#I will very rarely be interested in serial killers/a particular crime and this is a just one of those times I guess 🤷🏽‍♀️

[autisticandroids]

Okay so this was a while back but im preety sure you had mentioned an au of yours where dean is a serial killer and cas successfully stalks him but i don't think you talked about it more than that and i just really want to hear a bit more bc that idea sounds so tastefully fucked up

okay so. weeks later i finally end up answering this ask. it inspired this post btw. anyway spn is a show that's like. all about justifications, as i said in the post inspired by this ask. it's about having no choice and doing what you have to do. and like there is the phantasy embedded in it, a phantasy that is both indulged and punished. but most importantly it's justified. the monsters are super strong to show how brave our heroes are for fighting them, the main characters let out great wails of grief every time their lady loves are violently ripped from them (even though now they are free to do whatever they want), the narrative twists to show our heroes as correct whatever they do. the fantasy (of being allowed to enact violence, of being free from feminine "control," of being right) comes first. the material construction of the universe of supernatural comes afterward. whatever the fantasy is, the universe of supernatural will provide material conditions to justify its acting-out.

and what this means is that our protagonists, dean in particular, are constantly doing just horrific things, which in any other circumstance would be unconscionable. but the universe of supernatural provides justification for these acts. the point of my serial killer au which i think about so so so much is to ask the question: what if these justifications melted out from under their feet? what if dean was left holding nothing but a lie and the weight of everything he's done?

therefore, the premise of my au is such (under the cut because this baby is long):

john and mary winchester, in the mid seventies, joined a doomsday cult known as the men of letters. the men of letters were rather unusual for a doomsday cult, in that they believed that the apocalypse could be prevented by human behavior. this started as correct living, correct worship, yadda yadda, the kind of behavior and thought control that cults are known for, but with the justification of: if you don't do this, the world will end. eventually, this escalated to human sacrifice. the men of letters managed to untraceably kill two homeless people in the late seventies. but they eventually fell apart. however, a month after john and mary left the men of letters (mostly john's choice, mary still believed), mary died in a house fire. john took it as a sign from god that actually, the men of letters were right, and the world would end unless john himself did something about it. so he took some of the (intensely numerological) theology of the men of letters. and he worked out his own formula. and he applied it to the yellow pages. and started ritualistically killed people to prevent the apocalypse, with his two sons in the back of the car.

now, obviously, this is some kind of grief induced temporary madness on john's part, shaped by the mental abuse he suffered in the men of letters. but the thing is, once you've killed a couple of people to prevent the apocalypse. well. there's this thing called the sunk costs fallacy. john wasn't gonna question his own beliefs after that.

and he raised his boys to believe it, too, or at least he raised dean to. they didn't tell sam what they did until he was twelve, and sam didn't buy it, tried to call the cops on them several times but in the end, they always prevented him. eventually sam ran off to stanford, where he now lives under a cloud of guilt that he's too loyal to his family to rat them out.

john died a few years back of a heart attack, but dean is convinced it's because he messed up a ritual two weeks before it happened, so it pushed him further into this belief system.

dean's killings (and john's before him) are ritualistic and distinctive, obviously the same killer each time. but they happen anywhere in the united states, seemingly at random, there are inconsistent amounts of time between each one (sometimes as short as days, sometimes as long as years), and there is no particular victim profile. obviously, since our killers are following an arcane mathematical formula to make their choices for them, but the police don't know that.

castiel novak is an unemployed shut-in with a small inheritance which he's living off of, a cryptography degree, and an obsession with all things morbid. he spends most of his time on the reddit true crime forums, playing amateur sleuth. by complete chance, he happens to recognize one of the symbols frequently used in corpse displays by the so-called sioux falls satanic slaughterer (so named because the first time three of his victims were in the same part of the country, it so happened that they were all in sioux falls, south dakota. this was in the late eighties.) as being mostly only used by a little known cult group called the men of letters, which dissolved in the mid eighties.

he only notices this because, as a teen, he had a special interest in cults and fringe religious groups. the men of letters weren't a particularly notable or well known phenomenon; they were small, and a lot like every other cult that formed during the seventies cult boom. (no outsider ever heard about the human sacrifice; there were rumors, of course, but they were garbled, sensationalized, and mixed up with satanic panic fodder.)

(the men of letters' two sacrifices were nothing particularly romantic or fantastical. they first lured panhandler josie sands back to their compound with promises of food and a warm bed when she admitted she couldn't get a bed at a shelter, and was thinking of getting caught shoplifting just so she could be under a roof in the county jail. the men of letters' leader, a man who took on the name alistair, forced his inner circle to dress in the ceremonial black robes he had given them when he initiated them into his nearest and dearest, and which his wife had sewn out of old bed sheets and dyed black with home made oak gall dye. these robes still left black smudges on the wearer's skin occasionally if they sweated too much. josie was laid, bound, on the altar, a slapdash thing constructed over the course of two days from scrap plywood and a couple of milk crates. a rich red tablecloth purchased at macy's for $3.99 hid its ugliness and gave it grandeur. alistair attempted to kill the struggling miss sands by bringing a sharpened kitchen knife down on her bosom and piercing her heart, but, having never killed a human or even slaughtered an animal before, was unaware of the problem presented by the human ribcage. after rather ineffectually poking at the area beneath sands' bosom with his knife while she shrieked in pain and terror for about ninety seconds, alistair tried a different tack, and slit her throat, which worked just fine, and she bled out quite nicely. the second and final victim of the men of letters was a local vagrant named larry ganem, an older gentleman who walked with a limp. he was lured back to the compound in approximately the same manner as sands, but instead of being bound, he was fed stew laced with sleeping pills. even if alistair hadn't slit his throat, he wouldn't have woken up. it's actually arguable whether he was still alive at time of sacrifice; mary winchester (eight months into her first pregnancy), who, as a member of the inner circle, was in attendance, actually tried to take ganem's pulse as he lay on the altar (now covered by a different tablecloth; the red one had turned stiff with sands' blood and been subsequently burned) and found nothing, so it is entirely possibly only sands' death can be directly laid at alistair's feet, and ganem's is the fault of mrs. ellen harvelle, who prepared the laced stew. regardless, these two deaths are lessons in the nature of human evil: it is very rarely skilled, suave, or smooth. it's often slapdash, half-hearted, and just plain incompetent. but that makes it no less grisly. alistair may have begun to drink his own kool-aid, as it were, and escalated this far out of genuine belief that the apocalypse was coming and it was up to him to stop it, but it is far more likely that he sensed the imminent collapse of his little empire, and wanted to bind his subjects to him through the horrors of shared guilt, considering two lives a small price to pay for the continued loyalty of his inner circle. and the tactic worked: the men of letters didn't start to collapse in earnest until almost four years later. perhaps if alistair had continued the killings, the men of letters could have lasted for far longer, maybe even up until the present day. but it seems that alistair, a psychiatrist by training and unused to violence, simply didn't have the stomach for it. unlike, say, john winchester, who before his time with the men of letters had done a two year tour in vietnam, during which he had killed three living, thinking human beings with the american government's go-ahead.)

anyway. castiel is the first person, ever, to make the connection between the men of letters and the sioux falls satanic slaughterer. and once that connection is made, castiel begins to research the men of letters far more in-depth. and he notices something: the theology of the men of letters was intensely numerological, filled with patterns, significant numbers, and even spiritual equations.

castiel thinks of the seemingly random selection of the slaughterer's victims, and has an epiphany.

he cracks all his fingers, and gets coding.

six months. it takes castiel six months to discover an equation that could fit the slaughterer's pattern. it's complex, but also clearly based on several of the men of letters' holy numbers, and accounts for every single one of the killings. it also suggests that there should have been two or three more deaths scattered across the years, but more than likely those did happen, it's just that they weren't reported as part of the slaughterer's portfolio.

but much more importantly, castiel's model can also make predictions. there will be two killings, fifteen days apart, in a city seven hours' drive away, six weeks from now.

so castiel waits. and he books a hotel room. and two months later, he's waiting outside 217 oak street when a shadowy figure climbs up a tree and lets itself into the upstairs window.

dean winchester is feeling particularly all alone in the world when he breaks into maisey banks' home (217 oak street). his father has been dead for half a decade, and he hasn't spoken to his baby brother for twice that. it's not like this whole grizzly saving the world business makes him a lot of friends. so once he's done killing maisey (which is easy, she was ninety three and dying of cancer anyway. she doesn't even wake up when he slits her throat) and arranging her corpse in the appropriate manner, with prayers and sigils, he turns around. and sees a man standing behind him.

smiling slightly.

as he watches dean gut this old woman.

dean freezes.

the man takes a step forward.

"you're very attractive for a serial killer who's been operating since the eighties."

dean is silent.

"family business, is it?"

silence continues.

"i'm not here to report you to police. i'm just here to see if my algorithm worked right."

and dean finally breaks his silence: "what the hell is wrong with you?"

what's fun here is that dean knows (or rather "knows") that he isn't a serial killer. so he finds what cas is doing, this amoral serial killer stormchasing, morally repugnant. because cas has no way of knowing he isn't a regular serial killer.

there's also the fact that that cas proceeds to flirt with him. aggressively. and follows him back to his motel.

but the thing is that dean is all alone in the world. and as cas continues trailing him around, he starts getting, well, flattered. and feeling a little bit less alone.

it doesn't take very long before they fall into bed. even if cas is an amoral stalker with a fetish for what dean considers a distasteful yet necessary vocation.

so. they fall into bed. they fall in love. they make a little life together, in dean's big sexy car. dean tries to explain to cas that he's saving the world. that these people's lives are a necessary price to pay. and cas seems to listen.

of course, castiel doesn't believe a word of it. but he's found that he likes dean. really likes him. and he realizes that the collapse of dean's belief system would destroy him.

so he sets about becoming as complicit in it as possible.

even to the extent where, when dean is hit by a car and ends up into the hospital a day before one killing is meant to take place, castiel agrees to take on the job. (he doesn't actually kill anyone, obviously. but he does use his extensive skill with computers to create three fake newspaper articles which make it look like he has.)

but five years later, something goes wrong. really, really wrong. dean miscalculates the formula. and by the time he checks his work, the actual date of the next kill, as demanded by the formula, has passed. in fact, so have three others. and the world didn't end.

dean collapses. he hyperventilates. all those people. all those people. for no reason. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people.

cas seems totally unfazed. dean stares at him in shock. but cas just takes dean in his arms, and whispers in his ear: "oh, dean, i never believed in the equation. i love you no matter what you've done."

and dean buries his face in cas' chest.

[vavuska]

CRUELLA, THE STORY OF A PUPPY SLAUGHTER (Part 2)

Here for part 1:

Part 1 - Summary:

In the previous part we saw how was originally described Cruella de Vil in Dodie Smith's 101 Dalmatians: a rich heiress, bossy, cruel toward animals, obsessed with fancy jewls, luxury and also fur coats. Cruella met Anita at school, they were in friendly terms, even if Anita described Cruella as a menacing student, expelled from school for drinking ink. Dodie Smith wrote that Cruella comes from a troublesome family: her ancestor was a serial killer, with the supernatural ability to summon storms and a tail (reference to Bram Stoker's Dracula and the devil). Cruella has strange eating habits (uses a lot of pepper, the Devil's spice) and is usually cold (as a corpse or a vampire). Cruella was so obsessed with fur to marry a furrier not for love but only for his job. Cruella's husband is weak and she is the dominant element in the couple, she also forced him to take her surname after their marriage.

We saw also the rapresentation of Cruella in 1961 cartoon version of 101 Dalmatians. Cruella is still a old friend of Anita. Her main colors are red (her loudy red car is the fist thing we see of Cruella) — expressing blood, anger, determination and passion — and green (she is always surrounded by nasty green smoke that comes from her cigarette) that rapresents envy, sickness and greed.

Her appearance is very particular, because she looks like a skeleton and her skin is very white - pale, very different from the healthy pink one of the other characters. She looks like a corpse, she looks sick in this 1961 version of 101 Dalmatians.

Her entrance is accompanied by a song, written by Roger, in which he anticipates the evil intention of Cruella and underlight the disturbing connotations of her surname (Count de Ville is one of Dracula's alias; Cruella de Vil is a pun name on “cruel devil”).

3 - Cruella in 1996

The 1996 live action of 101 Dalmatians the entrance of Cruella is anticipated by a sequence in which we heard a news London Zoo discovered the excoriated carcass of its prized 3-year-old female Siberian tiger, then the news reporter says that according to animal protection groups that monitor the international trade that a white Siberian tiger's fur is so rare that the offer of a pelt would surely draw the attention in contraband. And then the journalist ask “Who cold do something so horrible?”

Then enters Cruella. She wears veiled garment complete with Balenciaga-inspired extreme shoulders and floor-length black and white fur cape.

We saw this mysterious woman with veiled face and a long fur coat - we doesn't know she is Cruella yet - , exiting from her black and white 1974 Panther Deville, license plate “De Vil”. This version of the car is more closed to the book's one.

In Dodie Smith's book, Cruella's chauffeur-driven car is black-and-white striped, which Mr. Dearly describes as “a moving zebra crossing”, and Cruella boasts that it has the loudest horn in London, which she insists on sounding for the Dearly couple.

We saw Cruella shaking the ashes of her cigarette on the shiny and impeccable shoes of her vallet Alzonzo, while he tries to not look bothered by this lack of respect, and then we saw Cruella entering in a luxurious place called “House of De Vil”. Her red cigarette holder — switching from the turquoise the 1966 animated version favored — matched with her brilliant red lipstick, makes a great contrast to her black and white attire and also underlight the psychology of color typical of Disney villains: red is associated with malice, evil (hell and the devil), blood, danger, strength, power, determination and passion.

Now we have a sight of this long railway-like white hallway surrounded by exotic fur-clothes. Now we know she is a stylist and that she is maybe the one who cold be interested in the fur of the dead Siberian tiger.

A crowd of terrified / adoring employees hurry to greet the woman: “Good morning, Miss De Vil”.

Finally Cruella enters in her office and takes off her hat with veil, reveling her double-colored hair. She is Cruella De Vil in all her glory.

This sequence recalls openly the Devil Wears Prada.

This version of Cruella played by Glenn Close is much more human that the 1961 version. She is more charismatic too and also more fashionable. Her entrance is not as scary as the 1961 version, but shows her obsession for fur, her violation of the law and abuse on animals (also at those at risk of extinction) and her high level stylist house of fashion.

She isn't Anita's friend anymore, she is Anita's boss.

While walking to her office, Cruella meets Anita, played by Joely Richardson. She spots that Anita is working on a new model (no more white tiger stripes, but dalmatian's spots). Anita's design catches her eyes and interest, as well as Anita's dog, Perdi: they had a strange chat about Perdi's fur. That, knowing already the plot of the movie and the news details Roger and Pongo were hearing in the previous scene, well, this conversation sounds a lot disturbing.

Cruella: “Anita, darling.”

Anita: “Good morning, Cruella.”

Cruella: “What a charming dog.”

Anita: “Thank you.”

Cruella: “Spots?”

Anita: “Yes, she’s dalmatian.”

Cruella: “lnspiration?”

Anita: “Yes.”

Cruella: “Long hair or short?”

Anita: “Short.”

Cruella: “Coarse or fine?”

Anita: “l’m afraid it is a little coarse.”

Cruella: “Pity!”

Anita: “But it was very fine when she was a puppy.”

Cruella: “Redemption! We need to have a little girl talk. Come to my office. Bring the drawing.”

Ok. The next scene contains a very popular quote from this movie.

We are in Cruella's office: she has just invited Anita to talk about her design. Cruella wants a new coat and would love to wear the one that has just see at Anita's desk. Let's remeber she doesn't want to wear Anita's puppies already, for now is just an abstract idea about someone else's puppies, but they are still talking about Dalmatians' spots, compared with leopard ones and Anita seems to be perfectly fine. I don't think she knows already of Cruella's criminal way to obtain fur from animals at risk of extinction that her henchmen steal from Zoos, but Anita works for a woman who loves to wear REAL fur. I just can't imagine Cruella wearing any faux fur coat. This is not a crime, because it's legal wear fur coats made of mink, sable and ermine and such, but I found very weird that Anita is not having any suspect about Cruella's intention, because she is working on a model of striped tiger fur and Cruella lives for fur, worship fur. She just could not accept to wear faux fur.

However, Anita doesn't seem bothered at all by this strange talk about her dog's fur (yes, dog are not coats), but as a woman who works for fashion/fur industry and loves dogs she should know that in some parts of the world it is legal using cat and dogs to make clothes. I simply can't understand why she is not having any reaction at Cruella's strage interest about Perdi's fur.

Cruella and Anita talk about their work and Cruella makes lovely appreciation for Anita's drawings: she says she is talented and she doesn't want to risk to lose her pen.

That's now that Anita says she would not left Cruella's House for another job, she would left only if she decided to be a stay-at-home mother and wife. Well, no, she talks more genericly of "plans" with a hypothetical, for now, husband/boyfriend, and this could means everything, for example moving to another city, the assumption about marriage is an association made by Cruella that told us a lot of things about how producers would she looks, compared with the family-oriented Disney business plan. This is a very relevant issue we was also in her 1961 version: the losing comparison between Anita's family's oriented live choice and Cruella's — who is sigle, rich and indipendent — one. Cruella loves only her fur coats, while Anita have an husband, a simple house and also a lot of dogs. Cruella is alone, evil, ugly, wears a lot of make up, and not happy, while Anita is married, preatty but in a natural way and happy of her simple lifestyle with her husband and their dogs.

Cruella: “Now, darling, tell me more about these spots. l did leopard spots in the ‘80s. Well, dalmatian spots are a little different, aren’t they? Cozy. Classic.”

Anita: “Cuddly. Less trashy.”

Cruella: “Exactly! Do you like spots, Frederick?”

Frederick: “Oh, l don’t believe so, Madame. l thought we liked stripes this year.”

Cruella: “What kind of sycophant are you?”

Frederick: “Um, what kind of sycophant would you like me to be?”

Cruella: “Frederick… l’m beginning to see spots. What would it cost us to start again on next year’s line?”

Frederick: “Millions.”

Cruella: “Can we afford it?”

Frederick: “Well, yes--”

Cruella: “Pay it, darling. Now go away. l have to talk to Anita.”

(...)

Cruella: “Sit down, please. How long have you been working for me?”

Anita: “Uh, two years last August.”

Cruella: “And you’ve done wonderful work in that time.”

Anita: “Thank you.”

Cruella: “l don’t see you socially, do l?”

Anita: No.

Cruella: “And you’re not very well-known, despite your obvious talent.”

Anita: “Well, notoriety doesn’t mean very much to me.”

Cruella: “Your work is fresh and clean, unfettered, unpretentious. lt sells. And one of these days… my competitors are going to suss out who you are… and they’re going to try to steal you away.”

Anita: “Oh, no. lf l left, it wouldn’t be for another job.”

Cruella: “Oh, really?bWhat would it be for?”

Anita: “Well, l don’t know. Um, if l met someone, if working here didn’t fit in with our plans.”

Cruella: “Marriage.”

Anita: “Perhaps.”

Cruella: “More good women have been lost to marriage… than to war, famine, disease and disaster. You have talent, darling. Don’t squander it.”

Anita: “Well, l don’t think that it’s something we have to worry about. l don’t have any prospects.”

Cruella: “Thank God.”

Cruella makes a very cynical — but historically appropriate and also very sharable — critic about marriage. She was right, expecially because of what we saw about her 1960s version and how she is rooted in anti-feminism and in an open condamn of women's growing emancipation from the “traditional family role” imposed by media in the 1950s and 1960s, rapresented by 1961's Anita. However, Cruella is a cruel, evil villaness, so what she says to Anita is just a condamn made by Disney on women who choose career over family and love.

But, here, Cruella is not a friend of Anita who gives her a kind and appreciable life advice (if we ignore that Cruella is evil), Cruella is Anita's boss and doesn't want to lose a valuable and talented employee, so from this point of view her statement sounds a lot more controversial: women in the 50s lost their job if they got married, they were fired because most of the time bosses made them sign a contract with a marriage bar that allow employers to withdraw from the contract, so their contract would terminate on marriage, or said in a simple way: employers used to fire the soon-to-be wife, because it was clear for them that a wife should focus more on family and house care than on a career (that's because the soon-to-be wife is going to have an husband, the bread-giver of the family).

Nowdays, it's a bitter different, but women that want to have also a family are discriminated in workplaces: employers ask constantly in job interviews of they plan to have a family, if they have some relationships or if they are single. That's because employers would lose money paying for maternity leaves to their female employees that cannot work for some month. A young woman in fertile age with a stable relationship is a risk for a employer more than a young man in fertile age with a stable relationship. A newly mom is more closed to chose a lesser paid job or a part time one compatible to her family then a newly dad.

And also this quote, remember we are talking about the 90s, gives a clear flashback on women's unstable careers back then, but also puts in highlines some stereotypes about women who menage to balance both work and family: their quility of work is lower than before (this is said by Cruella to the new-mom Anita, we will see it below), they are not productive enough, they makes employers lose money, ecc. Nowadays, unlike in the 90s there is a constant svalutation of women who chose to put family first: they have no free time, they have no a social life (well, some shy single woman like Anita doesn't have a frizzy social life too), some kind of lifes are better than others (luxury and exotics vacation are better than reading books, dancing and going to bars with friends is better than playing sports or painting, ecc.) and if they dare to go out with their friends or take time for themselves and their hobbies, society is still ready to shame them for “not being good mothers”. That's not right: everyone should be able to live their life as they want, to have a frizzy social life or just enjoying a little time for themselves, without receiving criticism of any sort.

In the US the marriage bar, the practice of restricting the employment of married women was never explicitly eliminated by federal laws. Marriage bars were widely relaxed in wartime, during World War I and World War II due to an increase in the demand for labor in the assistance of war efforts (mostly because men were at the front).

Since the 1960s, the practice has widely been regarded as employment inequality and sexual discrimination, and has been either discontinued or outlawed by anti-discrimination laws. For example, in Italy marriage bar is declared illegal with law nr. 7 of 1963, that establishes the prohibition of dismissal of female workers for reasons of marriage (later extended also to male workers), and law nr. 1204 of 1971 prohibited dismissal of the working mother within the first year of the child's age (maternity bar).

The main reason of the bar is that married women were supported by their husbands, therefore they did not need jobs. However, marriage bars provided more opportunity for those whom proponents viewed as "actually" needing employment, such as single women or married men (needed to support the family).

Discrimination against married female teachers in the US was not terminated until 1964 with the passing of the Civil Rights Act.

Marriage bars generally affected educated, middle-class married women, particularly native-born white women. Their occupations were that of teaching and clerical work. Lower class women and women of color who took jobs in manufacturing, waitressing, and domestic servants were often unaffected by marriage bars.

However, some State law provides protection for people discriminated for their marital status. For example, in California, discrimination in employment based on marital status is against the law. Under the California Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), it is illegal for an employer to discriminate based on an applicant’s marital status or perceived marital status.

Under the FEHA, it is an unlawful employment practice for an employer to treat an applicant or employee differently based on the employee’s marital status. This includes: Refusing to hire or employ, Refusing to select a person for a training program, Firing, bearing, or discharging an employee, Discriminating against a person in compensation or in terms, conditions, or privileges of employment.

Marital status could refer to whether an individual is married or not, has been married, or plans to get married. This includes: Currently married, Divorced, Married to a same-sex partner or opposite-sex partner, Engaged to be married, Married but separated, Married but seeking a divorce, Widowed, Annulled marriage, Plans to get married someday, Plans to never get married, Other marital states.

Forty years ago, on October 31, 1978, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) was signed into law to prohibit discrimination in the workplace on the basis of pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions. Since its passage, more women have been able to continue working while pregnant; they have also been able to work further into their pregnancies without being forced to leave their jobs.

Pregnancy discrimination involves treating a woman (an applicant or employee) unfavorably because of pregnancy, childbirth or a medical condition related to pregnancy or childbirth. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) forbids discrimination based on pregnancy when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, such as leave and health insurance and any other term or condition of employment. Pregnancy discrimination also includes perceived bias when expectant employees experience subtly hostile behaviors such as social isolation, negative stereotyping and negative or rude interpersonal treatment such as lower performance expectations, transferring the pregnant employee to less-desirable shifts or assignments or inappropriate jokes and intrusive comments.

Claims of pregnancy discrimination filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) increased sharply in the 1990s and 2000s, and pregnancy discrimination remains a widespread problem across all industries and regions of the United States. Yet statistics show that in the last 10 years, more than 50,000 pregnancy discrimination claims were filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Fair Employment Practices Agencies in the United States.

So, yes. Disney here touched a lot of points in about two levels:

Family is more important than a career (successful, unmarried stylist Cruella is the evil one) and if you, a working woman, put career over family you are wrong. Nowday, we know that there isn't anything wrong about putting career first, but also we know that there isn't anything wrong also on putting family first or find a balance between the two. The important thing we should remember is that if we have not equality in working places, we should have not real free choices about our dream life;

It's perfectly fine excluding women in stable relationships or women with children from workplaces, because their work would not be at the level of a single woman, that can sacrifice her free time working late (employers exploitation logic deny free time);

Only child-free single women should be allowed to work, but only until they meet a soul mate (reminiscent of the old Disney penchant for old traditional gender roles).

However, returning at the plot, after that Anita reassures Cruella that she has no marriage prospects on the horizon, Cruella asked to Alonzo to bring Anita's drawings to her and the two women start to discuss about Anita's work, because Cruella want to add a long fur stole to Anita's original model: “I look wonderful in spots”, says Cruella,“we could do this in linen. It would be stunning in fur”. Then Anita remarks that would not be appropriate wearing fur in April, so Cruella give her famous lines: “But it’s my only true love, darling. l live for fur. l worship fur. After all, is there a woman in all this wretched world who doesn’t?” and then makes a joke that anticipates what she will plan to Anita's puppies more over in the movie: “lt is rather amusing, isn’t it? (...) If we make this coat... it would be as if l were wearing your dog.”

Then Anita and Perdi meet Roger (Jeff Daniels) and his dog Pongo, they fall in love and get married. Cruella doesn't like this. Obviously. We see a very enraged Cruella, wearing a black cellophane velvet with black and white coque feather trim, screaming against Anita's “betrayal”, when she read Anita and Roger's wedding publication on a newspaper.

Her anger toward Roger for stealing her best employee, maybe envy for Anita's love (well, it’s Disney), are promptly consoled, when her two henchmen bring her a little present from Mr. Skinner (Nomen omen, this surname fits perfectly creepy scared guy that work as furrier): it's the Siberian tiger found dead and excoriated in the London Zoo at the beginning of the movie. It was Cruella that wanted her fur and at the end she obtained it.

This Mr. Skinner (John Shrapnel) is a sadic taxidermist that enjoys killing and skinning animals alive, just like he did to the female white tiger at the London Zoo. He doesn't speak beacause when he was young, a dog attacked him by tearing open his throat and ripping out his vocal cords in the process, leaving him with a bad scar on his neck and is a little based on Mr. de Vil, Cruella's husband in Dodie Smith's book, but with the difference that Mr. Skinner has a more strong and menacing personality, while Mr. de Vil was weak and totally dependent by Cruella's desires.

Near the end of the movie, we will see in a crescendo of more explicit references to animal abuse, this charming version of Cruella de Vill ordering Cruella De Vil to Mr. Skinner to kill the dogs, because she fells that the police's suspicion are mounting against her: “poison them,” says Cruella “drown them, bash them on the head. Got any chloroform? I don't care how you kill the little beasts, just do it, and do it now!”

(See here for references: X and X)

In second relevant scene, Roger and Anita are out, walking the dogs, when Anita spots Cruella's car. In fact, as happen at the beginning the black and white 1974 Panther Deville is the first element we see in this scene and anticipate the entrance of Cruella. Recognizing the car, Anita runs to home and there she found Cruella. She welcomes in a very lovely way Anita in her own home, but she is very rude with Roger, who tries his best to be polite during the whole scene. Cruella then mocks Roger about his job (he is a videogame designer, a well paid job nowadays, but that in the 90s can just make snobbish people like Cruella turn up their noses, it's not the classical respectable professions “to make money”). Anita and Roger are just returned from their honeymoon and Creulla acts very nicely toward Anita, she says she missed her and their exchange of ideas, but she isn't happy when Roger announce they are going to have a baby, but Cruella remarks that “she has no use for children”, but she is very interested in Pongo and Perdi's puppies.

Unlike her cartoon version Cruella during the movie shows a lot of different, hiconic and fashionable outfits: at her visit at Anita and Roger's house, she wears a zebra coat dress with mink sleeves with matching Russian-inspired hat, red PVC boots that match with gloves in the same color and material (long fake red nails on each finger) and her red cigarette holder. Her dress also features a practical detail: a cigarette case paired with ammo cartridges as if they are military medals. The zebra stripes also give off the impression of bones or a rib cage for that extra goth vibe. Her lips are permanently stained the color of crimson, while her winged eyeliner adds to her high drama aesthetic.

Despite being set in contemporary London, everything about Cruella's closet defies a specific time period. It is as if she stepped in from the '60s of the original story combined with a century's worth of high fashion references. This is very logic: people have a lot of clothes and is natural for a very fashionable stylist to have and wear a lot of haute couture outfits.

Cruella: “And you must be Rufus.”

Roger: “No, it’s-- it’s Roger. And it’s a pleasure, Miss De Vil.”

Cruella: “What’s a pleasure?”

Roger: “Uh, making your acquaintance.”

Cruella: “Such a sweet thought. l wish l could reciprocate. Tell me, darling, you married him for his dog. Oh, darling, l’ve missed you so. l hate that you’ve taken leave.”

Anita: “But l’m still working. Um, you’ve been getting my sketches?”

Cruella: “Well, it’s not the same thing. l miss the interaction-- And what is it that you do… that allows you to support Anita in such… splendor?”

Roger: “l design video games.”

Cruella: “Video games? ls he having me on?”

Anita: “Oh, no, he’s very good at it. Um, and it’s a growing business.”

Cruella: “Those horrible noisy things that children play with on their televisions?Someone designs them? What a senseless thing to do with your life.”

Roger: “Oh, did Anita tell you the news? She’s going to have a baby.”

Cruella: “ls this true?”

Anita: “Yes.”

Cruella: “Oh, you poor thing! l’m so sorry.”

Anita: “We’re very excited about it, Cruella.”

Cruella: “You can’t be serious.”

Roger: “She is!”

Cruella: “Well, what can l say? Accidents will happen.”

Anita: “We’re having puppies, too!”

Cruella: “Puppies! You have been a busy boy. Well, l must say, that’s somewhat better news. l adore puppies! l’ll expect a decline in your work product.”

Anita: “Oh, l shouldn’t think so.”

Cruella: “Be sure to let me know when the blessed event occurs.”

Anita: “Oh, well, it won’t be for another eight months.”

Cruella: “The puppies, darling. l’ve no use for babies.”

Again here we have a remark of how horrible is Cruella as boss (she says to Anita she expect a decline in her work, and this would make her useless and less precious for Cruella's House) and as person: according to Disney people who doesn't like children are horrible and cruel, but there is a double meaning in Cruella's word: “Iʼve no use for babies” could mean both that she is not interested in maternity (that's perfectly legit, not all like children, are comfortable with them or just dream to have children someday) but also that she couldn't find any material use of babies, while for puppies we know she knows well how to use them: as material for a new fur coat.

The next scene is a classical recall to the original Disney cartoon of 1961: it's a stormy night and during the lightning flash for a few frames only, we see Cruella as a complete silhouette while few second after she opens the door and enters in Anita and Roger's house, with a big menacing smile on her face.

Pattern clashing will not only stand, but it is also encouraged, as the tiger cape with a leopard lining reveals. Paired with a leather skirt and tiger bodice featuring claw clasps

Again there is the recurring joke about Cruella misnaming Roger (Rufus, Rupert, Roland), if it's intentional (and this version of Cruella doesn't seem to left anything casual) it's a clear remark about how she dislikes Roger, the guy that stole her best designer, if it's not intentional, shows how Cruella find him irrelevant for her purpose at the point she doesn't even bother to rember his name to flatter him. Cruella is not polite or kind to Roger as she is with Anita. She doesn't need Roger, she need Anita and hates Roger for turning down Anita's value for her interests.

In this scene Cruella uses the same words she uses in the 1961 version (“How marvelous. How marvelous! How perfect... Oh, the devil take it! They’re mongrels! No spots! No spots at all! What horrible little white rats!”), but with something new that shows her uncaring nature (“All right, put them in a bag. l’ll take them with me now.”) and again mocks Roger for his “strange” and not prestigious job, when he firstly deny her offer for the puppies (“Oh? You’ve come into some money, have you? Did you design some silly game… that will drive the delinquent kiddies into frenzies of video delight?”).

However, compared to her 1961 alter ego, this Anita is more assertive and talks for herself, saying a determinated “no” to Cruella. Anita also starts to be a bit suspicious about Cruella's intentions (“But, Cruella, what would you do with 15 puppies?”). Roger and Anita this time seems to be equally determinated to refuse Cruella's business proposals.

Cruella crescent rage is underlight by the sounds effects of thunderclaps and it is Anita who says the final “no”.

“All right, keep the little beasts. Do what you like with them. Drown them, for all l care! You’re a fool, Anita! l’ve no use for fools. You’re fired! You’re finished! You’ll never work in fashion again! l’m through with all of you! l’ll get even! Just wait! You’ll be sorry, you fools! You idiots!”

When Roger and Anita refused to sell the puppies, Cruella's rage exploded as happened in the cartoon version (she screams and insults Roger and Anita, she tears the check into a thousand pieces and throws them in Roger's face), but let's remeber she is Anita's boss now: she uses her power and fired Anita's too, now that Anita and Roger refused to Cruella what she want, Anita become immediately useless. In fact Cruella has yet the design for her new outfit, from Anita needed only the puppies and if she cannot obtain them with good manner, well, as happened in the cartoon version, she will steal them.

In the previous part we saw how in the 101 Dalmatians of 1961, the car was the alter ego of Cruella, well, in this 1996 live action, her personality and her obsession is channeled into her outfits. Before it all goes to hell for the fashion maven, her rotation of zebra, leopard, and tiger print reveal she wasn't bluffing when she exclaimed of her fur obsession.

The costumes as designed by three-time Oscar winner Anthony Powell (co-designed with Rosemary Burrows) take Cruella's love of all things animal print to the extreme, delivering jaw-dropping results.

Cruella's entire life is a performance supported by her wardrobe, makeup, and hair. Cruella increases the level of red (it's the outburst of her bloody determination to obtain what se want, it's her mad passion for furs that determinated her end) during the climax with her fur coat of choice, which will soon be ruined by some farm animals. That smell is going to be hard to get rid of, and there aren’t any dry cleaners in prison.

As we saw in the previous part, Cruella's change of luck is well rapresented by her ruined clothes: she is going to jail, her life and career are over, her clothes aren't perfect and fancy anymore.

This happens also in the 102 Dalmatians live action of 2000: red clothing anticipates Cruella's criminal climax, while her ruined clothes are the sign of her defeat.

Nearly at the end of the movie, when her plans are finally reveled, Cruella wears a very unique red “flames” dress: the bodice is organza and silk satin beaded, sequined with a beaded net collar. The skirt is silk satin and nylon net beaded and sequined, lines in ostrich feathers. The headdress is tiered flames made of mirror, metal and painted glass. While her attire during her final metch with the Dalmatian is a black dress with large shoulders that recall Balenciaga, a black lather waist belt and a Gothic necklace with rubies, pearls and diamonds. The fur coat is floor-length black and red, while her headdress is a little hat with black and red feathers.

(See here for references: X and X)

4 - Cruella in Once Upon A Time

More recent version of Cruella can be founded in the ABC TV show Once Upon A Time. I will not make a summary of the themes of the TV because it has a very complex plot and that is not relevant for our comparison. So, let's say only that is a show who feature the adventure of Emma Swan, Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Prince Charming (Josh Dallas)'s daughter, and her biological son Henry (who was adopted by Regina Mills, the Evil Queen, now mayor of Story Brook) to break the magic curse that turned Enchanted Forest to a modern day Maine town called Storybrook, in which live all the characters from the popular fairy tales we know from Disney adaptations, unaware of their true identities.

Cruella is introduced in Season 4. The evil Rumpelstinskin (Robert Carlyle) recruited her and some other evil lady to regain his Dark Lord magic powers and take his revenge on the people of Storybrook as well as his happy ending.

The first we saw Cruella is at her ungodly hour: she is divorcing from a guy called Mr. Feinberg, strongly in debt and FBI is repossessing her husband's belongings, including her fancy fur coats, her big mansion in Long Island, New York, and her other goods. (See here for references: X)

Cruella plays little importance in the plot, until the Author is released from the book; unable to kill him herself, she pretends to threaten Henry Mills's (Jared S. Gilmore) life to force Emma (Jennifer Morrison) and Regina/Evil Queen (Lana Parrilla) to do so. However, Emma confronts her, not knowing the restriction the Author placed on Cruella, and magically blasts her off a cliff to her death.

The actress chosed to play Cruella de Vil is Victoria Smurfit and her appearance recalls more the 1961 version than Glenn Close. She wears a black night gown with paillettes or little pearls, long red PVC gloves and a white fur coat, but drives her black and white 1974 Panther Deville. However, during the show she is seen also wearing leather black pants, red boots matching with her gloves and several different types of fur coats. Cruella's phone case has dalmatian spot patterns.

Rumplestiltskin/Mr. Gold snarkily remarks that he recognized Cruella's scent as “desperation and gin”, somewhat suggesting or implying that Cruella is an alcoholic of sorts. Cruella later confirms this, having blamed her misfortunes on “bad judgment and gin”.

Unlike her other version, this Cruella has some a very limited magic powers, and has only been known to accomplish a few specific spells. Her most remarkable power is the ability to control any animal, whether it be a Dalmatian or a Dragon. The green smoke that comes out of Cruella's mouth when she uses persuasion magic on animals is designed to reflect Cruella's green and yellow cigarette smoke in Disney's 101 Dalmatians.

Her other main power is a very limited telekinesis: Cruella is able to enchant her car to drive itself around.

In the 5 Season, after her death, Cruella ends up in the Underworld, a purgatory run by the deity Hades (Gregory Germann). She makes a deal with Hades, who offer her to rule Underworld in his absence and help trap the heroes there. Delighted with the idea of getting to torment souls for eternity, Cruella agrees to the deal. This makes even more evident the similarities with the goddess Hela from Norse Mythology, as both ruled the underworld and have half-black half-white hair.

However, the most important episode about Cruella is “Sympathy for the Devil”, in which we learn about her true story.

"Sympathy for the De Vil" Season 04, Episode 18

In 1920s England, a young and blonde Cruella De Vil (played by Milli Wilkinson as child and Victoria Smurfit as adult) is being mistreated by her mother Madeline (Anna Galvin) as she instructs her Dalmatians to chase her daughter, and is locked in the attic in the same setting that resembles the 1979 Gothic novel Flowers in the Attic by V. C. Andrews. The room where Cruella is locked up is filled with her mother's dog statuettes and dog show trophies. Fast forward to several years later, and that a reporter, who is revealed to be the Author (Patrick Fischler) but is using an alias by the name of Isaac Heller, is paying a visit to the home pretending to seek out a story after having seen Cruella from the attic, only to have Madeline warning him to stay away. Isaac returns and helps Cruella escape from the attic. He then takes Cruella out for a date that includes dinner and dancing. Cruella reveals to Isaac that the reason she was kept in the attic was that she witnessed her mother kill her father and her succeeding husbands; Isaac then reveals to Cruella that he was more than just a reporter and has the ability to use his pen and ink to create magical stories. Isaac proposes that they run away together, and uses his quill and ink to give Cruella her persuasion powers to control animals.

(See here for references: X, X, X and X)

However, for Isaac, his future with Cruella would later take a unique twist that will put his future in danger. When Madeline pays a visit to see him, she tells him that Cruella had lied to him about what actually happened to her husbands: as child Cruella killed her own father, Madeline's first husband, by putting a poisonous flower in his tea. Cruella was a troubled child and her parents had hoped she would grow out of her disturbing behavior. But after Cruella murders her father, her mother fears that Cruella's murderous tendencies will get worse and will become a full fledged serial killer. Not wanting anyone else to get hurt or killed by Cruella and not wanting her daughter to go to prison, Madeline had no choice but to lock her Cruella away from the outside world and keep her close to try to snap Cruella out of her disturbed mind. However Madeline's intentions were in vain as Cruella ended up poisoning her next two husbands. Terrified that Isaac will set her daughter free and start killing more people, Madeline warns Issac to stay away from her, because she is dangerous and can not be saved, while Isaac doesn't believe her, Madeline tells Isaac that Cruella takes everything someone loves and destroys it and tells him to stay away from her or he will suffer the same fate as her two husbands and lose all he holds dear.

(See here for references: X)

When Madeline returns home, Cruella was ready for her, and eventually kills her mother by controlling her Dalmatians and commanding them to attack her.

Afterwards, Isaac discovers that Cruella has stolen his pen, and goes back to her house to find out that Cruella used her ability to control animals to make her mother's pet Dalmatians turn against her and rip her to shreds, before Cruella herself slaughtered the Dalmatians and made a fur coat out of them.

«Some people struggle not to be drawn into the darkness. But ever since I was a little girl, I've said... "Why not splash in and have fun?"», says Cruella to an astonished Isaac.

Horrified, Isaac makes a dash for the pen to stop her, but during a struggle the magic ink is spilled onto Cruella. She accidentally ingests some and the ink shows her true colors. As Cruella is about to kill him, Issac uses his powers as the Author to make it so that Cruella can never kill anyone ever again by writing it down on a piece of paper "Cruella De Vil can no longer take away the life of another." As he leaves, Cruella tells him she's not done.

Cruella kept this secret, as intimidation would still work for her needs.

This episode have a lot of Disney reference to the old 1961 version of 101 Dalmatians:

Madeline's car is similar in design and color to Cruella's car from One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

The song that Cruella hears on the radio is a jazz instrumental version of the song "Cruella De Vil", from One Hundred and One Dalmatians.

Ink spills on Cruella, just like Cruella spilled ink on Roger Radcliffe and Pongo in the movie. (One Hundred and One Dalmatians, 1961)

When Cruella uses persuasion magic, the magic comes out of her mouth in the form of green smoke, which is designed to reflect the green and yellow cigarette smoke that Cruella puffs in the movie. (One Hundred and One Dalmatians, 1961)

This 1920s version of Cruella de Vil we see in Once Upon a Time is inspired by Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Interestingly, in "Sympathy for the De Vil", Isaac can be seen reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby. While he is captive in Mr. Gold's cabin, Isaac reads F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. And largely recall what we already saw of Cruella's original version in the book by Dodie Smith: Cruella is a cruel serial killer. She is smart and manipulative, shows no empathy and emotions and uses people for her own needs. She uses Dalmatians as her own weapons to take her revenge on her mother: she turned her own dogs against her and finally removes the last obstacle to her own freedom. Is important to notice that Cruella slaughters and skins the Dalmatians to create a new dalmatian fur coat for her own, that wears victoriously under Isaac horrified eyes. The Dalmatian fur coat is her trophy. Killers like to take trophies and souvenirs from their victims. Keeping some memento — a lock of hair, jewelry, piece of clothing, newspaper clips of the crime — helps prolong, even nourish, their fantasy of the crime or to relive the crime over and over in their minds. Cruella at the end fully reveals herself as the serial killer she is.

When Cruella drinks accidentally Author's ink that transforms her hair black and white, is another reference to the novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith, in which is said that Cruella used to drink ink as a child. The dress Cruella is wearing at the jazz club is the dress Bérénice Bajo wears in the the famous 2011 comedy-drama film The Artist. Also the dancing scene between Cruella and Isaac recalls the one between Bérénice Bajo and Jean Dujardin, when play the role of actors Peppy Miller and George Valentin filming a ball scene for a mute movie.

Conclusion

As we saw, all the version of Cruella that were developed time by time, still share the characteristics of a sadic, cruel villaness.

Glenn Close version of Cruella doesn't care about animals' lifes, doesn't care about workers rights or other person's life projects. She uses creepy hanchmen to obtain what she wants, she steals and plot the death of even rare animals for their fur. She uses and manipulates people.

Victoria Smurfit's Cruella is a real serial killer. She is selfish, cunning, manipulative and the violence against animals is just a moment on her murderous revenge on her mother: she used Madeline's pretious dogs to kill her and then kept their skins as souvenir, as serial killers do.

There's no doubt that all those versions of Cruella are evil and Disney simply can not create any positive emotional connection with a woman who murders dogs. It's simply impossible to explain why Cruella hates dog in a way that can justify abuse toward animals. That is why this Cruella movie with Emma Stone is a huge mistake.

As conclusion, I will borrow again the words of composer Bill Lee from the 60s animated version of 101 Dalmatians to say what I think of trailer with Emma Stone as Cruella:

This vampire bat, this inhuman beast

The world was such a wholesome place until

She ought to be locked up and never released

Cruella, Cruella de Vil

[voicedaily]

VOICE4 Interview with The Writer, Ma Jiwon

-The impression of successfully ending up to season 4?

I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank the viewers who watched Season 4 of 'Voice'. This season seems to be the season where I thought the most about 'how can I make a more developed and meaningful drama?' In addition, after a long deliberation, the ending decided to connect Kwon-joo Kang, Derek Jo and Dong Bangmin from season 4 with the characters Bang Jesoo and Gardness Lee from season 2-3. It was the ending to expand the voice universe until season 5, and I was worried about the reaction inside, but I felt really relieved and grateful that the viewers seemed to have responded. Since the season system is planned over a long period of time, I think that meaningful results can be achieved when all the production crews have a long breathing and run with one mind. In particular, this season 4 is even more precious and grateful because, despite the difficult situation of the COVID-19 pandemic, all the production crew 'considered and communicated' and finished happily until the end.

-What message did you want to convey through Season 4?

Season 4 of 'Voice' took the theme from the crime rate data on the increase in abuse and violence within the family amid the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In fact, after season 3, family crimes (violence between families, child abuse, etc.) are the most frequent and quiet crimes around us. In particular, I wrote this with a sincere hope that it will be an opportunity to think about the reality of child abuse that occurs frequently recently, but does not get better easily, and to realize that the person we need to listen to the most is our family.

Also, since family crime is a sensitive issue, I thought a lot with the director on how to deliver it to the viewers without discomfort. In the end, I worked on the script with the belief that "if we make it with sincerity, viewers will recognize it," and I think it was realized well thanks to the director's humanistic directing and the actors' passionate performances. In particular, after the ending of episode 14, there were many viewers who recognized the feelings of the production team, so I was really grateful. Thanks to the viewers who listen to what 'Voice' wants to say, I think 'Voice' can continue the season system.

-What did you expect from Song Seung-heon following Jang Hyuk and Lee Jin-wook?

If actor Jang Hyuk and actor Jin-wook Lee were 'symbols of a ruthless macho detective with pain', actor Song Seung-heon has a soft and gentle image, so he is an actor who suggested casting because it fits perfectly with the character of Derek Cho, who does not lose his dignity and pride as a human being and a police officer under any circumstances. In fact, in a meeting before filming, I told actor Song Seung-heon that it could be a tricky character that needs to be attractive while avoiding all the strengths of the male lead character from seasons 1, 2, and 3. In addition, the former child abuse victim who was adopted by the US police is not an easy one.

Nevertheless, actor Song Seung-heon willingly took on the challenge and is sincerely grateful for playing the best detective Derek Joe. In fact, Derek Joe is not a detective who runs blindly in front of the scene, but a person who knows how to comfort people even in the midst of an incident. The action was also expected, but it did so much better than expected. Under the judgment of the martial arts director that Derek Jo, an adopted child born with pain in Korea, would have played a lot of popular sports in the United States, professional wrestling, judo, and Kravma were crafted to subdue opponents in an instant with techniques. do. In particular, I heard that he impressed the scene with his passionate acting that digested a number of actions without a stand-by, such as climbing up the railing on the second floor of the dog kennel without a wire prepared in advance at the time of filming, or collided with a car. I wanted to show that the consideration, sacrifice, and leadership of Derek Cho, played by Song Seung-heon, are the charms of this season's male protagonist.

In addition, child abuse is a crime that is serious enough to say that it leaves a trauma that is difficult to heal, and it is a crime that our society must work together to eradicate. What I ultimately wanted to draw through Derek Cho was a good will to overcome the wounds of the past without being engulfed in the wounds of the past, unlike the people of the East, who became trapped in their own wounds. (The setting to become a principled police officer instead of direct revenge on the adoptive father was also the intention)

-Lee Hana, who is active in the 4th season, must have many things to praise.

Hana below is very clear and warm. Because it contains all the tendencies that a voice profiler should have, there would probably be no 'voice' without Lee Ha-na. Throughout season 4, he is an actor who not only perfectly digests the difficult acting of investigating super-strong cases, giving orders and emotionally comforting without a partner in the center, but also takes good care of the field staff. He shows his affection for the script to the extent that he thinks he is himself the script for 'Voice', and as a writer, I feel grateful and proud. Especially this season, I know that it must have been a lot of mental burden in the beginning because I had to play a villain who is a multi-personality. I was worried when I entrusted the role of a cruel villain to the main character, who has been a just police officer for three seasons.

However, I had a belief that if we were Hana or an actor, we would create a completely different character without compromising the goodness of the main character. When I finally saw the actual video, I was surprised by how well it was digested beyond my expectations. When I saw the reaction of the viewers who welcomed the villain acting of actress Lee Ha-na as 'Dark Kwon-ju', I was amazed that people's eyes are similar. While acting both good and bad roles at the same time, there must have been a lot of hardship, but I want to give a big applause to actress Lee Ha-na, who steadfastly led the 'Voice' without any expression. I would like to take this opportunity to bow my head and express my heartfelt gratitude to the actors of 'Voice', including actress Lee Ha-na, who has been acting unwaveringly in powerful crime scene dramas for several years.

-How did you plan to set up a serial killer with 5 personalities?

The personalities of Dongbangmin, 'Master', 'Center Director', 'Circusman', 'Good Dongbangmin' and 'Boy Dongbangmin' were either the Dongbangmin himself who had been abused by children, or good people who tried to help the Dongbangmin in some way during their lifetime. However, he was unable to help, and he was eventually absorbed into the character of a murderer by a Dongbang man suffering from a personality disorder. This is a common occurrence in multiple personality disorders. The five personalities were also created in part 14 to give reality to the fight between the personalities, as well as a device to trigger an inner conflict between the personalities when Kwon Joo and Derek arrest the people of the East. To protect themselves, the people of the East created the personalities of their victims as vicious criminals, but in the end they were devastated by their personalities.

Also, in Season 4 of 'Voice', the reason for creating multiple personalities and creating multiple personalities is to show that we can all be in danger if we miss the golden time to rescue someone, and the way to prevent child abuse is to show the interest of those around us. There was also I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude to actor Kim Yoo-nam, who gave an impactful performance in the role of Seok-gu Eom, a circus man who is the character of the people of the East.

- How was the Dong Bang-min that actor Lee Kyu-hyung digested?

The Dong Bang-min character was a multi-personal character that rarely appeared in Korean dramas. I knew that acting would not be easy, so I had a lot of trouble deciding which actor to join, but I was very happy that the director casted actor Lee Kyu-hyung, who performed the best in plays and musicals as well as broadcasts and movies, and that actor Lee Kyu-hyung was willing to take on the role. . In fact, it would be a lie if I said I had no concerns as a writer while writing a multi-personal villain and watching the process of its implementation. However, through the appearance of clearly throwing (detailed) serious concerns about the script, I was convinced that Lee Kyu-hyung would perform the best (more than the script), and it was great to have time to convey the intentions of the warriors and writers for each character. .

In particular, details such as facial expressions and voices between the personalities were very important, and I was amazed to see that they not only prepared surprisingly perfectly, but also lost nearly 10 kg of weight to give the impression that they could disguise themselves as women, and carefully prepared even the accessories and gait. Actor Lee Kyu-hyung, who has been well-received for his multiple roles in plays and musicals, seems to have clearly demonstrated the true value of a genius actor who changes into a different face in an instant as if he absorbed each personality in Season 4 of 'Voice'. (I was even worried that I might feel too focused on the villain)

And in fact, I heard that actor Lee Kyu-hyung had a wrist fracture ahead of the last episodes 13 and 14. Nevertheless, I was really thankful that I successfully completed the final confrontation scene with actor Song Seung-heon while wearing a pressure bandage. In private, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to actor Lee Kyu-hyung, who has a pleasant relationship with the golden time team.

- About Kang Seung-yoon's casting?

After Han Woo-joo was set up as a 4D cyber agent born in the 90s, he was very happy that actor Kang Seung-yoon said he would do it willingly when he was looking for an actor. It was because I thought that Kang Seung-yoon, an idol, singer-songwriter and excellent actor, would be perfect for Han Woo-joo. And before filming began, he showed his passion for running through the last season of 'Voice', and even the way he was immersed in his favorite field was Han Woo-joo, who was born in the 90s.

The role of providing clues in the right place in the process of arresting a criminal must have been difficult because there were a lot of technical terms in the lines, but I was really thankful that I played while taking advantage of the fun point. I also heard that he brought laughter to the weary on-site staff as a mood maker in the field. In reality, the spectrum is diverse, so it seems that he can handle other strong genres and roles, such as thrillers. I would like to give a generous round of applause to actor Kang Seung-yoon, who not only acted but also participated in the OST called 'Your Voice' with the best singing ability.

-What is the biggest difference from the previous season?

'Voice' always brings the luck of working with the best coaches, but it has the disadvantage that it is not easy to meet the schedule for the next season. As a result, it is difficult to meet a new coach every season and start over from the beginning, but thanks to the coaches, the season with a different color seems to have the advantage of 'Voice'. In Season 4, I met director Shin Yong-hwi, who made genres with strong humanism such as 'Tunnel', and focused on realizing those emotions, such as the pain of victims and why family crimes occur. As I said before, I was very worried about how to deal with the level of family crime. I want to talk about the importance of family, but if it is cruel, the meaning will fade, and that doesn't mean I can't abandon the tone and manner 'Voice' has maintained. In the end, season 4 of 'Voice' worked together under the purpose of differentiating it into a season faithful to detail, emotion and emotion rather than the urgency of real-time pursuit.

In addition, by setting the male lead, Derek Jo, as the opposite of Jinhyeok Mu and Kangwoo Do from the previous season, we tried to create a different (mature) atmosphere in the relationship with Kwon Joo and the Golden Time team. In addition, unlike last season, when team members were involved with episodic incidents, this season only unified the theme of family crime for each episode and developed independently. Lastly, to connect the world view, Detective Shim Dae-sik from Season 1 and Agent Cheon Sang-pil were reunited again in Season 4, and I was very proud and moved by the hospitality of the viewers.

-The best scene this season? Is there an episode you worked hard on the most?

All episodes are precious, but the most elaborate episode seems to be episode 14, in which Dong Bang-min is arrested by Kang Kwon-joo and Derek Jo. As it was an important ending of season 4, it was a sequence that was revised several times. The main actors wearing spring clothes (leather jackets, etc.) in the heat wave and the actors who played the characters of the people of the East were waiting. It was fortunate. Also, the most memorable episodes are 'The Road of the Underworld' and 'The Man in the Rape Field'. It was not easy to write a story because 'The Way the Grim Reaper Lives' is an episode in which a man with paranoia and wild dogs who live in the forest appear. (I also heard from the director that he had a lot of trouble on set, such as mobilizing a portable toilet.) I know that 'The Man in the Rape Field' is an episode with a lot of likes and dislikes, but the perfect performances of actor Jeon Moo-song and actor Jo Jae-ryong, who appeared as father and son, I was genuinely impressed.

In addition, there are lines that were repeatedly mentioned in Season 4 of 'Voice'. 'Because it's a family, you shouldn't be silent'. Due to Corona 19, we are all in a situation where we cannot afford it, but the more this happens, the more we need to look around and pay attention to our family, neighbors, and surroundings.

-What kind of picture do you envision for the next season?

In fact, like season 2-3, season 4-5 was also planned together, so the ending of season 4 implies that the narrative of the character Kang Kwon-ju will begin, and the work is done with the intention of laying out multiple lines about what will happen in season 5. did it right In fact, I think season 5 is the part where the secret of Kang Kwon-ju's hearing, which is the most important story of 'Voice', is revealed and the end of the worldview that continues through seasons 1-5. The story related to the re-appearance of F Child Nursing Hospital, Gardness Lee, Fabre Lab, and Bang Jesu, which will be the basic framework of season 5, is actually conceived to some extent.

However, even the writer does not know the schedule for the new season at all. This is because there are many things to consider, such as the actors' schedules and production conditions. This is an area that cannot be decided by the author alone, and if the production of season 5 is confirmed, detailed adjustments may be made later. One of the driving forces of 'Voice' is that it gained sympathy from viewers through the epic narratives of the male protagonists from season 1 to 2-3. Now, for the first time, Center Director Kang Kwon-ju is leaving the Center. Last but not least, actor Kwon Yul, who willingly decided to appear in the area, came running after finishing filming in another province even though it was midnight, wearing a white suit in the heat, and filming until dawn. I would like to express my gratitude once again for actor Kwon Yul's professionalism and his unchanging love for 'voice'.

-What kind of work would you like to be left behind for your fans?

I was very surprised when the viewers who saw 'Voice' season 4 for the first time heard that they were going to run again from season 1. It was the season when I felt 'this is the power of the season system' again, and I also thought that this would give the drama a longer life. Once again, I sincerely bow my head and thank you. Hope for the rescue of the victims, anger towards the perpetrators, and support for the Golden Time Team are not limited to dramas. In a world desolate with cynicism and disgust, 'Voice' listens to small sounds and leaves it as a drama that shows that humans live with hope rather than anger. If you ask me, I can answer, “That drama is interesting,” and when the next season comes out, I sincerely hope that it will remain as a drama that “I miss you”.

-Any message to the viewers who love the 4th season?

I think communication with the viewers is also important because I know that the 'Voice' season system would not have been made without the affectionate interest of the viewers during the 4th season. While 'Voice' was airing, I would like to reflect the points of sympathy and observation with you, and the points of disappointment, in my work in the future. In the meantime, I would like to sincerely thank you for watching the process of resolving Kwon-Joo Kang, Derek Jo, Golden Time Team, Circus Man, Sonam Village, and family crimes in Season 4 of 'Voice', Vimodo.

SOURCE: chosun.com

[knifeonmars]

Capsule Reviews, February 2021

Here's some things I've been reading.

The Curse of Brimstone 

DC's New Age of Heroes books, emerging from the beginning of Scott Snyder's creative-flameout-as-crossover-event Metal, mostly constituted riffs on Marvel heroes like the Fantastic Four (in The Terrifics) or the Hulk (in Damage). The Curse of Brimstone is a riff on Ghost Rider. It's... uneven. The first volume is generally pretty good, and when Phillip Tan is drawing it, as he does the first three and a half issues, it's gorgeous and unique, when he departs though, the quality takes a nose dive. None of the replacement artists, including the great Denis Cowan, can quite fill his shoes, and the story gets old fast. Guy makes a deal with the devil (or rather, a devil-like inhabitant of the "Dark Multiverse" as a not horribly handled tie-in to the conceits of Metal), realizes it's a raw deal, and rebels. The characters are flat, lots of time is spent with the main character's sister haranguing him to not use his powers (it is, in my humble opinion, something of a cardinal sin to have a character whose primary role is telling other characters to stop doing interesting things), too many potboiler "I know you're still in there!/I can feel this power consuming me!" exchanges, a couple of underwhelming guest spots (including a genuinely pointless appearance by the old, white, boring Doctor Fate) too many flashbacks, and not enough of the action. There's potential in the classic demonic hero rebelling plotline and its link to the liminal spaces of the DC universe, forgotten towns and economic depression, but the wheels come off this series pretty much as soon as Tan leaves. The really disappointing this is that the series is clearly built as an artistic showcase, so after Tan's shockingly early departure, the main appeal of the series is gone and there's nothing left but the playing out of an obviously threadbare story.

Star Wars - Boba Fett: Death, Lies, and Treachery

I don't care much about Star Wars these days, and I think that most of the old Expanded Universe was, as evidenced by Crimson Empire, pretty bad. Death, Lies, and Treachery, is that rare Star Wars EU comic which is actually good. John Wagner writes and he's in full-on 2000 AD mode, writing Boba Fett as a slightly more unpleasant Johnny Alpha (who is like a mercenary Judge Dredd, for those unfamiliar) right on down to the appearance of a funny alien sidekick for one of the characters. The main attraction is Cam Kennedy's art though, along with his inimitable colors: this might be the best looking Star Wars comic ever. The designs are all weird and chunky, with an almost kitbashed feeling that captures the lived in aesthetic of classic Star Wars, and the colors are one of a kind. Natural, neutral white light does not exist in this comic, everything is always bathed at all times in lurid greens or yellows, occasionally reds, and it looks incredible. In terms of "Expanded Universe" material for Star Wars, this hits the sweet spot of looking and feeling of a piece, but exploring the edges of the concept with a unique voice. It's great. I read this digitally, but I'd consider it a must-buy in print if I ever get the chance at a deal.

Zaroff

Zaroff is a French comic (novel? novella?). It's like 90 pages and it delivers exactly on its premise of "Die Hard starring the bad guy from The Most Dangerous Game." It's pretty good. Count Zaroff, he of the habitual hunting of humans, turns out to have killed a mafia don at some point, and after miraculously escaping his own seeming death at the end of the original story, finds himself hunted by the irate associates of this gangster, who have brought along Zaroff's sister and her kids to spice things up. Zaroff not only finds himself the hunt, but he also has to protect his estranged family as they struggle to survive. Nothing about this book or its twists and turns is likely to surprise you, but I don't think being surprised is always necessary for quality. Zaroff delivers on pulpy, early-20th century jungle action, is gorgeously rendered, and the fact that Zaroff himself is an unrepentant villain adds just enough of an unexpected element to the proceedings and character dynamics that it doesn't feel rote. There's a couple of points, ones typical of Eurocomics, which spark a slight sour note, such as some "period appropriate" racism and flashes of the male gaze, but for the most part these are relatively contained. It's good.

Batman: Gothic

Long before Grant Morrison did their Bat-epic, they wrote Batman: Gothic, an entirely different, but then again maybe not so different, kind of thing. It starts off with what must be called a riff on Fritz Lang's film, M, only where that story ends with a crew of gangsters deciding they cannot pass moral judgment on a deranged child-murderer, in Morrison's story they go ahead and kill him, only for the killer to return years later to rather horribly murder all of them as a warmup for a grandiose scheme involving unleashing a weaponized form of the bubonic plague on Gotham City as an offering to Satan. Along the way it turns out that said villain, one Mr. Whisper, is a former schoolmaster of Bruce Wayne's, who terrified the young Batman in the days before his parent's deaths. It's an earlier Morrison story and it shows. Certain elements presage their later Batman work; Mr. Whisper as a satanic enemy recalls the later Doctor Hurt, and the cathedral Mr. Whisper built to harvest souls recalls what writers like Morrison, Milligan, and Snyder would do concerning Gotham as a whole years later.The art, by Klaus Janson, is spectacular. If you're familiar at all with his work collaborating with Frank Miller you'll see him continuing in a similar vein and it's all quite good, even when he stretches beyond the street milieu which most readers might know him from. There's one particular sequence where Janson renders a needlessly complicated Rube Goldberg machine in motion that manages to work despite being static images. The writing by Morrison though, is not their finest. The M riff doesn't last as long as it could, and Mr. Whisper's turn in the latter half of the story from delicious creepy wraith to a cackling mass murderer who puts Batman in an easily escaped death trap feels like something of a letdown from the promise of the first half of the book. Gothic is good, but not, in my opinion, great. It's certainly worth checking out for Morrison fans however, and I imagine that someone well-versed in his latter Batman stuff might be able to find some real resonance between the two.

Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters

For a long, long time, Longbow Hunters was THE Green Arrow story. It is to Green Arrow as TDKR is to Batman, deliberately so. Mike Grell wrote and drew the reinvention of the character from his role as the Justice League's resident limousine liberal to a gritty urban vigilante operating in Seattle over the course of these three issues, which he'd follow up with a subsequent ongoing. Going back to it, it certainly merits its reputation, but its far from timeless. Grell's art is unimpeachable absolutely incredible, with great splashes and spreads, subtle colors, and really great figure work. The narrative is almost so 80's it hurts though, revolving around West Coast serial killers, cocaine, the CIA and the Iran-Contra scandal, and the Yakuza, and it's hard to look back at some of this stuff without smirking. The story begins with a teenager strung out on tainted coke sprinting through a window in a scene that's right out of Reefer Madness. In the cold light of a day 30+ years later, parts of it look more than a little silly. The 80's-ness of it all doesn't stop with that stuff though, even the superhero elements smack of it. Green Arrow realizes that he's lost a step and has be to be shown a way forward by an Asian woman skilled in the martial arts (recalling Vic Sage's reinvention in the pages of The Question), and Black Canary gets captured and torture off-panel for the sake of showing that this is real crime now, not the superhero silliness they've dealt with before. The treatment of Black Canary here is pretty markedly heinous, it's a classic fridging and Grell's claims that he didn't intentionally imply sexual assault in his depiction of her torture is probably true, but still feels more than a little weak considering how he chose to render it.The final analysis is that this book is good, but it exists strictly in the frame of the 1980's. If you're a fan of Green Arrow, there are worse books to pick up, or if you're interested in that era of DC Comics it's more than worth it, but as a matter of general interest I wouldn't recommend it very highly.

SHIELD by Steranko

Jim Steranko is sort of the prodigy of the early Marvel years, a young guy who came up through the system, blossomed into an incredible talent, and then left the company, and by and large the industry, behind. He would go on to dabble in publishing, work in other mediums, and generally kick around as the prodigal son of Marvel Comics. This collection, of both his Nick Fury shorts in the pages of Strange Tales and the four issues he drew of the original Nick Fury solo series, charts Steranko's growth as an artist. The book starts off with Steranko working from Jack Kirby's layouts with Stan Lee's dialogue and writing, and Steranko might be the one guy in history for whom working off of Kirby's blueprints is clearly holding him back. The first third or so of this collection really isn't much to write home about, as Steranko is obviously constrained by someone else's style, and at the end of the day those early stories still read as somewhat uninspired pulp compared to the highlights of early Marvel. There are flashes though, of techniques and ideas, which foreshadow what Steranko is capable of, and when he finally takes over as solo writer/artist it's like he's been unleashed. He immediately has Nick Fury tear off his shirt and start throwing guys around over psychedelic effects. He writes out most of Kirby and Lee's frankly uninspired boys' club supporting cast, he makes Fury visibly older, wearier, but also so much cooler. It's the birth of Nick Fury as a distinctly comic book super spy.By the time he finishes wrapping up the previous writers' plotline with Hydra and Baron von Strucker, Steranko is firing on all cylinders. By the time it gets to Steranko's Fury solo series, he's somehow surpassed himself, turning in effects, panel structures, and weird stories which make the earlier installment about a suit-wearing Man from UNCLE knockoff and its strict six-panel layouts look absolutely fossilized.I can't recommend this collection highly enough for any fan of the artform, even if the stories themselves might not be everyone's cup of tear. It's truly incredible to watch Steranko emerge as an artist over the course of this single collection. The book itself has a few problems, it's not the most elegantly designed in its supporting materials and index, but the content of it more than outweighs that. It's great stuff.

[violetsmoak]

The Specter at the Feast [1/?]

AO3 Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24556579/chapters/59300599

Summary: A tragic incident as a child left Tim Drake with the ability to commune with the dead. It’s a skill he’s used to close some of the most confounding cases to come across his desk at Gotham City’s Major Crimes Unit. But when he learns of an apparent murder-suicide that could link to a very personal case he’s been working for ten years, he might need more than a connection to the afterlife to solve it. Especially when Detective Jason Todd, a man in denial about his own psychic abilities, is assigned lead on the same case.

Sparks immediately fly between the two detectives—and not necessarily in a good way—as they are forced to work together to take down a macabre serial killer before it’s too late.

Disclaimer: This story uses characters, situations and premises that are copyright DC Comics, Inc. No infringement pertaining to graphic novels, television series or films is intended by violetsmoak in any way, shape or form. This fan-oriented story is written solely for the author’s own amusement and the entertainment of the readers. It is not for profit. Any resemblance to real organizations, institutions, products or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Author’s Note: Here’s one of the stories I’ve been working on for JayTimWeek. As I mentioned on tumblr, I got hit by a big blast of inspiration for one of my original stories and have kind of been working on that like mad for the past three weeks, so unfortunately I didn’t have time to dedicate to the prompt fills for JTW as I wanted to. As soon as I run out of steam for that, I’ll get back to filling the prompts. So, bad news I probably won’t post anything else during the event, but eventually my prompts will all crop up once I recapture my attention span :P Huge thank you to strawberyjei for taking the time to beta-read this chapter!

_______________________________________________________________

“That stuff will kill you one day.”

Tim Drake frowns and glances to his right, noticing the half-amused and half-exasperated smile playing on his best friend’s face.

“Will not,” he retorts with the instantaneity of an oft-repeated argument and leans more securely against sun-warmed stone. He takes a defiant sip from his jumbo travel mug, enjoying the bitterness of his favorite morning indulgence—slow-brewed light roast with three shots of espresso. “Besides, how else do you expect me to be awake enough to drive out here at this hour?”

He doesn’t have to see Kon to know he’s rolling his eyes.

“You don’t actually have to—you’re the one who keeps showing up; I just wait here.”

There’s something buried in the joking tone, and Tim shifts in discomfort as he detects the unspoken scolding. Choosing to ignore it, he swallows another mouthful of coffee and stares past the well-kept shrubbery, observing the gentle waves on the river.

From a distance, Gotham’s elegance is deceptive. By daylight, the riot of architectural styles jutting into the horizon appear whimsical instead of grotesque, and the layers of filth and decay suggest character as opposed to rampant corruption. Even on a Sunday, it teems with energy.

I guess that’s what still convinces people to move to the crime capital of America.

Tim knows from experience that the city’s grandeur is not as noticeable when combing her streets for the criminal element.

That knowledge doesn’t stop him from digging out his cellphone and snapping a few lazy photos. The quality won’t compare to shots taken with the Nikon he has at home, but it’s rare to perceive the city of his birth as something other than sinister; he won’t squander the opportunity.

“Maybe it’s the other way around,” Tim suggests in a light tone. “I could just be out here, minding my business, taking in the scenery—”

“Hah!”

“—and you’re stalking me.”

“Stalking’s your thing.”

“Is it really stalking if you get paid for it?”

“Whatever you say, detective,” Kon sneers without true malice and crosses his arms across his chest. Despite the chilly early spring air, he’s wearing only a black t-shirt with a red Superman symbol. Tim gave it to him for his birthday a few years ago, but the sight of it these days still elicits a nostalgia-induced lump in his throat. “Either way, you’re the chump who showed up here on his first day off in forever. Sunday, remember? You’re supposed to be spending the day lounging at your fancy estate, getting ready to gorge yourself on Alfred-made dinner, not bumming around with me.”

“That’s not for hours,” Tim dismisses, “and to be honest, I’d rather skip it.”

Kon glances sideways at him. “Haven’t you missed it all month?”

“I was working the entire time. Everyone in the family has to do the occasional weekend rotation, Alfred knows that. Besides, I see them all at some point or another every week.”

“Excuses, excuses,” Kon taunts. “I thought we agreed you needed to stop isolating yourself?”

The furrow in his brow is one that Tim recognizes as a prelude to concern, though, and he suspects he won’t be able to deter his friend.

“I’m not isolating myself.”

“That so? When was your last date?”

And there it is.

“I left myself wide open for that one,” Tim sighs.

“You know I’m right.”

“Here it comes…”

“I’m serious—you can’t still be carrying a torch for your ex—”

“There are no torches.”

“—hoping it’ll work out—”

“I’m not!”

“—because that ship has sailed,” Kon concludes. “She’s dating your sister for God’s sake.”

“I’m aware.”

“And it’s been two years.”

“I’ve been on dates in the last two years,” Tim protests.

“Cassie doesn’t count,” Kon replies. 

That earns a wince. “We agreed never to speak about that.”

“And I told you I was fine with it, man, it’s not like I was there.”

There’s a heavy sensation in Tim’s chest at that reminder, and he scowls at Kon for bringing it up. That usually earns a shrug or palms-up gesture of surrender, but today Kon squares his shoulders and raises an eyebrow in challenge.

“I already told you it meant nothing. We were both hurting and just…needed someone,” Tim insists.

Kon ignores him. “Which I’m okay with—relieved, even. I know you guys wouldn’t have looked at each other if circumstances were different. Which brings me back to Cassie, not counting.”

“She was there for me as much as I was there for her—can we please talk about something else?”

“Depends—do you have a better example than my last girlfriend?”

“Hey, I’ve been with other people! Remember Tam?”

“Yeah, your dad’s former business manager’s daughter,” Kon deadpans, “who you only started dating because everyone thought it was convenient. And she left you because you weren’t interested enough in the relationship.”

“What are you talking about? I was interested!”

“You didn’t even get to second base with her, man.”

“Are you seriously using the baseball metaphor?”

“Then there’s Bernard Whatshisname for the occasional booty call.”

“I regret ever telling you about that.”

“And don’t even get me started on that cop from Hong Kong that you hooked up with last month.”

“Okay, that one was a mistake,” Tim admits.

“But none of those were actual relationships. You haven’t had one of those since Steph.”

“I don’t recall you being this judgy before.”

“You’re one of my only sources of entertainment,” Kon deflects. “It’s like binge-watching Netflix and yelling at the idiot hero to stop screwing up his life. Except in this case, the idiot hero can actually hear me and have to listen.”

“‘Have to’ is debatable…”

Kon pushes off the stone they are both leaning against and turns to face him. It always annoys Tim when he pulls this, given he’s three inches taller and has twice the upper body strength.

“This is what you do, Tim. You keep people at a distance and on the rare occasion where they disappoint you or hurt you, you close yourself off,” Kon sighs. “You need to relax, man.”

Tim’s phone rings, granting him a welcome distraction.

“The last time I relaxed, I got stabbed,” he reminds Kon as he glances at the device. He blinks in surprise when he recognizes his brother’s scowling face and phone number flashing up at him. “Speak of the devil.” He swipes at the screen and answers, making a face at his best friend. “Gremlin.”

“Timothy,” is the terse answer, and Tim can almost hear the scowl in the younger man’s voice.

Huh. First name today. Either something bad happened, or he wants something.

Tim ignores the tiny edge of worry blossoming at the thought; if it were a family emergency, Alfred or Dick would call him, not Damian.

It must be the second thing.

“What do you want?”

“Where are you this morning?” the younger man asks, ignoring the question.

“It’s Sunday, where do you think I am?” he shoots back, deciding two can play ‘answer-with-a-question.’

Except Damian seems to have no intention of following the usual script.

“Of course,” he says instead, sounding distracted. “Then you should be close enough.”

“…For what?”

There’s a beat of hesitation, and then Damian says, “I may have stumbled upon something you’d find…interesting.”

Because that doesn’t sound ominous…

“Define ‘interesting’.”

“I’m at work,” Damian says. “Securing a crime scene.”

That moves Tim along the spectrum from wary to defensive at once. He goes to substantial lengths to avoid working with any of his siblings in a professional capacity. It’s a necessity in a family where law enforcement is all but synonymous with the name Wayne. Even if their older brother Dick hadn’t started the tradition of downplaying that link in the professional sphere, Tim has always been diligent in establishing professional boundaries. So far, his family has respected them. Damian, in particular, has always been gleeful—almost militant—in keeping to that maxim; for him to break it, something must have upset him. 

And for him to reach out to me instead of Dick is…I don’t think it’s ever happened.

“Are you sure you should have called me then?” Tim queries in a careful tone, wanting to make sure he’s not misreading the situation. “Dick might be a better option.”

“Richard wouldn’t understand. He wouldn’t view it the same way.”

“The same way,” Tim repeats, the words sparking something—a flicker of suspicion begins to take shape.

“I shouldn’t even be telling you this,” Damian continues, “so you’d better be appreciative—”

“Spit it out, Damian.” Tim doesn’t have the patience for the adult version of ‘I-know-something-you-don’t-know’.

“Murder-suicide. Apparently. The bodies were posed,” Damian says, voice low as if he doesn’t want someone to overhear him, “And all the victims are holding hands.”

Tim’s mouth goes dry and his entire body tenses. “All?”

“Five,” Damian tells him shortly.

That makes Tim close his eyes in dismay. “Other than the number it’s the same MO as the others?”

“The crime itself, yes. Don’t your files say the last one was five years ago?”

Tim knows it should irritate him that Damian’s been poking around his casefiles—he always considered office protocol as more guidelines than law. But the infraction pales next to the knowledge blossoming into being.

It’s happening again.

“If you want to see for yourself, get here before whoever they assign as the lead detective does,” Damian is saying.

Torn, Tim’s eyes flick to Kon, who clearly knows what is being said and whose expression is all-too knowing for Tim’s liking.

“Where is it?” Tim asks at last.

“Diamond District. Gotham Tower Apartments.”

“That’s unusual,” Tim grunts, trying to ignore the tightness in his chest. Only one of the earlier cases took place in what either of them would consider an upper-class neighborhood. “Also, outside of my jurisdiction.”

“That wouldn’t stop me if I were in your position.”

There’s a click and then a dial tone.

Tim gives a slow exhale, closing his eyes.

He and Damian were never the closest, but once the early friction between them eased, they developed their own dynamic. And one specific shared understanding that they bonded over in secret, away from the prying and often unintentionally judging eyes of family.

“How is he a jerk even when he’s trying to be helpful?” Tim mutters more to himself than Kon. He’s already calculating how long it will take him to get across the bridge from Metropolis.

Half an hour, with no traffic.

It will be cutting it close, assuming Damian holds off giving his own precinct the details until the last second.

He must be serious about this if he’ll risk being called up on discipline for not following protocol.

Tim turns to Kon. “Sorry, but I need to head out.”

“Like I won’t see you again next week,” Kon dismisses with a grim smile. “After all, you’re always here.”

“You say that like you don’t want me to be,” Tim replies, suspicious.

“Don’t put words in my mouth. You’re my best friend, I obviously want you to visit. But you need more in your life than work, checking in with me and—I dunno—chasing some white whale.”

“Really?” Tim deadpans. “You, of all people? You want me to give up trying to get justice—”

“Not what I’m saying,” Kon interrupts. “I’m just trying to tell you there’s more out there and you deserve to find it.” He pauses. “And   agrees with me.”

Tim cuts off a curse with a hiss. “That is a low blow, you two ganging up on me.”

“What can I say? You’d better listen, or he’ll do something impulsive, if he hasn’t already.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Tim grumbles, keying the coordinates of the crime scene into his phone’s GPS.

“Remember,” Kon calls after him, “ ”

“Always do,” Tim replies. As he heads for the gates of the cemetery, brushing his fingers against the headstone that reads: Connor Kent, Beloved Son, Brother, Friend—Brave Fireman of the Metropolis Fire Department.

⁂

“Six days,” Jason Todd fumes, glaring down at the muddle of papers and file folders in front of him. “I’m gone for six days, and you jerks decide to turn my desk into an episode of Hoarders.”

“Relax, Todd, it’s just paper, not toxic waste,” Detective Adams drawls as she passes by, unapologetically grabbing a few of the offending folders on her way.

“This? This is not just paper, it’s a potential biohazard.”

His desk, usually the immaculate outlier in the chaotic, open concept dumping ground of the 12th Precinct, is now covered in empty coffee cups, old take-out cartons, and other detritus.

“Says the man who filled my desk drawer with a cubic foot of golf balls the last time I was on leave.”

“None of which were covered in saliva—I mean, come on!” He holds up several crumpled napkins. “It’s just common fucking courtesy!”

“Take it up with Rayner.”

“Of course it was him. Guy has it out for me…”

“You did shoot him.”

“One time! And it was a shoulder wound! If I hadn’t, both our covers would have been blown and we’d both be dead.”

“Cry me a river, Todd,” Adams snorts. “I’ve got a lead on the Kirano case and don’t have time to wipe away your tears of manly angst.”

She stalks away, totally missing how he flips her the bird. Not that his heart is in it; he’s actually fond of Onyx and would even work with her if she could stand him. But the one time they were partnered together, it ended with them running away from an exploding truck and a two-inch-thick shard of metal through her shoulder.

Still trying to figure out how I got the blame for that one…

It’s not like he goes into a situation intending to get the people next to him injured. For some reason, he just happens to be better at intuiting incoming threats, whether it be a perp taking a swing with a knife or stopping just short of being shot.

It happens, sometimes, this inexplicable intuition. Roy always called it a sixth sense, but Jason takes issue with any of that hokey paranormal crap. He gets hunches—gut feelings that have served him extremely well in his career and helped him rise quickly through the ranks.

But he doesn’t like to think of himself as psychic.

He likes thinking of the possible reason for his “hunches” even less.

Finally getting the worst of the garbage into the trashcan beneath his desk, Jason starts on the wayward papers, pleased that most of it can be shredded and won’t require a trip to the file room. There’s one folder, however, that doesn’t fit anywhere: some arson report that has nothing to do with any of his ongoing cases.

He skims through the particulars of the folder and notes the name on the CSI report—B. Allen—which suggests it isn’t even recent. He’s been friends with the new ME, Stephanie Brown, for two years now, and never met the guy that was here before her.

Maybe someone’s trying to find a pattern or something.

Jason decides to bring it to the captain; if anyone’s missing a file related to their case, she’ll have a better idea.

He skirts around uniformed officers moving to and fro, some leading handcuffed offenders to the holding cells at the back of the building, others talking over their cases with each other or on the phone. He passes the office corkboard, filled with everything from sketches of perps at large (it seems Dr. Pamela Isley is up to her usual eco-terrorism) to reminders about the Gotham General Blood Drive (anyone who donates in uniform gets the rest of the day off, as well as the next one).

By the time he reaches the captain’s office, he’s sweating. It might be crisp outside, but inside there are so many bodies moving around that it might as well be the hottest day of summer.

Raising his hand to knock, he’s surprised when the door opens inward and the captain steps out.

“Todd,” she says with a blink, then nods to herself. “Right. You’re back today. That works. Get in here—I’ve got a case for you.”

He’s too used to Artemis’ brusque manner to be bemused; instead, he ducks into her office and closes the door behind him.

“It’s not another missing kid, is it?” he asks apprehensively; the last case involved a fourteen-year-old girl. “No promises I won’t break some scumbag’s teeth again if that’s the case.”

“You’d better not break anyone’s teeth,” Artemis chides him, a warning glint in her eyes. “Especially since you just got off suspension.”

And that for using “unnecessary force” in apprehending a drug dealer selling his shit to a bunch of kids.

“But no,” she continues, sitting behind her desk and reaching for a file, “it’s not. The officers on the scene are reporting it as an apparent murder-suicide.”

“And you thought that’s how I wanted to spend my first day back at work? I’m touched. Whatever made you think of me?”

“The fact that you were conveniently in front of me when I opened the door.”

“Aw, here I was expectin’ you to say something like, ‘well, you’re a constant pain in my ass, but you’ve also got the best record for closin’ cases in this department’.”

“You don’t need the ego boost. Now either take it and be grateful, or I’m giving it to Adams as I planned—”

“Gimme,” Jason interrupts, snatching the file folder from her.

“That’s what I thought.”

He settles into one of the chairs in front of the captain’s desk and opens the folder.

“I want this one looked into and closed as soon as possible,” Artemis goes on.

“Why?”

“Because of who the victim is.”

Jason frowns, scans through the preliminary report to see that the victim—victims—have, in fact, been identified. His eyebrows shoot upward.

“J. Devlin Davenport.” He looks up at Artemis, askance. “The investment guy? The one being investigated for embezzlement?”

“Fraud Squad’s been building a case against him for six months now,” Artemis confirms. “The guy set up a fake company and defrauded his investors out of 200 million. They’re still trying to track the stuff he funneled through the Bahamas.” 

“If they find it, send it my way,” Jason says, still skimming through the papers.

“Could you sound any more cliché?”

“If I tried, maybe,” he replies, distracted as he slides the folder he brought to one side of her desk. 

“What’s that?” Artemis asks.

“Dunno. File was on my desk. Arson, I think. Figured someone left it there.”

“We don’t have any arson cases ongoing at the moment, but I’ll ask around. Maybe someone’s doing case research.”

“Uh-huh,” Jason murmurs. He taps the paper in front of him. “Listen, if they’re saying this is a murder-suicide, that’s probably what it is.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Look at the transcript from when it was called in.”

“‘Bodies of the deceased were…arranged around the dinner table’,” Jason reads. “What the… ‘lack of struggle might suggest sedation before they were removed to the dining room and posed’—posed? Like a photographer does?” He makes a face. “Kind of a lot of effort for someone who just committed suicide right after…”

“If I’m not mistaken, that would be the thing that needs investigating.”

Jason ignores the sarcasm, checking to see who called this in.

Al-Ghul. Huh. Well, at least he’ll keep the place from being overrun. Kid’s scary good at keeping the rubberneckers away.

And pissing off the MEs by lurking around while they work.

Jason knows the new officer just wants to learn, but he also tends to be a bit of an entitled know-it-all like most of his generation. It’s a trait he’ll lose the longer he walks a beat and works up through the ranks, but right now it makes most people want to punch him.

Jason might be one of those people if it weren’t for the fact Al-Ghul is meticulous about taking statements, prompt in securing crime scenes, and entirely willing to go the extra mile to help a detective close a case even when he’s off the clock. He recognizes the ambition and the need to prove himself from his own first years as a cop.

If he adjusts that attitude a bit, I might even put in a recommendation to put him on detective track…

Jason closes the folder and grins at Artemis.

“So, who’s the unlucky bastard you’re pairing me with today?”

He doesn’t work well with a partner, given his tendency to ignore rules in favor of his gut instincts. Especially since it’s never steered him wrong. Most other detectives can’t stand that, with the exception of his last partner, Roy Harper, who transferred to Star City six months ago to be closer to his daughter. Then again, Roy always considered rules arbitrary anyhow.

Since then, Jason’s been cycled through almost all the detectives at the 9th Precinct, all without finding a decent fit.

Pretty sure it’s Artemis’ way of torturing me since plenty of other guys work their cases solo.

It’s a blatant implication that he needs a babysitter.

“Rayner wrapped up most of his cases last week,” Artemis replies without even checking the duty roster on her desk.

“Hell no.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, am I giving you the impression you have a choice?”

“Unless you want me back on suspension, you’re not putting me with that asshole.”

“Well, Jason,” she says, finally looking up at him with an expression that suggests she’s fully ready to call his bluff, “you have this tendency to either piss off or sleep with whoever gets assigned to you. At least if you’re working with someone that pisses you off, I’m less likely to need to fill out the paperwork to reassign them afterward.”

“And if they happen to fall into both categories?” he leers at her in an exaggerated manner. She was one of his partners once, both on the job and briefly outside of it. He prods at the plaque on her desk that reads Captain A. Bana-Migdhall. In retaliation, she reaches over and raps him on the knuckles with it. “Ow!”

“You’re not helping your case right now.”

“You know, it’s not my fault Eddie decided he’d rather play Bond Babe for the scary CIA chick with the one eye. And Miguel’s the one who couldn’t keep his hands off me, so…”

“Just…go find Rayner,” Artemis sighs, waving her hand in dismissal. “I need that crime scene checked over and wrapped up quickly. The Mayor’s office wants an answer on this pronto.”

Jason sneers at that. “Of course they do. Because the Waynes and Davenports are old country club buddies, right?”

“Maybe fifty years ago. But Bruce Wayne spent more time as a cop than some rich college co-ed. He got elected based on his tough-on-crime stance, so it’s more likely he just wants to make sure the high-profile target of a class-action suit hasn’t been the victim of foul play.” Artemis pauses. “Especially since, having met the man, I’m pretty sure Wayne would have liked to beat the truth out of Davenport personally.”

“Now there’s a reality show I’d watch.”

“On your own time. Now go do your job.”

“Or Rayner.”

Artemis drops her pen and stares. “What?”

“Well, from what you said before, I figure if I fuck Rayner, it means you won’t ever make me work with him again, so—”

“Get the hell out of my office!” Artemis barks, throwing her tissue box at his head. Jason ducks and slips out of her office with a grin on his face.

There are a few good-natured laughs from his coworkers—“In trouble again, Todd?”—and he heads across the room to Kyle Rayner’s desk.

“What do you want?” the other detective demands, nose wrinkling at Jason like he’s just smelled something rank. It’s his default expression whenever they cross paths.

It’s also the expression that drives Jason to mess with him whenever he can.

Time for a bit of payback for the desk thing.

“Not me,” he says, affecting a nonchalant shrug. “Captain wanted to know if you could head down to the 7th.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Apparently her opposite number there has something she needs to be sent over and doesn’t want to wait on official channels to slow everything down.”

“What do I look like, a courier?” Rayner growls, but Jason can see from the way he smooths a hand through his hair that he’s got him.

It’s not exactly a secret that Jason’s workplace nemesis has a thing for Precinct 7’s Captain Troy, or that he’ll take any excuse to go flirt with her.

It’s unrequited, of course, and Jason’s bound to get an earful from Donna the next time they run into each other, but worth it to get Rayner out of his way.

“Whatever, man, I just work here,” he says, only half-pretending irritation. “You want to tell Captain ‘no’, it’s your balls in a vice, not mine.”

“Yeah, that’d be a switch, wouldn’t it?”

But the other man pushes back his chair and grabs his jacket.

Jason smirks at his retreating back and spins on his heel, returning to his own desk to grab his car keys.

Maybe the day’s looking up a bit.

⁂

There’s a gaggle of reporters already on the scene when Tim arrives, and he wonders not for the first time just how many of them have their own inside sources in the various police precincts of Gotham. There are also two ambulances on the scene, but thankfully someone had the foresight to park them in a way that shields the entrance of the high-rise apartment.

Officer Kelley, Damian’s partner of six months, is walking back and forth along the police tape to ensure none of the intrepid rubberneckers can get through. Head down and dark glasses firmly in place, Tim hurries past the press before they can recognize him (it thankfully doesn’t happen very often, but when it does it’s a pain in the ass) and approaches Kelly. Though they’ve met before, he flashes his badge and identifies himself. 

All of Tim’s official identification name him as Timothy Drake-Wayne and have since he was about seventeen, but he only uses the latter name if he absolutely must. With regards to work, he’s only ever used it during official meetings with the Commissioner or during obligatory police ceremonies.

Or when Bruce makes up some official sounding excuse to check up on me when he feels he hasn’t heard from me in a while.

He's endured at least one of those this past month.

Kelley barely raises an eyebrow, suggesting Damian must have warned her who he was calling and waves him through. It speaks to how much they trust each other as partners that she’s going along with what’s clearly a personal issue. Most other cops would question the need for two law enforcement officers from the same family needing to be at the same crime scene.

There are two elevators in the lobby, one of which is already open with a sign posted to warn residents from using it. Another officer Tim doesn’t recognize is waiting beside it, and Tim once again flashes his badge before heading up.

He’s subjected to a brief interlude of elevator muzak, before the doors open to the foyer outside of what has to be the victims’ apartment. Two ambulance techs are just exiting, carrying with them tools that are clearly useless here. He waits for them to pass and slips inside, taking in the stylish décor of the hall and nearby living room. Inside the latter, there’s a small woman speaking to another EMT, a blanket over her shoulders as she tries to speak through sobs.

Damian is watching the scene from across the room, mouth pulled into his habitual frown; this deepens when he sees Tim. Undeterred, Tim strides over—he was invited, after all.

“So, are you going to tell me why I’m risking Cassie’s wrath this morning?” he asks as he joins the younger man. Tim's friend might not be the type of captain to fire him for the flagrant conduct unbecoming, but she can make his life miserable for the foreseeable future.

“The bodies were found this morning by the cleaning lady,” Damian says, also not bothering with such trite pleasantries as a greeting. “No signs of break-in or struggle.”

“Cleaning lady? This early on a Sunday? They must have been paying her overtime.”

Damian raises an eyebrow. “Pennyworth works Sundays.”

“Only because it would take the same amount of phenobarbital to stun a moose as it would to make Alfred take a day of rest.” They exchange a wry look of agreement, and Tim returns to the subject at hand. “So, she identified the bodies?”

“Yes. Joseph Devlin Davenport, his wife Lina, and the three teenaged offspring—Neil, Irene, and Roderick.”

Tim’s eyes go wide; he’s met every one of them before. “Shit.”

“Indeed.” Damian flips through his notepad, though they both know it’s for show. “All the victims were executed by two gunshots to the head, except Davenport himself; the medical examiner was here, and her preliminary findings suggest the husband shot his wife and children first, then turned the gun on himself. There are no signs of struggle, no bruising, or markings on the bodies…”

“None of that’s particularly extraordinary though.”

“And then there’s their hands.”

They share a look.

“Did you mention that when you called it in to your superiors?”

“No, when I called it in I gave them the basics. Since then I’ve noticed a few things.”

“Such as?”

“Such as the fact a firearm was discharged several times in a residential complex and no one heard anything,” Damian says. “Yet I didn’t find a suppressor anywhere on the scene; just the weapon itself.”

“Is the penthouse soundproofed?” Tim asks.

“No. When I spoke to the downstairs residents, they told me they had even made several noise complaints to the building management in the past. Nothing ever came from it, of course—money talks—but someone should have heard something.”

“Assuming they recognized the sound of gunfire. This isn’t exactly Burnley. Which…could be a good thing. Buildings like this tend to have good security systems.”

“Obviously that was my next thought,” Damian drawls. “While Kelley was calming down the help, I went to speak with the security guards in case the camera system caught sight of anyone suspicious.”

"And did they?"

“No. They apparently had to run a routine update on their software, which knocked out the feed between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m.”

“And you think this is when the shooting took place.”

“I imagine Brown will find the time of death to be around that point,” Damian agrees with a smug upward quirk of his lips. “For Davenport to decide to kill himself at the exact time when the security feeds go offline is rather coincidental.”

Tim shakes his head. “Maybe, maybe not. Anything else?”

“What about the fact Davenport was left-handed but shot himself with his right hand?”

Tim blinks. “And how do you figure he was left-handed?”

“Please,” Damian dismisses with a snort, “I’ve been forced to attend enough fundraisers with Father in the past, and Davenport was often present. Even you would remember that ham-fisted troglodyte trying to sip from a champagne flute had you ever deigned to attend.”

Tim tilts his head in acknowledgment of both the barb and the observation. “Fair. Though so far all of this sounds pretty circumstantial—nothing really screams 'second shooter' here. And other than the hand thing—”  

“Go see for yourself. The bodies are in the dining room. I imagine your specific talents will confirm my suspicions.” Tim starts into the apartment. “By the way, if you’re still here when the lead detective gets here, I’ll deny knowing you.”

Tim snorts. “As expected.”

“And you are not to tell Richard I was involved in this. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

Tim has to hold back a chuckle at that; Damian is even more acquainted with Dick’s mollycoddling than he is.

“Noted. Let Alfred know I might be a bit late for dinner tonight.”

“It’s not Alfred you have to worry about.”

Tim heads down the hall, accepting a pair of plastic gloves from one of the passing investigators. As he pulls them on, he takes note of the doors to the bedrooms that remain open, and the photographs and paintings hanging on the walls. Nothing is disturbed, no signs of a struggle like there would be if the victims had been dragged from their beds, and there’s no sign of blood on the floors leading from the rooms or even the hallway itself.

That means the victims either walked voluntarily—which is unlikely—or sedated and carried.

It’s looking like Damian’s instincts might be on-point here, but it’s not until Tim steps foot in the dining room that he realizes just how much that’s the case.

He freezes in place, hit with a familiar jarring of his senses at something not meant to be perceived.

Davenport was a man in his mid-forties, tall and with the look of a skinny person that’s suddenly gained a whole lot of weight, and not in a healthy manner. Tim remembers meeting him at some dinner with his parents when he was younger, and his mother disparaging the man behind his back as a social-climbing schemer.

And that was before the Ponzi scheme.

The man’s blond hair implants are now plastered with blood and brain matter that oozes down the left side of his head. His eyes roll in wild fear, tears and snot running down his face, which is immobilized in a stiff smile from regular Botox injections. That mouth is now twisted in a grotesque scream that makes Tim wince even in its silence, the unsettling sensation of nails on a chalkboard traveling up through his nervous system.

Tim is careful not to draw the attention to himself, not just because of the crime scene team still milling about the scene, but because the last thing he needs right now is a panicked ghost latching on to him. Davenport’s spirit is still in too much shock for rationality and may fixate on Tim if he discovers he can see him. Which he knows from experience is not fun.

The newly dead are like drowning victims—if they catch hold of you, they’ll drag you under with them. Best case scenario, Tim experiences a few seconds of possession and a week of dissociative identity issues; worst-case scenario, he could die from the same trauma.

Unfortunately, given the lack of control newly dead spirits have, the latter is most likely.

The ghost is luckily far enough from the dining room table that Tim can edge past him without ostensibly acknowledging its presence; instead, he studies the actual bodies and tries not to regret his coffee that morning.

The five victims have not yet been moved, but the placement of tarps over them suggests the crime scene photographers have already been by. Going from one body to the next, Tim lifts the sheets carefully, trying not to disturb anything too much in his investigation. The victims are all dressed in their nightclothes, seated around the table on wooden, cloth-back chairs. 

Damian wasn’t lying; all of them holding hands.

The dining room table is fully laden with dishes and cutlery, glasses filled with orange juice and bowls with the soggy remnants of cereal and milk. Other than the angry red entrance wounds on their foreheads—two shots each—there are no other visible injuries. Only the body of the presumed shooter, based on the position of the gun and his hand, is splayed out unnaturally across the table, ostensibly from the force of the gunshot.

Otherwise, it looks like they were all just sitting down to breakfast at the time of death.

His stomach roils a bit at the notion, not only because of the clearly depraved mind behind arranging the tableau but because the scene is familiar to him in a way he wishes it wasn’t.

Teeth clenched, Tim digs out his phone and starts to take his own pictures, not wanting to have to contact the lead detective and beg for copies. In the periphery, Davenport’s ghost continues to spasm and flail, making it hard for Tim to concentrate.

His eyes rest on the spot where the murder weapon fell and is struck by a sudden idea. Hoping he’s right, he takes a quick tour of the rest of the apartment but makes deliberate stops in the bedroom and the home office.

It’s another fifteen minutes of taking pictures and lightly rummaging through the belongings of the dead before he finds something. Striding out of the office and back toward the scene of the murder, Tim shoots a text message off to his friend Victor at the ATF.

Running gun serial numbers might be a little more complicated than on TV, but the guy owes me a favor. And if I’m right—

His thoughts cut off as he notices movement out of the corner of his eye, a movement that belongs to someone living this time.

There’s a newcomer on the scene, and from the way he flashes the badge, Tim would guess it’s the detective who’s actually supposed to be here. He’s redheaded, wearing a leather jacket and a loose tie that looks like he threw it on in a hurry. Even from this distance, Tim can make out a couple of days’ worth of stubble on his chin and the edge to his mouth that’s inherently challenging. The man’s whole esthetic reads scrapper, but his posture and carriage inarguably declare cop. Tim would know, his family is made up almost entirely of them.

Pretending like he hasn’t noticed the stranger, Tim shifts to face the scene once again, continuing to study him under his lashes as the man exchanges words with Damian.

He blames Kon entirely for the way his attention rests on the man’s muscular thighs, before the man turns toward Tim and starts forward, conversation with Damian clearly over.

Well shit…

⁂

Jason has an uneasy feeling in his stomach even before he even arrives at the Davenports’ penthouse apartment.

It’s not an anticipatory reaction to seeing the aftermath of a murder—he’s worked homicide long enough to have developed a means of distancing himself from the crimes he investigates. The feeling is more like expectation, a nagging sense that something huge is about to happen.

Never a good sign in my experience.

“Detective Todd?”

Jason pauses as he finishes putting on a pair of plastic gloves and glances up at the speaker.

“Officer Al-Ghul,” he replies, more formal than usual as he tries to shove the weird feeling to the back of his mind. “What’ve we got?”

The kid excuses himself from the small, tearful woman he’s speaking to and strides over.

“It seems to be a murder-suicide,” he says and launches into a report that’s almost word-for-word the transcript of what he called into the precinct, with a few extra additions. Jason lets the words wash over him, keeping an ear out for anything that deviates too much from what he already knows while casting his eyes about the apartment.

Geeze, you could fit three Crime Alley families in the living room alone. Who the fuck needs all this space?

His eyes fall upon someone across the room that he doesn’t recognize.

Young—maybe a bit younger than Jason—with an athletic build and good looks that, despite being clean-cut, give no clue as to whether they’re male or female. Whoever it is, they’re not dressed as a CSI or in an officer’s uniform, but they’re studying the crime scene with the eye of someone in the business. When the stranger notices Jason, he or she turns around, apparently fascinated by the photographs on the living room wall.

“Who’s that?” Jason interrupts Al-Ghul. “New CSI?”

Al-Ghul scowls in annoyance, either at the interruption or at the subject of the question, Jason isn’t sure.

“Major Crimes,” he says after a beat. 

That immediately puts Jason’s back up. “What the hell is MCU doing here?”

Al-Ghul shrugs, as if to say, ‘that’s your problem, not mine’, and returns his attention to the woman from before. Deciding this is a welcome distraction from his own unease, Jason stalks toward the stranger, ready to rip them a new one.

“Hey, buddy—wanna tell me what you think you’re doing at my crime scene?”

“Just taking a look around,” the detective replies, not turning around immediately.

Jason’s eyes flick to the photos on the wall, wondering what seems so captivating.

Most of them are glamor shots, professionally done, but some are clearly personal photos. Davenport and his wife on a golf course, the teenagers lounging around against a tropical beach backdrop, and another of Davenport sitting in a bed surrounded by his kids. Though his surroundings seem comfortable, he’s hooked up to some kind of IV stand, and despite the smile on everyone’s faces, there’s a haunted edge to it.

Oh yeah, now I remember.

A while back there was something in the news about him undergoing treatment for some kind of blood cancer. He actually tried to use that to discourage his case from being investigated. Just proves what kind of scumbag Davenport is.

Was.

Which brings him back to the present.

“I’m gonna need a bit more than that unless you want me making a call to the brass up at MCU,” Jason warns.

The detective turns to offer Jason what is clearly intended to be a disarming smile. “No need for that, I’ll be out of your hair in a minute.”

Jason prides himself on not being susceptible to that sort of thing, but—

Holy shit, he’s hot up close.

And yes, that’s definitely a male face studying him with an air of appraisal, in spite of the deceptively delicate features. The guy is mostly clean-shaven and wearing a smart-looking peacoat that offers a compliment to his eyes, which are very blue. It’s the intense color you don’t see very often outside of newborn babies, but with a pronounced gleam of intelligence that feels almost penetrating.

There’s also a confident set to his shoulders and a stubborn bend to his lips that instantly puts Jason’s mind on the defensive (and other parts at attention).

“Detective Drake,” the guy goes on, offering a hand to Jason. His voice is warm and smooth, the kind that’s more suited for phone sex than reciting Miranda rights. “Major Crimes, as you already seem to be aware.”

Jason refrains from taking the hand. “Detective Todd. 12th Precinct. Homicide. There a reason you guys are sticking your noses into a murder-suicide?”

“There’s reason to believe this may actually be the work of a serial murderer,” Drake replies, looking unbothered by the rebuff.

“Really,” Jason says flatly. “And what are you basing that on? Because the report I got is leanin’ pretty hard on this guy killing his wife and kids, then himself. That’s probably how the city’s going to record it. This isn’t a scene that needs in-depth investigating and there’s no need for one lead detective here, let alone two—especially not a guy who’s clearly out of his jurisdiction.”

‘Detective Drake’ doesn’t appear to notice the clear marking of territory.

“Have you been in there yet?” he asks instead.

“No, because I’m wasting my time explainin’ protocol to a smart-ass out of his jurisdiction.”

Drake smirks at that, sharp and unwavering. “Well, when you get around to it, you’ll probably cotton on to the fact the murder weapon was a .32 automatic with the serial filed off.”

“So?”

“So, first of all, the neighbors would have heard the discharge if it was fired without a decent suppressor, but there’s no evidence of one at the scene of the crime.”

Which, Jason can admit, is out of the ordinary. Most people committing suicide don’t care about how loud the shot will be that takes them out, but if they did use one, it would still be attached to the gun.

“Second, Davenport was an ardent supporter of gun rights. I remember seeing a clip of him on the news, going at it with the Mayor over his proposed gun-control laws.”

Jason raises an eyebrow. “Your point being?”

“My point is that generally, gun rights activists own guns. Which Davenport did—you’ll find them in his closet and his study, next to all the relevant paperwork: 9mm Glocks. And they have serial numbers.” Drake levels a challenging stare at Jason. “What’s the point of procuring an unregistered weapon when you have your own within easy reach? And why chisel the number off if you’re just going to commit suicide? It’s not like you need to care about it being traced once you’re dead.”

“The guy was rich—rich people do weird things. Probably some convoluted insurance thing,” he suggests.

“Or it wasn’t his.”

“So maybe he was holdin’ it for a friend. It happens. Still doesn’t change the fact this tool offed his own family.”

“And what about the fact that the same model gun has been found at the scene of at least fourteen other murder-suicides in this city in the past ten years?”

“It’s Gotham. Play the probabilities game long enough, you’ll get a bunch of seemingly random crimes that resemble each other.”

“Maybe. But in the ninety-something years before that—in fact, as long as the city’s kept records on this sort of thing—there have been only two murder-suicides that could fit that pattern, and those had enough additional evidence to solve immediately. But in the past decade, we've got two particular years where a series of murder-suicides were committed using an unregistered .32, where neighbors didn’t hear any of the gunshots and yet there was no sign of a suppressor. Five years ago, and ten years ago,” Drake tells him grimly. “Both those years there were exactly seven incidents, and then they stopped. None of those have been solved.”

“That says more about the investigating cops than the crimes themselves. You don’t solve a murder-suicide—the evidence is right there,” Jason insists, though what Drake has to say is uncomfortably close to what his own gut was telling him when he walked into the apartment.

“And the fact that in each situation, the victims are found holding hands?” Drake challenges, with the air of someone presenting a winning argument.

And, yeah, that’s a bit of a weird coincidence, but still not an argument for a major investigation.

“If that’s an actual detail in all these supposed cases of yours, it would have been noted.”

“Not if no one thought it was worth noting,” Drake retorts. “Not if whoever made those reports just thought it was some kind of death pact or…cult related suicide. They weren’t looking for it.”

“But you are.”

“Clearly.”

Jason peers at him another beat and then shakes his head. “Look, I have about seven other cases of actual homicide that need my attention, so if you could just—"

“Seriously?” Drake demands, losing some of his smooth calm at last. “You don’t find any of that compelling enough to—”

“To what? Start imagining serial killers where there are none? No, I don’t,” Jason snaps. “All I see so far is some rich bastard got caught running a Ponzi scheme, so he decided to take the easy way out and dragged his poor family with him. It’s what rich people do when things get hard; because if they can’t have it, no one can.”

That earns him a cold look. “Out of the other fourteen cases, only one of them involved a couple who could be considered rich.”

“Fourteen other cases where only you seem to notice the pattern. I dunno what you want me to say, buddy. Clearly, you got an ax to grind, so do me a favor and grind it away from my scene.”

Despite his words, it’s not a suggestion, and Drake recognizes it.

Scowling at Jason in something like disgust, he straightens up. “Fine. I’m going. But when another family is slaughtered by this nutjob—and it will happen—you’ll remember this discussion. Hopefully, before you have to answer another six homicide calls.”

Drake spares Jason one final judgmental look and heads for the front door.

Jason watches him, briefly admiring the man’s ass as he walks away, and then puts the encounter out of his mind. He’s got a job to do, and Artemis said she wanted this sorted out today.

Squaring his shoulders and preparing himself for another grim sight—he hates crime scenes that involve kids—he heads out of the living room toward the back of the apartment and the scene of the crime.

Crossing the threshold to the dining room, Jason’s earlier disquiet morphs, evolving from nervous apprehension to a full-blown dip towards dread. He barely catches a glimpse of the tarps draped over the bodies, when his stomach pulls tight, shoulders tensing as if waiting for a blow from the right, but there’s no one there. Something far too close to fear chokes at his throat, forcing him to pause in the doorway and put a steadying hand on the doorframe.

Spots appear across his vision, a chill winding up his spine, and—

—sobbing, hysterical tears, please don’t do this, please just let them go, heart racing, blood thundering, please no, I’ll give you anything, someone help, click, bang, agony, nothing—

Jason shudders as he comes back to himself, reeling back a step.

The sensations ebb a little but don’t completely vanish, and he has to take a few breaths to regain his control. Now that he expects it, it won’t be too hard entering the room, but the fact it hit him like that...

Jason glances back to the entrance of the apartment, mouth setting into a grimace. He’s cleaned up plenty of suicides, and they never hit him with that degree of dread before.

 He has a bad feeling that Detective Drake might have been right—whatever happened in the apartment, it wasn’t as simple as it's meant to look.

________________________________________________________________

I want to know what you think of my story! Leave kudos, a comment or if writing comments isn't something you're comfortable with, as many of these (or other emojis) as you want and let me know how you feel! ❤️️ = I love this story!

😳 = this was hot!

💐 = thank you for sharing this

🍵 = tea spilled

🍬 = so sweet and fluffy!

🚔 = you’re under arrest! the writing’s too good!

😲 = I NEED THE NEXT CHAPTER

😢 = you got me right in the feels

🤯mind blown

🤬god damn cliffhanger

😫 whyyyyyyy?!?!? 

[pynkhues]

I’m sure you’ve already gotten a bunch of asks since Manny’s Crime King interview! I’m just like confused about him saying he’s enamored by her world but honestly like how is his different (besides his obvious commitment to the game) he lives in a nice loft, takes his kid to baseball, drives a fancy car, and plays tennis at the club. It’s not like he’s living the life of a thug. I guess I’m not getting the exact contrast of their worlds.

(Rest of my ask) I’m probably missing some obvious point here which is why I’m asking you lol helllppp

I do think Rio’s enamoured with Beth’s world, yes! I think that really boils down to the fact that while on paper Beth and Rio aren’t living dissimilar lives in terms of their roles as parents, and while they obviously now share parts of the criminal world, I do think the show is actually pretty specific in how it represents those worlds, particularly in terms of the masculine / feminine, and how a part of the curiosity around each other is in viewing one another as a key that both compliments their own world, while also unlocking the other’s one for them.

The gendering of spaces in storytelling – but particularly films and TV is, hilariously, a topic that I’m incredibly passionate about and have both written it a lot in my original work, and written about it a lot for magazines, journals and media sites (I’m actually writing an essay at the moment for a literary journal about LGBTQI cinema and how lesbian romances are highly domesticised [i.e. Portrait of a Lady on Fire, The Handmaiden, The Favourite, The Kids are Alright] while gay romances are usually very pointedly about keeping away from domestic spaces, moving and traveling [i.e. Brokeback Mountain, The Talented Mr Ripley, Moonlight, Midnight Cowboy, even Call Me By Your Name is heavily focused on being Americans abroad aka away from home] but that all feels like a different story, haha).

Luckily for me, Good Girls is actually about as obsessed with the gendering of spaces as I am. It’s a major, major throughline throughout the show for many of the characters, but particularly Beth and Rio, and their intrigue with the other’s spaces – her interest in his powerful, highly masculine one, and his with her deceptively innocent, strongly feminine one – is really central to their intrigue with each other more broadly.

So to talk about this, we probably need a little bit of context.

(Under a cut because this is literally 4,000 words)

Gendering Spaces in Cinema

It’s probably not a surprise to anyone here, but places and spaces in stories are about as gendered – if not more gendered – as they are in daily life. In particular, cinema’s visual and textual language has historically been very clear:

The inside is female. The outside is male.

This concept has really been around since the beginning of cinema but became very popularised through Westerns in the late 1920s onwards, and really underlined by war films particularly during propaganda cinema in WWII. Men are outside, battling the elements and other men, claiming land, building outwards, while women are at home – either literally or figuratively (if they’re actually out at war, like in the utterly fabulous So Proudly We Hail!, they’re at the ‘home base’ as nurses) – building inwards. Men protect the home while women create it.

Westerns feature these images very potently and very literally. Almost every single western dating back to the 1910s will have some combination of these two shots:

a)       Woman at home, looking out into the wild:

b)      Man leaving home, stepping out into the wild:

(These two stills are from John Ford’s The Searchers which is generally regarded as one of the greatest Westerns of all time. It’s………very racist and misogynistic, as many were and still are, but in terms of technicality and visual language, it’s a very well-made film, albeit not one I enjoyed).

The purpose at the time, of course, was steeped in historic sexism and invested in maintaining that culture, particularly westerns and war films which are heavily devoted to ‘macho’ narratives. Women were passive, men were active, but these images really set the stage for how the ideas of ‘space’ continues to exist in cinema. A fact that’s bolstered by broader social discourses that still exist today – schools, grocery stores, laundromats are inherently ‘female’ spaces because they are seen as an extension of the home, while police stations, car dealerships, warehouses, are inherently ‘male’ spaces because they’re about work, protecting and providing for a home, and being pointedly outside of that domestic space aka ‘the wild’. It’s not an accident that the girls are robbing grocery stores and day spas, but I’ll get back to that, haha.

These ideas of gendered spaces underpin everything we watch, no matter the genre.

Sure, these ideas can be subverted to varying degrees of effectiveness (often it’s steeped in my least favourite trope – the ‘not like other girls’ heroine), but you can’t subvert a trope without actually acknowledging it exists. Sometimes these subversions are done brilliantly too – like in Legally Blonde which was not just about Elle existing in a space that was quintessentially coded as male, but embracing her femininity and womanhood within that space; and often brutally too in films like Winter’s Bone, Room and The Nightingale which all brutalise women in ‘male spaces’ while simultaneously weaponizing female spaces against them – usually the home. The lead character of Winter’s Bone is going to lose her house unless her absent father shows up in court, the lead character of Room creates a home that is simultaneously a sanctuary and a mockery of a sanctuary to try and protect her son from reality and survive, the lead character of The Nightingale has her home invaded, her husband and baby murdered, and is horrifically raped within that home.

Hometown Horror: a divergence

This is a slight aside to where I’m going with this overall, but please indulge me, haha. I’m a big fan of horrors and thrillers, which explore this in a really stark way. In that, the invasion of a home or a domestic space – whether by ghost, demon or serial killer, is, generally speaking, synonymous with the invasion of a woman’s body and the violation of her as a person.

Films that focus on a female survivor or a ‘final girl’ are very generally focused on the invasion of her home as much as it’s focused on the invasion of her body. Think The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, Scream, The Babadook, Hereditary, The Conjuring, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Panic Room. The violation of a woman’s home is the invasion of her, because cinema relies on over 100 years of movies telling us that a house and the woman who lives in it are symbolically the same thing.

Horror films that focus on men are very rarely centred in the home. It’s men travelling, or men visiting a woman’s home, or men who’ve been taken. Think of the first Saw movie which takes place in a mysterious basement, Hostel which is at a hostel, Dawn of the Dead at a shopping mall, An American Werewolf in London while two men are on holiday, The Evil Dead is in a cabin, Get Out is at his girlfriend’s family home.

There are exceptions, of course! Family home invasion films like The Purge, Funny Games and The Strangers are rooted in the violation of that home, but still. You’ll generally find that it manifests differently narratively speaking for men and women. Rear Window too takes place entirely in a man’s apartment – but it’s interesting to note that most of the ‘horror’ comes from him spying on somebody else’s home – notably a woman’s, The Descent too is very much about women and is set during cave diving. Still! These are all exceptions, not the rule.

Good Girls and Gendered Spaces

Every single space in Good Girls is gendered. It’s actually one of the things I seriously love about the show because it’s thoughtfully done, and it is deliberate. We know it is, because they tell us explicitly in the writing multiple times. I mean – hell, think of Ruby telling us (well, telling Rio, haha) way back at the end of 1.04 when they’re selling him on the idea of washing cash through Cloud 9 – “Nobody thinks twice about a woman buying her husband a TV or new tires for the minivan.” A store like that is gendered, and Ruby’s reinforcing it by saying it’s a place women go to build a home. It hasn’t been weaponized yet - - but our girls know how to weaponize it. They’re playing on the fact that people think women’s spaces are effectively impotent, and they’re telling Rio – and us as an audience – that they’re going to exploit it.

This is an idea the show revisits frequently. Women’s spaces are – both in life and in storytelling – spaces that are viewed as passive because they are representative of women, and what the show is – I believe – very invested in, is showing how those spaces are fundamentally active. If you want a house to represent a woman – well, okay. Then you get to see what’s under the rug, y’know?

I’m going to come back to the home thread – because I really do think it’s very important, and I think the way the show depicts people in those spaces (and invading those spaces) is significant – but it’s not just homes that are looked at in this way. The show is very specific about having feminine spaces and masculine spaces, with only a few in between (and usually those in-between spaces are very specifically for Stan and Ruby, showing just how in-sync they are with each other and how much they operate within a shared space). Beyond the women’s homes, there are the kids’ schools, Fine & Frugal (very important here to note that Annie emasculates Boomer in what is an associated female space and that he retaliates by attempting to rape her in her own home aka not only another female space, but a space that is symbolically Annie, something he repeats later with Mary Pat – a violation on essentially every character, narrative and symbolic level, again), the waxing salon, Nancy’s day spa, Jane’s dance recital (and actually the physical object of the dubby – being a highly feminine object lost in a very masculine space), and already what we know of s3, with Ruby being at a nail salon and Beth being at a paper / card store.

The show also has very masculinized places – I’d argue Boland Motors is one of the biggest ones – very much about ‘boys and their toys’, which is why Beth pointedly feminising it when she takes over is so significant and symbolically indicative of Beth’s claiming of that space; but also spaces like the police station, the drug dealer’s house in 2.07, the hotel suite Boomer briefly occupies, even to an extent the church. When the girls are in these spaces, there’s a distinct feeling of encroaching on territory that isn’t theirs, or being in spaces that they don’t belong in. This is often done as a two-hander too – the police station and the church Ruby doesn’t belong in anymore, not necessarily as a woman, but as a criminal.

Nothing though, from a technical standpoint, is more masculine than the spaces that are shown to be Rio’s. From the warehouse spaces to the bar to his loft to his car, Rio’s ‘places’ are distinctly masculine and generally placed in direct contrast with Beth’s femininity. But I’ll come back to that point too.

Home, Identity and Invasion

Almost every female character on this show has a very defined domestic space, from Beth, Ruby and Annie, to Mary Pat, Marion and Nancy. These spaces are representative of not just who they are, but who they are as women, and really comes to routinely represent the interior lives of these characters. This is probably the clearest in 2.09 when Beth is uncharacteristically messy following Dean taking their kids, and in 2.06, when Beth and Dean switch roles, and Dean is incapable of maintaining that domestic space because it’s not his. But let’s not start there.

Let’s start with Annie.

Annie’s apartment is fun, feminine (but not overly so), youthful, sweet, and generally a bit of organized chaos. It’s often underequipped – there are several mentions of the pantry being understocked – but it’ll always do in a pinch. More than anything though, Annie’s apartment comes to life when her son is in it. She’s happiest when he’s there, and when he’s not, her loneliness drives her to pulling people into the space with her, whether that’s the electronics guy, Greg, or Noah.

This is particularly significant when Annie’s forming bonds with people. The show has symbolically relied very heavily on Annie’s moments of vulnerability and connection being grounded in her apartment or an extension of it – usually her car. There was her reconnecting with Greg over YouTube videos in s1, there was Nancy and her talking about pregnancy in 2.02, and there was Noah settling in across season 2. These are all substantial moments in terms of Annie’s interior life that are represented through her home – she lets them all in. Which is why it’s significant what people do when they are in. Particularly the show marrying Noah getting to know Annie while simultaneously rifling through her belongings, trying to know specific things about her.

This is only reiterated by Noah’s scenes with Sadie later in the season – always at home, reiterating just how much Noah’s invaded Annie’s life, how much he’s inside her, how much he’s using everything and everyone who’s important to her, and how much he’s a threat to all of that too.

Ruby and Stan are a little different. Ruby’s house is the only one that’s genuinely shared with somebody, and the show represents this across the board – Ruby and Stan wear similar colours, the house feels like theirs, and the parts of their worlds that are separate are still frequently pretty defined by each other (even when Ruby’s acting away form Stan, the show makes it clear that Stan’s at the forefront of her mind, and vice versa). This indicates their partnership, but the house really still is symbolically tied to Ruby. This is particularly represented by the effect of having Turner in the house, but, more than that, it’s underlined symbolically by Turner arresting Stan at home. If the home symbolically carries the meaning of the woman, Turner arresting Stan there is starkly about Turner taking Stan away from Ruby. That image would not hold the same weight if he was arrested at, say, the park or the police station, because the locations don’t hold the same meaning.

It’s also why there’s significance in Stan and Turner’s showdown narratively speaking happening at the police station. It needs to, because symbolically it should occupy a masculine-coded space, because that showdown isn’t just about who they are as people, but who they are as men.

Beth and Beth’s house is very, very different to Annie and Ruby’s, and holds a more substantial narrative and symbolic function. From the very first episode, the potential of losing her house is key to her arc, and key to her identity as a character.

Beth is a lot of things, but a recurring image with her as a character is that she is invested in projecting a dated idea of ‘perfect womanhood’, and, within that, actually pretty perfectly creates parts of it for herself. For Beth – as somebody who was a housewife for roughly twenty years – her house really is her in every sense of the word. Every threat to that house, every disruption, every wrinkle, every intrusion, every theft, every invitation is personal. Dean might have at least two rooms in the Boland House, but that space is Beth’s on almost every symbolic level. When people pop into it, it’s a direct invasion of her.

This is something that the show has revisited time and time again, particularly when it comes to Beth’s bedroom. When people want to be close to Beth, that’s where they go. Annie slept there across season one when she was vulnerable and lonely, despite Beth telling her to go home, Jane broke into Beth’s closet there when she felt she was being neglected, Dean’s constantly trying to sidle into it (and – pointedly – only really in it when they’re fighting and Beth is revealing something / letting him in on something – that they’re out of money, that she has Rio’s money, that she knows about his affairs). When Beth has been at her most vulnerable, she lets Ruby and Annie into it. That said, the only character who’s been explicitly invited into it has been Rio – significantly both in fantasy, and in the show’s reality.

It’s not just about inviting people in though – when she kicks somebody out of it, the act is loaded.

She’s not just pushing somebody out of a space, she’s pushing them out of her.

It’s not just her bedroom of course (although I do think that’s the most significant space on perhaps the whole show). Rio and Turner between them have regularly invaded Beth’s living room, dining room, her kitchen, her yard. These are often distinctly tied with her doing something domestic and / or distinctly feminine. She’s bringing groceries home, she’s baking, she’s trying on jewellery, she’s mothering her children. Symbolically, this is often when Rio and Turner both are at their most masculine and their most threatening, which just serves to underline the invasion of Beth’s space.

It’s not just the girls though, as I said above. Female domestic spaces on this show are significantly coded as belonging to women, even if they share those spaces. Think about Nancy and Greg’s house – which is Nancy’s space, not Greg’s, and throughout season 1, Annie was pitted as the outsider to that. She’s a smear of hair oil on Nancy’s perfect couch. It’s made all the starker when Nancy kicks Greg out, and when Annie helps Nancy give birth in that house – a distinctly female, intimate act, that not only operates as a significant feminization of that space, but also about Annie fighting for Nancy to let her in again.

These spaces all keep secrets for the women they belong to too – Mary Pat’s husband’s dead body, Boomer’s very much alive one – because, again, symbolically, they are these women.

Rio’s loft is a really interesting one to look at in this context, because not only is it hyper masculine, but the show underlines that it does not hold the same significance that the girls’ places have for them. Beth does not learn Rio by being inside him – something made stark through their game of twenty questions. In fact, being in Rio’s loft, in his space, only serves to point out how much Beth doesn’t know him. Not only that, but Beth’s inability to lose her house (which is really central to her arc) is paralleled exactly with how easily Rio can separate from his.

The domestic space is not male.

Rio exists outside of it.

Beth x Rio and the Feminine x Masculine

Rio and Beth are basically at polar opposites of the masculine / feminine spectrum, and it’s something that this show often casts in a really stark light through dialogue, visual language, character coding and symbolism.

Beth epitomizes the old archetype of femininity and the female world in a way that I don’t think Annie and Ruby do (although I do think Ruby does in some respects). This is coded into almost every part of her character – from her long history of domestic servitude and marital submission (letting Dean control their finances, not working, keeping the house, etc.) to her fertility (four children!) to the way she dresses in floral, bakes, to certain traits, namely her nurturing tendencies, overt empathy and guilt (not being able to kill Boomer). Even in terms of the casting – Christina is somebody who has a very distinctly feminine body.  

On the other hand, Rio, in many ways, epitomizes the old idea of masculinity and the masculine world. He’s coded that way almost as much as Beth is coded as feminine – he’s physically strong (beating up Dean, holding Beth up while they were having sex), assertive, dominant, capable and collected. That’s not even touching on the fact that the golden gun is incredibly phallic, haha.

The show loves to place Beth’s femininity in direct contrast with Rio’s masculinity in a way that it doesn’t do with the other girls or – in fact perhaps more notably – with Beth and Dean (if anything, Dean’s frequently emasculated around Beth, but that feels like a whole other thing, haha), and it does this frequently, and often even in the same shot.

Most notably, think of her pearls on the warehouse door handle:

Their cars parked side-by-side:

Her necklace, his gun:

Her light, his darkness:

Her floral, his solid colours:

Interestingly though, these things are very rarely in competition or combative (although occasionally they are – Rio trying to use her femaleness and his maleness / their sexuality to literally bend her over a table in 2.06 being the clearest example of that). Generally speaking, the show’s visual language though shows us how these things compliment each other. They occupy different gendered spaces, so they can ‘crime’ in different ways – Beth using the big box stores, the secret shoppers, robbing the day spa, are all things that are highly feminised, and give Rio by proxy access to a world he ordinarily wouldn’t (albeit it’s not always a world he’s interested in – like it wasn’t with the botox), and the reverse of that is that Rio gives Beth access to spaces that are highly masculinised and that she ordinarily wouldn’t have access to (again, not always a world she’s interested in either). It’s why when they’re working together, and acknowledging they have different departments, they actually become something really whole, comprehensive and effective.

It’s the exploration of this that I find really intriguing generally, and particularly a thread that I think is reiterated where Beth’s usually at her worst and her most ineffective when she’s trying to emulate Rio’s masculinity. We saw that at the end of 1.10 and the start of 2.01, and I think we saw it at the tail end of season 2 too. When Beth’s succeeding, she’s typically doing something that revels in the strength and power and the underestimation of femininity and female spaces, and turns places that are typically viewed as passive into active ones.

The Secret Shoppers (which worked briefly! And fell apart because she couldn’t handle Mary Pat. Notably almost every scene with them was inside Beth’s house):

The day spa heist:

The Boland Motors takeover / reclamation that focused on feminising the place:

Pretending to be somebody’s mum to get into the kids’ space (which would’ve worked if Beth and Ruby hadn’t started fighting):

Breaking into Rio’s loft:

Again, this is something that seems to be being teased out already in s3 with the paper store and the nail salon, and I’m sure we’ll see it coming up again and again beyond that.

But yes! Your question, haha. I think Rio is enamoured with the strong, feminine space and the untapped female world that Beth exists in, and the ways that she is actively capable of utilising her femininity and her womanness in a way that is completely impossible for him. She can manipulate these spaces – either those already female, or those she makes female aka Boland Motors – in ways that he can’t, and in a way that, at the end of the day, lines his pocket, in the same way that giving her access to his powerful, masculine world lines hers. It’s market development, y’know? But it’s also something that could be a true and successful partnership if they could stop, y’know, playing games and trying to kill each other, haha.

I think it’s worth noting here too that the show has shown us explicitly that Beth absolutely gets off on Rio being highly masculine, and while I think Rio absolutely gets off on Beth being a boss bitch too, it’s also important to note how he responds to her when she’s displaying vulnerability in a way often defined as very feminine – namely crying – and how that display of femininity not only affects him, but often makes him want to touch her (and more and more, follow through on touching her).

Basically I think they’re as obsessed with the contrast between the two of them as we are, haha.  

[liamtsullivan]

-- && guests may mistake me as ( andy biersack ), but really i am ( liam sullivan + cis male + he/him ) and my DOB is ( 12/28/93 ). i am applying for the ( banquet manager ) position as part of the EHP and would like to live in suite ( #203 ). i should be hired because i am ( + loyal, charismatic, driven ), but i can also be ( - distracted, opinionated, pushy ) at times. personally, i like to ( watch documentaries, play poker, get tattoos ) when off the clock, but that won’t interfere with work. thank you for your consideration!

ooc;; it’s ya girl kay again, i’m so so sorry adfjlaksfj. this is liam, he’s a brain baby of mine that i played a little while ago and he’s been haunting me since i stopped playing him so here he is to be a part of y’all’s lives. hopefully you dig him, if not......... well that’s fine, too. can’t make you do anything, i’m not your mom unless you’re card; go to your room, card.

TW’s: Mentions of prostitution. Abortion. Drug use, drug addiction, drug overdose, & drug related death.

fast facts / personality details;;

( i put these first this time because the background is A Lot on this one okay )

has a rather protective and care-giving nature mixed in with his excellent work ethic and drive.

loves when guests ask for the manager and he gets to come out and see how much they didn’t expect the manager to be a 6′4″ beanpole with neck tattoos.

lives by the ideal “put your money where your mouth is” ; also just like, be genuine and up front with him in general, like he’s not an asshole, but also he knows how to deal with assholes, so let that be said

has a five year old german shepherd named Roxy that he rescued from shelter overflow when she was only a six month old puppy; Roxy still thinks that she is a small lap dog despite being a Big Girl

still wears the ring that his mom gave him for his eighteenth birthday every day, despite the issues that they had, and despite her being gone now.

has his nose pierced and his lip pierced, though the lip ring he takes out for stretches of time; the nose ring is always in, though.

absolutely covered in tattoos, in case that wasn’t already painfully obvious. he loves getting them and yes, still has room for more, will continue to get them probably forever.

prefers brown liquor over pretty much any other alcohol, though he’s not opposed to a good draft every once in a while

listens to more classical music than anyone would ever probably expect of him; that being said he also listens to a lot of classic rock and, naturally, a dose of pop punk, too, for fun.

he likes listening to true crime podcasts and watching various true crime / serial killer documentaries; criminal minds is also his favorite show. so like don’t piss him off, i guess ajdkfljasdklf

smokes cigarettes like he’s a motherfucking chimney; says he’s working on quitting, has yet to actually start that process.

generally just a supportive person; if Liam cares about you in any capacity - even if it’s just because you work together - you’ll know it. he likes to help the people around him, try to steer them in the right direction, offer them advice.

he’s not a shy person, in fact he’s rather social, and while there’s a dry humored joke or a sarcastic toy here and there, he’s a pretty genuinely nice dude. despite the things that he’s seen and been through in his life, he’s worked really hard to stay optimistic, and driven throughout and so far he’s been very successful at that.

dresses rather nice / got that business casual look down with the short-sleeved button ups or the long-sleeved ones with the sleeves rolled for work purposes. however, outside of work it's like a cat and his wardrobe were in a trash bag together. lots of black, and dark earthy colors, too. the duality of man.

background / life story;;

Liam Travis Sullivan was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, where his mother, Stephanie Sullivan, was an escort / call girl on The Strip.

Stephanie getting pregnant was a tremendous ‘oops,’ but she kept the baby anyway. The baby’s father was a client who had a wife and kids already, so he paid Stephanie a whole lot of money to stay quiet and out of contact with him. This money allowed for her to take time off from working to be able to have Liam and take care of him for a bit.

Liam really was Stephanie’s whole world once he was born; the best thing that she ever did, as she so often told him through the years.

Liam never knew his father, but he put two and two together once he was old enough to understand what it was that his mom did.

Liam was three years old when Stephanie finally returned to working on The Strip. He was left in the care of some of Steph’s other ‘working girl’ friends on the nights she happened to be working.

He got very accustomed to spending his time around females, having a heavy female influence in his life as he grew up -whether that particular female influence was always the best or not. It led to his respect for women, though, and his ability to feel very comfortable around them, even from a young age.

When Liam was six years old, Stephanie ended up pregnant again. However, this time she ended up actually having an abortion. Liam only knew about it because his mother rambled about it to him in an overemotional drunken state. She told him that “he was her good boy and all that she needed.”

Working The Strip -as notorious a place as it was- and making the money that she did left Steph open to a lot of drinking and drug use.

At eight years old, Liam found a stash of his mother’s cocaine in their bathroom. This earned a distressed meltdown from Steph about him staying away from that sort of stuff because it was bad. Though, as a developing child gaining understanding of the world around him, that proved to confuse Liam because he didn’t understand why his mommy had it and was doing it if it were so bad.

Liam was ten years old the first time that his mom overdosed. This instance just involved going to the hospital to get her stomach pumped and spend the night on a fluid IV, but it was still terrifying for the boy at the time.

Stephanie struggled with drug abuse for most of Liam’s life. Living where they did facilitated it so easily and also made any getting caught up in the law with it rare -it was Vegas, after all, not to mention Stephanie was in sex work, so the law wasn't always looking out for her anyway.

Right before Liam was about to start high school, the young teenager -already having had to do so much growing up so early and so fast- took it upon himself to give his mother an intervention of sorts. He told her that if she was going to keep taking time with her away from him that he was going to run away, figure life, out himself, even if he did end up in the foster system or something. He pleaded with her that he didn’t want to lose her, that he wanted her there for all the things his life could still have in store for him. Ultimately, after many tears and a lot of convincing, Steph let her fourteen year old son flush her drug stash and they made a very rushed plan to finally get out of Vegas.

Moving to California was really good for the both of them for a while. Being in a new place meant starting fresh, moving forward. Stephanie didn’t know anyone she could get drugs from; between that, the support of her son, and finding help at local NA meetings, she managed through the withdrawal and the struggling. She got a stable, more normal job, working at a sports bar -bartending and waiting tables.

Liam easily adjusted to the change of environment. He practically thrived in Los Angeles. Before he knew it, he had friends, got into playing football at his high school, was losing his virginity. Fast-paced and unconventional were ways that Liam was used to living his life, so getting into things like physical relationships with girls, despite how young he was in reality, felt normal to him in all his adjusting.

Things stayed going really well for pretty much the whole first year they were in LA. Liam did well in school, got a part time job to help his mom out. Steph ended up picking up a second job to stay busy and keep money coming in. They were good, they were better than they had been, and they had each other.

The summer before Liam’s junior year of high school, he caught his mom using again. Evidently it had been going on for a few months already at that point, and because of how busy he was with school, friends, and work, he had caught on late. Stephanie argued with him on the matter, told him that it wasn’t his business to worry about, among other unexpectedly harsh things. It was the first real, legitimate fight he ever really had with his mom, at least the first one that really mattered.

With too much riding on his focus on school and football -given he had since come up with the goal to go to a good college, to make something of himself and do good things- Liam shut himself off from his mom for a little while. They lived together, came and went about their lives, but they spoke minimally, Liam didn’t fight more with her despite knowing that she was still using at the time. It was very odd for him, to have any sort of bad energy between him and his mom -it was so rare, it had always been just the two of them. He decided, though, that he had to focus on himself and his future.

Senior year came with the promise of scholarships, multiple college scouts having their eyes on him, more than one girl interested in dating him, a wide friend circle, a basic car he had been able to buy for himself, and a growing savings account. Liam was doing great, he was on the right track, focused. Stephanie, however, had downward spiraled. Her using had gotten out of hand to the point of losing both of her jobs, having to get a new one in a setting that was dangerously close to the things she had been doing in Vegas -a strip club.

It wasn’t until Liam’s Winter Formal that year -Stephanie deep into her continued cocaine addiction- that something changed. He was in his suit, getting ready to leave to go pick up his date when his path crossed with Stephanie’s. Upon finding out where her son was heading, who he was going with, the friends he was meeting -details she hadn’t been knowledgeable on for some time at this point- the woman burst into tears. She sobbed apologies to her son, begged him to forgive her for missing out on his life, made promises to him that she would get better for him -promises Liam tried not to take to heart; he had learned.

They did get Stephanie into a rehabilitation clinic shortly after the holidays. She had to sober up a little bit and once again Liam shouldered the responsibility of getting rid of the drugs that she had in their apartment. He spent two months alone in their apartment while his mom worked through her issues, sobered up fully, came back to him. It was an exhausting couple of months for him, trying to be a self sufficient adult in an apartment that had to have things paid for in it, while also juggling school and football, but he managed.

Stephanie came home a different woman than she left, and upon getting a more functional version of his mother back, Liam had the tiniest glint of hope that maybe things would be okay again. Graduation was looming, and he had a few different schools that were more than willing to offer him full ride football scholarships to their universities. Notre Dame, Duke, UCLA, among other state-based colleges all had eyes on him. It was something he could finally talk to his mom about.

While Stephanie encouraged him to follow his heart, follow wherever his dreams were gonna take him, Liam couldn’t shake the idea of being far from home -or, in particular, being far from where she was. Things were so fragile with her and her addiction, it was so much more possible for something bad to happen and him to have absolutely no idea about it if he went far away. So despite the incredible opportunities he could have had elsewhere, he chose to accept to scholarship from UCLA out of all the schools who chose him.

Going to college, let alone such a prestigious and well known state school like UCLA was like something out of a fairytale for Liam. Looking back on what his life had been up to the point of graduating high school and moving on to bigger things, he was amazed at what he had accomplished. Given the healthy and sober way that his mother still was at the time of his high school graduation, she, too, made it a point to make sure he knew how amazed and proud she was of him.

College wasn’t quite as easy for him as high school was, but that just drove Liam to work even harder. He wasn’t going to waste the opportunity he was given. He was double majoring in business and marketing; even though he had little idea what sort of business he wanted to be a part of, he knew that he wanted something for himself, something that could do good, give back in some way shape or form. Those subjects would do a lot to help him get there, he knew that much.

Stephanie stayed sober for most of Liam’s college experience, after the help of going to rehab, and the continued going to NA meetings. He popped back to the apartment every now and again -having moved into campus living during the semesters- and that helped her, too. Things seemed really good for quite some time, but having the other shoe drop once again unfortunately didn’t come as too terribly much of a shock to Liam. She had been getting involved with some guy she knew from work, they’d been sleeping together, and what Liam didn’t know is that they frequently went out for drinks. Drinking slowly but surely progressed into getting high together; something easy for Stephanie to fall into, particularly because of her habit, but also because of the familiarity of the circumstances -it was awfully similar to when she was working on The Strip and would get wasted with clients.

Liam was in his last semester of college, just about three months shy of graduating with his bachelor’s degree. It was a huge deal for him, it was something that he wasn’t going to give up for anything in the world. Still, he made it a point to help his mother after she called him absolutely high out of her mind and apologizing to him while he was pulling an all-nighter on an assignment one night. He didn’t ask many questions, just the basics, and he looked into a place himself -a rehab center that was further away, lengthier and more in depth with their programs. Before, they had gone with what was convenient, facility-wise, but he wasn’t going to make that mistake twice. If his mother needed more special attention, he was going to get her to that.

Getting his degree was a gift, a blessing he in reality never thought would be his. While his mom was still in rehab at the time of his graduation -Liam insisted that she not leave treatment just to come to the ceremony- she still wrote to him consistently, sent him a congratulations card right around the day of the ceremony. Liam was in a position in his life that awed him in a way, ready to take on the world.

Pursuing the concept of his own business sort of took a back seat; having just gotten his degree, it wasn't like Liam could immediately leap into much, not to mention he didn't have the funds. He had been working and saving all through college - served, cooked, and bartended at a grand total of six different restaurants in Los Angeles by the time he graduated - but on top of any business itself being expensive, school itself was expensive, too.

By the time Liam was twenty-four years old, he was managing two bars, and co-managing a restaurant out in Los Angeles. He was living on his own, keeping tabs on his mother sporadically, but mostly working toward a goal for a business of his own. He was teetering between a pub of sorts, or a burlesque club - two wildly different ideas, but both with the same idea in mind; somewhere entertaining but somewhere that also provided a sense of community, somewhere he could give jobs to people that needed them - perhaps that was inclined to women, from his subconscious protection of his mother, but that was beside the point.

A coworker of his at one of the bars he was the bar manager of ended up being who presented a move out of Los Angeles to him. There was potentially more business opportunity somewhere out of that location, out of the state of California, even. Chicago was brought to the table, this friend having heard of a program that offered employee housing at a luxury hotel. Liam was apprehensive about the Malnati at first, given he didn't want to have to start on a bottom rung in terms of his job once again. As it turned out, however, there was a management position that was generally up his alley. Seeking opportunity and further growth wherever he could find it, Liam made the move to Chicago.

Things between him and his mom had been more distant over the year since he graduated college, and in his move to Chicago, he couldn't say he was surprised to end up hearing about things getting bad again for his mom. It was a moment of true growing up for Liam, realizing that he had to be responsible for himself, he had to do what he needed to do, he couldn't carry his mom anymore. If she didn't want to get better and stay better, he couldn't be the one derailing his life to continue to try to make her do so.

That first year of him living in Chicago, working as the banquet manager at the Malnati, his mom overdosed for the last time. It was unexpected in the same way that it wasn't; Liam went through a brief period of a numb sort of grieving - he was of course sad to have lost his mom, to have to come to terms with the fact that he'd never get to see or speak to her again. He also, though, had to face the fact that as dark and upsetting as the circumstances were, they were out of his hand, they were not his responsibility. He mourned his mother as she deserved, and he went on with his life; because deep down he knew that she would want that for him, anyway.

Liam has been living in Chicago and working as the Malnati's banquet manager for the last nearly-three years now. He oversees more than just a restaurant and a bar now, and it's expanded his career experience in ways that he is very thankful for. It's a little bit on the backburner once again, but definitely not forgotten, that he intends to have his own business some day. Perhaps more than one, even. He loves the organization and the hard work and dedication that go into leading - whether that be a kitchen or a bar or an event. He likes to be supportive as much as a leader - Liam wants to see his team succeed; if there's slack that needs to be picked up and he can help, he will. He's not going to bark orders and call it a day, that's not what he's about, that's not what he considers his job. He's got a good head on his shoulders, and a good work ethic, and he likes doing what he does.

wanted connections;;

IT’S TIME ONCE AGAIN FOR ME TO FAIL AT THESE LMFAO

Liam in his job oversees chefs, bartenders, servers, room service runners, and musicians, so like we got a whooooole lineup of connections to be had there; he’s their boss yeah, but as I’ve said like a million times now he’s really active in trying to help his team succeed. he’ll help out on the bar and running food and covering breaks or callouts or whatever, so like there’s a lot of good potential relationships to be had there.

other managers bc we love seniority adfjlkasdfjk no i’m just kidding, but still we love some manager pals why not

idk i think it’d be really funny to have someone who’s like intimidated by him simply because of the way that he looks and he’s like look i’m really not that bad i just like tattoos a lot okay lmAO

a casual hookup here or there is chill; he’s not super into the fwb thing? like he’ll stay friends after a hookup if the other person is cool with it, but as an ongoing thing it just gets too complicated for his liking.

pet parent friends; his girl Roxy is a friendly giant baby and he adores her, bring him some parent friends and her some dog friends

tattoo pals of some variety?? even if it’s just him constantly encouraging people to go get tattoos, or talking them through processes? going with them for moral support because he barely even feels it when he gets tattoos now?? who knows

honestly we been knew i’m up to just talking shit out and winging it a lot of the time too so just hit me up if you wanna figure some stuff out with this inked up beanpole okay? okay ily.

[questionablygourmet]

I Like This Show A Normal Amount: Will Graham As Autistic Representation

In a previous meta post about Will, I briefly alluded to my appreciation for Will as good autistic representation, and for Free-For-All Friday, @tin-can-paladin prompted me to do as I’d said I might and write a Thing about that.  (Hopefully today is the day I actually get this post finished and up!)  So here we go.

First of all, this post will be starting from the premise that Will is an autistic character.  I don’t particularly care if Hugh’s said he’s not; whether or not he meant to, he and Bryan gave us an autistic-coded character and I reserve the right to be delighted about it!  (Actually, that’s not quite true - I do care, in the sense that I wish he hadn’t said that, because acknowledging portrayals of characters on the spectrum that aren’t a walking fucking stereotype played for lulz *cough BBT COUGH* or as a tragedy inflicted upon their neurotypical family members as being on the spectrum is Important.  But whatever.)

This post will address aspects of Will as a character, but also to an extent how he’s handled in the wider context of the show, and why that matters.

Agency

This was my primary focus on that previous Will meta post, but in context of autistic representation, I think it’s an important thing to highlight in this post as well: Will Graham is a whole-ass adult in control of his actions even when other characters don’t think so (see: Alana, Jack, et al in late season 1) or are actively trying to subvert that (see: Hannibal, You Asshole).

Autistic characters in various media are all-too-frequently infantilized and handled as though their environment/circumstances completely dictate their behavior.  Will both implicitly and explicitly (“You can’t reduce me to a set of influences” - ironically for a later part of this post, the next thing he says mentions behaviorism), resoundingly rejects this, and I love that as part of his narrative in general but also as an autistic character in particular.  

Empathy

This one’s gonna be a doozy.  There’s a lot to talk about here that all generally falls under the heading of “autism and empathy,” so I’ll do my best to stay organized.

First, the simplest: He cares!  So!  Deeply!  And complexly!  And we know that throughout the show!

Frankly, this in particular massively exacerbates my irritated wish that the creators would explicitly acknowledge him as autistic because holy shit the stereotypes he combats with this.  Autistic people in the real world have widely varied, diverse relationships with empathy and compassion (which are different things, and I have some beefs with the way the show uses the word “empathy,” but that’s a digression and this is already going to be a long post), but media largely erases this, conflating difficulties with normative, neurotypical-passing social behavior with inability to empathize, and/or display compassion, and/or even feel emotions (FFS).  

There’s a related point about “normative-passing social behavior” that I want to expand on a bit, here: we see a lot of profound differences in demeanor for Will over the course of the show, and that’s something I’ve seen interpreted as manipulation sometimes when it really isn’t.  (Not to say Will is not manipulative/capable of being manipulative, because he is, very!  But not everything calculated is necessarily manipulative, and I see the two conflated a lot and that annoys me.)  Will has, to my eyes, four basic social “modes.”  

I’m Dealing With Most People With Whom I Have No Particular Antipathy Or Affection - Aloof, and either standoffish or polite depending on how his boundaries are being treated.  He’s not particularly interested in making people comfortable when they’re making him uncomfortable (and being a white dude generally enables him to take this attitude without big repercussions), and people frequently make him uncomfortable.

I’m Dealing With Someone I Perceive As Vulnerable - Exaggeratedly calm, kind, careful.  He’s trying to connect and provide comfort and support.  He’s minding his every move and word because he doesn’t want to cause harm incidentally.  (Abigail, Peter, Walter, etc. and to some extent, Margot, though with her it’s mixed with other attitudes.)

I’m Dealing With An Enemy - This is where the manipulativeness (and even, particularly in the cases of Bedelia and Hannibal, cruelty) comes in.  He’s minding his every move and word because he wants to elicit a specific response from the person he’s interacting with.  (This comes into play with Jack and Alana at various points even though they are rarely full enemies.)

I’m Dealing With A Trusted Friend - Has neither the deliberation of 2-3 nor quite the standoffishness of 1.  He’s neither projecting an image appropriate to a specific kind of fraught social situation, nor actively trying to deflect attention and interaction.  In my opinion we really only see this with Hannibal (in season 1 and then with flashes of it in 2 and 3) and Molly, though he gets close in a handful of moments with Alana, Beverly, and Jack.  

All these modes deal with a) to what extent he is acting, and b) why he’s acting.  And I love that we get to see this breadth of social interaction modes from him, because that is an accurate and sensitive portrayal of an autistic adult, reflecting the often-dramatic differences in “difficulty setting” of an interaction - how and to what extent are we expected to (or otherwise have a need to) mimic neurotypical mannerisms?  What are the stakes of the situation?  These are explicit considerations for a lot of autistic people, and Will demonstrates that vividly throughout the series.

Another way in which empathy and social interaction come into play in terms of autistic representation is that Will can and does form strong social bonds - not very often, because the way most other adults treat him isn’t conducive to it, but with people who display acceptance/a lack of judgment for his non-neurotypical reactions and behaviors, and importantly, who don’t treat him as Other for the way he can reconstruct crime scenes, we see that can form very strong bonds.  Hannibal is obviously the prime example of this, but also Molly, and to a much lesser extent, Alana and Margot.  (Though Jack refers to him as a friend and they have some friendly interactions, their bond is not a strong one and not at all marked by the kind of humanizing acceptance it takes to get truly close to Will.)  People who accept who he is, and who are neither threatened by his skills nor dependent on them.

Finally, in this section, let’s look at the crime scene reconstructions and “getting inside killers’ heads” bit.  

I have complex feelings about this aspect of the show, or more precisely, how other characters talk about his reconstructions and serial killer profiling - they (even Hannibal, to an extent) talk about it in mystifying terms, and I thoroughly dislike the term “empathy disorder” that gets thrown around so much in seasons 1-2 to explain what he does.  Will is apt to testily correct people that he just interprets the evidence, and that is exactly what he is doing.  His vivid imagination coupled with years of active study of criminal psychology allow him to take that interpretation a lot farther than anyone else would, and sometimes make intuitive leaps that the other characters can’t follow.  But it’s clear that this intuition is founded in concrete evidence, as we frequently see him stymied when he doesn’t quite have enough of it, much to the frustration of Jack, who is particularly shitty about treating him like an oracle.  

I like that Will gets to stick up for himself and correct people on several occasions, but I wish the ableism and the Othering was less pervasive amongst the other characters because it makes me want to slap them.  I find that I really appreciate how most of the fic I’ve read since entering the fandom thoroughly and often explicitly rejects the pseudo-magical divination and/or Crazy Person With Magic Brain angle.

Perspective

There was something I was reaching at that was eluding me in my first attempt at this draft, and then I ran into an excellent article about writing autistic characters that suddenly and thoroughly solidified it for me.  It’s really brilliant; it discusses and illustrates the strong difference between a behavioristic (see previous reference) approach to characterization and a humanizing one.  Behavioristic analyses divorce themselves from the actual mindset and experience of the subject, whereas humanizing portrayals display the subjective experience of the person who is perhaps behaving in a way other people may find confusing.  

Since Will is the main point of view character in the show, we get front-row seats to his subjective experience and can therefore more properly empathize with him.  An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.  The behavior that Jack and various other characters are exasperated, impatient, and/or unnerved over all looks pretty reasonable when we know how Will is experiencing the crime scene, or are seeing his nightmares and hallucinations along with him!  And while the nightmares and hallucinations in season 1 are a matter of encephalitis and trauma rather than neurotype, it still matters that we’re led to understand something of what he goes through, from his own perspective rather than an outside one.  

It’s incredibly necessary emotional context moving forward in the show, giving us an autistic character who is flawed but deeply human and whose darkness we can understand.

[claudia1829things]

"THE A.B.C. MURDERS" (2018) Review

"THE A.B.C. MURDERS" (2008) Review Years ago, I had once compiled a list of my favorite novels written by Agatha Christie. One of those novels was her 1936 mystery, "The A.B.C. Murders". The novel led to a movie adaptation, a radio adaptation and two television adaptations. One of the latter was the three-part miniseries that was adapted by Sarah Phelps for the BBC.

"THE A.B.C. MURDERS" is a rare tale from Christie. In it, Belgian-born sleuth Hercule Poirot helps Scotland Yard investigate a possible serial killer named "A.B.C.". The killer uses this moniker in the letters sent to Poirot before committing a murder; and leaves an ABC railway guide beside each victim. Although there are several mysteries written by Christie that features more than one victim, "THE A.B.C. MURDERS" marked the first of two times in which the victims have nothing in common whatsoever. Phelps made some significant changes to Christie's novel. One, this version omitted Captain Arthur Hastings from the plot. I found this incredible, considering Hastings had served as the first-person narrator for the 1936 novel. Chief Inspector Japp made an appearance, but his character was killed off via a heart attack in the miniseries' first episode and Poirot found himself working solely with Inspector Chrome, who was also in the novel. The Mary Drower character, who was related to the first victim, Alice Ascher, was also eliminated. Phelps made changes to the Donald Fraser and Thora Grey characters. Phelps included more detail than Christie in the story's Doncaster murder and added a fifth murder (at Embsay) to the story. She also added a romance for the Alexander Bonaparte Cust character in the form of his landlady's daughter. Phelps explored and changed Poirot's World War I backstory. She also made sure that the first three murder locations had some relevance to Poirot. He had helped deliver a baby aboard a refugee train that stopped in Andover. He had visited the Bexhill café where the second victim, Betty Barnard, would later work. And he had once attended a party at the home of Sir Carmichael Clarke, the third victim. I was surprised at how beautiful the miniseries' production looked. Although the novel was first published in 1936, Phelps had decided to set her adaptation in 1933. I thought Jeff Tessler's production designs did a superb job in re-creating 1933 England. A beautiful job. And his work was supported by Joel Devlin's excellent photography, which struck me as colorful and sharp; along with Andrew Lavin and Karen Roch's excellent art direction. Another aspect of "THE A.B.C. MURDERS"that impressed me were Lindsay Pugh's costume designs. I thought she did an excellent job in creating costumes for characters that varied in both class and gender in 1933 Britain. This also included costumes for characters that were impacted by the Great Depression, regardless of class. When it comes to Sarah Phelps' adaptations of Agatha Christie novels, I have mixed views. I really enjoyed her 2015 adaptation of Christie's 1939 novel, "And Then There Were None". I cannot say the same about her adaptation of the author's two other stories, "Witness For the Prosecution" and Ordeal By Innocence". How did I feel about "THE A.B.C. MURDERS"? I am very grateful that Phelps had basically stuck to Christie's main narrative from the 1936 novel. Unlike "ORDEAL BY INNOCENCE", she did not completely revise the narrative by changing the murderer's identity or motive. And unlike "WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION", she did not change the fate of the story's main protagonist. However, there were a few changes that I liked. One, she included more detail into the story's fourth murder at Doncaster . . . at least more detail than Christie did. In doing so, she prevented this part of the narrative from being irrelevant. And two, she included a fifth murder. Phelps did not have to do this, but I thought it filled the narrative rather nicely. I noticed that the movie went out of its way to get rid of both Arthur Hastings and Chief Inspector Japp. I thought I would be upset about this, but . . . I was not. Their lack of presence did not harm the narrative. More importantly, it allowed Poirot's relationship with Japp's replacement, the slightly xenophobic Inspector Crome to develop from a conflict to a working relationship with a hint of a possible friendship. This did not bother me since Poirot had to deal with a hostile Crome in the novel. And I feel that Phelps' portrayal of their relationship was better handled in this miniseries. Unfortunately, Phelps used minor changes in the story to continue her campaign to make her Christie adaptations more edgy and angst-filled. These minor changes included transforming the Donald Fraser character into this publicity hound trying to profit from the death of his fiancée, Betty Barnard. What was the purpose of this change? To criticize those who try to profit from the death of others via publicity? I found this irrelevant and unnecessary to the story. The miniseries also featured a potential romance between stocking salesman Alexander Bonaparte Cust and his landlady's daughter, Lily Marbury. In the novel, Lily was Cust's friend and nothing more. For some reason, Phelps thought it was necessary to create a romance in order to convey the idea of Lily walking on his back in heels as a means to release some psycho-sexual need to remove his pain. What was the point of this? To make Cust more interesting? What really irritated me was how Phelps changed the character of one of the supporting character by making that person knowledgeable of the killer's identity long before Poirot . . . and an accessory. Why? To make that character more interesting perhaps? It made me realize that this change made it easier for viewers to identify the killer before Poirot's revelation. The movie made one last change that I disliked . . . Poirot's personal background. Christie had indicated in many of her novels and short stories that before becoming a private detective, Poirot was a police officer in Belgium. For reasons that still astound me, Phelps had changed Poirot's background from former police detective to Catholic priest. Worse, she had created this mystery surrounding some major trauma during World War I that led him to leave the Church and become a crime fighter. What on earth? The problem with this character arc is that it had nothing to do with the main narrative. It played no role in Poirot's discovery and revelation of the actual killer. I will say this about "THE A.B.C. MURDERS". It did feature some excellent performances, save for one. John Malkovich was the second American actor to portray Hercule Poirot, the first being Tony Randall in 1965. I found his Gallic accent slightly questionable. But I still admire his portrayal of the Belgian-born detective and found it refreshingly subtle without any theatrics or histronics. Many have complained about Malkovich portraying the most dour Poirot on screen. I do not agree. The actor did an excellent job of conveying Poirot's grief over Japp's death, his weariness from the never ending encounters of British xenophobia and his personal ghosts from World War I. But I never regarded his Poirot as "dour". Frankly, I found David Suchet's portrayal of Poirot in the 2010 television movie, "MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS"rather depressing. I thought Rupert Grint gave the second best performance as the slightly xenophobic Inspector Crome of Scotland Yard. I have a confession. I have always been impressed by Grint as an actor and at times, thought the HARRY POTTER franchise did not provide any real opportunities for him to convey his skills, aside from one particular movie. But I was really impressed by how he had conveyed Crome's journey from an angry and narrow-minded police officer to someone more open-minded, less angry and more willing to trust Poirot. There were other performances from "THE A.B.C. MURDERS" that impressed me. Eamon Farren gave a first-rate performance as the beleaguered Alexander Bonaparte Cust, a bedraggled traveling salesman who seemed to suffer from epileptic seizures. Anya Chalotra struck me as equally impressive in her portrayal of Lily Marbury, the daughter of Cust's landlady, who has been forced by the latter to prostitute herself for extra money. Tara Fitzgerald gave a very emotional performance as Lady Hermione Clarke, the ailing widow of the killer's third victim, Sir Carmichael Clarke. I could also say the same about Bronwyn James' portrayal of Megan Barnard, the sister of the second victim, Betty Barnard. James did an excellent job of conveying Megan's initial infatuation of Betty's fiancé, Donald Fraser and her jealousy. I found Eve Austin's portrayal of the shallow yet flirtatious Betty rather skillful and memorable. Freya Mayor gave an interesting and complex performance as Sir Carmichael's ambitious secretary Thora Grey. And Andrew Buchan seemed to be the personification of the literary Franklin Clarke, the sexually charming, yet eager younger brother of Sir Carmichael. The miniseries also featured first-rate performances from Jack Farthing as Donald Fraser, Michael Shaeffer as Sergeant Yelland, Lizzy McInnerny as Betty's mother, Mrs. Barnard, Christopher Villiers as Sir Carmichael Clarke and Kevin R. McNally as Japp. If I could name one performance that I found unsatisfying, it would Shirley Henderson's portrayal of Cust's landlady, Rose Marbury. I found her performance rather theatrical and filled with too many exaggerated mannerisms. I did not dislike "THE A.B.C. MURDERS", but I did not love it. There are aspects of it that I admired, including the production's visual style, writer-producer Sarah Phelps' adherence to the story's main narrative and an excellent cast led by John Malkovich. But I also feel that Phelps had added too many unnecessary minor changes to some of the characters and the story. And I suspect that she did this in another attempt to relive the glory of 2015's "AND THEN THERE WERE NONE". The 1939 novel was a rare creation of Christie's. If Phelps wants to write and produce another mystery on that level, I suggest she consider adapting a novel from another writer . . . perhaps P.D. James. Or she should consider creating her own mystery.

[chronically-autistic-dinosaur]

This is an EXTREMELY long post, but there you have it:

With the exception of the first photo, these tests were taken in March. I took the same tests back in November and I took them even earlier than that as well. I got nearly the the same results. I score high for Aspergers. I’ve had questions and concerns for the past 5 or so years about whether or not I had ASD (certain things stuck out to me) and so I started to do some research. I did those tests, talked to some people, and looked into my childhood and realized the signs were always there. Now, I could pay almost $3000 and get my diagnosis on a piece of paper, but what’s the point of that? I’ll still get the same results on the tests. The diagnosis will just sit in my medical file and unless I plan on getting government benefits, I don’t see the point. Yes, I was diagnosed when I was 12. No, I don’t have it in writing anywhere (that I know of). My testing was done as part of a clinical trial I was in and the results of those are never made public or put in a medical record. It sucks, but that’s how those things work. My parents know my diagnosis and I know. That’s enough for me.

Yes, I hit every developmental milestone, but most of us with Aspergers do. We don’t normally have the speech and language deficits that those elsewhere on the spectrum will have. It’s why we are usually misdiagnosed/diagnosed later in life. We are more intelligent than most people. My IQ is 120 (according to all the free tests I’ve done here and the over the years). Now that’s not genius level, but it IS higher than normal. I was reading proficiently at 4 years old. By the time I was in Kindergarten, I was reading at a grade 3 level and could comprehend what I was reading. We have excellent memory recall. I can retain information a lot easier than most. I could name the capital cities of most countries (and if given a few minutes, I could still remember). I love reference books and text books and I was the same way as a child. I’ve always been smarter than my age, which is common for Aspies.

In the language category though, I DO have minor echolalia. I will mimic/repeat what people have said to me. When a customer tells me they are paying with debit (or whatever their payment method is), I will repeat what they said. I’ll repeat numbers back when someone is telling me them. I’ll repeat phrases I hear on TV or movies. It may be immediate or it may be a delayed response somewhere down the road. I use words and phrases out of context. I’ll print something or a receipt will print and I will say “perfect” or “excellent.” I heard the word somewhere and I’m now repeating it in a situation. I talk to myself. And I’m talking full on conversations. Extremely common in those with ASD. I did it as a child as well but it would have been chalked up to “oh she just has an imaginary friend.”

I have very particular interests. At the age of 5, I was reading medical dictionaries and encyclopedias. I love anything medical. I love true crime and serial killers. My favourite TV shows are either medical or crime related. In grade 2, I knew the name of every dinosaur and what period they lived in. If I’m talking to people and they don’t like either of those things, the conversation is over. I could go on and on about my interests and not get bored. This is another ASD trait.

I also inventoried my Halloween candy. I did this every year up until I stopped trick or treating. I organized my teddy bears and inventoried them as well. In fact, everything in my bedroom was inventoried. I had a massive Barbie doll collection and I would spend hours setting everything up in VERY specific spots. It would stay like that for months and the Barbies wouldn’t get played with because I didn’t want anything to get touched and wrecked.

Stimming. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s how I deal with the world around me. Stimming calms me down and can prevent a meltdown. As a child, I chewed things. I chewed my sleeves on my sweaters and the collars on my t-shirts. I sucked on my fingers/hands. I still chew. I chew on hoodie strings. I chew my nails (which I also did as a kid). I play with my hands. I bang my fists against my legs. I play with headphone wires. I also do the stereotypical autistic clapping of the hands. It’s the most obvious of my stims, but what can you do? 🤷🏻‍♀️

Sensory Processing Disorder. This is the most common sign of ASD. In fact, anyone with autism will have SPD to some degree. This was actually the first thing I started researching since a person can have SPD without being autistic. After doing my research, that wasn’t my case. I have mild-moderate SPD. I have always been a picky eater. I eat foods based off of their texture. It’s why I eat a lot of processed food. It has no texture. I don’t like sticky foods like fruit because I can’t stand having sticky hands. In fact, I can’t stand having dirty hands in general. I eat finger food with a fork and a knife for this exact reason. My food can’t touch (unless it’s a stir fry or something) I can’t have tags in my shirts. I don’t wear belts. I don’t wear tight clothing. I don’t like being touched or hugged. It’s uncomfortable. This is also common in people with ASD. As a kid, I was forced to hug because in a NT (Neurotypical) world, that’s what you do. So I learned to fake it. I get window seats on planes so the flight attendants and other passengers can’t touch me. I wear noise cancelling headphones so I can block out most of the noise outside. It can be a tad overwhelming at times. I am sensitive to bright lights, high pitched sounds and certain smells. My brain doesn’t have a filter to properly filter out all the different senses so overload is a thing and always has been. My migraines are more than likely because of sensory overload. As a child, my sensory overload may have disguised itself as something else, though.

Social Interaction. Those with ASD struggle with social skills. I can count on one hand how many friends I had in school. And I’m going from Kindergarten to Grade 12. And I no longer have regular contact with these people. I was able to copy (common for those with ASD) those around me and make friends that way. But I had no idea what I was really doing. Making friends is hard when you have ASD. I lack the social skills needed to talk to people. I was shy. I liked playing alone because it was easier than talking to people and I could be off in my own world. To this day, I still don’t like talking to people. I have to rehearse what I’m saying before I say it. I don’t like talking on the phone. I will use self serve checkouts if I only have a few items. I use the self serve kiosks at McDonalds so I don’t have to speak to an employee. I have learned to adapt in a NT world and I have a job that requires me to talk to people. But it’s repetitive. I say the same thing to each customer. If I have to deviate from that system, I’m flustered. I do not make eye contact with people. It’s unnerving. I look past people. I struggle with reading body language. I avoid most large social gatherings. I’m not trying to be anti-social. But having to deal with all the people and the noise gives me anxiety and overwhelms me. Even in school, when ever there was some event in the class, I would try and be in the back, so I wouldn’t have to interact with anyone.

Emotions. I struggle with empathy and sympathy. Not ALL those with ASD have issues with those but I do. I have a hard time feeling sorry for people or knowing what people are going through. I don’t know why people are crying sometimes. I don’t know what to do when people are crying. Even as a kid, I could hurt my siblings and it wouldn’t bother me that they were in pain. I simply didn’t care. I also don’t express my emotions correctly or know WHEN to correctly express my emotions. It’s why I threw tantrums as a child. It’s one of the reasons I saw a counselor in Grade 3.

Meltdowns. These are different then tantrums. Meltdowns happen when I get too overwhelmed with everything (sensory overload or stress) and I shut down. I CAN go non-verbal but that is extremely rare. I also suffer from shutdowns, which are milder forms of meltdowns.

Routine and Structure. Another big sign of those with ASD is routine. This is one of the the things that stuck out to me the most before I even started doing research. I always had a routine. And it couldn’t be changed or it would cause major problems for me. I have morning routine and it doesn’t matter where I am, I follow it. I have another routine for my Monday and Friday shifts. If it deviates at all, we could have a meltdown depending on how much of a deviation there is. I don’t recall much routine as a child, but I imagine it was there in some form.

Those with ASD have sleep problems. I wake up 3-4 times a night and I remember being this way even as a child. I am never tired though. 4 hours of sleep has always been sufficient for me and the research I have done on ASD and sleep shows this to be a common thing. I also have to sleep with my iPad on. I can’t have complete silence or darkness when I sleep. I can recall sleeping with my light on when I was younger.

Now how did I go so long without any of this being noticed by teachers or even my parents? Well I was born in 1989. Autism was not a big thing back then so it wouldn’t have been on the radar of anyone, really. My mom did tell me that I’ve always had behavioural issues and “strange and odd” behaviour since I was a baby/child but again, autism was not the thing it is now so there was no reason to have me tested when I was really young. Same as in school. It was chalked up to “behavioural issues” or “bad parenting.” Females are more commonly misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all because doctors still hold the belief that only males can have ASD. Females are also better at masking their ASD traits than males. I have been masking the majority of my life. It’s how I’ve been able to keep the same job for 10 years. It’s how I managed to make the friends I did. I can appear NT even though I am not. Masking is also physically exhausting and I am trying harder to NOT mask.

Being part of an Aspergers group on Facebook and being a part of the autistic community on Tumblr has really helped me. It lets me know there are others JUST like me with the same things and that I am not alone.

“I have autism. It’s a part of who I am.”

[themachiavellianpig]

Prodigal Son, Episode 8: What’s in the Box?

Episode 8 of Prodigal Son and Malcolm continues to make interesting life choices. Oh, and there’s a new serial killer in town who just can’t get enough of the Whitly family. Those two things are most definitely connected. 

As always, full review and spoilers below. 

This week, we return to the most pressing (hah!) question of ‘just who crushes people to death with a car compactor’, thanks to a delightfully creepy phone call from ‘Paul’, as Malcolm quickly dubbed him. Paul knows enough about the Surgeon, Malcolm, the Girl in the Box and the Camping Trip From (or possibly To) Hell and he uses this information to wind Malcolm right up over the course of the episode. 

It was, however, downright impressive how quickly Malcolm managed to slide into Profiler Mode during the first conversation, using all the clearly well-learned tricks to eke out as much information as possible. Those precious few bread-crumbs led the team back to the junkyard, where Malcolm discovered a buried Winnebago with a traumatised drug addict inside, like the world’s weirdest Kinder Egg. 

This rare living victim of a serial killer was immediately dropped into a plot-convenient medically induced coma, because of course he was. Nevertheless, the appearance of a victim who was not yet smashed into little pieces and, as such, was far more identifiable did allow the team to track three of the victims back to one particular soup kitchen. Here, they met Father Leo, a stressed out priest with a hipflask and a deep-seated cynicism about the treatment of addicts and the homeless in our society. 

Fair enough, Father. Fair enough. 

Dani immediately points to Father Leo as a potential suspect, largely on the grounds that priests are a little creepy, but that line of inquiry is entirely derailed when he’s kidnapped by the actual serial killer, who cuts off his hand and posts it to the NYPD. 

(Look, I’m a sucker for a body-part in a box during a crime investigation, so sue me. Particularly when such a plot device allows us to have another brilliant line from Dr Edrisa: “One of the nice things about a severed hand is fingerprints… Maybe the only nice thing.”) 

And then Malcolm freaks right out when Paul calls to taunt him about the Girl in the Box - and then follows a potential serial killer down the street and into a CREEPY UNDERGROUND TUNNEL. I was so glad that Gil called this behaviour out later, because I was full-on yelling at the screen. Malcolm gets the stuffing beaten out of him through imaginative use of a full-height turnstile, but manages to convince Paul that their more similar than he might think be appealing to his status as the son of the Surgeon. 

It’s a nice little bit of manipulation, especially given Malcolm’s self-evident issues with being the titular Prodigal Son of such a man. It’s good enough to get him a phone and the promise of a date with a serial killer. 

The most interesting things about this scenario was the slight moment when I really wondered if Malcolm was going to obey the order not to tell anyone else about the meeting; even when we saw him interacting with Gil later, I couldn’t entirely tell if he’d told the man the entire story or just enough to convince Gil that he was on the straight and narrow. 

Thankfully, bruised ribs seemed to be enough impetus for Malcolm to call for backup when Paul did make contact and his deviousness was rewarded with the return of Father Leo and the gifting of a bracelet which Malcolm last saw around the wrist of the Girl in the Box

Malcolm’s behaviour is always, of course, borderline questionable at the very best, so it was no great surprise when Gil pointed out that the FBI was sniffing around the case and that they were not particularly impressed with Malcolm’s work. I greatly look forward to Malcolm and the lead FBI agent butting heads over ownership of the case before one of them saves the other’s life and/or the agent dies tragically to put Malcolm back at the heart of the investigation. 

Meanwhile, Jessica is Not Dealing Well with the appearance of a new serial killer in her life, reverting to day-drinking and keeping a loaded revolver (with a mother-of-pearl handle because of course); while the former is standard for Jessica, the second is unusual enough to worry us, Malcolm, and Eve (the lawyer fighting human trafficking from Episode 5). Jessica’s switch from praising Eve to calling her a “wretched little tattletale” when Malcolm comes to collect the gun was deeply pleasing, but it was also nice to see that there was someone in Jessica’s life who recognised unhealthy behaviour and took steps to correct it, as Eve did when she got Malcolm involved over the gun. The Whitly Family could use a few more people like that, to be honest. 

It also gave us Malcolm’s priorities when unexpectedly entertaining - hide the icepacks, hide the prescription meds, then put on a shirt over all the insane bruising from where a serial killer tried to crush you.

Following my complaints about Jessica’s living arrangements last week, we do get an answer as to why the hell Jessica is still living in the murder house: it was her family’s home long before she even met Martin, and I suppose there is something to be said for reclaiming the things that might bring you some joy. Bellamy Young has consistently done a wonderful job as Jessica, but her delivery of “This is my home” just really punched me in the gut. Suddenly I want good things for Jessica and I’m increasingly worried that she might not get them. 

At the hospital, we also get to see the consequences of Ainsley filming her boyfriend’s surgery - Jin decides, understandably, that he doesn’t want to be a part of her life if she thinks his near-death is “compelling”. I’m assuming this will be the end of Jin’s role in the story, at least for a little while, which is a shame; Raymond Lee brought some good comedic timing to the story, and it would have been fun to see him and Malcolm talk about complicated connections to serial killers, but I am also very glad that Ainsley’s actions are having some sort of consequence.  

There’s no new episode next week, which is a great injustice, but all previous Prodigal Son reviews are available here. 

[fletchermarple]

Quick Review of the True Crime Books I Read in 2018 (Part 1)

Review of books in 2017 Part 1 and Part 2

Review of books in 2016 Part 1 and Part 2

Review of books in 2015

Inside the Mind of BTK by John Douglas and Johnny Dodd: I’m a big fan of John Douglas and his books, but I think this one is probably the worst one I’ve read from him. I think the problem is that inserting himself in this particular story feels a little forced, since in reality Douglas had little to do with serial killer Dennis Rader, aka BTK, until well after his arrest and imprisonment (in fact, he did a profile while he was still unidentified that turned out to be completely wrong). The little tidbits of John Douglas’ life in the middle of the story of Rader are unnecessary and harm the narrative, which is often dull. It doesn’t help that Rader himself is such a bland, uninteresting and down right dumb person who aside from his horrific murders has little to offer in terms of captivating character. That being said, this book certainly offers an in depth and complete portrayal of who he was and how he worked, so at the end you still feel like you learned a lot about the case.

Vulgar Favors by Maureen Orth: As you probably know, this book was the basis for the show The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story and that’s because it’s really the best account of Andrew Cunanan’s murder spree that there is out there. That doesn’t mean it’s not without its flaws. While I have to commend the author for her very well researched profile of Cunanan, it still leaves so many questions. That’s not really her fault: this killer was such a mystery that we’ll likely never understand all of what he did, and we’ll never get the complete details of his murders. The main problem I found with the book is that it feels very outdated. It was originally published in 1999, and you can tell by the way Orth talks about gay culture that there’s a lot of ignorance and prejudice that seems unacceptable in this day an age. Because she wrote it so close to the crimes, it also lacks the benefit of a deeper reflection that only time and distance can give.

I’ll be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara: You can find a more extensive review of this book here, but in short, this is a brilliantly written novel of one woman’s obsession with solving a long standing mystery. I had issues with the structure of the novel and some editing issues that are likely because the author tragically died before she could finish the book (or find out that the case she put so much time in was solved in 2018). Still, this is a must read for any true crime enthusiast, even if now knowing the identity of the Golden State Killer makes it just a little less compelling.

Unsolved Child Murders by Emily G. Thompson: I wrote a longer review of this book here. The debut non fiction novel of our own @congenitaldisease​ is a great selection of horrific cases, some more familiar than others, told with all the relevant information available and in a very compassionate and non sensational way. What I liked the most about this book is that the author took time to explain the social repercussions of these crimes and how they’ve helped shaped new laws, which makes it even more relevant to know about these cases.

I Will Find You by Joe Kenda: I’ve never watched Homicide Hunter, the Investigation Discovery show that features some of the cases of Detective Kenda’s career, so I didn’t really know about him before this book. I was expecting a Douglas type of book that would mix interesting cases with some teachings about crime and investigative techniques, but I was wrong. This book is really a disjointed potpourri of cases Kenda worked in, but most of them aren’t really presented in an interesting way. Sometimes he doesn’t even tell you the names of the people involved, so it’s more like he’s just remembering stuff from his life and telling it as it comes to him, and less a structured narrative that has something to offer to anyone that’s not a previous fan of him. This book lost my interest before the middle mark, and unless you’re an avid watcher of Homicide Hunter, I would not recommend it.

Unanswered Cries by Thomas French: Now here is one of those rare jewels in the true crime genre, a book that combines thorough and flawless investigation with great penmanship. It comes from a brilliant journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his article about the murders of the Rogers women by Oba Chandler (you can, and should, read it here). Unanswered Cries covers the not very known case of Karen Gregory, a woman who was murdered in a quiet neighborhood of Florida and even though many of her neighbors heard her screaming for help, no one thought to call police. The book is a really deep dive into everything about the case from the point of view of several characters involved, and it’s written just like a thriller, in which the reader doesn’t really know who the culprit is beforehand (so if you are thinking of reading it and don’t want to be spoiled, I recommend not reading anything about it). French understands the importance of having relatable characters to follow, so instead of writing about dozens of investigators, he focuses on just a few of them. He also does the rare thing of telling us what went inside the jury room while during trial they were discussing their verdict, which really gives us priceless information about how this process truly works.

Convenient Suspect by Tammy Mal: This book is about the murder of Joann Katrinak and her 3 month old son Alex, who disappeared one afternoon of 1994 in Lehigh Valley and were found a couple of months later in the woods, shot. Patricia Rorrer, the ex girlfriend of Joann’s husband Andy was eventually convicted and sentenced to life for the crime, but this book wants us to believe that Patricia was the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice. I’ll be honest and say that I started to read this book with a lot of contempt for the author’s claim and completely determined to dismiss her theory and to keep believing that Patricia Rorrer is guilty. I kept that belief for at least half of the book, especially because Tammy Mal is so eager to defend Patricia, that she has a tendency to drag Joann through the mud and point her fingers at a lot of other potential suspects. However, when she gets to the trial and all the post trial motions, I have to say I can definitely see why this case has many flaws, and I finished the book in serious doubt that Patricia Rorrer killed Joann and Alex. There’s a lot of details that I won’t go in depth here, but wonky and questionable science and a prosecution changing his timeline of the crime are two main things, not to mention the unanswered questions about Andy Katrinak. If you like difficult cases and poking holes at the criminal justice system, this is definitely a book for you.

[scripttorture]

Hi! Apologies if this isn't the kind of thing you can answer here, but it's my understanding that criminal abuse (say, a serial killer who tortures their victims or a kidnapper holding their captive as a sexual slave, etc) is fundamentally different from torture in the effect it has on the victims. Can you elaborate on that? For example, if two victims both encountered the same abuse, but one from a sadistic criminal and the other from a regime, how would their responses and recovery differ?

Iwouldn’t say it’s fundamentally different no. Torture and otherforms of repeated abuse produce the same symptoms in survivors. Themajor difference is literally a legal category designed to reflectthe fact that abusers in positions of authority over large numbers ofpeople are responsible for a larger scale breach of trust anddereliction of duty.

Butat the same time I think there aresome subtledifferences.My understanding is that these differences are less to do withtrauma/how we respond to trauma and more to do with the socialstructures that surround victims.

Ihave a post on common symptoms of torture here.

Thesesymptoms do notjust effect torture victims. They effect people who witness tortureand they effect torturers. The same broad set of symptoms accompaniesanytraumatic event involving loss of bodily autonomy.

Somesymptoms appear to be slightly more common in certain situations butthat doesn’t mean they’re impossible in others. For instance PTSDis morelikelywith repeated trauma and with attacks that are directed at thevictim. It also seems to be more likely when the victim has headinjuries. However it is stillpossible to get PTSD from witnessing a car crash, even if this is theonly traumatic event in the person’s life.

Chronicpain is common among torture survivors because it can be caused by acombination of both psychological and physical factors. Most torturetechniques provide both rather than one or the other.

Butat the end of the day- you’re talking about actions that areeffectively only differentiated by the motivations and employmentstatus of the abuser.

Victimsdo not care about whether the person punching them in the stomach isa government employee as much as they care about the fact they’rebeing punched.

Ialso feel the need to stress that torture is not purely the productof despotic regimes.

Tortureis a globalproblem.

Itis happening on French streets.Andin American jails.Andin English military schools.

Itis happening in Indian orphanages.Andrefugee camps in Bangladesh.AndSouth Africa.

Andyesit is happening in countries like mine too.Oftenfar more openly then in the West.But pretending that torture is purely a remote, foreign problem ispartof the problem.

Weare allin this together and we all play a part in stopping it.

Andif we’re talking explicitly about the differences between victimsof regimes and victims of private individuals then that’s part ofthe difference.

Ina horrible way totalitarian regimes and the violence they inflictcan...for want of a better term create communities.

HadI been unfortunate enough to have been arrested back home, or been inSyria when the violence really started- then I would have a communityof people in London who I could rely on to understand my experience.Because there are hundreds, thousands of people there right now whohave lived through that.

Theselarge shared traumas can mean that these particular survivors haveaccess to better understanding and better support than the victim ofa random crime. Everyone important in their lives understands whatthey went through. That isn’t true for most victims of crime inpeaceful countries.

Thereare differences in the support and understanding survivors might haveaccess to and this effects long term recovery. But it does not effectthe initial symptoms or the types of symptoms that are likely tooccur. It effects healing, not the wound itself.

Ifind the extreme examples of crime you’ve picked interesting too-because these are rare crimes you’re honing in on. So thecomparison you’re making is a very specific and rare subset ofcrime to a very specific subset of torture in foreign countries.

IfI was conducting an actual scientific comparison these are not thesubsets I would choose; partly because of the number of volunteersI’d be likely to find (low) and partly because I suspect it wouldbe impossible to control for other factors in the volunteers.

IfI wanted to make this comparison between torture and abuse I thinkI’d try to find survivors of taser based torture in Americanprisons and compare them to American spousal abuse survivors ofsimilar age and economic background.

I’mnot sure where you got this idea from and I don’t think it reallystands up to much scrutiny.

Ifyou’d like to find out more about how torture effects victims andsurvivors you can take a look at my sources page here. O’Marais a good place to start. I’d also recommend Monroe for a wonderfulselection of accounts by survivors in their own words. You could alsotake a look at Amnesty International’s excellent website. They havea good search function that allows you to pick out campaigns,interviews and cases related to specific topics such as torture.That’s available for free online. The UN reports also periodicallytalk about torture in specific areas and often include interviewswith survivors.

Ihope that helps.

Disclaimer

[okimargarvez]

S. VALENTINE IN RED (BLOOD)

Original title: San Valentino in rosso (sangue)

Prompt: crime case, anonymous courtesy, one night deleted.

Warning: none.

Genre: romantic, angst, friendship.

Characters: Penelope Garcia, Luke Alvez, BAU team, Roxy.

Pairing: Garvez.

Note: oneshot.

Legend: 💑💏😘😈🔦🐶

Song mentioned: none.

A serial killer who kills only once a year: in the period preceding and following Valentine’s Day. His victims are apparently random, they don’t have in common neither gender nor ethnicity, or age, or social class. But the BAU team is forced to speed up the investigation, when their computer technician is in danger of becoming next victim.

MY OTHER GARVEZ STORIES

S. VALENTINE IN RED (BLOOD) 02/14/16

-And those flowers? - the dark man scrutinizes the colorful bunch of carefully placed on the desk of computer technician. The latter glares at him, asking him telepathically probably the reason for his sudden entrance. He had never entered in before. In nearly six months. The thing is quite strange.

-What is it, Alvez, do you think I bought them myself?- her tone is ironic with different bad shades, as always when she talking with him, apart from rarely if the subject of their conversation is Roxy. Yet that draws him far more than if she behaves like with all the others, even with Stephen, the very latest member who was joined their team, with whom she has been since the beginning sweet, cute and loving. Exactly the opposite to him: after all he has committed a serious infringement: he had taken the place of Agent Morgan.

-No.- he answers only. As hard as her is a weird, eccentric person, especially in the way she dresses up her hideout and herself, from what he can see (he doesn’t lose the opportunity to carefully scrutinize every detail of the room, all the pictures - damn, how many photos of her with Derek, them hugging… - cuddly puppets, colored pens), he can’t imagine her buying flowers for herself. She maintains a fixed her gaze in that of man. Always with the same defiance in her eyes, but what’s really at stake? He has some ideas, one, to be sure, but not the courage to express it. But something shines through her manner however: the lips that fold into mischievous way, arched eyebrows, smarting eyes and brighter than usual.

-So, what do you want? - how strong is the urge to take off that grimace of her mouth, once and for all? Enough to fall? Or surrender?

-Anything. But Emily told me that we must work together.- he announced casually, as if he didn’t care the task given by their leader. He really isn’t able to mask the entire satisfaction that he feels, telling her that she’ll forced to endure his presence for many more hours than what she thinks; that she had to got to get over it, seek to cooperate with him. Alone. The woman snorts, whirling around, turning to one of the numerous screens scattered around her bunker and sitting at her desk. Her blond hair flutter wrapping her face. He doesn’t hold a slight chuckle and after a moment’s pause, he approaches her slowly, bending and staying a few centimeters from her neck. For a moment in his mind pass very different images, from those of the case that they should studied.

-I am perfectly able to do my part alone.- she says, her voice firm and precise, not even turning and trying to pretend she doesn’t care the concrete fact that the damn breath of him, warm and… (no!) is brushing her bare and vulnerable skin. She doesn’t know if the man has noticed it, but soon his face is almost up to her shoulder and she can’t help but experience a feeling of deja-vu quite particular, because the male subject isn’t the same of her memories. And this is precisely the problem. She feels the weight of his eyes and embarrassment that tries to make red her cheeks. But she’ll never give this satisfaction to him. But he doesn’t stop to staring her and if she thought good for a moment about it, she would come to the right conclusion. Three coincidences are a proof. And she would have far more to explore.

-I’m sorry, Emily said that we can’t stay alone and you have to get over it, she had entrusted you to me.- he makes a significant pause. She hates when he does that. And then, the choice of terms. Entrusted, as if I were a… No, what Alvez intends is quite different, as if she really need a protection… -You have to learn to be more professional.- isn’t the first time that he gives her a scolding this kind. Once he dared to say that she should be nicer (but in his head, he thought cute) with him. I, the Queen of nice! And he had the gall to respond, Maybe like … the Queen of ice. And perhaps the heart of the matter was that the beautiful dark man wanted to be able to make melted her… in more ways than one.

-Okay, Newbie.- she strongly highlights her favorite nickname for him. -There are papers.- she shows him a huge pile that nearly submerge whole table. -We must digitize each document.- she makes even a break, allowing herself to turn her head toward his. Now they are at the same height. She approaches a bit. A little too much. she seems to see his pupils dilate, but… -Enjoy yourselves.- and she returns to take care of her computer.

Luke passes the next three minutes mentally relive the last scene. What the hell she had wanted to do? Only provoke him, or was there more? Maybe she… knew? And what it was there to know? Here was the real question. So, it’s better if he focuses his resources on those files. And so, he begins with finding a chair, bringing it closer to that of her (but not too much, keep a safe distance) and dictate her those information’s, which turn quickly in brilliantly data from the action of darting and quick fingers of the bespectacled blonde. She is so fast also in other situations? he can’t help but wonder, then he thanks everyone who has made sure that the thoughts remain as such, stored in personal storage and inaudible from other external.

-What’s the matter with you, Alvez? You saw a ghost?- he realizes that he was holding clutching a paper from a long time. She is peering him too carefully. He must recover immediately.

-I was… I was just thinking that today is Valentine’s day.- he shoots the first bullshit that crosses his mind. She doesn’t seem very convinced, but she flies over.

-Uh uh.- she emits verses in television sitcom style -Don’t tell me that Roxy has a rival.- is her convoluted way in order to extract information without him clearly understand that she is interested to know if he is engaged, without her knowing. And maybe something more, but we overlook. This is what the dark man hoped, but not betting on it too many chips. He shakes his head. He is unable to say more, because it would sound something like Actually yes, she is here in front of me. What the hell is this thought? Concentrate on this damn case! But there’s nothing to do. Isn’t destiny that today is a fruitful day.

-It’s eight o'clock at night…- Garcia looks up to a rose clock kitten-shaped, with its tail beating the passing of every second. But he observes the way in which some tufts of her hair fall on the neck, until the neckline. But he can divert his attention before the computer technician being aware of it.

-Well, you can go home, I still have to settle a thing.- after a moment, she understands that he has no intention to carry out her order. -I don’t need a damn bodyguard!- she says, placing angrily already digitized documents in a special folder. Luke asks himself the real reason behind this sudden anger that seems to have possessed her. Even he seems to see a reflection in her dark eyes and some crystals on her eyelashes, as if she had been crying…

-It is useless to try to fool me, Garcia. We can’t be alone until the unsub shall have been catch.- and this thing doesn’t dislike him at all. But he lets her guess this only minimally. Almost there was a game going on, between them, an endless game, destined to remain without a winner. Not at least until neither of them will make a really bold move first. Not until neither of them won’t be willing to reveal his cards.

-But imagine if, with lean JJ blonde with blue eyes, Emily brunette and slender, Tara and her shades of amber… the crazy on duty would kidnaps me! - and how many things can be in a word produced by a single syllable, two only letters? A whole world, immense suffering, an unknown past (but not too). Garcia isn’t unable to restrain herself. She wouldn’t certainly have wanted to make it clear to the agent with whom she has less relation in entire team, that she not considered herself aesthetically worthy of being the victim of a serial killer.

-Except for the fact that they will not stand alone- ugly truth, this (JJ has Will and her sons, Tara her father and her brother, Emily has Mark and Sergio) -what would you mean?- but looking at those so damned dark eyes, in those depths in which she wants so desperately to get lost and not think about the consequences (at least for one fucking time), she realizes that he knows, what, how serious is, no, she doesn’t want to think about it. But he understood everything, or better he understood too much, and the blonde is not able to deal with the repercussions of this.

-What you think- she crosses her arms, defensive -and you not have the courage to say.- now his black eyebrows are raised surprised and concerned. But it’s just her head. It’s not real. -What I’m not beautiful enough to receive flowers from a stranger, nor chocolates… therefore why with all the beautiful women available in the BAU, someone should kidnap me?- and this time there is no trace of irony in her tone, or angry, if not towards herself. They dominate the sadness, sorrow towards what she feels like an absolute truth and impossible to change. -In the movie, those like me are killed only if they are unable to mind their own business.- but she reads too much understanding into those spheres open to scrutinize her. Too much to bear. If it was any other day, but it’s that day. She goes back in many years, when her hair, tied in pigtails, came up to the knees of Luke. When she was really happy, and she hadn’t to strain every day to believe it. She is a positive person. But there is difference between hoping and believe it seriously. One difference platonic, that only those who know the Iperuranio may really understand. Damned philosopher’s exam…

When tears begin to fall, she leaves free the documents, preventing them from stain and get wet with a part of her DNA. While the salty drops continue their path down her face up to clothes, she curses herself for being so weak, so foolish as to start crying right in front of him. She would have so much need of the man who replaced him. He doesn’t tease her. He would hug her, and everything seems better. Bearable. Better than nothing. But unfortunately, when she lifts her eyes in front of her there is always the ex-ranger, tall, dark and bland-some, and terribly sexy, even when he pretending to be concerned about her. If only he hadn’t occupied just that place. If only he hadn’t joined the BAU. If only she hadn’t been so… not his kind of woman. What the hell are these thoughts? She doesn’t like him, dammit, Luke Alvez. She can’t stand him. Every time she tries to take the elevator and believes she can enjoy a minute to herself, he appears behind her and he starts doing questions about her Canadian boyfriend. And then, wretched Emily, although I love you the same, she must stand him indefinitely. Why she had to put him with her? They could all camp out in their offices. But others have their lives outside of here: moms that need help, husbands and sons, boyfriends, ex-wives not too ex… You’re damn alone. And he is no less. Although he has at least a very cute dog waiting for him every night. And heck, how difficult it is to strive to appear unpleasant when there Roxy around.

From the corner of eye, despite hers are grew cloudy, worse than if there was fog on the highway, she captures a movement. The man is always there that stares at her, but now he is really extremely too close. An alarm continues to reverberate in her head.

-Penelope…- finally it’s what comes out of his lips, so stretched out toward hers, colored. She decides to completely ignore the tone of gentleness and understanding in his voice and focus on whatever he may have done wrong.

-Don’t call me Penelope. You’re not…- but this time Luke hasn’t going to wait, to grant her time.

-I’m not..?- and the distance is still reducing. She can’t argue anything. -Derek Morgan?- still no response or sign of life. -It’s his what you meant, or not?- any signs of tenderness disappear from his expression. In its place predominates again that look of defiance that she’ll never caught. -Exactly, I’m not. I’m your partner in this case, and because you don’t…- a moment before he had earned some points and less than a thousandth of a second later, he has already ruined it.

-I don’t have…?- the tears have dried on her eyelashes. The tap is finally closed. Her cheeks are red with anger that has again conquered her heart. -I haven’t anyone?- but it sounds more like an affirmation than one rhetorical question. -JJ has Will, Emily has Mark, Tara her father and brother, Spencer his mother, Stephen his family, Rossi his ex… and I have no one and that’s why I am forced to spend Valentine’s Day with you.- it was not exactly what she wanted to say. It could easily be misinterpreted. -Why I shouldn’t cry?- she stands up and deletes the last traces wet with a sleeves, giving him shoulders, not having the courage to hear his answer, if never will be there. But a sudden grip on her arm forces her to look back at him and in a second their equally dark eyes chained each other.

-I have never said that you shouldn’t cry…- he says so gently that this time even Penelope isn’t able to argue with some pungent phrase, fired at random (but not too).

-Please, don’t try to seems sweet.- she says after a few minutes that remain silent, simply either of them ever distract the eye from the other. -I’ll come home with you, I give up.- she raises her hands imitating the gesture of surrender. And for the second time in a few hours, in his mind pass very different pictures of how he would spend Valentine’s Day with her, if he could. -But I don’t want fake sentimentality.- she is quick to argue before turning off the computer, put on hers jacket (which can’t quite mask her exuberant forms), grab the bag and walk out of her bat-cave, followed by Luke. He raises his eyes to heaven, asking for divine help to survive the evening.

The elevator ride has never been so long. Those few seconds seem immense. Neither speaks. Luke looks at her only in passing, as to make sure that she is true. She doesn’t notice it, intently staring at her shoes. They come to his car in silence. Before he has the time to open the door, Penelope is already seated. Not because she feels at home, but just to prevent him to do some act that could put her even more embarrassed. Neither has the courage to break the ice. Luke thinks of a million ways to start a conversation, but he discards them one after another. Because in the end, the only thing he would like to ask her, is the reason why just a moment ago, she burst into tears. Not only because she doesn’t consider herself suitable to the kidnapping. He is sure. There’s more to this.

Eventually, however, they stop before in front of a house of modest size. But too big for one single person. And this time the blonde can’t prevent that her coworker opens the door to her. But he stays in the doorway, when she gives him a sharp look before disappearing behind the door of her own home. She didn’t intend to share with him this part of her life. She always tried to keep it separate from work, although ten years ago she was being unable to avoid it. After just five minutes she resurfaces with a small suitcase with wheels. She looks up and immediately Luke’s eyes capture hers. Apparently, she doesn’t seem to have moved since she had left him there. He notices the way she looks at him and he understand what she is thinking.

-It’s all worked out.- she justifies herself with a shrug. The man is going to grab it out of her hands, but she avoids him, fleeing toward the car. Left alone he raises his eyes to heaven (for the umpteenth time and probably certainly not the last) before reaching her. It will be a long night, much longer than he could believe. Because when they get closer to his home, where Roxy is awaiting (unaware of the surprise that awaits her), he can’t help but imagine what he would it was going to happen with her. It’s hard to concentrate on driving, having her so close. And when they ’ll behind those walls…

He opens the door and lets her go first; in doing so their bodies brush slightly, by transmitting tremors each other, although both do ignore it. But he is less able to her to play ignorant, and at that exact moment he would reach out his arms and holds her so that the contact between them endure some more. Her perfume, her skin … enough!

The hand automatically finds the switch. Roxy is in crisis because she doesn’t know whether to greet prior the guest or her master; eventually she opts for “attacking” both simultaneously. And in doing so she forces them to stay closer. After another awkward moment, she unexpectedly speaks first.

-Show me where I’ll sleep, so tomorrow morning we’ll be able to get up early and maybe then this story will be ended.- but he takes his time, indeed. He approaches her of a few centimeters to the passing of every minute. And she didn’t move away, but she not even goes meet him. She stays still, as in shock. The last time a man looked at her that way and who behaved in a similar way, she found herself with a bullet near the heart. But he isn’t like Battle. Even if she knows him too little to be able to judge him. But he is a federal, he doesn’t want to kill her. But… why he keeps getting closer and closer? He wants to make fun of her, is the only solution. Or loneliness is playing some sort of a trick with his mind and rather than spend Valentine’s Day alone, he is willing to pretend to be interested in her. In any case, when now only two air centimeters separates their faces, fortunately Luke stops. But his hands come to life and wrapping around her face, caressing her cheeks with both thumbs.

-What… what…- for a moment she isn’t able to ask the question. -What are you doing?- his gaze seems so sweet, as when he talks about his dog. It’s been too long since a man touched her seriously. She is too vulnerable. But she can’t give up at this point. She still has a dignity. And then… she turns red at the thought of showing naked before his eyes.

-Just something I wanted to do for a long time…- he whispers, not leaving the grip, while on his full lips is painted a smile devoid of any kind of irony. Still he can’t believe this is happening. He hadn’t decided a priori that as soon as they were safe within his walls, he would make his move. However, when there was that brief contact, he realized he couldn’t continue to reject the desire the whole evening. This was the opportunity he had been waiting for a while. When he would have another chance to have Garcia to his house? -I desire you terribly… I’ll not pretend it’s not so…- he immediately captures the expression of surprise which appears on her face. -If I were a unsub, crazy and dangerous, I’d kidnap you without thinking twice.- he whispers with a sexy tone that beats any Fifty (but even Hundred) Shades of Gray, Red, Black… is the most strange and absurd compliment that she have ever receive. She can’t help but chuckle, though nervously. -I’m serious, Penelope.- her name… how it sounds on those lips… it is useless that she still to deny. She wants him, she wants him in a way so tragic and intense, to hate herself. She needs him, without knowing why. And then his fingers slipping toward her mouth, touching her lips, opening her mouth, and finally he starts to lean in his direction, making her feel all their height difference. When their mouths come into contact, everything that happened before this moment seems to fade. She doesn’t want to think about the fact that tomorrow morning, definitely, she’ll be in the throes of remorse and repentance. At least for one evening, she wants to live what will happen and nothing else. While the tongues ​​are intertwined, conducting various dances, in the numerous minimum pause for breath, she feels so beautiful, so desired… After a few minutes his hands going to remove her jacket, without letting her, as she had watch only in the movie and this excites her more than she would like. Each button causes her a gasp. Taking courage even her fingers, colored with rainbow colors, getting under his shirt, unbuttoning it and finally meet the skin under it, run through the muscles in length and breadth. She can’t help but smile when she hears him moan with pleasure. -Penelope…- her jacket falls to the ground. The big hands of the man linger a moment, remaining on the ribs, causing her various chills. She has to give him the green light, so he finally can reach her breasts and losing his mind simultaneously. And when he realizes that he can’t really resist more, that his jeans are really too tight… he leads her into his room (where no other woman has ever set foot), making her walk backwards. He takes off her shirt, her skirt, then he is stopped from her hands and her agitated tone.

-We could… turn off the light?- she doesn’t want him to see her how she truly is, without make-up and accessories, out of her role as BAU’s omniscient genius. Without those things, she doesn’t think she can be attractive. And Luke didn’t take long to figure it out. He stares her intently, still stroking her cheek once.

-You don’t need anything else, apart from your soul, to shine before my eyes.- and after a statement like that, even the fears of Garcia falter, enough that allowed him to complete his work.

And before they become one, he looks long at her, with a mix of desire and tenderness, as if to make her understand that yes, he wants her in that sense, but there’s more behind and when he have will the courage to peer into his soul, he’ll prove it. And in that instant, she believes him.

Lying beneath his muscular body and dripping sweat, she still can’t be convinced that it really happened. Sure, she was out of practice, but he’s been… monstrous. Luke remains in this position for a while, raised his body with the arms to avoid crushing her. It was far more than what he could expected, though never before he had dared to imagine how it could be. Yet, though she seems satisfied, remains a shadow that floating on her face, trying to obscure that moment.

-What you’re thinking, chica?- a lifetime had gone by since the last time he had used that nickname for her. She hadn’t realized how much she missed until she hadn’t heard it again. There was a something personal and possessive, in that nickname in Spanish.

-That it was excellent sex, but in a few hours, my crumpled dress will be the only tangible trace of it.- he didn’t expect she would give him an answer so blunt. He is glad she told him the truth, but at the same time he didn’t like her choice of terms, to define their… Close encounter. But, thinking about it, in fact, she’s right.

-This depends on us…- he replies, without yet being able to expose himself. Penelope looks at him strangely. -If you wanted to…- he strives to take courage -…I could show you the difference between having sex and making love…- at this point the blonde pushes abruptly away him and trying to get dressed. When he tries to stop her, she begins to scream.

-Don’t try to make me believe that suddenly you’re in love with me or other silly stories like in C-movie. It’s Valentine’s Day, we found ourselves forced in this situation, I don’t… for a while, and because of the impetuousness that you have shown, I guess you too. Two frustrations have led to a few moments of satisfaction. Now we don’t have to build on this a Disney tale.- the worst is that she really seems to believe in what she says with bitterness and sadness, gradually lowering the pitch up to a kind of resignation.

-Even if I told you, you would think that is a lie, right?- she nods firmly. -So, let me try to use another kind of “speech”. If you were to have right, you just would have to making “good sex” like you insist on defining it…- and if she decides to surrender, it’s mainly because she wants to get to understand why the hell, he still wants to fool her with this story of “there is more than rubbing under the sheets”.

The next morning, they don’t get up at six, like Penelope had expected, but much later, exhausted from the second and third round. In the end he had reason; making love was something else; yet she still didn’t believe him at all, she couldn’t let go herself and risks, yet she was very close to do it. Already the first cracks in her armor of ice were visible without the aid of a microscope. Luke had understood, especially when he had awakened in the middle of the night and he had found her, resting on his chest, her face innocence of a child. But he wasn’t going to push too hard on the accelerator, he would have given her time, now that he had made a significant first step. The street to convince her that he was really interested in her as a person (not just physically), it was still very difficult and tortuous.

Yet only hours after he finds himself again back to square one.

-Where are you?- random question doesn’t seem to have any immediate effect. -Garcia?- she finally turns to him and seems to sense his presence. But she isn’t going to say anything. How she can? She has now admitted herself to be attracted to him, but what happened last night was just a lucky… case, a convergence of situations, definitely not something that will be repeated in the future. With the idea of being forced to spend the evening together, because there was a serial killer on the loose, the distorted thinking that she could become one of the victims… this must somehow have him excited, driven him to do what he did. But it was only a moment, a way to stress that they were still alive, that everything was still possible. But she couldn’t tell him, because she wouldn’t have been able to mask the fact that for her, their meeting wasn’t just sex. -Hey, it’s almost time to go to work. Criminals don’t wait!- he tries a joke that not obtain any reaction in woman. Now he really starts to worry. But when at last their eyes meet, everything becomes terribly clear. -Yet. Tell me I’m wrong, Penelope.- while he talking his tone increases the intensity. -Tell me that you aren’t again convinced that yesterday I was just… caught with the situation.- but she doesn’t respond, and a slight furrow starts to dig between them.

02/13/17

A year after that groove has become a chasm. They continued to work together, as if nothing had happened; a few months after, they start again to exchange jokes in the presence of others; but unlike previous times, there was much more behind, than some expressions two-way. It was as if each blamed the other for what had happened between them. Because in the meantime, the feelings that were unripe, have developed, settling in their souls. And taking with this resentment and regret.

The killer of roses, as the press had dubbed the unsub, which kills during the period close to Valentine’s Day and for the rest of the year will become off the grid, was still active. On February 15 the previous year Penelope and Luke had been welcomed by the dark looks of their colleagues. The name of another woman that night had been added to an already too long list. But she hadn’t been a total stranger. She was a childhood friend of Emily. The chief of the BAU had decided that there wouldn’t be another. And she was prepared to keep this promise at any cost.

To the point that she pushes JJ to give an interview, where she threw a challenge to the killer. And someone didn’t like it.

Garcia winces when she hears someone reach her behind shoulders. She was re-reading for the umpteenth time the note she had received. Like the others, it was signed cryptically. But today it contained one more particular: he tells her to wait for him the next day in the waiting room that preceded the entrance to the main offices of the heads of various departments of the FBI. She had suspected from the beginning that he was one of them, indeed, she had even hoped that could be Luke… but that wasn’t his style and basically it was better that way. She had to find a way to forget. It had been just a damn night; there had been no promises or exchange of important phrases. So why she hated him so deeply? Why a year had passed, and she couldn’t overcome it?

-Look that, we are just waiting for you…- the man was able to give only a sidelong glance at the narrow cardboard between the long fingers of the technician, remaining a bit too long staring her. But he doesn’t have enough elements to make an educated guess. Although, judging by this perfume… it’s certainly something private and … gallant. And it bothers him, a lot. Especially because before entering into Penelope’s bunker, he lingered a few minutes behind the door, hearing her talk to herself. And in this case, he understood every syllable uttered by her full lips. She believes that the type of the cards, damn if I catch you, you’re dead, is also in charge of the flowers she received during all this week… chocolates… books… everything that I gave her, accompanying each gift with a phrase (engraved on each one and inseparable from it) that I hoped would show her who was the “handler”, the “sender.” But I just made sure that the type of the cards earned more points. And I can’t even say anything, because that is going to make me look like an idiot.

-Luke? Now you’re the one lost on moon.- she chuckles slightly. She adores make fun of him and she doesn’t do anything to hide it. When he lifts his head, as always, their eyes chain up, and in those brief moments they confess million secrets, and, as Bukowski said, they make love with eyes. It’s weird how easy it’s to forget that he knows everything, that he has seen her naked in every possible way implied from the term. It’s absurd how easy it’s to continue this farce rather than admit they were wrong.

-Someone has perhaps a secret admirer?- he dares to ask, carefully watching how she arranged the different flowers (why you not go to do a damn search on the internet on their precise meaning?) and as one of the books he gave her, is open in the middle on the table. The blonde raises her eyes, annoyed (because he has no right to ask her about her private life) and yet flattered by his jealousy (because this could mean that perhaps he still feels a little something for her).

-If it was, it’s not your business.- he comes dangerously close, as he had hardly done in recent months. Because kissing her wouldn’t lead to any result, except to meet again in the horizontal position. And once it wasn’t enough, in fact, it has done more harm than good. -I know you think I can’t be worthy of receiving attention from a man, but you’re not always right.- she says it not because she believes seriously (the past year is at least served to find more self-confidence and begin to truly love herself, with or without glitter), but because she wants to force him to contradict her. With the corner of eye, she sees his hands tight a fist, the veins of his muscular arms stand out along with the muscles tense. He bends a little toward her, and, as it happens during accidents, she doesn’t seem to be able to move around and avoid catastrophe.

-I never said you didn’t deserve male attentions, but who or what tells you it’s a boy? Do you know him? You did identified him in some way?- he tries to try to make her understand that, notes aside, the man who has rekindled her smile these days, through various surprises that would show how much he had learned to know her seriously, was none other than the one she had in front of her. But Garcia doesn’t notice the love that he gives her. She just thinks that he demonstrates a kind of very childish jealousy, as if he doesn’t really want her, but at the same time he wishes that no one else feels something for her. She finally able to reactivate circulation of her blood and takes a step, leaving the door ajar. But Luke stops her before she can get out of it completely, grabbing her arm.

-Leave me! Did not you say the team was only waiting for me to expose the case? And then, let’s go. The others will be wondering if we weren’t sucked into a black hole.- but he isn’t going to do the right thing, or at least the most rational, reaching their colleagues and taking care of their work, another day pretending it’s nothing. He lets her go, but he turns towards the flowers, books and anything else that was donated by the “mysterious admirer.” She observes him in shock, unable to understand what the hell he’s doing.

-You might not be able to understand it?- he makes them all fall down in front of her. His dark eyes seem like coated with a thin veil. Might be tears, but it looks little likely. -May. You had tell JJ you liked science fiction novels of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, even more than the well known masterpieces of Sherlock Holmes.- shock increases more and more in Garcia, as she listening to him talk, associating something she said, maybe in passing, during the last year, each of the objects that she has received this week next to Valentine’s Day. -When you were a kid your favorite color was purple and you dreamed of having a horse.- also the puppet go to reach the pile at the foot of the blonde. When he silent, she remains for a moment to stare him, unable to pronounce the truth in a loud voice: it was him. Luke Alvez knew her better than herself. But… why?

-But… but… those notes… those words… why you didn’t write something that would make me realize that you were behind this?- the Latin sighs, frustrated.

-I never sent you any note.- a shiver runs through the body of the computer technician. Not for pleasure, but of sheer terror.

-So… who did write this?- just then the door opens and Rossi appears, the worried look that turns quickly in surprised and confused to see them like that, all those objects and flowers on the floor.

-Luke, Penelope, we were about to send out the search team…- no one laughs at his joke. -What the hell happened here inside?- it doesn’t take a profiler to note that both are blushing and launch murderous glances at each other. -Where’d this come from?- before he can make time to talk, the man is preceded by Garcia.

-I have a secret admirer. I was arranging this mess, when Luke came to warn me that the meeting was about to begin, and… we clashed. He was giving me a hand to collect everything.- the explanation given is credible enough, but Dave feels that doesn’t properly correspond to the truth. Before entering he felt them shouting each other and neither of them was bent or it was going to resetting… But he decides to overlook. They have already lost too much time. The blonde throws a sharp look at Luke, who wonders why she wanted to cover him, and if he has to positively interpret this attitude or rather the exact opposite. At the end he gives up and follows the other two down the hall to the meeting room. He tries to ignore it, but it’s impossible not to notice the mischievous look of JJ, the confusion of Reid, doubts painted on the faces of the rest of the agents.

Emily rolls her eyes and finally begins to expose the case that everyone knows very well -The last victim was Sasha Ivanova . And I emphasize “last.” As I said a year ago, there haven’t to be others. We have to catch the unsub. We have had more than ten years to take him, he was being free to do what he wanted. It’s time somebody ruins his plans.- anger in her eyes is evident and it’s also transmitted in the way she holding the remote control. -But I have not called you here to reiterate the obvious. There is news.- Luke subconsciously search for Penelope’s eyes and her hand (but not implement his own thoughts). -Chicago police found some interesting details…. Each of the victims under their jurisdiction had received “gifts” from a secret admirer, in the week before the murder.- after the last sentence also Rossi stares Garcia, who looks toward her shoes, hoping to disappear.

-But especially, they found some notes. The hand that had written them is the same in all cases.- now Agent Alvez feels really fear, fear for this woman, so damn stubborn that she would be willing to get kidnapped in order not to let people know that he is the author of the gifts she has received… but not the notes. And she is willing to risk, in order to prove that she has reason: she isn’t a type that someone might abducting, consequently she runs no risk.

-Garcia, can we talk for a moment face-to-face?- the woman takes a second too long to get up. Luke would follow them, but he doesn’t know what excuse to adopt. -All those gifts that I saw in your room… there were some notes to accompany them?- she doesn’t know what to say. Betraying Luke? Or rather betray herself, because what David will think, when he’ll know that she lied about something like that?

Left in the meeting room, Luke can’t concentrate on what his colleagues are saying. Conversations come to his brain as muted, as if he had cotton in his ears or was in a soap bubble. He can’t think of anything other than what they are saying? And the answer comes soon enough. The oldest agent returns alone. Things get worse than he expected.

-What’s going on, Dave?- Emily finally gives voice to what everyone is wondering.

-Penelope received very similar gifts to those you have just described a moment ago.- everyone except Luke, open their astonished eyes. -And even the famous notes. No need for a graphologist for sentencing that were written by the same person.- JJ launches a desperate look toward Reid.

-What? Why she doesn’t told us about it? And where is she?- the young genius puts his arm around the blonde, now in tears. Tara stays more composed, but she is equally worried.

-She is in my office. Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, and we don’t know when the unsub will hit. Just finished here, I’ll accompany her in the secret areas of the FBI for Witness Protection.- the ex-ranger immediately guess the future: he not see her again for who knows how long, if not forever. It’s not an acceptable perspective. But even the idea that she can seriously become the next victim of the killer of roses. If only she would leave herself to protect by me! He has before him an important choice: are more important his own selfish needs or the safety of the computer technician?

-We can’t even greet her?-  no one could answer negatively the desperate request of the blonde of the FBI. The oldest in the room nods his head and everybody make their way to his office. Luke last, lost in his thought. I can’t let her go. I can’t lose her. Rossi knocks with two shots, then he pauses, and he knocks other three times. The door opens, and Penelope appears that tries to hold back tears, with poor results. The impulse to rush to comfort her is strong, more than any other he has had at this year’s “separation” and abstinence, to kiss her or hold her so their bodies again converging. But yet he resists, with the last of patience grains he’s got. In the room they are eight of them, but, as one of the classic cliché, it’s just them in there. Their eyes are fixed, inseparable, they are seemingly oblivious to what is happening around; they carry on one conversation parallel to the verbal one. She is pleading him not to do what he thinks, and he, in turn, he’s apologizing because he can’t perform what she asks.

-Penelope… Why didn’t you tell us anything?- the women of the team surround their friend, partially interrupting the visual contact between the two. It’s the leader who speaks, while JJ strives not to cry in turn. She thinks of the day that saved her life, shooting point-blank at her attempted assassin. You do whatever it takes to protect your family.

-I… I didn’t think it had to do with the case. I was seeing one of the security officers of the first-floor and… I thought he was just very shy. - Luke feels a sharp pain in his chest at this revelation. But she is saying the truth, or it’s just a way to escape from him?

-No, not again. This time I’ll not allow to happen what happened with Battle.- the brunette says resolutely. Now Tara, Stephen, not to mention the agent Alvez, are even more confused. Meanwhile, the self-control of the latter is going more and more going to hell. -A policeman with murderess hero syndrome…- Prentiss begins to explain, but she is blocked by their own victim-subject of the story.

-I know that you will do everything to stop it.- she glances her very clear. Don’t speak of this matter. She doesn’t want him to know. She doesn’t want he knows this part of her life, this is connecting directly to a person and a series of misunderstandings that led where she is now. It doesn’t matter that for this man (damned the day when Hotch asked him to work with the BAU!) she now feels a much stronger feeling of confusion than a year earlier.

-I hate having to be a spoilsport, but… we have to go.- Rossi changes the subject. Luke observes Penelope, the woman for whom he feels more than he wanted (because this has greatly complicated his life) taking her own bag. He decided that this time he’ll not let her go away, like that day nearly a year ago.

-Wait! I have something to say.- everyone turns toward him. Garcia silently shouts him to stop. We can go on like this. We can pretend that nothing happened. Only you and me, know that. -I’m sorry. I gave her those things. Not the unsub. Except for the notes.- he adds bitterly. He explicitly turns to her and everyone understand the implications at stake. JJ wonders how it’s possible that she not noticed what had happened between her best friend, godmother of her children, and the Newbie. Sure, there were some incidents that had given her to think about, like when he played with the remote control in the meeting room and he had taken time considerable to pass it at her. Not to mention the countless times she had caught him staring at her. Yet she didn’t connect the dots. What stupid! -I’m sorry, Penelope. I know you didn’t want others to know, but I can’t allow you to finish in the witness protection program and disappear forever… just because I’m unable to deal with the complexity of the feelings that you arouses in me.- behold, he had said this. Now there’s no going back. Now everybody knows, including her. She stares him even more astonished than before, if possible.

-This doesn’t change anything, however.- the pure wisdom of Rossi intrudes, he’s not just able to realize that his kitten has a true lover, willing to do anything for her, even humiliate publicly himself or expose himself to rejection. -The writing matches perfectly, meaning that Garcia is still among the potential victims of the killer of roses.- the dark man nods, but he still seems to have something to say. Also, because all the others are still paralyzed by the news.

-I’m aware that she is still in danger, but… I would like to be able to contribute to her security, if you allow me… I participated in several operations of the witness protection program. I know how it works. And if the killer is clever enough, no protection is enough. I also feel that Garcia was chosen for a reason. Her belonging to the team.- finally someone seems to be able to recover.

-I understand what you want to mean. With this press conference, Prentiss has virtually challenged the unsub. Or in any case, it’s what seemed to him.- Reid asserts, while his face assumes the classic thinker’s poses.

-But then why he hasn’t hooked me up?- the chief asks.

-Because Garcia was … the woman most low-risk.- saying this, he knows he hurts her. But it’s better an ugly truth than a pretty lie, but with little lasting and more harmful effects in the long run. -You, Emily, live with your boyfriend… JJ has a whole family thinking about her, while Tara has returned to live with her father and brother… Penelope is simply the only woman in BAU… lonely.- and adding this, he transmits the idea that it’s her fault. It was mainly her stubbornness and her belief that he can’t absolutely like her, what had truncated any possibility of a serious development between them, a year earlier. And he was too confused at the time of their past, to prevent her from doing that bullshit.

-I’m fear you’re right, Luke.- the Italian admits. -And then, what is your proposal?- if he could say exactly what he thinks! Go to my house, make her a special dinner, talk, talk for hours, explain and ask for explanations. Try to find a way to make her understand how difficult it was this long year, because her coldness has hurt me, how I wanted to hold her, even by force, and only tell her I’m sorry, I’m very confused, but not enough to let you go away. How I wanted to try the feeling of having her lips fused with my own, and the courage to ask her if she, too, at least once, maybe before going to sleep, she felt that loneliness hug her, hold her in a vise that is neither liberating nor consoling. And then try to convince her that I’m able to protect her, I can do it, I’ll always be here, whenever she needs it. That I know her more than she would like, but certainly not as much as I would like. That it wasn’t just sex, even that night. And finally, that I haven’t been here for many years of her life (certainly not my fault); but I’m here now.

-I think that if the unsub discovered that she is no longer alone- not all notice the choice of words, the use of present (although hypothetical) which indicates that what follows this verb corresponds to a fact existing and not an uncertain possibility (what really is, in this case) -he’ll change the target. And though this would mean that another woman would run the risk of being killed… I feel I can be partly selfish, this time.- and the sense of his theory is more readily apparent to all.

-You would pretend to be her boyfriend until we take him?- a break. -We may need days as years. This is no light commitment. Or maybe you want to make a back and forth around the time of Valentine’s Day, doing the exact opposite of many males that not want to buy a gift for their lovers and fulfill the duty imposed on them by the capitalist society we live in?- it seems that talking was Reid instead is Emily the one make fun of him affectionately. For Luke the idea of having to protect her for years has certainly not displayed as a burden. Everything is relative, depending on the perspective from which you look at things. As an old man who breaks a mirror: he’ll be happy to have yet seven years (of trouble).

-According to me, you hope, rather, that continue to pretend, Garcia forget what the truth is and fall into your arms!- JJ also helps to lighten the atmosphere. The idea that another woman could be killed tonight and that they will have to investigate her death, now doesn’t even brush them. Even profilers have the right to a little serenity.

02/15/18

He finds her exactly where he thought: standing in front of the monsters’ wall, that is, every unsub that they had captured over the years, since the unit had opened its doors, long before they worked on it, both she and him, or that they met. He vividly remembered the moment Emily had hung that picture, while she was crying, a prayer to her disappearance friend, she, that didn’t believe or didn’t want to believe in any kind of God. Even the woman at this moment in front of him, she had a giant tight in the throat, that day and although she wasn’t able to consume mourning, allowed him to console her, to lay his hands on her shoulders, to embrace her. And she let him shout at her, not wanting to go along her, this time, while repeating like a mantra, before the image of yet another tragic murdered woman, surrounded by rose buds - It should have been me, there. It should have been me. It was no less blurred in his memory the moment when he had called to tell her -It’s over.- and how they had made love, directly to her office, as soon as he got off the jet, exhausted and alone desiring to sleep indefinitely. And as he found the strength for a second round, but this time there hadn’t been a third. But the next morning she was still there, in his arms, and although she was very embarrassed and awkward, she had not tried to escape. She had preferred to hide her face on his skin, which had finally absorbed those tears for too long withheld (for the year they had lost, because she wasn’t been the victim), she had tried to disappear to merge with him. And then she had re-emerged from the abyss and the other side had found right this man, patient as always, determined as never before.

She feels his presence behind. If even she hadn’t recognized his walk or his scent, she hadn’t need to be a profiler, or put a motion detector in his cellphone, to identify the person who appeared behind her. She not turns to look at him.

-I seems absurd that has passed already almost a year. I realize that it’s a banality that doesn’t suit me, but sometimes it’s as if it happened yesterday, others days seem to me full years passed and much more often… it seems it never ended.- he didn’t say anything. He moves at her side, to look exactly the same direction of the woman. His arm around her shoulders and in that single gesture there are friendship, respect, love, understanding, desire, consolation. -And even more comical, or tragic, depending on how you look at it, it’s that I owe my happiness to a serial killer.- she turns completely to him. It’s not need to replicate anything. It’s like this were a conversation made thousands of times, a ritual. Purifying.

-Let’s go home.-

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[norton-addiction]

THE RISE OF MR JAMES NORTON

Britain’s brightest TV star on breaking into Hollywood and whether he could be the next James Bond

Mr. James Norton is not a man to be underestimated. The first time I noticed the London-born, Yorkshire-raised actor, he was playing an earnest young lover in Death Comes To Pemberley, a cosy whodunnit set in the world of Ms Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice. I had him down as a production-line fop, the kind that elite English schools crank out as reliably as the Disney Club cranks out Mouseketeers. He seemed… nice. Agreeable. The sort of teacake your granny would like.

I certainly couldn’t see him pulling off someone such as Tommy Lee Royce in Happy Valley, the most haunting TV psychopath of recent years. Or earning admiring reviews from the Russians for playing their national literary hero, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, in the all-star BBC adaptation of War & Peace. But in projects as varied as the clerical mystery Grantchester and dystopian drama Black Mirror, Mr Norton has demonstrated that enviable quality – range – and has configured his career to use it to the fullest.

“That’s the joy,” he says. “Most actors would agree that the reason why you go into the job is that there’s a hunger for experience, a general inquisitiveness. When you have a group of actors at a restaurant, everyone will try everything. It’s not just a sensory thing. It’s about wanting to suck up everything that life can offer.”

Life is offering Mr Norton, 32, a lot right now, and it couldn’t happen to a more grateful individual. His conversation is peppered with “I’m so lucky”, “It’s a privilege”, “One of the joys”, etc. His first Hollywood studio production, Flatliners, is about to hit cinemas. It’s a remake of Mr Joel Schumacher’s cult 1990 psycho horror, which starred Mr Keifer Sutherland and Ms Julia Roberts, about a group of medical students experimenting with near-death experiences. In the remake, Mr Norton stars opposite Ms Ellen Page and Mr Diego Luna. And he’s taking the lead as the son of a Russian mobster in McMafia, a BBC/AMC international co-production that stands out in the autumn TV schedules. “One of those situations where everything is in place, and all you need to do as an actor is not fuck it up,” he says.

One of the co-writers is Mr David Farr, who adapted Mr John Le Carré’s The Night Manager for BBC, which was widely seen as Mr Tom Hiddleston’s audition for the role of James Bond. So it will do Mr Norton’s chances of leapfrogging his fellow Cambridge graduate on the shortlist no harm at all. They’re both 8/1 with William Hill. “It’s nice to be in that conversation,” he says. “But I’m certainly not saying no to stuff because I’m holding out for that.”

For now, Mr Norton has asked me to meet him at the National Theatre in London. I assume he’s in rehearsals for some top-secret project (though he does confess an ambition to play Hamlet here one day), but no, he just wants to spare me an off-Tube trip to Peckham in south London, where he lives. He turns up in “vegan trainers”, made by Veja, black Levi’s and an old grey cashmere jumper, with what looks like a duelling wound on his neck but turns out to be a scar from an operation on an old rugby injury. He is profusely apologetic for being approximately five minutes late. And prays leave for another 60 seconds of my patience so he can purchase a croissant.

He’s a Type 1 diabetic and a “little munch” will ensure he doesn’t die during the course of our interview. Mr James Geoffrey Ian Norton grew up in a timeless bit of North Yorkshire and remains a country boy at heart. It is rare that he passes a body of water in which he doesn’t want to take a dip. “I love being outside, swimming in the lido or Shadwell Basin,” he says. “There’s a bridge near where my parents live where you can jump in. It’s so wholesome and English.” His dream is to have a river in his garden, so he can frolic among the trout and herons each morning. His childhood was idyllic but also instructive. Both his parents are academics, both took an equal role in domestic duties and both encouraged reasoned debates around the kitchen table. Young Mr Norton was sent to Ampleforth boarding school (posh, monastic, Catholic) and went on to study theology and philosophy at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, before a spell at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. People often assume he’s religious – the dog collar he wears for the 1950s period piece Grantchester doesn’t help – but he says his youthful interest in Christ was more one of “moral intrigue and the love of storytelling. I loved the gospel reading at mass every Sunday. But it became a relationship of intrigue rather than belief. And most of my degree was about Hinduism and Buddhism in any case.”

Still, you can see why he makes such a convincing vicar in Grantchester and why he’d want to break away from that mode. “I remember early on in my career people would say to me things like, ‘You have a very period face.’ I was like, what does that mean? They’d seen me in a couple of period dramas and imagined that would be my career.”

So he was elated when the supremely depressing Happy Valley came along. Ms Sally Wainwright’s critically lauded BBC series (now streaming on Netflix) gave him the chance to play a working-class ex-convict whose soul descends to the very depths of hell. “I will be forever grateful for that role,” he says. “To be given the opportunity to prove myself like that was just great.” He sees each role as a licence to go out and learn. “Not just from an academic point of view, but in an emotional, embodied way. The word we always use is empathy. There’s nothing more powerful than that. I’d never managed to empathise with a serial killer from any article about them, but when you’re actually inhabiting them, you have to learn to love them, however abhorrent they are.”

I guess it’s about getting to know the part of yourself that could kidnap and torture, were circumstances different. “It’s like undergoing a crude form of psychoanalysis on your own,” says Mr Norton, but confesses that it’s also kind of fun. “I’ve been wary talking about this because it could be misconstrued,” he says slowly. “But it was incredibly empowering not to care at all what people think, to go the other way and want people to be afraid of me. For someone like me, who goes around the whole time being very polite, to be allowed to spend some time not giving a fuck what people think was fucking cool.” He smiles bashfully. “I remember walking on set and seeing people’s reactions to me with a skinhead and tattoos. People started to treat me completely differently.”

He’s no method actor. He and his co-star, Ms Sarah Lancashire, tried to keep the mood light between scenes. But still, he found Tommy hard to shake off. “He’s so mistrusting of the world,” he says. “The sadness in that character was that he thought the world was so inherently hostile that the kindest thing he could do for his son was to take him away from this suffering. That’s dark.” He was haunted by “weird, dark dreams, me being horribly abusive”.

McMafia ought to draw on similarly dark currents, albeit in more glamorous circumstances. Mr Norton plays Alex, a “Michael Corleone-type Russian guy”, who ends up being pulled back into the family business (crime, extortion, money laundering) despite his efforts to escape. “His dad was a Mafia boss who was exiled by Putin, but Alex has tried to turn his back on that and set up his life properly, with a fiancée and a good job.” Mr Norton is particularly excited about this one. Mr Farr’s co-writer is Mr Hossein Amini, who created Mr Ryan Gosling’s tour de force Drive, and it’s inspired by investigative journalist Mr Misha Glenny’s book. The cast includes highly respected Russian actor Mr Aleksey Serebryakov (from Leviathan) plus a host of stars from Israel, Mexico, Brazil and Turkey. “It was such an interesting set,” says Mr Norton. “I don’t think there can have been many casts like it. And with what’s going on with Trump, Russia, the Panama Papers, all that, basically our show lifts up the curtain and shows what state-level corruption looks like. The Mafia isn’t a family with a protection racket in a city. It’s a multi-national globalised corporation where all the parts are linked. You always want to be chasing the zeitgeist. With this, for the first time in my life, I felt the zeitgeist was chasing us.”

On Flatliners, he seems a little more tentative, perhaps wary of incurring the wrath of fans of the original movie. “Everyone remembers it very fondly,” he says. But it was the first time he’d been let loose in a big studio. “The money, the toys, the stunts – Ellen and Diego had done all that before, but I was like this token Brit, running around having lots of fun.”

As for the other sides of success, he’s readjusting. Last we heard, Mr Norton was in a relationship with Ms Jessie Buckley, the English actress who played his sister in War & Peace, but when I ask about his love life he makes a complicated face and asks if we can avoid this particular subject. “Having this dream job, it compromises family, friends, relationship, because you’re always away,” he says. “I have 12 cousins and we’re all very close, but there have been a few family occasions where I’m the only one who isn’t there. And your relationships do take hits.”

He’s politically engaged, too – “As I think we all are right now” – but isn’t sure if and when to use his celebrity to promote his causes. “I must be the most boring person to follow on Twitter,” he says. He essayed a few politically themed tweets recently, but found the response a bit dismaying. “I tweeted a photo from an anti-Brexit march a few months ago, and said, ‘Let’s get behind a second referendum, there is hope!’ and I’ve never received so much hate and vitriol. And I thought, what’s the point? Well, there is a point, but maybe that’s not the right way to make it. Maybe it’s better to start a conversation, to listen rather than to shout.”

That doesn’t seem a bad idea. He’s itching to get behind the camera, he says. He has stories he’d like to tell. “I don’t want to be sanctimonious, but I’m interested in using my voice as an artist to…” He trails off – that English habit of not quite finishing his sentences – before remarking how much he admired Mr Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, a devastating indictment of the British welfare system. But it seems his own thoughts are more to do with young men and their place in the world. He’s been reading Narcissus And Goldmund by Mr Hermann Hesse, which is about two monks taking divergent paths through the world – one as an artist, one as a thinker – at the time of the Black Death. It seems to have struck a chord.

“There’s a lot of confusion now about men’s place in the world,” says Mr Norton. “There needs to be a conversation. I’m putting together a script about how a young man deals with that confusion. We’re being pulled in different directions. I think for women, the feminist movement is a lot clearer. And we do need to redress pay inequality and, of course, men are implicated in that. But we also need to recalibrate our own position. Men whose identity is to do with being a protector and provider and full of testosterone are finding it harder.”

When it comes to redressing the gender imbalance, however, he seems more than happy to take one for the team. He is a reliable source of “phwoar”-style headlines in newspapers. “Female actors have been putting up with this tenfold for ever,” he says. “So I don’t feel male actors have a particular right to cry out about this. I don’t feel objectified, put it that way.”

[jamesginortonblog]

Words by Mr Richard Godwin

Photography by Mr Mark Kean

Styling by Ms Eilidh Greig, Fashion Editor, MR PORTER

Mr James Norton is not a man to be underestimated. The first time I noticed the London-born, Yorkshire-raised actor, he was playing an earnest young lover in Death Comes To Pemberley, a cosy whodunnit set in the world of Ms Jane Austen’s Pride And Prejudice. I had him down as a production-line fop, the kind that elite English schools crank out as reliably as the Disney Club cranks out Mouseketeers. He seemed… nice. Agreeable. The sort of teacake your granny would like.

I certainly couldn’t see him pulling off someone such as Tommy Lee Royce in Happy Valley, the most haunting TV psychopath of recent years. Or earning admiring reviews from the Russians for playing their national literary hero, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, in the all-star BBC adaptation of War & Peace. But in projects as varied as the clerical mystery Grantchester and dystopian drama Black Mirror, Mr Norton has demonstrated that enviable quality – range – and has configured his career to use it to the fullest.

“That’s the joy,” he says. “Most actors would agree that the reason why you go into the job is that there’s a hunger for experience, a general inquisitiveness. When you have a group of actors at a restaurant, everyone will try everything. It’s not just a sensory thing. It’s about wanting to suck up everything that life can offer.”

Life is offering Mr Norton, 32, a lot right now, and it couldn’t happen to a more grateful individual. His conversation is peppered with “I’m so lucky”, “It’s a privilege”, “One of the joys”, etc. His first Hollywood studio production, Flatliners, is about to hit cinemas. It’s a remake of Mr Joel Schumacher’s cult 1990 psycho horror, which starred Mr Keifer Sutherland and Ms Julia Roberts, about a group of medical students experimenting with near-death experiences. In the remake, Mr Norton stars opposite Ms Ellen Page and Mr Diego Luna. And he’s taking the lead as the son of a Russian mobster in McMafia, a BBC/AMC international co-production that stands out in the autumn TV schedules. “One of those situations where everything is in place, and all you need to do as an actor is not fuck it up,” he says.

One of the co-writers is Mr David Farr, who adapted Mr John Le Carré’s The Night Manager for BBC, which was widely seen as Mr Tom Hiddleston’s audition for the role of James Bond. So it will do Mr Norton’s chances of leapfrogging his fellow Cambridge graduate on the shortlist no harm at all. They’re both 8/1 with William Hill. “It’s nice to be in that conversation,” he says. “But I’m certainly not saying no to stuff because I’m holding out for that.”

For now, Mr Norton has asked me to meet him at the National Theatre in London. I assume he’s in rehearsals for some top-secret project (though he does confess an ambition to play Hamlet here one day), but no, he just wants to spare me an off-Tube trip to Peckham in south London, where he lives. He turns up in “vegan trainers”, made by Veja, black Levi’s and an old grey cashmere jumper, with what looks like a duelling wound on his neck but turns out to be a scar from an operation on an old rugby injury. He is profusely apologetic for being approximately five minutes late. And prays leave for another 60 seconds of my patience so he can purchase a croissant.

He’s a Type 1 diabetic and a “little munch” will ensure he doesn’t die during the course of our interview. Mr James Geoffrey Ian Norton grew up in a timeless bit of North Yorkshire and remains a country boy at heart. It is rare that he passes a body of water in which he doesn’t want to take a dip. “I love being outside, swimming in the lido or Shadwell Basin,” he says. “There’s a bridge near where my parents live where you can jump in. It’s so wholesome and English.” His dream is to have a river in his garden, so he can frolic among the trout and herons each morning. His childhood was idyllic but also instructive. Both his parents are academics, both took an equal role in domestic duties and both encouraged reasoned debates around the kitchen table. Young Mr Norton was sent to Ampleforth boarding school (posh, monastic, Catholic) and went on to study theology and philosophy at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, before a spell at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. People often assume he’s religious – the dog collar he wears for the 1950s period piece Grantchester doesn’t help – but he says his youthful interest in Christ was more one of “moral intrigue and the love of storytelling. I loved the gospel reading at mass every Sunday. But it became a relationship of intrigue rather than belief. And most of my degree was about Hinduism and Buddhism in any case.”

Still, you can see why he makes such a convincing vicar in Grantchester and why he’d want to break away from that mode. “I remember early on in my career people would say to me things like, ‘You have a very period face.’ I was like, what does that mean? They’d seen me in a couple of period dramas and imagined that would be my career.”

So he was elated when the supremely depressing Happy Valley came along. Ms Sally Wainwright’s critically lauded BBC series (now streaming on Netflix) gave him the chance to play a working-class ex-convict whose soul descends to the very depths of hell. “I will be forever grateful for that role,” he says. “To be given the opportunity to prove myself like that was just great.” He sees each role as a licence to go out and learn. “Not just from an academic point of view, but in an emotional, embodied way. The word we always use is empathy. There’s nothing more powerful than that. I’d never managed to empathise with a serial killer from any article about them, but when you’re actually inhabiting them, you have to learn to love them, however abhorrent they are.”

I guess it’s about getting to know the part of yourself that could kidnap and torture, were circumstances different. “It’s like undergoing a crude form of psychoanalysis on your own,” says Mr Norton, but confesses that it’s also kind of fun. “I’ve been wary talking about this because it could be misconstrued,” he says slowly. “But it was incredibly empowering not to care at all what people think, to go the other way and want people to be afraid of me. For someone like me, who goes around the whole time being very polite, to be allowed to spend some time not giving a fuck what people think was fucking cool.” He smiles bashfully. “I remember walking on set and seeing people’s reactions to me with a skinhead and tattoos. People started to treat me completely differently.”

He’s no method actor. He and his co-star, Ms Sarah Lancashire, tried to keep the mood light between scenes. But still, he found Tommy hard to shake off. “He’s so mistrusting of the world,” he says. “The sadness in that character was that he thought the world was so inherently hostile that the kindest thing he could do for his son was to take him away from this suffering. That’s dark.” He was haunted by “weird, dark dreams, me being horribly abusive”.

McMafia ought to draw on similarly dark currents, albeit in more glamorous circumstances. Mr Norton plays Alex, a “Michael Corleone-type Russian guy”, who ends up being pulled back into the family business (crime, extortion, money laundering) despite his efforts to escape. “His dad was a Mafia boss who was exiled by Putin, but Alex has tried to turn his back on that and set up his life properly, with a fiancée and a good job.” Mr Norton is particularly excited about this one. Mr Farr’s co-writer is Mr Hossein Amini, who created Mr Ryan Gosling’s tour de force Drive, and it’s inspired by investigative journalist Mr Misha Glenny’s book. The cast includes highly respected Russian actor Mr Aleksey Serebryakov (from Leviathan) plus a host of stars from Israel, Mexico, Brazil and Turkey. “It was such an interesting set,” says Mr Norton. “I don’t think there can have been many casts like it. And with what’s going on with Trump, Russia, the Panama Papers, all that, basically our show lifts up the curtain and shows what state-level corruption looks like. The Mafia isn’t a family with a protection racket in a city. It’s a multi-national globalised corporation where all the parts are linked. You always want to be chasing the zeitgeist. With this, for the first time in my life, I felt the zeitgeist was chasing us.”

On Flatliners, he seems a little more tentative, perhaps wary of incurring the wrath of fans of the original movie. “Everyone remembers it very fondly,” he says. But it was the first time he’d been let loose in a big studio. “The money, the toys, the stunts – Ellen and Diego had done all that before, but I was like this token Brit, running around having lots of fun.”

As for the other sides of success, he’s readjusting. Last we heard, Mr Norton was in a relationship with Ms Jessie Buckley, the English actress who played his sister in War & Peace, but when I ask about his love life he makes a complicated face and asks if we can avoid this particular subject. “Having this dream job, it compromises family, friends, relationship, because you’re always away,” he says. “I have 12 cousins and we’re all very close, but there have been a few family occasions where I’m the only one who isn’t there. And your relationships do take hits.”

He’s politically engaged, too – “As I think we all are right now” – but isn’t sure if and when to use his celebrity to promote his causes. “I must be the most boring person to follow on Twitter,” he says. He essayed a few politically themed tweets recently, but found the response a bit dismaying. “I tweeted a photo from an anti-Brexit march a few months ago, and said, ‘Let’s get behind a second referendum, there is hope!’ and I’ve never received so much hate and vitriol. And I thought, what’s the point? Well, there is a point, but maybe that’s not the right way to make it. Maybe it’s better to start a conversation, to listen rather than to shout.”

That doesn’t seem a bad idea. He’s itching to get behind the camera, he says. He has stories he’d like to tell. “I don’t want to be sanctimonious, but I’m interested in using my voice as an artist to…” He trails off – that English habit of not quite finishing his sentences – before remarking how much he admired Mr Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, a devastating indictment of the British welfare system. But it seems his own thoughts are more to do with young men and their place in the world. He’s been reading Narcissus And Goldmund by Mr Hermann Hesse, which is about two monks taking divergent paths through the world – one as an artist, one as a thinker – at the time of the Black Death. It seems to have struck a chord.

“There’s a lot of confusion now about men’s place in the world,” says Mr Norton. “There needs to be a conversation. I’m putting together a script about how a young man deals with that confusion. We’re being pulled in different directions. I think for women, the feminist movement is a lot clearer. And we do need to redress pay inequality and, of course, men are implicated in that. But we also need to recalibrate our own position. Men whose identity is to do with being a protector and provider and full of testosterone are finding it harder.”

When it comes to redressing the gender imbalance, however, he seems more than happy to take one for the team. He is a reliable source of “phwoar”-style headlines in newspapers. “Female actors have been putting up with this tenfold for ever,” he says. “So I don’t feel male actors have a particular right to cry out about this. I don’t feel objectified, put it that way.”

Flatliners is out on 29 September