider myself genderqueer/genderfluid so some days I’ll be crushed over the fact that I can’t be this tall, jacked, majestic Tiergan-shaped dude, while other days I’ll be fine and dandy with looking like a woman, while MOST days I just want to be the purest manifestation of Gender Confusion Inducement™ in other people.  Me wanting binders over my itty-bitty nublet tiddies is just me wanting to go that extra mile to be flat as a fuckin’ wall.

But when I thought I was a cis woman? I felt crushingly ashamed by them.  

Back then, I didn’t really like myself or how I looked. I didn’t like looking at myself in the mirror. I HATED looking at myself in pictures. I rarely took selfies, because I thought I was not very attractive.  I thought I was bland and ugly looking.  Society had told me again and again that attractive women looked a certain way, were shaped a certain way, dressed a certain way, etc, and that clearly my unhappiness was based upon the fact that I did not conform to that mold.I thought to be happy and to feel better about myself, I had to double down on the womanliness and become more conventionally attractive. So I’d buy things like massive push-up bras that never felt good, comfortable, and I hated in a desperate attempt to conform. I’d buy these really specific types of shirts and clothes that I didn’t like at all, but thought was what was ‘pretty’ for women. I’d fumble through learning make-up, not because I was interested in the colors, the expression, the creativity, and accentuating my features the way I wanted, but because that’s just what adult women were supposed to do.  I’d buy certain shoes I didn’t really even like, but knew pretty women were supposed to like and wear.

I was trying so damn hard to fit the mold and in the end, it only made me feel worse.  I felt like I was wearing this awkward, uncomfortable shell. People would tell me I was pretty, but I didn’t feel happier. I just felt more miserable, because all this extra emotional and physical labour I was putting into myself just to fit this arbitrary bullshit notion of what an ideal pretty lady was supposed to be like was EXHAUSTING and I didn’t even really like how I looked. I didn’t want to do it all every. single. day of my life.

Realising I was nonbinary was absolutely liberating for me, because I thought  “Well… if I’m not a cis woman and none of the old ‘rules’ matter anymore, …what does handsomeness or beauty actually mean to me?” 

And for the first time in my entire adult life, I defined for myself what beauty and handsomeness truly meant for me.  It was wonderful and liberating.  The first thing I realised was that I didn’t really give a fuck about how big my boobs are. Society did. And BOY HOWDY it was GREAT not giving a flying fuck about that anymore.  I still keep a few bras around for costuming/cosplay purposes, but you could not catch me fucking dead in one otherwise.

I used to hate make-up and find it to be this long, cumbersome chore that I would lose interest in doing every day, but once I got to sit and experiment on how I personally actually wanted it to look on my face - I fucking loved it. I like experimenting with colors and want to play with more. It appeals to the artist in me to play on a canvas even if that canvas is my face.

Fashion as a whole became a wild new experience. I stopped thinking about what I felt pressured to buy because it would make me look a certain way and what I really, really wanted.  I made a pinterest board of fashion goals and pinned every single thing I could find that I liked - regardless of whether it was a man, woman, or theater major dressed up in costume wearing it so I could identify what I actually wanted.  I dyed my hair pink, but got it cut in a more masculine manner and I fucking love the way I look now.

You might be thinking “Yeah, ok, Tiergan, that’s great and all, but I’m not nonbinary.”

But the funny thing I realised was that even though embracing that I am nonbinary led me to this understanding that I could take back my own power and define for myself what attractiveness truly means for me - this was a thing I could have done at any point in my life if I hadn’t been so buried in all those signals from society on what beauty was supposed to be.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you “just accept ur natural self! Don’t change a thing! Body positivity!!!!!” Because: 1) I know when you’re in a place of feeling super down on yourself, that shit doesn’t help at all and just feels extremely inauthentic. 2) I changed A LOT about myself until I was happy with my appearance. I just didn’t change it in the ways that I previously thought I was ‘supposed’ to.

So instead what I’ll say is that if you’re willing and able, I would set aside an hour or two each week to clear your mind, dig deep, and try to visualize a universe in which nothing anyone else thinks about your appearance matters anymore, because YOU are God.  You have a blank slate.  

There is no pressure to look a certain way to be considered beautiful, because you’re God. You decide what is beautiful..  No one in this universe gives a fuck if you have big tiddies, little tiddes, medium tiddies or any kind of tiddy, because right now the universe is a blank slate and all tiddies are created equal in a blank slate.�� No one in this universe cares whether or not you have the perfect heart-shaped feminine face or not, because you’ve not told anyone yet what is considered attractive.  You are the decider of beautiful things.

Now imagine that you, as God of this World, descend down to hang with the mortals.  You can’t really change your body without going back to your old weirdo universe back on Earth, but what you can change is your clothes, your hair, your make-up, etc.  Knowing that this universe is yours and you get to decide what beautiful is for yourself, what would you change?  

Remember, you’re God in this universe you’ve made - so you don’t have to impress fucking anybody.  Anyone who says shit to you gets smited or yeet into the sun.  As a god, you get to wear what makes you feel powerful, majestic, and appropriately godlike - what does that clothing look like?  Can you imagine it?  If it’s hard, maybe pull up pinterest and surf around for your god-clothes.  Would you get stylish sneakers or thigh high boots?  Would you get a lady’s power-suit or a lolita dress?  Would you get some neat unique godly jewelry? (If yes, I recommend Etsy. That site is gonna destroy my fuckin’ destory my wallet.)

What’s your make-up like?  Is it tough to imagine?  Pull up another pinterest. Use it to find your god-makeup.  And hey - are you putting this make-up on because it makes you feel GOOD and POWERFUL like the goddess you are, or to impress the mortals? Because again - you’re god. You don’t have to impress jack shit. This make up is for YOU and what makes you feel GOOD and POWERFUL and GODLIKE.

Do you still care about having bigger boobs? (Did you know a fuckload of actual supermodels and Hollywood actresses have small tiddies? So even in THIS universe, you don’t need big boobs to be beautiful!)  Do you still feel unhappy that your face is kind of androgynous according to the dumbasses back in the vastly inferior universe you originally came from?  Or do things in your universe where you’re god feel pretty great?  I hope so, because gods don’t really have time to worry about the funky assumptions of mere mortals. You’re too busy being fabulous and doing godlike shit.

Hope this sort of helps!

[arcticdementor]

“Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.” This, one of Lady Macbeth’s most famous lines, is cited by Elizabeth Winkler in her recent Atlantic essay, “Was Shakespeare a Woman?,” as a thrilling instance of a woman’s resistance to femininity. Winkler then goes on to compare Lady Macbeth’s anger to women’s #MeToo “fury.” “This woman,” Winkler says of Lady Macbeth, woke her out of her “adolescent stupor” by “rebelling magnificently and malevolently against her submissive status.”

Of course, what Lady Macbeth is actually about to do is help her husband murder an innocent man, the king, in cold blood while he sleeps under her own roof. Unless one aligns female empowerment with sociopathic behavior, this isn’t really a triumphant moment for women’s liberation. Nor would any reading of the text other than a willfully perverse one count her as one of Shakespeare’s admirable characters. When she celebrates Lady Macbeth as one of Shakespeare’s heroines simply because Lady M has the desire to do something horrific, there is indeed something adolescent about Winkler’s attitude.

…

But what I find more troubling is the assumption that forms the foundation of Winkler’s thesis: the belief that men don’t really like women, at least not enough to think and write about them with understanding and empathy; not enough to see the value in female friendships and feminine bonds of love and fidelity; and certainly not enough to find strong, tough, funny, clever women believable, admirable, and desirable. When I consider the men I know, male friends and relatives, colleagues, fathers of my children’s classmates, Winkler’s failure to entertain the notion that a man could have written the compelling female characters that populate Shakespeare’s plays is more than merely baffling, it is an insult to men, both past and present.

I have written elsewhere about how contemporary feminism needs the idea of an oppressive patriarchy in order to define women as victims of oppression, and as such it seeks to attach to men a primal stain of (toxic) masculinity so that third-wave feminism is righteously justified in all its complaints against them. Fighting “The Patriarchy” is feminism’s raison d’etre, and without this enemy the cause itself is in jeopardy (see Feminism’s Dependency Trap in Quillette). It seems as though Winkler’s take on Shakespeare is yet another iteration of feminism’s belief that men have a blind spot for women’s humanity. The irony of the current feminist orthodoxy, however, is that it is women who fail to see men’s position clearly. A further —and funnier—irony, if one has a palate for the absurd and the tragic, is that most men, for their part, are usually so chivalrous, so solicitous of women as people, that they sympathize with women’s crusade against them, and by and large assent to women’s complaints. They must really like us!

…

But what troubles me is that women commonly fail to appreciate the internal struggle men have with their sexual instincts, and instead condemn them for having these instincts at all. In other words, consciousness raising feminism rightly asserts that men shouldn’t treat women like objects for their use, but it does so while being unconscious of men’s humanity, and as a consequence, both minimizes and punishes the male sexual instinct that causes men to see women sexually in spite of men’s civilizing efforts not to.

What contemporary feminism fails to adequately grapple with is nature itself, and as a result, feminist attitudes towards men, and particularly towards male sexuality, are compassionless and punitive (not to mention humourless—and human sexuality is so often very funny!). With a blind spot for men’s experiences, consciousness raising feminist attitudes towards male sexual energy are unlikely to inspire mutual respect, and instead work to engender resentment, anxiety, and unhappiness.

…

An obvious oversight in Winkler’s grad school approach to understanding Shakespeare is that while she is correct to assert that Shakespeare wrote female characters with whom he clearly empathises, she might have at least once considered that he also does the same with men. In what follows, I want to look briefly at one of Shakespeare’s most reprehensible male characters, the magistrate Angelo from Measure for Measure. I want to think about him carefully, not merely to look at how he uses his power to mistreat women in Weinstein-esque fashion (although he does indeed do this), and not simply to condemn him for his misogynistic sexual anger (although his behavior is very wrong). But, rather, to try to understand his internal struggle with his own lack of self-sovereignty, the crisis that his desire elicits: the sudden, inescapable, and unwanted pressure that his sexual nature exerts over his better judgement which overturns his self-autonomy and will.

…

In contemporary expressions of male predatory sexuality told from the perspective of women, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, now a popular television show, men are viewed as powerful, threatening, and in a real sense empty of humanity, a kind of monolith of authority. Shakespeare’s Angelo is very different in that when his sexual appetite is awakened, he realizes that he is in fact almost entirely powerless. He doesn’t want to want her, and is confused and overwhelmed by how his sense of identity and autonomy have been absolutely overturned by this woman, who intended to do nothing of the sort. It is in part his astonishment at his own sexual desires, and in part his disgust with these desires, that make him so fascinating.

“What’s this? What’s this?” he asks himself as soon as Isabella takes her leave after pleading with him to have mercy on her brother’s life, “Is it her fault or mine? / The tempter or the tempted who sins most, ha? / Not she, nor doth she tempt; but it is I.” In this moment Angelo encounters for the first time his own sexual nature that he would really and truly prefer to be without. Unacknowledged in himself previously, Angelo judges harshly others’ sexual desires (that is why he has arrested and condemned to death Isabella’s brother). In some ways, he is the #MeToo movement’s goal: to have an impartial bureaucratic system of rules rather than any actual humans arbitrate the morality that governs sexual behavior. His lack of humanity is what might make his authority fair, if it weren’t so brutal. And it is his encounter with his own messy humanity that causes him to realize that the self he has constructed, the chosen identity he wanted for himself, has collided with a nature about which he can do little to change. We are, all of us, in some ways, not at home in our bodies.

I am obviously not endorsing Angelo’s course of action. He is the slimy villain of this play, there is no doubt about that. And I am obviously not excusing any man’s sexual coercion of a woman. These are serious criminal and immoral acts. It isn’t at all Angelo’s submission to his desires that I find instructive here, but rather the internal self-abasement he feels at having them in the first place, a self-abasement that is transformed into self-disgust because he suddenly realizes how little control he has over his lust. “Blood, thou art blood,” he says. “I have begun, / And now I give my sensual race the rein.”

Again, and I feel like I need to keep repeating this here lest I be misunderstood and used to excuse sexual aggression, Angelo does not have control over his nature, but he does over his behaviour, and it is his refusal to find himself up for the task of contending with his nature that makes him a villain. What feminism doesn’t understand, and probably doesn’t want to understand because it might create compassion for male sexuality, is the internal struggle of men against their own appetites. Men must possess and exert a strong and powerful will, not over women to pressure them into unwanted sex, but over themselves so that they don’t. The male will, what Simone de Beauvoir called transcendence over immanence, might be a very real quality because from adolescence onwards men must be well practiced in it.

…

You might be asking, “Ok, men have powerful sexual desires that their masculine assertiveness must work to control. What now?” I am asking myself this same question, and of course there is no easy answer. The history of civilization is, in many respects, our struggle with the intractable problem of human sexuality: the conflict of our Nature and our Reason. Some cultures have taken the tack that it’s better to try and eliminate men’s oppressive sexual nature by hiding their oppressors, and so we can see the burka, for instance, as an attempt to minimize the constant gnawing pressure of male sexual instincts, with greater or lesser success. In the West, other codes have been adopted. Christianity’s influence, the ideas of self-sacrifice, service, and human dignity, have mixed with barbaric European warrior cultures, which resulted in the codes of chivalry. This approach to our sexuality has worked, not perfectly, but pretty well, actually, all things considered. Yet now the ground of Western civilization is shifting, not from influences outside us, but from within, and the assumptions of chivalrous attitudes are the very things being taken to task. What’s next? Women’s revenge? (I’ve read Hamlet—revenge seems like a bad idea.) An unsexing of the selves? (I’ve read Macbeth; this one seems like a bad idea, too.)

…

Just as Angelo fails to respect his own sexual nature until it overpowers him, the near-nun Isabella also fails to contend with her nature as a woman. She is disgusted with her feminine sexual nature, it seems, which is why she desires to enter into the strictest order of nuns in the first place. Isabella’s relationship to her own sexuality is complex, but at bottom what she lacks is the strength and willpower needed to confront and handle her sexual power over men. She doesn’t know what to do with her sex appeal. Like Angelo, what she has been unwilling to face is her own nature. Since she isn’t up for the task, she seeks to retreat absolutely from the challenge: become a nun of the strictest order. Without men to desire her, in herself she becomes sexless. In Isabella we are faced with the flip-side to Lady Macbeth’s “unsex me here,” which is, in that play, too, a rejection and denial of nature, not, as Winkler wants to believe, of woman’s submissive social status. By vilifying the male sexual desire for women, consciousness-raising feminism seeks to relieve women of the burden of confronting the part of their own sexual nature that comes into being as a response to male desire.

…

If contemporary feminist orthodoxy insists that masculine sexual energy is, in itself, “toxic” and must thus be written out of social discourse, women will not have to contend with their own powerful sexual nature as the inspiration and location for the masculine imagination. But women’s condemnation of men’s sexuality will not inspire women to understand themselves sexually, nor is it likely to help men understand women. No woman should lose her sense of agency and self-integrity, but is it really such a horror to accept that we’re not entirely autonomous creatures, that we’re, in fact, meant to understand ourselves not merely as individuals, but relationally? The failure to contend with our natures because it is easier to retreat into our own self-willed dream of autonomy seems less like moral progress, and more like a lonely lack of courage.

So what is the answer to the intractable battle of the sexes? Hopefully it will continue to be a somewhat awkward answer, one that we will have to fumble through together. But if we do not treat our natures with honesty and understanding, with affection, humour, and generosity, then I am unconvinced that we will become less resentful, more just, or in any way happy about our human bodies.

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 109 Review

A Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy Edition

-From ch. 109

-From my review of ch. 102

YES! I WAS RIGHT! KISS MY ASS YOU FOOLS1

So just as I predicted, we are seeing the start of a schism on Paradis.

On one side of the divide you’ve got a right-wing extremist faction composed of Floch, Louise, Zeke, his cult, and Eren (the Eldian Freedom Caucus, if you will) and on the other, a moderate faction composed of the other members of the 104th, Hange, Levi, along with other high ranking members of the government. (The establishment, again, if you will)

The conflict between these two factions is an incredibly political one (squeee!) with both sides trying to out-flank each other and gain the upper hand.

Of the two, the establishment faction is the one currently on the defensive. Most of the maneuvering by it’s members involves containing the EFC and just trying to figure out who’s side Eren is on. In other words, they’re being reactive, playing defense. As a result, the EFC has the freedom to seize the initiative and go on the offensive, as they have in this chapter.

It makes sense that the establishment would be on the defensive right now. Eren is such an important figure that any plan against the EFC will involve him as a key player.

Thus, before they can formulate a strategy, they must know who’s side Eren is on. The 104th has openly debated this amongst themselves, but Hange has also gotten involved as well. Their scene with Eren at the start of chapter 108, in hindsight, can easily be read as them trying to get a read on Eren. As them trying to get a feel for his allegiances.

Levi and Zeke’s bromantic comedy in the woods is also a part of this maneuvering, but it doesn’t need much expounding upon because how this figures into things is obvious. Zeke is dangerous so they’ve secluded him in the woods with their top soldier to keep watch on him.

The maneuvering by the EFC, aka Zeke’s faction, is shrouded in mystery. Because of course it is.

Has anyone here been following the news? If you have you’ve probably heard of Robert Meuller’s investigation into L’Affaire Russe, Russia’s (failed) attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Part of this investigation involves determining whether President Trump was complicit in this attempted influencing.

In his writings on L’Affaire Russe, Josh Marshall, editor-in-chief of the left-leaning Talking Points Memo news site, made an analogy about conspiracies that can be applied to Zeke. Conspiracies are like black holes.

Black holes cannot be seen. All light that approaches them is sucked in so you end up with a black object against a black backdrop. But they can be observed indirectly. Scientists observe black holes indirectly by measuring the influence they exert on objects that can be observed directly. For example, the gravity from black holes distorts the light traveling around them resulting in a “lensing” effect. By measuring the degree of visual distortion, scientists can determine the black hole’s size, among other things.

Conspiracies are similar. Many aspects of a conspiracy may not be directly knowable. It’s size, scope, etc. But you can get a good feel for it’s size and scope by observing it’s apparent effect on things that are directly observable.

Take L’Affaire Russe for example. There’s the Veselnitskaya meeting, Trump’s inexplicable fealty to Putin, the fact that Paul Manafort, massively in debt to a Russian oligarch, chose to work for Trump’s extremely pro-Russia campaign for free, etc, etc. Conspiracies can’t be seen directly, but they can be indirectly seen.

And so it is with L’Affaire Zeke, which is the name I’ll be using to refer to the apparent conspiracy Zeke has masterminded against the establishment. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and there’s a fuck-ton of smoke here. Seriously, I didn’t subtitle this post “a vast right-wing conspiracy edition” for nothing. Words cannot describe how fucked Paradis is if things are as bad as they seem to be. We’re talking “Donald Trump was a spy for the Russian government the whole time” levels of bad. 

The establishment was planning on feeding Zeke to Historia immediately, but then Historia conveniently got pregnant, thwarting their plans. This implies that Zeke somehow roped the queen in.

According to Pixis, there is reason to suspect Floch facilitated a covert meeting between Yelena and Eren, and during this meeting Eren was apparently turned to Zeke’s side. In other words, L’Affaire Zeke may have successfully infiltrated the military.

It doesn’t end there though. In this chapter the EFC leaked to the public news that Eren has been imprisoned, clearly in an attempt to undermine public support for the establishment. These people may be shithead nationalists, but they’re smart too.

Floch knew he couldn’t convince the establishment to free Eren, but you know what he also knows? That if enough public pressure were to be applied, they’d have no choice but to release Eren. Eren is seen by the public as a hero. As far as the public is concerned, Eren’s reckless action in Marley resulted in a resounding victory; the revelation that he’s been imprisoned for this will naturally stir outrage. Floch knows this so he leaked news of Eren’s imprisonment to the press knowing the people would support his call for Eren’s release.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Floch Forster is leading a fucking psy ops campaign to get what he wants.

We don’t know what Zeke is planning, but it’s clear his reach, even in the midst of enemy territory, is seemingly boundless. The sooner he’s dead, the better.

The story has low-key been building up to this for a while now. I’ve mentioned the contrast the story has drawn between Jean and Floch in an earlier post. And in hindsight, the scenes in chapter 108 strongly play into this as well. The scenes of Hange and the 104th trying to deal with their Eren problem, along with the implied existence of L’Affaire Zeke. Things will only continue to escalate from here. The heart and soul of Paradis is at stake.

This fight is exemplified in the conflict between Eren Yeager and Armin Arlert. And it is a conflict that mirrors not only the real world fight for the heart and soul of the United States but also the one for the heart and soul of Western civilization itself.

The ideology of the EFC, of Zeke, Floch, Louise, and possibly Eren, is an inherently backwards looking right-wing nationalism. They long for days of past glory, of days when Eldians ruled the world. It’s the politics of nostalgia at its most toxic. Eldians are oppressed and they don’t just want restitution, they want revenge. They feel a deep grievance over the indignity their race has been dealt.

(Note that “indignity” is an understatement here. I use it because that is exactly how they would describe what Eldians are dealing with.)

But the connection goes deeper than that. Right-wing nationalism, as a way of thinking, is strongly informed by a dominance centric worldview. The right-wing worldview is defined by an unshakable belief that there is a social Darwinian war of the races where defeat means death. They see the world in purely dichotomous terms. Strong vs weak. Dominators vs the dominated. Eldians vs the world.

And yes, there is a racial conflict brewing here, but the important difference is that the nationalists believe this conflict exists as a matter of course rather than as the result of circumstance.

This dominance centric worldview naturally leads to an obsession with strength, with being strong so you can win and achieve security.

“A human who used her strength to throw a titan to the ground. The day I saw you do that, I knew. You can’t defend anything without strength.” 

-Louise.

That is the ideology of the EFC, including Eren. Eren rejects the notion of interracial coexistence completely. We all saw what he said at the gun range in chapter 106. (It was 106, right?) But what’s notable about that scene is that it saw Eren’s nationalist worldview pitted against Armin’s worldview.

If the ideology of Eren Yeager is nationalism, then the ideology of Armin Arlert is cosmopolitanism. Armin thinks the races can live together peacefully. He believes in a world where people of different creeds and ethnicities, through compassion and understanding, can overcome their differences and find happiness together. Like a true cosmopolitan, Armin sees himself as a human first and as an Eldian second.

It’s funny. This series started with wannabe spider-men killing silly looking giants. Now look at where we are. The final conflict of the series will be just as much a battle of ideas as it will be a physical one. And it couldn’t be more politically relevant to our world. Nationalism vs cosmopolitanism. That is one of the central conflicts of the series.

Decades from now, when our children are in high school, they will most likely be taught that the defining social conflict of 2018, indeed, of the entire decade of the 2010s, was nationalism vs cosmopolitanism. Not just in the United States but throughout the western world.

In the United States, this cleavage is embodied by the conflict between the Republican Party of Donald Trump (the nationalists) and the Democratic Party of Barack Obama (the cosmopolitans).

In Europe the nationalists are the various nationalist political parties that have grown in popularity in most countries. Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, the AfD in Germany, the Sweden Democrats in Sweden, etc. The cosmopolitans are the supporters of the European Union, a pan-national organization created to emphasize unity among nations so as to avoid another continent destroying war.

This is what we’re dealing with here. Nationalist vs cosmopolitan. Republican vs Democrat. Trump vs Obama. Eren vs Armin.

(Why yes, your eyes are not deceiving you, I did just lump Eren in with the Trumpmeister.)

(*dodges thrown chair*)

Who wins here, Eren or Armin, depends on what kind of story Isayama wants to tell. Are human beings more like Donald Trump, insular and petty. Or are we more like Barack Obama, flawed but ultimately judicious with a seemingly endless well of compassion.

So who will win?

In our world the winner will almost certainly be the cosmopolitans. People of different backgrounds can and do live peaceably together and what’s more, there are measurable benefits to this. There’s a reason why cities are the drivers of economic growth and not comparatively less diverse rural areas. Bringing people of different backgrounds physically together, like in a city, allows for an easier exchange of opinions and ideas, and that leads to more creativity and innovation. That means greater prosperity for everyone. Cosmopolitanism will win because the benefits are obvious and human tribalism always yields in the face of practical benefit.

This is in stark contrast to the world of Attack on Titan. In that world, the narrative is seemingly on Eren’s side. The nationalist one. The immoral light the EFC has been presented in notwithstanding, the narrative seems to nevertheless be saying that humans are nationalists by default and that this cannot be overcome. The story apparently presents it as a tragedy, but it is ultimately inevitable.

That’s wrong. It doesn’t have to be this way.

It was almost painful to read that scene at the gun range in chapter 106 because Isayama is so obviously siding with the nationalist camp. Eren the nationalist gets to make his points clearly, meanwhile Armin and Mikasa struggle to even articulate their views. Armin’s beliefs are framed by the narrative as being idealistic and naïve even though the facts are on his side.

In ways both subtle and obvious, the nationalist bug is spreading. The people of Paradis cheered at the victory in Marley just like how Floch and his ilk cheered on the airship. They cheered in a fit of nationalistic fervor. That is probably the clearest indication of where the series stands: people writ large are nationalists.

Okay, what else.

You know, one thing I find annoying is when writers try to give their stories an air of “seriousness” by using technical terms. Like how during Kiyomi’s conversation with Zackley she refers to him as the “head of state.”

The head of state for Paradis, the one tasked with performing the ceremonial functions of the executive,  is Historia Reiss, the reigning monarch. If I’m not mistaken the arrangement is that Zackley actually governs Paradis because the military are the ones in charge and Zackley is commander-in-chief. That makes him the head of government, not head of state.

This is me being petty, but as a politics nerd it comes off as try-hard and it rubs me the wrong way.

…

Alright, time to address the elephant in the room.

Gabi and Kaya.

Their scenes were one of the hardest in the entire series for me to read. I almost decided not to.

It has been speculated that Isayama believes in a right-wing nationalist politics. I have never had as much of a sinking feeling about that notion as I have after reading this chapter. At the very least, I think the message Isayama is trying to convey, if not pro-nationalist, is definitely misguided.

In the real world there are people who believe we should be more mindful of the crimes our ancestors committed. The imperialism of Europe, of the United States, and yes, of Japan as well.

Those people are opposed by the right-wing nationalists. “Social justice worker” is the term they often use.

If you ask one of these nationalists to describe a sjw, they’ll paint a picture of someone obsessed with “the unforgivable sins of our ancestors” to the point of raving lunacy. In the minds of nationalists, social justice workers think that crimes committed centuries ago taint the descendants of the perpetrators alive today and that those descendants cannot be forgiven for their ancestor’s actions. The clearest example of this is the case for reparations: some sjws believe that the United States government owes currently living black people reparations because of slavery, even though slavery was abolished over 150 years ago and no one currently alive lived through it. Right-wing nationalists think this is madness.

Sound familiar?

“Have you already forgotten the utter atrocities the people of this island committed against the world? Each and every Eldian can only begin their path to eternal atonement when they come to have a correct understanding of their sins. No matter how good you try to act, your crimes are too heavy to ever escape.”

 -Gabi

Right-wing nationalists often caricature leftists as being people who’ll list off every single immoral act committed by their own country (or people) at the drop of a hat. Is Gabi, at least as far as chapter 109 is concerned, one of those caricatures?

Let’s back up a bit. I’ve told you about the caricature, now let me tell you about the truth.

There is indeed a strain of thought that overemphasizes historical sins. The most famous example of this is Howard Zinn and his book A People’s History of the United States. The series pushing against this way of thinking is not wrong.

What is wrong is the conceit this series has that the descendants of the perpetrators owe nothing to the descendants of the victims.

This is false for two reasons.

Firstly there’s the governmental perspective. At the end of the day the inescapable fact is this: Paradis is the legal successor state to the Eldian Empire and so the legal and moral obligations of the empire devolves to them. The Eldian Empire ceased to exist when, after Erwin’s coup, sovereignty was transferred from the Fritz family to the military. But the legal and moral obligations of the Eldian state also transferred.

That does not justify what the Marleyans are doing. And in light of the circumstances, I don’t even think reparations are called for. But Paradis owes something to the world; it doesn’t have to be much. A formal rebuking of the Empire’s actions would be enough.

Secondly: the impact of past actions resonate throughout history. No white person alive today partook in, for example, the partition of Africa. But that doesn’t mean white Europeans alive today don’t owe black Africans anything. The wealth white Europeans alive today enjoy is founded on a system of racist, imperialistic exploitation that had the effect of impoverishing the African continent. People in Africa continue to deal with that impoverishment.

This system, more or less, no longer exists, but regardless, ALL white Europeans benefit from it to this day which is why white Europeans are collectively indebted. Europeans, collectively, are wealthy because part of that wealth was stolen. Thus, there is a debt to be paid.

Note, though, that I’m using the concept of collectivity to argue for the existence of some intergenerational obligation. This is a facet of the debate the series completely ignores which is why its treatment of this issue is shallow at best and a kind of excuse making at worst.

The government of Paradis owes the world something but Kaya is right that Eldians as individuals don’t owe the world anything. This is not, however, because of the general principle that “the sins of the father should not be visited upon the son,” as the series would have you believe. It’s because the institutional system of oppression the Eldians used to dominate the world has been dismantled. Whatever benefits the Eldians accrued has since been taken away.

The end result, on a meta level, is a message that amounts to a tautology: that people who owe nothing to you don’t owe you anything. Not the most insightful of messages to be sure.

The series seems to have this conceit that denies the intergenerational nature of the oppression our racist society enables. That’s bad. In the context of a world still dealing with the consequences of racially motivated imperialism, it’s worse.

The subtext here is that the victims of imperialism aren’t owed anything by the descendants of the perpetrators because they (the descendants) weren’t personally involved. That is a common right-wing talking point. 

If I didn’t know this story was being written by an ethnic Japanese man, I would have said it was racist.

[webcricket]

Looking Glass

Chapter 3 - The Quote Unquote Situation

Pairing: CastielXAU!Reader

Word Count: 1914

Summary: A summer hiatus series. The reader is a refugee from the apocalypse AU where angels pursue humans with righteous wrath under the rule of the archangel Michael. Against all odds, the reader awakens in a world where the apocalypse never happened and not everyone is who they seem to be. Does her heart truly long to save her world, or does it belong now to the last person she ever expected to give it to?

A/N: I know everyone is eager for the reader and Cas to properly meet and greet - it’s happening next chapter! Until next week, feel that slow summer simmer...

Miss a chapter? Have a Masterlist Link!

Sam’s gaze locks on his brother’s mouth flexing wide; hazel horror enlarging in the suspense, his own mandible gapes and aches with a pang of physical sympathy at viewing the freakish yawn of square jawline. A cringe creeps across his shoulders, constricting the muscles there so that his neck recoils into itself. Unable to tear his aghast gawp from the impending massacre, he rubs the phantom pain afflicting his chin with a thumb and watches.

Jaw unhinged and snake-like, Dean’s teeth and lips warp in seeming docudrama slow motion to engulf a full corner of a meat-stuffed soggy sesame seed bedecked bun swimming in red sauce. A piece of saturated bread sheers away under the stress, carrying with it a rubbery appendage of artificial orange cheese that extends from his grease glistening fingers to the plate.

Sam can almost hear a melodramatic British narration of the scene in the dull background din of the diner: ‘Witness the fervor of the squirrel – that eager huntsman of epicurean delights – consuming what may be his final meal in single-minded preparation for the coming wintery apocalypse.’ If it were farther from the truth, it might be funny. Despite this grave thought, Sam tries a relaxed smile on for size so as not to dampen his brother’s glad mood.

The elder Winchester lets out a long, low, and borderline sinful groan of decadent approval; a stupid gooey-gummed grin stretches his stuffed cheeks. Freckled lids flutter to drape across greens glittering with wanton gluttony. “Ohmygod,” he moans around the mouthful of chili cheeseburger ecstasy. With no room for spoken words to escape, gobs of chili dribble from the corner of his overfull mouth and ooze down his shirt with every muffled syllable. “You have to try one of these!”

Staggered to silence by the sloppy show, Sam’s slim smile curls up and twitches on one side in a patent blend of outward revulsion and amusement as Dean devours another bite before bothering to swallow the first.

For the Winchesters – Dean in particular – it’s often like this on the other side of a whopping failure sandwiched by a win. Food, drink, and a frivolous attitude abound to celebrate a turnaround in their favor. It’s Dean’s version of having room to breathe after having a portion of the weight of the world lifted from their chests; Sam generally obliges to play the role of hapless bystander.

For the moment, anyway, the knockout punch of losing Gabriel and their source of rift-revealing archangel grace to use to journey to the Armageddon-devastated universe to rescue their mom, Jack, and – if they’re feeling magnanimous – maybe even Ketch, is semi-superseded by Rowena’s redemption; after all, she’s a powerful ally. Sam allows himself to crack a compact authentic smile about that witchy bit of progress. Perhaps the situation finally is turning around for them.

Dean’s cell phone, discarded on the tabletop in front of him beside an as yet unused napkin, jumps to life; it vibrates and blasts out the opening instrumental of Stairway to Heaven. Gastronomic orgasm denied mid-chew, the hunter drops the dripping burger on his plate with a juicy slosh. He smacks his sticky hands together; and in lieu of the obvious choice of using the readily available napkin, he swipes his messy fingers across his pants. “It’s Cas,” he mumbles.

“Ya think?” Sam sasses, spiking a brow as if he didn’t already know by the not-so-subtle ringtone.

Dean scowls at his brother. Wiping his face with the back of a sleeve, he snatches up the phone. “Hey Cas! You’re not dead!” He punctuates the proclamation with a smirk even though Cas can’t see the facial quirk to appreciate it; not that he isn’t happy their angelic ally is alive – he’s thrilled – it’s just that this ‘Hail Mary!’ notion of his to ask Heaven for help was an idiotic gambit in a long line of rash ideas using the angel’s own life as collateral again.

Castiel’s blues spin upward in their sockets to regard the drab grey ceiling of the bunker hallway. He can hear both the conflict of condescension and relief fringing in Dean’s tone. He’ll never admit it aloud to his friend, but in instants like this a simple ‘Hey man, I knew you’d get through this one!’ would go a long way toward bolstering his ever-floundering morale. Instead, he finds Dean’s default setting of shocked sounding jocular jabs when wrong about stuff – stuff like the wisdom of Heaven’s arguably second least favorite fallen son trying to crash the pearly gates to implore aid and the peril of undertaking such a task – pointless and demeaning redirection.

He’s a billion-odd-year-old being capable of making his own decisions – poorly informed, plotted, or otherwise – and taking responsibility for the outcomes. He asked Dean once to show him some respect; he’s still waiting on it. And anyhow, if they’re keeping tabs on who has died or almost died more times in desperate dim-witted self-sacrificing plots to save the day, Dean’s the one with the winning score. The angel offers a snarky rejoinder instead of pointing out this fact. “While I appreciate your unwavering confidence in my ability to not get dead again, this isn’t about the angels.”

“It isn’t?” Dean laughs in nervy anticipation of the update’s evidently non-angelic punchline even though he knows odds are the joke won’t be remotely funny and invariably involves worse news; Cas is just about the least hilarious – on purpose – person he knows.

“What’s going on?” Sam prods from across the table. He recognizes his brother’s uncomfortable chuckle. “Is it about Gabriel?”

Dean catches the angel’s slow nasal inhalation of breath happening through the speaker. Shaking his head, he holds up an admonitory finger at his brother to beg silence.

After a pregnant pause and a quick glance at the locked door of the bunker sleeping quarters room designated by the number 15 – which also happens to be the angel’s chosen room – as he paces by it on hallway patrol, Cas states, “I’m in the bunker and we have a . . . situation.”

“What kind of situation? Did you drink the last beer?” In Dean’s mind this is both the best and worst case scenario defining a situation at the bunker.

“Situation?” Forehead corkscrewing into a knot in the middle, Sam ignores Dean’s warning digit.

Peeling the phone from his ear, Cas halts in the hall to grudgingly glower at it; and via it, Dean. Snorting sharp through his nose, his frustration flecked blues again roll skyward at the Winchester taking nothing about this call seriously. He regrets not choosing to call Sam instead. Pinching the bridge of his nose, jamming the device back to his ear, he grumbles, “Dean, this is serious.”

Air of good humor precipitously threatening to plummet, Dean gripes in retort, “It’s you, of course it’s serious. Once, just once, maybe you could lighten up a little bit.”

“Need I remind you that Michael is maneuvering as we speak to breech the walls of his world to crossover and destroy this one, and you’re suggesting that I lighten up?” Cas doesn’t bother to repress the gravel of a reproachful rumble grating his voice.

“Just a little bit,” Dean answers in smug satisfaction at successfully riling the angel who ruined his lunch.

“Perhaps that would be a viable option if your apocalyptically traumatized houseguest hadn’t attempted to murder me a few minutes ago with a meat cleaver in the kitchen and then barricade herself in my bedroom after she fled.” And here his friends had conveyed worry about homicidal angels – all the extant nine or ten of them currently keeping Heaven from flickering out of existence forever; not that anyone’s going to ask him about that concerning development.

It sounds too much like a rousing game of Clue for Dean not to snicker. “She tried to off you . . . with a meat cleaver?”

“What’s going on?” Sam asks, making a mental note to request that Cas call him first in the future – if only for the sake of efficiency.

Cas huffs a longsuffering sigh, “Well, Dean. Evidently she thought the bag of flour and variety of canned goods hurled at my face weren’t sufficient to subdue me although I offered no protest. Suffice to say, she’s not a big fan of angels. Though, along with the physical violence, she used much more colorful phrasing to make the point.”

Dean scoffs, “Why the hell did you tell her you’re an angel? You know where she’s from angels are public enemy number one.”

“That’s the problem – I didn’t say anything; I didn’t have to. Somehow, she knows me; knows my name. And she’s absolutely terrified of me. I don’t know what to-”

“Alright,” Dean interrupts, gathering the gist that he and Sam need to hoof it back to the bunker before their rescued apocalyptic butterfly takes flight and flaps her wings to cause chaos somewhere in their world. “We’re a half day’s drive out. Hang tight.” He shoves his plate aside with a frown, muttering, “And maybe in the meantime, try apologizing or something to smooth things over.”

The angel’s brow furrows at the proposal insinuating he wronged you. “Apologize for what?” Apologize for healing you? For being courteous? For being . . . himself?

“Figure it out.”

“Dean? Dean!” Call disconnected, the angel clamps his fingers across the black screen and drops his arm limply to his side. When it comes to the number of times a pair of angelic eyes can ascend to their heavenly zenith as a result of a solitary phone call, Castiel holds the record encompassing all of creation. Glaring at a cobweb strung across a corner of the ceiling, the confused notion he should be sorry nonetheless niggles him. In healing you, he remembers the rejuvenating touch of his grace brushing the outskirts of the charred wasteland of your mind – a swath of still smoking cauterized devastation where he did not dare venture without permission. He remembers the broken vow necessity of what he did to Donatello. He wonders if he – the other him – did that to you.

You lift your earlobe from where it’s been compressed to numbness listening to the conversation happening outside the wooden door. Looking at floor, in the trickle of light streaming through the space at the bottom of the doorframe into the darkened room, you see the shadow of the seraph shift, hesitate, then disappear. The words he spoke to this Dean character echo in your mind and wobble your legs: ‘Need I remind you that Michael is maneuvering as we speak to breech the walls of his world to crossover and destroy this one . . .’

Sinking to sit, you wrap your arms around your knees and continue to anxiously watch the gap of uninterrupted light for any sign of his return. Your body rocks in a reflex of comfort. Michael’s world, you think, your world. And . . . this one. It would explain why Castiel, this Castiel, appeared so genuinely startled when you lashed out at him. Why he didn’t attack. Why he mustered only enough movement to shield himself and clear a path for you to escape. And also why he hasn’t broken down the door to finish his fiery interrogation.

You shiver and hug your limbs tighter. Or maybe this is all a part of his sadistic endgame – a trick of the mind meant to confuse you, to dupe you into letting down your guard – smoke, and now mirrors.

Next: Ch. 4 - Somewhere Under the Rainbow

[hegglespeggles]

Mental Illness, the Honour System, and the Commodification of Human Beings.

Hi. I’m Peggy. I have a mental illness.

    People talk a lot about mental illness. It’s kind of a Thing. It pops up when a teen commits suicide, or there is a mass shooting, but especially at Halloween, where monstrous “psychopaths” and “schizoids” charge at us with their chainsaws from the dark corners of haunted houses and our screens. Particularly, a good chunk of the discussion tends to centre on how to integrate these mentally ill people, with their strange green-skin and their funny antennae, into our society full of humans. I find a lot of this dialogue to miss the point, so like every person with an opinion and a keyboard, I’m going to offer mine.

    I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder when I was 15. When I was 19, those were both were discovered to be manifestations of PTSD from an emotionally abusive and neglectful childhood. I was hospitalized at 16 for a suicide attempt (the most successful in a chain which started when I was 12) and have been in therapy ever since. With the right combination of medications, therapy, and accommodations from my university, I am in my second year studying Music at Western University and have a part time job. I also do musicals with the campus theatre society and do a bunch of writing and composing and occasionally, stand-up comedy. I spend my summers working at an overnight camp and I want to be a music therapist when I finish school.

    I tell you all of this for two reasons. One, that I am not some waif withering away from some romantic disease, like a modern-day Victorian heroine. I am not some tortured saint who is just too delicate for this world. I am loud, and abrasive, I love my friends and strangers with the same ferocity and I give great advice. It just so happens that last week I was also spending about 4-6 hours a day staring at a very specific chink on my balcony because my brain was shutting down and I had no ability to focus and very little awareness of what’s happening around me. (This is what the psychologist-types would call a “Hypoarousal Trauma Response” and it is just as scary as it sounds.) This is a very foreign concept for a lot of people, and before I finish this I’ll probably end up trying to explain it even more, because yeah, part of what makes this such a hard concept to grasp is that even those who suffer from it have trouble describing it. Lumping us all together is difficult for the same reasons lumping cancer patients together is difficult. In the same way that leukemia, brain tumors and melanoma are all vastly different from each other, I could no sooner fully grasp what its like to have OCD, or schizophrenia, but I’m going to accept that your melanoma has different symptoms than my leukemia. Please don’t ask me what I did to catch it, or if I’ve tried this herbal remedy, or tell me that you don’t think that my medication is a good idea, because its messing with my brain. I know it does. That’s the point.

    Secondly, please understand that those with these illnesses are under no obligation to prove themselves to you. I have had many a boss or professor push for details of my diagnosis, to the point where one professor asked for the nitty-gritty of my abuse. And hey, I get it, we all love salacious gossip and exciting backstories on the people around us. But the problem is that what is your fun real-life soap opera, or your next conversation topic for Girls-night-in, that same problem is the reason that I wake up screaming in the middle of the night, or hyperventilate, shake, and vomit until I pass out. It’s the same way that while Game of Thrones is fun to watch, no one would want to live there.  I am offering my issues up as a platform and case study for discussion, and so please, I ask you to pick and prod and ask questions, (As any of my friends will tell you, I have dangerously little filter,) but the people you meet and interact with in the world, you must understand that their struggles are their own bruises to pick at and not yours. These are issues that we struggle to talk about with ourselves, let alone other humans. I understand the desire to verify the truth, but that is a job for professionals, (with all due respect,) not you.

    And that’s the crux of the issue isn’t it? Mental illness is antithetical to our society’s method of dealing with the ill. It’s not a linear healing journey, and its not always a cold that you can muscle through. Submitting the proper paperwork and showing up for disability meetings and the fighting and clawing and demanding the help with is your right (the difficulty of access to which is its own discussion) is something which is difficult and frustrating under the best of circumstances, and is infinitely more difficult when the very nature of your illness is to convince you that you are an unworthy burden, sapping any focus and energy you had to do it anyway. Perhaps more frighteningly, it is an invisible illness. There is no way to tell if someone is faking it or not, and in our empirical, productivity-based society, that is a frightening notion: if some people, not for lack of trying or desire to do so, cannot function at peak efficiency most of the time, how do we measure their worth?

    I can feel your incredulity, but I mean it. We pay a lot of lip service to being well rounded and self-care, which to my delight is becoming more and more mainstream, but for most it’s a lofty dream, on par with being a Best-Selling Novelist, or owning a home in Toronto. But check some twitter bios, and go on some first dates, or a party with lots of people with people you don’t really know, and you’ll notice we define ourselves by our careers, what we do, not who we are. So, what do I say when I spend an alarming amount of time fetal on my floor this morning because I didn’t have the energy to get up, and even if I did, my brain is screaming how burdensome I am to any system with which I interact?

    See, we grew up in this culture too. We internalized that otherness and vague discomfort with mental illness too, often long before symptoms started manifesting. So, all that frustration and confusion at how we can’t just get up and do things, we feel that too. It all adds to the melange of confusion and self-hatred. On top of that, we see the same people who wear their neurodivergence like a shiny new thing which separates them from the normies who just don’t get it. Believe me, it makes me just as angry. I would do just about anything on this earth to be one of those normies. I believe in self acceptance and loving yourself for who you are, right now, but I also must believe in the innate human lust for self improvement, and that we all must take active steps in our lives to better ourselves every day. It’s hard, but it must be done. My illness is not beautiful, but it is also not a flaw. It is a part of myself which a work everyday to improve, and that involves taking hard, humbling looks at how I interact with the world and working hard to turn that into tangible change. Again, this shows us where that tangible change gets sticky: its different for everyone. For me, that means working on my trust issues. In order to tell my friends something as small as my age and birthday, I had to be at least five glasses into a case of boxed wine and spent the next week a broken shell of a human crying in bed as a result. In a culture which vilifies mental illness, and expects objective proof of things, where do I go from here? Surely, this is not my fault, as this was a misstep in an ever-present journey to be the best version of myself that I can be. Likewise, how do I, or anyone around me, know whether I’m faking it? How do my professors know that I am not just blowing off class because I don’t want to go?

    Now of course, I’m lucky. I am a white, pretty, middle-class woman who has a very agreeable personality. This means people are more likely to give me lots of extra chances and help me out. My family had the money to put me into therapy. I’m also lucky that I’ve had lots of experience pushing through the system, first trying to access support on my own when I was 13. This means I have no fear asking for accommodation, and I have the vocabulary to describe what I need. But what about people who don’t fit the key demographic for what we expect mental illness to look like? Or people who don’t know where to start, or think that they deserve it? What about men, who are just as likely to suffer from these issues but only a fraction as likely to seek help? And while we’re at it, what about people who will experience anxiety and depression without it being a full-on disorder? I am a rare unicorn in that I have the support I need, and the self assurance to speak up when I am not getting it. But why should someone in my position, which I stress again, is an almost impossible best-case scenario, be the only person who is allowed to access support to it’s fullest? Even with a well documented diagnosis and disability accommodations, I have professors and bosses who express disappointment in my inability to function. It leaves me wanting to scream “I know! I’m angry at myself too!”

    The best way to explain it is that it feels a bit like having your insides vacuum sealed to the point where breathing feels like trying to pull against the vacuum, being blindfolded and thrown naked into a pool of maple syrup which has thumbtacks at the bottom and trying to make it to some nebulous “other side” of the pool. Meanwhile everyone in your life is waiting on the other side of a door for you and you can hear them telling you that “you should be moving faster,” and that “you don’t have it that bad.” You also don’t want to be doing this, but you don’t know where the pool stops, how to avoid the thumbtacks, or how to move faster through the syrup. You start to wonder if the pool is infinite, is this just what your life is, and how you’ll ever accomplish anything.

    That’s why I need the support. Because its handy to get an extension on a paper when all of a sudden, the pressure of the vacuum seal is too strong, and I need to remember how to breathe. Its really nice to not be penalized for not going to a rehearsal because I was busy fishing a thumbtack out of my foot. And its difficult to describe what’s happening to me when I’m blindfolded, so I have no way to describe where I am. Everyone around me is waiting for me to get to the other side of the room, but they aren’t allowed in, so they can’t see that in order to do this, I have to traverse this surrealist obstacle course. My academic accommodation is someone telling my professors that my room is a bit more difficult than other rooms, and my therapist is up in the spectator gallery, talking me through it from the PA system. Medication is like a pair of flipflops. I’m lucky to have these things, but what about someone who doesn’t know how to work the PA system? Or someone who’s superiors think they’re taking a nap in that room? What about someone who doesn’t realize their room has a pool in it, and now they’ve fallen head-over-foot into it?

    This is why I’m about to propose a mildly radical thought: If someone says they’re struggling, believe them. Give them the benefit of the doubt, that they are actually doing their best. Yes, there will be people who abuse the system, but don’t you think that letting them go, is worth helping people who need it? Otherwise, we run the risk of throwing more thumbtacks in the pool of someone who is genuinely trying to meet you halfway. Likewise, these people are not delicate flower petals who just couldn’t cope with the difficulty of their room. They’re just as capable, and strong as anyone coming out of any other rooms. Maybe their syrup was a bit deeper, or there were more thumbtacks, or to this day they aren’t quite sure of the shape of the pool and they’ve tripped and fallen back in a few times. All that does is speak about their pool. Not them. They didn’t build the room, and they didn’t ask for this room so that you would pity them. Who would want to go through a room like that? All they want is someone waiting at the door and cheering them on, without hurrying them.

    When you live in a society that is timing how quickly you can get through rooms and how far you can get, it’s a wildly daunting task to not only believe that you can get through the room, but that doing so is worth risking stepping on another thumbtack, and making sure that you’re taking the air you need. For me, I don’t know if there will ever be a point where someone releases the vacuum seal, but that is something I can live with. I like so many others, am just desperately yelling to the people on the other side of the door to wait for me until I get there. I know I won’t be able to make it through with the times that other people have, and in our society’s way of measure success, that means I’m not as good. The only way to reconcile this is for us all to realize the differences in our rooms, and that we might not be able to directly compare times. Its frustrating and complicated, that there wont be such a clear one-to-one comparison of our successes, but isn’t it that much more rewarding to know that you’re actually be timed for what you actually have to go through?

    So, my professors won’t know that I’m not faking it. My friends are waiting on the other side, and they’re probably getting annoyed at how long they have to wait for me. All I can do, all any of us can do, is call out to them that our room is a little bit weird, and that we’re still trying to make it to the other side, but it’s going to take a while. I guess I just hope that the world takes us at our word.

[dailydormer]

Natalie Dormer for the Rake

Publicists are an interesting breed. They are the gatekeepers of popular culture, guarding the people we want to get to know. Avaricious periodicals seek access to tell a good, saucy story, and the publicist is the alkaline to that acidic form of journalism. We at The Rake like to think our mould is different. We want to celebrate people rather than destroy their reputations, and the Rake-in- Progress feature was always intended to pick out younger men who personify the nuances of style and substance.

A few months ago a publicist contacted me with an idea — to feature women in this column. Ah, I thought, this magazine was built on the notion of making certain men relevant, empowering the XY sex and giving the reader confidence that his classical tastes are not antediluvian. With that in mind, if we were to feature a woman, we realised she would have to have something extra special, a bar that, depending on her identity, might be insurmountable. “Natalie Dormer” was the response I got. Bar cleared.

Dormer’s work could have appeared on your radar from a number of places. It could have been in her role as the ill-fated Anne Boleyn in The Tudors, or as Cressida in the blockbuster epic The Hunger Games, or as Margaery Tyrell in that lesser-known show Game of Thrones. In a series that deals in androgynous powerplay and raw sexuality, to come in late and bring something new, as Dormer has done in GoT, requires a rare and idiosyncratic talent — the acting umami, if you will.

Dormer’s red-carpet appearances often see her in bold suits with a cracking selection of colours. For her taste, her craft and, as we discovered on meeting, her humorous and kind disposition, we are delighted to say, Hello to Natalie Dormer, our first female Rake-in-Progress.

On a scale of one to 10, how annoyed are you at interviewers still asking you about Game of Thrones?

ND: Annoyed is the wrong word. I am respectful of what that show did, profile-wise, to my career, and it helps that I love the creators of the show and I don’t begrudge Dan [Weiss] or David [Benioff] a moment of their vision and success, and I am fucking proud to be part of something that is so part of the zeitgeist. I just never want to be defined solely for any role, but I know that with Game of Thrones it will take a few more years than other roles to go; I am not her, I have the ability to change. That is why The Hunger Games was great for me... Doing those two roles at the same time helped me find the money for my own film that I cowrote — without them, the financing would be harder to find. It’s about tipping your cap when you look back and say, ‘Thanks, guys, that was fucking amazing’.

Do you think as an actress you get to be part of today’s influential youth culture by default?

ND: Yes, definitely. I was at the GQ awards and Stormzy came up to me asking for a selfie. I knew who Stormzy was, but I am not into grime. I kind of think the fact this guy wanted to have a selfie with Margaery Tyrell blew my mind.

What has made you resist the lure of social media affirmation?

ND: I do believe that if you open the door to that, there are two sides. If you believe the good stuff, you’ve got to believe the bad, too. At the end of the day I fundamentally act for quite a selfish reason, in so far as I can’t imagine doing any other job. And there is something about storytelling that is cathartic for me, it is how I cope at how unjust and scary the world is, working out my humanity, arguments of love and power, who am I and what do I want to do with the years I have on this earth... My day-to-day way of surviving the world is acting.

So how does that translate to home life?

ND: I am a simple person that likes to operate on a low level. I am quite introverted. People always assume with my relationship with Anthony [Natalie’s fiancé] that naturally I must be the extrovert and he the introvert, but it is actually the other way round, because he is a director who feeds off people, he likes socialising, being around people, whereas I am very happy being with the dog on my own, reading a book, or going three days without seeing someone. I like my own company. I need quiet, because when I am on set or rehearsal, I do have high energy, so I need calm and quiet and to be a human being that is removed from my job.

Your job is to tell other people’s truths rather than your own. Do you get peace from that?

ND: Yes, there is a catharsis by processing issues through metaphor. Fuck, it’s why we tell stories. Doesn’t matter if we talk about religion, mythology or the latest Netflix show, the way human beings deal with the darkness and light of life is by telling stories.

You were out of work for a while. How did you manage to keep on keeping on?

ND: It was horrific, and I did my fair share of crying every night, rocking in a corner and facing all those demons of, ‘Oh my god, I am never going to work, this is all fucked up, I can’t pay the bills, what am I going to do’ — deep 3a.m. fear. But you have a choice.

There is something innate within me, and I don’t know where it comes from, so long as I think a fight is still worth fighting, I persevere. I have learnt as I have gotten older that if you don’t care about the fight, it is O.K. to walk away.

And now that work is coming your way, can you ever feel comfortable, is it ever enough?

ND: When you are 18 years old you have projections of where you want to be, and at various stages of your life you start ticking boxes... Oh my God, I am sitting here in conversation with Julianne Moore, or on a plane on the way to a premiere, or being directed by Patrick Marber. You have all these imaginary places where you go where you think, I made it, whatever that means. Fuck me, you’ve made it if you can pay the bills and keep a roof over your head doing something you love. What I have learnt as a woman who has come out of the angst of her twenties and being liberated by knowing yourself in your early thirties, you don’t have to hold yourself to the promises you made yourself when you were 18.

Is there anything that gets on your nerves?

ND: Yes, I sometimes hate the word ‘strong’. It gets used in interviews a lot, people say to me, ‘Natalie Dormer, you love to play strong women’, and I think, Holy fuck, how reductive can you be?

What’s the latest film you’ve watched?

ND: Last weekend we rewatched The Karate Kid. I haven’t seen that fucking movie since I was 11, it’s so good. I was bawling, when he was standing the way he does at the end, the tears were coming down. It’s so poignant, a three-act structure and to a tee the perfect hero’s journey.

You were directed in a Hozier video by your fiancé largely in the arms of other men. Did you know that was the plan when you showed up?

ND: No, we didn’t, he didn’t write it. We are friends with Andrew [Hozier-Byrne] and we love his music so much and said that we would love to do a video for you. He said his brother had just come up with the treatment for the video and we went home and read it and I said, ‘Fuck, are you O.K. with this, darling?’ It was amazing, we did it in 24 hours. To me that video is about how our imagination takes us to other worlds, worlds where we see a man on the Tube with a man bun and tattoos and you think, How would my life be different if I was with them, what kind of music would we be listening to, what food would we be eating, what kind of sex would we be having? Or look at that really attractive banker down there with that lovely watch, that’s a completely different existence. To me that girl [in the video] was lonely.

Do you feel like the dynamic of masculinity is changing in a good way?

ND: There are men who are conscientious about their body and their appearance, their spirituality — the modern man, one dare say. Just because women find feminism and equality, and their voice, doesn’t mean men need to be pushed down and be emasculated. Both genders, especially in the 21st century’s cosmopolitan cities, are refining the balance between them, and finding that it is O.K. to think and feel and dress in these different ways.

What do you feel is rakish in a man? What attracts you?

ND: I like a man who knows himself. I can equally fall for a man who wears a £3,000 suit or a guy busking on the street in dirty clothes. If a man knows his identity and is funny and not too egotistical, it is all about making me laugh, because the way the world is going, if you can’t laugh it all goes to shit. Someone who is truthful, candid, honest, and can be called on their bullshit. Aesthetically I have fallen for all different types of men, I don’t have a type, I really don’t. Yes, I like a well dressed man, what woman doesn’t?

You’ve just finished filming Picnic at Hanging Rock in Australia. How was it?

ND: I was staying in an area of Melbourne called Fitzroy, which is like hipsterville. By osmosis, after two months I began to buy the jump suits, wearing my hair in a top knot, getting my turmeric latte (I asked if this was truly a thing: it is).

You often wear suits on the red carpet. Do you know where that comes from?

ND: I came home from this shoot and told my other half about it and he went, ‘Oh my God, that shoot was so you’. Increasingly the core Natalie Dormer is those suits. It comes from an obsession with Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Vivien Leigh, the 1940s, when women started wearing those trousers and the shoulders were in. And suits are so comfortable — fuck you, guys, you’ve been wearing them all this time and you didn’t tell us.

So what’s coming up for you?

ND: Picnic at Hanging Rock has been bought by Amazon. I play Hester Appleyard. It is about a girls’ college on the outskirts of Melbourne in the 1900s: a woman who has run from a dark past in London and has set up her own little fiefdom, this girls’ school, where she reigns as a sort of misguided anti-heroine, trying to teach girls what it takes to get on in the world, but in a kind of Miss Jean Brodie way is doing the opposite of what she thinks she is meant to be doing. I am looking forward to seeing it.