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David Sauvage - The Future of Collective Decision-Making

Podcast: Emerge: Making Sense of What's Next by Daniel Thorson 06.08.2022

Daniel: Welcome back to the Emerge podcast. Today on the show, I'm joined by David Savage. I'm connected with David at the recent Emerge gathering in Austin, Texas, and I thoroughly enjoyed his presence, even though our connection was pretty brief. And then afterwards, he reached out to me on Facebook Messenger and told me that he had a vision that he'd like to share my podcast about collective intelligence and the need for sacred containers for emergence. And we scheduled a very short conversation just to kind of feel ourselves together and, you know, it was a provocative invitation. And for whatever reason, I was just game.

People reach out to me on this, you know, on all kinds of mediums asking to be on this podcast and generally I decline people who invite themselves. But in this case, I don't fully understand why I was very into it. And so I'm really excited to talk to you, David, and have enjoyed just the way you show up in the spaces I've seen you in and excited to explore your vision. And maybe before we dive into that. Would you be open to sharing a little bit about who you are, what kind of work you do in the world, what you tend to think about?

David: Delighted and grateful to you for allowing me on. I felt that actually when I was reaching out I felt something like “this happens a lot and probably ‘no’ is usually the answer, but I also felt like we would do it.” I would say there's something in the air about this conversation, or there's something that wants to come through this conversation that you and I are subtly attuned to.

I am currently in my house in upstate New York, I live about 20 minutes from the town of Hudson. I think the essential thing to understand about me is that I put a lot of time and energy and care into attuning to my own feelings and attuning to other people's feelings and putting words to it.

About six or seven years ago, I started calling myself an empath, not merely in the sense of I'm really sensitive, but also just owning it as something of a career path. I would do these performances where I would get in front of audiences, close my eyes, invite members from the audience to sit with me, take in their feelings, and then describe what I feel they're feeling as a kind of performance art. So, I'm really interested in the edge realms of empathy, let's say.

I'm also really interested in the intersection of the subtle realms and the political realms, and I think we'll probably go there, here. There is a moribund activist in me. I used to be very activisty, lefty activisty, then I dropped that thread more or less to focus on my healing. Maybe a better way of saying it is the thread dropped me so that I could focus on my healing. And now I wouldn't say I'm on the other side of my healing generally, but I'm on the other side of what there was for me to work through. And now I'm starting to see and feel the hybrid of my anarchist leftist leanings or the synthesis of my anarchist leftist leanings and my understanding and appreciation of the subtle dynamics between people.

A couple more random things about me that are coming up. I used to make a living as a director. I directed documentaries and commercials for many years. I really loved the word and identify with the word propagandist. It has a lot of negative connotations, but I kind of don't care. I'm super passionate about finding ways to communicate meaningful and powerful ideas on a large scale.

I grew up in Los Angeles. My dad's a story and my mom's a lawyer. I have a younger sister and a week ago I hurt my knee really bad and I have been limping around on crutches. So I'm a little bit out of sorts too.

And I think that's mostly me, some of me anyway. I write, I teach, and I appear on podcasts periodically and I'm happy to be here.

Daniel: Great. Thanks David. Also, let's dive into it then. As I said, he reached out to me with a vision that you had that you wanted to share with the world. I kind of leave it to you. What's the best way to open that up?

David: What's coming up first is Occupy Wall Street. So maybe what I'll do is I'll share the vision or the visions in a nutshell so that I don't leave everyone too confused. But as I share them, I recognize that they won't make a whole lot of sense up front and then I'll take the long route to explaining them. How's that? How's that strike you as a narrative strategy?

Daniel: Yeah, let's go for it. Sounds good.

David: Awesome. Before I get to occupy, I'll say what the vision is: It's a vision that emerged at the Emerge gathering. A part of it felt like it came through me, and I'll share that first and another part of it, maybe the bigger part of it, seemed to emerge through a few of us at the gathering. It just landed and I got really excited to put language to it.

The part that came through me is the following sentence:

“The future of collective decision making is the creation of sacred containers for emergence with clear and clean intentions.”

I'll unpack that for a little while and then I'll share the even bigger and bolder vision that was coming through a few of us at Emerge, but this one will start here.

Collective decision making is simply how any group of people makes decisions and I think we all would agree, even people who don't think about it much, that the way we make decisions right now on a collective basis is not just broken, but extraordinarily broken and destructive. The best we seem to have on offer in the mainstream is something like representative democracy and I think most of us in representative democracies are no longer in the belief that they can really do the job. I don't know anyone who really believes that the American political system, for example, without almost unimaginable reforms could possibly make decisions that serve the highest good of even Americans, let alone the world at large, let alone the biosphere. I think there's this creeping consciousness, and this unspoken collective awareness that our collective decision making apparatities are irredeemably broken.

We don't do much better in smaller organizations where collective decision making happens in the corporate world, for instance, collective decision making is generally a function of straight up power, who has the power to make the decision makes the decision and how that power is accumulated, generally goes to the person who is believed to be able to maximize the profits of the organization, irrespective of the damage done to the employees, let alone the wider community, let alone the world at large. We all sense that this is broken.

And what you get on the left, where I tend to hangout, is a lot of theorizing and occasional practicing of something called participatory democracy. And so participatory democracy is when everyone who is relevant to a decision has a direct voice in the decision itself. That's a simple way of understanding participatory democracy. There are periodic movements of participatory democracy that come and go. One movement centered around participatory democracy, that I was a big fan of and a big part of, was Occupy Wall Street 10 years ago. Occupy Wall Street was a radical attempt to organize society, first the little society of Occupy, but with the dream of organizing the larger society of America and indeed the world around the idea of participatory democracy.

I'll pause there because that's a lot and see how all this is landing before I go further. I'm somewhat self conscious at the density of these ideas so please help me lighten them up if need be or whatever you think.

Daniel: I think you're doing a great job of explaining all this and I'm imagining right now that most folks listening are familiar with a lot of the topics that you're exploring. They’re topics that you know I've explored in numerous conversations on this podcast.

And just to add: I actually didn't know that you were part of Occupy. I was also part of Occupy. Were you in New York City?

David: I was

Daniel: What working group were you in?

David: The media working group.

Daniel: How cool! I was in facilitation and info. I was there for like eight months. I bet we met there.

David: Oh wow! I was there for six or eight months too. I mean I was all in.

Daniel: Yeah me too. I moved to New York City to be a part of it. I was sleeping in the square and everything, yeah.

David: Oh well, since I was living in New York City and a little too privileged, I didn't sleep in the square except for one night, but I went for five days a week and spent many an hour there.

Daniel: It's an incredible, incredible place, incredible time. I learned so much there. I feel like a lot of my work was seeded there and so I'm appreciating your presencing of that movement and its relevance to the conversation that we're having now. But I think you're doing a great job. There's nothing that I would add or change to what you're saying. I think you're right on the money and I just wholeheartedly agree with your framing.

David: Yay. And we're about to get into facilitation and occupy Wall Street so which was not which was not my working group. For those who don't know, I'm delighted to share with you that Occupy Wall Street was organized along working groups. And there were, I don't know, this is a rough guess, don't hold me to it anyone, I'm going to go with 20 or so working groups and a working group would just be whatever people were most drawn to doing. So, Daniel spent his energy in facilitation. I spent my energy in media. Other working groups would be like kitchen or medical or direct action. Direct action were the group of people who planned the marches or the protests or any action. Sanitation… you get the idea. So basically it was a self organizing society where people naturally and I would say beautifully, for the most part, gravitated to what they were most passionate about. And it was for both of us, I'm gathering, one of the formative experiences of our lives.

Daniel: Yeah, indeed.

David: Yeah, and it was my political awakening. What I didn't even know was possible, until I saw it at Occupy Wall Street, was that a group of people could come together with different needs and perspectives and spend the time to share what's inside them and to listen to what's inside others until an agreement is reached by all of them, that feels genuinely good and serves the greatest good both of the community there and the larger whole, that the community represents. I didn't even know that was possible and I would wager that, unless you see it with your own eyes and feel it with your own body, you can't really know that it's possible. And it is so different from democracy in the sense that we're used to thinking about it, where you gather people together and usually there are two sides, they fight about it. One side wins the argument rarely on the basis of the quality of their arguments, usually on the basis of their charisma or their leverage. And then there's a vote. The majority takes the power and the minority sucks it up embittered, plotting to win later. This system that I just described, democracy, blows.

Daniel: Yea, Forrest Landry described it as “this kind of the system we have is the perfect technology to divide a population and to polarize them.”

David: Yes

Daniel: And to your point about Occupy and the choice making processes that were present there: that was one of the things that drew me in, that made me fall in love with that whole movement. I remember attending a kind of workshop intro to consensus decision making, which was one of the main decision making processes that we did there. And just falling so deeply in love with this mode of being together, whereby you hear from the concerns of the group and do this creative work to integrate the concerns in order to make a choice, that meets the needs of everybody present, which we kind of intuitively do with small groups like your friends, but doing it on the level of a hundred or in some cases, a thousand people when we're making decisions at the general assembly, the whole group-choice-making-space was incredible, was incredible work. I remember it just being so much work to do that and it is beautiful, meaningful work. And so yeah, I'm right there with you in terms of the beauty and the profundity and the deep significance of that aspect of what we're doing together.

David: Yeah, sounds like we have both come out of that experience holding something in our hearts, and I don't know about you, but it's been pretty uncomfortable to engage with politics in any on the ground way, that isn't connected to the truth of what we saw there.

Daniel: Yeah, for sure.

David: I used to be more conventional, like if you think about even on the left, even on the far left, even on, not the far far left, but the acceptable far left, let's call it the Bernie Sanders left or something like it, we're still in the broken paradigm of convincing people you’re right, amassing power for leverage and getting what you want done, in spite of the people who disagree with you. We're still in that model and there has not yet entered into the political mainstream, even the idea that there's another way of doing it.

Daniel: Yeah, Somebody framed it subsequently, I forgot, might have been Nathan Schneider, who framed it as a prototyping of a new political operating system… that's in a way, what you can understand, what occupy was attempting to do or trying to build, the thing that we would then use as a new way of organizing our society, which is, what it felt like: getting food every day, people taking care of sanitation, people taking care of each other, making choices together.

And I will add though, and maybe you'll get to this, as somebody in the facilitation working group, making consensus decisions with multiple hundreds of people didn't work very well in the end, it actually didn't go so well. In a sense, I got quite traumatized by that experience, trying to do consensus decision making with that many people. And, being a part of a movement that really, really valued inclusivity, that was, I think, one of the tensions that ended up vibrating Occupy out of existence.

David: I agree. And I wonder if we share the same analysis of why it, quote unquote, ultimately didn't work. My analysis right now is that there's something rigid around consensus decision making and there is something rigid around the inclusivity. So if your intention is to get to a decision that everyone consenses upon, you are oriented around what people say, you're oriented around external forms of communication and you are stuck with the will of whoever happens to show up. And you're also stuck abiding by rules that inevitably will be undermined by people who intend to undermine things.

Daniel: Yes.

David: So one conventional problem that that Occupy ran into was, for instance, the biggest veto power you could exercise as a member of Occupy Wall Street was a hard block, where you would cross your arms and basically you're saying through this hard block, that if this goes through, you would leave the movement. And what there wasn't was clarity around who's hard block mattered and who's hard block didn't and how much time to spend with people who hard blocked. And there was a massive difference between a white man hard blocking and a black woman hard blocking. And there was very little deep thought about the intentions of that white man or that black woman and it just collapsed into a stew of unprocessed racial fears, dogmatism and I would just say general immaturity.

Daniel: Yeah, I want to share just a quick story and then I want to spend more time just getting your whole vision, so you can talk once that's all constructed.

As a member of the Facilitation Working Group, we were very aware of this vulnerability in the consensus making process, essentially that there could be agents who weren't on the side of the occupation of Occupy, who had bad intentions, bad faith actors who could use blocks to disable the movement. And so I took it upon myself foolishly, naively, to attempt to create a process by which you could exclude people from the movement. [laughter]

David: Not a job for a white man, my friend.

Daniel: Yeah, no, many, many ways in which it was foolish and naive, but I remember this is the kind of beginning of the end of Occupy for me … was holding the initial meeting to try to solicit perspectives on how to craft this Proposal. And the “who showed up” was everybody that we suspected was an agent, who just completely tore it apart, disabled it, made it completely impossible for me to move forward. And I remember something in my heart actually broke that day with regards to Occupy. I started falling out of love with it. I started getting burned out.

And so, as you're speaking, there's a lot of emotional activation, a lot of memories happening in me, that what you're speaking of was very real for me, was very present in my life, almost every day.

David: Well, I think it was a fatal flaw. And there was no winning. There was no way to come up with a solution to people exploiting the rules that had already been agreed upon, to undermine the movement. There was no winning. So no matter how you tried to hold that meeting, it was hopeless. And if you didn't hold that meeting, it was hopeless. And that is because ultimately no fixed rule will survive somebody who is smart and determined to bring you down.

Dogma will always destroy things. And that is the problem, I think, with Occupy Wall Street.

And obviously, we're both coming from a lot of love and a lot of just admiration for the facilitators, especially who were breaking new ground as far as you could tell. There's a history of participatory democracy and all of that, but for most of the facilitators, it was new ground you were breaking.

And, but my God, we need experiments and they're going to fail and we need to learn from them. So this isn't so much of a critique as an appreciation of what we were able to learn from that. And what I'm learning from that right now, it took me 10 years to get clear on the message. But what I'm learning from that right now is that consensus is not the right goal.

Consensus is not the right goal!

And I want to posit what is the right goal:

The right goal is not consensus. The right goal is resonance.

The right goal is a collective experience of the truth.

What the problem with that is, that it appears, at least to people untrained, as subjective and elitist and it raises the question of who gets to decide what is true then and are we not just replicating blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I am of the belief now that there are enough of us who are committing to embodying, well, at least first allowing, listening to, and then embodying the truth of what wants to emerge through a group, that we can hold the proper resonance that allows for the right decision. And the right decision is not one that everyone consenses upon, even though I think when it's felt, it will be largely consensed upon, but the right decision is the one that resonates through a group of people and feels like the truth. And when consensus driven decision making works, it works because it's doing this. And Occupy had a big spiritual blind spot; spirituality at Occupy Wall Street was a drum circle … and facilitation was the center.

But the point of facilitation is not to get everyone to agree. The point of facilitation ultimately is to allow for the collective intelligence to emerge. The facilitators are not supposed to be mere mediators trying to balance everyone's needs. The facilitators are more like, hold this word lightly, but I think it best more like priests. Not in the sense that they have the authority of God, but in the sense that their job, like the best priest, is to connect you with your own openness to God, your own spark of divinity, your own receptiveness or to prepare the space for the emergence of the divine intelligence.

I cannot imagine a better way of making decisions. I think this is the gold standard of collective decision making. It doesn't mean that we will often be able to reach it, but I find that it's meaningful and powerful to put language to it. And it sits very comfortably at the intersection of what, I don't like this word in this context, but I got no better one what modern spirituality is starting to tell us around embodiments and what anarchist political thought is trying to tell us around participatory, participatory democracy.

It also aligns with what I imagine have been the containers for collective decision making throughout history: you gather people who are capable of listening together around the fire and you sit for days or weeks or however long it takes until the divine speaks through the group. I don't think that that is a new idea. That is an idea that is likely found among cultures all over the world. It is one that we have been, I guess, incapable, or at least reluctant to adopt in our modern world. But I think now with our understanding of participatory democracy and the edge of spirituality among those who would be otherwise simple leftist, but are now recognizing that the revolution that we need is something like embodied love. I think now we can put it all together and say, I think we can say it with authority. I'm going to say it with authority that:

The future of collective decision making or even the future of politics is the creation of sacred containers for emergence with clear and clean intentions.

And emergence in the broadest sense, I'm using the word emergence to mean what happens without force, what arises without force, what arises naturally. So what is arising through the group naturally without force, and then what I mean by sacred is, I mean a conscious attitude of attuning to a higher intelligence. We're not just pretending that's what you think and what you think and what you think are all equal. That is an old, dead, and boring paradigm that causes a lot of frustration and confusion in left leaning circles, but we're also not going to privilege people based on money, power, status, and race. That's even older and dumber paradigm, but we're going to have to start acknowledging that some of us are more equipped to listen and tune in to what wants to emerge through the collective and others of us, and those people who are most attuned to what wants to emerge, and most adept at organizing a group such that it emerges are going to be known as facilitators.

And what I mean by clear intention is that when you gather a group together, if you don't have a clear intention of what you need to understand or decide, then whatever ambiguity is in there will corrupt the container. It could be something trivial. Us five here are now here to decide on where we are going to dinner. That is our intention here and if that intention is held with clarity, then more likely than not, even with a mediocre facilitator, you'll find the right answer. But if the unnamed intention is to placate the person who we all imagine is going to be paying, then you've got a corruption in the intention, which will corrupt the process, which will corrupt the decision.

And the last word I had there is clean, clean means that you are genuinely trying to bring down or allow to bubble up the collective intelligence. The facilitator does not have some hidden, other agenda. And once we get clear on this, and I'm not a big fan of my language here, this is how it's coming out of me, but once we get clear, that the future of collective decision making or the future of politics is the creation of sacred containers for emergence with clear and clean intentions, once we get clear on that, and put that in language that people can get. - This is really crappy propaganda I'm sharing right now. These are just good descriptions of what's happening under the hood. I'm not saying we should put this in a meme yet. - but once we get good at explaining this and good at showing it, I think it will be clear enough to more and more people that this is how decisions must be made. This is decision making itself.

So if we get clear that this kind of container is how we make the right decisions, then in any container or in any organization or in any political system, that comes into contact with this healthy way of making decisions, then the political process will be faced with the decision of whether they want to move toward healthy and wholesome and authentic and like spiritually alive decision making processes, or if they want to stay in the delusion of representative democracy, or in the toxicity of pure power based politics.

We haven't yet had a new mem to pull people into new forms of decision making. You can't go around the world and tell people “trust me democracy works” and then point to America or France, that's a farce. If I were a tyrant, if I were a tyrant anywhere in the world, I would say “are you sure” to my people and my people would say “you know what, you're right.”

So we need a new coherent decision making process that we can point to as something to aspire to. And this is my offering for what that is. It might take 10 years or 20 years or 50 years before it clicks, but I'm pretty sure this is what it is.

Daniel: The first thing I want to share is that, when you said that the right goal is resonance my whole body tingled, right, and I felt like this sense of clear alignment, which we might call resonance. And so that seems like the most significant thing that happened on my side.

I mean, it feels like you're speaking with more clarity, a lot of sensing that I've been doing and maybe we can save this for later, but a lot of my work is preparing people to be appropriate instruments for that kind of truth seeking or truth resonating, that kind of collective harmonizing, that I sense is possible and that I've had experiences of, in these sorts of spaces at the edge of our culture.

And so, I think that the main thing I want to respond with is just, yeah, I'm with you in a deep way.

David: Well, that feels really good. And in a way we're doing, we're doing our jobs here at the level of the soul that we tried out it Occupy Wall Street, which is if your work is to help people become clear vessels for emergence and resonance, that is job of the facilitator in the world, I'm describing, and that does not feel like my job. My job is to propagandize or share what people need to get, so that I can draw them into this world and then you can help center them. [laughter]

Daniel: You're still in the media working group and I'm still in the facilitation working group.

David: Exactly. That's what I'm saying. We're doing our jobs. [laughter]

Daniel: Fantastic, Yeah.

David: Yeah, I'm glad it's resonating. Maybe I'll say more about resonance. The question that resonance is the answer to is, how do we know what the right thing is. How do we know what the best decision is?

And unless you have resonance as the guide, You're left with a bunch of really crappy answers like voting, or even like consensus. Resonance transcends consensus.

The problem with resonance is that a lot of people are liable to confuse resonance with something like satisfaction, or pleasure, or it feels right to me. But there is, for those of us who have done sufficient work on ourselves, a relatively easy distinction to make between this is what I want and this is what feels genuinely true. And if you are not ready to make a distinction between “this is what I want” and “this is what feels genuinely true”, you are not yet in a position to contribute in a meaningful way to collective decision making.

Daniel: How do you support somebody in making that distinction in their own experience?

David: I think most of us have some examples where we were able to feel both, even in retrospect. So you might say “I really wanted it and then I got it. And then I realized that maybe I shouldn't have eaten the pint of ice cream. Because now I feel sick and I kind of knew that before I got the ice cream. I could feel that it wasn't the right thing.”

So in almost every decision that you really regret, there was a split in you between what you wanted and what you needed, what seemed true and what was true. And so, in a way, life is always trying to teach us the difference between resonance and mere desire or resonance and your avoidance.

Daniel: Well, it's really tricky. I mean, so even when you say there's a difference or distinction between something feeling right and something that resonates, I hear those being used interchangeably. I think I've actually used them interchangeably in my own life. So as you're speaking, I'm realizing how there is this challenge around language and definitions and almost phenomenology of these experiences so that we can start to track them better and honor them with their truth carrying nature, right?

So resonance is something to be deeply honored or inspected, what you desire, if it's a kind of clinging ego desire in the Buddha sense, that's actually to be discarded as an obstacle to truth. And yet the untrained mind can see them as being, as you say, kind of indistinct. So it's really, really interesting.

David: Yeah, I guess I'm not so Buddhist here. I would say it's relevance, it's just not supreme. So somebody's desire might be healthy and we want to meet it. I wouldn't say just because you have a desire you're attached, we ignore it. We want to integrate it but we want to integrate it consciously. So like you want this. Thank you for that information, that goes into the pot. But the sheer fact that you want it is not in itself a sign that it is right. It's not a sign that it's wrong either. So it's just more information.

But what's right is when those who are sufficiently attuned to the higher intelligence collectively feel it as resonance. That's what's right.

Daniel: Yes, I think perhaps a better distinction that you're helping me bring forward is that many people who haven't done some kind of training or introspection don't treat their desires as information but as truth claims.

David: Yes. Right.

Daniel: And that if you are able to treat your desire as nearly information, relevant information, then that's also a signal that you would be prepared to enter into this kind of collective choice making space.

David: Yes. And I want to add to that, that we all go in and out of that ability even those of us who are pretty far along. So it's not a clear line like you're ready or not. Some of us are going to be more or less capable at different times. For the last week, I have not really been in a place to make many very good clear decisions, because I've been in pain and fear around my, what I now know to be a small fracture in my knee. And so, one of the hallmarks of maturity too here, in this new world is knowing when you are equipped to be part of the resonance field and when you need to step back because you are distracted.

And also another hallmark here is the willingness to, not just the willingness, the ability to have others tell you, reflect back to you where you are in your capacity and to take that in. So if somebody's … I'm very willing to have somebody say to me, you're not in a place to make a decision right now, and that will not hurt my ego. If I … it won't hurt my ego period and if I trust them, I will defer.

So these containers for emergence are going to require facilitators who are able to reflect back to people where they are in their journey and facilitators who are able to listen to others who reflect back to them, their capacity to hold the field.

Daniel: Yeah. Yeah, and this is resonating with, and maybe this is a different use of that term, but with the sort of term that's often used in this liminal emergent space of sovereignty, right, that you have the capacity to hold your experience in relationship to others and you also have the capacity to know when you are no longer in sovereignty, when you are out of a kind of agentic mode of being and are into a kind of trauma patterning or some other kind of delusion. And that you can then step out, you have at least enough sovereignty to recognize that.

So yeah, and at least in the Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Hall, their construction of sovereignty was for the sake of the value of coherence in collectives, which is something I think like collective resonance. Right. There's a kind of harmonic that can happen there when sovereign individuals get together in care about something that's important.

David: Yeah.

Daniel: And so I'm just picking up on that.

David: Yeah, I would say maybe coherence is a, if not a requirement, something like it for the kind of resonance that I'm talking about.

Daniel: Excellent.

David: So I want to share the bigger idea. Are we ready?

Daniel: Yeah.

David: All that was scaffolding.

Daniel: Great.

David: The bigger idea is about the movement. So what I shared was about politics and politics is an aspect of the movement, but it is not the movement. Collective decision making is a part of what needs to change in the world, but it is not the only thing that needs to change in the world, it's a part of it.

And I'll use some of the framing that we got from the emerge gathering, even though it's problematic, but at the very least it's simple. So I'm going to steal it.

There was this premise that there are three possible futures. One is a totalitarian one, maybe a techno totalitarian one, where control is used to keep the world running and we see the world trending in that direction in some ways.

And then another possible future is chaos. Not in the sense that the anarchist in me would appreciate, but in the ugly Mad Max sense of the term. Think roving bands of dangerous folks raping and pillaging. And we can imagine the world heading in that direction in the near future too.

And then there's this third possibility, which was called at the Emerge gathering and maybe it's called more broadly, but I didn't know the phrase, the third attractor. The third attractor, it's another kind of world. The best language I know for that world is from our friend Charles Eisenstein, who calls it the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, which might very well be my favorite phrase in the English language. That is where I want to live. I want to live in the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

And so the question is always present: how do we create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible?

And obviously, well, not obviously, but it's obvious to me, but maybe it's not obvious to some. It's obvious that we cannot force it. We cannot force the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. If we force it, then it is a function of force and the force will be there and that is not the world my heart longs for, my heart longs for deep freedom and genuine community and natural harmony with earth and with the cosmos.

And even as I use those words, you can feel the absence of force. You can feel the absence of, let's call it the Bernie Sanders approach. We need to redistribute resources in this way. It's coming from a different energy. It's not coming from a desire to set things right through justice, though I too want to set things right through justice. It's coming from love. It's coming from what is flowing through my soul into my voice and the word that I like the most and I've liked for years is: it's emerging. It's emerging.

What do we do to help it emerge is the question that I think so many of us are oriented around, especially if you're listening to this podcast and unanswered that bubbled up loud and clear for a few of us at the gathering is that we can, one thing we can do very powerfully for it to emerge, is to gather people who are genuinely committed to emergence itself, emergence as a process, not just an idea, not a concept, emergence as a process, who are capable of holding space for emergence, to gather such people together with the intention of holding a shared field for the emergence of the more beautiful world our hearts know as possible.

So there is a sacred fire that I sense is burning at the center of the more beautiful world our hearts know as possible, that is as of now not yet being consciously tended to by the appropriate folks who need to collaborate together to hold it sacred and who will use resonance and coherence as their guide, hold that frequency, rotating in and out per their capacity and then inviting more and more people who can also hold that frequency with them or with us until that frequency becomes the norm.

So back to occupy Wall Street for a second, one of the problems that we both agree on was fundamental to occupy was that anyone could join, including those people who were out to destroy it and there wasn't a way to avoid the problems that that created. Here conscious exclusion is the center of the thing. It's like, are you capable of tuning into and facilitating what wants to emerge in service of the more beautiful world our hearts know as possible. Can you hold this with us and if you can welcome and if you can't, whether you think you can or not, you are not yet welcome, please wait. And then in come more of us, and more of us. And I hope that my language approximates it enough that you can feel it, this shared frequency.

I'm a little bit more concretely, it might look like gatherings of facilitators whose intention it is to hold the space for the emergence of the more beautiful world our hearts know as possible, working together to find coherence with the ultimate intention of allowing that world to come through. That's the center of the movement that hasn't yet formed, that I was feeling was needed and not yet available at the Emerge gathering. And that I feel is needed and soon to be emerging in the movement.

That's the big idea. And I want to acknowledge that it's not just mine, there were like four or five of us who just kept circling this until we started to put this not quite yet clear language to it, but I'll stop there to see what you got out of it.

Daniel: I wanna pause and just let it sink in. …

Yeah, so what I notice is that there's again a kind of quality of rightness to it. And there's also in me a kind of sobriety that it brings. You know, questions that come up are like, is it time yet? Am I ready? Are we ready? Is our culture ready?

And I even can sense that the training that I've been doing here, I live in this kind of monastic community and I have for a long time, that the training I've been doing is, and I've always felt like it's to prepare me for something like this … and I can feel the longing in my heart too. In a sense, that is both the means and the end collapsed into one. Right. That is the thing. And I could feel that being gestured towards at Occupy in moments, that there was, that means and ends collapsed, but we couldn't hold it. And maybe it wasn't time.

That's the question I'm left with and I hope listeners will forgive me. Maybe you have more concerns and questions, but to me from where I'm sitting, you're giving more precise descriptions to a possibility than I've felt for a long time. And so, I was already “in” in a sense before we met. And then there is this question of timing and rightness of like kairos, the right moment … that comes for me.

David: Well, to the extent that part of my role is to play the shofar, to blow the shofar or sound the bugle for when the moment is. I don't yet feel it.

Daniel: Yeah.

David: So it doesn't feel like it's yet. But it doesn't feel that far away. And my language here is approximate. And I think we want to do better to find better language, so that when it's time to issue the call, it's crystal clear.

Daniel: Yes.

David: And it's not yet. But yeah, it feels really good that it feels true to you and it does feel to me too like what it's pointing to.

And I have one more big idea to share when you're ready. A climax.

Daniel: Yeah. Let me see. Let's pause for a moment.

David: Yeah. I also want to be sure I was clear. So if you think there's something I wasn't clear about, that we can do better at clarifying… I'd be very down to…

Daniel: Well, this is the part that I'm kind of worried about: for me it is extremely clear, it is crystal. But when I take on the point of view of my listeners, I don't … it's harder for me to see.

But I don't … It's like coming up with clarifying questions because it’s consensus-decision-making terminology. It feels artificial to me right now. It doesn't feel real. So I'm not going to do it. And I would invite folks, if you don't feel with it right now, to just rewind the podcast and hear the explanation again or hear the description again. And if you have questions, let them burn you until you get clarity because it seems pretty clear to me. I think there's reasons for that and I think there's reasons why it's clear to you too.

David: I'll trust that. I also really appreciate that. I've never heard somebody who's responsible for an audience say “doesn't feel right to try to clarify for the audience.”

Daniel: I'm emboldened by your framing.

David: Yeah. Love it.

Daniel: So why don't you lay down the final piece? Is this the last piece?

David: This is it. It's probably just a, not just, it's a continuation of the last thing that we said this ultimate gathering, a perpetual gathering, both live and online, both between actual people in real time and also happening in parallel by people who sense it, of facilitators working to hold the space for the emergence of the more beautiful world and syncing up with each other, so that it holds with integrity. I think I know one thing that will come through that. So yes, the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible is the intention, but I have a prophecy for what will emerge on route from here to there. And that I believe we are going to experience in our lifetimes, sometime soonish: collective undeniable experiences of the divine, shared collective undeniable experiences of the divine and not inside a religious context, that allows for rational skepticism. But inside a comprehensible framework that allows for anyone with an open enough mind to experience. And that spreads around the world. So, when enough of us are holding a sacred container for emergence, when enough facilitators are holding a sacred container for emergence and enough people who are able to allow things through them are gathered together. Then what will emerge, one thing that will emerge will be the collective experience of the divine.

The closest analogy I have is Mount Sinai. Moses went up Mount Sinai and got the 10 commandments, but it was clear to everyone, down at the bottom of the mountain, that God was present. And I think the age of Moses might be over. We are no longer going to rely on the single prophet with the direct connection to God. We have exhausted that approach to spirituality. Now, as has been said many times, the collective is going to serve as the prophets, the ultimate prophet. And soon the collective will be ready to do that or at least some collectives will be ready to do that. So this is the spiritual awakening that we have been sensing, calling for, intuiting and now it feels on the horizon and I'm able to articulate how we get there.

Daniel: Hmm … The next Messiah is the Sangha.

David: Yes. … That's what I got.

Daniel: Good. Good stuff.

Well, there's a voice in me and I have to imagine that this one is in folks who are listening too, because given my life, I'm actually surprised that it's coming up, which is a kind of cynical voice.

Right. It's saying: “We don't have time for that. That will never work. That is foolish as in the opposite of wise. The wise thing to do is to consolidate political power .. is to do really intense systems design … and networking with. Powerful agents to try to make some kind of significant change in the system. You know, there's all these levers we can pull and strategies we can deploy and …”

I wonder what … I have my own response to that voice in me, but I think it's important to name that kind of cynical voice and what would you say to that?

David: Try. I mean, I don't know. I can't exhaust you of that effort unless you either go through it and realize in a way you can feel that it doesn't work. In the fundamental way. It works sometimes to modulate some of the most horrible effects of our current system, but I don't think anyone believes that organizing in conventional ways to gather political power is going to affect the kind of drastic shift that we need to preserve the biosphere and better, to set up a harmonious relationship in perpetuity between humans and the planet.

Um, so you, you can try. And you'll fail and then you'll learn what those of us who have given up have already figured it out. Or you need to have an experience that shows you. If you have an experience of the divine, a concrete, inarguable experience of the divine, that you feel in your body, then you know already that the accumulation of political power and conventional forms is not going to bring about a meaningful enough shift in time. And then if you can start to imagine having collective experiences of the divine, what more could we want? The most powerful, the most powerful and transformational ideas that have swept the world, or at least a lot of them. The ones we are all in the shadows of are based on collective experiences of the divine. Moses on Mount Sinai, Jesus on the cross, sitting with Buddha, these are collective experiences of the divine, unfortunately, as experienced through a man, a single man, but you can imagine it being experienced more directly. So I guess I would say that the cynicism is welcome and a function of where we are.

Daniel: Yeah. Hmm. I appreciate this most because mostly my mind is rendered silent. And I think that's … It feels appropriate. Yeah, and I can feel in the silence longing and the yearning that your vision touches in me.

David: My equivalent of your cynical voice is like, almost like a “whatever” quality in me, just sort of in my tone sometimes. The only way I can hold what I'm saying is to trivialize it somehow? So when I try to vision it, I'm in it. I'm honoring it. I'm doing my best.

But then when I take the pause, something comes over me: It's like “yeah, whatever.”

Daniel: Hmm.

David: I can't, I can't hold it totally either.

Daniel: Yeah. Well, I think, I think none of us can. And that's why it needs to be this collective. Because of my experiences with even really deep cats … that they fall down often, because the world right now is just so burdensome. It's just so harsh. And so it's the idea of doing it with the kind of, maybe it's not the right analogy, but a metaphor of an army of folks who are dedicated to this and who are willing. I mean, this is one piece that came out for me … who are willing to sacrifice, right? Who are really willing to sacrifice.

This was one of the things that was so compelling about Occupy is that there were people who just gave up their lives to be there. You know, they just gave up everything to take part in this because they felt called to, they felt like it was worth the sacrifice and that sacrifice really matters. The folks that you and I know, the folks at the Emerge gathering, that they would be willing to put down their lives to put down their projects, to engage in this kind of way and not that they'd have to … there's lots of different ways to participate, but part of what seems called for and part of what I hope to be able to do when the time is right, is that kind of sacrifice, just to give it up for the sake of something like this.

David: I am so right there with you. To me, it feels not that much of a sacrifice, because I'm so excited, like my soul, so running in that direction, but it does require the giving up of your identity and it definitely requires a jettisoning of the resume.

Daniel: Yeah. Well, and it will appear as a sacrifice to many, right? It would appear like an insane sacrifice to folks who are still embedded within certain narrative structures and what life is for.

And the other thing that occurs to me and that we saw at occupy, the other thing that will come rushing in, is all of the unfelt pain of our world. Right. This happened at Occupy, all the folks who felt like they've been cast aside by our culture showed up for the occupation to have their voices heard. You'd have their pain recognized. So, which of course, with skillful facilitation becomes a portal into that kind of collective experience of divinity, but it was just like feeling into the immensity of the thing that you're pointing to as this adventure, for sure, to say the least.

David: We will need huge containers for the processing of pain and those containers need to be held distinct from the making of decisions.

Daniel: Hmm. I remember when I had that inside at Occupy. [laughter]

Great. Well, hmm. There's a part of me that wants to be like, how do we know when the bat signal goes out, David, where is it going to come from? How are we going to … who pushes the button? What's the next step?

David: Oh, I've always felt like one of my, for a decade, I have felt that one of my jobs, and I didn't even know what it was for was to, like, fire the gun at the beginning of a race. I didn't know what the race was.

I don't know that I'm the one to listen to, but I think I will at the very least have a sense of when the moment is. Or maybe it's more like when the moment is right, it will announce itself through those of us who are sufficiently attuned to it and it could come in any random way, in a way like with Occupy Wall Street.

I have the poster on my wall right now, It says, hashtag Occupy Wall Street September 17th, bring tents. Iit's an image of a ballerina on the bull, the statue at Wall Street. That was the meme that launched occupy. So there will be an invitation for the creation of this container of facilitators for the movements.

I don't know who, I don't know when that meme is launched, but I know that enough of us will know and I feel like it's … the field will shift.We will just, it's like we'll all turn left at the same time and go, Oh, wait, did you hear that? Did you hear that? Not all of us, but those of us whose job it is to be in that facilitation. I think I want to be there for it. But again, I don't know if that's my role. So my precise role is to help with the communications. I know that for sure. So I'll be there, I'll be there with the bullhorn. I'll be there with a laptop. I'll be there trying to figure out the right language.

Daniel: Oh, man. You're speaking me into an embodied experience that … the felt sense of being in Occupy Wall Street right now and it's electrifying. Like what I've dreamed Occupy could have been. I appreciate you evoking that in me. It's a real gift and I feel totally turned on and alive from what you shared.

David: It feels like the call … like everyone's waiting, not everyone, those of us who are consciously and with their hearts oriented around the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, are tuning to a call that hasn't yet been issued and I think it will be issued when enough of us who are far enough along on our emotional spiritual development can hear it such that we can hold it together. So there's some sort of critical mass. It's not as simple as numbers. There's like a critical mass of energy that can hold the frequency of this. And the call cannot come until that critical mass is reached, or maybe another way of saying it is that the call is issued by the critical mass itself. It's like, it has now been reached, we can hold this.

Daniel: Hmm. In that sense it is kind of like the dress rehearsal.

David: Mm hmm. Yep. I mean, it had so many things right. It just was missing, for lack of a better word, it was just missing God, God needed to be at the center and instead. Participatory democracy or the best form of political dogma, my favorite political dogma was at the center, but God transcends dogma. So what needs to be at the center is … maybe a better phrase than God is the way … The way is at the center.

Daniel: Well, thank you, David. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with folks before we end the call?

David: I'm grateful to you for allowing me on your show and I guess I want to say to the folks listening: I really care about being comprehensible. I really care whether what I said made sense. I wanted to be clear, but I trust Daniel's intuition that maybe perfect clarity is not the thing yet and maybe what's here is to be with whatever feeling emerged in you through listening. Did you feel some faint stirring? And if you did, then I am grateful or satisfied. I am satisfied and I am grateful for you listening. So, thank you so much.

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askadvancewars · 1 year

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2014 - AW Zine

It could be I’m getting sick and I may regret this when I wake up but I can’t stop thinking about it

Though maybe people will be tired after the secret santa and valetine stuff

(yeah it won’t be a fanbook just by me who’d want that

I’m hoping for a for-fans-by-fans submission pdf fanbook kinda deal)

Nothing really came out of this, unsurprisingly.

I think I just really wanted to an Advance Wars fanbook but the best I could do was make one of myself.

Here’s a post I wrote back then which is the context of some pics I repost

While I still try to work out how to put together a pdf thing, just been thinking about guidelines

I really want this to come as accessible and not intimidating to submit because people submitting is great and people showing their love is super series through art

but I’d also like it to look nice, like quality-wise, as in you open it up and the quality of the art doesn’t like junk, as it happened when I tried

Also, I don’t want anybody to feel their art isn’t ‘good enough’ because the plan is to make expression of love for the series

I’ve been tossing ideas, like should there be a theme or not? In general, I’d like to be the general theme of ‘What AW means/meant to you’/'What you love the most about the series’.

If there is a particular theme, I’d still want it to be open-ended enough for the artist’s interpretation

I would want to it be mostly new art made for the book but also open to old art they might want to showcase?

Right now the ideas I like best are

COLORS

-depending how many people sign up, they get assigned a color and draw around that (maybe there would be four people and the colors split up, one might get black and yellow so they’d make a black page and a yellow page, the other might be get orange and blue)

DRAW ALL THE COS

-depending again how many people sign up, they get a random draw of COs to draw so everyone will draw everyone else, could be as simple as just drawing heads or stick figures or as elaborate as making a whole comic

Ah, but the Days of Ruin COs are always welcome which is why I always make it a point to include them in the guidelines.

Nobody seems to request, haha. (I probably will if this ever comes to pass, them and Super Famicom Wars peeps)

Other ideas are Seasons (particular Summer) and Food

But then I circle back to idea that these might be needlessly complicated and might work against me when crunch time comes around because the keywords are 'Advance Wars’ and 'for fun’

not that kind of fun

Even with willing participants, a thriving fandom, and no reward or gain other than a showing of love for a series, a fanbook would need a lot of work.

I did making my own fanbook so maybe “nothing” isn’t exactly the right word for it. But as someone who did not know what I was doing with anything…doing it all by myself? It obviously wasn’t very good.

I ended up putting everything on my askadvancewars a couple of years back.

The theme I went with was: draw every Advance Wars Classic COs once/sorted by faction+ Infantry guys

I called it Jake Wars because of course I did

I still really like that the divider I chose was having each nation’s soldier playing a game system where a Wars game appeared (Orange Star playing on a GBA SP, Blue Moon on the DS, etc) before introducing their group…except for Black Hole’s. Yeah, I ran pretty much of steam out that one.

I still really like this one of them playing on the GameCube. Ironically, the only Wars game on the platform wasn’t made by Intelligent Systems and the one I don’t know, haven’t played and don’t talk about ever.

#aw miscellany

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soulmate-game · 3 years

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Not related to the other two Bio!mom Harley AUs that I did. Just... similar. I wrote this instead of sleeping, as per the usual.

—*—*—*—*—*

“I need your help.”

No accent, no threats of violence, no beating around the bush (figurative or otherwise). No fighting or unconscious bodies.

Just Harley Quinn with her hair down, no makeup, and completely serious, in the center of the Bat Cave. Even though her usual exaggerated Brooklynn accent (circa 1950s) had become a pretty inseparable part of her personality over the years, every now and then she forcibly stuffed it down and used her mostly unaccented voice. The one reminiscent of days with less colors on her face, a high bun, and a pristine white lab coat.

Every single one of the Bats and Birds present, fresh from an interrupted patrol thanks to her, could count the number of times they had seen Harley like this on one hand. Bruce would have the most recollections, but everyone else would have plenty of fingers left on said hand. So they all knew, especially when Bruce willingly pulled down his cowl so he could look Harley in the eye, that this was the start of something they were not likely to forget. And maybe their chances of survival were slim too.

“Harley,” Bruce’s voice was still gruff, seeing as he was still mostly Batman at the moment, but his eyes were soft. “Maybe you should tell us what you need help with first. And sit down. You look exhausted.”

Sure enough, there were dark circles under Harley’s eyes. She let Bruce-man lead her over to one of their debriefing tables and sit her down. She let out a huge sigh, her fingers tangling in her loose blond locks.

“I have a confession, and it isn’t gonna leave this cave, capiche?” The slight return of her accent relieved a little of the tension, but not much. Taking this as their cue, the rest of the bats spread out into their usual seats at the table. Bruce stayed near Harley, keeping a hand on her shoulder in silent support. Harley didn’t continue talking until he gave her a solemn nod in agreement. She gulped— an action that immediately returned the tension.

“... fifteen years ago, back when I was still with Joker, I disappeared off the Gotham scene for a few months. I’m sure a few of you remember,” she looked up, and a couple of the older vigilantes nodded. Really, Jason has still been Robin back then. But the memory stuck out in his head now that he was thinking about it.

“Yeah, you were breaking away from him a little bit, which was weird at the time,” Red Hood mused aloud, arms crossed. “I think you helped us out a couple times and did some of your first team ups with Ivy before you vanished. Then a few months go by and you were back in action with Joker, so we mostly ignored it as you just being you.”

Harley nodded. “Ah, my Ivy’s a lifesaver, even back then. She helped cover up the timeline by keeping me in action for longer than I should’a been without putting me at too much risk.”

“Timeline…” Red Robin spoke up, eyes huge even behind his mask. “You don’t mean—“

“Harley,” Bruce breathed, having also caught on. “You were pregnant?”

The air went still. Harley sniffed, eyes watering even as she smiled.

“Oh yeah. Shouldn’t have been possible, ya know? Me ‘n Joker being dumped in that damn acid should have made us both more sterile than an operatin’ room. But I knew I couldn’t raise a kid, so after she was born—“

“You kept her?” Damian interrupted, earning a gentle cuff over the head from Dick. Harley just snorted.

“Yeah. Not gonna lie, I thought about abortion. But the baby didn’t do nothin’ wrong, and I was still in love with Joker back then so I was ecstatic that I was able to make something new with part ‘a him in it. Still, I knew a baby didn’t deserve to be raised in Gotham. Especially not my baby, not with my enemies and history. Not with who her father was. I knew he’d never want her, never let me keep her. So I spent the last five months of my pregnancy lookin’ around for the best possible family to take her in. And I found them in Paris, France. A sweet couple, both of them bakers. Sabine, she’s both adorably sweet and super kickass. Comes from a Chinese family that is crazy about teachin’ their women martial arts. But nothing shady about it, I triple checked. Just bonding through kicking people in the face. Which is perfect, I wanted my baby to know how to defend herself. I knew she’d need those skills eventually. And Tom, that’s Sabine’s wife, he’s a gentle giant. Same size as Bane, but as harmless as a puppy and makes the best croissants ever. Seriously, the best.”

“Harley,” Bruce gently prodded, but there was a tiny grin on his face. Seeing her behaving so… so normally, so proud and reminiscent, was a rare treat. Bruce would be lying if he said he wasn’t proud of how far the woman had come. How she had freed herself and become a better person, mostly on her own.

“Right, right. The point,” Harley took a breath, rubbing her forehead. “I came clean to Tom and Sabine, but apparently they knew who I was the whole time. They just didn’t care— did I mention they are perfect? Anyway, once I explained everything, they agreed immediately to adopting my baby. They’d been wanting kids, but it would’a been too risky for Sabine’s health. That’s how I found them anyway, they were in the market to adopt. We named her Marinette. She took Tom and Sabine’s last names, hyphenated. We decided Quinn would be her middle name. And after that, I came back to Gotham and told myself that she was in good hands and I needed to forget about her. Cuz I was no good for her. I knew that. I went back to my old tricks. And then…” Harley chuckled, but it was self-depreciating.

“Then a few years passed, and I started breaking away from Joker for real. Then we broke up, I blew up Ace Chemicals while you guys were outta town doing Justice League and Young Justice shit. I started dating Ivy. And—“ she smiled softly at the table, clearly seeing something the rest of them couldn’t. “Then Ivy convinced me to go see her. Visit my baby, see how she’s been. And I did. Marinette was seven years old, but damn it to hell she was gorgeous. And say whatever you want about me and Joker— most of it will even be true— but neither of us are stupid. And she inherited all of our intelligence. All of it. She got my blue eyes. But she got his hair, which meant Sabine teased me relentlessly about ‘are you sure she isn’t that Wayne’s kid?’ And don’t make that face Bruce, you’d be lucky to have a kid half as beautiful as my Mari-pie. No offense, Damian. Anyway. Anyway, this is the important part. Or part of it.

“She sat there and listened to everything I had to say. Everything. A little seven year old, who could barely understand English at the time, and she listened without interrupting once. She never threw a fit, she wasn’t angry or confused. I told her about the things I’d done in the past— well, G rated versions— and she didn’t care. She called me Momma Harley right away, said she wanted to meet Aunt Ivy sometime soon, and started telling me everything about her that I’d missed. From that day on, she became my sunshine. The light of my life, and I still call her at least once a week every week. When I disappear for a few days out of the city? I’m visiting her—“

“You’re banned from international travel, Harley,” Dick scolded, but he sounded way too amused for it to work. He knew she had her ways, anyway. Nobody could actually stop Harley damn Quinn from doing whatever she wanted.

“—Ugh, she tells me the same thing every time! Disappointed glare and everything. I don’t know how I gave birth to such a goodie goodie, but somehow I did. Not important though! The important thing is, I’m always the first to hear when something new happens in her life. And we had decided that she wouldn’t visit me in Gotham until she was at least eighteen, but apparently she disobeyed me— which I should have expected honestly— and entered you guys’ WE international scholastic competition.”

“Oh no,” Bruce pinched the bridge of her nose. “Marinette Dupain-Cheng? The contest winner?” He finally pulled out a chair and sat down. “The winner gets an all-expense paid trip to Gotham for them and their whole class.”

“Exactly!” Harley threw up her hands. “Mari told me last week, and I’ve been trying to talk her out of coming ever since. But she’s inherited both of our stubbornness too, and she isn’t budgin’ a bit. ‘Momma Harley, I wanna see you and Auntie Ivy though!’ And ‘Momma, Gotham’s nothing I can’t handle,’ or my favorite, ‘Maybe you’ll finally get to see me dropkick someone three times my size then, and I’ll prove it.’”

“So that’s what you meant by you need our help,” Tim said as he leaned forward over the table. “Joker just broke out of Arkham yesterday. You want us to protect her.”

“I’d prefer if one of you was with her outside of the mask too, as often as possible,” Harley confirmed. “I can’t stop her from coming here anymore, but I also don’t trust Joker for a second. As soon as he sees her, I’m afraid he’ll make the connection.”

“She looks like him?” Damian asked, scrunching up his nose at the ugly mental image of Joker as a teenage girl. Harley shook her head, solemn.

“She looks like a dark-haired mini-me,” she corrected. “She even keeps her hair in pigtails as her way of showing support for me. And I know Marinette can kick ass, Sabine’s trained her well. But Marinette inherited more than I’d like from me,” Harley ran a hand through her hair. “I didn’t notice it until she was thirteen. She got a crush on a classmate, and it was almost like watching videos of me back during the early days of— well, of Harley Quinn. Just without the crime and insanity. She didn’t even realize that she was almost stalking the poor kid until I pointed it out, and luckily I was able to put my doctorate to good use and we nipped that right in the bud ASAP. She never meant it that way, anyway. As soon as I explained things to her, she was horrified and immediately asked me to help her learn how to have a healthy relationship. That was a fun discussion,” Harley grimaced. “But she still gets attached to people really, really easily. Once she grew out of her crush on that boy, she adopted him as her unofficial brother. She already calls Selina “Auntie,” even though I’ve barely mentioned her to Marinette. She gets attached fast, and deeply. And I’m afraid that even after all the warning I’ve done, all the stories I’ve told her—“

“You’re afraid she’ll get attached to Joker just like you did,” Bruce finished for her, closing his eyes. “Because she knows he’s her father.”

“Yes,” Tears were slowly dripping down her face already, her hands curled into fists so tightly that her knuckles were paper white. “You know how he is. If he finds out she’s his biological daughter, he’ll immediately try to take advantage of that. And he’s far too good with his words for people like me and Mari. I’m worried outta my mind. Please. Help keep my baby safe from him.”

“We will,” Jason no longer had his helmet on, or the domino mask that he usually wore underneath it. All of them knew masks were merely formality with Harley nowadays. And he needed to look her directly in the eye so she could see how serious he was. “I can sign up as a bodyguard for the class. It won’t be weird, seeing as they’re tourists and this is Gotham. They also have several rich kids in their group if I remember right.”

Bruce nodded, agreeing with Jason. “That’s a good idea. I can lead the class on their tours of WE personally. That’ll serve the purpose of keeping an eye on her and shutting up the investors that keep begging me to make more public appearances for the sake of the company. Marinette’s name is already released to the news as the winner of the contest, so we can’t keep her out of the spotlight long. Tim, you’ll have to keep an eye on any and all pictures of the class. Try to erase or doctor the images with her in it well enough that connections between her and Harley can’t be easily made. Dick, you and Damian will be in charge of keeping an eye out for any activity from Joker. The slightest hint, and you notify all of us. We’ll decide on a case-by-case basis who is necessary to stick with the class and who goes after the clown.”

“She’s gonna sneak out of her hotel to stay with me and Ivy,” Harley admitted, bringing the (now slightly judgemental) attention back to her. She raised her hands up in surrender. “She didn’t tell me that, and I didn’t approve or suggest it! I just know my baby too well to not realize that that’s her plan. Could ya provide an escort?”

Bruce sighed. “This is gonna be an eventful month.”

#maribat #ml x dc #mlb x dc #soulmate-game #bio!dad au #bio!mom harley quinn #bio!dad joker #maribat fanfic #maribat fic #platonic Harley x Marinette #platonic Ivy x Marinette #platonic brucinette

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timbertumbr · 3 years

Text

Average (Ninjago Zane X Reader)

No spoilers. Just something I wrote. :)

Believe it or not, you’re the only average person aboard the bounty. No elemental powers, no crazy super intelligence, you’re just a normal human being that happens to know the Ninja. How you met is also pretty normal, you just came across the dojo in search of directions and now you live on the bounty. Sensei Wu was intrigued by you, even if you were normal and kept insisting as such.

“Normal comes in different shapes and sizes, but it’s always based on interpretation. You may find yourself to be normal, but others may think differently,” That’s what he said which convinced you to join, that and the fact he muttered under his breath that the Ninja need more social interactions besides their own tight knit group.

The Ninja were a little wary at first, which is understandable after all they’ve been through. But they came around eventually. You help them out whenever and however you can. Usually it’s small things like doing a chore or making sure the equipment was cleaned and safe for the Ninja.

And it hasn’t gone unnoticed, after you’re done with a chore or whatever you’re doing to help out, one of the Ninja comes up to you and asks if you want to watch them train or want to play video games with them. Ah, bonding experiences.

While you were reminiscing on how close you’ve gotten to the Ninja, you walked to the kitchen to see if you could find something to eat when you noticed the fridge and cabinets were practically bare.

Taking out your phone, you begin writing a list of things you need before texting Jay that you’ll be going to the store. He sends you a thumbs up emoji in response. You pocket your phone and walk out onto the deck, hop over the side and tumble onto the top of a building. Just because you live with the ninja, doesn’t mean you are one.

You get up, dust yourself off, open the roof top and walk down the stairs until you’re on the busy streets of Ninjago city. You open Google Maps and begin walking to the closest store.

________

After around an hour and a half, you walked out of the store with a cartful of bags. You pull out your phone and begin texting Jay to come pick you up with the groceries when someone grabs you from behind, a hand covering your mouth.

Fear flooded your system and you grabbed a hold of the assailants finger before pulling back on it HARD. A male scream rang through the parking lot as you slipped from his grasp and started running. You didn’t make it far before another person jumped out from the corner and swiftly punched you in the face. You stagger for a bit before your body hits the pavement and you soon lose consciousness.

_________

You groan when you open your eyes and realize your body is stiff. You try to stretch but realize you're tied up. Great. And on top of that, a stinging pain is erupting from where you got punched.

You look around and see that there’s a lot of people around. They’re all looking at you, so you can’t exactly try and figure out how to escape even if you wanted to. But you’re too terrified and shocked to be even thinking about escaping.

In a matter of moments, a person emerges from the shadows of the dark room and approaches you with a grin. You could only stare in fear.

“Comfortable? I’d hope so since you’re our money bargain,” He taunted, so clearly he's the leader. Or maybe the right hand man? Again, you couldn’t tell. You swallow as best as you can and open your mouth to speak.

“Wh-What do you want?” You curse under your breath, stuttering and showing fear is what they want… But you can’t exactly help it. The people in the room begin cackling.

“Sounds like someone’s not paying attention, ey gang? You’re a money ticket, and you’re also going to help us prove that we’re the only thing the ninja should care about,” He sneers while poking your forehead. Oh. OH. They’re THOSE kinds of bad guys, the overconfident ones. He backs away from you and looks to the others in the room.

“Be on your guard, they ARE Ninja after all,” And with that he takes his leave. Okay, so this is good. It’s only a matter of time before the ninja find you. Either before or after the ransom call, it wouldn’t matter anyway. But… a small part of you worried they wouldn’t notice.

You shake your head gently to get rid of those thoughts. They’d come. They always do. Your shaking slightly irritated your now bruising cheek which made you inhale sharply. A chorus of quiet chuckles scattered throughout the room.

Seconds pass, them minutes. You waited and waited… until you heard a wonderful sound. Something hitting one of the many gang members and them groaning in pain. You look around in hope.

“It’s the Ni- AGH!” They got kicked into the wall and got knocked out instantly. The entire room was filled with the sounds of fighting while you watched blurs fly around the room. In a matter of minutes, everyone was on the ground either groaning in pain or just flat out unconscious.

“Y/N! Are you alright?!” Cole asks, taking off his hood and coming around to untie you while Zane looks around the room scanning their vitals to ensure no one was faking.

“I’m alright, just glad you’re here,” You stretched after being released from your bonds. You meant what you said, you just wish you could’ve done more.

“It seems everyone is down for the count. I have contacted the authorities to deal with them and their leader,” Zane approaches you two as he speaks and stares at you.

“You are injured,” Cole furrows his brows in slight confusion before checking and gasps.

“What the- You said you were alright!” Cole panicked a little (a lot), you smile sheepishly.

“I am, it just stings a bit is all,” Zane silently looks between you and Cole before speaking.

“We should return to the bounty. The others are worried for your safety,” He turns on his heel and begins to walk out despite Cole trying to protest. You awkwardly follow the two back to the bounty.

___________

When you return to the bounty, you receive a lot of worried yelling from mostly everyone on the ship. Wu and Zane were able to quiet them before things got out of hand.

“Zane, can you take care of Y/N’s injuries?” Wu asks, Zane opens his mouth to answer.

“Y/N WAS INJURED?!” Jay screeched.

“Who was it?! Let me at ‘em!” Nya yelled afterwards.

“Hey, at least leave some for me sis,” Kai adds. Zane sighs and gently takes your hand. He starts to slightly drag you away from the worried chaos that was the Ninja. You walk past the kitchen to see Lloyd was making dinner. He sees you both and waves before returning back to his task.

“How-”

“It was the cart that led us to your location. I asked Jay, Kai and Lloyd to put away the groceries while Cole and I searched for you,” Zane explains as you enter the bathroom. He asks you to sit on the toilet and you do. Zane takes out the first aid kit and grabs the necessary supplies. He pours some hydrogen peroxide onto some cotton pads, turns to you and kneels.

“This may sting,” He mutters before gently patting your bruised cheek, causing you to inhale sharply until the stinging stops.

“Apologies,” He gets up and throws away the cotton pad, returning to the first aid kit and fishing out the appropriate bandaid and ointment. He applies the ointment on the bandaid before gently putting it on your cheek.

“Thank you Zane,” He nods as he puts away the first aid kit.

“In the future, when you’re running errands please take one of us with you,” Zane comments politely.

“Oh. Yeah, I can understand why but…” You trail off, Zane raises a brow in confusion.

“But…?”

“It feels like I’m wasting your time. I’m not like any of you and was only able to live on the ship because Wu thought it would be for the best. You all have big responsibilities to shoulder and I don’t want to make things more difficult for you,” Zane stares at you unsure of how to respond. You start to get uncomfortable and get up.

“S-Sorry, forget I said anything, yeah?”

“No,”

“Huh?” You look at Zane confused.

“No, I will not be simply forgetting something that you’ve seemed to be harboring for quite some time now. I do not believe you are wasting anyone’s time, in fact, time spent with you always makes the others and myself quite happy. You’re always making sure we’re alright and do what you think are the simplest of chores that we simply do not have time for. You brighten our world, Y/N. You always have and always will,”

Zane smiles at you while you stare at him shocked but also happy. He opens his arms offering a hug and you take it, wrapping your arms around the robo boi.

“Thank you Zane,” You mutter. He gently pats your head.

“It is no problem, Y/N,” You both separate and FINALLY exit the bathroom. The scent of Lloyd’s cooking enters your nose as soon as you leave the room.

“Looks like Lloyd’s done! Let’s go before Cole and Kai eat it all,” You joke, speed walking to the dining room. Zane follows with a confused smile, but a smile nonetheless.

Want to Request? Please Read this before you do so.

#Ninjago #Zane #Ninjago Zane X Reader #X Reader

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benjaminmoorepaint · 3 years

Text

red: the color of...grantaire?

Figured I might do another meta post like the one I did for Marius to address the myths and misconceptions surrounding certain characters, so it's Grantaire's turn!

I'm sure we all know Grantaire quite well...a sensitive starving artist, with his Apollo as his muse, and a cynic who pragmatically points out the flaws in Enjolras's idealism, which they quarrel over.

Let's unpack that!

Grantaire is most likely middle class if not wealthy, he is certainly not poor. We don't know what he's studying (if he's studying at all) but he is nevertheless a quintessentially Parisian bourgeoise "student", much like Bahorel. "A rover, a gambler, a libertine..." As the foil of "severe in his enjoyments" Enjolras, Grantaire is a pleasure-seeker, indulging in the excesses that Enjolras disdains.

Again, though we don't know what Grantaire is studying (and I suspect he's just Bahorel-ing it) he's clearly an educated man, judging by the references he throws into his speeches, and he mentions that he once was a student of Gros.

So is he really an artist? He might have been an apprentice at some point, but it's clear he was not particularly enthused by it. After all, discipline is something that Grantaire…lacks. And because it's Grantaire, you can't completely discount the idea that he made it up just for a pun (though I do find that unlikely.) But it's a triple (quadruple?) play--it's important not to take this quote too far out of context because he's actually saying several things here.

It is a shame that I am ignorant, otherwise I would quote to you a mass of things; but I know nothing. For instance, I have always been witty; when I was a pupil of Gros, instead of daubing wretched little pictures, I passed my time in pilfering apples; rapin is the masculine of rapine. So much for myself; as for the rest of you, you are worth no more than I am. I scoff at your perfections, excellencies, and qualities. Every good quality tends towards a defect [...] there are just as many vices in virtue as there are holes in Diogenes’ cloak.

Gros was a well-known neoclassical painter of the time, and I believe Hugo's inclusion of him here is a jab at the neoclassicists, as Grantaire doesn't seem to care for him.

There's a pun! "Rapin"--term for a painter's assistant--is the masculine of "rapine"--to steal.

So he likely means he stole the apples intended to be painted for a still life, which fits his careless attitude... but he's ironically putting himself down for it too, and at the same time

putting his companions down, saying they're no better than him even if they do have more "good" qualities because each good quality has a corresponding downside, so what's the point, really?

You can see that even in this small sample of his speech that Grantaire often has layers upon layers of meaning in what he says. He's a smart guy! But that means you can't always take what he says at face value, as Hugo says, he's constantly "reasoning and contradicting" himself. So let me invite you further down into what I think his real meaning is here (though now firmly into the depths of my own conjecture, so others may have different interpretations.)

I would speculate that "the rest of you" who he professes to mock refers mostly to a specific person, you can probably guess who. After all, Enjolras is surely the paragon of virtue among them, and you could certainly argue that his good qualities edge on being flaws. I think Grantaire is right about that, and it's a sort of theme we see pop up again and again--the Bishop's generosity does hurt the women he lives with, Valjean's self-sacrifice hurts Cosette, and Javert is someone who's tipped all the way over to his virtues being vices.

But like, man, come on. Seriously. "I scoff at your perfections, excellencies, and qualities." Dude. We all know that you're obsessed with this man.

And you might notice that this is just a whole lot of Grantaire talking and talking over people, never letting anyone else get a word in. It's not a debate, Grantaire never actually debates anyone, let alone Enjolras. The idea of Grantaire debating Enjolras and making him see the flaws in his idealistic revolution is wholly a fandom invention.

The closest we get, really, is Grantaire trying to convince Enjolras to send him to the Barriere du Maine...and Grantaire doesn't come out of that looking so good.

“Do you know anything of those comrades who meet at Richefeu’s?”

“Not much. We only address each other as tu.”

“What will you say to them?”

“I will speak to them of Robespierre, pardi! Of Danton. Of principles.”

“You?”

“I. But I don’t receive justice. When I set about it, I am terrible. I have read Prudhomme, I know the Social Contract, I know my constitution of the year Two by heart. ‘The liberty of one citizen ends where the liberty of another citizen begins.’ Do you take me for a brute? I have an old bank-bill of the Republic in my drawer. The Rights of Man, the sovereignty of the people, sapristi! I am even a bit of a Hébertist. I can talk the most superb twaddle for six hours by the clock, watch in hand.”

I won't bother going too in-depth here since you're probably familiar with all this--Grantaire talks a big game and then fails to follow through. And we see one of two red waistcoats mentioned, neither of which are worn by Enjolras.

Grantaire lived in furnished lodgings very near the Café Musain. He went out, and five minutes later he returned. He had gone home to put on a Robespierre waistcoat.

“Red,” said he as he entered, and he looked intently at Enjolras. Then, with the palm of his energetic hand, he laid the two scarlet points of the waistcoat across his breast.

So yeah, it's actually Grantaire who wears red, at least canonically! I know their popular red/green color scheme comes from the musical, but it might be fun to reverse it sometimes...I think Enjolras would look great in a nice emerald green, and he'd be more likely to wear that, actually.

Why? A red waistcoat like would be a very obvious, in-your-face political statement--perfect for Bahorel, the other red waistcoat wearer, but Enjolras is actually a lot more reserved and less reckless than fandom sometimes makes him out to be. Wearing something that blatant isn't really his style.

The real question is, why does Grantaire, of all people, own one? Why has he read Prudhomme and the Social Contract and the Rights of Man?

Grantaire is not a super sympathetic character. He's a man of means, talent, intelligence...and he wastes those gifts and privileges on doing nothing, he has no aims in life, he does not aspire to do better or make the world better. He may be Enjolras's foil but I would also contrast him with Feuilly, who has spent his life dedicated to improving himself and the world despite the challenges he's faced. He's obnoxious to women, denigrates his friends for their beliefs, and is generally useless. He's given the opportunity to change and he squanders it. He's not so much cynical (because that's a belief) as he is indifferent, which is arguably worse. His indifference can certainly be read as symbolic within the group, their belief versus the apathy of the world.

But, layers upon layers...Grantaire does have a good heart hiding underneath all that. What I've been getting at all along here is that he does care; he may say he doesn't, he may even believe he doesn't, but he does, clearly, care. He says he hates mankind; he loves people. He says he scoffs at his companions; he admires them. He declares himself indifferent, yet he can't help but talk about the sufferings of the world.

Which isn't to say that simply caring absolves him of anything. Up to this point, he's still just been a useless layabout. What does absolve him (narratively speaking) is the first time, possibly the first time in his life, that he chooses to act. He chooses to take a stand. And this transfigures him, as Hugo says.

Grantaire had risen. The immense gleam of the whole combat which he had missed, and in which he had had no part, appeared in the brilliant glance of the transfigured drunken man.

At the last moment, he chooses to believe, and Enjolras finally accepts him.

One last thing: Grantaire never calls Enjolras "Apollo". Furthermore, he's actually the only one who couldn't have called him "Apollo". The only line where this nickname is mentioned is as follows:

It was of him, possibly, that a witness spoke afterwards, before the council of war: “There was an insurgent whom I heard called Apollo.”

Who could have called him that? Not Grantaire, he was fast asleep during the whole thing. So I choose to believe it was Prouvaire…he would.

#grantaire #meta

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pan-fangirl-345 · 3 years

Text

Books Bring People Together

Summary: A frustrated and stuck Kaminari comes to you for help, and it somehow blooms into something else along the way.

TW: I made Kaminari ADHD, so I'm sorry if there's anything wrong, I went off what my ADHD friends do and what a medical site told me. I myself am not ADHD, so again, I apologize if there's anything wrong with this. Small swears, and Mineta, which should be a warning in and of itself.

A/N: I have had this half-baked idea stuck in my head for months and I wanted it out, so I am giving you all this!

"Hey, um, (Y/L/N), can I ask you something?" Kaminari asked, sliding into the chair across from you at the common room table.

"Sure, what's up?" you asked, setting your pencil down on the paragraph you were reading.

"Um, this is kind of embarrassing," Kaminari admitted. "But, um, I'm having a really hard time with English right now, and I know that you're right behind Bakugou in grades."

"Where are you going with this Kaminari?" you asked, crossing your arms in front of your chest.

You had heard things about Kaminari, and after meeting Mineta and knowing that Kaminari hung around with him, you didn't have the best impression of him. You had just been placed in Class 2-A, and so far you had mostly hung around with what the other students were calling the 'Dekusquad'.

"I need someone to tutor me," he admitted. "Normally English isn't all that hard for me, but Shakespeare is whack and I don't understand half of it."

"You want me," you started, "to tutor you. Why not ask Bakugou? Isn't he your friend?"

"Yeah, but . . . Bakugou has . . . harsh methods, and I need someone who won't treat me like an idiot," Kaminari confessed.

"Alright," you relented. "Why don't we get started now? Do you have anything going on?"

"No, this takes precedent," Kaminari said, rushing to grab his things.

"Alright, here's my question for you," you said when he propped his book open. "Why don't you understand?" You saw the look on his face change and you winced. "Sorry, sometimes I have a hard time controlling the tone of my voice. Let me rephrase that question." You paused for a moment, thinking of the right words before you said, "What about this don't you understand? What's the one thing about this that trips you up?"

"The formatting for one thing," Kaminari grumbled. "Why the hell is printed like that?"

You chuckled, brushing hair out of your face. You had thought the same thing the first time you had read Shakespeare.

"Alright, how about you just read, and then you can ask me any questions while I work on my own stuff, alright?"

"That sounds like it might work," he admitted.

"If that doesn't work, feel free to let me know," you told him. "This is about what helps you remember the material better."

"No, like I said, normally this is really easy for me," Kaminari said. "Let's try it."

"Alright, and remember, if you have any questions, I'm right here."

"Thanks (Y/L/N)," he mumbled.

"Of course, I wouldn't be much of a hero if I couldn't help people, right?" you mused, smiling at him.

"R-Right!" he chirped, grinning back at you.

You both worked in silence for a little bit before Kaminari leaned back in his chair, rubbing at him eyes.

"You okay?" you asked.

"Yeah, sorry, I'm ADHD, so sitting still and trying to read this is a little hard," he confessed. "And I might be dyslexic, I've never been tested but sometimes reading is hard for me."

You frowned, biting the inside of your lip, running the situation through your head.

"What if I read it to you?" you asked, looking up from your chemistry homework.

"How? It's a play," Kaminari said.

"I used to be in a drama club in middle school," you told him. "It's set up like a script, or if we don't have the energy to act it out, it's not hard to pretend that it's a regular story."

Kaminari stared at you for a moment before he nodded.

"Yeah, yeah I think that might work a little bit better than me staring at the same paragraph for fifteen minutes without actually reading anything."

"What part are you on?" you asked Kaminari, moving to glance over his shoulder at the page.

"Portia is trying to convince Brutus to tell her what's going on in her house. I think."

"Oh, I adore this part," you muttered, mostly to yourself. "Alright, what has you stuck?"

"This part. 'I grant I am a woman; but withal A woman well-reputed, Cato's daughter. Think you I am no stronger than my sex, Being so father'd and so husbanded? Tell me your counsels, I will not disclose 'em: I have made strong proof of my constancy, Giving myself a voluntary wound Here, in the thigh: can I bear that with patience. And not my husband's secrets?' I don't entirely understand what she's saying."

Wow, English must've been his thing, he didn't mess up a single word, and he was able to read it fairly fluently, everything considered. It might have taken him a little longer than normal, but he had nailed it.

"Okay, so she's basically telling Brutus that she won't tell his secrets if he tells her what's going on, it doesn't matter if she's a woman or not."

"What was with the voluntary wound thing?"

"So, it depends. Sometimes, in plays, the women playing Portia will have a fake knife and stab themselves in the thigh, other times they pretend to slice themselves, depends on the director," you told him. "She basically cut herself on the thigh and said, 'If I can handle this I can handle whatever's going on inside your head.' Do you understand?"

"Yeah, but damn, this woman is a badass," Kaminari said, staring down at the pages."

"Right? Some people read that as psychotic, but it's Shakespeare," you told him, "everything in Shakespeare is psychotic to some extent."

"That's fair. Thank you for explaining that to me," he said.

"Of course, that is why you came to me," you replied, laying a hand on his shoulder for a moment before you moved back to your seat.

Kaminari, despite the things you had heard, was actually quite intelligent, it just took him a little longer to get the answer sometimes.

"Thank you so much for helping me," Kaminari murmured. "You were super helpful."

"Of course, I actually enjoyed helping you," you told him. "And if you need any more help, please, let me know."

"I will, thank you so much (Y/L/N)," Kaminari repeated.

"Have a good night Kaminari," you told him.

"You too!" he chirped before he headed up to his room.

You sat down at the table again, staring at the chemical formula in front of you.

So, if zinc only had one charge, positive two, and it was combined with thiosulfate, that meant that there shouldn't be the need for two of the zinc atoms, they would make the charge neutral.

You wrote the answer down, checking the textbook to make sure you were right. Polyatomic ions were a little more complicated than monoatomic ions.

There were only a few more questions, and then you could go to bed too, and you just hoped that there were no trick questions.

You were the last one in the common room, as usual, despite assuring Iida that you were right behind him when he went to bed an hour ago.

"Alright (Y/F/N), time for some good sleep," you muttered, shutting your book and gathering your supplies.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You had been tutoring Kaminari for about six weeks, and he was definitely smarter than people gave him credit for. Sometimes he just needed a few minutes to think, or he needed something explained to him in a different way than everyone else.

Sero had been joining your little tutoring sessions too, and you had started doing them in Sero's room, since there were things Kaminari could mess with while he studied, and it was an environment where he didn't feel the need to prove himself.

"Hey, (Y/L/N), can you help me with this problem?" Sero asked, waving you over.

"Of course, what are we working on?" you inquired.

"Polyatomic ions, again," Sero said. "I need this extra credit."

"Alright, which one are you stuck on?"

"How do I figure out which Roman numeral goes here? Gold has multiple charges."

"You work backwards," you told him. "When you look at the formula, you need to figure out what charge dihydrogen phosphate has."

You gestured to the chemical formula.

"It has a negative one charge. Right?" Sero inquired, checking the list of common ions that the teacher had given them at the beginning of the unit.

"Right, and you have three of those ions, right?"

"Yeah, because there's a subscripted three outside the parentheses."

"So you have three of those, which means that those three together have a negative three charge."

"Right."

"So now you just have to figure out which gold variant has the right charge to cancel that one out."

"Well, there's only one gold atom, so it's gold three right?"

"Bingo, you got it."

"Oh, that makes it so much easier than what I was doing," he muttered, erasing the math he had been doing, writing down the way you had just shown him.

"(Y/L/N), can you come read through this essay for me?" Kaminari asked. "I think it's okay, but I need another eye on this."

"Sure, hand it over," you told him, taking the papers that he had handed to you.

You grabbed one of your signature blue pens and uncapped it, ready to mark anything you thought he could do better.

There wasn't as much as you were expecting. While Kaminari had a hard time interpreting things, once he understood, he was golden. He had a way with words, you noticed as you scanned through the paper he needed to hand in next class. You assumed that it gave him time to think about the right phrasing of things.

Other than a few grammatical and spelling errors, the paper was well written, and there was nothing major that needed fixing.

"Good job Kami, this is really good," you told him, ruffling his hair lightly.

He responded well to physical affection and praise, you had also noticed, and he made it easy.

Once you got past the typical shield he threw up, he was a nice guy with insecurities, just like everyone else.

He chuckled, leaning into your hand.

You noticed that the others didn't touch Kaminari as much as you did, despite having known him for much longer. They were worried about getting shocked, Sero had told you.

"Why though? He's never shocked me," you had told him.

"He can't control it sometimes, it builds up in his body and it needs an out."

"Well, that still no reason to stop touching him," you had mused. "If he shocks me he shocks me, it's really no big deal."

Kaminari had only shocked you once, during a thunderstorm when there had been a lot of lightning outside. He had gotten excited about getting a 90 on one of his tests, and had hugged you, giving you a slight shock.

He had apologized profusely, but you had waved his apologies off.

"It's okay Kaminari," you told him. "It happens to all of us sometimes."

You were finding yourself thinking about him more than you should've. You had become good friends with both him and Sero, and the other students had started coming to you when they had a question, but Kaminari was a little different.

It had started out with the flirty comments, but slowly those had turned into real compliments. He had been keeping Mineta away from you more and more, and he had even started laying off the perving with the grape rat.

He was a good guy, he really was, despite the playboy attitude. He was sweet, and he was just like every other person in the world.

"Thanks for tutoring us both," Kaminari said as the session was coming to a close.

"Yeah, you're really saving our asses," Sero agreed.

"Of course, come to me any time," you told them both, smiling as you made to head back to your own room.

"Hey, um, (Y/L/N), can I ask you something?" Kaminari asked.

"Sure. You know how much I love questions," you teased, smiling at him. Then you noticed his expression. "Kami?"

"Will . . . will you-" he chuckled awkwardly, messing with the seam of his pant leg. "Can you read something to me?"

"Yeah, of course," you said. "What is it?"

He handed you the book, and you smiled.

"My dad used to read this to me when I was little. I think that's why I love books so much," you admitted. "That was before . . . well, it doesn't matter now. Come on, we can head down to the common room if you want. Or your room, it doesn't really matter to me."

You had visited Kaminari's room on more than one occasion to return things to him, he tended to be a little forgetful, and he had often left things with you.

Despite the fact that everything you had learned about society told you that you should avoid being alone in a room with a boy, you trusted Kaminari enough to be alone in a room with him.

"I really like to read too," he confessed. "But sometimes my brain doesn't like to let me do it."

"I understand, it's okay," you told him, touching his arm lightly. "Are you sure that you'll be able to sit still long enough for me to get through any of it?"

Kaminari, after spending so much time with you over the last few weeks, had figured out how your voice worked, and he rarely got offended by your tone of voice anymore, which you were thankful for.

"Yeah, I like the sound of your voice, it helps calm me down. I think I might pay attention more if you read it to me."

"Alright, sure, let's go," you said, holding the book to your chest.

You knew this book like the back of your hand, and you had a feeling that Kaminari was telling the truth when he said he would be able to pay attention.

Kaminari followed you into the common room of the dorms, trailing just slightly behind, but he was in front of you the moment Mineta tried to get to you.

It amazed you how fast he could move sometimes, when he really wanted to.

"Get lost Mineta," you said. "I have nothing to say to you."

Mineta opened his mouth but a raised brow from Kaminari had him shutting it and heading to his own room so he could think his pervy thoughts in peace.

"I can't believe I was ever friends with that perv," Kaminari whispered. "I think I owe a lot of the girls apologies."

Kaminari glanced over his shoulder, and you smiled at him, linking your hands together.

You were proud of him, he had really grown lately, and you were glad that he was seeing how uncomfortable he had made the girls.

"I'm proud of you," you told him, and he beamed.

He responded well to praise, and being told that he had done a good job.

"Come on, we'll have to go to bed soon if we don't want Iida to lecture us again," you said, sitting down on one of the couches.

Kaminari sat down next to you, leaning his head on your shoulder as your propped the book open.

You didn't mind the fact that Kaminari was a little clingy, the contact was nice, and he always radiated warmth, though whether that was his normal body temperature or he ran hot because of his quirk, you didn't know.

You started the book off, barely having to look at the words as you read, changing your voice as necessary, stopping every once in a while to explain a word to Kaminari that he didn't understand, or to answer a question that he had.

It was nice, spending time with him like this, simply because he wanted to, not because he was going to fail a subject.

Somehow he had ended up with his head on your thighs, and you had one hand buried in his hair, brushing it away from his face, your fingers carding through it softly.

He was making a content noise in the back of his throat, and you smiled down at him, finishing up a chapter.

"Do you want to go to bed?" you asked softly, not wanting to disturb him too much, he had enough trouble sleeping as it was.

He hummed softly, leaning into your hands, and you smiled down at him softly.

You had never been one for crushes, they had seemed pointless, and there had never been a person who had caught your attention like this.

You had thought about it, of course, what it would be like to be in a relationship, but you had never thought that you would have to worry about it.

Well now you were worrying about it.

That nameless, faceless person that had been with you in those daydreams was starting to look frighteningly like Kaminari.

You had panicked when it had first started happening, until you realized that it would probably fade. You had had a friend in middle school who had a new crush every week, and you had assumed that it would fade with time.

It hadn't. That uneasiness that had popped up around him slowly melted into a nice warmth whenever he was close. You had started to stop worrying about whether he would like this, or hate that, and had started to show your true colors.

He had seemed to like you even more when you had started doing that, and you were glad.

But the only bad thing was that now you were noticing other things. His hands lingered a little longer than necessary when he helped you during training, his smile always seemed brighter when you made him laugh. His eyes always seemed to follow you around the common room, and he sometimes appeared at your side when you walked in.

You weren't sure if you just overthinking things or if he might like you back.

But this wasn't a simple crush anymore. You weren't sure what it was. It was a little too early to be love (even though it was just a rush of chemicals in the brain meant for human survival), but it was way past a simple crush.

Was there another step between a crush and love? Was this going to end with your heart breaking? Was there even a chance that he might like you back?

These were things that you kept in the back of your mind until you were alone in your room. Worrying about them in his presence made him worry about you, and you didn't want him to worry about you if he didn't need to.

"Kami, seriously, you need to go to bed."

"If I do, so do you," he told you, making you chuckle.

"I'll go to bed if you will. You are in my lap after all," you teased, pulling your hands away.

"That's fair," he murmured, stifling a yawn.

"Go to bed Kami," you whispered, standing up as soon as your legs were free.

They had fallen asleep a while ago, but you hadn't had the heart to move him.

"Alright," he mumbled, stumbling towards his dorm room.

You smiled softly, heading for yours.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You weren't sure what woke you up hours later. Maybe it was the three glasses of water you had drank before bed, or maybe it was the fact that your brain hated you almost as much as Kaminari's hated him.

You stretched, pulling a hoodie on over the tank top and shorts that you had gone to bed in, heading for the common room.

You weren't going back to bed any time soon, so you might as well get some studying done with a nice cup of tea or something.

You were almost surprised to see Kaminari sitting at the common room table with his books out.

"Denki? What are you doing?" you mumbled, wandering over.

"(Y/L/N)? What are you doing up?"

"I could ask you the same thing," you murmured, plopping into the seat next to him.

"Couldn't sleep, my brain went into overdrive the minute I tried to fall asleep."

"I at least got a good four or five hours in," you replied. "But it's Friday night, I should be sleeping in."

"What woke you up?" he asked, laying a hand on your thigh.

Kaminari, you had noticed, liked having his hands on you.

Not in the perverted way you had expected though. He liked having a hand on your thigh or on the small of your back. He liked an arm around your shoulders or his arm linked with yours when you all took class outings. He liked being close to you.

"No idea. It might've been a nightmare," you admitted. "I remember faint flashes, but it might've been something else."

"Are you going to be able to go back to bed?"

"Nah, I'll be up for a good while," you told him, leaning into his shoulder.

"Anything I can do to help?" he asked.

"Can you just . . . talk to me?" you inquired. "I like listening to you talk about things. Calms me down."

"What do you want to know about?"

"Anything. Everything. You."

"Did you know that I have a cat named Marshmellow?"

"What? No," you said, perking up a little bit. You had always been an animal person.

"Yeah. He's the spawn of the devil, but I didn't know that when I named him. All white, pretty blue eyes. Pure fucking evil," Kaminari told you, taking his phone out to show you a photo.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah, he absolutely despises me," Kaminari said, handing his phone over to you. "Loves my sister though, so he isn't a complete psychopath."

"He's a cat, can animals even be psychopaths?" you asked, moving your seat closer to his.

"No idea, but it wouldn't surprise me if he is," Kaminari said, chuckling.

"You're right, he is pretty," you murmured, flipping through the photos quickly.

Kaminari hummed, but when you glanced up he was looking at you.

He had that look on his face, the look that he sometimes got when he looked at you. It was one of the reasons you wondered if he liked you or not. He looked like he was in pain when gave you that look.

"Denki?" you inquired softly.

"Hmm?"

"Why are you looking at me like that? Like you're in pain? Like you're hurt?" you asked.

You didn't like the way your voice sounded. That little hint of insecurity snuck in, your voice had that clogged sound it got when you tried not to cry.

You weren't sure whether you could handle his response to that, but you needed to know if being around you caused him pain. You needed to know if there was any chance that he hated being in your presence.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Kaminari's POV)

Pain, huh?

Yeah, this was definitely pain, seeing her like this, swaddled in a hoodie he had left in her room accidently a week ago, covering her shorts, making her legs look a mile long.

He had tried to ignore it, tried to ignore the feeling in his chest every time he looked at her, tried to ignore the blatant male pride that came with seeing her draped in his hoodie, but he was only human after all.

Denki, after spending so much time with a girl that didn't tend to pull her punches, he knew how uncomfortable he had made the girls with all of his comments. He now knew how it made them feel when he said some of the things he had.

Denki never wanted her or any of the other girls to feel like that again, and he wanted to ignore some of the things that were running through his head, but she was making it hard when she looked at him like that, when she said his name the way that she just had.

"Denks?" she asked softly, moving to get a better look at his face.

Denki had never had a crush, not a real one anyway. He had had his eyes on Jirou first year, but that had been fleeting.

He was flirty, it was just his nature, but this feeling whenever he looked at her . . . that was completely new on him.

"Denki, are you okay?" she asked, putting her hands on his face lightly, making him look at her.

"Do you have any idea what you do to me?" Denki asked, placing his hands over hers. "I wasn't sure whether you felt the same way and I didn't want to mess anything up."

"Denki? What are you saying?" she asked, eyes bright with hope as she looked at him, running her thumb over his cheek softly, almost absentmindedly.

"I like you, (Y/F/N), I like you a lot, and this isn't some . . . three A.M. spur of the moment confession, but . . . it kind of is. The point is that you're smart, and all kinds of gorgeous, and there's so many things about you I wish I could list, but words aren't my thing, and I know that I'm rambling, but I really can't stop 'cause I'm terrified of what your response is gonna be and I don't want to fuck anything up and-"

"Denki," she cut in, smiling at him the way she did when she was fondly exasperated with him. "You have nothing to worry about. Absolutely nothing. I like you too."

"Why?"

Even Denki was surprised by the amount of confusion in his own voice.

"Because you're a dork," she stated. "Because you're smart, even if people don't always see it right away. Because you want to be a hero, because you like to make a difference. Because in the end, you're a good guy, when you get past the playboy attitude and shitty pickup lines. Because you're cute and all kinds of soft. Because apparently I have a thing for hyperactive morons with screwed up hair."

"Rude," he muttered, but she smiled at him even wider, and he knew that it was worth it.

"Am I wrong?" she asked softly, swinging her legs around to get closer to him.

"No, but that doesn't mean that I'm happy about it," he mumbled, pouting slightly.

She gave a small giggle, something that rarely happened, and Denki smiled, wide and unburdened.

"So, what do you say about going on a date?" he asked, tucking her hair behind her ear to get a better look at his face.

"I think that's the smartest thing you've ever said to me," she teased.

Denki pouted again and she touched his nose lightly, making it crinkle in response.

"That wasn't a no," she told him, wrapping her arms around his neck softly.

"You know, this looks good on you," he whispered, touching the hem of the hoodie carefully. "And it looks very familiar."

"It does?" She pulled away to look down at it and her eyes went wide. "I didn't even know it was yours. I just threw it on on my way down here. When did you even . . . .?"

"I left in there like a week ago," Denki informed her. "I thought you had just kept it."

"I didn't know it was in there," she admitted. "But I'm not sorry that I'm in it, it's very comfortable."

"We can share custody," he murmured.

"We'll have to," she agreed. "I don't think I can deal with never wearing this again. You actually have good taste in hoodies."

"Why are you so surprised by this?" he asked.

"Because most of the time your style seems all over the place," she replied. "But that's not a bad thing. It makes you unique."

"Normal is overrated."

"A normal sleep schedule is not," she said, standing up. She grabbed his hands, pulling him to his feet. "Come on, we can chill in my room if you want to."

"You aren't nervous about having me in there?" Denki asked.

"No, because I know that if you try anything I can knock you on your ass. I also trust you," she told him, linking their fingers together softly. "Is this okay?"

"More than okay," he breathed, stepping close enough to brush their shoulders together.

He could get used to this.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(Your POV)

It was a rare day when you and Denki got a day off together. Being heroes was tiring, and schedules were always weird, so when you both got a day off together, you always spent them together.

"You're up early," Denki murmured, slipping in behind you from where you were sitting on the window seat of your apartment.

He wrapped his arms around your waist, burying his face in your neck.

"The baby woke me up," you said.

Said baby padded into the roof, tail high in the air, a smug look on that cute furry face as he jumped up onto the seat, curling up in your lap.

"Marshmellow, don't lay on my book," you muttered, pulling the book out.

"Told you, he's fuckin' evil," Denki murmured, kissing your shoulder lightly.

His shirt was slipping off your shoulder, and Denki treated uncovered skin like a target, regardless.

"How long have you been up?" he asked.

"Only an hour or two, and you looked so peaceful, I felt bad waking you up. I know that you've been getting more action than I have these last few weeks," you murmured, taking one of his hands, kissing his palms softly, leaning back into his warmth.

"I love you," Denki hummed.

"I love you too Denks," you told him.

"Read to me?" he requested, and you smiled.

"Always," you replied, finding your spot in your book again.

#denki kaminari x reader #denki x reader #kaminari fluff #kaminari x reader #kaminari x reader fluff #denki x reader fluff #mha #mha kaminari

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sk1fanfiction · 3 years

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the many faces of tom riddle, part 4

-attachment, orphanages, and yet more child psych: time to add yet another voice to the void-

FULL DISCLAIMER THAT THIS IS JUST MY OPINION OF A CHARACTER WHO DOESN’T HAVE THE STRONGEST CANON CHARACTERIZATION, AND THUS ALL THIS IS BASED ON MY CONCEPTUALIZATION.

I'm going to be super biased, because my favorite portrayal of Tom Riddle is actually Hero Fiennes-Tiffin as eleven-year-old Tom Riddle, in HBP and I get to chat about child psych in this one, sooo here we go.

First of all, I’m just so impressed that a kid could bring that much depth to such a complex character.

This is the portrayal, I feel, that brings us closest to Tom’s character. Yes, Coulson’s brought us pretty close, but by fifth year, the mask was on.

We don't really get to see Tom looking afraid very often, but it's fear that rules his life, so it's really poignant in our first (chronologically) introduction, he looks absolutely terrified.

The void being the fandom's loud opinions on a certain headmaster. I wouldn't call myself pro-Dumbledore, but I'm certainly not anti-Dumbledore, either. (Agnostic-Dumbledore??)

Since I'm not of the anti-Dumbledore persuasion, I decided to poke around in the tags and see what the arguments were, so I don't make comments out of ignorance.

Most of the tag seems to be more directed towards his treatment of Harry and Sirius, but a few people mentioned that Dumbledore should have treated Tom with ‘exceptional kindness’ and tried to ‘rehabilitate’ him.

As I said in Parts 2 and 3, I am 100% in favor of helping a traumatized kid learn to cope, and I don’t think Tom Riddle was solidly on the Path to Evil (TM) at birth, or even at eleven. Not even at fifteen.

Could unconditional love and kindness have helped Tom Riddle enough for the rise of Lord Voldemort to never happen? Possibly, but...

Yes, I'm about to drag up that Carl Jung quote, again.

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”

The problem with this is that if you’re going to blame Dumbledore for this, you also have to blame every other adult in Tom’s life: his headmaster, Dippet, his Head of House, Slughorn, his ‘caretakers’ at the orphanage, Mrs. Cole and Martha, and possibly more. In fact, if we're going to blame any adult, let's blame Merope for r*ping and abusing Tom Riddle Senior, and having a kid she wasn't intending to take care of.

Furthermore, you cannot possibly hold anyone but Tom accountable for the murders he committed. (I should not have to sit here and explain why cold-blooded murder is wrong.) And if you like Tom Riddle's character, insinuating that his actions are completely at the whim of others is just a bit condescending towards him. He's not an automaton or a marionette, he's a very intelligent human being with a functioning brain, and at sixteen is fully capable of moral reasoning and critical analysis.

I've heard the theories about Dumbledore setting the Potters up to die, and I'm not going to discuss their validity right now; but he didn't put a wand in Tom's hand and force him to kill anyone. Tom did it all of his own accord.

And while yes, I have enormous sympathy for what happened to Tom as a child, at some point, he decided to murder Myrtle Warren, and that is where I lose my sympathy. Experiencing trauma does not give you the right to inflict harm on others. Yes, Tom was failed, but then, he spectacularly failed himself.

We also have no idea how Dumbledore treated Tom as a student.

In the movies, it’s Dumbledore who tells Tom he has to go back to the orphanage, but in the books, it’s Dippet. We know that Slughorn spent a lot of time around Tom at Slug Club and such, yet I don’t really see people clamoring for his head.

I regard the sentiment that Dumbledore turned Tom Riddle into Lord Voldemort with a lot of skepticism.

But let's hear from the character himself -- his impression of eleven-year-old Tom Riddle.

“Did I know that I had just met the most dangerous Dark wizard of all time?” said Dumbledore. “No, I had no idea that he was to grow up to be what he is. However, I was certainly intrigued by him. I returned to Hogwarts intending to keep an eye upon him, something I should have done in any case, given that he was alone and friendless, but which, already, I felt I ought to do for others’ sake as much as his."

Now, assuming that Dumbledore's telling the truth, I'm not seeing something glaringly wrong with this. No, he hasn't pigeonholed Tom as evil, yes, I'd be intrigued, too, and it's a very good idea to keep an eye on Tom, for his own sake.

“At Hogwarts,” Dumbledore went on, “we teach you not only to use magic, but to control it. You have — inadvertently, I am sure — been using your powers in a way that is neither taught nor tolerated at our school."

Again, it seems like he's at least somewhat sympathetic towards Tom, and is willing to at least give him a chance.

More evidence (again, assuming Dumbledore is a reliable narrator):

Harry: “Didn’t you tell them [the other professors], sir, what he’d been like when you met him at the orphanage?” Dumbledore: “No, I did not. Though he had shown no hint of remorse, it was possible that he felt sorry for how he had behaved before and was resolved to turn over a fresh leaf. I chose to give him that chance.”

Now, I think Dumbledore is pretty awful with kids, but I don't think that's malicious. Yeah, it's a flaw, but perfect people don't exist, and perfect characters are dead boring. I am not saying that he definitely handled Tom's case well, I'm just saying that there's little evidence that Dumbledore, however shaken and scandalized, wrote him off as 'evil snake boy.'

It's also worth taking into account that it's 1938, and the attitudes towards mental health back then.

Why is Tom looking at Dumbledore like that, anyway? Why is he so scared? What has he possibly been threatened with or heard whispers of?

"'Professor'?" repeated Riddle. He looked wary. "Is that like 'doctor'? What are you here for? Did she get you in to have a look at me?"

"I don't believe you," said Riddle. "She wants me looked at, doesn't she? Tell the truth!"

"You can't kid me! The asylum, that's where you're from, isn't it? 'Professor,' yes, of course -- well, I'm not going, see? That old cat's the one who should be in the asylum. I never did anything to little Amy Benson or Dennis Bishop, and you can ask them, they'll tell you!

Tom keeps insisting he's not mad until Dumbledore finally manages to calm him down.

I'm really upset this wasn't in the movie, because it's important context. Instead we got these throwaway cutscenes of some knick-knacks relating to the Cave he's got lying around, but I just would have preferred to see him freaking out like he does in the book.

There was extreme stigma and prejudice towards mental illness.

'Lunatic asylums,' as they were called in Tom's time, were terrible places. In the 1930s and 40s, he could look forward to being 'treated' with induced convulsions, via metrazol, insulin, electroshock, and malaria injections. And if he stuck around long enough, he could even look forward to a lobotomy!

So, if you think Dumbledore was judgmental towards Tom, imagine how flat-out prejudiced whatever doctors or 'experts' Mrs. Cole might have gotten in to 'look at him' must have been!

Moving on to the next few shots, he is sitting down and hunched over as if expecting punishment or at least some kind of bad news, Dumbledore is mostly out of the frame. He’s trapped visually, by Dumbledore on one side, and a wall on the other, because he’s still very much afraid. uncomfortable, as he tells Dumbledore a secret that he fears could get him committed to an asylum (which were fucking horrible places, as I said).

It brings to the scene that miserable sense of isolation and loneliness to that has defined Tom’s entire life up to that point (and, partially due to his own bad choices, continues to define it).

And, when Dumbledore accepts it, his posture changes. he becomes more confident and more at ease, as he describes the... utilities of his magical abilities.

"All sorts," breathed Riddle. A flush of excitement was rising up his neck into his hollow cheeks; he looked fevered. "I can make things move without touching them. I can make animals do what I want them to do, without training them. I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me. I can make them hurt if I want to."

Riddle lifted his head. His face was transfigured: There was a wild happiness upon it, yet for some reason it did not make him better looking; on the contrary, his finely carved features seemed somehow rougher, his expression almost bestial.

I do think Harry, our narrator, is being a tad bit judgmental here. Magic is probably the only thing that brings Tom happiness in his grey, lonely world, and when I was Tom's age and being bullied, if I had magic powers, you'd better believe that I'd (a) be bloody ecstatic about it (b) use them. And, like Tom, I can't honestly say that I can't imagine getting a bit carried-away with it. Unfortunately, we can't all be as inherently good and kindhearted as Harry.

Reading HBP again, as a 'mature' person, it almost seems like the reader is being prompted to see Tom as evil just because he's got 'weird' facial expressions.

So... uh...

Nope, let's judge Tom on his actions, not looks of 'wild happiness.'

To his great surprise, however, Dumbledore drew his wand from an inside pocket of his suit jacket, pointed it at the shabby wardrobe in the corner, and gave the wand a casual flick. The wardrobe burst into flames. Riddle jumped to his feet; Harry could hardly blame him for howling in shock and rage; all his worldly possessions must be in there. But even as Riddle rounded on Dumbledore, the flames vanished, leaving the wardrobe completely undamaged.

Okay, one thing I dislike is Tom's lack of emotional affect when Dumbledore burned the wardrobe, in the books, he jumped up and started screaming, instead of looking passively (in shock, perhaps?) at the fire. Incidentally, I can't really tell if he's impressed or in shock, to be honest. I think they really tried to make Tom 'creepier' in the movie.

This is one of the incidents where Dumbledore's inability to deal with children crops up.

I think he was trying to teach Tom that magic can be dangerous, and he wouldn't like it to be used against him, but burning the wardrobe that contains everything he owns was a terrible move on Dumbledore's part. Tom already has very limited trust in other people, and now, he's not going to trust Dumbledore at all -- now, he's put Tom on the defensive/offensive for the rest of their interaction, and perhaps for the rest of their teacher-student relationship.

Riddle stared from the wardrobe to Dumbledore; then, his expression greedy, he pointed at the wand. "Where can I get one of them?"

"Where do you buy spellbooks?" interrupted Riddle, who had taken the heavy money bag without thanking Dumbledore, and was now examining a fat gold Galleon.

But I'm not surprised Tom is 'greedy.' He's grown up in an environment where if he wants something, whether that's affection, food, money, toys, he's got to take it. There's no one looking after his needs specifically. I'm not surprised that he's a thief and a hoarder, and I don't think that counts as a moral failing necessarily, and more of a maladaptive way of seeking comfort. It would be bizarre if he came out of Wool's Orphanage a complete saint.

Additionally, I think given that the Gaunt family has a history of 'mental instability,' Tom is a sensitive child, and the trauma of growing up institutionalized and possibly being treated badly due to his magical abilities or personality disorder deeply affected him.

And there are points where it seems that Dumbledore is quick to judge Tom.

"He was already using magic against other people, to frighten, to punish, to control."

"Yes, indeed; a rare ability, and one supposedly connected with the Dark Arts, although as we know, there are Parselmouths among the great and the good too. In fact, his ability to speak to serpents did not make me nearly as uneasy as his obvious instincts for cruelty, secrecy, and domination."

"I trust that you also noticed that Tom Riddle was already highly self-sufficient, secretive, and, apparently, friendless?..."

And while this is all empirically true, these are (a) a product of Tom's harsh environment, and (b) do not necessarily make him evil. But the point remains that child psych didn't exist as a field of its own, and psychology as a proper science was in its infancy, so I'd be shocked if Dumbledore was insightful about Tom's situation.

But I've gone a ton of paragraphs without citing anything, so I've got to rectify that.

Let's talk about Harry Harlow's monkey experiments in the 1950-70s.

If you're not a fan of animal research, since I know some people are uncomfortable with it, feel free to scroll past.

Here's the TL;DR: Children need to be hugged and shown affection too, not just fed and clothed, please don't leave babies to 'cry out' and ignore their needs because it's backwards and fucking inhumane. HUG AND COMFORT AND CODDLE CHILDREN AND SPOIL THEM WITH AFFECTION!

I will put more red writing when the section is over.

This is still an interesting experiment to have in mind while we explore the whole 'no one taught Tom Riddle how to love' thing and whether or not it's actually a good argument.

Andddd let's go all the way back to the initial 1958 experiment, featured in Harlow's paper, the Nature of Love. (If you're familiar with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, him and Harlow actually collaborated for a time).

To give you an idea of our starting point, until Harlow's experiment, which happened twenty years after Dumbledore meets Tom for the first time, no one in science had really been interested in studying love and affection.

"Psychologists, at least psychologists who write textbooks, not only show no interest in the origin and development of love or affection, but they seem to be unaware of its very existence."

I'm going to link some videos of Harry Harlow showing the actual experiment, which animal rights activists would probably consider 'horrifying.' It's nothing gory or anything, but if you are particularly soft-hearted (and I do not mean that as an insult), be warned. It's mostly just baby monkeys being very upset and Harlow discussing it in a callous manner. Yes, today it would be considered unethical, but it's still incredibly important work and if you think you can handle it, I would recommend watching at least the first one to get an idea of how dramatic this effect is.

Dependency when frightened

The full experiment

The TL;DW:

This experiment was conducted with rhesus macaques; they're still used in psychology/neuroscience research when you want very human-like subjects, because they are very intelligent (unnervingly so, actually). I'd say that adult ones remind me of a three-year old child.

Harlow separated newborn monkeys from their mothers, and cared for their physical needs. They had ample nutrition, bedding, warmth, et cetera. However, the researchers noticed that the monkeys:

(a) were absolutely miserable. And not just that, but although all their physical needs were taken care of, they weren't surviving well past the first few days of life. (This has also been documented in human babies, and it's called failure to thrive and I'll talk about it a bit later).

(b) showed a strong attachment to the gauze pads used to cover the floor, and decided to investigate.

So, they decided to provide a surrogate 'mother.' Two, actually. Mother #1 was basically a heated fuzzy doll that was nice for the monkeys to cuddle with. Mother #2 was the same, but not fuzzy and made of wire. Both provided milk. The result? The monkeys spent all their time cuddling and feeding from the fuzzy 'mother.' Perhaps not surprising.

What Harlow decided next, is that one of the hallmarks being attached to your caregiver is seeking hugs and reassurance from them when frightened. So, when the monkeys were presented with something scary, they'd go straight to the cloth mother and ignore the wire one. Not only that, but when placed in an unfamiliar environment, if the cloth mother was present, the monkeys would be much calmer.

In a follow-up experiment, Harlow decided to see if there was some sort of sensitive period by introducing both 'mothers' to monkeys who had been raised in isolation for 250 days. Guess what?

The initial reaction of the monkeys to the alterations was one of extreme disturbance. All the infants screamed violently and made repeated attempts to escape the cage whenever the door was opened. They kept a maximum distance from the mother surrogates and exhibited a considerable amount of rocking and crouching behavior, indicative of emotionality.

Yikes. So, at first Harlow thought that they'd passed some kind of sensitive period for socialization. But after a day or two they calmed down and started chilling out with the cloth mother like the other monkeys did. But here's a weird thing:

That the control monkeys develop affection or love for the cloth mother when she is introduced into the cage at 250 days of age cannot be questioned. There is every reason to believe, however, that this interval of delay depresses the intensity of the affectional response below that of the infant monkeys that were surrogate-mothered from birth onward

All these things... attachment, affection, love, seeking comfort ... are mostly learned behaviours.

Over.

Orphanages, institutionalized childcare, and why affection is a need, not an extra.

His face is lit the exact same was as Coulson’s was in COS (half-light, half-dark), and I said I was going to talk about this in Part 3. I think perhaps it's intended to make Fiennes-Tiffin look more evil or menacing, but I'm going to quite deliberately misinterpret it.

Now, for some context, Dumbledore has just (kind of) burned his wardrobe, ratted out his stealing habit, and (in the books only, they really took a pair of scissors to this scene) told him he needs to go apologize and return everything and Dumbledore will know if he doesn't, and, well, Tom's not exactly a happy bugger about it.

But interestingly, in the books, this is when we start to see Tom's 'persona,' aka his mask, start to come into play. Whereas before, he was screaming, howling, and generally freaking out, here, he starts to hide his emotions -- in essence, obscure his true self under a shadow. So this scene is really the reverse of Coulson's in COS.

And perhaps I'm reading wayyy too much into this, but I can't help but notice that Coulson's hair is parted opposite to Fiennes-Tiffin's, and the opposite sides of their faces are shadowed, too.

Riddle threw Dumbledore a long, clear, calculating look. "Yes, I suppose so, sir," he said finally, in an expressionless voice.

Riddle did not look remotely abashed; he was still staring coldly and appraisingly at Dumbledore. At last he said in a colorless voice, "Yes, sir."

Here's an article from The Atlantic on Romanian orphanages in the 1980s, when the dictator, Ceausescu, basically forced people to have as many children as possible and funnel them into institutionalized 'childcare', and it's absolutely heartbreaking.

There's not a whole lot of information out there on British orphanages in the 30s' and 40s', but given that people back then thought you just had to keep children on a strict schedule and feed them, it wouldn't have a whole lot better.

The only thing I've found is this, and it's not super promising.

The most important study informing the criteria for contemporary nosologies, was a study by Barbara Tizard and her colleagues of young children being raised in residential nurseries in London (Tizard, 1977). These nurseries had lower child to caregiver ratios than many previous studies of institutionalized children. Also, the children were raised in mixed aged groups and had adequate books and toys available. Nevertheless, caregivers were explicitly discouraged from forming attachments to the children in their care.

Here's a fairly recent paper that I think gives a good summary: Link

Here, they describe the responses to the Strange Situation test (which tests a child's attachment to their caregiver).

We found that 100% of the community sample received a score of “5,” indicating fully formed attachments, whereas only 3% of the infants living in institutions demonstrated fully formed attachments. The remaining 97% showed absent, incomplete, or odd and abnormal attachment behaviors.

Bowlby and Ainsworth, who did the initial study, thought that children would always attach to their caregivers, regardless of neglect or abuse. But some infants don't attach (discussed along with RAD in Part 2).

Here's a really good review paper on attachment disorders in currently or formerly institutionalized children : Link

Core features of RAD in young children include the absence of focused attachment behaviors directed towards a preferred caregiver, failure to seek and respond to comforting when distressed, reduced social and emotional reciprocity, and disturbances of emotion regulation, including reduced positive affect and unexplained fearfulness or irritability.

Which all sounds a lot like Tom in this scene. The paper also discusses neurological effects, like atypical EEG power distribution (aka brain waves), which can correlate with 'indiscriminate' behavior and poor inhibitory control; which makes sense for a kid who, oh, I don't know, hung another kid's rabbit because they were angry.

Furthermore...

...those children with more prolonged institutional rearing showed reduced amygdala discrimination and more indiscriminate behavior.

This again, makes a ton of sense for Tom's psychological profile, because the amygdala (which is part of the limbic system, which regulates emotions) plays a major role in fear, anger, anxiety, and aggression, especially with respect to learning, motivation and memory.

So, I agree completely that Tom needed a lot of help, especially given the fact that he spent eleven years in an orphanage (longer than the Bucharest study I was referring to), and Dumbledore wasn't exactly understanding of his situation, and probably didn't realise what a dramatic effect the orphanage had on Tom, and given the way he talks to Tom, probably treated him as if he were a kid who grew up in a healthy environment.

In case you are still unconvinced that hugging is that important, there's a famous 1944 study conducted on 40 newborn human infants to see what would happen if their physical needs (fed, bathed, diapers changed) were provided for with no affection. The study had to be stopped because half the babies died after four months. Affection leads to the production of hormones and boosts the immune system, which increases survival, and that is why we hug children and babies should not be in orphanages. They are supposed to be hugged, all the time. I can't find the citation right now, I'll add it later if I find it.

But I think it's vastly unrealistic to say that Dumbledore, who grew up during the Victorian Era, would have any grasp of this and I don't think he was actively malicious towards Tom.

Was Tom Riddle failed by institutional childcare? Absolutely.

Were the adults in his life oblivious to his situation? Probably.

Do the shitty things that happened to Tom excuse the murders he committed, and are they anyone's fault but his own? No. At the end of the day, Tom made all the wrong choices.

And, for what it's worth, I think (film) Dumbledore (although he expresses the same sentiment in more words in the books) wishes he could go back in time and have helped Tom.

"Draco. Years ago, I knew a boy, who made all the wrong choices. Please, let me help you."

#tom riddle #the many faces of #tom marvolo riddle #character analysis #character study #albus dumbledore

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theliterateape · 3 years

Text

We Killed Jason Todd

By Matt Markman

In 1988 my friends and I killed a kid.

He was just a boy really. We had help it wasn’t just me and my pals. there were adults involved, lots of them. I mean we were young we were just thirteen and really couldn’t comprehend the ramification of our actions, the adults knew what they were doing. I’m painting it to sound way more sinister than it was, and in today’s society, wouldn’t trend on Twitter but maybe in the ’80s, it was probably considered quite ominous.

To set your mind at ease, it was Jason Todd. You know, Batman's sidekick, The Boy Wonder, Robin—well, the second Robin anyways. And I helped kill him.

I was big into comic books but my favorite was, The Dark Knight, The Caped Crusader, The Batman… He donned the best costume, he had all the money and was the most intelligent of all the superheroes. That last trait right there, the fact that he was considered a superhero and he had no actual super powers made him cooler than the other side of the pillow. You know how The Big Bang Theory has convinced the world it’s an Emmy-winning sitcom worth watching? I think it’s the fact that Batman was someone any one of us could actually be. Sure we needed to start with a base coat of genius followed by a splash of handsome billionaire playboy then train overseas in martial arts for several years, but if you had those things you, too, could be a vigilante. You ask me today and I'd stand by the fact that Batman would beat Superman in a fight, say ten out of ten times. This is not debatable because super beings from another planet are not real.

My favorite thing about Batman, though, is his ability to balance out good and evil. He spawned one of the greatest comic book villains and fictional characters ever created, The Joker. They have tried and tried again but in my opinion never got close to the Clown Prince of Crime—maybe Negan from The Walking Dead, he's pretty ruthless. The Joker is what would happen if a stand-up comedian became a criminal mastermind, so basically the plot of the 2019 film Joker.

My love for Joker made sense because growing up I was always more into the bad guys than the good guys. Watching and playing with G.I.Joe, I was always on the side of Cobra Commander, the twins Tomax and Xamot, and Zartan because they were always more glamorous and eye-catching than the boring ass Joes. Just once, I’d like that “knowing is half the battle” part at the end of the cartoon to have been Storm Shadow giving us kids a tip on how to fuck up Shipwreck and his stupid Parrot. Megatron, Skeletor, Shredder, Mumm-ra…

The list goes on, but the antagonists always resonated with me. they had a much better and more intriguing agenda than the good guys did. I know that wasn't the purpose, we were supposed to cheer on the good guys, like the idea of saving the world and all, but the mayhem… It’s like Alfred Pennyworth said, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” It’s odd because the bad guys in my life were real, the bullies and I didn't like them at all. They tormented me daily unprovoked because I was short and had big ears. Perhaps my love for the dark side stemmed for my desire to be on that side because in real life there was no Superman swooping in to rescue me from the clutches of Lex Luthor.

There were two sides, and good had a lack of champions looking out for the weaker, smaller good guys. The bad guys in my neighborhood, well, they were real and never really foiled and more importantly, they always got the girl in the end. Fuck the good guys!

My admiration for evildoers achieving their agenda was tested in 1988, Batman was running a four-part series called A Death in the Family. It was your typical Batman arc. Somehow, The Joker was going to get the upper hand on The World’s Greatest Detective only to be bested in the end by Batman. But this time, the third comic decided to do something nobody had never seen in the industry. The writers were going to give the fans the opportunity to decide where they were going to go with the story, only it was an option between two different roads, one quite unconventional. Apparently a few years earlier, one of the writers, Dennis O'Neil, had seen a sketch they did on SNL where Eddie Murphy held up a Lobster—Larry the Lobster—and was asking viewers to decide whether Larry was boiled and eaten or was to be set free. The choices were offered in the form of two phone numbers both costing fifty cents a call. One number was a vote for him to be freed and the other number was a vote for Larry to be murdered, smothered in butter, and devoured by Axel Foley. Ultimately, after nearly 500,000 calls, the people voted for Larry the lovable lobster to be pardoned with a 12,000 call margin. The popularity of this bit intrigued O'Neil and A few years later he decided to implement it in his Death in The Family storyline.

In the third book, The Joker had taken Batman's sidekick, the Boy Wonder, hostage. He’d beaten him bloody with a crowbar leaving a cliffhanger to be wrapped up in the fourth book. The last page of the comic was full page and at the top read in true ’80s Do the Right Thing fashion: “Robin will die because The Joker wants revenge, but you can prevent it with a telephone call!” They even phrased it to steer you down the hero’s path, like you can literally be Batman with one phone call. Underneath the imploring verbiage were two numbers, dial one number; The Joker fails and Robin lives, Batman would once somehow saves the day. However, call this other number and The Joker succeeds and Robin dies. Gruesomely.

Wow! They were going to let the fans decide the fate of Robin, really this was one of my earliest introductions to a reality voting competition type show. In my opinion, it was a bad idea. Robin was always the worst. Go back and read through an adventure or two involving Jason Todd and tell me he wasn't always whiney and bellyaching. He was never going to be iconic or cool like Bruce Wayne or even his predecessor Dick Grayson—the first Robin. See, Dick got pissed off, decided he was tired of being in Batman's shadow, ditched the Robin costume, threw on a black blue and gold costume, moved to another city and became Nightwing. Dick was a go getter, ambitious. Grayson’s Robin was a winner, Todd's Robin was an irritating little bitch; he was not an innocent lobster.

I went to my mother and asked if I could make a call that was going to cost just fifty cents and I would pay her back or she could just take it out of my allowance. She wanted to know what it was for and mostly wanted to confirm it wasn't for an adult sex line, which costs more than fifty cents a minute, but that’s a different story. It was nothing as tawdry as phontercourse, I just wanted to help murder an annoying teenage sidekick. My mother response was “Oh, yeah, that’s fine.”

I think after it was exposed that it wasn't phone sex anything else I said went in one ear and out the other, surely she didn't think I was actually voting for a plucky comic book sidepiece to be murdered by The Joker. So that’s what I did. I cast my vote along with a majority of DC comic book fans that shared my detest for the boy wonder. Ten thousand votes were recorded with a narrow margin going to Robin dying. I think the writers never suspected that fans would go that route.

O’Neal himself voted for Robin’s stay of execution. A man of his word, Batman issue #429 was released and Robin was killed by The Joker in an explosion and we were to blame for it. Sad to say but you give a bunch of comic book nerds the power I think it would go bad every time. That day we were all proud to be The Joker's henchmen. I felt like a soldier at the end of Star Wars cheering madly while The Joker received his metal shouting, “I helped that happen!”

So many shows these days embrace our fascination with the anti-hero with the success of The Sopranos, The Shield, Breaking Bad, hell Narcos had me rooting for Pablo Escobar—Pablo fucking Escobar. I wouldn't say I was a bad person growing up. Quite the contrary, I was a shy nerd with no power to do anything but pick my books up after they were smacked to the ground. What I’m saying is don't give me the power to make important life or death decisions with your franchise because myself and the other dorks will have the bodies of Orko, Snarf, and Jimmy Olson lying in a shallow grave, just tell me what number to dial… or text.

Matt started performing standup comedy in 2004 in Las Vegas and is now a regular at every major comedy club on the Las Vegas strip. He released his first comedy album in 2016 titled Uncut available on iTunes. More about Matt and his upcoming appearances can be found on MattMarkman.com.

#Matt Markman #Matt Markman Comedian #Matt Markman Comedian Las Vegas #Las Vegas Comedians #G.I. Joe #Skeletor #Joker #Batman #Joker kills Robin #Jason Todd

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andimlonely · 4 years

Text

Your parents disapprove | Kokichi, Shuichi + Rantaro

Request: Hello! Hope you are doing well!! Could possibly request Kokichi, Shuichi, and Rantaro with a s/o who’s parents don’t like them(as in they don’t like the boys- because i feel like my wording is weird)

A/N: I wrote these as if the reader and the boys are college-aged, since it was harder to be creative with the scenarios with the characters being high school students. Also, requests are still open!

♡ Kokichi:

- To be honest, you had dreaded bringing Kokichi to meet your parents. He’s a pretty boisterous person, and has a habit of stretching the truth. You can understand why people who don’t really know your boyfriend like you do would think differently of him, but the truth is, he never means any harm. It’s just.. difficult to prove that to people, including your parents.

- Normally, Kokichi isn’t very concerned with how others see him, at least not enough to change his behavior for them. But of course, because he cares about you, he tries his best to make a good impression on your parents. It’s just, he maybe takes it too far sometimes.

- He’s tried complimenting your dad on his cooking. “Woah, this steak is the best I’ve ever had, Mr. (l/n)! Much better than anything my folks make anyway, nehehe.”

- And asking your mom about her job.. “That’s super interesting, Mrs. (l/n)~ No wonder (y/n) looks up to you so much.”

- And even lying about his hobbies and interests just to impress them. “Yup, I read about psychology and physics all the time! I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but, y’know.”

- .. among other things. But it always ends the same; despite his best efforts, Kokichi rubs your parents the wrong way.

- Your parents find him disingenuous, and well, to be fair, they aren’t fully wrong. But his disingenuousness stems from a desire to get on their good side, not hide how awful they believe he must secretly be.

- “I just don’t trust Kokichi.” “I don’t like that he isn’t close to his family, that’s a bad sign.” “You could be doing so much better, (y/n). Kokichi needs to grow up some more before he ever deserves you.”

- You try to talk to your parents about how coldly they treat your boyfriend, and how they aren’t trying very hard, if at all, to get to know him.

- You reassure Kokichi that he doesn’t need to lie or play up his charisma to make a good impression, but he isn’t so convinced, and moreover, he’s too stubborn to let up.

- So when you tell him he doesn’t need to come to your family functions if he’s uncomfortable, he waves your idea off and tags along anyway.

- You reach your breaking point when you catch your parents threatening Kokichi at the door when he drops by for a surprise visit to you, telling him he should leave and never see you again, that he doesn’t deserve you.

- You stop them and come to your boyfriend’s defense, and finally tell them this: “If you can’t accept Kokichi and my love for him, then fine. You don’t have to see him anymore, but you’re not going to see me anymore either.”

♡ Shuichi:

- You and Shuichi were equally nervous the first time you planned to introduce him to your parents, but in an attempt to make it easier on yourselves, you convinced Shuichi that you were positive that they would love him.

- After all, why should you be worried? Shuichi is polite, kind, intelligent, and has a well-paying, steady job. There’s nothing more a rational parent could want.

- But you neglected to remember, your parents aren’t very rational.

- They find him too quiet, not expressive enough. They take his shyness for disdain, and make assumptions about why he’s so quiet.

- “It’s just strange. He doesn’t really say anything unless we talk to him first. How do we know he isn’t judging us?” “He seems off. He’s too serious, and I can’t tell what he’s thinking.” “Don’t you want a man that’s more confident and assertive?”

- They mostly save their comments to tell you behind his back, but they’ll be passively critical in his presence or try to play it off as if they’re only joking. “Shuichi, speak up! You’re so quiet I forget you’re there.” “Oh don’t be so serious, I’m only teasing.”

- Even when he offers to help with the dishes, or brings flowers or some other gift for no particular reason, your parents aren’t fond of him

- Despite your constant reassurance that your parents are wrong, and that Shuichi is the most wonderful person you could ever hope to be with, you can see that their hurtful criticisms and comments are really getting to him, so you stop bringing him to family functions.

- But this only prompts more criticism from your parents. “Why doesn’t he come anymore?” “Is he too good for us? He doesn’t like us?”

- This is where you finally put on a brave face and stand up to your parents. “I’m not going to bring him until you treat him with respect. I love Shuichi, and if that doesn’t matter to you, then you have no right to know anything about us.”

♡ Rantaro:

- You weren’t sure what to expect when introducing Rantaro to your parents. You didn’t think they would love him immediately, but you were fairly certain that he’d make a good impression. Rantaro is quite charismatic, after all.

- Then again, your parents have always been strict about dating. You weren’t allowed to date until you were 17, and even then you were only given the ‘privilege’ of dating after fighting to convince them.

- So you should have seen it coming when they were openly skeptical of his intentions with you.

- Most of their judgments stem from your boyfriend’s appearance and style.

- “You can’t trust pretty boys, (y/n). They only want one thing from you.” “Isn’t he too girly? He paints his nails and wears makeup.”

- But there’s something they dislike even more. Before Rantaro, they could tell you anything - whether it be criticism for harmless things or comparisons to family members you should be more like - and you would rarely make any attempt to talk back about it.

- But now that Rantaro is around, when he hears the things they say, he always cuts in to defend you. So when your dad says, “(y/n), aren’t you eating too much? You don’t want to gain weight, do you?”

- “You eat as much as you want, sweetie. The food’s good, don’t want it to go to waste, do we?,” he’ll remark encouragingly.

- What’s worse is that even in his absence, you’ve started standing up for yourself more. It’s no doubt due to Rantaro’s boosting your self esteem influence that you’ve become so ‘defiant’.

- “That’s it. We don’t want you seeing him anymore. Rantaro is a bad influence for you.”

- Because you live at home with your parents still, you have to take their complaint seriously, but it doesn’t stop you from sneaking out and shutting your parents out in the process.

- Eventually your boyfriend invites you to move in with him, and you secretly pack your things over a series of nights until you’re finished and move out while they’re out of the house. You only leave a note behind as your goodbye: “I’m moving in with Rantaro. I’m finally going to live with someone who treats me with respect, so don’t try to come looking for me. I love you, but I can’t live with people who make me feel so terrible anymore. - (y/n)”

#danganronpa #rantaro x reader #rantaro amami #kokichi x reader #kokichi ouma #shuichi x reader #shuichi saihara #danganronpa imagines #dr imagines #dr #drv3 #imagines #headcanons

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liunaticfringe · 3 years

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(via Lucy Liu's Independent Woman - Interview Magazine)

There have been many great sidekick pairings in the history of modern literature. Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, Phileas Fogg and Jean Passepartout, Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet…the list goes on. Yet, it seems there has never been a delightfully tumultuous relationship that comes close to echoing the one embodied by rogue detective Sherlock Holmes and his faithful friend and assistant Dr. John Watson. Written in the form of short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the opium-den loving Holmes would terrorize London with his intellectual, astute, and stubborn prowess, with Dr. Watson providing medical expertise and chronicling their entertaining exploits along the way.

Doyle’s works have now long been entered into the public domain, with many film and television adaptions cropping up every few years. Still, when CBS announced in 2012 that it would be turning Doyle’s works into an hour-long crime-drama series titled Elementary, it elicited an unusually high response—this was mostly due to the news that a woman would, in fact, be portraying Watson. Her name would be Joan, not John. And she’s now a fallen from grace surgeon-turned-sober companion and private detective, forfeiting her “Dr.” title in the process. The woman chosen to take on this exciting, contemporary role of Joan Watson was none other than seasoned actress Lucy Liu.

Liu, who’s best known for her roles as a fierce and ill-mannered lawyer in Ally McBeal, an ass-kicking “angel” in the rebooted Charlie’s Angels, and an equally ass-kicking bad girl in the Kill Bill series, certainly provides the yin to the yang of Jonny Lee Miller’s gritty portrayal of Holmes. Elementary chronicles the duo’s relationship as they consult for the NYPD on various criminal cases while living in a shared brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. Initially starting off in Season One as a substance-free friend to the fresh-out-of-rehab Holmes with a keen interest in solving crimes, Watson quickly transformed into a sharp and observant right-hand woman who now clearly has the aptitude to work on her own. And it appears she’ll be doing just that—the end of Season Two left viewers witnessing Watson’s decision to move out of the brownstone and start a new career as a solo private detective, seemingly fed-up with Holmes’ erratic behavior.

The warm and delightful Liu recently called up Interview from her home in New York City to discuss Elementary’s upcoming third season.

DEVON IVIE: Were you on set today?

LUCY LIU: I was running around like a maniac, yeah. It’s beautiful today, it started getting a little bit cooler again. But of course I’ve been bitten by the two mosquitos that are still alive in New York City.

IVIE: I know you were recently at New York Comic Con. How was it?

LIU: It was amazing. It’s such a spectator place. Not only do you get super fans, but you also get people who are curious and inventive and imaginative. It’s fun.

IVIE: Did you run into any cosplayers dressed as Joan Watson?

LIU: Oh, no, I don’t know about that. That’s funny! We did a panel with a huge audience so I couldn’t really see if anyone was wearing anything specific, but it’s an excuse for kids and adults to get dressed up and just be crazy. You know you’ve made it when you have super-fans out there.

IVIE: When you first read the scripts for Elementary, what was it that attracted you to the role of Joan?

LIU: I liked the fact that it was going to be about [Joan and Sherlock’s] relationship and their friendship, and bringing that into modern times. And I thought it was wonderful to change up the gender.

IVIE: Did you immerse yourself in Arthur Conan Doyle’s work as preparation at all?

LIU: I did, I did! I started reading the short stories. I never read them before so it was a really great excuse to read them. I can’t believe it was written so long ago, because it’s so current. The characters are so colorful, which is why I think there are so many incarnations of Watson and Holmes.

IVIE: Do you have a favorite story? I love “A Scandal in Bohemia.”

LIU: There were some pretty amazing stories. The one that stood out to me, which was a Watson story that I got to know him a little more through, was “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” He really is on his own in that. Of course it turns out that Holmes has been there all along, but it’s interesting looking into his interior.

IVIE: Yeah, the entirety of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” is narrated just by Watson. And his diary and letters, too.

LIU: Yeah, I think it’s really cool. We started incorporating that into the show, too, the letters and journals.

IVIE: Has this detective genre always appealed to you? Did you grow up watching or reading detective whodunits?

LIU: I remember more of the old school Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys sort of thing. I also grew up with the Scooby-Doo mysteries. Remember when the villain would go, “I would’ve gotten away with it if it weren’t for you rascal-y kids!” Those were the kind of the things I immersed myself in. I have to say that my mother has always been a huge fan of Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, so this show was her dream come true. I don’t think she totally understood what was going on with Ally McBeal. [laughs]

IVIE: I’ve enjoyed witnessing Joan’s evolution throughout the course of the show, starting off as a sober companion and eventually ending up as a trusty sidekick and confidant to Sherlock. What can we expect from Joan in Season Three?

LIU: When you see them in the third season, you see some friction between the two characters. Joan is now on her own, she has her own detective agency, has a boyfriend, and has been without Sherlock for eight months. She’s got her own apartment, she’s settled, and he shows back up. I think she’s a little bit hurt by what happened and how their relationship and partnership ended, which was basically his decision and his choice, and he left it all in one little note for her. I think she felt that their relationship was much deeper than that, and that he was dismissive in the way that he handled that.

IVIE: How would you define the relationship between Joan and Sherlock?

LIU: I think that it’s a really positive and good relationship, overall. They really have a good chemistry together, work really hard together, and understand each other. They acknowledge each other and respect each other, which is a really important way to have a friendship. And they can learn from each other, you know? She’s very curious about him and I think he sees that she’s a very smart person—that’s vital for him in having respect for someone, having them be intelligent and thinking for themselves.

IVIE: Do you see any of Joan in yourself?

LIU: I do to a certain degree. She’s a lot more measured and patient, for sure. She’s a very curious person, which I think I am, and I think she isn’t afraid of change. She was a doctor, and then became a sober companion, and then jumped off and became a detective. I think sometimes it’s good to make big leaps.

IVIE: You’ve probably been asked this question many times, but do you think a romance between Joan and Sherlock could ever fittingly happen?

LIU: It’s a question that’s often asked and I think it’s really up to the executives. Rob Doherty, the creator [of Elementary] really feels incredibly strongly about keeping their relationship platonic. He has already taken great strides to keep the relationship as clean as possible according to the literature, but he has also changed so much of it by changing the gender of Watson. To have them have a romantic involvement would turn the whole thing upside-down in a way that might really jump the line. [Doherty] felt really strongly about it and I think that’s the one thing he really wants to stay true to.

IVIE: I totally agree. Even on the BBC’s Sherlock, there are campaigns to get Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock and Martin Freeman’s Watson to become romantically involved. It’s like, enough already, no!

LIU: No way, that’s so weird! People do have that level of friendship oftentimes, but it doesn’t mean it’s physical. I think that everyone just assumes because there’s chemistry the next thing should be happening. I would vote “no” for a romance. I think for sure the creator would vote no on that, too.

IVIE: I’ve talked to both women and men who watch Elementary, and they all consistently mention how well dressed and fashionable Joan is. Do you collaborate with the wardrobe department on styling decisions at all?

LIU: That’s awesome. Yes, I collaborate with Rebecca [Hofherr], who’s the costume designer, who’s wonderful. She’s very easy to work with. One thing we try to maintain about Joan and her style is that she’s a bit wrinkled, you know what I mean? Sometimes it looks like things are really put together, but we always want to make sure things aren’t too tight and are comfortable, kind of like she throws things together. We don’t want it to seem so business-y, so we go away from suits. Chic, but not corporate. Also just to make her seem like her outfits aren’t so put-together all the time. But I’m glad that people really seem to like it, it’s a relief! We don’t splurge a lot on the show, we try to do cheaper things, like things Joan would wear a lot. She wears the same white jacket and shoes frequently.

IVIE: Will we be seeing more of the infamous Clyde the Turtle in the upcoming season?

LIU: Clyde will indeed be in it again. We have to share custody of Clyde.

IVIE: Is it true that Clyde is actually two tortoises? Pulling a Mary Kate and Ashley in Full House on us?

LIU: Yes. It’s just like having twins on a show. Just in case one is crying and screaming and passed out or something.

IVIE: You made your directorial debut for an episode of Elementary last season [“Paint It Black”]. Do you have plans to direct an episode again soon?

LIU: That was so exciting. I’ll be directing another episode again very shortly in December, so you’ll be seeing it in a month and a half.

IVIE: Where did your interest in directing come from?

LIU: I guess I was curious about it. Having been in this business for a while, you kind of see and get a glimpse of everything doing film and television. I think it seemed like a natural progression to go into directing, and I hope to explore more of it, because it’s very exciting and a really good way to collide all the things that you’ve known and experienced in the business and put them all into one.

IVIE: Is there an ideal guest star that you’d like to see on the show in the upcoming season?

LIU: I would love to see Mycroft come back. I really think there was a wonderful tension for Mycroft and Sherlock as well as the triangle that occurred when Joan became involved with him. There’s something very deep about that relationship, and I also think that Rhys Ifans is a fantastic actor. He commands the screen, but off-screen he’s incredibly lovely. A real treat to have on the show.

IVIE: I remember the first few episodes that I saw Rhys in, I was like, where have I seen this guy before? So I looked at his Wikipedia page and it became obvious: he was the crazy guy from Notting Hill!

LIU: Yes, the roommate! So good! Everything he does, he just kills it, no matter the role.

IVIE: And it’s always good to have some MI6 action on the show, which Mycroft provided. Some international flair.

LIU: [laughs] International flair, exactly, some added spice. Just throw some spy stuff in there to throw people off their game. You just don’t expect it, you know? It came out of nowhere.

IVIE: That whole three-episode arc at the end of the second season…

LIU: That was awesome. I was lucky enough to direct one of those episodes, which is more narrative in tone. It’s more fun in some ways, too.

IVIE: You’ve done a range of acting work for both television and film. Do you now find yourself preferring one to the other?

LIU: I love both of them equally. The lack of predictability with television is something that’s constantly changing what your perception of who you think your character is. Suddenly I have a father that’s schizophrenic, or I discovered something else, or I have a relationship with Mycroft. The things that pop up and change the game for you and always keep you on your toes. The wonderful thing about film is that you have something that has a beginning, middle, and end, and you have a concrete amount of time to shoot it. And the process of that can be longer, like editing and advertising and testing the movie, so it’s very different. Television you just continue going, no matter what’s happening outside of your world. You get lost in that vortex a little bit.

IVIE: It’s interesting that America is now embracing the “mini-series” format that has already been so heavily utilized overseas, where there are a set amount of short episodes, and that’s it. In a way, it’s kind of like a cinematic experience.

LIU: I like that, too. It allows you to have a freedom of creativity and at the same time you don’t feel like you have to be contracted to something for that long; you’re really working on a piece of art. And then you’re done and you move on, or it comes back, like Downton Abbey. You don’t know. Those things become little masterpieces. The thing about television is that you see a range of actors now that you may not have seen five years ago even, 10 years ago absolutely not, and I think now there’s no wrong about doing television. There’s no definitive category for what kind of department you fall into anymore.

IVIE: What’s a fun, secret fact about your costar Jonny Lee Miller?

LIU: A fun fact about Jonny Lee Miller is that he oftentimes does handstands on a wall before he does a take, sometimes with pushups, to get blood to his brain and get him geared up for a long monologue that he may have. He stays there, hangs a little bit, and then turns around and does the scene. Most of the time in the brownstone more than anywhere else. He’s in full costume and everything. That’s trivia!

IVIE: I wish I could do wall-handstands by myself.

LIU: Oh my god, I need someone to push my legs up and then hold me there. I’m a cheat!

ELEMENTARY PREMIERES THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30 ON CBS.

#Lucy Liu #Interview #2014 #comic con #jlm #mycroft #wardrobe #directing #third season #joanlock

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thispabulum-blog · 2 years

Text

Single and Ready to Mingle

What's the Tea? Tuesday

Very soon after becoming officially single, I decided it was time to start looking for new people to spend time with - one of the things about living with someone for so long is that you get really used to having another person around all the time - which is a roundabout way of saying I was lonely.

I wasn't sure how much dating had changed in the last 8 years, so I instinctively went back to my old stomping grounds: OkCupid. I don't know if my old profile exists anymore and had no luck trying to find it, so I just went ahead and created a new one. OkCupid seems like the best platform for me, primarily because it's VERY word-heavy. Lots of super long, detailed profiles, tons of match questions, and match percentages. It's also a very poly/kink/ENM-friendly site.

Tinder, by comparison, is essentially a lawless wasteland. Super short profiles, and you mostly have to figure out for yourself if you think you'd be compatible (except for the "passions") which are…meh. At first I was barely matching with anyone, though it has improved a bit.

I don't have profiles on any of the other popular sites, but I'm open to it, if for no other reason than to check it out and see how it works.

Living in the future

I set up a Google Voice phone number almost immediately, because I wanted to be able to text or call people without giving out my actual number. It's really easy to block people and I think this was a good choice. I would recommend this to anyone who’s doing online dating, or anything where you might need to give your phone number to strangers online (selling stuff, etc.).

What am I looking for?

Every time someone asks me this, I think I give a different answer, because at this point I really don’t know. I’m open to most things. I’d like new friends, people to spend time with, people I can chat with. To some extent I would like people to go on dates with. I mean, honestly, I’m starting my life over in a lot of ways, so I’ve got space for all kinds of things.

I tend to tell people that I’m recently out of an unhappily-monogamous relationship, and that I’m mostly looking for cuddly-affectionate friendships. Sometimes I add that I’m open to further intimacy if the vibes are right, but often I leave that part out because a lot of people get stuck on it.

Like in a sitcom when a wife asks a husband for a backrub, and he rubs her back for about 30 seconds before trying to turn it into sex. I truly would like to cuddle, and it’s super important to me that I not feel pressured or obligated to have things go further than that if I don’t want to - because if I feel pressured, I won’t want to, you understand?

What's my type?

Physically: This has been an interesting exploration for me, because one of the things that I tend to lie to myself about is that I like to think I don't have a type. Scrolling through my matches, though, a few things stand out. I like brunettes. I like Hispanic and Latino guys. I like facial hair. Glasses come up a lot. I’m seeing a lot of long, curly hair. None of these are hard-and-fast rules, though, just preferences and tendencies and common threads I notice a lot. Height doesn’t matter, and as far as body type I really run the whole spectrum.

Mentally: I like guys who are into nerd shit. Star Wars/comic books/D&D are big ones, but I’m also interested in guys who are nerds about history or astronomy or music or whatever. I love gamers for some reason, despite not doing much gaming myself. If they're unapologetically excited and passionate about something, I want to hear about it. They also have to be intelligent, and funny - I like to have deep conversations, but I can’t deal with someone who takes themselves too seriously all the time. I have a particular fondness for people who share my love of dad-jokes and wordplay. As my profile says, "I like 'em smart, silly, and a little bit surrealist".

Emotionally: I like Sad Boys. I really, really like Sad Boys. Idk. This is probably not super healthy, but oh well. Tell me you're just off a breakup and I will swoon. Hint at some past trauma and I’ll basically invite myself over. Let’s go sit in a corner at the party and talk about your divorce and then make out.

I think one of the shifts in my approach this time around (maybe? It's hard to recall the headspace I was in before) is that I am more comfortable emphasizing looking for friends and just letting things be whatever they are.

A lot of times on dating sites there's this idea of gogogogogogo! If you don't set up a date within 2 days of starting to talk, everything is ruined! If your conversation fizzles out you can never get it back! If someone doesn't answer your message for a few days, they're not interested! If you wait a few weeks, the person will be locked down!

Maybe it's an age thing [I am now a thirtysomething], but like…life happens. I understand people have busy schedules and jobs and friends and other things going on, so I'm more patient now. Half the people in my life I haven't seen in more than a month, and I don't worry about it.

I'll see if I can go through two weeks at a time until we get caught up.

Week 1 (Feb 13 - 19):

I set up new profiles on both OkCupid and Tinder, sent out a lot of messages, talked to a few guys that seemed interesting but nothing really happened. Met up with no one. Ran into Space Kitten on OkCupid and said hi.

I did start talking to this guy Eclipse who's super chill. He has great taste in mellow music and the most amazing natural curly hair that I want to bounce. (Side note: I don’t remember how old he is, and he has since deleted his OkC profile after ensuring that I had his phone number so we could text. It feels weird to ask at this point, but I think he's somewhere between 23 and 27.) We've been trying to meet up continuously, but we are plagued by obstacles. Scheduling, illness, car difficulties, etc. I just wanna go eat Thai food and play board games with him. Is it a relationship? No. Is it a cuddly-affectionate friendship? In the making, perhaps.

Week 2 (Feb 20 - 26):

Whew. This was quite a week. Already, things are popping off in a big way.

The first thing that happened during Week 2 was that on Sunday I started talking to Weeb Dude (he has ended up with the worst nickname ever and there's nothing I can do about it at this point; that's how everyone in my life knows him. After this I mostly get more proactive coming up with better nicknames).

He’s in his mid-20s, works in education, watches Euphoria a lot when he’s not deep into anime. I really enjoy his positive, supportive energy and his silly but often dry sense of humor.

He was determined to get me to start watching anime, and asked me a lot of questions about my taste in tv, movies, and books to get an idea of where I should start and what I would enjoy. Then he sent me some clips of his recommendations so I could check them out and pick what I thought I’d like. I appreciate this level of determination, which is more than anyone else who’s tried to get me to watch anime has done. I’m not unwilling, I’m just overwhelmed.

The second thing that happened was that your girl Pabulum did a dumbfuck thing. I was home alone on Sunday night, and there had been this guy I’d matched with on OkC and exchanged a couple of messages with. We’ll call him Blocker, in a bit of foreshadowing. Cute Hispanic guy, 24, really fit, definitely what I would consider Out of My League or at least just like...not existing on the same plane of dating. I think my first message to him said something like “This isn’t gonna happen, but damn you’re hot”, because he was very clear in his profile about looking for hookups and that’s just not me, but I can always appreciate an attractive human being, and I think men in general don’t get enough compliments.

Anyway, he was more into it than I expected, and there were some flirty messages and a lot of me being like “Nah, man” and him being like “That’s okay, just let me know when you’re ready” and he said lots of nice and very appealing things about what he wanted to do to me. At some point I was like...fuck it. I’m an adult. This is an experience I should have at least once, right? He adds me on Snapchat because that’s what the kids do these days to make sure they’re talking to the person they think they are, and we send some pictures back and forth. I run out of reasons to say no, so I guess it’s on now.

[Clearly this didn’t work out well, so you’re gonna hear some stuff. Break out the earmuffs for the small children.]

We get together and he’s like...immediately on me, which is not my favorite. He’s a really hot guy and I want to kiss him on his nice, full lips and I want to take his shirt off so I can touch his stomach and I want his mouth on me, and none of those things are happening. He’s got one hand in my shirt, and the other guiding my hand down his pants, and this is like literally less than 1 minute after saying hi. Ugh.

He wants my mouth on him, but he’s too aggressive about it and that’s a pet peeve of mine (I know what I’m doing, thanks, back off), so I push him onto the bed and climb on top of him so he will at least sit still. And then very quickly things progressed [safely, I promise] and it’s like...okay. It’s decent. There’s a lot of moving around but not a lot of interaction, and none of the things that would make this a fun experience for me are happening, and before I know it he’s done and that’s that and shoes are on kthxbai. Womp womp wooooomp.

He blocks me on OkC and on Snapchat before I’m back to my own bed, and I’m surprised that I don’t even feel like anything happened. Literally less than 20 minutes from walking in the door to walking out.

Rant Time: It was just so underwhelming, honestly. And I was baffled. Like…is this what people do? It’s boring. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to a one-night stand or anything, but I like to take my time. I like connecting with people. I like physical touch.

Not only was this not satisfying or enjoyable for me, but I’m not sure how it could have possibly been good for him, either. And I guess the block proves that. I feel like he could have taken care of it himself just as easily and saved us both the time and hassle.

A friend of mine suggested that while obviously he’s emotionally immature, it may be that because he’s so attractive, he feels that he can afford to treat women as disposable sex toys, the same way you hear jokes about rich people wearing clothes once and then throwing them away rather than wash them. Which I suppose is probably the most accurate assessment of the situation, but AT LEAST WEAR THE CLOTHES WELL, Y’KNOW??

Texting one of my best friends about it the next morning, I said “If I don’t get to rub my face on your tummy, you’ve failed sexually”, and as great of an out-of-context quote as that is, I stand by it. I spent most of the week complaining about it to anyone who would listen, and was pretty sure that'd be the last time I did that.

(Spoiler: It was not)

The third thing that happened during this week was Baymax. Sigh.

I got a message bright and early on Monday morning.

So I looked at this guy's profile and he is TWENTY. Full stop. Twenty. Not old enough to drink. But he's got these really pretty blue eyes and a goofy smile and he has enough facial hair that he doesn't look like an infant.

However, I went ahead and told him what I was looking for, and his answers back to me hit me where it hurts - he's a Sad Boy. Dammit, my weakest weakness!

I continued talking to him throughout the week while trying very hard to maintain an aloof presence - you can probably guess how well that worked.

I wasn't playing hard-to-get (I honestly don't do that), I was just hesitant to get my feels wrapped up in this tiny infant baby-child that I didn't think I was emotionally available enough for. He needed a girlfriend, someone he could devote himself to, and that just ain't me right now.

The thing is, though.

I'm also not one to ignore The Universe when it decides to send me an adorable gift wrapped up in a hoodie with the words "Good Vibes" on it.

I fell hard. He fell hard. We spent every night on the phone together for hours, sometimes talking and sometimes just hanging out - he watched me assemble a desk on video chat, and I watched him fall asleep more than once. Please, show me your chaotic theater kid energy, tell me about your favorite Disney movies, how you do Latin ballroom dancing, the multiple languages you’re fluent in, the horse you own, your Twitch stream, play piano for me, do that silly accent for me, show me your art.

We sent Snaps back and forth of us doing laundry, brushing our teeth, cooking, singing while we do chores. His vibes were so comforting, and he's a super kind and genuinely caring person.

Without getting too specific about his business, he’s got a trauma background that’s similar enough to mine that we were able to really bond over some mutual understanding of experiences and boundaries. It’s nice to have someone you can call when you’re having a panic attack; it’s incredible to have someone that will turn around and call you the next day when they’re having one. A++

The fourth thing was interesting. I was swiping through dudes, as you do, and I came across a guy that made me go "Wait, I know that face!" I recognized Item 9's adorable ski-slope nose, crooked smile, and Bill-Hader-esque good looks, but I figured it couldn't be him because last I heard he was engaged. Well, as it turns out, he's recently divorced, and has managed to have three kids since the last time we spoke. Virile, that Item 9. I matched with him, but because I go by a different name now he didn't recognize me, and I decided to go along and then break the news in person (because those are facial expressions you want a front-row seat for). What's more low-pressure than a guy I've already dated?

Believe it or not, that was my first two weeks post-breakup. It was...a lot.

Next post we’ll do some fun stuff! I know all you non-single people want to see how much of a dumpster fire these dating websites are.

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