#I put on American psycho cause I’ve never seen it | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

marshmellowtea · 3 years

Text

i woke with her walls around me, nothin' in her room but an empty crib

listen on 8tracks here.

listen on youtube here.

this is a playlist for mia and ethan winters, spanning across their relationship pre and post resident evil 7 and 8 (though it mostly focuses on resident evil 7 and the space in between the games). the songs are ordered in a way that’s meant to loosely order the events of said games, though of course things don’t always match up exactly. i hope other mithan enthusiasts will enjoy this, cuz i had a lot of fun making it! :P

tracklist, annotations and timeline under the cut:

Pre Resident Evil 7

1. When the Day Met the Night - Panic! at the Disco

When the moon found the sun // He looked like he was barely hanging on // But her eyes saved his life // In the middle of summer ... Well, he was just hanging around, then he fell in love // And he didn't know how, but he couldn't get out // Just hanging around, then he fell in love

2. Fidelity - Regina Spektor

I never loved nobody fully // Always one foot on the ground // And by protecting my heart truly // I got lost in the sounds

3. Who’d Have Known - Lily Allen

I haven't left you for days now // And I'm becoming amazed how // You're quite affectionate in public // In fact your friend said it made her feel sick // And even though it's moving forward // There's just the right amount of awkward // And today you accidentally called me "Baby"

4. Every Night - Imagine Dragons

My mind is made up // Nothing could change that // I'm coming home to you // Every night, every night, every night, every night ... No matter, no matter, no matter what we're facing // It don't matter, it don't matter // 'Cause the reason that I'm here // Is the same through all these years // I'm not changing, I'm not changing anything at all

Resident Evil 7

5. Candy (Paulo Nutini Cover) - Marina

I was perched outside in the pouring rain // Trying to make myself a sail // Then I'll float to you my darling // With the evening on my tail // Although not the most honest means of travel // It gets me there nonetheless

6. Ilomilo - Billie Eilish

Where did you go? // I should know, but it's cold // And I don't wanna be lonely // So show me the way home // I can't lose another life ... The world's a little blurry // Or maybe it's my eyes // The friends I've had to bury // They keep me up at night ... I tried not to upset you // Let you rescue me the day I met you // I just wanted to protect you // But now I'll never get to

7. Are You Hurting the One You Love? - Florence + the Machine

Are you hurting the one you love? // And was it something you could not stop // Could not stop // Stop // Could not stop...

8. the run and go - Twenty One Pilots

I am up against the wall, the wall // Pa, I hear them coming down the hall // I have killed a man and all I know is // I am on the run and go // Don't wanna call you in the nighttime // Don't wanna give you all my pieces // Don't wanna hand you all my trouble // Don't wanna give you all my demons // You'll have to watch me struggle // From several rooms away // But tonight, I'll need you to stay

9. American Beauty / American Psycho - Fall Out Boy

You take the full, full truth, then you pour some out // You take the full, full truth, then you pour some out // And you can kill me, kill me or let God sort ‘em out // And you can kill me, kill me or...

10. Dixie Boy - April Smith And The Great Picture Show

Don't make me come over there // 'Cause ladies, I'm a lady but please understand // When it comes to my boy, I will fight like a man // I will seek, and I will destroy // For the apple of my eye, my pride and joy // My Dixie Boy

11. Evelyn - Kim Tillman & Silent Films

I've been awake // To see the day // Devour the night // I've seen decay // Give way to growth // And make the most // Of nearly nothing ... These lofty thoughts are killing me // Preoccupied by what I could be // I get so high on my ideals // Don't call me down // But you can meet me where I land

Post Resident Evil 7

12. Woman Woman - AWOLNATION

I may be worthless without you // I'll never decide to replace you // Amen, the worst is behind us now // (Woman woman)

13. Holding Onto You - Twenty One Pilots

I'm taking over my body, back in control, no more "shotty" // I bet a lot of me was lost, "T"'s uncrossed and "I"'s undotted ... You are surrounding, all my surroundings // Sounding down the mountain range of my left-side brain // You are surrounding, all my surroundings // Twisting the kaleidoscope behind both of my eyes // And I'll be holding on to you

14. Tiptoe Through The True Bits - Los Campesinos!

Girl, I helped you with your demons // But your ghosts are now haunting me too ... But if we tiptoe through the true bits // We might make it to the other side // What doesn't kill you leaves you wounded // But I will nurse you better, alright // I've been waking on your side of the bed // As the sun's been rising in the West

15. Like Real People Do - Hozier

I knew that look, dear: eyes always seeking // Was there in someone that dug long ago // So I will not ask you why you were creeping // In some sad way, I already know // So I will not ask you where you came from // I would not ask and neither would you // Honey, just put your sweet lips on my lips // We should just kiss like real people do

16. Me And My Husband - Mitski

But me and my husband // We are doing better // It's always been just him and me // Together // So I bet all I have on that // Furrowed brow // And at least in this lifetime // We're sticking together // Me and my husband // We're sticking together // And I'm the idiot with the painted face // In the corner, taking up space // But when he walks in, I am loved, I am loved

Resident Evil 8/Post Resident Evil 8

17. Sleep Awake - Mother Mother

Lie awake, I sleep awake // I sleep with one hand on my 45, the other 'round my baby's waist // Lie awake, I sleep awake // I go to bed with all my lights turned on // So I don't slip away // I stay awake

18. Four Seasons - Los Campesinos!

When I come home it will be with // Someone else's blood on my shirt // Another county's dirt on the knees of my ripped jeans // And I won't wanna talk about it ... As you bathe the stains from my skin // Only dirt is washed away // 'Cause all the bad lays far more deep // Please, I don't wanna talk about it

19. Work Song - Hozier

When my time comes around // Lay me gently in the cold dark earth // No grave can hold my body down // I'll crawl home to her ... My babe would never fret none // About what my hands and my body done // If the Lord don't forgive me // I'd still have my baby and my babe would have me

20. I Will Follow You Into The Dark - Death Cab For Cutie

Love of mine, someday you will die // But I'll be close behind; I'll follow you into the dark // No blinding light or tunnels to gates of white // Just our hands clasped so tight, waiting for the hint of a spark // If Heaven and Hell decide that they both are satisfied // Illuminate the "No"s on their Vacancy signs // If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks // Then I'll follow you into the dark

#resident evil #ethan winters #mia winters #mithan #resident evil 7 #resident evil biohazard #resident evil 8 #resident evil village #marshy's playlists #also sorry it's not on spotify i wanted to put it there but it doesn't have marina's cover of candy #and that's the version i know so. shrug emoji #maybe i'll try to add it there later anyway we'll see it depends

32 notes · View notes

esperwatchesfilms · 4 years

Text

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016)

This film always reminds me of Starland and the happiest time I’ve probably ever had in a job. I put the rental stickers on this one myself, and on top of that, it’s just an amazing film. If you haven’t seen it, as I write this, it’s streaming on American Netflix. If you can get your hands on it? Watch it *ASAP*. And also stop reading this because spoilers incoming.

Fun Fact: The fourth film directed by Taika Waititi to premiere at Sundance Festival, after Eagle vs Shark (2007), Boy (2010), and What We Do in the Shadows (2014), which all won critical acclaim.

Paula: Apparently, he’s a bit of a handful, a real bad egg. I mean, if you look at his file, you’ll see that for yourself. We’re talking disobedience, stealing, spitting, running away, throwing rocks, kicking stuff, defacing stuff, burning stuff, loitering, and graffiti. And that’s just the stuff we know about.

Hec: [meeting Ricky] You ever worked on a farm before or you just... ornamental?

Bella: [to Ricky] Come on, have some breakfast, then you can run away.

Hec: [to Ricky] Yeah. Leave me alone.

Ricky: Maggots wriggling in that sheep / Like moving rice. Yuck. That was my haiku about maggots. It’s called “Maggots”.

youtube

Bella: [after Ricky gets a dog] What are you gonna call him? Ricky Baker: I'm still thinking. Something fierce to reflect its true nature. Either Psycho, Megatron or Tupac. Bella: What's a Tupac? Ricky Baker: It’s just my... this really cool rapper [mumbles] and he’s, like, my best friend...

Minister: Like a sheep trapped in a maze designed by wolves.

Minister: You would think Jesus. I thought Jesus the first time I came across that door. It's not Jesus. It's another door. And guess what's on the other side of that door? Yeah, Jesus. He's tricky like that, Jesus.

Ricky Baker: I ran out of toilet paper, give me some of yours. Hec: Eh? Ricky Baker: I've gotta poop. I need to poop, you need to poop, we all poop. Hec: Use a leaf. Ricky Baker: A leaf? Ugh! I hate you. [Ricky walks away] Hec: And bury it! Ricky Baker: I'll bury you.

Paula: This ain't no charred foster kid.

Andy: Something definitely happened, but I’m wondering what. Paula: Okay, I’m gonna need you to shut up, Andy, ‘cause you’re doin’ my freakin’ head in.

Ricky Baker: [reading wanted poster] "Faulkner is cauc-asian" - well, they got that wrong because you're obviously white.

Hec: You can take him, but I'm staying here. Hugh: Like hell. People want answers. Ron: Yeah, answers. Hec: Look, we got lost, I got injured, he's fine, it was basically a holiday. Ricky Baker: Not a real holiday because he made me do stuff. Hugh: Like what? Ricky Baker: Just stuff. He had a sore leg so he made me do things for him. It was hard at first because my hands are so soft, but I got used to it. I didn't really wanna do it, but it was the only way to survive. It wasn't always hard, sometimes I got to do my own thing. He pretty much never joined in with me though. I asked if he wanted to play with me, but he would just make me play with myself. Ron: I feel sick.

Hec: What's juvie? Ricky Baker: Juvenile prison. They don't care about kids like me, they just keep moving us around until something happens like... Amber. Hec: Oh no, bugger then. Okay, okay. We're in about a million hectares of bush, that's big, it's big enough to hide in for a while, anyway. Ricky Baker: Good enough for me. Hec: But we're heading into winter. It's gonna be rough, no huts, no tents, real bush life. Can you handle that? Ricky Baker: I can handle it. Hec: Yeah. And if you play up, I dump you. Ricky Baker: Okay, Uncle. Hec: I'd still prefer if you don't call me Uncle. Ricky Baker: Okay, Hec. So what do we do now? Hec: We run. [They run for a few seconds, then stop out of breath] Hec: Wait, wait wait. Maybe we don't need to run. Ricky Baker: Oh yeah, let's just fast walk.

Hec: Pretty majestical, aye? Ricky Baker: I don't think that's a word. Hec: Majestical? Sure it is. Ricky Baker: Nah, it's not real. Hec: What would you know? Ricky Baker: It's majestic. Hec: That doesn't sound very special, majestical's way better.

Hec: Me and this fat kid / We ran, we ate, and read books / And it was the best.

ESE: 110/100

50 +5 for Bella Falkner’s sweater +5 for giving a pig a piggyback +3 for haikus +15 for the Ricky Baker birthday song +5 for Tupac the dog -10 for Bella’s death +5 for the weird minister -5 for burning the barn -3 for the foot injury +5 for Ricky trying to talk things out with Hec +2 for Andy +3 for Ricky’s goofy headdress -5 for the assholes in the hut +10 for “Shit. Just. Got. Real.” +5 for fast-walk +5 for Bella’s heart of gold +5 for Kahu +10 for Kahu’s dad -5 for sleeping in -10 for “a new Bella” +10 for not trading family for anything +5 for the Wilderpeople -10 for Zag being gored by the boar +10 for Bushman aka Psycho Sam +5 for Crumpy -10 for car crash -10 for Hec being arrested +5 for Ricky staying with Kahu +5 for Hec learning to read +5 for Hec’s haiku

22 notes · View notes

lovemesomesurveys · 4 years

Text

surveys by -thoughtlessdork

Have you ever had the chicken pox? Yeah, back when I was 7.

how often do you do laundry? I personally don’t do it because I have help with certain things like that, but it gets done like once a week. I have a lot of clothes.

Have you ever been evicted? Nope.

would you grow your own garden? Nah. I don’t have the green thumb. Or the energy or interest in even trying.

do you know anyone who snores? Yeah.

what is your favorite font? I like Times, Ariel, Verdana, Tahoma, and Georgia.

do you know what a wombat is? I’m familiar with the name and know it’s an animal of some kind, but I couldn’t pick one out of a lineup.

would you make a good movie critic? No, I’m horrible at describing...anything. My movie reviews are like, “Omg, it was soooo good! Amazing cast, intriguing storyline. 10/10 recommend.” haha. Or on the flip side, “Uh, wtf did I just watch? 10/10 would not recommend. Super lame.”

what goal are you aiming for this year? Well, right now I’m just trying to get better from this infection I have and take this disgusting antibiotic for the next 10 days. I wasn’t sure I could do it. I’m still not, but I kinda have to. I’m not getting into it all over again, I made a lengthy rant in a previous recent survey, but basically it’s absolutely awful because I have to crush my pills and this pill is d i s g u s t i n g. My body revolts it when I take it and I have to fight to keep the damn thing down. My body is also dramatic and I don’t do well with nasty tasting things (I mean, most people don’t, but they can probably just suck it up and chug whatever it is or eat it really quickly and move along barely fazed at all... not me). It’s just causing a lot of stress and anxiety and makes me feel worse than the illness because of it and yeah. Not fun. Unfortunately, that’s my only option unless I want to spend a week in the hospital to receive the medicine through an IV and that sounds awful as well. Ha, so much for not getting into all over again. *shrug*

are you currently reading any books at the moment? Not at the moment. I just finished one a few days ago, though, and plan to start a new one soon.

when i say foxy lady what comes to mind? Beyoncé’s character in the Austin Powers movie she was in lol; her name was Foxxy. <<< Hahaha yep.

would you have liked to have lived during the Victorian times? No.

would you own a Siamese cat? No, but I’m just not a cat person.

have you ever had an ultimate adrenaline rush? No.

do you like deviled eggs? I’ve never had them; it’s not a common dish here. But they always look so good in the American shows I watch??? I really hope they taste as good as they look. <<< I think they do! I love ‘em.

what tends to upset you? Upsetting news.

what's the farthest you've walked? All around San Francisco. It’s a big city and the streets and sidewalks go up and down at high slants, so it’s no easy feat.

what is your favorite horror movie? I enjoy several, but my top favorites are the Halloween, Scream, and It movies.

what does your favorite shirt look like? I love all my graphic tees.

is your life like a daily routine? It very much is.

were you ever told as a child if you eat carrots you'll have pretty eyes? Not pretty eyes, but strong eyes.

what career are you most interested in? I don’t know. :/

have you ever seen a rooster? Yeah.

what time do you usually wake up? Lately, it’s been really all over the place. I don’t know what’s going on with my body.

what do you think about religion? I believe in Christianity.

what made you feel most accomplished in your life so far? Graduating college with my BA was my biggest accomplishment. Probably always will be.

have you ever seen a lunar eclipse? No.

what are you allergic to? Tangerines and typical seasonal allergies.

do you ever feel like people hold things you do or say against you? Yes.

what can't you afford but wish you could? A beach home.

what is one word that sums up this year so far? Shitty?

ever felt like you were putting your life in danger? Yes.

what do you like with your eggs? I like scrambled eggs with cheese, green onions, and spinach, or with just country gravy. I like over-easy eggs with just pepper. I like hardboiled eggs as is or with just a little bit of salt. I like deviled eggs with mayo, mustard, and paprika.

what remedy do you partake when experiencing the common cold? The good ol’ wait-for-it-to-go-away life hack. <<< Yep. Cold medicines can help alleviate some of the symptoms a little, although I personally find they don’t really help at all except for if I have a headache. I honestly don’t usually bother taking any cold medicines. I think teas can be soothing and can make me feel a little more relaxed. Ultimately, though, it’s just something you’re gonna have for at least a week or so regardless.

would you ever spend a weekend in the mountains in a log cabin? Not alone, but yes absolutely. That sounds amazing.

have you ever been called a psycho? No.

have you ever taken martial arts? would you? No.

who is someone you look up to? My mom.

is there something you're anxious about? Of course. Ongoing things and new things.

what is the longest you've gone without sleep? Like 36 hours.

what is the longest you've been on the phone? I used to spend a few hours on the phone often with friends back when I was in middle school and some of high school. It still surprises me that I used to do that because of how much I hate talking on the phone now and have for a long time.

do you care about calories? No.

do you know someone with a really annoying laugh? No.

what band do you mostly always listen to no matter what mood? Linkin Park.

have you ever been to Indianapolis? Nope.

what type of bread do you like to eat? Wheat, white, sourdough, croissant.

do you have any great great grandparents still living? No.

what is one country that you really want to visit someday? Sweden.

who usually cooks or what do you usually crave the most? That’s two different questions, but okay. In my household, it’s usually my mom or brother that cooks. My dad does sometimes. As for what I crave the most, it’s ramen and boneless wings from Wingstop.

ever been associated in a program that was a complete waste of time? Hm. Not that I can think of at the moment.

do weird numbers call your phone? Sometimes.

where are you right now? On my bed wrapped in my blanket. I love that it’s finally cold here. It even rained yesterday *chef’s kiss*

do you tend to care about other people's feelings more than your own? I most definitely do.

what type of lifestyle do you want to obtain? if you haven't obtained it? I don’t know.

what was something that use to frighten you as a child? Ghostface from Scream. I love those movies now, though.

have you ever been on a train? Nope.

who's been in your life the longest? did you expect this person to still be around? My family.

how do you feel about anatomy? Uhhh. It’s complex and pretty crazy how it all works.

Insert interesting fact here: Nah.

#personal #text #survey #surveys

4 notes · View notes

sushigirlali · 4 years

Text

If You Don't Love Me, Lie To My Face - Part I (Reylo Fanfic)

Part I | Part II | Part III | Epilogue

Summary: Grifter!Rey helps U.S. Senator Leia Organa's son, Ben Solo, out of a jam when a couple of muggers invade her turf. Afterward, she debates robbing the rich American herself, but can she protect her heart while stealing his?

Pairing: Rey + Ben Solo | Finn + Poe Dameron

Rating: E

Continuity: Modern AU

A/N: For the first time ever, I’ve actually written most of the story before I started posting! I think it will be way less stressful since I don’t have to “keep up” with updates. New chapters will be posted each Friday. Enjoy!

Master list –> AO3 | ff.net | Tumblr

——————

If You Don't Love Me, Lie To My Face - Part I

By: sushigirlali

——————

Kennington, London

——————

There are moments in life that make you question everything that came before. A look from a stranger, an incident at your job, a terrible movie... things Rey Niima was usually able to push past without pause, but tonight, she was finding it extremely difficult to ignore the feeling that her life was about to change forever.

"Hey, give us your wallet!" A pair of brawlers had cornered a man at the mouth of a nearby alley, drawing Rey's attention as soon as she stepped out the back door of her favorite pub, The Black Prince.

"Excuse me?" the would-be victim responded indignantly. His voice was deep with an American lilt, his stature intimidating.

Did these fools really think they could steal from a man like that? But then, not all criminals were as intelligent as her.

"You heard me! I want your wallet!"

Rey hung back from the potentially violent situation unfolding before her, sizing up the assailants. Their outfits were all black, including the ski masks covering their faces, but she couldn't see any identifying marks or gang affiliations. "Must be lone wolves," she thought.

There was something familiar about the tall one doing the talking, but she couldn't place them. It probably didn't matter, though, because the redwood with the nice accent looked like he could take the both of them with one hand tied behind his broad back.

Still, for some reason, she was finding it hard to walk the other way. Definitely not because the man was the most striking person she had ever seen. No, it had to be due to the fact that these bums were causing a ruckus on her turf. At least, that's what she kept telling herself, frozen to the spot as she was.

"Listen, I just got done volunteering at a shelter all day and just want to get home. Please allow me to leave unmolested."

"Volunteering at a shelter?" she muttered under her breath. "Well, fuck. But it's not your business, don't get involved." Rey was turning around to go back inside the pub when the sound of a gun cocking drew her up short.

"Don't make me repeat myself again, pretty boy."

"Whoa, hey, there's no need for that!"

"Then empty your pockets! Now!"

"No," he said crossly. "Put that thing away before somebody gets hurt."

"Dammit," Rey groaned, retrieving the silver baton clipped to her belt. Sometimes, she really hated having a conscience; in her line of work, it was a real liability.

"Hey, get your hands off me!"

"Oh, for fuck's sake," she growled, resolutely stalking toward the turbulent scene. "Oi! You lot!"

The big guy and his sidekick paused to look in her direction. "What?" the leader said in a surprisingly feminine voice.

"Not a guy," Rey mused. "Based on your absolutely abominable bullying technique, I don't think you're getting that guy's wallet any time this century, so why don't you just leave him alone and move along."

"Excuse me?" the woman said threateningly.

"I'm sorry, did I stutter?"

"You move along, little mouse, this doesn't concern you!" the shorter guy spat.

"You do know who's neighborhood this is, don't you?" Rey said tauntingly.

"Yeah?" the first one said dismissively. "So what."

"So, knock it off! We don't need the fuzz coming down here because some hooligans are roughing up a foreigner."

"Hooligans?! And who the fuck are you?"

"Me?" Rey sneered, flicking the baton out to the side so that it extended into a long poll. "I'm no one."

"Phas," the skinny guy said nervously, obviously recognizing her at last, "we should go."

Rey had never been so proud of her reputation as a grifter who was just as likely to steal an expensive piece of art from the peerage in an elaborate heist as kick a thug's ass in the street.

"But the boss—"

"He'll understand."

"But—"

"Phas!"

"Fine. But don't think this is over!" the woman yelled before running off with her companion.

"Well," the American said slowly, "that was an experience I never wish to repeat again." He smiled at her. "Thank you," he said sincerely.

"You're welcome," Rey replied gruffly, still riding high on adrenaline. "Do you always walk around by yourself at night in a city not your own?"

"Do you always save unsuspecting passersby from thieves?" he retorted.

Her phone went off, but she didn't answer it. Up close, the man was even more attractive than she had initially thought. "Suit looks expensive, too… and is that a Breitling?" Perhaps it was her lucky night after all. "Only if they're handsome," she said smoothly.

"Oh, uh…" he flushed at her compliment.

"Hmm… not the reaction I expected." It was kind of refreshing, though. "Sorry, I—ugh, one sec," she said as her cell went off again. "My brother," she explained, checking the caller ID. "I have to take this or he'll just keep phoning until I pick up."

The man shrugged, "No problem, I'll just wait over here." He stepped up onto the curb and walked a few paces away.

Rey nodded and lifted the phone to her ear. "What?" she said shortly.

"Who's the stiff?" Finn asked without preamble.

"Nobody."

"Right," he huffed. "Are you working him?"

"Undecided, stop pushing."

"Whatever you say, Rey. Just be careful."

"I will. Where are you anyway?" she said, humored by his tough older sibling act.

"Hanging outside the pub, just around the corner. Why? You need me?" Finn teased.

"No, I'll catch you later. Don't wait up." She ended the conversation before he could respond and stuffed the phone into her back pocket. "Sorry about that, uh…?"

"Ben," the stranger supplied, moving closer again. "Ben Solo."

"I'm Rey," she said, holding out a hand.

Ben's lips quirked and he gave her a firm handshake, his huge hand dwarfing hers. Rey felt a shiver run up her spine at the brief contact, but she shook it off.

"So, what's that for?" he indicated the weapon still in her hand. "Joining the circus?"

"No," she grinned, "it's a bo staff. I use it for self defense."

"And the defense of others," he said warmly.

"On occasion." She folded the bo staff back into a baton before reattaching it to her belt.

"Can I get you a drink?" he nodded toward the pub. "To say thank you?"

"I was actually on my way home before I… bumped into you."

"I could… walk you home? If you want." He didn't sound desperate, but it was a near thing.

"I'm not from around here," she said evasively. She couldn't really bring him back to her base of operations, which was only a few blocks down the street, but she didn't want to stop talking to him either. "What a dilemma."

"No? Where are you from then?"

"Nowhere."

"Okay… Well, I promise I'm not a pervert or a serial killer or anything," he said earnestly, "so you can come back to my hotel with me if you want. It's late and I'd hate for anything to happen to you."

She crossed her arms. "Because I'm a woman?"

"Hey, I'm 6'3" and double your weight and I almost got jumped like ten minutes ago," he reminded her. "It can happen to anyone."

"Fair enough," she allowed, lowering her defenses. "Still…"

"I can call my security detail if you want verification that I'm not a psycho," he offered. "I'd just like the opportunity to get to know the woman who saved my hide."

Rey's interest sharpened. "That's sweet, but uh… security detail?"

"Yeah," he said nonchalantly. "My mother is a U.S. Senator. I'm in town on her behalf. She was supposed to come herself, but her re-election campaign is heating up and she couldn't spare the time."

"You disapprove," she said perceptively.

Ben's dark brows shot up. "Yeah, actually. You a mind reader, Rey from nowhere?"

"Something like that," she smirked. "I prefer the term grifter."

"Grifter?" he said curiously. "What does that mean, exactly?"

"Oh, you know," Rey winked for effect, assuming the privileged American was about to run in the opposite direction, "I swindle rich people out of their valuables by preying on their weaknesses. Basically, I'm a professional bad guy."

Ben looked hopelessly confused by her explanation. "But you just helped me."

"Well, sometimes I like to help out the little guy." Rey looked him over. "Little big guys too."

"Like Robin Hood?" he said, disarming her with a crooked smile.

"What? I wouldn't say I'm—I'm a hero or anything," she stuttered.

"Well, you're my hero," he said smoothly, holding out a hand. "That's my driver pulling up over there, in the black Jag. Join me? Please?"

"I… okay," she agreed, placing her hand in his, "but just for a little while." This time, she couldn't ignore the shiver.

——————

Alarm bells should be going off in her head, but Rey felt perfectly comfortable with her new companion. It was odd, considering her trust issues, but Ben didn't seem to be only interested in her looks. And she knew she looked good tonight, her dark leather leggings were basically painted on and her lacy bra was visible through a mostly sheer black tank top. Add on her subtle smoky makeup and half-up hair style that emphasized her cheek bones and...

"Rey?"

She loved the way he said her name, almost like a caress. "Yes?"

"Are you hungry? I haven't had dinner yet."

"Oh, sure," she said, never one to give up a free meal. Though she did kinda wish something else was on the menu… "What is wrong with you? You just met the man! Note to self: masturbate more."

"Chinese okay?"

Her mouth watered. "Perfect."

"What do you like?"

"Besides you?" she said without thinking. "Uh, I mean—anything, really. Noodles, if they have them."

Ben let her comment pass, but he was beaming. "I like noodles too. Maybe some kind of chicken? Orange?"

"Excellent," she seconded.

"You're easy," he said, but then caught himself, looking horrified. "I mean to order food for, not—"

"It's okay," she laughed, patting his thigh. "I know what you meant."

"Sorry, I haven't done this in a long time," he said sheepishly, catching her hand before she could remove it.

"This?"

"Gone on a date."

"Oh." Was this a date? Rey couldn't remember the last time she had been on one. Pretty much anytime she'd been alone with a man not her brother in the past ten years it was because she intended to rob them.

"Not that this has to be a date," he said quickly, releasing her hand. "Sorry, I keep saying stupid things."

Dammit, but he was cute. "You don't have to keep apologizing," she replied lightly. "Let's just have dinner and talk and see where that takes us." Maybe the night would lead to some fun extracurricular activities, maybe not, but at least she'd be able to case his place. Based on what she knew so far, the guy definitely came from old money. "Just keep reminding yourself that he's potentially a mark, not a boyfriend, Rey."

"Sure," he smiled, looking relieved. "Hey, Poe?" he said to the driver. "Can you pick up some food after dropping us at the hotel? We're starving."

——————

Ben fumbled a little opening the door, but quickly recovered and ushered Rey inside with a gallant sweep of his arm. The hotel was nice, but not extravagant, something she found odd for the son of a U.S. Senator. Then again, he had apparently been helping out at a shelter all day, so maybe he really was as down to earth as he seemed.

"The bathroom is through there if you need it," he pointed toward the bedroom.

"I'm fine, thanks."

"Okay, I'm just going to grab a quick shower. Poe should be back within the hour, so make yourself at home."

"Can I join you?" she was tempted to say. "Sure, I'll just watch the telly."

Ben nodded and left the room. A few seconds later, Rey heard the water start. Flipping on the TV, she left it on the cartoon channel before having a look around.

There weren't any expensive electronics or pieces of art in plain sight, so Rey could only assume that anything valuable would be in his room. "Oh, well, nothing gained, nothing lost. Better update Finn, though."

Yanking her cell out, Rey sent a quick text to her brother with Ben's name, the hotel's address, and a couple sentences about the modest state of his living room. He answered her almost immediately, sounding concerned.

Finn: Are you sure about this bloke? If you're not there to rob him, I assume that means you're interested in something else?

Rey: Yes? Maybe? I don't know. We just met, but…

Finn: At least text me later, okay? So I don't have to worry

Rey: I will. Love you 3

Finn: Love you too, peanut

Finn: ...check the room safe if you get a chance. Those types of hotels always have them and you never know what might be inside ;)

Rolling her eyes, but knowing he was right, Rey listened for a moment. It sounded like Ben was still in the shower, so she took the opportunity to pop into the bedroom and search his closet. A standard issue hotel safe was at the back, surrounded by some very nice black suits.

It wouldn't have been hard to crack the safe if she had her gear, but her heart wouldn't have been in it even if she did. She didn't want to rob Ben Solo, which was a first. Still, she did appreciate a challenge...

"Did you need something?"

Rey whipped around to see her host in nothing but a low slung white towel. "No, I—uh…"

"Would you like something to change into?" he inquired kindly.

Unable to respond with his magnificent chest and long thighs on display, Rey just shook her head in the negative. His brow creased and she felt like a kid who had been caught snooping for Christmas presents. "Shit, shit, shit, I've totally blown it!" Backtracking to the living room, she wasn't surprised when he followed. "What should I do? Oh, god, I don't want him to think…"

"Rey, what you said earlier… about being a… what did you call it? A grifter? Are you—mmph!" he started, unable to complete his thought as Rey impulsively reached up to kiss him.

But instead of pushing her away and demanding an answer, Ben threaded his fingers through her hair and dragged her closer. Taking his response as permission, Rey wrapped her arms around his waist, gripping his bare back as the kiss went on and on.

Somehow, they ended up next to the couch. Rey pushed Ben into a sitting position and climbed onto his lap, rubbing her clothed core against the tent in his towel. "Rey," he whispered, lips trailing down to her neck, "Rey, I want you."

"Yes," she responded as he reached for her waistband. Coming up on her knees, she growled when he yanked her leggings and underwear down her hips with one forceful tug. Things were getting out of control, going too far too fast, but she didn't care; she wanted him too. "Help me," she demanded, legs trapped by the constricting garments.

"I've got you," he huffed, reaching behind her to unzip her black combat boots and pull her pants the rest of the way off.

Meanwhile, Rey tore her top and bralette over her head before going to work on the towel barely covering his lap. "Wow!" she blew out a breath, zeroing in on his ardent erection when it was uncovered. He was big, maybe bigger than anyone she'd ever been with. Would he fit?

"Fuck," Ben sighed, sitting back to stare at her body, "you're beautiful, Rey."

Feeling weirdly shy about the sincerity in his sinful voice, Rey kissed him again in lieu of a response, reaching between them to spread herself for entry.

"Wait," he said, gasping for air, "what about protection?"

"Implant," she mumbled, rubbing her slit against the tip of his penis. "I'm clean, are you?"

"Yeah, I haven't—oh, god—uh, done it in a while."

"Good." She felt strangely possessive of him, this man she had just met. It pleased her that he didn't sleep around. "Fuck me, then. Raw."

Ben slammed his mouth down on hers again, positioning his dick with one hand and gripping her left buttock with the other. But he didn't ram himself home, instead he teased her hole, sliding only a fraction of the way in before retreating. He did it over and over, mimicking the action with his tongue until she was incoherent with desire, squirming, imploring him to fill her…

And then he was, and she found that he fit very well inside her indeed. His thick cock seemed to be made for her, hitting all the right spots and ones she hadn't even known existed until now. "Ben!" she cried, furiously pumping her hips in time with his thrusts. "This is—you're—"

"I feel it too!" he returned, palming her breast and teasing her erect nipple. "From the first moment I saw you, I—"

She licked his mouth, begging for entrance, not wanting to hear his sweet words even as they made her heart soar. He opened for her, but was obviously frustrated that she had cut off his declaration. Before she knew it, the hand squeezing her ass drew back and lightly smacked against her butt-cheek.

"Oh!" Rey jolted at the slight sting, but it wasn't in pain. On the contrary, she requested, "Again! Ben, do that again, please! I'm—"

Knock, knock.

"Oh, shit, Poe's at the—"

"Don't you fucking dare, Ben Solo," she growled, bouncing up and down on him with renewed vigor. But the driver started knocking harder, likely because of the guttural sounds erupting from Ben's throat. "Come on, man, can't you tell we're busy?!"

"But—shit!" Ben hauled her against him, no longer playing, just looking for relief before his friend broke the door down.

Rey found his soft grunts and swears endearing, so she took pity on him and increased her pace even further. "Come for me, Ben," she instructed, grinding down on him with all her might. "Come now and then we can eat. Or you can eat me, whichever you prefer."

The dirty talk seemed to work, because in the next minute, Ben was biting down on her shoulder, shaking with the force of his orgasm. Not far behind, Rey led his hand to her swollen nub, needing just a hair more stimulation to tip over the edge. Almost instantly, his trembling touch sent her into climax. Still vaguely aware of what's-his-name banging on the hotel room door, she pressed her mouth to Ben's pectoral to muffle her cries and came for what felt like ages…

"That—was—amazing," Ben panted, hugging her so tightly she thought she might pop. "The—best—I've—ever—had!"

"Me—too," she couldn't help but admit.

Loosening his hold, Ben cupped her cheeks and kissed her softly. "Thank you."

"Ah—you're welcome," she said, smiling like an idiot. Before she could lean in again, Poe resumed making his presence known.

"Ben? Are you okay? Answer me! Did that woman kill you? Your mother will be so pissed if you're dead." He hit the door again. "Either answer me in the next ten seconds or I'm going to get security!"

"I'm fine, great, alive, whatever!" Ben called back loudly. "And annoyed," he said to Rey. "Go into the bedroom for a minute while I get rid of him."

"Okay," she agreed, gingerly getting up. They both groaned when he slipped out of her, which Rey found gratifying. "Can I use the shower now?"

"Sure, there are towels under the sink. My sleep shirts are in the top drawer of the dresser," he offered.

"He wants me to spend the night?" she mused, feeling giddy and terrified all at once. "Alright," she said aloud, picking up her clothes and disappearing into the bedroom she'd been casing earlier, "call out if you need backup."

"Will do," he chuckled, "will do."

——————

Ten minutes later, Rey emerged from the bathroom feeling fresh and back in control. Picking a long sleeve shirt out of Ben's dresser at random, she pulled it over her naked body before toweling off her wet hair. The black cotton was as soft as it was big, but Rey didn't mind; it smelled like Ben.

Catching her reflection in the floor length mirror by the closet, she was amused to see that the garment fell to her knees like a sack, giving her already slender body exactly zero shape. "Oh, well, it's not like I plan on wearing it lon—"

A disturbance in the living room suddenly diverted her reverie. Sneaking to the door, she carefully cracked it and peaked out.

"You can't just keep her here!" Poe nearly shouted at Ben.

"Keep your fucking voice down," he snarled back. "You're not my boss or my mother and you can't tell me what to do. I'm a grown ass man!"

"Maybe so, but you're acting like a teenager! You can't just sleep with some chick you picked up off the side of the road when Leia is counting on you to—"

"I told you," Ben said through gritted teeth, "she saved my ass and I wanted to get to know her. I didn't hire her for the fucking night!"

"Could have fooled me," Poe scoffed. "For all you know, she could have been in on the attack and—"

"Get out!" Ben ordered, clearly at his wit's end. "I'll call you when you're needed again, if you are."

"Are you firing me?!"

"Not yet," Ben said grimly, marching to the door and flinging it open. "Just go before I forget that you're my best friend and say something I regret."

"Fine," Poe said, storming out of the apartment. "Let me know when you come to your senses!"

Ben slammed the door shut, then turned around and leaned on it. Scurrying back into the bathroom before he caught her eavesdropping, she started combing her hair, attempting to look natural in case he came in after her. When he didn't, she tried not to feel disappointed.

Leaving her damp hair hanging loose around her shoulders, Rey found him sitting at the dining table in his towel with several brown paper bags in front of him. He looked lost in thought and she hoped he hadn't taken Poe's opinion about her motives to heart. "Wotcher, Ben?" she asked hesitantly.

"Hmm?" he said, looking up at her. "Sorry, I was just...uh…" The arrested look on his face made her toes curl. "Wow, you look amazing."

"This old thing?" she joked, sidling up next to him. "I borrowed it from a mate."

"He has good taste," he said, opening his arms.

"I certainly think so," she said coyly, moving to sit sideways on his lap. Rey curled one arm around his neck and placed the other one on his chest. "Are you still hungry?"

"For food?" he choked, holding her so that she wouldn't slide off.

"Food," she nodded, leaning her forehead against his, "and other things."

One of Ben's large hands inserted itself between her thighs. "These kinds of things?" he murmured. "I think we can—fuck!" he bit his lip as he discovered that she wasn't wearing anything underneath his shirt.

"We can certainly fuck," she teased, "but—oh!" Rey gasped as he stood with her in his strong arms. "Ben? What are you…?"

Before she could get the words out, he'd pushed their dinner out of the way and laid her down on the table. Placing the backs of her knees in the crook of each arm, Ben pulled her forward until her butt was on the edge of the table and her pussy was level with his mouth.

"Having dinner," he said in the most ridiculously sexy tone of voice she'd ever heard, flipping his nightshirt up so that she was bare from the waist down.

"Oh, god!" she whimpered as he lowered his head. "Ben, you don't really have to—ah!" Gripping the back of his head as he started to lick her folds, Rey shuddered every time his long nose bumped against her clit.

"Enjoying yourself?" he said a little arrogantly. "Is this why you came home with me? Cause you wanted me to make you feel good?"

Considering how very well he was treating her, and the uncertainty on his face, she decided to play along. "Yes, Ben, I wanted you the second I saw you!"

He smiled slightly, then resumed tasting her. "So, does that mean you want to come?"

"That would be lovely," she sighed, enjoying the pressure of his wide mouth.

His mouth quirked at that. "Never heard sex described that way before."

"Then you're doing it with the wrong people."

"Oh?" his gaze turned hot. "And how many people have you been doing it with?"

"Not many," she said hurriedly, "and not in a long time."

"Good girl," he said silkily. "So, if I were to put my fingers inside you, would your cunt feel… full?"

"Yes!" she panted, so wet she was dripping onto the table now.

"Let's see then."

Arching her back as he slid two fingers inside her body, Rey realized that she had never really known sexual satisfaction until tonight. She was twenty-five and still basically knew nothing about sex and relationships. "Huh."

Ben stopped moving, lifting his dark head to look at her. "Rey? Is everything okay?"

"Yeah," she said dreamily. "I guess I've just never felt this way before."

He held her eyes for an extended moment, amber striking against hazel. "Yeah, me too." And then he was fingering her again, sucking and teasing her slick opening until she was crying out his name in ecstasy.

Afterward, he scooped her up in his arms and carried her to the bedroom, kicking the door shut behind them. Needless to say, they skipped dinner that night.

——————

Rey grunted as she felt Ben leave the bed the next morning. He had been her heater since the sheets and pillows were strewn about the room. "Come back," she said hoarsely, throat worn from use. "I'm cold."

"Just a moment," he laughed, opening the bedroom door to fetch something from the living room. "Your cell has been going off for an hour straight."

"My cell?" she yawned. Then, "Oh, no." She sat bolt upright. "Wait! Don't—"

"Rey?" Ben called in disbelief. "Who the fuck is Finn?"

——————

A/N: I love Kingsman and always think about Rey being a punk with a heart of gold like Eggsy. I didn't include the spy angle, but I was able to visit The Black Prince, where scenes were filled for the movie, a couple years ago and have fond memories. Anyway, reviews are appreciated! <3

#reylo #reylo fic #reylo fanfic #kylo ren #ben solo #rey #modern au #my fanfiction #sushigirlali

8 notes · View notes

aquagenesis · 4 years

Text

This is by no means a vent post or anything I just need to discuss topics and ideas.

It’s so bizarre how, for most of my life, I did have psychotic tendencies and explicitly schizophrenic symptoms. I would get disoriented on a school bus and want to make a big show of it; storm up to the bus driver in a fit of rage and demand to know where I was being taken. I would ask incoherent, nonsense questions in class that would get me a resounding look of “what the fuck are you talking about”. Friends in particular would always take the time to step in and allow me to re-phrase what I was asking because they would learn to understand sometimes information is jumbled in my head, which I am not aware of.

It happens on here too, though I’ve gotten better at it. What begins as a cohesive argument in my mind eventually spirals into a whirlpool of me repeating the same three things, the same three points, the same three everything while pretending it’s something different. Because I have voices in my head that take over and make it hard to focus. I thought everyone heard voices, because how else do you process information? But for other people, it’s not voices. Not ones they can hear, at least.

The only thing that ever stopped me was, incredibly, what I think my paranoia was. I was too afraid of making a scene because I thought, assuredly, they’d always tell me they were going to kill me. I would stand up to assert myself only to get pulled back down in my own head with “if you cause problems, you will die”. I thought that was survival instinct. I prided myself, in fact, on my survival instincts because of things like that. Because I believed every person who utilized and prided their autonomy was doomed to die for their arrogance. How can you exist so unabashedly in life when you know death is something you cannot hide from and cannot know the origin of? Standing up for yourself is putting yourself in harms way; the lines between “what is paranoia” and “what is formative child abuse” are too blurred for me to even care “which one it is” because they’re both the same.

It’s just knowing I was so schizophrenic. Knowing I was so blatantly delusional; I’d get called delusional all the time because I wasn’t living in reality. My original self was already forced to be so separated from its body because of infant-aged trauma when I felt “normal” it already wasn’t me. Every time I’d stabilize myself in a deeper level of my own psychosis I’d get punched down through another one, like a personal version of Dante’s Inferno.

Of course I developed a dissociative disorder. How else was my psyche supposed to survive losing family members who cared about me, how else was it supposed to survive losing everything. The personality I shifted into to appease my conditions were never good enough; they never protected me enough. It’s so fucked up my brain already had to put me in another reality to cope with not receiving basic physiological needs as an infant and then had to shatter and reform reality after reality because anything was better than living in real life but nothing protected me enough, nothing justified anything enough, nothing could make me feel like I was living how I was meant to.

And then I wonder why I got so deep in it. I wonder why that’s all I knew. It was. Living in delusion was the only thing that kept me from being suicidal, because it made me believe something grand was meant for me at the end of it all. I only broke down because, after everything, after five years of eviction and homelessness, there was still only despair ahead. Now I’m 26. an entire high school education away from 30 but abysmally depressed I had to spend all this time helping myself, and continue to, in the vain hope one thing would ever happen to me to make life worth it.

All I needed was to be pushed into reality, to be shown and taught nothing happened to me in some grand plan. All I needed was a therapist who would listen for long enough in my Anime Tragic Backstory to tell me, “Hey man, that was fucked up, but it’s not like you have to forgive them. You don’t have to be tortured by anything. You can leave other people; you can leave them too.” But therapists are no longer trained to listen to trauma and try to work out anything formative that could have happened to someone. I didn’t know I was schizophrenic. Nobody cared enough to tell me I was unless it was through the “well...you have The Disorder. we have to keep you to make sure your SCARY PSYCHOTIC EPISODE--you’ve seen American Psycho, right?--doesn’t make you do that to yourself or someone else.” lens of “take this medicine and it’ll fix something you don’t think is a problem, because psychosis deludes the brain into thinking it isn’t delusional”.

And there was nothing anyone could have done; my untreated schizophrenia prevented me from being able to work. My delusions would go unchecked, people wouldn’t know I was stretching the truth and neither did I. Through the lens of insanity I doomed coworkers to bitter rivals, others to beloved friends, and still others to unworthy of my respect with nothing in between. My life was a grand path to luxury and respect from the bottom of the earth; who wouldn’t be adored to know me?

I would tell people time and time again I was schizophrenic, I was psychotic, I experienced delusions. I was cast as “the good outcome” of a psychotic condition and my experiences, the only true part of my life, were chalked up to “well there Luke goes with his silly little rants again”. I was abandoned to spiral because I was “okay”; I didn’t experience delusions where I thought I was God (anything remotely attached to that was different, I said it was different), my psychosis never drew me to suicide. Everyone else who claimed they were schizophrenic were automatically compared to me and regarded as “good” or “bad” with no regard to what was swimming around in my brain. If I didn’t have a god complex before (I did, but I said I didn’t, so there’s no blame here), I certainly developed one then.

But I knew I wasn’t someone to be compared to, because I did experience delusions where I thought not that I was God but some higher being, I was drawn to suicide at the drop of a hat. But then I couldn’t admit to those things being so much deeper than they were, because everyone else who experienced these things were “bad” schizophrenics. I was supposed to have this together; I knew I had no right to judge people with my same condition because I knew I was no better than them. If I had a best friend I’d known all my life, I would probably go to them with my ever-wavering mental condition too. That’s what I craved; the ability to tell someone about what was happening to me.

And it’s not like I ever thought I was entitled to people, you know, listening. I never expected anyone to look me in the eyes and tell me “Hey buddy you know you don’t really seem in reality” because if someone said that to me I’d probably freak out and doom them to “Bitter Rival Plus” for the rest of my life. It was the attitude that I was redeemable because of how well I handled everything, the way I never let my symptoms show, the way a one-time freakout seemed more preferable to everyone else but me because “at least he only got that bad once”, as opposed to the risk of smaller breakdowns more often. I lost my ability to realize I had control over myself because the admittedly bad symptoms everyone else experienced, which I did too, never were offered support. I was told a story of a mutual once-friend who threw herself off a roof in the midst of a schizophrenic breakdown. The pitilessness of it all told me I would never find sympathy in admitting my faults.

It’s hard because if it were depression, if it had been depression, this would have been solved eons ago. Anyone can go to a friend and talk through a depression; nobody can go to a friend and talk through a psychotic episode without your companion growing frustrated as you’re unable to grasp reality. Once is fine, twice is annoying, thrice is overwhelming. I can feel it just as anyone. Nobody wants to talk to crazy people.

And what do people think that does, exactly? Do you think your delusional friend can really have a talk once, be told they’re psychotic, and immediately know? How do we have thousands of articles dissecting every aspect of anxiety, from work to generalized, but none to tell the everyman that “psychotic people suffer from a condition that prevents them from differentiating reality from fantasy”. or, we do tell people, but it still follows the same rules of once is fine, twice is annoying, thrice is overwhelming. Depression is a mental condition that causes extended states of misery. Anxiety is a mental condition that causes extended states of stress. Psychosis is a mental condition that causes extended states of, well, delusion. Someone who wakes up already delusional is not going to be able to tell you “when it started”; everything has always felt this way. Now that they can see clearly, because they feel energized (because they are delusional), “nothing is wrong” and they are left to spiral into whatever rabbit hole they fall into.

If we know it’s harmful to tell people with depression and anxiety to “get over it”, why are psychotic people different? Why is it so hard to go into a relationship and be told, explicitly, “I have a psychotic condition”, and follow through as you would anyone else?

“Because psychosis is different.” No further context needed.

#hi guess who it is #it's me and i'm complaining about ment of illness loves #not mine just in general #you know. my lifetime topic of psychosis.

1 note · View note

musingsfromalily · 4 years

Text

American Beauty/American Psycho Lyric Starters (Warning, some NSFW)

Irresistible

“I just followed your scent, you can just follow my smile.”

“All of your flaws are aligned with this mood of mine.”

“You ought to keep me concealed just like I was a weapon.”

“I didn’t come for a fight, but I will fight till the end.”

“And this one might be a battle might not turn out okay.”

“And I love the way you hurt me.”

“It’s irresistible.”

“I’m gonna get you to burst just like you were a bubble.

“Frame me up on your wall just to keep me out of trouble.”

“Too many war wounds, but not enough wars.”

“Too many sharks, not enough blood in the waves.”

“You know I give my love a four letter name.”

“You’re second hand smoke.”

“I breath you in, but honey, I don’t know what you’re doing to me.”

“But the truth catches up with us eventually.”

“Try to say lie, live and let live.”

“I’m no good at lip service, except when they’re yours.”

“I’m coming for you, and I’m making war.”

American Beauty / American Psycho

“I think I fell in love again.”

“Maybe I just took too much cough medicine.”

“I’m the best worst thing that hasn’t happened to you yet.”

“You take a full truth, and you pour some out.”

“And you can kill me, or let God sort ‘em out.”

“I wish I dreamt in the shape of your mouth.”

“All those dirty thoughts of me, they were never yours to keep.”

“We’re the things that love destroys.”

“Us, we were only meant to make you live again.”

“Us, we were pity sex.”

Centuries

“Some legends are told, some turn to dust or to gold.”

“But you will remember me; remember me for centuries.”

“Just one mistake is all it will take.”

“We’ll go down in history.”

“No, it’s nothing wrong with me.”

“The kids are all wrong, the story’s all off.”

“Heavy metal broke my heart.”

“Come on, and let me in.”

“The bruises on your thighs like my fingertips.”

“And this is supposed to match the darkness that you felt.”

“I never meant for you to fix yourself.”

“And I can’t stop ‘til the whole world knows my name.”

“ ‘Cause I was only born inside my dreams.”

“As long as there’s a light, my shadow’s over you.”

“I am the opposite of amnesia.”

“And you’re a cherry blossom, you’re about to bloom.”

“You look so pretty, but you’re gone so soon.”

“We’ve been here forever, and here’s the frozen proof.”

“I could scream forever.”

The Kids Aren’t Alright

“Maybe I bit off more than I could chew.”

“Fall to your knees, bring on the rapture.”

“Blessed be the boys time can’t capture.”

“On film, or between the sheets.”

“I always fall from your window to the pitch black streets.”

“And in the end, I’d do it all again.”

“I think you’re my best friend.”

“Don’t you know that the kids aren’t alright?”

“I’ll be yours.”

“When it rains, it pours.”

“I’m not passive, but aggressive.”

“Take note, it’s not impressive.”

“Empty your sadness like you’re dumping your purse on my bedroom floor.”

“We put your curse in reverse.”

“And it’s our time now if you want it to be.”

“Maul the world like a carnival bear set free.”

“Your love is anemic.”

“I can’t believe that you couldn’t see it coming for me.”

“And I still feel that rush in my veins, twists my head just a bit too thin.”

“All those people in those old photographs I’ve seen are dead.”

“Sometimes I just wanna sit down and gaze at my shoes.”

“Let your dirty sadness fill me up just like a balloon.”

Uma Thurman

“I can move mountains.”

“I can work a miracle.”

“I’ll keep you like an oath, may nothing but death do us part.”

“Bury me ‘till I confess.”

“I can’t get you out of my head.”

“Divide me down to the smallest I can be.”

“Put your venom in me.”

“The blood of the lamb is worth two lions, but here I am.”

“I slept in last night’s clothes and tomorrow’s dreams, but they’re not quite what they seem.”

“You’ll find your way, and may death find you alive.”

“Take me down the line.”

“We turned the tide.”

Jet Pack Blues

“I’m the last one that you’ll ever remember.”

“I’m trying to find my peace of mind behind these two white highway lines.”

“When the city goes silent, the ringing in my ears gets violent.”

“She’s in a long black coat tonight, waiting for me in the downpour outside.”

“She’s singing ‘Baby, come home’ in a melody of tears while the rhythm of the rain keeps time.”

“I remember.”

“Baby, come home.”

“Did you ever love her, do you know?” “Or did you never want to be alone?”

“Fight off the lights tonight, and just stay with me.”

“Honey, don’t you leave.”

“Do you remember how we used to split a drink?”

“It never mattered what it was.”

“I think our heads were just that close.”

“The sweetness never lasts, you know.”

Novocaine

“This is a black ski mask song.”

“So put all of your anger on.”

“In the truly gruesome do we trust.”

“I will always land on you like a sucker punch.”

“I am your worst nightmare.”

“If you knew what the bluebirds sang at you, you would never sing along.”

“Cast them out cause this is our culture.”

“These new flocks are nothing but vultures.”

“They took our love, and they filled it up.”

“Now I’m just numb.”

“I don’t feel a thing for you.”

“I’m just a problem that doesn’t want to be solved.”

“So, could you please hold your applause.”

“I said one day this valley’s gonna swallow me whole.”

“I feel like a photo that’s been overexposed.”

Fourth of July

“It was the fourth of July.”

“You and I were fireworks that went off too soon.”

“And I miss you in the June gloom too.”

“I said I’d never miss, but I guess you never know.”

“May the bridges I have burned light my way back home.”

“I’ll be honest as you let me.”

“I miss your early morning company.”

“You are my favorite ‘what if’. “

“You are the best ‘I’ll never know.’ “

“I’m starting to forget what summer meant to you.”

“What did it ever mean to you?”

“Oh, I’m sorry--I didn’t mean any of it.”

“I just got too lonely.”

“In between being young and being right, you were my Versailles at night.”

“Again and again till I’m stuck in your head.”

“Had my doubts, but I let them out.”

“You are the drought, and I’m the holy water you have been without.”

“All my thoughts of you, they could heat or cool the room.”

“No, don’t tell me you cried. Oh, honey--You don’t have to lie.”

“I wish I’d known how much you loved me.”

“I wish I’d cared enough to know.”

“I’m sorry every song’s about you.”

Favorite Record

“Do you remember when we drove through the night?”

“We danced.”

“And I confessed to you, riding shotgun underneath the purple skies.

“We danced with the windows down.”

“You were the song stuck in my, every song that I’ve ever loved.”

“You can get what you want, but it’s never enough.”

“And I spin for you like your favorite records used to.”

“I can’t remember just how to forget the way we danced.”

Immortals

“They say we are what we are, but we don’t have to be.”

“I’m bad behavior, but I do it in the best way.”

“I’ll be the watcher of the eternal flame.”

“I’ll be the guard dog of all your fever dreams.”

“I am the sand in the bottom half of the hourglass.”

“I try to picture me without you; But I can’t.”

“We could be immortals, just not for long.”

“Live with me forever now.”

“You pull the blackout curtains down.”

“Sometimes the payoff for having any faith is when it’s tested again and again every day.”

“I’m still comparing your past to my future.”

“It might be your wound, but they’re my sutures.”

Twin Skeletons (Hotel in NYC)

“I don’t want to remember it all.”

“Hold on.”

“I just need enough of you to dull the pain.”

“ ‘Till we’re stripped down to our skeletons again.”

“ We’re saints just swimming in our sins again.”

“And there’s a jet black crow droning on and on.”

“Keep making trouble ‘till you find what you live.”

“I need a new partner in crime.”

“And you shrug.”

“A birth and a death on the same day.”

“I only appeared so I can fade away.”

“I wanna throw my hands in the air and scream.”

“I could just die laughing on your spiral of shame.”

“Hit it, never quit it.”

“I have been through the wreck.”

“I can string enough to show my face in the light again.”

5 notes · View notes

notsimplysusurrus · 5 years

Text

Reading List for Antis

You all really need to understand that published fiction isn’t somehow more wholesome or unproblematique™️ than fan-written fiction. I offer this list both to widen your horizons and to help you understand that a) these books have all been published and b) society hasn’t suddenly decided that paedophilia, incest, rape, etc. are anywhere near okay in real life. Moreover, all of these books are either classics and/or bestsellers, meaning that they’re super mainstream and a lot of people have read them. So here it is:

The Perks of Being a Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky

The movie version of this is also soooo good and one of my favourites.

Tw: abuse, csa, homophobia-induced violence, suicide, mentions of sex and drug/alcohol use

Beloved - Toni Morrison

This book is dense asf. An interesting read, but it’s...quite a lot.

Tw: violence, mentions of sex, mentions of rape, slavery, abuse, bestiality

Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Depressing as shit. Like, so damn depressing. But also very anti-war, which is a plus in my book.

Tw: descriptions and depictions of abuse, violence, war, the experience of a prisoner of war, mentions of sex

Flowers In the Attic - V. C. Andrews *

Have not read the book, but I have seen several film adaptations and liked them quite a lot.

Tw: incest--like major theme of the book incest, abuse, child abuse, depictions of sex and possible rape

Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

I read this book for the first time when I was thirteen years old. Thirteen! I don’t think I was old enough then to appreciate it as a work of literature, but it’s not super uplifting, to say the least.

Tw: sex, violence, abuse, torture, mentions of or hints to suggest nonconsensual sexual activity

The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

Love this book and the tv adaptation. Very politically relevant.

Tw: rape, violence, abuse, slavery, mentions and descriptions of both consensual sex and rape

American Psycho - Bret Easton Ellis *

I have not read this book, and I honestly do not want to. I can say, however, that I’ve read passages of it which...I will never recover from. Incredibly disturbing.

Tw: extremely graphic depictions of violence, sexual violence, torture, rape, and abuse

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Tbh one of my favourite books.

Tw: violence, drug use, mentions and descriptions of sex and very open sexual practices, suicide, underage sex

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

Got to be honest, I’ve never liked this book. It’s just...absurd to assume that ANY group of people put in this situation would act the way these rich, entitled, white boys did.

Tw: violence, abuse, child death

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

I didn’t really like this book when I read it, either. Read it pretty young, so perhaps I just didn’t appreciate it enough, but it very much seems to me like a rich, young man complaining about problems he, himself, has caused.

Tw: lots of profanity, sex, drug and alcohol use

Fareinheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

READ THIS. It is literally all about why censorship is bad and where it could take us in the future. SO good. Love it lots.

Tw: violence, mentions of sexual violence, suicide

Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card

Love, love, love! A great read. Highly recommended. As for tws, it’s important to remember that the characters in this book are literal, actual children. All of them, like under-13 children. Important to keep in mind when you’re skimming through my list of tws. Regardless, it’s such a good book.

Tw: graphic depictions of violence and child abuse, bullying, sexual innuendos and lots of mentions of child nudity, profanity

Z for Zachariah - Robert C. O’Brien

Read this book when I was about thirteen, and I liked it a lot. Very interesting plotline and world-building.

Tw: violence, attempted rape of a minor and generally creepy behaviour towards the aforementioned minor that may be classifiable as grooming

This is all that comes to my mind just this moment, but I may make subsequent lists in the future (like with movies because that’d be fun!)

Please take notice of how none of these come with irl trigger warnings. If you were to pick this up in your nearest book store, you’d have no idea. Fanwork authors are DOING YOU A FAVOUR by adding warnings to their works. Never forget that.

I have read the vast majority of the books on this list (and marked those which I have not read with asterisks). None of them have incited me to any behaviour even remotely similar to that which I mentioned in the trigger warnings. Published fiction is just as “problematic” as fanfiction, but censorship is still a net bad for society.

Don’t like it? Don’t read it.

#mod Fiver #original #reading list #pro writer freedom #long post

374 notes · View notes

theparanormalperiodical · 5 years

Text

Halloween (1978) - Based On A True Story

It’s the tagline that haunts the horror film industry: Based on a True Story.

Typically, it roughly translates to “a door moved several feet so shit this is a haunted hizzle ma dudes”. Or, it represents some of the most iconic moments in paranormal phenomena.

It was Halloween (1978) that surprisingly slotted itself into the second category of films.

Halloween is famous for several reasons, indeed, it’s one of the most celebrated horror films to have graced your not-so-legal streaming site.

It’s a cult movie for slasher fans, and it’s name has centred it as a must-watch during this season. And it’s all because it echoes out those eerie vibes of urban legends, but snaps us back to the chilling reality of pyscho-killers when we need it most.

It even started the slasher film craze that would tumble one corpse-domino into the following decades.

And it’s based on a true story.

Which, ya know, that’s fine, this is so fine, this is great.

So, it got me thinking: what was this true story? And are there any other similar stories that we need to know about come Halloween night?

Unfortunately, there are.

There are so many.

Today’s post is going to take us back to the story that inspired the Halloween series, the similar stories that bulked up the shocking reality of the 11-film saga, and the urban legends that still echo out these themes.

So, whether you’re carving a pumpkin, or piecing together your costume with a hot glue gun, settle in.

Let’s get spooky!

First, let’s recap the Halloween saga.

And lord, she’s a saga.

Across 11 movies we witness one plotline: this bloke, Michael Myres, stalks Laurie Strode.

No, he is not the lovable voice behind shrek.

And no, ‘shaggable’ is not used as a comical easter egg mid-murder in these movies.

But despite this basic plotline, normally a dash of back story is chucked into the occasional prequel-sequel-who’s-a-what’s-now to shake things up and drag it across 11 films.

Take the backstory of Laurie Strode - she’s his estranged sister, a connection which is dragged down to her daughter, Jamie. This is the central line that the series dances around.

It’s a bit like American Horror Story - you know when every season has a different setting?

There’s been a college massacre; there’s been a hospital of horrors. There’s been more reboots then Britney Spear’s career!

But pushing aside the mess of writers chipping in a line for each screenplay, and wiping off the fake blood coating the legacy of films, one thing is for sure:

We centre on a psycho-killer who defies all psychological analysis.

Michael Myers is pure evil.

That’s the point.

It’s the true fear that I think we all have - it’s this unrelenting force that’s out to get you and will not stop, will not sympathise, will not suffer nor scar.

And so we arrive at the true story behind this phenomenon of a franchise.

Unless you’ve been stuck under a rock for, what, 40 years - no seriously, I did maths and everything - then you will be oblivious to the Halloween saga.

But for everyone else, there is only one image that pops into the head when it comes to these films - and it’s Michael Myers in his white mask, and cloaked in a blue jumpsuit.

#OOTD

And he is based on a true story.

The OG director and co-writer of the OG film - John Carpenter - was approached with the premise of a film many moons ago.

And let’s be honest: it’s more basic than I am.

The whole idea was that this psycho-killer slits bitches up on All Hallows’ Eve. Simple, right?

Well it was Carpenter that added the twist on Myers that sent this flick head-first into film history.

Carpenter was reminded of an encounter he had at University whilst visiting a mental institution. He came across a boy, maybe 12 or 13 years old.

And he had this look.

He had this look that he could only describe as emotionless, as pure evil - and this probably inspired this quote from the film from Myers’ psychoanalyst:

"This blank, pale emotionless face. Blackest eyes. The devil’s eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized what was living behind that boys’ eyes was purely and simply evil."

Oh, you thought it stopped there?

Oh, my little ghoul.

No, it continues.

Myers is believed to be complete and utter evil. And this is based on the historical root of Halloween.

Samhain is the celtic celebration behind the best day of the whole entire year. And in basic terms, it is the conflict between summer and winter, or, between good and evil.

Sound familiar?

Okay fine, every horror film - no, scratch that - every goddamn film is about the fight between good and evil.

But it’s Halloween that brings this up. Halloween drags it up from the depths of hell and puts a white face mask on it.

However, legend has it that there is another real life story that directly influenced it: and that’s the murders committed by Stanley Steirs.

Take yourself back to 1920.

On Halloween night, Stiers went on a killing spree, going so far as to murder his own family.

Carpenter - nor, anyone affiliated with this cult series - makes mention of Stiers. But it’s safe to say that the sheer volume of murders that happen to fall (or purposefully striking) on Halloween is nothing short of inspiration.

The film might stick to the big screen, but the reality is never too far from the cinema doors.

It’s here that we turn to these real life events.

I’ve found five major events of murders, assaults and kidnapping that have collided with Halloween, mirroring the images on the big screen.

(Yeah, it wasn’t a positive google search experience.)

And none of them fall short of the actual movie inspiring this post.

We start in 1975, a mere 3 years before the original film hit the cinemas.

It was the morning of Halloween when Martha Moxeley was found beneath a tree in her backyard. She was dead, murdered via a beating with a golf club.

It was 25 years later that Michael Skakel - then, a 15 year old body - was arrested and convicted for her murder. This story gained attention not for the gruesome circumstances of Martha’s death, but because of the sheltered, and famous life he had lived.

He was the nephew of Robert F Kennedy’s widow, and had spent him life swanning around the elite circles.

His alibi? Well, it’s just as disturbing as her death.

He claims that the reason his DNA was on her body was because he was masturbating underneath the tree she was found under on the same day.

These themes aren’t so unheard of in Halloween - indeed, the opening scene features the uncomfortable sex scene of Michael’s sister and her boyfriend before he stabs her to death, completing his first kill.

We then jump forward a few decades, and dive headfirst into arguably the decade of the most Halloween related murders. Indeed, given the stretch of slasher films before this decades that were spiked by the movie inspiring this post, the film itself could have figured as an ambition for these murders.

And it starts in 2002.

Chris Jenkins - a student at the University of Minnesota - was last seen alive at a bar on Halloween night. Four months later, his body - still clad in appropriate Halloween get-up - was found in the Mississippi River.

This is not the first halloween-related catastrophe to be witnessed in this river.

Obviously someone falling into a river on a infamous night of parties and revelry can be seen as either an accident, or a suicide. But it was 4 years later that the death was reclassified as a homicide.

Even though someone did confess to the police that they witnessed a murder, it is still shrouded in a mystery fit for an urban legend.

Particularly as it is rumoured to be a victim of the Smiley Face Murders.

Basically, 40 male college students in the US died of drowning around the same time, and graffiti of smiley faces was found around the sites of the murder.

The murderer was never found.

Next, we turn to a similarly urban-legend like story: the murder of Leslie Mazzara and Adriane Insogna.

It was 31st October 2004, and three roommates - including those that were murdered - were enjoying Halloween night. Having handed out Halloween candy all evening, Lauren Meanza awoke to the sounds of a scuffle at 1am.

She fled the house in fear, and turned around to see someone climb out of one of their windows.

She ran back inside, only to be greeted by the corpses of her roommates.

Nearly 1500 people became persons of interest, but it was when Eric Copple - who was apart of this pool - refused to cooperate by handing over DNA, suspicions were roused.

A year later, he confessed to the murders.

No motive was given, but he was engaged to a friend of one of the victims, creating a peculiar link that must’ve inspired the events of that fateful night.

6 years later, an Ohio teen encountered a similar situation.

He returned from a church service to the bodies of his murdered family, including his new stepfather, William Liske.

The killer behind the murders was found to be Liske’s son from a previous marriage who had a history of violence and schizophrenia.

2009 too witnessed a grotesque event.

3 teenage girls were held at gunpoint and abducted following an evening of trick-o-treating, and were sexually assaulted in a wood. Luckily, one of the girls was able to use her phone to call for help, causing the kidnapper to flee.

When he was eventually arrested in 2012, it followed a string of previous sexual assaults that have occurred since the late 90s.

Our final murder takes us to Halloween night, 2011.

Taylor Van Diest was believed to have just left a Halloween party when she was beaten to death near railway tracks.

The story only gets ever-more terrifying considering she texted her boyfriend shortly before the attack to tell him that that someone was following her.

The police eventually found DNA of the killer underneath her fingernails, leading them to the culprit.

Traumatised? Me too.

But these tales don’t end with finished cases, and they certainly don’t end with the credits of the films they inspire.

They come back to haunt us in the urban legends set on Halloween.

Clearly, halloween-inspired murders make the most iconic urban legend concept. It’s the scariest time of year, and what’s scarier than, well, murder?

One of these legends sticks to this theme, closely mirroring the film in question.

It’s affectionately known as the 1962 Idaho Massacre. The story goes a man in a black mask attended a Halloween party in - you guessed it - Idaho.

He proceeded to lock all the doors, and then murder each and every attendee of the party. Well, he is believed to have killed 7 before escaping.

He was never found. But it is still claimed that his mask was found by the FBI in 1969.

The murder train continues with the most noughties urban legend ever.

In 2008, an email chain warned people that a gang was to hold an initiation on Halloween night.

And the task that needed to be completed?

The murder of 31 women, each death a day of the month.

And in true urban legend fashion, 140 women were to be killed in another version of the email, and so the list of variants continues.

Our next tale of terror sticks to a more classic halloween story - that of the haunted house:

Well, this house either exists in Pennsylvania, Detroit, or Chicago; regardless, this is a typical and twisted tale often encountered with urban legends.

The story goes that a haunted house with 13 floors exists. I mean, fuck that’s a tall house, how did they get that signed off?

But the legal repercussions are not the frightening feature of the story.

The challenge is to make it to the top floor alive. If they do, they win some cash. If they don’t… well they're dead, so there's that.

Legend has it that no one ever made it to the top floor.

It also doesn’t exist, but anyway.

What about the campus massacres of halloween night?

Every year, from 1960 to 1998, psychics would make the same prediction for Halloween night. No points for guessing what the prediction was…

Next is the rumoured threat to animals.

Satanists have always been supposedly murdering black cats on Halloween for decades. Or maybe it’s witches capturing them for ceremonies? Or maybe its National Kill a Pit Bull Day, the all-American hoax that cropped up in 2012?

Either way: no one is safe. Not even ya doggo.

Our final urban legends prey on children, and infer that they will either be drugged, poisoned, or stabbed on some sort of sharp implement.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

These are the most prevalent legends, especially since trick-o-treating and dressing up are children’s activities, even if we all like to partake - child or not.

Some real life cases have even informed the fears that candy has been spiked with poisons, such as the case of the poisoned Pixy Stix.

It was Ronald O’Bryan who spiked his son’s candy with cyanide with the ambition of receiving a hefty insurance cash payment.

There have even been rumours of temporary tattoos being laced with LSD!

The original icon for this was a blue star, but this eventually included other unsuspecting images such as Mickey Mouse.

Cause nothin’ says drugs like Disney.

Now we turn to pointy things.

Commonly needles and razors blades are rumoured to be concealed among halloween treats handed out to kids. This was even proven in 2000, when a man was charged with concealing needles in chocolate bars.

Not convinced by razor blades? What about drugs being smuggled across borders, or handed out to children?

Fact is, these urban legends could go on forever.

They twist, they turn, they come back around full circle, and they pack up shop to move to different parts of the world.

And when we finally think we are safe from the myths and legends that haunt halloween…

Tragedy strikes.

Fact is, Halloween isn’t just based on the demeanor of one psychotic teen.

It’s based on stories that happen year upon year, reminding us that urban legends are never too far from the truth.

22 notes · View notes

puroresu-musings · 5 years

Photo

NJPW KING OF PRO-WRESTLING 2019 Review (Oct 14th, Tokyo, Ryogoku Kokugikan)

El Desperado Comeback Match: El Desperado & Yoshinobu Kanemaru vs. Roppongi 3K ***1/4

Tanahashi 20th Anniversary Match IV: Hiroshi Tanahashi & Tomoaki Honma vs. Togi Makabe & Toru Yano **3/4

Tetsuya Naito & Shingo Takagi vs. Taichi & DOUKI *1/4

Jushin Thunder Liger vs. Minoru Suzuki ****1/4

IWGP Jr. Heavyweight Title Match: Will Ospreay (c) vs. El Phantasmo ****1/2

Hirooki Goto, Tomohiro Ishii & YOSHI-HASHI vs. Jay White, KENTA & Yujiro Takahashi **1/2

IWGP U.S. Title Decision Match: Juice Robinson vs. Lance Archer ***1/4

Tokyo Dome No.1 Contenders Contract Match: Kota Ibushi vs. EVIL ****

IWGP Heavyweight Title Match: Kazuchika Okada (c) vs. SANADA ****

Photos.

This was a problematic show in that it suffered several misfortunes due to Typhoon Hagibis, the worst typhoon to tear through Japan in a generation, and this caused both Jon Moxley and Zack Sabre Jr to miss the show due to not being able to get into the country. As a result of Moxley not being able to make the show, New Japan stripped him of the U.S. Title, and the belt was declared vacant, with Juice now taking on Lance Archer in a decision match. Beyond this totally unforseen and unpreventable natural disaster, the show had an issue in that it didn’t offer anything especially interesting from a fresh match stand-point. Beside the long-teased Liger/Suzuki bout, it was a card full of matches we’ve seen before, granted matches we knew would deliever, but still, it hardly got me really excited at the prospect. A probelm New Japan’s been facing this entire post-G1, pre-WK season. However, those matches we knew would deliver did, so on the whole, despite being somewhat disappointing, it was a very enjoyable supershow.

The returning El Desperado lead his team with Kanemaru to victory over Roppongi 3K in a hot opener, which saw the masked man get the win over SHO after he took the whiskey in the face off Kanemaru, and Despy nailed Pinche Loco at the 10:44 mark. Tanahashi hit the High Fly Flow to pin Toru Yano in a fun, but unspectacular 9:43 doubles match to celebrate his 20th anniversary as a wrestler. It was weird seeing Tana in a totally nothing old-timers match. The Naito/Shingo vs. Taichi/DOUKI tag match was by far the worst thing on the show, and it ended in a DQ when Taichi nailed Naito with the mic stand right in front of the ref. Taichi laid Naito out with a Last Ride in the post match. I honestly couldn’t give a rat’s ass about another match between these two. Then things got great with the long-awaited Liger vs. Suzuki battle. This wasn’t the crazy brawl they’ve been teasing for months, instead it started as a mat based grapple battle, then turned into a Strong Style grudge match. At 55 and 51 years respectively, these guys worked an excellent match with incredible emotion. They started hitting each other really hard, with Liger, in Battle Liger garb, laying in the Shoutei’s and Suzuki coming back with hard strikes and forearms. It looked like Liger might get the submission win with the Brakes Special arm submission, but Suzuki escaped and locked in a sleeper. Liger scored a very close near fall with the Thesz Press, then hit his Brainbuster finish, but again Suzuki kicked out. After hitting his trademark big dropkick, Suzuki floored the masked legend with a stiff forearm, then hit the Gotch Piledriver at the 17:38 to end this. In the post match, Suzuki nailed the Young Lions with a chair, then threatened to hit the helpless Liger with it, but instead threw it away, kneels and bowes to Liger in a sign of total respect as Kokugikan went crazy. Liger thanked Suzuki over the house mic as he left his final match at Ryogoku Kokugikan. This was great.

The Junior Title Match followed and it was pretty damn crazy. They were out there for 28 minutes and hit so many crazy spots that its impossible to remember them all. Whilst it was my favourite match of the night, I can’t help but feel they maybe did too much. It reminded me of those Adam Cole NXT main events that I just can’t get away with in that they hit so many big moves that weren’t the finish, it became a bit beliveability-stretching. Now thats out of the way, this was a tremendous encounter. The story was that ELP in the early going decided to eschew his evil ways and play the honest babyface, which of course everyone knew was bullshit. After attacking the eyes and hitting frankly brutal back rakes, Ospreay sent Phantasmo into fellow Bullet Club member Gino Gambino at ringside. This lead to them brawling through the crowd, where Phantasmo hit a massive balcony dive. Back in the ring, ELP tried the tree-of-woe-nut-stomp, but Will countered into a Spider German. Ospreay escapes a CRII on the apron and hit an Oscutter off the guardrail whilst Phantasmo was still on the apron, which teased a countout, but ELP ate a huge corner-to-corner dropkick as he enters, and Will gets a near fall with the Shooting Star Press. After Ospreay scored a near fall with Oscutter, Taiji Ishimori ran out, but was sent packing by Robbie Eagles. This allowed ELP to hit a dick punch and a belt shot, then hit the Big Splash, but Will kicks out. A Styles Clash from Phantasmo gets another near fall, then he hits the V-Trigger, then attempts One Winged Angel, but Ospreay rolls through into a cradle for a near fall. Will gets a near fall with Essex Destroyer, then gets crotched as he tries to go up top. Phantasmo tries the super Frankensteiner, but Ospreay turns it into a massive sitout Powerbomb, hits Hidden Blade, then retains the title, and finally avenges his losses to Phantasmo after putting him away with Storm Breaker. As I say, I thought this was great stuff indeed, but it got a bit silly, and I mean PWG levels of silly, by the end.

The six man that followed was the epitome of an OK bout, with the focus being on White and Goto, KENTA and Ishii tearing it up, and Yujiro looking frankly terrible out there in this one. Goto won for his team when he hit Takahashi with GTR at the 12:27. The match for the now vacant U.S. Title followed, and was made a No DQ match (the planned Moxley/Juice encounter had the same stip). This felt utterly superfluous as there was no reason for this to be No DQ, and the plunder spots felt forced. Much of the match was spent setting up furniture, which hurt it slightly. Juice suffered a nasty looking dislocated finger along the way here. The finish saw Archer hit Black Out into a pile of chairs for a close near fall. The big man became infuriated and slammed Juice’s head into the pile of chairs repeatedly, then applied the EBD Claw to win the title at 14:58. Before he could do anymore damage, the returning David Finley ran out and hit his Stunner on Archer, so thats The American Psycho’s first title programme. Interesting. Kota Ibushi avenged his G1 defeat to EVIL in his successful defense of the IWGP Briefcase in another great match. This wasn’t as good as their G1 outing in July however, and personally speaking, the show felt as though it was starting to drag by this point. This started slow, but built into a hot closing stretch with loads of great counters. The King Of Darkness gets a near fall with Darkness Falls, but Kota counters into the Bastard Driver, and scores a near fall of his own with a Last Ride. Ibushi tries Boma Ye but EVIL turns him inside-out with a huge Lariat counter. The STO is turned into a Straight Jacket German, and EVIL hits a Half Nelson Suplex, then tries another Lariat, but Ibushi counters with one of his own, hits a V-Trigger, then Kamigoye for a super close near fall. Ibushi lifts EVIL up and hits another Kamigoye to keep the briefcase at the 24:05 mark.

And in the main event, Okada and SANADA squared off for the fourth time this year in a major bout. This was an excellent match, no doubt, but it had several things going against it. Namely that its the fourth match between these two this year, it was probably never going to live up to their G1 encounter, and no one could feasibly have believed SANADA was going to win this. Indeed he didn’t, but he still put in a great effort. However, I’ve been saying this for years now, and this match just cements this with me, but he needs to drop that Skull End as a finish. It just isn’t a believable submission in the slightest. The amount of times he locked it on in this particular match really jumped the shark, especially when it never looked good, and no one bought it. This was a long, story-based match that went 37 minutes and felt every single second of it. It started really hot but slowed to a very methodical pace, and by the end, I was very tired indeed, so perhaps I’m doing this a disservice. This featured tremendous counters sequences. SANADA turned a TKO in to Skull End but Okada reversed into a Tombstone attempt. SANADA reversed that into a Tombstone of his own, then nailed the TKO for a near fall. Cold Skull locks on Skull End again, Okada freeing his head, but SANADA kept locking on Skull End. He laid there in the hold for what felt like an eternity and Red Shoes really tried to sell us that he was going to stop it. Okada finally fought free and counters a SANADA rolling elbow into a Rainmaker atempt, but SANADA turns it into another Skull End attempt, but Okada hits a dropkick to the back for the double down. Okada with a dropkick, but SANADA escapes another Rainmaker, and locked on another Skull End. SANADA with a Moonsault to the back, rolls the champion over and goes for another, but Okada gets the knees up. Another goddamn Skull End is applied, but Okada escapes by walking up the turnbuckles and hitting a Tombstone. SANADA escapes another Rainmaker and scores a fantastic near fall with the Rolling Leg Clutch. Okada arm drags his way free of maybe the 47th Skull End attempt, and SANADA ducked another Rainmaker attempt. The finish saw SANADA again try Skull End, but Okada turned it into a Fire Thunder Driver, then hit the Rainmaker to finally retain the title.

As I say, this was an excellent match, but it started to lose me by the end. The post match however, was incredible. As SANADA lay on the mat crying, knowing he’s now 7-1 against Okada, the champion sat next to him giving him a thumbs up. This is the sort of believable emotion that sets NJPW apart rom almost every other company. Okada cut a promo in the post match saying he believes one day, these two will main event the Tokyo Dome. We’ll see. This brought out Ibushi, and Okada noted that Ibushi has avenged his G1 losses, but Okada, who lost to Golden Star on the final A Block day at Budokan, has yet to do so. Okada then said Ibushi was overlooking him in wanting to become a double champion, when theres no way he’s getting past Okada on January 4th. They then pretty much made the main event for the first Dome show official, and Okada thanked everyone for coming out in the midst of a Typhoon, and noted that its the wrestlers job to give the fans the energy to carry on through such adversity.

NDT

#njpw #king of pro wrestling #review #njkopw #kazuchika okada #sanada #kota ibushi #evil #juice robinson #lance archer #will ospreay #el phantasmo #jushin thunder liger #minoru suzuki #new japan pro wrestling #puroresu #wrestling #wrestling review #wwe

16 notes · View notes

theculturedmarxist · 5 years

Link

The left is in crisis across the West. It is out of power in most countries and out of touch with its historical working-class base. Class politics has given way to identity politics. And noble causes like anti-racism, anti-sexism and anti-discrimination have congealed into a stifling morass of political correctness and competitive victimhood.

Thankfully, there are some pockets on the left who recognise this predicament. I’m in New York to try to understand the thinking behind the ‘dirtbag left’. The phrase was coined by Amber A’Lee Frost, a writer, commentator and activist, to describe a loose constellation of American leftists who reject the civility, piety and PC that has come to characterise much of the left.

Frost is a co-host of the hugely successful Chapo Trap House, which offers a funny, irony-laden and often downright vulgar take on contemporary politics from the left. She also writes a column for the Baffler and is a trade unionist.

Newer on the scene is the acerbic and wickedly funny Anna Khachiyan, art critic turned cultural commentator, who co-hosts the podcast Red Scare. Red Scare saves its most biting criticism for ‘neoliberal’ feminism.

Among the most refreshing things about Frost and Khachiyan is that their politics are resolutely not woke. ‘You can tell people that I’m trans’, says Khachiyan, with characteristic irreverence, as Frost, Khachiyan and myself sit down to talk at Eastwood in the Lower East Side. ‘I’m not trans, but you can say that just for fun.’ Their reasons for rejecting wokeness are both pragmatic and political. ‘The majority of people are not woke’, explains Frost: ‘Why would we dismiss the majority of people as hopelessly reactionary?’

Not only that, for Frost, identitarian divisions based on gender, race and sexuality are ‘a distraction at best, an active detriment at worst’. ‘The biggest divide in American society is class and that’s it. I’m a class-first person’, she tells me. ‘You’re hearing in the election how much we need to elect a woman or we need to elect a woman of colour. But the most left-wing candidate is an old, white, heterosexual man [Bernie Sanders] and I want him to win… I’m a Bernie bro. I was a Bernie bro in 2016 and I am now.’

But would the first woman president not be a breakthrough for women? ‘They’re always talking about the “little girls” – how would little girls know that they can be president? It’s just so stupid. I was a little girl once, I’ve never felt limited by this stuff’, says Frost. She raises Margaret Thatcher: ‘You [Brits] had a girl boss – she showed those bro miners!’

Frost describes herself as a socialist. She says she came to socialism through feminist organising. But the current wave of media feminism turns her off. It is about ‘middle-class women trying to get spots in the boardroom’. ‘A lot of this stuff is “fight the power, put me on the throne”.’ Or it’s, ‘Men are rude to me and they explain things to me’, she jokes.

Of course, I suggest, there are many real struggles that women face, particularly working-class women – from low pay to childcare – so why do these issues barely get a look in? ‘They don’t care about working-class women’, Frost says of contemporary feminists. ‘Half the time they’re smearing them as reactionaries because they voted for Trump.’

‘I fundamentally think they are disgusted and horrified by working-class people’, says Khachiyan. ‘Real women don’t live up to the liberal-feminist pieties’, adds Frost. ‘And I think that’s very threatening for the uptight, white, overeducated, liberal women to be confronted with’, replies Khachiyan.

So why did so many people vote for Trump? ‘There are two categories of Trump voters worth discussing separately’, says Frost. ‘There was the wealthy, petit-bourgeois reactionary. But there were also working-class people who heard only one of the candidates talking about jobs.’

Trump has many faults, of course. ‘Fundamentally, he is a cruel, stupid man’, says Frost. But he has ‘a very good observational talent’. Liberals, suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, have been far too moralistic about the Trump vote, she argues: ‘Most people don’t believe that presidential candidates are telling the truth the entire time.’

Worse, the left’s response to Trump has been totally counterproductive: ‘Do you want to tell people how bad they are? Do you want them to repent because they’re bad racists? Or do you want them to pursue a left-wing project?’

‘Those people are ours to win’, says Frost. The populist moment is an opportunity, she says, but one which ‘I can totally see us pissing away’. ‘The self-identified left are very sceptical of the populist stuff. Look at their takes on the yellow vests: “They’re all fascists!” They’re probably just fucking French people – and who can tell the difference?’

Just as significant as Trump’s victory was Hillary Clinton’s loss, they tell me, in that it represented a rejection of an era of neoliberalism. ‘I’m from Indiana’, Frost tells me. ‘Bill signs NAFTA. That obliterated the towns where I’m from. People are extremely bitter about Bill Clinton for very good reasons. And she is married to that, literally and figuratively – she defends that legacy. How did we not see Trump coming?’

What’s more, Trump represented a repudiation of the entire establishment – Democrats and Republicans. ‘There is a severe crisis of legitimacy in our institutions’, says Frost: ‘The Republicans did not want Trump to win either… He was nobody’s first choice, except the American people’s, apparently.’

For Khachiyan, ‘You can say a lot of bad things about Donald Trump, but you can’t say the man is boring’.

‘Trump should be an artist, not a politician’, she adds. ‘He says, “I’ve never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke”, and he loves Diet Coke, that’s his drink of choice. I don’t know if he’s self-aware or not.’

The problem with liberals, she says, is that ‘they can’t differentiate between their political critiques of Trump and their aesthetic critiques of him… He really brings to the fore all these inarticulable taboos. But as a politician, he’s not very exceptional.’ It is not so much Trump’s policies that anger the liberals, but his brashness, his demeanour. Frost adds, by way of example, that Obama also ‘threw tear gas at the border’.

Three years on from the 2016 presidential election, Democrats are still largely in denial or in despair about Trump’s victory. The now-discredited Russia-collusion narrative provided an excuse to avoid any soul-searching. ‘The whole Rachel Maddow and the NBC crowd have infected the minds of boomers with this dystopian narrative’, Khachiyan tells me. ‘Even my mom, who’s from Russia, buys the collusion narrative.’

‘The narrative isn’t itself so interesting’, she argues, but it shows ‘the willful failure of the Democratic Party. Again and again, they fall on their face. There’s some kind of Freudian, masochistic thing they have where they get off on publicly humiliating themselves.’

But while liberals may be electorally challenged, they still dominate mainstream culture. ‘“Liberal’ is the political denomination, but “nerd” is the cultural denomination’, says Khachiyan. ‘We’re living under the triumph of the nerds… If you had an American Psycho-esque novel today, there wouldn’t be this broad-shouldered besuited guy who looked like he walked out of the pages of an advertisement. It would be about a fin-tech soy boy. He’d be hunched over, clutching his tote-bag’, she says.

‘Bret Easton Ellis said there could never be the great Millennial novel – we’ll see. I haven’t read that Sally Rooney book that everybody’s writing about’, Khachiyan says, referring to the Irish author’s breakthrough novel, Normal People, which focuses on a millennial relationship. Frost adds that she read the book ‘with the intent of savaging it’, because ‘all the Guardian feminists like her’, but found ‘there was a lot of good shit in there’. ‘I think the women who like it don’t understand why they do… women today aren’t allowed to want a traditional relationship’, she says. Khachiyan adds: ‘Which is what most people since the dawn of time have wanted… There’s nothing reactionary about wanting a boyfriend!’

The conversation turns back to Bret Easton Ellis, a critic of what he calls snowflake culture, who is frequently accused of being a reactionary. ‘A lot of artists either don’t have any politics or their politics are retarded’, says Khachiyan. ‘His whole virtue as a writer is being a great stylist and a great narrator who retains plausible deniability. American Psycho has references to killing homeless black people, calling Asians “slant eyes”. And a lot of these woke SJW people sincerely think he’s a racist because he describes the condition… Artists are sometimes unassailable… The whole impulse to peg someone for what they are now is bizarre.’

Another recent favourite author among Guardian feminists is Kristen Roupenian, whose short story, ‘Cat Person’, went viral. The story is about a young woman who realises – slightly too late in the day – that the sexual encounter she is about to embark on is not what she wants. When the man finally realises he has been rejected, he lashes out. ‘Guardian feminists liked it because it “proved” men are trash because the man called her a whore at the end’, says Khachiyan. ‘Actually what it showed is that men can be sad and pathetic’, adds Frost.

Khachiyan tells me about an event she was at with Roupenian recently. (‘Hands down one of the most inarticulate, scatter-brained speakers – but the woman can write!’) Lena Dunham was meant to speak, she says, but didn’t show up because ‘she cooked up a fake illness’. ‘It was around the time she had her uterus removed’, she says. Frost adds that lots of American women are ‘voluntary removing their reproductive organs’. ‘Nobody is talking about this. It’s a middle-class, very elite phenomenon, where they’re like, “I have menstrual problems, I’m going to remove my womb”. Lena Dunham wrote a whole fucking essay about it.’

I asked how the seeming frigidity of the #MeToo moment, let alone the alleged epidemic of uterus removals, sits alongside modern feminism’s ‘sex positive’ celebration of polyamory, pansexuality and sex workers. ‘It’s because these people would rather negotiate sex than actually have it… They don’t want to take responsibility’, says Khachiyan. ‘That’s why nerds love this stuff’, says Frost. ‘It’s huge in Silicon Valley. They like games and rules. These are people who consider themselves leftists but probably don’t like anything about socialism except the gulags.’

Khachiyan says ‘a lot of these people are tyrannical narcissists’. ‘They are noncommittal, incapable of tolerating conflict or taking consequences. So they would rather have a system like polyamory where you kick that can down the road.’ Frost adds that many millennials ‘think they can eliminate jealousy… But sometimes you’re going to have bad sex, sometimes you’re going to be jealous. It’s not the end of the world.’

We move from jealousy to hate, and to the alleged epidemic of racism or even fascism often talked up by the left. Hate speech, we’re told, must be contained. Khachiyan takes a refreshingly liberal line: ‘You should be able to hate and hatred should be protected, as long as it doesn’t spill over into physical violence.’ ‘There’s this idea that we live in a white supremacist country when we fundamentally don’t’, says Khachiyan. She mentions antifa, the self-styled anti-fascist group that, since our conversation, has hit the headlines for beating up a right-leaning journalist in Portland. ‘Antifa have manufactured a threat to have some semblance of an identity’, she says. ‘All these people who say they are anti-fascist don’t know what it means to be persecuted.’

Frost and Khachiyan have a Marxist understanding of race. ‘We invented race to justify exploitation’, says Frost. ‘Splitting people on the basis of race was used to morally justify slavery… Racial discourse was created after hyper-exploitation.’ But ever since, argues Frost, ‘When we tried to not be racist, we ended up using the same framework’, which today also lives on in identitarian form. ‘All “race” is, is that some people don’t sunburn. That’s the entirety of racial difference.’

But how much can Marxism really illuminate today’s mad world? ‘Twitter call-out culture’, Frost concedes, ‘has no Marxist explanation. It makes no sense economically or even logically.’ Marx cannot account for a ‘social phenomenon where you rat out your closest friends’ and ‘describe them as reactionary’: ‘Why would you do that? Of course it will be bad for you.’

While there are plenty of woke types queuing up to ‘call out’ Frost, Khachiyan and their collaborators – even accusing them of being Nazis – let’s hope the dirtbag left can resist being ‘cancelled’ altogether. Voices like these, challenging woke orthodoxy and standing up for traditional left values, are needed now more than ever. Here’s to the dirtbags.

Fraser Myers is a staff writer at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on Twitter: @FraserMyers.

#marxism #dirtbag left #chapo trap house #interview #Amber A’Lee Frost #Anna Khachiyan #cancel culture #callout culture #sjw #liberalism #neoliberalism #silicon valley

9 notes · View notes

violetsystems · 6 years

Text

#personal

There’s always been a very strange stigma attached to morning people or people who enjoy getting up before anyone else. Lately morning has been a very clear divider between me and parts of society that exacerbate personal woe. The idea that I wake up super happy and joyful about looking puffy and famished is an American myth that died hard with international travel. Jumping back and forth twice a year between Asia and America by myself was jarring enough to my body clock. Some of the most peaceful times were spent jet lagged in my kitchen after a trip sorting through my things. The permanence of home was a safety net where I could reflect about all these adventures. Mostly I kept them to myself. Nobody is ever awake at five in the morning to tell. Which is why for almost two years I’ve spent writing and reflecting here after a plausibly good night’s sleep alone. Every weekend. You could set your watch to it. My body is already waking up an hour earlier. I take advantage of the daylight in more ways I’m conscious of. But the truth is there are a lot of people who wouldn’t do the same. Year after year. Waking up this early and trying to seize something unexplainable. Where does all this inspiration and motivation actually come from? There’s people of course that inspire me to challenge myself. I find I’m only as successful as I can rely on myself and my own clear headed decisions. Lately people keep telling me they envy my ability to stay away from certain aspects of life in doses. I’ve seen a lot of my failures in twenty twenty. Hindsight has always been harsh when you apply the criticism solely on yourself. But I find when I take the blame for something I learn to understand the causes. What stands in the way of most of what I’ve tried to do these days is people. And more often than not, a lot of those people never wake up as early. The functional truth of my life lately is that people ask way too many questions. Those questions are filled with expectations that don’t respect my privacy or what I chose to keep intimate. Secrets are kept for many reasons. You have governments nervous about encryption. You have contracts nervous about your image. You have people that care deeply enough to dance around the details. And the details about life are painfully real to me as I face them day after day with unrelenting confidence. I don’t say much. I go about my business and get paid while doing it. I run to the Nike store and get there at ten when they open. The manager asked me if what I used the apps for. I told him running and yoga. He commented that was a good look. So was waking up early to see if they had the new gyakusou collection.

Stigma gets attached to anything and everything in America. We’re a culture of freedom. Everybody has to have an opinion about everything and everyone. We identify with what we project. And we imprint our worst fears onto people without ever letting them defend themselves. Every time I apply moisturizer to my face I’m flashing back to American Psycho. I used to be more self conscious of my lifestyle. That is until I started to look at the sustainability of it. Rhythm and pacing is crucial to most of what I’ve been able to do. Stigma is what gets in the way most every time. The very word is rooted in Christian culture which refers to the stigmata on Jesus’s body left after the crucifixition. A more secular definition would be disgrace associated with a particular quality. We judge everything before it happens. We squeeze out every possibility until we can be sure. And in the process we apply unneeded and unwarranted pressure on every day people trying to live their lives. We do this in varying degrees of persecutation. And we always find a way to retaliate. To get even. To exact revenge. To be consumed with anger and fury instead of saving your energy for something better. I’ve spent years fighting for an environment that erases the unrealistic stigmas in America. That to me was just the default definiton of growing up punk. The unconscious stigma attached to my life has always been that I’ve been good enough to be ignored. So there has always been a sort of bitterness with knowing just how disingenuous people are. I got into street wear at a very genuine time of my life. My entire world had come crashing down from the end of a ten year relationship. I spent a decade in a monogamous partnership that crashed and burned with infidelity. It hurt a lot to be betrayed. And my life changed forever. I moved on. It took years. In 2011 a DJ friend introduced me to Popeye magazine and Japanese street wear. He had travelled often to Tokyo to run the marathon and had just turned me onto Undercover and Jun Takahashi. I had been running in makeshift sweatpants and used nike gear all over the neighborhood. The police would often follow me on occasion wondering if I was lost or homeless. Years later I would run in the park draped in Gyakusou and they’d still follow. This time they must have thought I worked for the CIA. Nowadays everybody knows at least one thing. I’m one of those fucking morning people.

A certain amount of confidence comes from proving year after year no one would do what you do to seize the day. A certain amount of loneliness is to be expected to. Training these days is never about what I can prove to someone else. I’ve proven enough. Validation is an echo chamber at times. Challenging yourself and comparing your growth is very real. Especially if you track it year after year. Two years ago I was just starting to travel to New York. Two years later it seems like I’m planning the trip back on the way out. People see what I’m doing. People still don’t ask me any questions. They expect me to project my moves. Which to a certain extent I feel there’s a right and wrong way to drop hints about anything. Just like communication evolves to support encryption. There’s a real need for more privacy and intimacy there. Because at a certain point people’s opinions about what you do and your image can be particularly invasive. I should know because I’ve literally lifted myself out of the negative sludge of public opinion in this city year after year. The joke is you have to put on some kind of mask. I find myself more focused mentally on how I present myself especially with yoga these days. Just taking the time to breath correctly and correct my posture gives me a lot more options on how I present myself. Most of my problems over the years was people getting the wrong idea. And running away with it. People hallucinate your celebrity without ever including you. It’s bizarre. Years later you find people are hijacking your very lifelines of communication to talk over your silent semiotics. You develop new ones. Or you step right over them and assert yourself. American convenience dictates that if you aren’t nice and accommodating about everything you are a communist leftist with intent on destabilizing the government. One morning at a time. Last time I checked I have done absolutely nothing for this country other than tone up my muscles and my pores. Everybody seems to have an opinion about that these days. I write the cliff notes on tumblr every weekend. The only two people who I can be sure really understand it is me and the person I care about the most. There’s always this stigma attached to being vague. Like you and the rest of the world deserve to know what keeps me alive and inspired. Inspirational women in short. One in particular is my focus every morning when I wake up and figure out how to make things right. I did call my mom last night. There’s no stigma to staying home and doing that on a Friday night. There shouldn’t be a stigma attached to me writing about how much I love you. I said it on the internet. Just imagine me saying it in real life. No stigmas attached. <3 Tim

1 note · View note

themyskira · 6 years

Text

Wonder Woman: Earth One, Vol 2 - Part 2

Previously, Morrison’s Amazons are the same awful people we met in book one, now with added mind control. Diana wonders whether her mission might be easier if she just conquered the world and forced everybody to follow the Amazon way.

This time, Doctor Psycho the pickup artist gets his hooks into Wonder Woman.

Steve is test-piloting a cutting-edge experimental aircraft. He races Diana in her vagina plane, struggling to keep up with her. The effort of maintaining the speed causes Steve’s plane to explode, and Diana rescues him.

Steve tries to explain to Diana that the military’s top brass perceive her as a potential threat and that she needs to tread carefully.

Steve: And on that subject… you still planning on leading that big angry ladies march?

um, excuse you?

Big angry ladies march?

What was wrong with ‘women’s march’? Why did Morrison feel the need to colour this line with sexist language? Is he suggesting that Steve Trevor believes that women who take part in political protest are angry and hysterical? Or was he just so busy polishing off his Homeric meter that he didn’t even notice he was being a sexist arse?

Well, all of it goes in one ear and out the other, anyway. Diana just shrugs and goes, ‘welp, they can’t hurt me, and if they provoke us then we’ll just crush them, soooooo…’

The military asks for Diana’s help rescuing an American negotiator who was captured by terrorists while attempting to secure the release of a group of hostages in the Middle East. She gets another very cool outfit for the mission:

She saves both the negotiator and the hostages with ease, of course. Afterwards, back at a US military camp, she shares a bottle of whisky with the hostage negotiator.

He’s interested in discussing Amazon philosophies. Submission to loving authority as a model for all human relationships, for instance. Surely that would be dangerous, unless one could be assured that the authority was benevolent. “Well, of course,” says Diana blithely. “That’s why women are best placed to lead.”

He points out that she comes from a civilisation that practices eugenics and uses mind control technology. That, moreover, she’s an outsider who comes to this world from a place of hyperprivilege, with no understanding of the societies she’s trying to transform. “How can you hope to understand us, let along change us?”

(Those of you who’ve figured out who this guy is yet, please join me in facepalming over the fact that this evil slug of a human being has managed to talk more sense in one and a half pages than Diana has in the entire book.)

At one point he also asks her if she’s “ever thought about submitting to the loving authority of a man”, and somehow it doesn’t end with his face being punched in.

Before they part, they exchange contact details, agreeing to meet up again in DC. Diana tells him, “I’ve enjoyed our adventure together, Dr Zeiko.”

Yeah. This is Morrison’s take on Doctor Psycho. While I have problems with the execution, it’s actually a reasonable base concept. Whereas Marston’s Doctor Psycho uses hypnosis, mediums and ectoplasmic illusions to deceive and manipulate people, Morrison’s Zeiko is a pickup artist-type who works in psy-ops, employing a combination of scientific techniques, staged simulation and good old-fashioned manipulation to identify and get inside people’s defences, and destroy them.

Zeiko: ‘Wonder Woman’. They’re all just the same. < by dr-psycho > If I had just one piece of advice, one precious axiom to impart to you losers, cucks and gamma dudes, it would be THAT singular nugget. Beautiful, smart, wise, powerful, principled. They’re all just the same.

There are a few things I like about this: it reimagines Doctor Psycho’s misogyny and his manipulation of women in a form that is both recognisable and relevant to today. Whereas the original is a cartoonishly depraved gremlin -- an exaggerated, ableist caricature of a misogynist who hates women because they laughed at his ugliness — this Psycho cuts a far more recognisable figure: a white, able-bodied, heterosexual man who abuses his position of power to manipulate women.

But it bothers me that Zeiko’s ability to control people draws so liberally from the pickup artist’s playbook. According to Morrison,

We really went deep with it in the sequences between Psycho and Diana. When he sits and talks to her, it's based on the actual script used by pickup artists with the movements he makes, he mirrors all her gestures, he makes this 'casting off' gesture every time he wants her to perceive something as negative. It was really tightly worked out to follow those scripts.

Pickup artist tactics are rooted in thoroughly debunked pseudoscience like neurolinguistic programming (which is specifically referenced as Zeiko’s field of expertise) and evolutionary psychology. Yes, these are men who prey on and seek to manipulate women, but let’s not afford them any more power or legitimacy than they’re due. By basing Zeiko’s power over women in his mastery of pickup artist theory, and ultimately having him successfully use these tactics to overpower Wonder Woman, Morrison appears to validate some very toxic, pseudoscientific ideas.

In the same interview quote above, Morrison says that he sought to draw awareness to this kind of predatory behaviour:

Part of it was my revenge on having seen [this level of manipulation] actually done to someone. You can see the narcissist type, the sociopath type and how easy it is for them get to people -- people you wouldn't even imagine could be that manipulated by anything. It's a very real problem for young people in the world. There are people out there who are quite willing to use these techniques so I kind of wanted to draw attention to it, but, you know, on the Wonder Woman scale where the guy is a supervillain. I wanted to put these paragon of femininity up against that threat and see how she deals with it -- because even paragons of intelligence and grace I've watched having real trouble with people like this. Here are the techniques. If you see anyone using these techniques against you, the warnings should go off.

Here’s where I think he goes wrong with this.

First, as I mentioned, he attributes Zeiko’s ability to get in Diana’s head directly to bullshit pickup artist theory and neurolinguistic programming. Morrison’s intention may have been to express disapproval and alert readers to predatory behaviour, but he’s nonetheless presenting pickup artist tactics as highly effective, affording them a level of power that’s neither warranted nor constructive.

This is where I think it’s helpful for Doctor Psycho to retain a measure of supernatural power. A writer can still incorporate manipulative and gaslighting behaviours and phrases that are familiar to women into such a character. His uncanny abilities may afford him a greater capacity to inflict wide-scale hurt than the average abuser, but at his core are attitudes and behaviours that many people will recognise. And rather than deriving a near-mystical ability to control women from the vile, pseudoscientific ideas of a real-life community of misogynists, he’s just another creep who abuses his power over people. It might not be a power that exists in our world, but it’s power all the same.

That’s the first problem. The second is that — spoilers — Zeiko kind of wins.

Well, okay, he does end up being captured by the Holliday Girls and sent to Amazonia for brainwashing, so it doesn’t end great for him personally. But ultimately, he achieves everything he sets out to do in the book. He plays Diana like a fiddle, he gloats over her weakness, and she only breaks free of him when it’s far too late to change anything. She is never allowed to triumph over him.

At the start of the book, Zeiko says he’s never met a woman that he couldn’t break, and this book proves him right. His methods never fail.

So at this point, it’s clear that the entire rescue mission was a set-up. General Darnell, we discover, has been ordered to go along with it, and he’s not happy. Even less so when he’s introduced to the secretive Project A.R.E.S.

It’s basically exactly what it sounds: a project aimed at producing highly advanced war machines capable of taking on even the Amazons. Max Lord shows Darnell the fruits of their labours: the Armed Response Environment Suit. It’s now being produced en masse.

A horrified Darnell confides in Steve what he’s seen.

Next, we cut to Amazonia. After some gratuitous perving on naked ladies as Hippolyta and Nubia bathe in the Fountain of Youth, Mala arrives with a bound Paula in tow. The temple was found vandalised again with a swastika, and Paula was found lurking in Hippolyta’s chambers. When asked to explain herself, Paula will only say that she yearns for Diana, her idol. Okay...?

Hippolyta consults the Fates, and returns to Nubia and Mala looking grave and resigned. It’s not explicitly stated, but it’s clear from her reaction that her death has been foretold.

Hippolyta: How I love you, Nubia. Your skin, your mind, your great heart. The time we’ve spent together. And Mala, sisters both, and lovers, and my friends ‘bove all. I’ll miss you all so much.

wait, Hippolyta is sleeping with her daughter’s ex-girlfriend? That is nasty.

(In fact, come to think of it, Nubia was originally Diana’s twin sister. Just to add an extra layer of ick.)

Back at Holliday College, Etta and Steve warn Diana that the government is out to get her, and Zeiko is part of it.

Steve: They’re onto you, Diana. Powerful, dangerous people. Think about how you’ve changed since you started hanging around with this Zeiko dude.

How she’s changed?

No, piss off, mate. Diana literally has not appeared on page since her first meeting with Zeiko. It’s not just that we’ve seen no change in her behaviour, we haven’t seen her at all. I realise that you’re working with limited page space, but if your characters are going to stage an intervention, then you need to at least make a token effort at seeding the warning signs.

Steve tells Diana that Zeiko is deep into psy-ops, mind control, neurolinguistic programming (which is NOT A FUCKING THING), the works. Diana laughs and surmises that Steve simply doesn’t like Zeiko.

Later, Diana hangs out with Zeiko at the firing range, inviting him to shoot at her while she deflects the bullets with her bracelets. When they’re done, Zeiko appears troubled. He feels sick to his stomach, he says! That he — who hates weapons — could so easily talk himself into firing a gun at a woman! At somebody who means so much to him!!

Yeah, Morrison is going there.

Zeiko kisses Diana, then immediately leaps back apologising, saying he doesn’t know what got into him. Diana’s just amused — is that what the men of this world consider a kiss? She decides to school him with a real kiss, and Zeiko bemoans that he feels like he has no control over his actions when she’s around. Oh god, he’s so confused! He’s saying all the wrong things! He doesn’t usually get close to anyone, not like this! He needs to prove that she can trust her!!

ugh, god, this is gross.

Anyway, it ends in Zeiko, under the power of the Lasso, revealing just enough of the truth to serve his ends: that the US military thinks she’s an advance scout for an Amazon invasion, that he was brought in to compromise her and uncover her weaknesses, and that he’s tried to tell them there’s a better way.

Diana runs off, devastated. Zeiko gloats.

< by dr-psycho > Target achieved. Wonder Woman emotional meltdown. Beat that, boys! God, I love my job. She’ll take off in her magical jet. No one treats a princess this way! But she’ll blame HERSELF — superior types always think it must be THEIR fault things went wrong. It has to her her fault for misunderstanding the rules of “Man’s World”. What will she have to do to be treated with the respect she deserves? This princess, this super-10. This prey of the day. What will she give up? How can she prove to me she’s for real…? At her speed… I give her 20 minutes. She gives me 19. Pushover.

PS, we’re eighty-odd pages into the graphic novel, and thus far Diana has done nothing but hit a baseball and get yanked around by the villains.

#comics talk #wonder woman: earth one

11 notes · View notes