mapeando-sonhos

[a-very-tired-jew]

Maintaining the illusion of being a good person

Since 10/7 there has been a consistent thread that the UN is an arbiter of truth, or something, regarding the conflict because it was reprimanding Israel (and has consistently done so in the past). As such, I often heard from activists that because the UN said something it must be accepted as truth. Now with the publishing of the UN’s report of sexual violence on 10/7 and its findings, I am currently seeing various activists backtrack. Suddenly the UN is no longer trustworthy. Suddenly it’s a corrupt entity run by the Jews Zionists and the report needs to be dismissed as Jewish Zionist propaganda.

It’s almost like their endorsement and justification of violent resistance through any means necessary was a fantasy. Any means necessary doesn’t actually mean that. No “good” resistance fighter against a the colonial oppressor would actually commit atrocities against civilians, right? At least, not in their fantasy uprising.

But it happened, and it has been independently confirmed by one of the organizations they’ve routinely turned to. Now many of these have to deal with the cognitive dissonance that they’re actually not the “good” person they believed they were. Their past comments about believing all victims, supporting victims, that sexual assault is a horrific and people who commit it are monsters, etc… all of that is contradicted by this report.

It’s almost like they either didn’t understand what they were actually endorsing and justifying or they’re realizing that they’re hypocrites masquerading as good people for morality points.

[damnfandomproblems]

"Ok but the ask you’re responding to is specifically saying that there’s a difference between depiction or endorsement and endorsement is a problem that many self-identified proship people are just refusing to acknowledge because it’s more convenient to argue every anti is against any bad thing being depicted ever. "

Here is the definition of endorsement: an act of giving one's public approval or support to someone or something

Here is the definition of depiction: to show or represent by a drawing, painting, or other art form

Please take notice of how the definition of depiction does not mention realism and how the definition of endorsement is specified as an act of giving public support/approval. If someone writes/draws something themed around abuse but portrays it wildly inaccurate, but they do not specifically say, "Hey yeah, I support this thing IRL," it is not an endorsement of that thing. It is just a depiction, however inaccurate, however inappropriately inaccurate

"You do get that pretty much all stories that depict murder, terrorism, torture etc. don’t portray it positively, right. Heck, terrorism is something people famously define by whether it’s justified or not, and there’s a fair few common terrorist tactics most will agree cannot be justified at all like bombing civilians and the like regardless of your cause (not the least because because they aren’t even going to further said cause). If a story said that someone was objectively in the right for doing a 9/11 analogue I doubt most “antis” would be cool with that."

Maybe it's because I don't engage with children's media, but most stories I read or watch flip-flop between portraying all those topics either accurately or inaccurately, and either positively or negatively. Children's media portray things as is because children's brains aren't fully developed and they need to be taught right from wrong, truth from lie, and reality from fiction. Once your brain is developed enough to separate the difference, bad things can be portrayed as good and good as bad because a strong moral framework that won't waver on just stories alone should have already been developed

Saw movies are just gore porn, same with slashers and most horror in general. You root for the villain because you watch those movies special for the brutal unexcusable violence, violence portrayed purely for entertainment and thus can absolutely be considered "romanticize" if not just straight up sexualized. John Wick, you root for him to kill all these people because one person hurt him, you root for him to take countless humans lives over the grief and pain of a singular animal life. You root for the glorified romanticized violence, cheer for it, in fact.

Also, with the attitude towards America today, I can already bet there are people already out their claiming that 9/11 was deserved, and those kind of people exist everyone, and that includes within anti groups. This argument is just a straw man fallacy. Also, more so than anything, if someone was to write a story from the perspective of someone who believes the attack was deserved, I can guarantee that it would most likely be, with 99% certainty, be aimed at adults. Adults, that I remind you, should be developed enough to understand that this is a story with an unreliable narrator, and that just because they the character glamorize the tragedy doesn't mean that they the person should too. Most proshippers and antis and everyone else not sucked into that toxic waste pit of shipping/censorship discourse would be able to accept that, and even if they think it's distasteful, understand at the end of the day it's just a story that trys to take into the mind of someone horrid to try and make sense of their horridness

"Also there’s a key factor you’re ignoring here. There are circumstances where it is justifiable to kill someone. Most concede at least self defense cases."

Definition of murder: the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.

Definition of manslaughter: the crime of killing a human being without malice aforethought, or otherwise in circumstances not amounting to murder.

In most places, killing self-defense isn't murder, it's manslaughter.

Murder very, very rarely is considered justifed by most people. Manslaughter, however, tends to be more debatabled. But even then, debatable is the key word. Their is no definited, absolutely line in the sand of accepted manslaughter and unacceptable manslaughter. People absolutely do argue about self-defense killings. Some believe it's just as bad as murder. Some feel it's a gray thing where the killer still needs some of consequence, some believe it's fully excuseable.

What you see in movies more often than not, though, is murder, not manslaughter. It is deliberate and/or done after the threat has been lifted. More often than not, from my experience, it's revenge killings, not self-defense.

This argument is just morality wank and the "key factory" of "justifiably" is completely subjective. It's a variable, not the control

"Like, another ask tried to use John Wick as a gotcha because it’s a “toxic love and bad actions portrayed positively” or smth because John Wick being motivated by into killing several gangsters who broke into his home, killed his dog, and are shown to murder people (including a priest who worked for them), by his love for his dog. And somehow that’s just as bad as someone being in an abusive relationship and that being seen as a good thing."

Are you talking about a real being in an abusive relationship and being told that's good, or about a fictional character in a fictional relationship experiencing fictional abuse portrayed inaccurately? I am assuming it's inaccurate fiction you're talking about, fiction, that once again would be aimed at adults, who can understand that this depiction is inaccurate. Just like how they can cheer on for John Wick and his romanticized violence in the context of a story and hate that same violence when acted out in real life, they can cheer on for a fictional inaccurate abusive relationship in the context of fiction and hate that same abuse when acted out in real life

Not only that, once again, whether abuse or murder is worse, be it in fiction or reality, is debatabled. Many can argue that romanticized and/or real murder is worse than abuse because murder is final wherest abuse can be healed from with time and effort

"Like, absurd as that comparison is on its own, it also relies on that killing being equivalent to any other form of killing regardless of context. And that’s silly because obviously there’s a difference between killing someone in self defense or as justified retaliation (again, the mobsters in this example are in fact murderers of people too) versus just murdering innocent people. "

The difference is subjective, "justiced retaliation" is extremely subjective, all of this argument is subjective

"You can’t say that with rape, incest, pedophilia etc. There’s not a circumstance where that can be justified. Every case is horrible and unjustified, there are not types you can rightly portray as a good thing or as morally acceptable."

Don't get me wrong, I agree that real life rape, incest, pedophilia is all wrong, but there are people who disagree. Justifiably is always subjective in the real world, and laws in many places reflect that justifiably, child marriage is still legal in many places, so incest, and so is rape. If I was to really push and play the devil's advocate and come up with a 1 in a trillion bullshit argument, how justifiable would rape be if their was a gun to your head, maybe even to your familes heada too, and you werw told to either assult this person or be murdered? I could easily agrue that rape in that situation is justifiable under the argument that preserving life is more important than preventing momentary trauma

"I never thought I’d have to explain this but here we are."

You didn't have to do anything. You felt like a little knight, a ray of light, the hero abmist the icky villains who just couldn't stand aside. We're here because of your egotistical sense of self-righteousness, not of genuine necessity. Don't conflate the two

Posting as a response to a previous ask.

[angry-antifascist]

Between Ye going full Nazi and the rightwing basically endorsing the Q club shooting a week prior, I’m really terrified that we’re going to see the U.S. go the way of Weimar Germany — with conservatives turning a blind eye to the fascists overrunning their party until it’s too late to stop them.

I guess it’s nice that Mitch McConnell had the stones to say “there’s no room for antisemitism” in the GOP, but even if the US doesn’t perfectly replicate the Nazis’ antisemitic ideology we’re still inches from seeing the sort of fascist terrorism that preceded Hitler’s assuming power begin en masse in the United States. If it’s not synagogues, it’ll be gay bars. In all likelihood, it’ll be both.

There are already more guns than people in this country, and the people that know how to use them have mostly been brainwashed by the right-wing media machine that tells them democratic pluralism is a threat to their way of life. It’s not enough that these manipulative monsters enrage people into voting for a party that stands for nothing but fucking tax cuts — they have to turn that rage into violence against people who want nothing more than to live their lives in peace.

And because of half a century of neoliberalism and market fundamentalism, driven by conservatives and by the Democrats’ desperation to be centrists, there are a lot of people in the Republican base who are hurting, who are angry, and who feel like they’ve had the life they were told they’d have taken away from them. The thing is, they’re RIGHT. But FOX News is part of the problem and they think it’s got all the answers. Inadvertently — or maybe not so inadvertently — the propaganda machine Murdoch built to propagate neoliberalism has created the perfect conditions for the seeds of fascism to grow. People are disaffected, they’re pissed, and they’re desperate. You tell them the Jews or pronouns are causing their problems, some of them are gonna believe you. And some of the people who believe you are gonna be armed and dangerous.

I’ve always been a pacifist, but it’s now clear US minorities need to be ready to defend themselves. There’s no promise of a “good guy with a gun” being nearby when a fascist attacks. Be ready to be that person yourself. If you’re queer or Jewish or Muslim or nonwhite, look into it, please. And stay safe, loves.

[love-chris001-blog]

Top 10 best gift for your Dog.

There is no better feeling in the world than when a dog comes to you, it wagging, half whining and half baking with excitement, and smothers you with doggy love There is nay the sheer terror of bared teeth, a menacing snarl or a pack chasing you. I absolutely love dogs, but I absolutely trust that with big love, come big responsilibility. There are two types of people in this Wolds:  Dog owners who are so in love with their four-legged friends that they understand Barbra Stralsund’s impure to clone her-dog - and everyone else. If you fall into that latter category, or are even, God forbid, a cat person, it can be hardly to find a holiday gift for the dog lover in your life they’ll actually find useful. But even the very most serious dog parents can everyday use some help finding unique, fun dog gifts that go beyond the regular old treats, toys, and travel accessories.  

01. Chuckit! Ultra Rubber Ball Tough Dog Toy- 2 Pack

When Former Strategies senior writer Karen Lorio adelson asked experts about how to exercise a dog indoors, three of them recommended these balls. Shelby semel, the founders, of Shelby semel Dog training, says they are a best way for dogs to burn off energy and get mental, stimulation. The ones shown are small, but Amazon but sells bigger versions of the Ultra Ball for big dogs.

02. Dura force Triangle Ring Tiger Dog Toy

If your gift recipient has good possessions that a bouncy ball could topple, Dr. Jennifer Coates, a veterinary expert at Chewy, Told Abelson about this soft dog toy that “Doesn’t bounce or roll” But can still be thrown and used for tugging. It’s machine-washable and designed to withstand heavy play.

03. Trixie Portable Dog Splash Pool

“If you’re outside playing or having a cookout or picnic, consider a dog pool like this one for water-loving pups,” says Erin Ask eland, an animal- health and behavior consultant at Camp

Bow Bow.

   04. Caseper Memory-Foam Dog bed

“As Reggie gets old, I wish him to have a much caring bed,’’ explains leimkhuler. This memory-foam dog bed from Caseper ranks top on her wish list, and it but took the high spot in our roundup of the best dog beds: It’s easy to clean and has a streamlined design that provider’s excellent orthopedic support for older dogs with achy joints. The bed comes in three sizes and three colors: blue, gray, and sand.

05. BarkBox Gift Subscription

Or, if you’re not sure of exactly what type of toy or treat to give, Shirley Braha, the mom to a elder dog named Phyllis, recommends giving the gift of new treats all months. “The first thing that comes to mind is a BarkBox subscription because I feel like Dogs are all running out of treats,” she says, “and good-quality treats are weirdly very costly.”

06. Pet safe Busy Buddy Twist ‘n Treat Dog toy

Kate Perry, a dog trainer and the writer of training for both Ends of the Dog leash, likes to gift “practical objects that helps stimulate the dog’s mind and help owners have a best relanshiop. one of her favorite interactive treat toys for pups is the busy buddy twist’s treat which she describe as “great as a gift for new dog owners, and great for trainings a dog to work for their foods.” Arden is also a fan of this “super durable” gift, telling us it’s “especially best for small dogs who need every chance to burn off mental and physical energy.”

07. Outward Hound Hide-A-Squirrel and Puzzle Plush, Jumbo

Strategist newsletter editor Mia Leimkuhler got his plush puzzle tree as a gift from a friend whose own dog was obsessed with it and she has since gifted it to many of her other dog- parent friends.(it’s also endorsed by formers strategist write Chloe Anello, who says her dog Rudy “love it’’) “it a hit every second, “she promise, adding that the tree and its includes stuffed, squleakys squrries keeps her dog Reggie occupied for hours.

08. Highwave Auto Dog Mug

The staff of doggy boutique or groomer Releash NYC loves the clever design of this hybrid water mug and bowl for active dogs. One worker explains how simply it is: “Squeeze it, and water fills the bowl for your pup to drink; release your grip, and the remaining water returns to the mug.”

  09. Aesop Animal wash

This animal wash from Aesop is a best gift for creating bath time more luxurious, according to Leimkuhler. “I bought it to use on Reggie. It lathers simply, rinses away simply, and he does smell really good” she says. “He smells like a status dog.”

 10. Nina Ottosson by Outward Hound, Interactive puzzle game Dog toy, Advance

Semel is very fond of Nina Ottosson’s Tornado: “It’s a bestway to feed your dog slowly and keep them occupied when you need them to self-occupy, and it’s good for stimulation! It’s easy to clean, not most costly, and entertaining to watch.”

[starshipsofstarlord]

Can you do a reader x Damon salvatore where everyone thinks the only reason they are together is because damon sired her, but she gets angry and tells them the truth that she always had feelings and didn't say anything because she knew he liked Elena...

Sire Or No Sire

damon Salvatore x reader / masterlist

summary; it is easily perceived why you look at Damon the way that you do, though most people think that is an affect of him having turned you to save your life. And that is the last straw of you realising that they know nothing / warnings; mentions of Damon x Elena, mentions of Damon x Caroline, jealousy, angst, mentions of the sire bond, mentions of sex, swearing, angst, breakup, toxic friendships

Their voices, their aloud opinions, brought you nothing but pain, the tragedy seeping into your vervain allergic veins, as you shook your head. It was as though they thought that you were unable to hear their chatter, but you knew that they would be wrong with assuming so. You were no longer weak, with human senses flooding your every whim, you were a vampire.

An immortal. It felt strange to think that you would no longer age in physical layers, instead, your mind would be the only participant within your body to forever grow with the various memories that you would be collecting through the next decades. Though, you weren’t the only one, Caroline was in that room, reprimanding Damon for saving your life.

You could hear her words loud and clear, as the Salvatores and the rest of your friends stood by, some agreeing with her, such as Elena, whereas others remained silence, such as the vampire that had turned you in the first place. The viscous tone hissing out of the blonde’s mouth scathed you emotionally, and ended with you thudding back against Damon’s bedroom door, before entering the room, and ensuring that it was locked behind you.

“The two of you are only together because of the sire bond. You turning her, had become nothing more an excuse to fuck and put a label on it!”

Did she think that she was defending you? Because to you, it didn’t sound like it, but that was Caroline for you, always insistent of her opinion, though, you two did get along. The pair of you understood what it was like to be on the sidelines, whilst perfect Elena played the victim every time, and got any guy she wanted, even her friends were swayed with the young gentlemen first.

Elena Gilbert was the epiphany of perfect; she was the damsel in distress, giving the opportunity to whomever she sought after to come and save her. You weren’t her, dissimilar to the whiny brunette, you were prepared to fight the monsters that threatened your life, human or not. And that included Damon long ago, before you saw how sweet the over century old man was.

One thing that you had never done though, was date someone and bluntly flirt with their brother. That was crossing a line, you appreciated honesty, especially in this lifestyle, and Caroline had declared her thoughts. She spoke truthfully, believing her own words, though they were far from facts.

They needed to know that you weren’t invested in a relationship with Damon because of him turning you, it was something you had never asked for, nor dreamed about. But it had happened, and whilst it brought the pair of you closer, there was no maker bond, instead, there had already been a flirtatious brewing between the pair of you whilst you were still human.

You becoming like him gave the two of you more time together as he trained you to breathe idly in and calm your bloodlust. Or how in the middle of the night, he would come by your house, and awake you from a terror, afterwards taking you for an innocent stroll through the woods.

Without him, you’d have been on a path to nowhere, lost and unable to find a route to continue on, wading through the life after death with no direction, nor set course to keep you in line. Surely, you’d have murdered many a man or woman, if you were dependant with surviving with her bewitched curse of immortality, digging into their inviting throats with your dagger canine teeth, that pulsed to be fed.

“That’s a load of- you know what, think what you want to think, you have a history of jealousy filled, toxic and werewolf involved relationships, you are not exactly the best person here to judge me on my healthy and loving romantic partnership with y/n!”

Damon half yelled at the vampiric blonde, however, another tone was fast to respond to his defensive outburst and cause the both of you a disgruntled pair of expressions. “She was turned by you brother, that runs the risk of a sore bond appropriating her feelings.”

Oh, noble Stefan. He had caused you to snap, thrusting the door open to his brother’s bedroom open, making its hinges weaken, as you whisked through the halls in seconds, joining the compendium of mystic falls in the living space, all eyes turned to you, well aware that you had heard all their smart mouthed and toxic opinions.

The sire bond wasn’t something that was too uncommon, however it affected nothing in your life. It was just for them to pick at something that was good, they could never allow something that was actually decent to revel in existence. They had to be the ones with the perfect prissy lives, not others.

“Shut your mouth, ripper!” Yes, you pulled at that string of his life, dangling it degradingly before his eyes, watching as his eyes that were focalised into you turned sour. “I love your brother, and just because you loved the love triangles the pair of you would be involved in with bitchy Gilbert over there, or bloody Katherine, does not make any other people that he or you are with invalid!”

Elena stepped forwards, her doe eyes boring with contained anger towards you. Though instead of speaking to you, her words were directed at her ex, and she wanted to gouge your reaction. “You promised me that we were going to last forever, are you going to do the same to her?”

“No, because I don’t need a time span to appreciate her presence in. I don’t need to tell her lies nor make selfish promises, because with her I am a better man.” Damon sneered at her, coming to stand beside you, protectively wrapping his arm around your shoulders.

“It’s the sire bond.” Elena stated furiously, hating the fact that she was not getting her way. In turn, you laughed, shaking your head at her incessant denial of allowing Damon to move on.

“Shut the fuck up, if you had maybe given a shit about me in the past, you’d have realised that I would stare at you enviously when you were at his side. But maybe you knew, and you just wanted to brag, but I can prove that there is no bond other than the one we already built together.”

“Yeah, and how are you going to do that?” She pestered, and with a sorrowful glance directed at Damon, you dropped your head, anything but proud with what you were about to do. Swiftly you turned, watching as Damon’s eyes widened.

“I’m going to leave.” Whence you began to walk, a hand grasped your wrist, keeping your feet locked where they were. Caroline’s voice broke through the air, her eyes were filled with regret, from all the things that she had said, and all the opinions that she had formed.

“You’re not serious! You’re gonna break up with him because of us?” Stiffly you nodded, watching as Damon felt a taken back. He gaped his mouth open, in shock.

“I’d do anything for my friends, despite the circumstances not being reciprocated. I’m not even allowed to be in a relationship with the man that I love because you are all endorsed with the idea that it’s some stupid bond. Yes, we have a bond, but it’s not a sire one.”

“Baby, don’t.” Damon practically begged, watching as you yourself were torn and conflicted in regards to the situation. A sad smile monitored your face, as you slipped out of his grasp.

“We might have to wait another lifetime until we’re allowed to be together without resorts of undermining and people that don’t really care about us. Some people want there to be a whole ass agility course to separate us, but maybe if we wait, we can prove how wrong they are, if they’re not dead by then.”

Caroline felt terrible, once again Stefan had taken his brother’s life from him, and Elena, well she felt accomplished. She went to reach for Damon’s arm, but he threw her consoling manner and herself across the room, heading straight after you, with a bottle of bourbon.

If you could leave them to prove a point, so could be; he loved you. That was enough, especially for him, he could leave those doses of poison behind, if he would grant himself permission without asking, a peaceful life with you.

[gdcee]

Road to Nowhere

Pairing: Loki/Sigyn - mild, might have to squint to see it.

Summary: Loki and Sigyn talk while she escorts him to Kid Loki's Kingdom.

Warnings: Panic attack.

=================

"You know I'm only going to keep pestering you until I have the answer."

"I wish you luck in your endeavour," Sigyn returned coolly, stepping lightly as she began to climb the massive pile of garbage blocking their path. "Nevertheless, my lips remain sealed."

Loki huffed, a slight quirk at the corner of his lips which was not quite a smirk. He set off after her, determined to be the first to the summit of Rubbish Peak.

He had to admit he was quite intrigued by that tantalising crumb of information this Sigyn (so very like and yet not quite like his own) had dangled before him. Of course he was curious about the identity of the lucky bastard who had won her fidelity.

All he had was a preferred pronoun. That at least eliminated half of his (admittedly rather short to begin with) list of possible lucky bastards.

After he had gone through the list (which did not take long because as stated earlier, it was really quite short), he started throwing out random names to see if any of them got a reaction.

No such luck.

His attempts to tease and fluster the information out of her had been just as ineffective.

Her reaction to his puppy dog eyes routine had been...perplexing. He'd gotten one soft, achingly tender smile before a heavy melancholy had descended upon her. Like the dark shadow of a mourning veil stealing the brightness from her eyes and the colour from her cheeks.

She had not reprimanded him, but he made a note not to pull that trick again anyway. Besides the practical reasons for keeping her goodwill (survival, information, mental stimulation), the simple fact was that she was Sigyn.

He didn't want to be the cause of her unhappiness. Not anymore.

Being a harmless annoyance and pest was still perfectly acceptable though.

He stood atop the great mound of refuse, his hands and face smeared with oil and other liquids of questionable origin, grinning triumphantly down at Sigyn. He vanished the grime he'd accumulated before gallantly holding out his hand to her.

Sigyn huffed a soft little laugh, the barest hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. Without any hesitation, she reached out and allowed him to pull her up.

Loki glanced down to where they had started and noted that it was a long drop. Not nearly enough to kill an Asgardian or a Frost Giant, but enough to hurt.

Trust.

It made him feel as giddy as the first time he'd tasted the enchanted, heady liquid gold that was the mead brewed from honey harvested from the hives of the talking bees that resided near Iðunn's famous apple orchards.

"Ahem."

Loki realised with no small degree of embarrassment that he was still holding Sigyn's hand. He hurriedly worked a spell to remove the dirt under her fingernails and let go. Then to cover up his embarrassment, he resumed pestering.

"I don't understand why the identity of your beau necessitates such secrecy," he sighed with the lightest touch of a pleading whine, "Do you think I would object to your taste? He can't possibly be worse than Theoric."

"I think my life choices are none of your business."

"Exactly! You should forget about my opinion. Shout his name to the world and damn the naysayers and killjoys."

"I would but sadly, Alioth has a sense of hearing."

With that, she picked up a flat sheet of metal lying loose and proceeded to slide down Rubbish Peak on the improvised board. Despite being only at most a quarter Ljósálfar on her mother's side, she moved with their characteristic effortless grace.

Loki peered down, did a couple of quick mental calculations and snapped his fingers. He disappeared from the summit with a flare of green light and reappeared at the bottom no more than a second later in similar fashion.

"Good to see your teleport still works," Sigyn tossed her wind-mussed hair out of her face, "Why didn't you use it earlier to get to the top?"

"Too much debris and no decent eyeline. I didn't want to risk getting stuck under a foot of garbage." He frowned, pondering. "Still works?"

"Not a reference to you personally," she moved forward without looking behind to see if he followed, "Just something I noticed about some of the other Lokis around here."

"Power loss? Nothing to do with you and that coven of other Sigyns whose domain I and the other Lokis are forbidden from entering, I presume?"

"No, I've seen it even in Lokis on their first trepass - if something is limiting their power it's not us. In any case, we would never do anything to permanently disable a Loki's magic. There's just some things you don't do to a fellow mage, you know?"

"You just rough them up a little and kick them off the property?"

"More or less. Except for the kid and alligator."

"Do I want to know how one instance of me ended up as a semi-aquatic Midgardian reptile?"

"You can ask him yourself when we get to the Kid's Kingdom," she paused for a moment, as if she'd just remembered something, "Or maybe not, I think only the old man you knows how to talk to him."

Loki blinked.

"There's an old me?" He asked, disbelieving, "As in a wizened, wrinkled, looks like your grandmother me?"

"Eh, not quite as old as Grandma Hretha. Maybe about 4,000? 5,000?" She shrugged, "Either way, your vanity may rest easy; you look perfectly fine as an old man."

"Thank you for that milquetoast endorsement of my future self's good looks," Loki said dryly, "I was more perturbed about...something else."

Curiouser and curiouser.

How had the aged variant escaped their destined end? How had he managed to grow old before the TVA arrived to arrest him for cheating his final death?

He thought about the tape featuring all the TVA approved highlights of his life.

He thought about that other Loki, the Loki who had played out the role assigned to him and how very young (the same face as his own) and terrified (the same fear as his own) he had looked with the Mad Titan's monstrous hand around his throat.

Loki swallowed thickly and pulled at the collar of his TVA issued office shirt which suddenly seemed far too tight. The tie impeded his work and as he struggled to loosen it he could feel his terror rising up to choke him.

there will be no realm, no barren moon, no crevice where he cannot find you

inevitable

you think you know pain?

Inevitable

HE WILL MAKE YOU LONG FOR SOMETHING AS SWEET AS PAIN

He felt his legs buckle and his knees hit the ground as if it were happening to someone else.

"Loki!" Sigyn's voice was close but he heard it as if a great distance separated them, "Loki, breathe."

"What do you think I'm doing?" He wheezed.

"I am going to remove the tie and unfasten your collar," Sigyn continued as if she had not even noticed his rudeness, "I will need to touch you to do this. Alright?"

Needing help for such a pitifully simple task was galling. But he didn't want Sigyn to leave him. Loki managed a shaky nod. He let her ease his trembling, sweaty hands from his shirt collar. With quick, brisk movements she pulled the tie loose and tossed it somewhere to join the rest of the garbage.

"Follow my breathing now." Her voice was clearer to him now, more present. She was kneeling next to him, so close and warm and oh, her hair did still smell like apple blossoms. He watched the regular rise and fall of her chest and tried to match it. "That's it. Very good. Nice and slow."

Her fingers were at his throat for a mercifully short time. Just long enough to pop the top button loose and push the starched fabric away from his neck.

"Stay with me. You're doing very well. Breathe with me. In. And out. In. And out."

Without really thinking he grabbed her hand and pressed her palm against the centre of his chest. Perhaps he was possessed by some irrational notion that the pressure against his breastbone could keep his thundering heart from beating right out of his chest.

She didn't try to pull away. Her hand was warm, even through the shirt fabric. She moved a little, and one of her dainty fingers slipped into the open gap of his unbuttoned collar and brushed against the dip between his clavicles. His breath caught in his throat for a moment before Sigyn's gentle prompting had him matching her rhythm once more.

"Feel better?" She asked after what seemed an eternity.

"Yes," he breathed, "Yes, much." His chest still felt a little tight but the worst of that dreadful episode was over.

"Good." She lifted her hand from his chest and patted his shoulder firmly - a gesture that he had seen Týr bestow upon struggling Einherjar recruits after they'd passed the final leg of their training. "You did very well."

He didn't feel like he'd done anything worth praising. He'd collapsed like a pack of cards. This wasn't the first time he'd experienced terror but every time before now he had been able to push past it - stamp it down through sheer force of will and that primitive, animal part of his brain that knew that danger was never far away.

Why had he folded now? Now - when he was probably the most at ease he'd been in ages (months? Years? How long had it been since New York?) and the threat of Thanos was no longer an issue-

...a terrible thought suddenly occurred to him.

"Just out of curiosity," Loki tried to sound nonchalant, "Have you ever come across a fellow by the name of Thanos here?"

"Thanos?" Sigyn's brows drew together in a frankly rather adorable expression of pure befuddlement.

Ah. Well, at least he could place whatever nexus event had led to her pruning as occurring before Ragnarok and Thanos's massacre of half the Asgardian survivors.

"Big purple fellow," he explained, "Quite ugly, enormous chin, has rather disturbing ideas about resource management."

"Uh, no, I can't say that I've ever met anyone like that here."

"You're not just saying that to make me feel better?"

She quirked an eyebrow. "I can swear on my magic if that would reassure you."

Sigyn had always been very leery about oaths, especially ones bound with magic. Most mages worth their salt were.

And yet...he couldn't really explain why, but he'd always felt like her issues with them were less about best practices and more about some personal grievance.

That she would offer him such a thing...

Loki felt completely undeserving.

"No," he said hurriedly, "No, no, it's fine. I...I trust you."

Sigyn smiled. It was the first real smile he'd seen so far and it was like watching the sun come out from behind a cloud. He didn't know if it would last - if that melancholy from before would snatch away the sweetness of this moment.

So Loki ruined the moment before it could be stolen from him.

"...even though you refuse to tell me about your paramour."

Sigyn scoffed, all exasperation but it was better than seeing her sad.

"You are insufferable."

"Thank you, I do try."

She snorted and shook her head. "Alright, come on, you goose," she helped him up, and even though his legs were slightly shaky, he stood and did not fall. "Our first rest stop is about 20 feet...thereaboutish-" she waved vaguely in the direction of a mostly empty grassy knoll upon which a gaggle of the oddest creatures scurried. They resembled iridescent headless chickens with little purple spheres hovering over their severed necks.

"I still think we should have taken the car."

"Ugh," Sigyn wrinkled her nose, "Cahrs. Nasty, noisy, smelly things. I swear, Midgard really went downhill after those monstrosities were invented. "

[levirise]

way late but hey, my name is jj and i’m here to introduce you to my literal piece of trash of a son AKA levi rise. there’s no triggering content, he’s just an asshole. if you read this then thank you and at the exact same time, i’m so sorry... ✌️☮️  feel free to pm me any time!  we’re going to pretend he’s been on this trip being a dick the entire time as i’m now up to date with things

INTRODUCING...

LEVI RISE has been accepted to participate ! they are a 27 year old all the way from JERSEY, UNITED STATES . HE is currently studying NUTRITION AND FITNESS at the interchange. ( jj, 26, he/him, michael evans behling )

PERSONALITY...

levi only cares about himself, he’s only nice if the moment takes him or he feels like he has something to gain. he is in general a selfish and unpleasant person to be around and he does not care at all. in his opinion, respect is earned and it’s hella hard to earn his (bordering on impossible). he keeps his circle small and it’s probably more dangerous if you’re allowed in it than if you’re on the outskirts. he’d take out his own parents as collateral damage if they stood in the way of his dreams. what is his dream? good question, depends on the mood of the day. very negative personality (the man does not like growth, dudes). he’s generally a bad person but not an evil one. he has no real evil intent and half the time is like ew, get over it, stop having emotions and stuff it’s really annoying me.

STORY...

shortest story in the world, born and bred in jersey, oldest son of a regular middle class couple who made their money late in life... he has two younger siblings who are just as pig headed as him (except they grew up rich and he grew up... in the middle of regular and having money). 

levi was literally an unbearable competitor from birth until now, he loved sports and was ruthless in pretty much any scenario to the point that he was kicked off some teams. still, there was always someone who would endorse him and allow him a spot where he could continue his reign of terror. 

levi was briefly lined up to be one of the new jersey devils until he had a public sex scandal that got him pulled. he was butt hurt but he also didn’t apologise or regret his actions so that was that (his girlfriend was also not really happy considering the scandal didn’t involve her). levi thought, two birds with one stone, who needs ‘em! that’s just normal attitude when things don’t go his way.

anyway, now he’s here and has been since whenever it started and his plans mainly consist of miserably getting his degree and hating everyone. 

WANTED CONNECTIONS...

a friend. i guess someone must be able to stand him but it’s probably bc they don’t care what he does either.

tutor. he’s probably a terrible student because he always thinks he’s right even when he’s wrong.

ex. someone he has a terrible, awful, possibly traumatic relationship with. he probably cheated on them more than once and doesn’t really give a rats ass. *levi vc* ew, stop being sad, it’s really killing the vibe! 

hateship. they have sex but they probably hate him and who’s to blame them? not me! not sure if it’d develop much further bc he is..... terrible

summer romance. not too romantic though, more like... he was nice for a weekend and then when he got in there he was like sorry, who are you?

i’m pretty much open to him being an asshole in any way possible to any person possible for no real reason..... i hate him and y’all can too ❤️

[magicalforcesau]

Letters (part 2)

As Obi-Wan and Satine continue their written correspondence in the back half of their Hogwarts career, their bond strengthens to the point where it might not strictly be platonic.

ao3 link

Fifth Year Summer

Dear Ben,

I GOT MY MENTORSHIP REQUEST APPROVED! I’m going to be a peer mentor this upcoming year! Oh, I know this is going to be another responsibility when we’re already saddling quite a bit with OWLS and our duties as prefects. While it was your initial idea to join, I have no regrets. If I’m to influence the minds of thousands from the Ministry, it will do me good to have practice on a smaller and more impressionable scale. Besides, far too many first years are led astray in my opinion. Having firm and caring guidance will be most beneficial.

I hope you can write to me with the same news, even if I still believe you are pushing yourself far too hard. Just please consider your own mental health for this upcoming term. You’re already wound tighter than anyone I know. I would truly not like to partake in the bets that Fives and Echo make behind your back about when your head will explode. I believe either myself or Cody would win. We know you best.

Speaking of being wound tight, I have been dedicating my summer to the practice of enchanting muggle objects as per our homework assignments. Turns out, it truly is not that difficult. I’ve been careful not to alter anything that would come into contact with other muggles, but I look forward to showing you the results of some of my recreations. Between you and me, I’ve been constructing some that were not on the instructed list.

You’re not technically a prefect yet, Obi-Wan Kenobi, so don’t even think about making a wise remark about how you could see me in trouble.

Yours Truly,

Satine

Dear Satine,

I, too, just received confirmation that I’m to mentor a first year this upcoming school year! Regardless of your speculation and wariness, I stand by my decision. We will be kept busy, but idle minds mean time wasted. If you hadn’t agreed on principle, I don’t believe you would have signed up right behind me. As for my extracurricular activities, pretending as though I am not stressed in the slightest about the prospect of the coming year is futile, but I hope to work through it and to become a better student as a result of it. My father has relented on training by Quidditch form. There are bigger things to worry about such as OWLS, which is why I’m to be locked in all summer. No complaints there- I’d much rather read.

Speaking of reading, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the books you snuck into my trunk. Yes, I found them and they were quite a welcome surprise. A bit of relaxing education is just what the doctor ordered. Not literally, because I loathe visiting my family’s practitioner. He takes the term “witch doctor” to new levels and I will leave it at that.

You’ve always been far better at charming objects than I ever have. To be fair, I still don’t have a full understanding of what certain muggle objects actually do, but I’ve got most of the list marked off by this point. While I promise not to report you for deliberate rule breaking, I do admire your gumption. I hope you’ll one day let me see what you’ve crafted. You know I adore learning the novelties of the muggle world. I believe last we spoke, you were telling me about ‘computers’.

As always, I’d love to know more. You have a manner of speaking that simply can’t go unnoticed, at least not to me.

Best,

Obi-Wan

Fifth Year- Winter

Dear Satine,

I apologize if this owl reaches you at an indecent hour. I know how you are about your beauty sleep. It’s been strange being back home, even if for a couple of weeks. It’s only made me realize just how unreal this year has been in terms of excitement and mystery. Though I do not blame the boy for any of it, I won’t lie that it was a much quieter school without Anakin Skywalker present. I wouldn’t change any of it, of course. I believe I am making a difference in working with him. He has a bright mind, if he chooses to use it.

I still can’t get the vision of him foaming at the mouth on the floor out of my head. There’s no doubt that someone has it in for him. I can only imagine who. While eccentric, Anakin is still just a child. He’s harmless.

At risk of drastically changing the subject- my true reason for writing was to thank you again for the watch. My parents have ingrained in me the importance of writing thank you notes regardless of the nature of the gift. However, this might be the first time the sentiment has felt important in action. It may sound ungrateful, but a boy can only receive so many tie clips before he starts to sound a bit robotic in his delivery.

However, please note that every word I say, I mean through my very bones. I hope you didn’t take my silence at receiving it to be anything less than breathlessness. You always keep me guessing, Satine Kryze, and I would have you no different. I am still in awe every time I catch a gander at my wrist.

You did a marvelous job in transfixing and refurbishing it. Seriously, it is of no wonder that Charms comes easier to you than it does to me. Had I not known otherwise; I would have assumed this watch was always crafted with the intention of being magical. Even if it were just a standard watch, it would still have meant more to me than anything I’ve received simply because it came from you. My friend. I’m not sure I deserve it.

I suppose I’ve no excuse for fear of being late any longer, now do I?

It’s never coming off!

Obi-Wan

Dear Ben,

I’m no longer, by any means, insinuating that the boy is trouble. Or more accurately, I don’t believe he’s cognizant of these omens. What concerns me, is Qui-Gon seems to believe that a dark time is upon us. He won’t share his suspicions outright, but I can tell just by how he talks to Anakin with a certain level of wonder and curiosity. Surely, you see it too.

Even still, I say, when school starts up, we try and start our own investigation- off the books and away from Anakin, of course. We needn’t worry him more than he already is. Perhaps while Gryffindor has the field for Quidditch practice we can better research. There’s been too many strange occurrences this year for it to all be coincidental. I’d argue this is the tipping point.

We can further discuss a game plan back at school, but at risk of hurting feelings and potentially endangering lives, we should keep this between us.

I am, however, glad to hear you enjoyed the watch ♥

Yours,

Satine

Sixth Year- Summer

Dear Satine,

I received my OWLS results today as I’m sure you did the same. I wanted you to hear from me, personally, that I am, in fact, alive and well despite what I received as scores. I’m surprised at how alive and how well, quite actually.

For some context- I received all O’s in everything… With the exception of Arithmancy- of which I got an E. I’m not positive where exactly I went wrong in studying for it. I don’t recall the exam being particularly difficult. It’s never been a prized subject of mine as you well know, but I’ve always delivered nothing less than near-perfect marks.

My parents took the news surprisingly well. As opposed to blaming me for slacking off or being distracted by frivolous things such as friends… They were in support of me. In fact, they’re positive that the school is deliberately discriminating against me. I think it might have to do with the recent revelation regarding Anakin being the chosen one. They’ve been much kinder to me and the choices I’ve made as a result of my association with him. Where they believed I was wasting my time, I apparently “saw” what they couldn’t- even if my decision to mentor Anakin had absolutely nothing to do with the matter.

I still have not yet mentioned my pursuit of becoming an Auror. You have to space this kind of news out when you can. They’ve supported me on this, but I’m not sure they’d take that in stride. My parents have been itching to have me become a lawyer or a politician for as long as I can remember.

How were your scores? I’m sure you did brilliantly. I should know, I studied alongside you during all of this madness. I’m eager to properly celebrate with you when we next meet. My mother asked me where I’d gotten the watch the other day and I exclaimed that the brightest witch of my age crafted it for me personally… She assumed it was Ventress, but you’ve always thrived in the chaos of being underestimated, now haven’t you? I will never make that mistake.

Truly,

Ben

Dear Ben,

Don’t you ever scare me with such a dramatic introduction ever again! I nearly had a heart attack, assuming you’d gone and failed your OWLS in a fit of insanity. Given how unusual our fifth year was, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it had another anomaly to toss our way. I thought I was going to have to portkey to you and shake the living daylights out of you for being so foolish.

You landed on your feet, as you always do and seem to make it look incredibly easy to those that do not know any better. We’re matching, actually, except my E was in DADA- likely during the practical session when I wouldn’t cast that Sectumsempra spell. To have us perform such an act on a defenseless animal is cruel (even if it was a spider), particularly in the name of ‘testing’. If they must endorse the epidemic of violence, can they not simply provide test dummies?

I’m actually surprised I scored that high, since the instructor looked at me like I had ten heads. I spoke to Cody today. He passed, despite how hard he doubted himself. We both knew that he would do fine, of course.

Ventress has been around a lot more frequently, hasn’t she? I know that she’s been quite displaced ever since Dooku’s outing. She’s quite smug and entitled for someone who hardly does anything aside from being an errand girl to a Sith terror. I’m sure she’ll be continuing her tricks this year. To think your family thinks you could be as shrewd and awful as her.

How is Anakin this summer? I contemplated sending him an owl just to see how he was processing the more recent revelations, but it would most likely sound more from the heart if it came from you. You were truly excellent with him this year, if I hadn’t already mentioned it. I know I convinced you to break away from the status quo and lean into your desires to become an auror, but you’ve got a real knack for teaching and seeing the best in people. It’s truly one of your best traits. That, and the fact that regardless how much of a mess you are, you always manage to look pristine from head to toe.

Actually, that last bit is borderline infuriating. I hope to see you before the summer lets out. I understand why that might be difficult, but it seems with your parents’ investment in Anakin, you might have a valid reason to be away from the homestead more often. If you understand what I’m saying.

Best,

Satine

Sixth Year- Winter

{A draft from the desk of Obi-Wan Kenobi}

[Boldened text in parenthesis] = out loud thoughts

Dear Satine,

How do I say this without sounding like a damn fool? You kissed me!

It’s been brought to my attention by literally everyone that we have a certain noticeable chemistry. [Why am I saying what everyone else thinks when I should be saying what I think?] Usually, when we are together, we argue. A lot. Sometimes, I’m surprised we haven’t strangled each other yet by how heated some of our debates become. You have this ability to get under my skin in a way that no one else possesses. Truthfully, I love [Too strong! Don’t go scaring her off now] truly appreciate that about you.

But there are times when I get this feeling… And it’s come on more and more the longer I know you… Like we could get beyond the possible strangulation phase and onto something… Better. [What is wrong with me?] You challenge me and I think sometimes I’m able to challenge you as well. I think having people in your life that push you to be the best you can be is a sign of true companionship friendship. You’ve become a constant in my life that I wouldn’t shake even if I could. Looking back, it’s only natural for me to grow feelings for you.

Where I tried to convince myself those feelings were simply an intense comradery, I cannot deny that I do not notice how the light casts on Cody’s hair or linger on him as he walks away [Blast that makes me sound like a pervert] wonder what his hand would feel like in mine. My heart doesn’t quicken if Cody touches my shoulder or laughs at one of my jokes. Cody doesn’t sit incredibly close to me at the dining hall, but if he did, I would be more confused than completely entranced. Cody is my other best friend, but my entire day is not made or broken by seeing him smile.

I wouldn’t be jealous if the seventh year boys decided to notice that Cody was beautiful.

And you are disarmingly beautiful, but I’ve always known that, even if I try to ignore it.

You can imagine how terrifying all of this is to realize at the remarkable hour of 3 in the morning- a mere 3 hours after you decided to kiss me under the mistletoe. How am I supposed to think of anything else now or ever again? Which leads me to think [Don’t be presumptuous] wonder… If you share these feelings. And if you do, we’ve got quite a predicament there. Because if I could blissfully convinced myself that we could never be, I’d be able to bury that deep within me, but even the idea of hope that you could see me in that light… I fear that would be all too tempting. The evidence says that you might. You’ve always been a better investigator than myself, but I can’t shake this feeling that we have these spellbound moments where everything slows down. And it’s just you and me. During those moments, everything is alright.

Usually, when I’m troubled as I am now, I do not hesitate to reach out to you. You’re my co-conspirator, my fellow prefect, my best friend. However, given the situation, that’s not very easy to do. Even if Qui-Gon speaks of it like it is . I wish it were, because now all I can imagine is the mark you’ve left with your kiss. It’s the same sort of feeling I get every time I touch the face of the watch you gifted me last year.

Should I ever muster up the courage to send this letter to you, which I definitely shouldn’t, because you deserve the sort of man that would bare his heart in person, please understand that while I’ve dedicated my life to studying magical text, I’m not nearly as well-versed in the subject of love. Since I’m so certain you’ll never read this, there’s no point in denying that it’s anything less than love.

Love,

Ben

Seventh Year- Summer

Dear Ben,

I wanted to ensure that you were on the road of being okay, all things considering. I tried to wait to give you space, but I couldn’t make it more than a week without knowing you weren’t going mad locked up in that house of yours. I’m not even positive you’ll write me back, which is infuriating, but understanding since Qui-Gon’s passing is not one to be taken lightly by anyone, but especially you. I wish I could alleviate the pain you must be feeling in any way.

I’m relieved just a little bit, knowing that Anakin is in your care. It was very surprising of your parents to offer him refuge, as he’s currently got no one else to possibly lean on. Hopefully the two of you can find some solace in each other during these difficult times. I care for both of you very much and my heart aches knowing I am virtually helpless in making this any better. I know you are likely placing an immense amount of pressure on yourself to distract you from addressing your own mentor’s death, but while your parents might encourage this behavior, it’s not a true way of coping. You need to let someone in.

Stay safe. Do not hesitate to reach out (no matter how cliché that sounds). Even if you talk to Cody instead, that’s fine. Just… Don’t lock yourself in that head of yours and go rogue. I’d miss you far too much.

With Love,

Satine

Dear Satine,

I’m not okay, but I’ll have to be soon. Anakin is safe and on the same boat. I’ll write later with a real reply. I’m not quite in the spirit right now. I just wanted you to know that I haven’t gone completely mad in absence.

~Obi-Wan

Dear Satine,

I’m sorry to be writing to you so late in “true” reply. I’ve been quite busy with Anakin this summer. It has been helpful having someone else around. While a gray cloud still seems to follow him around, I’d say he’s faring better than expected. It’s alarming how resilient the boy is, but also incredibly depressing that it needs to be that way. We’ve discussed the matter of Qui-Gon’s death a couple of times. While you won’t like this, I think there is some closure to knowing that Anakin’s attacker, who became Qui-Gon’s murderer, is dead.

Meanwhile, I must confess that it still haunts me every night. I haven’t said anything to Anakin, because like you rightfully assumed, I’m not about to unload that burden onto him. He feels it’s his fault just as much as I do. We’ve taken to playing Quidditch outside. My family owns several acres of land, so we are able to get out of earshot every now and then. Anakin actually gets on quite nicely with my parents, which is a massive relief. Getting back to school for our final year will be a good way to get back into routine. On the other hand, I’m dreading trying to attempt adjusting to a school without Qui-Gon.

I suppose studying my brains out for the NEWTS alongside you will provide for ample distraction. You, alone, are admittedly very distracting. I am referring to your character of course. A general statement.

There’s always Quidditch, unfortunately, which isn’t nearly as fun and carefree as playing with Anakin in the yard. Despite how massively competitive he is? He’s just turned 13 and he’s loads better than me already. I still hate the flying aspect.

I’m writing you, of course, because we just got notified that I’m to be the Head Boy to your Head Girl. This incredibly tragic time has truly made me appreciate the people I have in my life. You are, without a doubt, shining at the top of that metaphorical list in bold and underlined print. I wouldn’t be Head Boy had it not been for you.

A lot has changed thus far, Satine, and I’m growing tired of being afraid. Life is too short and it’s always going to throw negatives at us- some that are absolutely debilitating. However, there is always the light, which has made me think that perhaps this year, some changes don’t have to be bad. There are many things I’d like to discuss with you, in person. Because this sort of conversation should be the kind that happens face-to-face.

Would you like to meet before school?

Truly Yours,

Ben

[suitofvibraniumarmor]

If You Just Realize [Finale]

Part Fifteen: Watching Over Us

Summary: Irina’s letter bodes well for Sebastian and his growing family.  Pairing: Sebastian Stan x Reader Word Count: 1945 Series Warnings: Death, angst, sadness. Lots of creative licensing, I’m sure. Chapter Warnings: Post-death grief/feels, custody issues, pregnancy.  Square Filled: This entire series will fill my realized feelings square for @marvelfluffbingo​​. A/N: I’ve much enjoyed writing this series, and I hope all of you enjoy reading it! The tag list is open; requests to be added can be done so here. There are bits and pieces of Romanian throughout the series, mostly from Google Translate and the few things I’ve picked up as I learn the language.

Also, I don’t know why I’ve never mentioned it before, but a huge song inspiration for the title of this fic (and some chapter titles) is Realize by Colbie Caillat.

Thank you so much to everyone who read, reblogged, replied, allofthethings, for this fic! I’m very proud of it and have loved writing and sharing this story with you. Your support means the world! Keep your eyes open for a new series announcement coming Sunday! ;) 

Series Masterlist

Y/N — 

Well, here’s a letter I never dreamed of writing. Having Milena, though, it’s changed everything. I look at my previous little girl and I want to give her the world. I’ve brought her into a scary world, and without a father to boot. I know, though, that she will have no shortage of family, love, and opportunities. 

Thank God for my brother. Sebastian is a good man. I’m a better person for being his little sister. Being a mama on my own seems so much more possible with my family, especially him. I know that my baby girl will always have that father-figure in her life with him around. Can you just imagine him walking her down the aisle one day? She’s such a tiny thing now, but I can picture it perfectly in my head. 

Part of protecting my daughter is making sure she is taken care of in the event that something happens to me. No shortage of family and love means there will be no shortage of people taking care of her, but I want it to be Sebastian. He’s going to think I’m crazy. My parents might not even understand. But I know, with every fiber of my being, that he is the best option to raise her if I’m not around. I can’t explain it beyond that — I just know. He will get her through my absence, get her through the toughest times in life. He will give her all of the love in the world. 

Which is why I’m writing you. I’m honestly not sure who will have a harder time if something happens to me, Milena or Seb. You’re his best friend, and I can only pray that the two of you maintain that friendship — not for the benefit of this potential situation, but for his sake and yours. I can tell you now that I secretly hope the two of you will see the love you have for each other and let that come to fruition. Either way, Y/N, you have to be the one to guide him through all of this. He will be grieving, may not know the ins and outs of parenting, especially of parenting a little girl … have to admit, I’m laughing to myself thinking about him trying to do her hair or pick out outfits for her. He’ll figure it out, on his own or not, but I know the best choice for my brother, in so many ways, is you. 

I’m having all of the legal documents sent to you, as well. You’ll be in a better place to handle all of this and make sense of it to Sebastian. He’ll handle my parents, but only if he’s in a good place. Help him find that good place. Please. 

Whatever happens with the two of you … take care of each other. Take care of my little girl. Take care of Mom and Dad. I’ll be watching out for you. 

— Irina

Philip set the letter to the side. Y/N had read it aloud to Sebastian when she first opened it, and they had read it countless times together, but hearing Philip read it aloud with all four of the grandparents present made the emotion new and raw. Even Tim and Anthony were brought to tears by the words. After a box of tissues was passed around, Philip continued. 

“The legal documents sent have all been endorsed — they’re legitimate. I spoke with the lawyer Irina had draw everything up and put in charge of sending the letter and the papers out. News of her death didn’t reach him quite the way it was supposed to, which delayed everything being mailed, and then they sat in Los Angeles for a while, of course. She’s included copies of everything we need: Conor’s rights being signed away, copies of the emails they exchanged leading up to that, a last will and testament appointing complete guardianship to both Sebastian and Y/N. I know we want to avoid a hearing, so I’ll present these to the court, and we’ll go from there. I don’t see, though, with all of this, how anyone could give Conor any part in custody of Milena, including visitations.”

Alice sniffled. “We have told Conor that we won’t take part in his case. We love our son, but he has to face the consequences of his initial decision.”

Sebastian nodded his gratitude. “We’d like to make sure all of the grandparents are included on visitations in the final papers, but Y/N and I want to adopt her. We want to make her officially ours.”

“And everyone is in support of that?” Philip asked. 

All four grandparents nodded their agreement, with enthusiasm and without hesitation. Philip explained the process going forward, promised to do his best to keep it out of the courtroom, and sent them on their way. 

The remaining days that Milena was with Conor, Y/N and Sebastian worked to put the final details of her birthday party together. They visited the breeder and put a deposit on a puppy they could pick up on Milena’s birthday to surprise her with at her party. Y/N washed her bedding and found a couple more things to decorate with, and Sebastian worked on putting together the swings they had invested in but hadn’t gotten to setting up yet. 

After that, there was nothing left to do but wait. With thirty-six hours to go, they decided it was okay to go out for a date night. They hadn’t been able to since they had opened up about their feelings and decided to make a real go of things, so they took the opportunity and went to dinner and a movie. 

“I had a good time tonight,” Y/N said, leaning on his shoulder while they waited for the movie to start. 

Sebastian smiled and kissed her forehead. “We’re only halfway through the evening, Bright Eyes.”

She shrugged. “I know, but I’m with you. That’s all I need.”

“Me too,” he agreed, hooking a finger under her chin to bring her lips to his as the lights in the theater began to dim. 

By the time Milena’s birthday came around, life had fallen into a pleasant routine. The adoption wouldn’t be final for a couple of months, but that was more to do with court timelines than anything; one week with a little girl processing her mother’s death and a lot of other changes in a short time had been enough for Conor to know that parenting was not something he could handle. He dropped his end of the custody battle a couple of days later, allowing the family to move forward with their lives unhindered. 

Milena’s night terrors continued, but were becoming less and less frequent. She was still seeing the psychologist once a week, and that seemed to be helping. She had even had an overnight with Georgeta and Anthony without any mishaps. 

Sebastian left around lunchtime to go pick up Milena’s puppy, leaving the girls home to put the finishing touches on party decorations and make sure everything else was in order. Milena was in her birthday outfit, her hair was secured in a cute, curly ponytail, and she was jumping around like she’d already eaten an entire pan of cupcakes. 

“Is it time yet, tanti?” she asked Y/N for the millionth time that day. [Tanti = Auntie]

Y/N chuckled and scooped Milena up in her arms. “Not yet, princess. Very soon, though.”

Milena groaned. “Can I call Gramma Alice and Bunica and ask when they’re coming?”

“You can call Gramma and Grampa,” Y/N offered, dialing the number and putting it on speaker before handing the phone to the now-three-year-old. 

Thirty minutes later, all of the grandparents had arrived. They grinned at the little girl dancing around and showing them everything that was set up for the party. While Milena was kept busy, Y/N checked her watch and realized Sebastian should have been back by now. Frowning, she found her phone and stepped outside to call him. 

“I’m just pulling up to the house, babe,” he answered. 

She looked up and spotted him, so she smiled and waved. She waited there, anxious to get her hands on that puppy. 

“Two puppies?” she exclaimed when Sebastian approached with a puppy in each hand. He carefully handed her a black and tan one, its little tail wagging faster than a hummingbird’s wings.

Sebastian kissed her hello, then stepped back. “I saw how you were eyeing that one when we put the down payment on Milena’s puppy. No reason both of my girls shouldn’t have a puppy.” 

Y/N held the little creature close, tears welling in her eyes. “She’s so precious!”

“Why are you crying?” Sebastian chuckled, pulling her to his chest and kissing her again. “I didn’t know you’d be this excited!”

“I am excited,” she sniffled, “but it could also be the baby.”

Sebastian nodded, then his eyes went wide. “Baby?”

Y/N giggled through her tears. “I was gonna wait to tell you — found out at my doctor’s appointment the other day. I wasn’t expecting it at all, since it was just a yearly check-up, but since you and I haven’t been preventing anything, they wanted a test and it came back positive. I was going to wait to get through the party before I told you …”

Sebastian set down the puppy that was in his arms and grabbed up his wife, tears flooding his own eyes now. “I can’t believe this — I can’t … I can’t form words.”

Y/N grinned and wrapped her free arm around his neck. “You don’t think it’s too soon?”

He shook his head, taking her face in his hands. “From the moment I realized how long I’ve been in love with you, I knew we had a lot of time to make up for. I’d say we’re right on track.”

“Me too,” she grinned. “Let’s not tell everyone yet though, okay? One shock at a time.”

Sebastian nodded his agreement and looked around for the puppy he had set down. He was just corralling the little thing when Milena came out to the porch and saw what her Uncle Seb had brought home. 

“Puppies!” she squealed clapping her hands and running toward Sebastian. “Can we keep them?”

“This one is yours,” Sebastian told her, handing the puppy over and guiding her on how to hold it safely. “Happy birthday, munchkin!”

“Thank you!” Milena said before peppering the puppy with kisses and then asking if she could go inside and show her grandparents. 

Y/N opened the door with her free hand. “Let’s go!”

Sebastian took the door from her, allowing both girls to go in and show off their new pets. He stood back and let them have their moment. Watching his parents, his wife, his niece, and Alice and Tim, Sebastian felt a moment of sadness. His sister should have been here for all of this. He would always miss her, but the pain of it was still too fresh. 

Seeing that Sebastian’s smile had fallen some, Y/N stepped in front of him and wrapped her arms around his middle. He hugged her back. 

“She’s watching over us,” Y/N reminded him. “She said so herself.”

He leaned to kiss her. He knew that Y/N was right — after all, he was married to his best friend, would be able to raise his niece the way his sister would have wanted, and had a baby on the way. Without his sister watching over them, he wasn’t so sure all of this wouldn’t have passed him by. 

“She did,” Sebastian grinned, “and I’d say today is perfect proof of that.” 

AllOfTheThings: @captain-s-rogers​ @star-spangled-man-with-a-plan​ @letsgetfuckingsuperwholocked​ @hurricanerin​ @horsesandbandsforlife​ @im-not-an-armrest-im-short​ @shynara51​ @sea040561​ @pinknerdpanda​ @xtina2191​ @jackryanplz​ @beakami​ @heartsaved​ @fullprunerebelstatesman​ @blackwidowismyhomegirl​ @averyrogers83​ @jennmurawski13​ @connie326​ @auriandthepussicats​

IYJR: @elsatxx​ @tanelle83​ @amanda-teaches​ @etherealwaifgoddess​ @kmuir1​ @ntlmundy​ @jayankles​ @rebekahdawkins​ @denise1605​ @rhadigen​ @peace-love-hobbitness​ @itsallyscorner​ @mizzzpink​ @auspiciousharriet​ @the-murder-strut-murdered-me​ @learisa​ @tellmewhatyouwill​ @katherinereid​ @lokilokilokilokilokiloki​ @itsmycorneroftheinternet​ @andreagf956​ @voltage-my2dlove​

[dog-day-morning]

WRONG MESSIAH WRONG PEOPLE Acts 1:1-14 Israel is run by gentiles who are not Israelite by blood. They call themselves Jews by declaration not by lineage. Jews are in the midst of casting out God's chosen people from Israel for fear of the prophetic word that states these Edomite gentiles, along with an admixture of the people of Alkebulan’s (Israel), whose DNA the Father anointed has blessed them will bow down, and worship at our feet. They fear the truth knowing we’ve determined the lies they’ve told us were intended to hide our identity from us, and the world out of hatred. The Jewish holocaust lasted for 4yrs whereas the curses of Deuteronomy have lasted 400yrs, and counting. No other tribe of people has suffered like the Israelites according to the curses, and accounts in Deuteronomy 28 save a peculiar people. And it shall come to pass, that as the Lord rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you; so the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you, and to bring you to nought; and ye shall be plucked from off the land whither thou goest to possess it. And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other; and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and stone. This is why I don't worship other religious faiths or religions. I'm cautious when it comes to Christianity knowing the deviltry of man, and the depths he will go, and has in order to maintain his stranglehold on us as a people. What allows a person to never be held accountable for their sins on Earth, but makes a race or tribe of people the burden bearer for all of Earth's iniquity? The devil is an accuser whose minions are fearful of the word manifesting in this generation. What we see on display isn't just a show of rebellion, but a fear of an arrogant people losing their position in the Earth which was only meant to be temporary, but in truth it wasn't meant to be at all. If 5 Black males congregate on a street corner it puts fear, spite, and hatred in the hearts of the so-called fragile psyche of those who want to control us. They call the Police in the hope of getting innocent people arrested or murdered. But 200 members of the proud boys can march through Urban Philadelphia in a show of defiance with Police protection, and nobody confronts them except a different breed of Black, Brown, and white people who are not like their fathers of old who relish in the thought of sending Jethro back to the woods with the rest of the hood boogers. The Jewish cabal worships Satan in the literal sense. They are the Devils cronies who know their time is up. Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time. They understand that the God of our fathers isn't playing games. If you ascribe this to my person as I’ve done in theory, how can God's 2 faithful witnesses see the Son of God and His Father if their hearts hadn't been tried like some of you? Revelation 11:3-13 3 And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. 4 These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth. 5 And if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed. 6 These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will. 7 And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. 8 And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified. 9 And they of the

people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves. 10 And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry, and shall send gifts one to another; because these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth. 11 And after three days and an half the spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them. 12 And they heard a great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come up hither. And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud; and their enemies beheld them. 13 And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven. The God of Israel has decreed this. The Jews in Israel will suffer a harsh penalty for their crimes against the Nigerian, Igbo Israelites, the Ethiopian Beta Israelites, the Ugandan Abayudaya, and other sects of Israelite people including the American tribal people of Ghana Africa (Judah), Gad (Native American), Reuben (Aboriginal Australian), and Issachar (Mexican South American descendants.) They are deporting the Yisraelites in Alkebulan out of Yisrael as though this can inundate God's plan. You’re bringing God to a higher and greater glory, fulfilling the promises He made to His people in this day for this generation. Joshua 24:13 13 And I have given you a land for which ye did not labour, and cities which ye built not, and ye dwell in them; of the vineyards and olive yards which ye planted not do ye eat. It’s a shame to construct a global economy only to be denied the American dream; it's a nightmare. For those that cater to the State of Israel like some Congressmen, and women who are Edomite Jews that are not willing to put in place a reparations plan for the ADOS, FBA, and all indigenous people of North America based on the Western Nations financing of the temporary inhabitants of Israel is an injustice to humanity. Our oppressor isn’t going to give up his throne or authority willingly, he’s drunk with it. Look to God to deliver us not man, especially those who historically have shown their extreme distaste and revulsion for us. God tells us: If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. God foreknew, He's all knowing, and all seeing. If one of them were to cosign a reparations bill for Black people they would’ve been found dead inside their congressional office within days or maybe hours. When your own people who look as you do, but think according to their massa’s will, in order to live a season of sin with the wicked advocating for the gentiles who live off our promised inheritance, and this nonphysical, hidden, unseen, but shrewd, devious bit of craft called white privilege, that Black people who believe in Yeshua spiritually call favor with God. What this microwave generation has asserted, and addressed as privilege in actuality is sinister, and diabolical. It's a Janus-like, double minded, spirit of torment that has caused a lot of agony to a people they refuse to relinquish that will bring a harsh judgment to them and the Earth, and yes, I’m paying my price. The people of Canaan were destroyed after having knowledge of the true living God. The Father isn't one who relishes in the spilling of innocent blood. He will always send you a warning before calamity comes to your doorstep. He's been doing it for the last 2,000 years. Like the Egyptians they refused to believe in the God the Israelites praised, and worshipped thinking He finds favor in them who shed innocent blood. This is the situation we find the Earth in once more with the Israelites who this time are being forced out of their homeland waiting for a deliverer. The people that lived in Canaan were not ignorant of

the God of Israel. Many times the impression is given that God ordered the Israelites to swoop in and destroy innocent people. But these people were neither innocent nor ignorant. They had heard about the God of Israel; it was they who rejected Him. When the 2 spies were sent to spy out the Land of Promise they were told by Rahab the prostitute: Joshua 2:9-11 9 And she said unto the men, I know that the Lord hath given you the land, and that your terror is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land faint because of you. 10 For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red sea for you, when ye came out of Egypt; and what ye did unto the two kings of the Amorites, that were on the other side Jordan, Sihon and Og, whom ye utterly destroyed. 11 And as soon as we had heard these things, our hearts did melt, neither did there remain any more courage in any man, because of you: for the Lord your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath. They had heard of the true God but had rejected Him. Consequently, their entire society acted in a sinful way. The Apostle Paul spoke of these people: Though they knew God they refused to believe let alone acknowledge Him as the true living God. The Father let their minds become reprobate following their flesh. What comes good of the flesh people? Nothing. They were shapen in iniquity, and in sin did their mothers conceive them. Israel is the biggest Nation on Earth that supports the Trans community being led by a morbidly, corrupted government overrun with rampant homosexuality, and like Amerikkka they endorse pedophilia. Of all the Nations on the Earth, Israel ranks number one in unnatural sex, and relations more so than the United States of Amerikkka, and Amerikkka’s European counterparts. When Jews here in the states get arrested for unlawful sexual acts committed against children those who have convenient connections are able to seek refuge, and fly to Israel fleeing prosecution. Oftentimes this is warranted, by US gov’t protection agencies who assist them in their transition back to Israel. Larry Nassar whose last name is Jewish, but they claim him not. The faith he was raised in makes him a Catholic which reeks of corruption, and entitlement that exceeds the realm of sexually deviant malfeasance executed by this religious sect that historically has gotten away with the most egregious sins committed against God's innocent ones. The FBIs handling of his high profile case was a case study in buffoonery, and an insane margin of flexibility that cannot be explained to a person of a simple mind. Hopefully this gov’t will learn which is doubtful. Pray that the payoff of a high monetary lawsuit will make the US government look at this flawed system, and send Goober Pyle back to law school or a police precinct to learn how to do his job. This is not privilege, it’s sin. Romans 1:21-25 21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four footed beasts, and creeping things. 24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: 25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. The inhabitants of Canaan were neither ignorant nor innocent victims of an angry God. They were committing these terrible sins being fully aware of the true and living God. Because they rejected Him, God judged them harshly. How do you explain the people of Israel, Amerikkka, Europe, and the rest of the West in this day and time? You can't without condemning them, and the rest of humanity which the Father had all authority to do. Instead, He sent His Son to die for Yisrael whom we rejected giving the

gentiles a pathway to His Kindome. Why do you refuse to accept His truth? Forgiving a jackass is like storing wine in old wineskins or plastic garbage bags. The messenger has made your hearts cold, and bitter towards the Father, and His Son Yeshua? Learn from us, and prepare for a New World in its natural order of things because this right here ain't it. Good evening people, Elohim 9/25/2021

[artxyra]

Ashes

Note: So yeah the ending suck, I couldn’t find the right way to end it, but for the most part this seems decent. I might rewrite some of this in the future and finally, update some of my other works. Also a creative slumber sucks when all you wanna do is write but nothing seems to work. 

Insp. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us0y6scOtyw

Everything was loud. Every voice rumbles at each word they spoke. She could feel the hot tears rolling down her cheeks as her vision blurs into nothing. The sound of her own heartbeat was loud, beating frantically. Her breathing became non-existent. 

“How could you, Marinette.” 

She didn’t do it. 

“Marinette, I’m so disappointed in you. You’re supposed to set an example.” 

For what, how can someone be an example when no one follows them. This isn’t her job as the class president but your job as the teacher. 

“You’re our everyday Ladybug.” 

She doesn’t want to be. It’s bad enough she’s Ladybug in real life, away from all this. 

The yells continue to get louder, her body begins to rapidly shake. No one is there to comfort her. 

“You’re nothing but a bully!” They shriek, “How can you…” 

Their voices merge into the same sound. Blame, disappointment, anger. Gripping her hair, her pigtails become loose, allowing her hair to cascade down her shoulders. 

She could see nothing, only white. The noises become muffled. She involuntary pushes away any movements towards her. 

“Cā liàng, I’m Hawkmoth. These people are beneath you.” 

His voice, smoothing, pulling her towards her darkest desires.

“I’m giving you the power to burn those that have wrong you. All I ask is that of Ladybug and Chat Noir’s miraculous.” 

“As you wish, Hawkmoth.” The whisper off of her lip cause mass panic. She could feel the change of her outfit. From her regular outfit to a black bodysuit with pink and purple flames outlining the pantlegs. Her hair becomes actual flames, flickering with every movement she makes. 

I could hear the signs calling out from the bottom of the fire. 

Opening her eyes for the first time since her meltdown, she welcomes the view of her classmates cowering in the corner. She blows a raspberry and walks over to them. 

“Marinette!” 

“I’m not Marinette, I’m Cā liàng, and you will all bow before me.” 

Lila is the first to be surrounded by fire. The flames didn’t burn the poor Italian migrant, but they did scare her into fainting. Alya and Mme. Bustier cries to comfort her, to make sure she’s okay. 

“You always listen to her. You listen to her and threw me out like yesterday’s trash.” Cā liàng screams, tears streaming down her face. The flames surrounding the room grows in size. 

Soon the fire alarm goes off allowing the students to run for freedom. 

The flames died down, but only to grow with Cā liàng loud screech. 

She stands alone in the classroom, she could hear the outcries of other students ranging from confusion to terror. With a flick of her wrist, the windows shatter sending a heatwave. 

I am like a torch flickering in the wind as the saying goes

Cā liàng flies out of the classroom only to oversee the crowd of students gather in front of the building. Akuma alerts screech to life. 

“Now, now, people, all I want this the miraculous and the students of Caline Bustier. You have wrong me for way too long. I want my freedom.” Cā liàng states to the gather of citizens. 

“Marinette!” 

Cā liàng turns around to see Chat Noir, standing battle-ready. His baton facing her as he readies to attack her. Cā liàng dodge, calling for her flames to do her bidding. 

“That’s cute, kitty. But you’re going to need more than a baton to defeat me.” Cā liàng turns to send a kick to Chat Noir’s stomach. He lands into her building. 

“Someone save my baby!” 

You didn’t take her side when she needed you the most. 

“Sugarplum, please don’t let Hawkmoth win.” 

She not stupid. Hawkmoth is the least of her problems, he’s just an out. 

Cā liàng sends her flames towards the streets. Not burning her subjects but to freeze them in place. 

Far away, Tikki is flying in search of a temporary Ladybug. 

“Master Fu, we have a major problem. It’s Marinette.” Tikki on the verge of a breakdown falls to the ground. Wayzz flies to comfort his comrade. 

Fu thinks about this, he only knows as much as Marinette when it comes to her allies. Who could take on the mantle of being Ladybug? 

“Wayzz, Tikki, the Tsurugi girl.” 

Tikki turns to Wayzz and nods. 

“I can find her.” 

“Good now hurry before Marinette does something she’ll regret.” 

Tikki, finding a new source of strength, nods, and flies through the walls of the small building. 

“Master, do you think she’ll be ready.” 

“We have prep for this, Wayzz, it was only a matter of time.” 

The two fall into silence. 

Lost all my precious

Cā liàng, still engaging in a heated battle with Chat Noir, toys with him. Stopping his own mid-kick, she pulls him closer and whispers: 

“She’ll never love you.” 

Her flames surround him tighten with her fist. Soon, Chat Noir was knocked out causing an outroar among the crowd. 

“Marinette, how could you?” Simultaneously, her class cries out seeing her. 

How could you? Is that all they say when she does something. It’s like a broken record being on repeat.

“Cā liàng, get me the miraculous.” His voice echoes with anger. She grips her head only for the flames to cover buildings. 

 Rage ate me up

Tears swell in her eyes. 

“Marinette,” She turns to see Chat Noir, coughing up blood. He holds onto his side using his baton as leverage. “Marinette this isn’t like you…” He holds out his arm for her to take. 

Memories of the past months’ skyrockets towards her. 

Almost getting expelled. 

Being left out of gatherings. 

Constantly being asked to do things she never wanted to do. 

Her good nature being taken advantage of. 

The flames grow more in size as she lets out a cry like no other. 

“NO!” She screams as a familiar yo-yo string wraps around her. 

“Cā liàng, your evil doings is no more.” Everyone turns to the figure that looks very similar to Ladybug. 

Cā liàng shakes off the string and sends columns of fire towards the Ladybug themed hero. 

“I won’t go back to being naive, kind-hearted Marinette Dupain-Cheng. I want them to burn.” 

“You don’t want that. Remember those that haven’t wronged you. Those that care for you.” The Ladybug replacement says coming closer to the akumatized victim. 

“You don’t understand!” Cā liàng cries out surrounding herself with her own flames. 

When the flames disperse, Cā liàng was no longer there. 

The temporary Ladybug gasps, searching for her opponent only to turns to help Chat Noir.

“Do you need to de-transform?” She asks after thoroughly examining the wounded hero. He shakes his head. 

“We need to save her.” He winces as he moves. 

She pushes back, “We can’t if your wounded,  Marinette is the most strong-willed person I know and I doubt that this will be the end.” 

Endless forlornness has made me numb

Standing on top of the Eiffel Tower, Cā liàng skips around. Pain crosses her face as she grips her head. His voice rings in the back of her head. Wrapping her arms around her torso, her nails dig into her arms. 

Tears threaten to leave her eyes.

Has the not feeling pain really become something of second nature to her? All the time she withholds herself from feeling negative emotions. 

“Cā liàng.” He wants her to do something she’s not capable of. Not because of her good nature but because she knows the truth. Her body captivated by the boost of power he had endorsed her with wants nothing more than to obey. 

“No!”

I'd rather rise from here 

Her flames surround her once more creating a sphere of pink and purple. 

A massive heatwave hits Paris, France. 

People sweating off their clothes runs to hide in either shame or embarrassment. 

From the Eiffel Tower, the sphere only grows in size. In the center is Cā liàng letting of her anguish cries. 

The temp. Ladybug swings with her yo-yo to the scene, keeping her emotions in check hidden from the world. She tries to break through into the spear. No luck. 

“Miraculous Ladybug!” The temp ladybug calls out. Only for a guitar pick to fall down to her hands. 

“Luka?” She questions looking between the growing sphere and the pick. “Of course.” 

Swinging the yo-yo back down, the temp. Ladybug runs off in the direction of a familiar houseboat. 

Or should I hold on to my past?

Luka, with a somber look, stares out of his window. Something wasn’t right, he knew that everyone in Paris knew that, but the odd feeling isn’t leaving him. 

“Luka!” A familiar voice screams out.

“Ladybug?”

“Yes, no, yes, look Marinette needs you. I believe you’re the only one that can get through to her.” She states staring the blue-haired dyed older teen in the eyes. 

Luka didn’t need any more convincing. With a nod of his head, the two rushes off the boat. 

In the sphere, Cā liàng is reliving her worst fear. The fire exits through her body, creating a ring as images of her past appear within the rings. Tears stream down her cheeks as she watches. 

From Adrien telling her to ignore Lila and don’t expose her to her parents giving her disappointed stares. Everything feels real. 

“Marinette!” Familiar voices call out to her. 

Unbeknownst to  Cā liàng, columns of fire spread across the streets of Paris. 

They've burnt to ashes

Faded to grey

The images turn into ashes. 

Cā liàng opens her eyes and takes a deep breath. Turning around, she is faced to faced with Ladybug and Luka, Chat Noir nowhere in sight. She smirks at the two and lowers herself away from the duo. 

“You’re too late,” Her voice echoes deeper than what they had expected. She turns to face the downfall of Paris and sees that ashes of buildings, bodies frozen in soot, the glowing of the sunset soon illuminated over the city of love. 

Temp. Ladybug swings her yo-yo...

Cā liàng doesn’t dodge it, allowing the yoyo to wrap around her. The sphere behind her moves hovering over the Eiffel Tower. 

“Chat Noir!” Ladybug calls out. 

“Cataclysm!” 

The world goes dark. 

Returned to the earth

Cā liàng feet touch the ground, as the explosion turns to flickering sparkles of dust. She looks up to the sky, Ladybug and Luka are staring down at the copy of Cā liàng. Her mission is clear, as she walks the familiar path towards the school grounds. 

There in the middle of it is a frozen version of Lila Rossi. The liar lies on the ground with a sooted covered Alya and Caline Bustier beside her. Cā liàng walks closer and gently caress the teen’s face. Her eyes dead of emotion, but face strained with tears, she holds up her hand. A swirl of fire surrounds the liar, only to clear revealing the liar un-sooted. 

“I forgive you.” Cā liàng whispers, “But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t kill you.” 

Lila, stares at the akumatized Marinette, “How can you? I destroyed you and this just tops the cake.” 

Cā liàng smirks and bits her lip. “And if I were to end you now, who would they blame?” A fire goes ablaze in her eyes all while forming fire beneath the one that has caused her so much pain. 

With one mighty shriek, Lila cries out, “Ladybug!” 

Yes it's meant to be

The battle was fierce, but tiresome for everyone. With Lila nearly dying by the hands of Cā liàng, nearly traumatizing Marinette in the process.  Ladybug had to work quickly as she knew this will only mentally damage Marinette if she were to go through this. 

“Marinette!” A spark of hope raises when the akumatized item sparks. Luka was the only one close to the two when spark appeared. 

Without hesitation, Luka pulls Cā liàng causing her to lose focus, nearly burning him the process. Ladybug is quick to destroy the object. 

Uncertain flame of hope I found

Will you lead me back on the right track?

Once the mist of the akuma faded away, Marinette falls into Luka’s arms. He holds her tightly humming a soft tune. The burnt marks fade away as the Miraculous magic revives those that froze and the buildings that turned to ash. 

Reporters try to get the temporary Ladybug to speak about the hardship of taking down this akuma, only for her to glare and disappear into the sky and behind buildings. 

“Luka,” Marinette soft voice pulls Luka out his tune and focus on the poor teen in his arms. 

“I got you, Nettie.” 

Marinette shakily nods and closes her eyes. 

Permanent ML Tag List: @damianette-is-life

[innuendostudios]

The newest installment of The Alt-Right Playbook - Endnote 4: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship - is a little different. This installment was presented live at Solidarity Lowell, and includes a bonus Q&A section. This video expands on the ideas put forth in How to Radicalize a Normie.

If you would like more videos like this to come out, please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

He is intriguing, yet unpredictable. He demands unconditional loyalty. He seems to have an intuitive understanding of what people want to hear but no actual empathy; he treats others as simply bodies or objects. And he’s surrounded by a network of subordinates but the personnel is always changing.

Does it sound like I’m describing The President? Because these are, according to Alexandra Stein, qualities of a cult leader.

Hi. My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, the flagship endeavor of which is currently The Alt-Right Playbook, a series on the political and rhetorical strategies the Alt-Right uses to legitimize itself and gain power. And, if that sounds interesting to you, and you haven’t already, please like share and subscribe.

The most recent episode of The Alt-Right Playbook is about how people get recruited into these largely online reactionary communities like the Alt-Right, a subject which, as it turns out, is real fuckin’ hard to research.

What I want to talk about with you today is how I go about studying a population that is incredibly hostile towards being studied. It involves finding the bits and pieces of the Alt-Right that we do have data on - the pockets of good research, the outsider observations, the stories of lived experience - as well as looking at older movements the Alt-Right grew out of, that have been extensively researched, and spotting the ways the Alt-Right is continuous with them, and trying to extrapolate how those structures might recreate themselves in the social media age.

So it’s… a lot. And, in the process of researching, I found a wealth of interesting perspectives that, by focusing the video on recruitment specifically, I barely dipped a toe in. All that stuff is what I’d like to get into with you today. But I’m trying to thread a needle here: you don’t need to have seen my video, How to Radicalize a Normie, to follow this talk, but, if you have seen it already, I will try not to be redundant. This talk is one part making my case for why I think the conclusions in that video are correct, one part repository for all the stuff I couldn’t get into, and one part how I’ve come to look at the Alt-Right as a result of this research, including some pet theories I wouldn’t feel right claiming as truth without further research, but I do think are on the right track.

This talk is called Isolation, Engulfment, and Pain: How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship. We’re going to cover a lot of ground, from information processing to emotional development, but we’re necessarily also going to cover racism and violence and abuse dynamics. So this is an introduction and a content warning: if some of these subjects are particularly charged for you, no offense will be taken if you at any point leave the room. I have to research this stuff for a living, and it is rough, and sometimes I have to step away. We don’t judge here.

Now. Requisite dash of self-deprecation: don’t give me too much credit for all this. I am proud of the work I do and I think I’m genuinely good at it, but much of this video was compiling the work of others. Besides research I had already done and my own observations, the video had 27 sources: three books, five research papers, six articles, one leaked document, three testimonials, four videos, four pages of statistics, and one Twitter joke. I also spoke to four professional researchers who study right-wing extremism and one former Alt-Righter.

Without all their hard work, I would have nothing to compile.

OK? Let’s begin.

We’re gonna center on those three main texts: Alt-America by David Neiwert, a history of the Alt-Right’s origins; Healing from Hate by Michael Kimmel, about how young men get into (and out of) extremist groups, be they neo-Nazi or jihadist; and Terror, Love and Brainwashing by Alexandra Stein, about how people are courted by and kept inside cults and totalitarian regimes.

I began with Kimmel. The premise of Healing from Hate is that extremist groups tend to be between 75 and 90% male, and that you cannot understand radical conservatism without looking at it through the lens of toxic masculinity. Which makes it all the more disappointing that Kimmel has been accused by multiple women of bullying and harassment. I found the book incredibly useful, and we’re still going to talk about it, I just need to caveat here that retweets are not endorsements. Also, if I spoil the book for you then you don’t need to buy it, give your money to someone who isn’t a creep.

Kimmel’s argument is that extremism begins with a pain peculiar to young men. He calls it “aggrieved entitlement.” I call it Durden Syndrome. You know that scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden says, “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rockstars, but we won’t, we’re slowly learning that fact, and we are very, very pissed off”? Yeah, that. As men, the world promised us something, and the promise wasn’t kept.

Some men skew towards social progressivism when they realize this promise was never made to women, or men of color, or queer or trans or nonbinary people, and recognize the injustice of that. Some men skew towards economic leftism when they realize that every cishet white man being a millionaire rockstar movie god is mathematically impossible. But they skew towards reactionary conservatism when they feel the promise should have been kept. That’s the life they were supposed to have, and someone took it from them.

Hate groups appeal to that sense of emasculation. “You wanna feel like a Real Man? Shave off your hair, dance to hatecore, and let’s beat the crap out of someone.” Kimmel notes that the greatest indicator someone will join a hate group is a broken home: divorce, foster care, parents with addictions, physical or sexual abuse. The greater the distance between the life they were promised and the life they are living, the more enticing Real Masculinity becomes. Their fellow extremists are brothers, the leaders father figures.

The group does give them someone to blame for their lot in life - immigrants, feminists, the Jewish conspiracy - but that’s not why they join. They’re after empowerment. According to Kimmel, “Their embrace of neo-Nazi ideology is a consequence of their recruitment and indoctrination process, not its cause."

But once an Other has been identified as the locus of a hate group’s hate, new recruits are brought along when the group terrorizes that Other. Events like cross burnings and street fights are dangerous and morally fraught, and are often traumatic for a new recruit. And experiencing an emotional or physical trauma can create an intense bond with the people experiencing it with him, even though they’re the ones who brought him to the traumatic event in the first place. The creation of this bond is one of the reasons some hate groups usher new recruits out into the field as early as possible: the sooner they are emotionally invested in the community, the faster they will embrace the community’s politics.

This Othering also estranges recruits from the people they are supposed to hate, which makes it hard to stop hating them.

So there’s this concept that comes up a lot in my research called Contact Hypothesis. Contact Hypothesis argues that, the more contact you have with a different walk of life, the easier it is to tolerate it. It’s like exposure therapy. We talk about how big cities and college campuses tend to be liberal strongholds; the Right likes to claim this is because of professors and politicians poisoning your mind, but it’s really just because they’re diverse. When you share space with a lot of different kinds of people, a degree of liberalism becomes necessary just to get by. And we see that belief systems which rely on a strict orthodoxy get really cagey about members having contact with outsiders. We see this in all the groups we’re discussing today - extremists, cultists, totalitarians - but also religious fundamentalists; Mormons only wanna send their kids to Brigham Young. They are belief systems that can only be reliably maintained so long as no one gets exposed to other people with other beliefs.

So that’s some of what I took from Kimmel. Next I read Stein talking, primarily, about cults.

Stein’s window into all of this is applying the theory of Attachment Styles to what researchers calls totalism, which is any structure that subsumes a person’s entire life the way cults and totalitarian governments do. Attachment is a concept you may be familiar with if have, or have ever dated, a therapist. (I’ve done both.)

So, for a quick primer:

Imagine you’re walking in the park with a three-year-old. And the three-year-old sees a dog, and ask, “Can I pet the dog?” And you say yes, and the kid steps away from your side and reaches out. And the dog gets excited, and jumps up, and the kid gets scared and runs back to you. So you hold the kid and go, “Oh, no no no, don’t worry! They’re not gonna hurt you! They were just happy to see you!” And you take a few moments to calm the kid down, and then you ask, “Do you still want to pet the dog?” And the kid says “yes,” so they step away from you again and reach out. The dog jumps up again, but this time the kid doesn’t run away, and they pet the dog, and you, the kid, and the dog are all happy. Hooray!

This is a fundamental piece of a child’s emotional development. They take a risk, have a negative experience, and retreat to a point of comfort. Then, having received that comfort, feel bolstered enough to take a slightly greater risk. A healthy childhood is steadily venturing further and further from that point of comfort, and taking on greater risks, secure in the knowledge that safety is there when they need it. And, as an adult, they will form many interdependent points of comfort rather than relying on only one or two.

If all goes according to plan, that is Secure Attachment. But: sometimes things go wrong when the kid seeks comfort and doesn’t get enough. This may be because the adult is withholding or the kid doesn’t know how to express their needs or they’re just particularly fearful. But the kid may start seeking comfort more than seems reasonable, and be particularly averse to risk, and over-focus on the people who give them comfort, because they’re operating at a deficit. We call that Anxious Attachment. Alternately, the kid may give up on receiving comfort altogether, even though they still need it, and just go it alone, developing a distrust of other people and a fear of being vulnerable. We call that Avoidant Attachment.

Now, these styles are all formed in early childhood, but Stein focuses on a fourth kind of Attachment, one that can be formed at any age regardless of the Attachment Style you came in with. It’s what happens when the negative experience and the comfort come from the same place. We see it in children and adults who are mistreated by the people they trust. It’s called Disorganized Attachment.

According to Stein, cults foster Disorganized Attachment by being intensely unpredictable. In a cult, you may be praised for your commitment on Monday and have your commitment questioned on Tuesday, with no change in behavior. You may be assigned a romantic partner, who may, at any point, be taken away, assigned to someone else. Your children may be taken from you to be raised by a different family. You may be told the cult leader wants to sleep with you, which may make you incredibly happy or be terrifying, but you won’t be given a choice. And the rules you are expected to follow will be rewritten without warning.

This creates a kind of emotional chaos, where you can’t predict when you will be given good feelings and when you will be given bad ones. But you’re so enmeshed in the community you have noplace else to go for good feelings; hurting you just draws you in deeper, because they are also where you seek comfort. And your pain is always your fault: you wouldn’t feel so shitty if you were more committed. Trying to make sense of this causes so much confusion and anguish that you eventually just stop thinking for yourself. These are the rules now? OK. He’s not my brother anymore? OK. This is my life now? OK.

Hardly anyone would seek out such a dynamic, which is why cults present as religions, political activists, and therapy groups; things people in questioning phases of their lives are liable to seek out, and then they fall down the rabbit hole before they know what’s happening. The cult slowly consumes more and more of a recruit’s life, and tightly controls access to relationships outside the cult, because the biggest threat to a Disorganized Attachment relationship is having separate, Securely Attached points of comfort.

And at this point I said, “Hold up. You’re telling me cults recruit by offering people community and purpose in times of need, become the focal point of their entire lives, estrange them from all outside perspectives, and then cause emotional distress that paradoxically makes them more committed because they have nowhere else to go for support?”

Isn’t that exactly how Kimmel described joining a hate group?

Now, these are commonalities, not a one-to-one comparison. A cult is far more organized and rigidly controlled than a hate group. But Stein points out that this dynamic of isolation, engulfment, and pain is the same dynamic as an abusive relationship. The difference is just scale. A cult is functionally a single person having a very complex domestic abuse situation with a whole lot of people, #badpolyamory.

So if we posit a spectrum with domestic abuse on one end and cults and totalitarianism on the other, I started wondering, could we put extremist groups, like ISIS and Aryan Nations, around… here?

And, if so, where would we put the Alt-Right?

Now, I have to tread carefully here. There are reasons this talk is called “How the Alt-Right is Like an Abusive Relationship” and not “How the Alt-Right is Like a Cult,” because the moment you say the second thing, a lot of people stop listening to you. Our conception of cults and totalitarianism is way more controlled and structured than a pack of loud, racist assholes on the internet. But we’re not talking about organizational structure, we’re talking about a relationship, an emotional dynamic Stein calls “anxious dependency,” which fosters an irrational loyalty to people who are bad for you and gets you to adopt an ideology you would have previously rejected. (I would also love to go on a rant puncturing the idea that cultists and fascists are organized, pointing out this notion is propaganda and their systems are notoriously corrupt and mismanaged, but we don’t have time; ask me about it in the Q&A if you want me to go off.)

So I started looking through what I knew, and what I could find, about the Alt-Right to see if I could spot this same pattern of isolation, engulfment, and pain online funneling people towards the Alt-Right. And I did not come up short.

Isolation? Well, the Alt-Right traffics in all the same dehumanizing narratives about their enemies as Kimmel’s hate groups - like, the worst things you can imagine a human being saying about a group of people are said every day in these forums. They often berate and harass each other for any perceived sympathy towards The Other Side. They also regularly harass people from The Other Side off of platforms, and falsely report their tweets, posts, and videos as terrorism to get them taken down. (This has happened to me, incidentally.) I found figureheads adored by the Alt-Right who expressly tell people to cut ties with liberal family members.

We talked before about Contact Hypothesis? There’s also this idea called Parasocial Contact Hypothesis. A parasocial relationship is a strong emotional connection that only goes one way, like if you really love my videos and have started thinking of me almost as a friend even though I don’t know you exist? Yeah. Parasocial relationship. They’ve been in The Discourse lately, largely thanks to my friend Shannon Strucci making a really great video about them (check it out, I make a cameo, but… clear your schedule). Parasocial Contact Hypothesis is this phenomenon where, if people form parasocial feelings for public figures or even fictional characters, and those people happen to be Black, white audience members become less racist similar to how they would if they had Black friends. Your logical brain knows that these are strangers, but your lizard brain doesn’t know the difference between empathy for a queer friend and empathy for a queer character in a video game. So of course the Alt-Right makes a big stink about queer characters in video games, and leads boycotts against “forced diversity,” because diverse media is bad for recruitment.

Engulfment? Well, I learned way too much about how the Alt-Right will overtake your entire internet life. There was a paper made the rounds last year by Rebecca Lewis charting the interconnectedness of conservative YouTube. (Reactionaries really hated this paper because it said things they didn’t like.) Lewis argues that, once you enter what she calls the Alternative Influence Network, it tends to keep you inside it. Start with some YouTuber conservatives like but who’s branded as a moderate, or even a “classic liberal.” Take someone like Dave Rubin; call Dave Rubin Alt-Right, people yell at you, I speak from experience. Well, Dave Rubin’s had Jordan Peterson on his show, so, if you watch Rubin, Peterson ends up in your recommendations. Peterson has been on the Joe Rogan show, so, you watch Peterson, Rogan ends up in your recommendations. And Rogan has interviewed Gavin McInnes, so you watch Rogan and McInnes ends up in your recommendations.

Gavin McInnes is the head of the Proud Boys, a self-described “western chauvinist” organization that’s mostly known for beating up liberals and leftists. They have ties to neo-fascist groups like Identity Evropa and neo-fascist militias like the Oath Keepers, they run security for white nationalists, and their lawyer just went on record that he identifies as a fascist. And, if you’re one of these kids who has YouTube in the background with autoplay on, and you’re watching Dave Rubin? You might be as few as 3 videos away from watching Gavin McInnes.

There’s a lot of talk these days about algorithms funneling people towards the Right, and that’s not wrong, but it’s an oversimplification. The real problem is that the Right knows how to hijack an algorithm.

I also learned about the Curation/Search Radicalization Spiral from a piece by Mike Caulfield. Caulfiend uses the horrific example of Dylann Roof. You remember him? He shot up a church in a Black neighborhood a few years ago. Roof says he was radicalized when he googled “Black on white crime” and saw the results. Now, if you search the phrase “crime statistics by demographic,” you will find fairly nonpartisan results that show most crimes are committed against members of the perpetrator’s own race, and Black people commit crimes against white people at about the same rate as any other two demographics. But that specific phrase, “Black on white crime,” is used almost exclusively by white racists, and so Roof’s first hit wasn’t a database of crime statistics, it was the Council of Conservative Citizens. Now, the CCC is an outgrowth of the White Citizens Councils of the 50’s and 60’s which rebranded in ‘85. They publish bogus statistics that paint Black people as uniquely violent. And they introduce a number of other politically-loaded phrases - like, say, “Muslim fertility rates” - that nonpartisan sites don’t use, and so, if Roof googles them as well, he gets similarly weighted results.

I have tons more examples of this stuff. I literally don’t have time to show it all. Like, have you heard of Google bombing? That’s a thing I didn’t know existed. The point is, the same way search engines tailor your results to what they think you want, once you scratch the surface of the Alt-Right they are highly adept at making it so, whenever you go online, their version of reality is all you know and all you see.

Finally, pain. This was the difficult one. Can you create a Disorganized Attachment relationship over the internet with a largely faceless and decentralized movement? I pitched the idea to one the researchers I spoke to, and he said, “That sounds very plausible, and nearly impossible to research.” See, cults and hate groups? They don’t wanna talk to researchers anymore than the Alt-Right wants to talk to me. Stein and Kimmel get their data by speaking to formers, people who’ve exited these movements and are all too happy to share how horrible they were. But the Alt-Right is still very young, and there just aren’t that many formers yet.

I found some testimonials, and they mostly back up my hypothesis, but there’s not enough that I could call them statistically significant. So I had to look where the data was.

My fellow YouTuber ContraPoints made a video last year - in my opinion, her best one - about incels (that’s “involuntary celibate,” men who can’t get laid). Incel forums tend to be deeply misogynistic and antifeminist, and have a high overlap with the Alt-Right. If you remember Elliot Rodger, he was an incel. Contra’s observation was that these forums were incredibly fatalistic: you are too ugly and women too shallow for you to ever have sex, so you should give up. She described a certain catharsis, like picking a really painful scab, in hearing other people voice your worst fears. But there was no uplift; these communities seemed to have a zero-tolerance policy for optimism. She likened it so some deeply unhealthy trans forums she used to visit, where people wallowed in their own dysphoria.

And I remembered the forums I researched five years ago in preparation for my video on GamerGate. (If you don’t know what GamerGate was, I will not rob you of your precious innocence. But, in a lot of ways, GamerGate was the trial run for what the Alt-Right has become.) These forums were full of angry guys surrounding themselves with people saying, “You’re right to be angry.” And, yeah, if everywhere else you go treats your anger as invalid, that scratches an itch. But I never saw any of them calm down. They came in angry and they came out angrier. And most didn’t have anywhere else to vent, so they all came back.

I found a paper on Alt-Right forums that described a similar type of nihilism, and another on 8chan. What humor was on these sites was always shocking, furiously punching down, and deeply self-referential, but it didn’t seem like anyone was expected to laugh anymore, just, you know, catch the reference. I found one testimonial saying that having healthy relationships in these spaces is functionally impossible, and the one former I talked to said, yeah, when the Alt-Right isn’t winning everyone’s miserable.

So I think it might fit. The place they go for relief also makes them unhappy, so they come back to get relief again, and it just repeats. Same reason people stay with abusers. I wanna look into this further, so, I’ll just say this part to the camera: if there are any researchers watching who wanna study this, get at me.

Finally, I read Alt-America by David Neiwert, a supremely useful book that I highly recommend if you wanna know how the Alt-Right is the natural outgrowth of the militia and Patriot movements of the 90’s and early 2000’s, not to mention the Tea Party. Neiwert also does an excellent job illustrating how conspiracism serves to fill in the gap between the complexity of the modern world and the simplistic, might-makes-right worldview of fascism.

Neiwert also provides an interesting piece of the puzzle, suggesting what people are actually looking for when they get recruited. He references work done by John Bargh and Katelyn McKenna on Identity Demarginalization. Bargh and McKenna looked at the internet habits of people whose identities are both devalued in our society and invisible. By invisible, what I mean is, ok, if you’re a person of color, our society devalues your identity, but you can look around a room and, within a certain margin of error, see who else is POC, and form community with them if you wish. But, if you’re queer, you can’t see who else in a room is queer unless one of you runs up a flag. And revealing yourself always means taking on a certain amount of risk that you’ve misread the signals, that the person you reveal yourself to is not only not queer, but a homophobe.

According to Bargh and McKenna, people in this situation are much more likely to seek online spaces that self-select for that identity. A fan forum for RuPaul’s Drag Race is maybe a safer place to come out and find community. And people tend to get very emotionally tied to these online spaces where they can be themselves.

Neiwert points out that the same phenomenon happens among privileged people who have identities that are devalued even as they’re not actually oppressed. Say, nerds, or conservatives in liberal towns, or men who don’t fit traditional notions of masculinity. They are also likely to deeply invest themselves in online spaces made for them. And if the Far Right can build such a community, or get a foothold in one that already exists, it is very easy to channel that sense of marginalization into Durden Syndrome. I connected this with Rebecca Lewis’ observation that the Alternative Influence Network tends to present itself as nerd-focused life advice first and politics second, and the long history of reactionaries recruiting from fandoms.

So I can see all the pieces of the abuse dynamic being recreated here: offer you something you need, estrange you from other perspectives and healthy relationships, overtake your life, and provoke emotional distress that makes you seek comfort only your abuser is offering. And I found a lot more parallels than what I’m sharing right now, I only have half an hour! But the thing that’s missing that’s usually central to such a system is, an abusive relationship orbits around the abuser, a cult around the cult leader, a totalitarian government around a dictator. They are built to serve the whims of an individual. But I look at the ad hoc nature of the Alt-Right and I have to ask: who is the architect?

I can see a lot of people profiting off of this structure; our current President rode it to great success, but he didn’t build it. It predates him. It’s more like Kimmel’s hate groups, which don’t promote an individual so much as a class of individuals, but, even then, their structure is much more deliberate, designed, where the Alt-Right seems almost improvised.

Well… one observation I took from Stein is that cult recruiters often rely on two different kinds of propaganda: the winding diatribe and the thought-terminating cliche. The diatribe is when someone talks at length, sounds smart, and seems to know what they’re talking about but isn’t actually making sense, and the thought-terminating cliche comes from Robert Jay Lifton’s studies into brainwashing. So, I went vegetarian in middle school, and, when I would tell other kids I was vegetarian, some would get kind of defensive and say things like, “humans aren’t meant to be vegetarian, it’s the food chain.” Now, saying “it’s the food chain” isn’t meant to be a good argument, it’s meant to communicate “I have said something so axiomatically true that the argument need not continue.” That’s a thought-terminating cliche; something that may not be true, but feels true and gives you permission to think about something else.

Both these techniques rely on what’s called Peripheral-Route Processing. So, I’m up here talking about politics, and, Solidarity Lowell, you are a group of politically-engaged people, so you probably have enough context to know whether I’m talking out of my ass. That’s Direct-Route Processing, where you judge the contents of my argument. But if I were up here talking about string theory, you might not know whether I was talking out of my ass because there’s only so many people on Earth who understand string theory. So then you might look at secondary characteristics of my argument: the fact that I’ve been invited to speak on string theory implies I know what I’m talking about; maybe I put up a lot of equations and drop the names of mathematicians and say they agree with me; maybe I just sound really authoritative. All that’s Peripheral-Route Processing: judging the quality of my argument by how it’s delivered.

Every act of communication involves both, but if you’re trying to sell people on something that’s fundamentally irrational, you’re going to rely heavily on Peripheral-Route tactics, which is what the winding diatribe and the thought-terminating cliche are.

I noted that these two methods mapped pretty cleanly onto the rhetorical stylings of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. But here’s the question: cults use these techniques to recruit people. But can I say with any confidence that Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro are trying to recruit people into the Alt-Right?

The thing is, “Alt-Right” isn’t a term like “klansman.” It’s more akin to a term like “modernism.” It’s a label applied to a trend. In the same way we debate the line between modernism and postmodernism, we debate the line between Right and Alt-Right. People don’t sign up to be in the Alt-Right, you are Alt-Right if you say you’re Alt-Right. But the nature of the Alt-Right is that 90% of them would never admit to it.

So are Peterson and Shapiro intentionally recruiting for the Alt-Right? Are they grifters merely profiting off of the Alt-Right? Are they even aware they’re recruiting for the Alt-Right? Part of my work has been accepting that you can’t know for sure. It would be naive to say they’re unaware; when they give speeches they get Nazis in their Q&A sections, and they know that. But how aware are they? I suspect Shapiro moreso than Peterson, but that’s just my gut talking and I can’t prove it. Like 90% of the Alt-Right, it’s debatable.

I don’t know if they’re trying to be part of this system, I just know they’re not trying not to be.

A final academic term before we say goodnight that’s been making the rounds among lefty YouTubers is “Stochastic Terrorism.” There’s a really great video about this by the channel NonCompete called The PewDiePipeline. Stochastic Terrorism is the myriad ways you can increase the likelihood that someone will commit violence without actually telling them to. You simply create an environment in which lone wolf violence becomes more acceptable and appealing. It mirrors the structure of terrorism without the control or culpability.

And I hear about this, and I look at this recruitment structure I see approximated in the Alt-Right, and I remember something I learned much earlier in my research, from Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarians. Altemeyer has been studying authoritarianism for decades, he has a wealth of data, and one thing he observes is that authoritarianism is the few exerting power over the many, which means there are two types of authoritarians: the ones who lead and the ones who follow. Turns out those are completely different personality profiles. Followers don’t want to be in charge, they want someone to tell them what to do, to say “you’re the good guys,” and put them in charge of punishing the bad guys. They don’t even care who the bad guys are; part of the appeal is that someone else makes that judgment for them.

So if you can encourage a degree of authoritarian sentiment in people, get them wanting nothing more than to be ensconced in a totalist system that will take their agency away from them, putting them in the orbit of an authoritarian leader, but no leader presents themself… can you just kind of… appoint one?

Like, if you don’t have a leader, can you just find yourself an authoritarian and treat him like one? And, if he doesn’t give you enough directives, can you just make some up? And, if you don’t have recruiters, can you find a conservative who speaks in thought-terminating cliches just because he thinks they win arguments; find a conservative who speaks in meaningless diatribes because he thinks he’s making sense; and then maneuver those speeches and videos in front of people you want to recruit? If you’re sick of waiting for Moses to come down the mountain with the Word of God, can you just build your own god from whatever’s handy?

Every piece of this structure, you can find people, algorithms, and arguments that, put in sequence, can generate Disorganized Attachment whether they’re trying to or not, which makes every part plausibly deniable. Debatable. You just need to make it profitable enough for the ones involved that they don’t fix it. This is a system created collaboratively, on the fly, with the help of a lot of people from hate movements past, mostly by throwing a ton of shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. The Alt-Right is a rapidly-mutating virus and the web is the perfect incubator; it very quickly finds a structure that works, and it’s a structure we’ve seen before, just a little weirder this time.

I’ve started calling this Stochastic Totalism.

Now, again, I’m not a professional researcher; I do my homework but I don’t have the background. I have an art degree. This isn’t something I can prove so much as a way I’ve come to look at the Alt-Right that makes sense to me and helps me understand them. And I got a lot of comments on my last video from people who used to be Alt-Right that echoed my assumptions. But don’t take it as gospel.

Mostly I wanted to share this because, if it can help you make sense of what we’re dealing with, I think it’s worth putting out there.

Thank you.

[kewltie]

"Where's no. 3?!" Katsuki demands, storming into the front office of Yavin Elementary.

"G-Ground Zero?" the receptionist squeaks, hand clutching her chest as though she's in a heartattack.

"Midoriya Hikaru," Katsuki snaps, stomping his way toward her. "Where the fuck is he?"

"I—we," she leans back in a little and breathes, "r-requested to talk Midoriya-san about Hikaru, sir," she says, attempting to regather her bearings once more.

"He's busy right now," Katsuki asserts, frowning, "so I'm here in his stead. Tell me what the problem is then."

"We would prefer to talk to a parental unit instead," she insists, steeling herself in the face of Katsuki's thinning impatient.

Katsuki glowers. "I'm his fucking guardian," he bites out. "The brat lives under my roof, shit in my toilet, chow down on my food, and hog my TV, so as far as I'm fucking concern he's as much mine as Deku’s!,” he finishes with a snarl.

"Um," she says, blinking hard.

Katsuki drags his face down his hand and sighs. "Look, you can just over your paperwork and see that I'm listed as one of the emergency contacts for him. Or,” he gives her a pointed glare, “you can talk to my fucking lawyers."

"I—I'll double check right away, sir," she says hurriedly, turning to her computer. Several minutes pass by as Katsuki waits with a growing agitation for her to confirm what he already knows. Thank fucking shit, he'd actually listened to Deku about getting listed on the kids’ emergency cards.

They're a fucking menace, so he should have known something would happen, but he'd given them at least a month, not a week into the new school year, that he would get that call. And for it to be Hikaru of all people and not his twin or eldest sister. That's the fucking shocking part.

"Zero-san?" the receptionist calls out to him. "I apologize for earlier. You're indeed correct, your name is listed as emergency contact for Hikaru," she says, picking up the office phone nearby. "I'll go ahead and call Okaye-sensei to let her know to bring Hikaru up right away."

And that take even longer several minutes, causing him to start pacing a hole in the floor with his rapidly depleting patience. Fucking hell.

He hears the click of heels and the slow familiar gait of Hikaru approaching from a distant before he even saw them. It makes him breathe a sigh of relief.

"Zero-san?" Okaye says, walking into the office with Hikaru's small hunched figure in tow. From the tilt in her voice she's as much as surprise of his appearance here as the receptionist was earlier. "I was honestly expecting Midoriya-san instead."

"He's not here right now, so you're stuck with me," Katsuki says dismissively, his only focus is the brat next to her. "No. 3?" He drops down on to the floor on one knee and opens his arms to Hikaru. "What the fuck happen to you, huh?"

Okaye frowns at his choice of language, but Hikaru quickly lights up at the sound of his voice and breaks away from her side to fall into his arms. "Kacchan," he wails, sniffing into Katsuki's shoulder.

"Hikaru got into a fight with another student from his class," she explains slowly.

Katsuki pauses, pushing him back to look at him over. He eyes Hikaru from head to toe, noticing the bruises running up both arms and the split lip on his kid. "Okay, tell me this at least: did you win and kick that other kid's ass?" he asks gravely, completely serious.

"Zero-san!" Okaye gasps in outrage.

Hikaru nods, gripping the sleeve of Katsuki's shirt in his bruised fist. Katsuki grins and reaches over to wipe away the tear tracks on Hikaru's wet cheeks. "Good, I knew you had it in you, No. 3," he says, pride thickening his voice as ruffles Hikaru's tangled mess of green hair.

"That's extremely improper," she argues. "We don't endorse that kind of behavior here."

"Yea?" he says, shooting a glare over Hikaru's shoulders toward Okaye. "Well, I didn't spent hours teaching my brat to fight back so he can let some snot nose little twat beat up him while you all watched and do absolute shit."

Okaye frowns. "Our academy does not condone bullying. We do our best to stop it before it happen."

"Then what do you call this?" Katsuki demands, carefully gripping Hikaru's shoulder and spins him around to show her the blotches of purple and blue on him. "I know No. 3. He's a good kid, he wouldn't start a fight but he'll finish them." He squeezes Hikaru's shoulder in reassurance. "You're lucky we even let him enrolled at this subpar academy, because you certainly don't know how to fucking take care of my kid properly."

Okaye goes red in the face. "That-that's such a baseless accusation! We take the utmost care of the all children at our academy, Hikaru included." She huffs, crossing her arms across her chest. "And besides Hikaru was the one who threw the first punch."

With a brow raised, Katsuki asks Hikaru, "Did you really?" Hikaru tilts his head back to look at him and nods again as he bites down on his lip. Understanding, right away, Katsuki continues to push, "What did that little shit do to you to make you wanna punch him?"

Hikaru looks down at his feet. He doesn't speak, so Katsuki waits, letting Hikaru decide when he's ready to talk or if he want to talk at all. Finally, Hikaru steps away from him, breaking contact only to turn around to face him properly with a dour expression on his face.

"H-he said I was the son of the devil," Hikaru mumbles, hands clenching by his side. "And that Papa was a bad person. A bad omega who mated with a villain and we, kids, were just as bad." Katsuki narrow his eyes as each devastating words pass Hikaru’s lips. “It made mad. I didn’t like the way he’d talked about Papa, Aki and Yuko-niichan like that,” he quietly admits.

"I hope you got more than a punch in on that kid," Katsuki says with every bit of sincerity that he can carry. "Because I would have pummeled him into the fucking ground and beat some more senses into him."

Okaye makes a noise of protest. "Zero-san, we don't—"

Katsuki's eyes flash to her with a hostile glare. "Shut your mouth, I don't want to hear any more of your bullshit excuses," he snarls. "Right now, I'm talking to my kid, so don't fucking interrupt us."

She reels back, face drawn tight in defense, but she wisely chooses to hold her tongue lest she test the infamous temper of Japan’s number one Pro-Hero Ground Zero that had landed more than one villain in the intensive care.

Katsuki turns his attention back to the more important matter at hand. Hikaru's shoulders are hunched over and his eyes are wary with hesitance. Ever since some rat ass bastard managed to leak the kids' face and names to the media, publicly linking them to the trashcan who donated the other half of their DNA, Izuku had been afraid of this moment. He didn’t want the brats to be exposed to the hostile reality of being the spawn of a villain and what the world thought about that.

Katsuki wasn't worry. Not really, he knows Yuko and Akira. They'll be fine.

It's Hikaru he is more careful about. He's too soft, too sweet, and too hurt easily for that kind of stigma he’ll have to live with when people eventually found out that his piece of trash other parent is a mastermind criminal, who'd menaced society for the last decade; the deathtoll number in hundreds, but those affected by his crimes are thousands.

Adults naturally shitty human being, but children can be way worst with their ignorance and youth. Katsuki would know, he was one himself before UA beat it out of him and made him better for it. "You want me to have a little talk with the twerp?" Katsuki muses, fingers flexing.

Teaching troublesome brats is way beneath his paygrade, but he’ll make an exception for Hikaru and only Hikaru; he can count on Hikaru’s sisters having no problem resolving their own issues. Yuko is a goddamn terror, and Akira can easily wipe the floor with kids who are even older than her.

Hikaru shakes his head. "I don't like fighting," he says quietly. "I just wanted him to stop saying mean things about Papa and my sisters." He looks earnestly at Katsuki as something akin to fear flash across his face. "Do you think Papa will be mad at me?" He wrings his hands anxiously in front of him.

Katsuki thinks of Izuku on that specific day: standing tall, shoulders straight, and with his kids huddled closely around him as he watched his alpha, husband, the father of his children, getting drag away in quirk suppression collar and cuffs. He didn't look away. Not one bit.

It took more than fucking guts to turn his back to his mate of over a decade and reported him to the authority for being a sack of villainous shit. Especially, when there were three children still under his care to think about, but he did it without a single drop of hesitation. He didn’t regret it at all.

It was stone fucking cold.

Even with all the heroes around them, even with Katsuki there, it didn't take much for Katsuki to clearly see how Izuku was easily the strongest and bravest soul there. Omega and quirkless, they were all just a footnote to Izuku's character. They did not define him. Not then, not now, and never will.

Katsuki smirks, leaning down to pinch Hikaru's cheek who puffs up his cheek indignantly. It’s cute as hell. "Disappointed sure, but mad? Nah," he says. "That would make him a fucking hypocrite otherwise. Didn't you know when he was younger Deku used to get into all sort of trouble and fight."

Hikaru's eyes widen. "He did?!"

"Yea," Katsuki's lip twitch in amusement, "you're a shit stirrer like you're good old Papa. And," he reaches for Hikaru's hand, "even if that wasn't the case, I got your back. The world could be against you and I'll still stand by your side."

Hikaru's face crunches up as though he's in pain. "K-Kaaaaaachan," he wails, but this time it's a river of happy tears as he slams his small body right up against Katsuki's legs and wraps his arm around him. "Y-You," hiccups, "mean it?"

"Yea, I wouldn't bullshit you, brat." Rolling his eyes as Hikaru happily sobs into his pant legs, Katsuki comments, "God, you're a crier just like Deku, alright.” But there's no bite to it as he pats Hikaru's back consolingly. He’s not Deku who can easily comfort the brats from nightmares and scary things that bump in the night, but if they need someone to protect them from the brutality of the world? They have Katsuki’s fists to protect them.

He casts an askance glance at Okaye. "I'll be taking him home early for the day," he tells her point blank.

Okaye actually has the audacity to look relief as though his brat was the problem in the first place. "I think that is a wise decision to make, Zero-san."

Katsuki pulls Hikaru back enough to lean down and hitches his hands underneath the boy's armpits. He lifts Hikaru up and hikes him over his hip. "Let's go get you some ice cream, but don't tell your Papa about it," he says.

Hikaru tucks a small smile in Katsuki's chest.

Just as they about to depart and Okaye is finally free of them at last, probably wishing she took a leave of absent today, they hear loud footsteps hitting the floor beyond the walls of the office. It's so loud that even Hikaru raises his head from Katsuki's chest in interest.

"Akira, you can't go in there!" someone loudly protest from outside. "Wait until Okaye-sensei is done talking and she'll call you in."

"You’ve been saying that for the last ten minutes. I'm not waiting around anymore!" a familiar voice argues back. "Let me see my brother!"

The back door to the front office is flung open to reveal a young girl who looks like an exact copy of Hikaru, except for the green insolent eyes and razor sharp tongue, and a taller tired adult trailing behind her.

Katsuki lets out a long exhale as Akira strolls in unprompted. Here is the real troublemaker. His small tyrant.

"Hikaru!" she says as soon her eyes zeroing in her brother right away, not even acknowledging Katsuki who has him in his arms. "I was so worried about you!"

"Aki," Hikaru returns excitedly back.

"Are you alright?" she coos, walking up to them. "Let me have a good look at you."

Katsuki gently lets Hikaru down and places him right in front of Akira. She immediately jumps on him as soon as his feet hit the floor, carefully looking over every cut and bruise she found on her brother, while happily ignoring Katsuki like he's just a rock on the road. He’s not even surprise at her insolent. Yuko is cooly polite, while Akira is so foul mouth and crass that sometimes he has a hard time thinking how Izuku managed to produce her, but her green eyes and hair are all Izuku’s.

Then, he remembers why she’s exactly like this.

"I'm sorry, Okaye-sensei," the woman who came with Akira says. "I tried to stop her but she was, very," she makes a pained face, "insistent."

Okaye heaves a sigh in acknowledgement. "Akira," she says warily the latest troublemaker. "Please refrain from breaking the school's property and causing a disturbance on the school grounds."

"Y'all rich as hell, so you'll be fine," she answers dismissively, not even looking back at her. Or at Katsuki either.

Here’s the thing: Midoriya Akira is self-proclaimed Ground Zero’s number one fan. She’d watched all his videos, tune into all his battles, and had all his merch. She absolutely adores him and tries her best to imitate her idol Ground Zero, but it’s a different story when Zero’s mask is removed and Katsuki is the one standing in front of her.

Okaye cuts to Katsuki with a drained expression on her face. "This child," she mumbles under her breath in pure annoyance and exhaustion, giving over to Katsuki to handle her now.

Katsuki grabs a hold of Hikaru's arm and pulls him back from Akira's attentive care. It's enough to finally catch her attention as her green eyes narrow and flashes toward him with open derision. He drags Hikaru close him as a hostage and prepares for the bloody battle ahead.

"What are you doing here, No. 2?" Katsuki demands with suspicion. "You should be in class."

"What the hell are you doing here, Kacchan? You should be out patrolling," Akira retorts back, and when he just glares at her, she scoffs before raising her bruised knuckles proudly.

"She kick started a brawl in the middle of the classroom and got the entire class involve,” the woman behind Akira answers for her, entirely too weary and vexed—which is the norm when dealing with Midoriya Akira. She’s abrasive and prickly as porcupine, but only those that are close to her does she soften up. “Several students had to be sent to the infirmary afterward.”

"I had to prove my dominance at the top of the pack," Akira announces proudly, who has none of Izuku's sweet temperament but all of his reckless diehard attitude that had sent more than one alpha packing with their tail behind their back. "Now, they won't bother Hikaru anymore."

Feeling a headache coming on, Katsuki glares at Akira. "What the hell, No. 2?" he demands. "Deku is going to flip his shit when not just one of his fucking brats got into a fight but two? And you even pick a fight with your entire class for that matter?!"

Akira pouts. “But you told me that if I want to protect my family I have to be strong, stronger than everyone else so that nobody can hurt them anymore,” she says sulkily. “I had to assert my power somehow!”

“I didn’t mean that you should start a one man war against everyone!” Katsuki snaps, exasperated. Akira got all that bravado, but none of that keen intellect of her older sister, Yuko.

Akira, whose bulldogged nature is more akin to Katsuki because blood be damned, that occasionally he forget whose daughter she actually is, but it's time like this when her eyes start to water and her lips wobble precariously, hands trembling at her side as the dam break, that he’s reminded how like Izuku she truly is.

"I-I didn't do anything wrong," she insists doggedly with eyes leaking a goddamn waterfall because she inherit Izuku's fucking cursed tears.

"Ah, fuck," Katsuki says warily. "Don't cry, No. 2."

"I'm not crying!" she yells back as another tear track rolls down her cheek.

Unlike Hikaru who openly cried like he's vomiting his emotions all over the place until he's emptied out, Akira is much more tightly wound up as though she's a densely packed ordnance that can go off at any moment and when she explode, everything give away to anger and hurt.

Katsuki sighs, dragging his hand down his face. He's trained professional who not only kick criminals' ass on regular basis but deal with plenty of crises. Hell, he'd even saved the country a few times in the past years or so but this—? Hardest fucking thing ever. Nothing can prepare him for the trial and tribulations of parenthood.

He doesn't know how Izuku does this on a regular basis especially when he's wrangling all these kids alone without any help from his dirtbag ex-husband and still managed to pull it all off like a true champion. A damn boss. Izuku can put Katsuki and his colleagues to fucking shame. Because this feel like disaster management 101 and he's failing spectacularly at it with the way the brats' teachers are looking at him like he's a giant disappointment because he's the asshole who made his kid cry in public.

"Akira," Hikaru says worriedly, stepping forward.

The line of his shoulders dips as his head bends low and Katsuki knows the sign well enough. They're twin. Creepily in sync and deeply emphatic of each other's pain. One crying kid is enough, but two? At the same time too? That’s fucking insane. He’ll leave that to Izuku.

Katsuki moves quickly to grab Hikaru by the shoulder and sets him in place. “Stay,” he orders, and without looking back, walks up to a sulking teary eyes Akira who looks like she would bite his head off if he get any closer.

"What you want," she snaps, sniffling hard.

Wordlessly, he drops down to her level. It's an even playing field here. Katsuki may know shit about kids overall but he knows his brats and Akira hates being patronize. He would know because she's like him in a lot of ways.

He extends a hand toward her; a peace offering.

She glares at the gesture like she can burn a whole in it. She doesn't move. Doesn't even respond to it, but he waits anyway. Katsuki doesn't have a lot of patience for anyone else but for Izuku and the brats, he'd learned it the hard way. In a series of trail and errors.

A minute pass by. Then two. Three. Four. Five, and then Akira's wall of defiance and anger softens just slightly enough for her to gingerly take his hand and he pulls her right into his chest, arms wrapping around her in forceful hug that leaves her no room to change her mind.

“Sorry,” he murmurs against her ear. “I shouldn’t have raised my voice at you. That was mean of me.”

She snorts. “I don’t care,” she tells him, dropping her head on to his shoulder as her hand tightens around the front of his shirt that says otherwise. “It was your ugly face that made me cried anyway.”

He doesn’t laugh, because he doesn’t want her to punch him, but it’s a near thing. Kids, they’re going to be the death of him. Thrice over.

[whiskeyworen]

“...it sounds like blood. And something else. Dunno how to describe the other thing. But it gives me shivers.” She told Cyrus as plainly as she could. It was a little hard to focus, looking at this ‘costume’ of his. Novni didn’t know what a ‘costume’ was. Without another word, she went somewhere else. There was a wall in her way, but she fixed that. She made sure not to remove it, of course. They had all asked very nicely for her not to ‘erase’ walls. And to use doors. Oh. Whoops. She glanced back as the rift she walked through closed, the squealing, screaming blackness fading away to reveal the bulkhead behind her. Novni realized she’d forgotten to find a door and use it. She had just done the usual and did the thing and walked from one room to another. Oh well. She would remember for next time. She had made a promise to her friends she would try. Novni didn’t recognize the room, but it was full of different clothes and stuff. Some of it was ornate. Some was ragged. Was this a storage room or a closet? Is this where the ‘shipment’ for the ‘theater group’ was? Whatever both those things were? Her friends used so many strange terms. She just didn’t care for them. Without debating whether she should or not, she took a few items. She traded her top for a sleeker one, with sleeve-y things. In exchange, she left her old top. That’s how it worked, right? You traded things for other things? She was about to leave when she saw a hood on a hanger. It was....cute. Yes, that was the word. Cute. Had little kitty ears, like Cyrus’s pet. Or that big Verula person. With a wave of her hand, a spectral claw brought it from across the room to her. The color was wrong; too bright. Another wave of her hand changed the color; she pulled the bright out of it, leaving a nice, quiet purple. She liked purple. The room felt empty now, so she left it, stepping into a new rift in the floor and reappearing in the Grove below. For some reason, the Aspect was parked there, instead of Lion’s Arch -- where Cyrus had said he was going ‘to have fun’ or something like that. Novni wanted to go to Lion’s Arch. She had been told she wasn’t supposed to go out alone, for reasons the others never explained and that she never cared to ask. But.... Cyrus was in Lion’s Arch, so if she went there, she wouldn’t be ‘alone’, right? He’d be in the city, and she’d be in the city, so it’d be like he was right there with her... right? The logic made sense, at least to her. She knew where the portal to Lion’s Arch was, and headed for it, ignoring the stares of the other sylvari; Wardens recognizing her, while most of the others did double-takes, since they couldn’t sense her through the connection to the Dream. Novni had heard Moryggan refer to it as ‘feeling like a ghost just went by’ when referring to her, and that was oddly pleasant to her. She didn’t mind.

Lion’s Arch was big. Very big. But it was also very open. It wasn’t tightly packed like Skrittsburg. Or all curvy and plant-y like the Grove was. It was...neat. There were pumpkins everywhere. She was going to ask someone about it, when she saw a weird man carving faces into one. He’d noticed her, and grinning broadly, slid a tall, thin pumpkin across his little table towards her. “Go ahead, little one! Carve into their flesh! Make the fears and demons within appear within the gourd! I’ll even lend you my flensing knife!” “I have a knife.” She said, pulling her long, razor-edged blade off her side. With surgical precision, she carved. For long minutes, she carved, and carved, and carved. Rind and pumpkin flesh fell from her victim in swirls and paper-thin layers. Finally, she finished, and stepped back. “There. Is that good?” The man with the grin reached over and gave the pumpkin a spin, until the section she carved faced him. He looked at her work... and stared. The grin, that manic grin, began to slide off his face. He leaned closer, his eyes wide and bright, darting back and forth over the carving. Without looking, he reached out and plucked a lit candle from the small mass of lit candles on the edge of the table. In one move, he opened the top of the pumpkin with his knife and stuck the candle inside, and then stared at what she’d made. Both hands, shaking, carefully and reverently held the pumpkin. It was a good while before he turned his gaze over to her, looking upon this petite, eerie sylvari with a look that mingled absolute terror -- and gratified elation. “.....This is the most wonderous thing I have ever seen. May I have it?” Novni shrugged, more interested in the change that had come over him than in keeping the pumpkin. “When my Mad King shows up, I shall present it to him.” The man said, his voice shuddering with terror. “I cannot possibly describe this....etching... but my dear child, I think you understand Halloween deeper than anyone I have ever encountered...” She tipped her head to the side. “....I don’t know Halloween. What is it?” That left him dumbstruck. All he could do was point to the big, boiling green cauldron across the plaza, and watch as she left, her bare feet making almost no sound against the courtyard tiles.

“Halloween. What is it?” Novni asked the strange woman by the cauldron. She was the only one people seemed to be avoiding. Perhaps it was because of the fresh, dripping blood coating her mouth and chin? Or was it her black eyes? “Oh, how lovely! A first timer!” Acreni crooned, leaning down to examine the pale sylvari. She grinned, revealling a set of familiar fangs. “Are you perhaps interested in joining the Lunatic Court, little one? I don’t believe we’ve had a Sylvari join our kind yet!” She rubbed her chin, the blood seeping into her gloves. “...on the off chance, do you have an aversion to blood? Gore? Violence? How mentally stable are you, child? I won’t endorse anyone who claims to be Sane.” “I don’t care.” Novni replied with a mild shrug. “I think I’m sane, but can I actually say that and be sane?” Acreni’s smile came back. “Very true! To be sane, you must be judged sane by those around you! To be insane....is to be of the Court!” She laughed, and placed a hand on her shoulder. She leaned in, so close that Novni could smell the coppery scent on her breath and coming from her clothes. “Tell me... are you by chance alone? It’s not safe to be alone during my King’s season.” Novni’s nose crinkled at the smell of the blood. Not because it was blood. Just because it was so strong. Gross. “I’m not alone. I’m here with Cyrus. He’s... in the Labyrinth.” The Lunatic noble blinked her black eyes, straightening up. “Cyrus? As in ‘Cyrus; Tenna’s friend’? Lovely little Tenna? You’re one of her friends?” Novni nodded simply, her cat hoodie wobbling. Acreni’s expression shifted to something almost soft, and she gently turned the sylvari girl around, guiding her through the crowds. “Any friend of Tenna’s is a friend of the Court. It truly is not safe for novices, here, child. But let us go to the Labyrinth, and find your friends. We shall have ‘fun’ there, and between the three of us we will teach you of the wonders of Halloween, and the glory of the Mad King Thorn.” And with that, Novni’s first Halloween truly began.

[ipictureitsoftandiache]

"warren selling out and throwing the progressive movement under the bus and irreparably damaging her reputation" Not trying to shame you, but stop getting your information from the misogynist left. Look at Biden's policies, not just the platform but the actual policies on his website. They are further to the left than any Democratic nominee in history thanks to Elizabeth Warren. It's really sad to see you buy into the misogyny.

baby the only reason i hold any venom for elizabeth warren is that i used to admire her before she walked back on a lot of the policies she started her campaign with, like her vow to not take superPAC $ and her once unwavering support of truly universal healthcare. the fact that biden’s policies are “further to the left than any democratic nominee in history” isn’t really a selling point, considering the democratic party is still a fundamentally right-wing institution. despite their alleged opposition to the RNC, the DNC still represents a status quo that has led to the deaths of over 165k americans. “going back to normal” is not an option when normal means millions of americans live paycheck to paycheck, without access to adequate healthcare — that “normal” is how we got here in the first place.

you’ll have to forgive me for my lack of enthusiam for biden’s “progressive” policies. i care more about what politicians actually do with the power they yield, not what they say to pander to voters before elections. it’s nice that joe biden has promised to champion racial justice — that doesn’t change the fact that he helped write the 1994 “tough on crime” bill that terrorizes communities of color (particularly black ones) to this day. it’s all well and good joe is outraged by the inhumane treatment of undocumented immigrants from the global south — that doesn’t change that he served in the cabinet of a president who deported more immigrants than any president in us history (even more than trump), who did, in fact, “lock people in cages,” despite what joe claims, who built those cages in the first place. of course, joe has now pivoted to calling those deportations a big mistake, and i can’t hold biden entirely accountable for the actions of a man he only served under. but you’re gonna have to understand why i, a latinx person, don’t trust him as far as i can throw him. you’ll have to excuse me for not creaming myself over biden’s proposals. obama promised things too. that’s what politicians do. they promise things. i think it’s fair for me to be wary of promises made by people who have in the past proven themselves to be untrustworthy.

as for the “misogynistic left” claim — are you under the impression that i’m a “bernie bro” or something? i’m not. i’m far to the left of bernie, and i’ve been very open about that. bernie, despite being to the left of most of his colleagues, is still a capitalist (albeit a different type), and i am an anticapitalist. i have no qualms about critiquing bernie (which i’m also open about), or any politician for that matter.

which brings me back to my earlier statement. do you want to know why i have so little respect for warren? because i used to hold any in the first place. i don’t speak about buttigieg or klobuchar the same way i speak about warren because i never had any faith in them to begin with. i knew they weren’t allies, but i thought warren was. hell, a few weeks before super tuesday, i told a warren phonebanker that called me that, while i’d be voting for sanders in the primaries, i’d gladly support warren if she were the candidate. i was willing to overlook how she left water protectors at standing rock out to dry (despite claiming indigenous ancestry for a good chunk of her life), or how she supported the sanctions on iran (though she seems to have changed course on this and called for sanctions to be lifted, which, good on her). but then, warren shifted from joining forces with sanders to push progressive policies (which i openly delighted in, if you saw me post about it) to pushing back against progressive policies (like medicare for all) in favor of the more “pragmatic.” she then went on to not endorse sanders during the primaries, being very loudly silent in her refusal to support a progressive candidate that she initially closely aligned with in his race against a segregationist rapist, because she (admittedly probably correctly) considered the political risk to be too great. i’m not an idiot. i know that’s just the name of the game. it still angered (and continues to anger) me.

and that brings me back to the whole misogyny thing — it’s kinda bullshit that i can’t hold politicians accountable for their actions without being decried as a misogynist. you can’t pick and choose the times i criticize politicians you like and claim i’m secretly a bigot. actually, it’s kind of ridiculous, considering my refusal to play into critiques of warren that are misogynistic, like her being shrill or manipulative (in a way that is notable and that differs from the way politicians are normally manipulative, because we live in a society). i honestly gave warren the benefit of the doubt for a long time specifically because she’s a woman, and nitpicking her over her infinitely worse male colleagues would’ve been counterproductive. like, i literally made a post about it. claiming i’m being misogynistic for critiquing warren is deflection. do i think warren is a sellout? yeah, i do. i think sanders is, too. i’ve been open about this, whether you’ve seen it or not.

i’m sorry you’re disappointed in me. my opinion of warren has not changed in the slightest. i’m not gonna flood her mentions with snake emojis, but i’m also not gonna get on my knees and kiss her feet. she is not my messiah. no politician is. i think you and i deserve better than whatever crumbs the DNC wants to throw us. we deserve truly progressive policy, not “more progressive than usual” policy. a little better is not good enough. i don’t think we should settle for “slightly less terrible.” i’ve been doing that ever since i first began forming my own politics, and it hasn’t done anyone any good. i’m tired of this “incremental change” bullshit. i’m going to hold politicians’ feet to the fire, because we (their constituents) are the ones being burned. politicians exist to serve us. not the other way around.

[bbq-hawks-wings]

Series Review Pt. 1/3

So, this isn’t even a YouTube video where you have the advantage of hearing a voice over a recording with snappy editing to lighten the mood or convey feeling; but believe me that there was a lot of earnest sincerity put into the review this time around.

But before I put the rest of it under the cut, there are some corrections/clarifications I want to put down about my last review that I believe we're significant shortcomings on my part. 

My first, and probably most MAJOR goof was my choice of words in trying to describe the scene with Hawks and Twice at the end of 263 - “ he clearly hasn’t killed Twice yet, and we don’t know why, but if he has to he’s prepared to do so without hesitation or remorse.”

BIG OOF. I hadn’t even been looking much at others’ opinions and the common-enough impression that Hawks doesn’t care about Twice at all/is incapable of empathy/ONLY concerned with his mission from the Commission. When I looked back at my own review, though I didn’t have any indication anyone believed I was one of those people (“without remorse” being the problematic phrase in question), I could easily see how others could get the impression and decided to wait until the next review to do a better job instead of just saying I would. My views on that particular scene will be clear later on, but at least that’s out of the way in case that was keeping people from reading this in the first place.

Second, I failed to arrange my observation points in a more ideal order. If anything, the fact that we were seeing that last page from Twice’s perspective should have been the first point. This mistake made it sound like a neutral assessment of the situation instead of an observation through the context of Jin's feelings. This ended up confusing even myself, as someone who usually writes these reviews solo, into forgetting to factor in that Twice's perspective may be warping the perception of Hawks guarding him into one of intent to kill while forgetting that the Hero Code forbids killing others unless it's truly a necessary last resort. For some reason, Sad Man's Parade and Twice's two-double limit also slipped my mind which brings me to the last point.

Third, I rushed things. When I rush, I make mistakes, sometimes pretty sloppy ones. It has been a ROUGH couple of weeks to be a Hawks or villain stan, even more so if you’re both, so for some reason I felt like I needed to get my thoughts out there quickly. I don’t have any kind of real incentive to do so other than a faster response - I don’t make any money off this, don’t have any relevance algorithm to feed as if I was on YouTube or Twitter, and I’m not the only half-decently known blog to hold these opinions so I don’t know what I was thinking. That’s my problem, but that doesn’t mean I have to make it anyone else’s.

For complete transparency, I’ve been reading and re-reading through the entire series canon again, starting with Hawks’ manga debut, and reviewing the entire series’ events and in-universe history, and have been taking literal whole pages of notes and drafts since Thursday the 12th. I’m glad I did because it brought to mind things that often get left out of pockets of fandom discussion who hyper-focus on their circles of interest while forgetting that each individual section is meant to work with the whole.

That’s what we’ll be working with today, and additional thanks goes to  @baezetsu and @dorito9708 for volunteering as proofreaders and editors to make this more focused and concise. If you’re interested please keep reading. A fair warning, this is what we in the professional field call a “long-ass post, no seriously guys grab a drink and a snack we’re gonna be here a while.” It's actually so long I have to split it up into parts because Tumblr Mobile is stupid and doesn't like making the "read more" function available to the mobile version.

So here we go, people, let’s try this again one last time…

Where we’re at in Chapter 264 (or at least, you know, ignoring literally everyone in the series that isn’t these two) is Twice and Hawks’ confrontation in the study room; but let’s put a pin in that for now and come back.

The biggest piece of information to keep in mind is that even though both these characters are currently front-and-center and have major plot and symbolic value in the series, they are still not the main characters. Their conflict is also not the central conflict. Let’s zoom out to the big picture and see what happens when we put everything together at the end.

The whole inciting incident of the series is when humanity began to display superhuman abilities in a few random individuals. These abilities are neither inherently good or bad - they are constantly intended as neutral with the potential being dependent on the user. Eventually these abilities began to be collectively termed as “quirks” - literally just a single facet of each person’s unique identity. From a social commentary standpoint, quirks have been used as a narrative stand-in for the unique situational circumstances or combinations of circumstances individuals may find themselves with that are either mostly or completely outside of their control like aptitude, physical ability, race/appearance, mental state, and inherited societal station. While more of these examples have been explicitly stated and inserted into the story later on, quirks still serve as the main catalyst and lens by which these topics are discussed.

Because of the initially new and unfamiliar nature of these abilities, people who possessed them faced descrimination and persecution despite having no say in whether or not they had them; and some who did possess these abilities began abusing their power. Taking advantage of this, a man calling himself One-for-All took unwanted quirks from people and redistributed them claiming to want to help others and bring about peace but merely wished to amass power and a following for his own gain. Morally upright individuals eventually rose to the occasion and placed themselves between innocent bystanders and evildoers, earning no official reward or compensation for their work, though eventually they became so effective that they became recognized and endorsed if they went through proper governmental training and channels. These endorsed specialty crime fighters came to be dubbed “heroes.”

All-For-One had risen to prominence by this point and his loyal following actively supported him in his now blatant criminal empire despite the morally reprehensible actions he committed which incessantly terrorized innocent bystanders - earning him the title Symbol of Evil or Symbol of Fear. Eventually a hero named All Might rose up to specifically deal with All-For-One’s reign of terror, having worked his way up from obscurity taking down criminals and saving civilians in unprecedented numbers, determined to create a world where everyone could feel safe in the face of danger. Though only succeeding in beating AFO into hiding All Might ushered in a new era of safety and prosperity earning him the title Symbol of Peace.

Therein lies the central message - “It’s not the situation you’re given that determines your worth or potential but what you choose to do with it” - and the main conflict is - “I want to use what I’ve been given for my own benefit" vs "I want to use what I’ve been given for others.” Deku and Shiguraki are merely the next generation iteration of this conflict distilled down to their simplest essence. Deku's desire is to save anyone who needs help the moment he realizes they need it. Shiguraki wants to remove people's sense of security regardless of their character or situation. 

This conflict is initially framed as simple - a clear black and white/good and bad dynamic that’s easy to see from a distance; but as characters and groups developed over time it’s become more and more difficult to tell the two sides apart. It was not a coincidence that immediately after introducing the clear-as-day bad guys to the series we were presented with the idea that who we perceived to be “good guys” could be bad people doing good things or that people could do good things for the wrong reasons when we were presented with the personal conflicts that Bakugo, Shinsou, and Todoroki all faced at the Sports Festival that were either their internal struggles with the way the were perceived by others or were their personal struggles with the way they perceived themselves. Immediately after that, we were introduced to Stain's criticism of modern heroes and shown who would come to be the core members of the League of Villains.

At the current events in the series we’ve waded through so many shades of grey we’re expected to determine who’s a “hero” and “villain” not by what they say but what they do, how they do it, and why they do it. The individual members of the League of Villains touch on various ways a person might be driven to a life dedicated either to the pursuit of personal satisfaction with no concern to others or to the active pursuit of destroying others, and generally the villains are some of the most morally gray characters we have in the series, though not all of them - the two most notable morally gray “good guys” are Hawks and Endeavor.

There’s one last thing to note about how the series chooses to distinguish morally gray characters as “good” and “bad,” and that ultimately boils down to the choices they make with the hand they are dealt - that being to help or to harm others. This is not quite the same thing as a “hero” and a “villian” (I know, as if it wasn’t confusing enough), but the series has now gone to great lengths to make a clear distinction between the ideals of heroism and the institution of heroism.

Looking at the difference in institutions and ideals as the series presents them we get a better picture of the actual core issues the series seeks to address. The institution of heroism is a utilitarian approach to maintaining a sense of order and safety, and it does so by incentivising people to resolve as many public altercations as possible in exchange for wealth and fame. Criminals are those who break the law regardless of the motivation for the crime or its degree of impact. The institution does not take into account factors that may drive someone to commit a crime nor is it concerned with the core motivations of those enforcing the sense of order.

On the opposite hand, the ideal of heroism offers no reward, no recognition, may require some amount of suffering on the part of the hero, and never guarantees that the victim in question will be saved. Conversely, villainy/evil is any action taken for one's own gain with zero regard to the impact on others and/or is any action committed with malicious intent. These definitions are about moral obligation and human to human connection.

While having a strong correlation (helping others because it's right usually helps the majority in the long run, and doing harm is often ultimately bad for the majority) these two schools of thought are able to function independently of each other. In other words, a criminal can be a good person fallen on hard times (like stealing food to feed their family, but only as much as they need from someone who won’t notice it missing) while a “professional hero” can be an evil person doing good things for the wrong reasons (like obsessing over gaining wealth and popularity with no mind to collateral damage they may cause). Most characters are categorized and even described in-universe as morally aligning with the institution they associate with; but several have been explicitly noted as exceptions to the rule such as Gentle Criminal and La Brava, Endeavor, and Twice. 

Are we properly confused yet? Great, because there’s one more layer to consider! What do we make of someone who is trying to do a good thing (like saving as many people as possible from a known threat) but to do so has to make a choice that might leave a few people in the fire? Which outcome do we use to decide if this is a good person or a bad one? Do we judge based on intent or on the outcome?

Now we zoom back in to Hawks and Twice, but we’ll pick that up in Part Two.

Part Three