#Light does a bunch of fake propaganda | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

frostyreturns · 11 months ago

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All those words and not a single cogent point. Was considering just ignoring this becaue not a single word of it warrants a response because it's just a bunch of smug seething and coping and anyone retarded enough to still believe in the moon landing will never be convinced, and I unfollowed you a long time ago because of seeing a long pattern of disingenuous bad faith arguments but fuck it I'll reply just this once for the sake of other more rational people who might see it.

1.) wearing a lead apron to get an x ray and passing through earths massive belt of radiation is the same thing apparently. NASA scientists have admitted to not having the technology to get humans safely through the radiation this video isn't even the first time either. And for those claiming that what he's saying is they can't get the sensors safely through while turned on but they got through with them turned off...That's bullshit NASA has claimed that back in the 60's they had the technology to get humans through but that technology has been lost and they can no longer do it. And then expanded on this point by describing why it's not currently possible to get people through the radiation safely. Your own sources undermine their own position because they are liars and have trouble keeping track of all the lies but sure you wear a lead vest at the dentist so that's the same thing.

2.) Nobody misunderstood what you were saying about Russia you smug faggot but I guess when you sound like this much of a dipshit you have to really reach for a reason to act intellectually superior. You were making a veyr stupid argument that claimed that since the ussr did not publicly denounce and debunk the american space landing it must mean it was real. I used that completely inane argument as a jumping off point for the fact that in Russia among the russian peoples it's not even a question that the moon landing was faked. Without the constant propaganda and the desire to believe in it they mostly came to the correct conclusion that it was all a bunch of fake horseshit. You see in conversation not everything is a point by point rebut and some words are ignored because they are stupid and used as a jumping off point for another point.

3.) I like how you post links and admit that the government and their space programs lie and cover up accidents and disasters...but this one specific one that hurts your argument has no evidence for it. This is what you delusional conspiracy ignorers always do, you just ignore evidence and claim there's no evidence. I like how you're not willing to believe the moon landing is a hoax with all the very good arguments supporting it... but are immediately willing to dismiss evidence you've never seen as a hoax because it would hurt your argument. I've heard the audio and even if I could find it again and post it it wouldn't matter because you've already decided its faked before hearing it....see what rational people do is they wait to see evidence and then make up their mind about it....like I did when I used to believe in the moon landing then saw the footage and realized oh that's fake as shit.

4.) You ignore my point about the astronauts being on wires and deflect to a bizarre point about the sand. look as he walks past the set lighting it briefly illuminates the stage wires, which you can see here. watching this moment in the video makes it more clear because you see the entirety of the wire through a few frames

Before you go claiming it's an antenna or other part of the suit here is seconds before that image

nothing visible because it's not yet been exposed by the lighting.

It's weird you mention the sand because I actually meant to use that to support my point that the dust/sand w.e is behaving like it does on earth and does not at all look like how it would behave in a vacuum or in a lesser gravity environment. Not sure how you look at that and think that's not how walking on sand looks like on earth because it does. It looks like they just poured sand on the set and tromped through it. It's wild that all it takes is someone telling you that's not how sand works on earth and people just believe it even though they've seen sand on earth. Like bro did you really just say sand that gets kicked up stays in the air in an atmosphere. Where are these floating sand beaches you go to they sound wild.

5.) People picking up tv signals with antenna is not proof of the moon landing, and nobody is debating the existence of sattellites and sattelite dishes.

6.) nobody is claiming they wouldn't be heavy cumbersome and unnatural we're claiming they are moving on wires both because the movement matches that notion perfectly and because I can fucking see the wires.

7.) I'm not mistaking my opinion for fact I'm calling a spade a spade, you're mistaking your blind trust in authority for fact something all delusional conspiracy deniers do. You want to believe in it so you're choosing to see what you want and choosing not to see what you don't want. I have no dog in the fight, I used to believe in the moon landing and because I didn't care one way or the other I reached the conclusion that made the most sense based on what I was seeing. Which is that it's fake and gay as fuck.

Repeat the lies often enough and people will believe them. 🤔

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rockyjulesxx · 2 years ago

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the correct marauders & co. head cannons pt. 2

Lily Evans

bisexual icon. uses she/her pronouns but does not correct someone if they use something else because even though she loves womenhood and feels connected to femininity, she doesn’t really care about gender.

raging activist. this is seen through her style because even though she dresses very light in pastels and soft skirts and dresses, all of her tote bags have activist propaganda sewn onto them.

she knits all of her hats and sweaters and makes a bunch for remus too.

she loves her light cottage core aesthetic, but she also heavily delves into grunge styles.

she has long wavy red hair, styled with curtain bangs.

she’s plus sized and loves showing off her tummy.

freckles <3

she has some light patch work tattoos that aren’t very noticeable across her body.

she has beautifully sculpted eyebrows that are frequently complemented upon, and has rich forest green eyes that james won’t shut up about.

shes 5”3-5”6 in height but will stomp on you with her chunky heels.

lily is welsh and loves talking to remus in their shared native tongue.

Marlene McKinnon

RAGING LESBIAN.

loves her punk style constantly says “it wasn’t a phase mom.”

she has platinum blonde dyed hair that she purposely let’s her natural hair peak through at the roots. it’s roughly shopped just above her shoulders with bangs.

has a medusa piercing along with many others and tattoos.

wears an excess amount of rings and eyeliner.

docs everyday all day with leatherjackets she steals from sirius’s closet and decorates with her own patches and buttons.

shes 5”6-5”9 in height (constantly tries to gaslight everyone that she’s taller than sirius even though they’re clearly the same height. she refused to see it though because “she’s not the same height as a little bitch.”)

loves boobs, especially her own, and often wears bralettes as shirts.

she’s an italian immigrant and constantly tells everyone that italy is better than britain.

she’s also bipolar and originally bonded with sirius due to similar struggles he experienced with bpd. she was the only person sirius felt comfortable with telling everything about how his mental illness truly effected him.

Dorcas Meadows

unlabelled but used they/them pronouns.

they’re very spiritual and love astrology. they keep crystals on them nearly all the time.

they're black and have their hair braided (they braid their own hair and think about opening up a small business to do others). they weave castles and charms into their hair too <3.

loves wearing long skirts with crop tops. it’s their go to staple outfit that never fails.

they love walking around barefoot. they say it feels more freeing (very much daisy johns and the six of them).

doesn’t really like to be called a hippie, they think that they dress more grunge than anything.

they’re about 5”5-5”7 in height. (marlene loves that they never wear heels, she likes being a lot taller than her partner).

they don’t mind being referred to as feminine terms such as girlfriend because they believe that “feminine” words are just words and have no real meaning because societal gender ideals are fake.

Regulus Black

asexual and biromantic. uses he/him or they/them pronouns because they’re autistic and don’t really care or align with societies ideals on gender.

he has a constant frown on his face that causes his brows to pinch together (sirius always tries to smooth the line forming there, telling reg that “wrinkles aren’t pretty, what does he have to be frowning about anyways?”)

whereas sirius has high cheek bones, regulus has a strong jawline and a prominent chin that points out.

they also have a very prominent brow bone that casts a dark shadow over their eyes, making them look almost black instead of blue. this eye structure is different from sirius’ double lidded eyes (regulus hates when people say that he looks similar to sirius and constantly looks for facial differences between them- there are a lot, the two don’t actually look THAT similar).

his style is very minimal, he often wears a plain white tee with black jeans.

their hair is short, dark and curly. they let their curls fall over their face and refuse to slick it back because that’s that his father used to do.

he’s 5”8-5”10 in height (he loves the few inch difference between him and sirius because it annoys his brother to no end).

they’re also half french and east asian.

i could honestly make more for the rest of the gang, this headconnon shit is fun because i’m just so right

#regulus black #marlene mckinnon #dorcas meadowes #lily evans #the marauders #marauders era #marauders headcanon #oppsimadethemallgay #dead gay wizards

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the-indigo-symphony · 2 years ago

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Kicky kicky ball games and wolf fursonas – why you should vote for Fubuki Shirou

As the @plural-bracket has officially opened polls, I need to make some propaganda for one (1) wonderful little soccer boy, because Fubuki Shirou is precious and deserves the entire world. Also shout out to our friend Ako who helped us make this.

So, who is Fubuki Shirou? And why should you vote for him?

Fubuki Shirou (hereafter referred to as Fubuki) is the semi-official name for a system of two headmates: Shirou and Atsuya. They're popular characters in the Inazuma Eleven franchise, a video game, manga, and anime franchise that centers around a bunch of kids playing soccer/football games that range in intensity from "just a relaxed game played for fun" to "the world is in danger and for some reason a game of kicky kicky ball can save it".

Shirou and Atsuya have a rough relationship when they're first introduced, especially considering that they hide their plurality from the rest of their team. They both have their issues and tend to clash over how to go about solving them, especially when it comes to their trauma. However, over the course of the story – especially following the reveal of their plurality to their team – they learn to work together and smooth out their relationship.

Also, he gets a wolf hissatsu (super soccer move) and it symbolizes the end of his character arc. In other words, there's a magic wolf that represents his character. So basically, his character arc resolved with him becoming a furry and making himself a wolf fursona.

Depending on the translation, installment in the franchise, and even which specific lines you look at, the origins for Fubuki's system differ. The original anime, for instance, leans towards a psychological traumagenic origin, while the games leave it up in the air, and evidence can be found for both psychological and spiritual origins – and even a few lines that suggest that no matter whichever way you interpret it, Atsuya might be a created headmate. Which means that depending on how you look at it, Atsuya is either a factive of Shirou's (the core's/host's) brother, or his brother's spirit possessing Shirou after an early death, and either way he might have been created or summoned by Shirou – but again, all this is convoluted across several different installments, lines, and translations, so it's really up to your personal decision on what to believe and headcanon. And honestly, we stan a skrunkly with the most confusing origins known to mankind.

Fubuki doesn't fall into the plural serial killer stereotype! Which is a very low bar, but for the record, he does clear it.

In the games, there's an entire mechanic that allows Fubuki to switch between Shirou and Atsuya whenever you set up the players of the team.

The bathroom seems to be Fubuki's favorite place to deal with his issues, because he's had a grand total of five on-screen breakdowns there in the original anime.

He wears his scarf – a memento of his original/physical brother – even when it's way too hot out for that.

He's canonically a Chad. There's a running gag in the anime that whenever they're lost, Fubuki easily gets multiple girls offering to help him out without even trying. In fact, there's a not insignificant chance that he's oblivious to this trend, and just does not realize his Chad powers.

This one is more of a fun fact, but his Japanese VA also voiced Light Yagami and will voice Mario in the upcoming Mario movie!

If all of that was a lot for you... TL;DR: fan favorite characters (for good reason) from a niche sports anime go through a character arc about learning to work together as a system, making friends who accept their plurality along the way. And also using sports magic to fight against the most ridiculous cast of opponents you've ever seen, like a team full of nothing but fake aliens.

I can and will make more propaganda for these two fellows as needed. Prepare for at least one drawing of these two, because they are my absolute favorite skrunklies!

Vote for Fubuki!!

#plurality #pluralgang #actuallyplural #actuallymultiple #plural system #fubuki shirou #fubuki atsuya #front soup.txt #inazuma spoilers

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snowtimeisbesttime · 5 years ago

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Thoughts and questions on Hiveswap Act 2– Part 1.

**DISCLAIMER** I haven't played through the entire game yet! I got to the intermission in the whole trial thingy, and will continue tomorrow! Therefore, I Am Not Looking at anything yet, only posting. I'll probably come back and edit this once I've actually finished the game.

-Did the default names for Xefros & Dammek's lusii change?? I loaded my Act 1 save, and I'm sure they had their default names (Zoosmell and Cornibuster) there, though I'm also pretty sure i accidentally unlocked the “name the lusii” achievement on that save by clicking on the text windows without actually changing their names so... Dammek's lusus is called Toothy now i guess?

-On that note, if Xefros' lusus died I'm going to fucking scream. Even though I'm pretty sure we've barely seen him on screen since like the end of Act 1 but Regardless.

-We see Charun's cave, and it turns out they were neighbours with Zebede all this time, but they're nowhere to be seen at the train?? unless they grabbed an earlier one... Charun did get a death flag the size of the pacific ocean, when interacting with their weird sculpture with a lot of legs and arms surrounding a mouth, but Zebede's just gone without a trace? The bees are gone and there's a hole in the side of his hive, but his lusus doesn't seem to be particularly upset? And neither is Charun's, assuming that huge bug near the cave is their lusus. (Idarat the canon fantroll #3 doesn't appear at the train either, but that's probably for the same reason there aren't any jade or teal background characters: to keep the court scene neat)

-The drones are supposed to be en route to the station, supposedly to fix the ticket machines but probably to cull whoever tripped the alarm on them... i sure hope they don't follow the train or anything orz

-Mostly everyone seems to resemble their respective Friendsims, more or less:

Fozzer appears to be scratched still, yet more philosophical. Also he's not in the train either.

Folykl seems just a touch friendlier than in her friendsim (and Kuprum's still just as hyped about becoming a helmsman as before, even if he seems to know more details about it now).

Chixie's more anxious, probably because it seems she's been doing stuff as The Mask for a while now, and she's going to fuck shit up at Jeevik Week. She says she's not alone in that, and considering it's apparently confirmed that the random troll from her good end Was Dammek all this time... is she also actively in the rebellion? Also is it just me or does her sprite look somewhat scribblier than everyone else's? Even the background characters??

Elwurd's pretty much the same, and it does seem her flirting with Joey was mostly to try and get her to buy something. Also... if her fake tickets were so good, why didn't she just use them, instead of giving them to Joey and Xefros? Like, I get Marvus and Boldir Knowing Stuff, but her?

Zebruh's paying attention to Marvus instead of Chixie, which. Small mercies. He's still a dick, and we're still doing the whole “clowns are peak oppressed” thing.

Marvus seems to still be perfectly nice to the main characters, and perfectly willing to let other people die in order to help them advance (getting Zebruh to sign up for Slam or Get Culled, Daraya if you fuck up in the trial thing, Hopefully Not Any More Cases...) He is helping Tyzias out with her defensive legislaceration experiments, though, and basically everyone who isn't Joey seems to think he might flip his shit and murder someone, as clowns do. At least people don’t seem to lose their minds around him anymore.

Vikare's basically the same, but Joey immediately picks up on his Jake Vibes and instinctively dislikes him.

Diemen eats people???????? as in, actively????????? wtf?????????

Skylla seems to be pretty much the same, but she's obviously worried because Ladyy's sick!! God I fucking hope we do get to help her out before the end of the game.

Marsti's also friendlier than she was in her volume, though I remember MSPAR was particularly prone to sticking their foot in their mouth in that one.

Cirava's surprisingly more trusting than they were in their volume (and also, their eye's light green and not teal). Also, apparently they gouged their other eye out on stream?????? as in live???? besides that, good to see not All of the powerful psionics get succesfully indoctrinated.

Polypa's also rather willing to help out, though we still don't know what the heck happened to her.

Boldir's suitably mysterious, and probably also involved with the rebellion... she does call Xefros “burgundy figurehead”.

Konyyl and Azdaja are still having relationship stuffs, but in the end they clearly care the most about each other. (he still doesn't seem to give a fuck about helm stuffs so far?) The question is, who exactly were they hunting down??

The jades and the teals are basically the same as their Friendsim incarnations, as far as I've seen. The one major change to the jades (besides jade lore which i'll discuss further down) seems to be that hatched2dance is now one of the biggest reasons for their fights, and Bronya does get a crunchy bit of Backstory (the jade from her past that got culled because of the Rainbow Hemotions saga, which is also the reason she's so hard on Daraya now)

On the teals, Stelsa and Tyzias seem to have a teensy bit of quadrant vacillation going on?? Tirona seems to be more focused on becoming a history revisionist than a memeagandist now, and it would also seem that Tegiri's the one into vampires now (or at least, Tagora's better at hiding it And a lot better at not getting involved with the whole mess that is whatever the heck the jades are doing)

-Psionics can have single-colored eyes!! tbh we'd already seen this back in Tegiri's route in Friendsim but it's good to Actually See it visually.

-Also, nice to see that Xefros *can* go toe to toe with the strongest psionic we know in all of Hiveswap! (95% sure that I've seen someone theorize something like this might happen?? I personally wasn't expecting it here but anyways Xefros you're doing amazing sweetie) What's not so nice is that he's only shown this strength when Azdaja hurt Joey (as far as i've played of course)... so unless he like unlocks his potential or something so he can do Big Psychics without seeing his friends get hurt beforehand we're in for some Angst.

-Also if Marvus got his ticket from Cridea (and Chixie won hers in like a raffle or something) then why couldn't she have given Xefros and Dammek some?? like, Dammek's been to one Jeevik Week already. Fiamet also told her about Joey, but by then they were already in the train.

-Me: Xefros' microphone's going to be important in act 2! Also me: *has to give it to fucking Zebruh to get his ticket*. Oh well, that's one thing for the Second Playthrough of Achievement Getting (plus: wearing the cone horns, having Joey introduce herself to Boldir, getting through the whole ace attorney segment without game overs...)

-We get the Quadrant Explanation #1000, sans auspisticism.

-It's vaguely implied that Dammek has also read some Soldier Purrbeasts books?? He's told Xefros the whole “death creates a bond deeper than matespritship or kismessisitude” thing, apparently! So if he's not secretly into troll warrior cats then. That sentence's more than mildly worrying??

-JADEBLOOD LOREDUMP PART THE NTEENTH: Okay first of all it's implied that More cloisters exist? Which in retrospect is pretty much obvious because you can't expect only six trolls to take care of All the troll grubs in existence. Also, the reason jades can't sneak out of the caverns anymore is “because they get Drone'd”, and it seems to be implied that they Can't go out At All*, which kinda contrasts with Friendsim (where literally all the jades snuck out of the caverns at least once: Lanque, Daraya and Wanshi in their own routes, Lynera in Vol 18, and Bronya in Vols 6 & 18). One of their tasks seems to be guarding Forbidden Literature, and Xefros states that they either cull or indoctrinate the most powerful psychic grubs.

-It's also stated that all of our jades were chosen for the cloister when they were basically wrigglers, while Lynera states in Friendsim that she's only been 2,43 sweeps in the caverns. (Considering Bronya's new backstory, it seems that capability to become a rainbow drinker ISN'T the qualifying factor for getting cloistered– depending on how exactly that jade died). It comes to mind that regular, non-cloistered jades might not really know about all these logistics, as it seems that at least Bronya wants to keep them secret– and therefore I don't have to go back and re-rewrite yet another chunk of Mirrorbent orz.

-Lastly, Xefros says they will all become nuns (btw, space church was mentioned in Lanque's route!) when they reach their Ordeals, and we already knew they'd be forced to live in isolation from Friendsim, but during the ace attorney thingy Lynera says she's NOT going to leave the planet because she'll become a midwife and tend to the Mother Grub (basically what we all thought jadebloods did back when we only had the ancestor stuff on Homestuck)... but either Daraya or Lanque told her that they weren't real? So either there's more jade propaganda that we didn't know about, or...

-*The one exception to this is, coincidentally, Jeevik Week, and it's apparently because Trizza herself made it so jades could go too, 3 or 4 sweeps before Hiveswap... why's that? What's so important about Jeevik Week that Trizza would do this? Iirc Cridea and Trizza were sort of set up as opposing forces (?? words), all the way back from the first bunch of concept arts we saw of them? The first thing we learnt from Trizza was that she was the “second best at memes”, and on Cridea's first appearance, when troll twitter was still Prongle, she said that some chick was stealing her memes... and now, Cridea has exactly one follower less than Trizza, who everyone in Alternia's forced to follow... would that person be the heiress herself?

#hiveswap #hiveswap spoilers #hiveswap theories #joey claire #xefros tritoh #thoughts and questions #long post #no really this got Long #idk how much of the game this covers tbh #and i will find out Tomorrow

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darkblueboxs · 5 years ago

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The Manga is Way Better (Save me from the Fangirls)

Read here or on AO3

Inspired by an absurd GC conversation feat. @hope-coeurell and @karmacharmeleon18 about exy anime in the aftg universe.

Neil wakes up to eleven hundred new twitter followers overnight, which sets off alarm bells for a number of reasons.

He didn’t want the damn account, but his publicist insisted, and Carol rules Neil’s public life with an iron fist. He leaves her to post generically upbeat tweets on his behalf about the exy world, and in return he tries not to start any fights that she’ll have to finish. Emphasis on tries.

He assumes that the influx of followers is down to some vaguely rude retort going viral that he’d already forgotten making, but to his bafflement most of the new followers seem to have cartoon avatars and names that are more emoji than letter. He clicks on one profile out of curiosity, understands about one word in five, and promptly loses interest.

He puts it down to the ramp up in interest caused by the approaching world cup and shuts off his phone. The muggy SoCal heat makes Neil drowsier than he usually would be, but the sound of Andrew brewing coffee in the kitchen is enough to drag Neil from bed. They’re only on the western coast for a few days while the national team attends a few mandatory press junkets and board meetings, and Neil would resent it more if not for the opportunity to spend time with his family.

They’re actually scheduled for a day off, but Kevin pulled every contact he had with the Trojans to bag use of their court for the day, and he’s dragging every player he can in with him. Luckily for them, it’s the off-season, so the only players they’re booting from their own pitch are the ones with nothing better to do on their break.

The fox’s group chat is buzzing regularly on the ride to the stadium, but Neil ignores it for the city sights rolling by his window. Neither he nor Andrew have visited this part of California before; it leaves a far better impression than their previous experiences with the state.

It’s when he arrives in the locker room to find Matt and a few other players huddled around a phone screen that the alarm bells return.

Matt looks up, takes one look at Neil, and bursts out laughing. “Hey, look, it’s Niall Jamestown.”

Neil gives him a deliberately blank look as he shoulders his bag from his shoulder. “Morning, Matt.”

“You’ve watched this, right? Tell me you’ve watched this.”

Neil glances to Andrew, who seems to know as much as Neil does, before replying. “No?”

“Oh my God,” says Matt, and shoves the phone in Neil’s face.

The sight he is met with is baffling to say the least; a bunch of cartoon boys with brightly coloured hair yelling at each other in Japanese the middle of an exy court.

“Japanese soap opera?” Neil guesses.

“Just wait.”

Neil watches with disinterest. The doors to the cartoon court bang open and the lights flicker as the music crescendos, building up to some dramatic reveal.

A kid with red hair, blue eyes and a scarred face steps into frame. “I’m Niall Jamestown,” say the subtitles as the character slings a racquet across his shoulders. “And I’m going to beat you all!” Then the screen goes black.

Neil is genuinely speechless.

“You’re an anime character, Neil!” Matt beams. “How cool is that?”

Neil looks back to his cartoon doppelganger. “What the fuck is anime?”

Neil is acutely aware of when the next episode comes out, because his twitter following jumps wildly again. He has a lot of new messages, although none of them seem to really be directed at him.

“Do not fucking talk to me about fucking King of the Court,” Kevin snaps as they toss a ball back and forth.

“It’s a show about exy, isn’t it?” Neil says. “Why wouldn’t you like it?”

“It’s thinly-veiled Raven propaganda that shows no respect for actual exy rules. They have a distant cousin of the Moriyamas on the creative team because they figured it might be a good merchandising opportunity, but thankfully the manga never really took off in America.” Kevin’s expression darkens. “The new TV adaptation, on the other hand…”

When Neil continues to look at him blankly, Kevin rolls his eyes and explains, “A Manga is like a comic book.”

Neil nearly drops the ball. “I’m a comic book character, too?”

“No, they’ve clearly changed the character’s name and appearance in the remake to make him look like you. They’re going to make you look like an asshole.”

Neil thought he was used to being on television; it turns out he was sorely mistaken. He shrugs. “I’m pretty good at doing that by myself already.”

Kevin throws the next ball to him harder than necessary. It whistles past Neil’s right ear; an inch to the side and it would have been a black eye. The whack of a racket against the ground clatters from the other side of the court, Andrew’s idea of a friendly warning. “Take this seriously.”

“It’s a cartoon, Kevin, how on earth do I take it seriously?”

“I wasn’t exaggerating when I said it was Raven propaganda,” Kevin snaps. “The main team, the protagonist, they’re very…” Kevin trails off. “Just go look it up when you get home.”

Neil tries ten minutes of the first episode, but quickly loses interest when he realises there’s more heartfelt speeches about friendship and teamwork than there is actual playing. Kevin’s right, though; the main team, Iwatobi Crows, are a clear stand-in for the Ravens with their black-on-red uniforms. They’re supposed to be the underdog team, which is hilarious, but worst of all is their captain, a charismatic, friendly, dark-haired teenager with a conspicuous beauty-spot on his left cheekbone.

Neil retches quietly before throwing his laptop aside and vowing never to think about the show again.

“People on twitter are yelling at me.” Neil frowns. “A lot.”

“This is not news,” Andrew says without raising his eyes from his book.

“This one says I ‘hurt her precious baby.’” Neil scrolls. “They could be a little more creative with their death threats.”

Death threats is enough to pique Andrew’s interest. He takes Neil’s phone and scrolls for several minutes, the crease between his eyebrows deepening slightly. He hands the phone back. “Your cartoon alter-ego is insulting their precious king.”

Neil snorts. He plays a clip beneath one of the tweets showing Neil’s character and Riko’s in a heated argument. It’s melodramatic and darkly lit, and fake-Neil’s smile is wide and sharp as he tells Riko his team will never amount to anything. “You are destined for failure,” Niall snarls. “Pathetic.”

It isn’t meant to be funny; it’s meant to be cruel and devastating, but Neil laughs. “This guy is growing on me.”

Andrew shakes his head as he returns to his book. “Don’t come crying to me when the fangirls break your face.”

Neil snorts. “I’d trust you to patch me up again after.”

Andrew raises an eyebrow but doesn’t deny it.

“One of my co-workers has asked me for your autograph,” Nicky says, his voice cracking and jumping across the videocall. “Think you can get a poster to me before Christmas?”

“Easily. I can get a hold of some national team merch as well if she-”

Nicky cuts him off with a snort. “No, it’s cool, she isn’t really into exy.”

At the kitchen counter behind him, Andrew’s knife stalls over the carrots. They share a baffled look.

“What?” says Neil eventually.

“Oh, yeah, she doesn’t follow exy or anything, she’s just really into that show, what’s it called? King of the Castle?”

“Something like that.” Neil says, keeping his expression remarkably straight. “You’ve heard about it?”

“Are you kidding me? The whole anime world is talking about it. Not that I’m deep in the weeb community or anything, I just followed a few people for posting those cute yaoi ice-skating gifs a while back and they’ve been talking about nothing else in months.”

Neil understands some of those words. “Okay.”

“Say, Neil, do you know what a ship is?”

“Like, a boat?”

Andrew reaches past Neil and hits the end call button. “Not today.”

Neil nods, feeling as though he has just been saved from something unfathomably vast and dangerous. “Not today.”

Robin sends a picture of the photo wall in the Foxhole Court’s lounge. Someone has put up a poster of Anime Neil in one corner. It’s life-size, and he glares across the room with overshiny blue eyes, a leather jacket thrown over his shoulder as he scowls. She accompanies the message with a simple smiley emoji, but Neil isn’t fooled.

Not funny, Neil texts back.

He’s taller than you, she replies.

“What are you going to do about it?” Kevin says on one of their phone calls. “You can’t let them burn your reputation to the ground like this. They’re portraying you as a mouthy bad-boy who listens to no one and breaks all the rules.”

“Just like real life, then,” Andrew says loudly enough that Kevin can hear.

“Kevin, some kid’s cartoon isn’t going to affect my exy career,” Neil says, scooping Sir onto his lap as he talks. “It’s about how well I play.”

“It’s about image, Neil. Your publicist will agree. Has she considered suing for defamation? I know some good lawyers if-”

“She’s looked into it.” Neil had watched Carol’s growing exasperation with detached amusement; she was, as far as he knew, a good person, but watching her having a meltdown over a cartoon caricature had been mildly entertaining regardless. Neil just couldn’t bring himself to see what all the fuss was about. “They’ve changed my name, so it’s a no-go.”

Kevin makes an exaggeratedly pained sound. Neil doesn’t have to picture his expression; he knows all too well what Kevin’s disappointed face looks like.

“You’re taking this heavily,” says Neil. Then, “Did make you into a character too or something-?”

Kevin hangs up.

“Neil, how does it feel knowing my husband loves you more than he does his own wife?”

“This isn’t news.” Neil smiles as Dan laughs. He can see moving boxes and sports equipment behind her as she spins, showing Neil through the camera their new living room.

“Have you seen the monstrosity? Has he shown you? He said he wanted to bring it on our next fox holiday, but I said no, there’s no way I’m sitting next to that thing in the truck for six hours, besides, it’s not even that funny.” The amused tilt to her voice says otherwise.

“I’m not sure I want to know.”

“If I have to be traumatised then so do you.” Dan leads into her bedroom, and for a moment the picture turns dark and grainy. The lights flick on, and on the bed Neil sees-

“Dan, what the fuck is that?”

“Randy came across it online and thought it would be funny.” Dan sighs.

“What is it?”

“Haven’t you seen a body pillow before?”

Neil screws up his nose, leaning into his screen to get a better look despite himself. “What is he wearing?”

Dan hesitates. “Swimming costume?”

“It’s a show about exy.”

“Yeah, I got nothing. So I’m guessing you don’t want us to bring it on holiday?”

“Burn it. Please.”

“Good idea.” Dan pauses. “Unless you think Andrew would-”

“No. He would not.”

Neil’s anime persona gets a girlfriend, which Neil discovers only when he opens Twitter (an action which becomes more fraught with danger with every passing day) to see art of them having sex.

He blocks several hundred more followers (he’s gaining more than he can possibly hope to block every day, but it’s for the sense of control more than anything) before throwing his phone aside and climbing back into bed.

“I have a girlfriend,” Neil announces. Andrew’s head appears from beneath the covers to blink at him blearily, dislodging one of the cats as he does so.

“An unexpected development,” he says eventually.

“Anime me. He has a girlfriend.”

“Jealous?”

“Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to.” Neil nuzzles under the covers and waits for Andrew’s go-ahead before shifting in against his side.

“Does it upset you?”

“No, it’s just weird.” Neil stares up at the ceiling for several seconds before meeting Andrew’s eyes. “Well, it’s not the show, really. It’s the people.”

Andrew doesn’t reply, but his gaze remains fixed on Neil, encouraging him to keep talking.

“I’m just not used to being seen like that. Like, the people who are yelling at me because they don’t like the character I kind of get. It’s more the really flirty ones. Like, why? They don’t know me.”

“The flirty ones?”

“Just a lot of people saying really sexual things. I keep blocking them, it’s fine.”

Neil thinks he has inadvertently conditioned Andrew to tense up at the word fine; he has long tried to erase it from his vocabulary, but it still slips through now and again.

Andrew’s chest presses against his as he leans over Neil to the bedside table. For a moment Neil’s mind stops working, just thinking about skin against skin. When Andrew leans back, Neil’s phone is in his hand.

“Don’t bother looking, honestly, it isn’t worth it,” Neil says as Andrew taps several buttons.

“I’m not,” says Andrew. When he hands back the phone, the screen says account set to private.

“Carol isn’t going to like that.”

“Carol can take it up with me.”

Neil smiles. “Jealous?”

“No,” says Andrew flatly, and Neil realises that, oh, this isn’t about him.

After several minutes on the phone with Andrew, Carol concedes that keeping a low profile might not be the worst thing in the world.

“Neil, it’s bad,” Kevin says before he’s even through the door. “How are you not keeping up with this?”

“Digital detox,” Neil answers as Kevin pushes past. “You should try it. Great for the skin.”

Kevin doesn’t dignify him with a response. “Your character broke Riko’s - I mean, Ryuu’s – arm. Mid-match. You can’t stand for this.”

“Are you watching this show every week?”

“I have to be ahead of the backlash,” Kevin says emphatically. He throws himself down on the couch, before standing up again, clearly too agitated to stay still. “You don’t understand, Neil. This could destroy you in the Japanese markets before you’ve even made it big in America. You have to-”

“What did they do to you, Kevin?” Neil interrupts. Kevin stops short, mouth open mid-sentence. “Because this clearly isn’t about me.”

Kevin looks away. “His name was Kev. The bumbling, obsessive, star-struck idiot that messed up the whole team’s dynamic, injured himself by pushing himself too hard and crashed out into nothing.”

Neil sobers. “Everything they told you you were.”

Kevin doesn’t look up.

“Kev? They didn’t even bother to change your name?”

Kevin shrugged. “Why bother? I couldn’t sue them. I was under the Moriyama’s thumb, remember?”

Neil stares at him. “You aren’t anymore.”

“I’m-” Kevin starts, stops, starts again. “Oh.”

“You said you knew some good lawyers, right?”

A smile breaks across Kevin’s face. “Right.”

King of the Court does not get renewed for a second season. Several of the foxes send Neil messages of faux commiseration, which he responds to with equal sarcasm.

A few months later, after the exy world cup medals are hanging securely over Neil and Andrew’s dresser, the same studio releases a promo for a new show. It’s nothing like their last exy anime save for the mutual sport. The characters are all decidedly fictional, neither looking nor sounding like any prominent figures in the exy world, and the protagonist’s strip doesn’t share the colours of any big USA teams.

The new anime looks as cheesy and melodramatic as the last, although Neil likes the name a lot more this time.

All for the Game. That’s a title he can get behind.

Thanks for reading, let me know what you think!

#aftg #tfc #andreil #neil josten #andrew minyard #kevin day #my fic

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thousandsunnywrites · 5 years ago

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FILE 1: WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF SMILES

⤷ word count: 1,7k

⤷ a/n: there’s no major romantic shet here, but it’s like the foundation of what’s to come

[BLACK LIVES MATTER]

⤷ TRIGGER: mentions of pills & death

“Roronoa, check the mission board.” A stack of papers land right in front of his propped feet, waking him from his light nap. Standing in front of him was no other than the assistant chief, Law. “In two weeks, we’re raiding the SMILES House.”

Yawning, he glanced over, doing as told. Law’s right. After extensive research, their department accumulated enough information to obtain a warrant to bust down this illegal business. Doflamingo is a smart man, he evaded the police’s eyes for years now despite his brother being the chief. His eyes skimmed through the raid team while taking a mental note — Usopp, Chopper, Law, and him, along with a bunch of other extra names. Supposedly, this ambush is the most difficult in the history of the New World Station, errr, at least that’s what Zoro hears in the coffee room.

Chief Corazon-- the name everyone addresses him as, only a select few know his real name-- lead this station ever since the retirement of ex Chief of Police, Sengoku. You and Zoro transferred into this department not long after graduating law school. As Chief puts it, it’s a miracle how you never crossed paths with Roronoa during school-- maybe he just got lost while trying to do so-- because you complement each other so perfectly: you’re academically strong, while he’s strong physically. It’s no hair-puller to know why he’s constantly paired with you.

Zoro’s train of thoughts halts as a very loud, and jumpy girl emerges from the corner, latching onto his arm almost immediately upon seeing him. “Zoro,” you cooed like a little bird, expectantly. Prior to this day, Zoro wagered that it’s easy to drive around while patrolling the area because anyone can do that, and you took him up on his little bet. It was hard, knowing the shortcuts and hidden roads within the area, but it was easy when you get the hang of it. Unfortunately for Zoro, he was blessed with confusing right with left, north and south. Call it whatever you see fit, but you can’t deny it’s like taking candy from a toddler.

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” he sighs, bringing out the iconic Starbucks cup, filled to the brim with your favorite coffee, Venti-sized. “Expensive-ass woman. You know how much that cost me?”

“Oh hunny, I know, you’re lucky I’m not asking you to pay for my rent,” you take a sip as Zoro nods along. Yeah, he’s aware of the rent surge for your apartment. That landlord of yours, what’s his name, Bella… Belle-something was a big pain in the ass, charging twice as much to splurge on gambling. He’s heard this rant so many times, he can recite it word for word.

“Y’know if you’re having a hard time with rent, then just leave. Go somewhere else.”

A pout forms on your lips, hand waving animatedly to dismiss his suggestion. “Easy for you to say, you own a house. Besides, it’s the only available one in this area. I don’t wanna go outta town. It’s hard enough to wake up on time in the morning-- what more of waking up 3 hours earlier?” You pinch his cheek, earning a groan from the man. Remind him again why he puts up with you.

“Don’t forget about our first-not-fake-date tonight,” you wink, body shimmying out of excitement. Sometime last night, you concocted the perfect date with Zoro to flaunt in front of Sanji. Zoro is to take you to the nicest park he can find and do a surprise picnic-- not much of a surprise if you orchestrated it-- whilst giving you a necklace with his initials on it-- again, nothing special especially if you’re gonna buy it. Zoro wonders why he’s even letting you use him, but then again, you pay for the propaganda, and he doesn’t have anything better to do. No rent money worries, no girlfriend to tend to, no stress that plagues the average adult.

“Doesn’t sound like we’re dating if you call everything we do a ‘not-fake’,” his lips downturn to a very displeasing frown that marred his big-tough-guy look, while he attempts to pry your clammy fingers off said face. He doesn’t know the first thing about love, but sure as hell he’s not a dumbass.

Law pulls you aside to escort you to the Chief’s office, leaving Zoro to revert his focus back onto his reports, overlooking the new cases. A killer clown running loose, gathering a circus to cause more trouble. Nothing more than clout for a rep.

The Massacre Solider’s, as the media dubbed, killings suddenly halted.

The Revolutionaries protesting and planning a riot downtown against the government, led by the infamous criminal dubbed as Dragon.

Firefighter accidentally sets the workplace on fire after reheating meat for too long. Damn it, Luffy.

“Hey, Zoro!” The familiar long nose approaches him, friendly as ever. “We’re partners today for patrol! Thank god it’s you.” He sobs out the last part, body turning milky white while remembering the horrid flashbacks of almost being shot at by an angry woman for notifying her about her illegally parked car in a handicap spot. The world is a scary place.

Usopp let out a huffy sigh after seeing Zoro’s nose scrunch in distaste. “No offense Usopp but Y/n is and has been my partner,” his arms crossed, gaze not leaving the paper.

The persistent sniper slides next to Zoro, slinging his arm over his shoulder despite the other shoving him off. “Yeah but the chief said that he’s borrowing her for today.”

Great.

It’s not like Zoro dislikes Usopp, it’s not like that at all. It’s just he knows he’s going to babysit the scaredy cat. Amazing how he’s a coward, yet one of the finest sharpshooters he knows. Nobody doing it like him.

The hectic, sharp alarm lights the room red, causing the policemen to spring to action. The once-chattering room fills with the sounds of rapid footsteps, police sirens, incoherent yelling, and the urgent news.

Local wealthy landlord found dead on the street, SMILES cause of death, victim unidentified.

They made it through the yellow tapes and through the crowd with the help of Usopp’s directions, and Zoro instantly remembered that face-- really, how can he forget that face when you constantly bitched about him nearly everyday. That cocky smile never left that bastard’s face despite half of the pearly whites being gone.

It was Belle...

Belle-something.

It was Belle!

He passes by him on the staircase whenever he visits you for nonsense. The medic hoists the mass onto the gurney, and drives off, leaving the remaining team to survey the area.

His colleagues told him that the victim OD’ed on SMILES, but the marimo knew better. Although faint, his sharp eyes can see the smudged trail of blood coming from another area. This isn’t a typical overdose. Belle was dead by the time the team got here. He was murdered somewhere else and dragged into the streets for a show. A declaration. A warning.

In short, he was murdered. And probably from the same guy who started this whole SMILES addiction.

Meanwhile as the news blared in Chief Cora’s office, your heart sunk when the anchor broadcasted the victim’s face after receiving identification for a brief moment. It was Bellemy! Holy Gorgonzolas, that’s your landlord! Crap! As fucked up as it seemed, the only thought that initially crossed your mind was Does that mean I don’t have to pay for rent? More importantly, he’s dead! Not that you feel deep remorse... he did call you a whore last week and scoped your apartment without your permission.

“It’s a message,” Cora puffed on his cigarette, the dim lighting of the room accentuating the smoke, “He knows we’re onto him.”

He ashed his cigarette in his heart-shaped ashtray, before relighting. Paper slid across the table, a confidential report wide open. Attached to the report was a headshot of a man with fancy, bird-eye-like shades.

“His name is Doflamingo. Known as God of the Underworld. Dangerous man,” Cora said dryly, and straight to the point. “That kid that was on TV worked under him. Bellemy.”

Your brows furrow as you flip through the pages, examining the details with careful precision. “So the assets belong to this man?”

“Legally. I didn’t find any contract that says that Bellemy shares this property with Doffy. Doffy must’ve not liked that one of his henchmen opposed his will. We can only assume that his death was the price to pay and to promote the SMILES. Other than that, Bellemy’s apartment lots are illegally owned, so we can also assume that it’s going to be confiscated when the police connect two-and-two together. You get where I’m going with this, right?” His eyes glanced over his shoulder, expecting you to catch on with the elaborative hints he dropped. It took a while, but it clicked.

“And now I’m homeless.” Hands thrown in the air, you sighed in defeat. First it was losing your bike in the walkway, next it was having to sneak in your own office like a burglar for a last-minute report that could’ve cost your job, and now it was being thrown on the streets because you lived and paid for an illegal apartment.

Law interjected your whine with the clearing of his throat. “You don’t have to be.” He was silently watching the events unfold before him, taking in your reactions along the way.

“You can live with us,” Corazon proposed, cutting off whatever Law was going to say. That offer left both you and Law with your jaws hanging wide open. After a second, Law collects himself and musters a very confused what.

“I was going to say to find someplace outside of town to live!” His disbelief coated his every word, and went unnoticed. “Are you sure?”

Cora simply nods, a thumbs up affirming his decision whilst trying to convince you to take up his offer.

“Please,” Cora’s hand found its way to your shoulder, lightly squeezing it. “It’d be beneficial for both you and us. You’re part of the brains of this operation so it’s better to keep you near us. And you did say you’re homeless now.”

He nudges you once more, after seeing your silence. “C’mon, beggars can’t be choosers.”

With that one line, you concede.

You pull out your phone and send a simple text to your date, telling him you’re taking a raincheck to pack up your shit. He never responds. Had you known the consequences of agreeing, you would’ve stayed on the streets if that could mean that he’d still be here.

#one piece #roronoa zoro #zoro x reader #police officer! zoro and y/n #one piece x you #one piece x reader

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pubtheatres1 · 6 years ago

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ONE GIANT LEAP Brockley Jack Theatre 2 – 27 July 2019 “That’s one small step for man…” Neil Armstrong INTERVIEW WITH WRITER & DIRECTOR OF ARROWS AND TRAPS THEATRE, ROSS MCGREGOR LPT: Hello Ross, We’re rather pleased to have another chat with you about your company, the award nominated Arrows & Traps but also wanted to grill you a little bit on your new writing, ONE GIANT LEAP. How long did it take you to write it? Hi there, how lovely to be asked. I have a somewhat unusual process in that I pitch the idea to the Jack, book the slot, design the artwork / poster, get the show on sale, start selling tickets and only then start writing the script. This is partly due to the quick turnaround of shows and my lack of time between, and also that we have to book these things quite far in advance as the Jack is a popular and sought-after space, but also because I have an issue with self-discipline, and so if I didn’t have a concrete deadline, I think I’d still be tinkering with Frankenstein, a show I wrote and produced in 2017. One Giant Leap is the first completely original piece that I’ve written without a source material, and it took me about two weeks to get onto paper. ONE GIANT LEAP is celebrating the fiftieth Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing but it seems you have got your own spin on it. Could you tell us the story in nutshell? Yes absolutely. It’s a comic take on the greatest conspiracy in history. It centres on Edward Price, a producer of a failing 60’s sci-fi show called Moonsaber – which is basically a poor man’s Star Trek. Edward’s life has fallen into a rut, his wife has left him, he’s lost his house to the IRS, and Moonsaber has just been cancelled in its first season. All looks grim, until a representative to President Nixon comes to his door with a suitcase of money and a proposition. The Apollo 11 Moon Landing is four days away, but due to the moon being about a hundred degrees too hot for photographic film; they can get there, they just can’t film it. And what is a massive propaganda exercise without proof that you actually did it? So they ask Edward to fake the footage by any means possible, if he can do it, he can bring Moonsaber back to life for another season, if he fails – he loses everything. Where does the comedy come from? Mainly from the people that Edward employs in Moonsaber. They’re a ragtag bunch of actors, stage managers and technicians, and due to the show being cancelled – they’re falling apart at the seams – it’s down to Edward to keep it all together, to pull off the greatest lie in history, whilst trying to save his marriage, salvage his career, and keep the lies he’s telling intact. It’s a study of the creative industry, a satirical and loving homage to theatre. We’re not trying to say anything serious about whether the moon landing was or wasn’t real, but more provide a raucous night out at the theatre, and keep you laughing about it on the Overground home. Why is it important to offer a lighter comedy in theatre right now? I think, at times, theatre can take itself too seriously, and become too myopic about tackling the dark and dreadful issues that are affecting society – I’ve lost count of how many shows there are about Brexit playing right now – and whilst that’s great, and admirable - speaking for myself, after the last year I’m sick of the darkness, I’m bored by the constant stream of depressive updates about the rise of the Right, I can’t engage with it, the European elections gave a victory to nationalists, we gave a state visit to a racist, homelessness is at an all-time high, and we’re literally cooking the planet to death. There are sometimes when I just want a great night out and forget how scary the world seems right now – laughter is the best medicine – not as a retreat, but a reminder of the good in us, of the joy, of the light. As the company is repertory, you’ll be working with some actors you know very well. Did you have any of them in mind when you were writing the script? I certainly wrote two of the eight roles with long time company members Will Pinchin and Lucy Loannou in mind. And whilst yes, the roles are tailored to suit both of them - I did write the roles of Howard and Alchamy to stretch and challenge Will and Lucy, because I’d never seen them play characters like that. Will is nothing like Howard, and Lucy isn’t at all like Alchamy, but in way, they’re made for those roles, and for me, they’re perfect choices. I do like working with the same actors repeatedly, it is true, because you build up a short hand of technique and approach, but also you build up a trust. The actors in the company come in on day one, sort of knowing what to bring me, and what kind of vision I’ll probably have, since my style is something of a constant, but also I’m able to, as their director, cast them in roles that perhaps play against type, or test their flexibility and skillsets. I’m not an actor, but if I were, I’d hate to play the same roles every time, to only get the “intense one” or the “dopey one” or the “awkward one” – I’d want to think I could play anything that was thrown at me, and I think our rep system allows for experimentation and exploration. What has been the hardest part of the whole process to date? We’re only in the first week of rehearsal, so nothing too taxing thus far. Hands down, the hardest part of a comedy is when you’ve rehearsed it so much you no longer find it funny, at which point we need an audience. One Giant Leap hasn’t hit that point yet, obviously, but I think most comic work benefits from the response and energy an audience gives. Theatre can be electric when you have that to play off, but in terms of where we are – One Giant Leap’s greatest challenge is the analysing of why something is funny, and making sure it’s that way every time. It’s all about timing. For many years I laboured under the misapprehension that stand up comedy was just a funny person being funny with a microphone, that was until I saw Dylan Moran do the same set twice in the space of three weeks. He has a very casual, off the cuff, almost improvised way of performing, and I assumed that it was just his natural charisma and quick wit, until I saw the set the second time, only to find it was identical to the first. All the pauses, the stresses, the tangents, the quips, all of which was honed, polished and a work of precision. It was funny because he’d worked out the best way to get the laugh, every time, and that’s beyond art, it’s science, it’s music. Traditionally Arrows and Traps have produced a selection of brilliantly adapted classics, including Dracula, Frankenstein, Crime & Punishment and Anna Karenina. Have you got a soft spot for one of them? I loved the breathlessness and breadth of Anna Karenina, the precision and murk of Crime & Punishment, the thrill and gothicism of Dracula, and the humanity and pang of loss in Frankenstein. I think my favourite adaptation, if I had to pick one, is probably Frankenstein – but that’s purely subjective, and there was something about the biography of Mary Shelley, which we incorporated into the show, that really spoke to me – in the sense of a creator and a creation, a parent and child, a sinner and the terrible revenge. You’ve also got THE STRANGE CASE OF JEKYLL & HYDE coming up at Jack Studio in September. Your adaptations of the classics have been Arrows and Traps main focus, so does ONE GIANT LEAP herald a shift away from this? No, in fact because I know the next season of shows, One Giant Leap is perhaps the anomaly. Our work normally has a dark bent, we favour drama with funny lines as opposed to an out-and-out comedy. We’ve only ever done one full comedy before, The Gospel According To Philip back in 2016, so this is something of a return to that. I knew that the company was changing, and wanted to make a swansong to the current phase of work, I had originally planned for it to be TARO but that story ended so sadly, I wanted the last one to be lighter, more celebratory – there’s something inherently amusing about the various tropes you usually get in the theatre world, and so I thought a comedy would be a fitting homage to where we’ve come from, and a clean break to where we want to go next. The company has been going from strength to strength, what are the things of which you are most proud? Mainly, that we’re still going. Most theatre companies on the fringe don’t make it to their third show, we’re on our seventeenth. Part of that is sheer stubbornness, there have been points where any rational person would have thrown in the towel, but there was always something in me that would never bend, never break, never give up. It’s part ambition, part not wanting to fail, part wanting to make my father proud of me, part bloody-mindedness, part theatre-addiction. I think production-wise I’m most proud of The White Rose, to what that achieved, all the five star reviews and the Best Production Offie-nom, but of course I’m also very proud of the other twelve times we’ve been nominated for Off West End Awards, the relationship we’ve built with the Jack, the bond I have with my creative team and my casts, and just the fact that people seem to like the work. It’s still always funny to me when a reviewer calls us “critically-acclaimed” or “renowned rep company” – to me it’s just me, telling the stories I want to tell, with people I want to work with, you don’t always think about how it looks from the outside. I’m just producing the theatre I’d like to go and see. It was rumoured that you would be leaving fringe theatre for other careers, partly because of problems with funding. Was there are truth in that? Absolutely! And in a sense, this is still completely true. I am indeed done with fringe. I think I got to The White Rose in 2018 – where we got the Offie-Nom for Production, we had eight 5-star reviews, four 4 star reviews, we’d completely sold out, and done it the cheapest way possible, and we still didn’t break even. Which was very hard to take, and forced me to face the truth – you cannot hope to attain best practice ITC rates for your casts / creatives / yourself if you only do 15 shows in a 50 seater and you don’t have subsidising support from an arts grant scheme. It just isn’t possible. So I made the decision to stop producing work. Now obviously, with the shows being booked so far in advance, there were still three productions upcoming in the diary that I had to honour. But knowing I was quitting, and that this was the end for me, was too hard to bear - ultimately I had to face the fact that theatre is my life, and I could never leave it – so I had to find a way to make it work financially, not just for myself but for everyone else in the company, particularly the actors who are so often completely screwed over in fringe, and often end up working for nothing. Which is where the idea to change the model came from. Shrink the casts and sets to a more tourable model – 14 people down to 4 – and engage a tour booker to take the productions out of London to larger spaces that could widen the potential revenue. The Jack is our home, and we will always premiere all our shows there, but then we will take them into the provinces. The vision is still the same, adaptations of literary work, and biopics of iconic figures of history, but the remit and scale of the endeavour has changed. I don’t see it as an ending, just a moving from one phase into another. But yes, absolutely, the 8-10 handers, movement-heavy, ensemble, big music, huge shows – this stage in our trajectory is ending with One Giant Leap, and whilst I see why it has to end, a part of me is sad to see it go, because there was something so wonderful about doing a massive 15-hander like Three Sisters. Are you one of those people who is meticulously planning the future? Yes indeed, because really we have to plan ahead in order to book the shows with the venues. We’re doing One Giant Leap next month, and then move to Jeykll & Hyde in September, both at the Jack – and then Hyde goes on tour for about six months, with an opening of our next biopic Chaplin coming about halfway through the run in February. Because I’m overseeing contracts, and touring plans, and writing the scripts as well as casting each show and most likely directing each one, I need to know where we’ll be and when we’re doing it – I’m trying to build a book of shows, a repertoire that is constantly touring, moving forward, and ever-evolving – reaching more audiences, and engaging with new communities. In the meantime, we can’t wait to see ONE GIANT LEAP. Could you give us a little flavour of what’s to come? In terms of shows after One Giant Leap, we have Jekyll & Hyde - a dark, political thriller set in a post-Trump America – a gritty examination of the corruption of power, then Chaplin – which tells the story of the 20th Century’s most famous clown, documenting his path to becoming the iconic Little Tramp – and his meteoric rise from Victorian poverty to Hollywood fame. After that, we’re bringing back one of our most successful productions of 2017, Frankenstein, revisited and rewritten for a more tourable model, and then a biopic of Marilyn Monroe, called Making Marilyn, which covers the Norma Jean origin portion of the star’s life. After that – who knows? I’ve always wanted to tackle Madame Bovary – and I’d like to bring back TARO as it was one that I was particularly proud of in terms of its style and poetry. Finally, your shows at Brockley Jack are becoming legendary, it’s a great partnership. What are the things you’ve learnt about theatre whilst working at Brockley Jack? So much. The Jack has been a great place to develop my approach to stagecraft, and how to tell stories as clearly and engagingly as possible. Since we joined the Jack, we’ve built a vision of the style we want to have, and how we approach each difficulty, or tricky moment to stage, how our work with movement and text interconnect, and what we look for in our ensemble for each show. And, I guess, ultimately, I’ve being able to return to my training as a writer, and I’ve been so lucky to have so many opportunities to experiment with my writing, and get to think about how to tell a story and how to build each character. Playwriting is not something I’ve tried before, and I’ve loved delving into each of the worlds that the Jack has opened the door to. But I think most of all, I’ve been honoured by the patronage and support of Kate and Karl – and they’ve shown me the power of hard work, diligence, and care – if I ended up with anything like the talent and acumen they have, I’d be very happy. @June 2019 London Pub Theatres Magazine Ltd All Rights Reserved THIS SHOW HAS ENDED ONE GIANT LEAP Brockley Jack Theatre 2 – 27 July 2019 directed by Ross McGregor produced by Arrows & Traps Theatre Productions Box Office > Below: Rehearsals at Brockley Jack Studio "We’re not trying to say anything serious about whether the moon landing was or wasn’t real, but more provide a raucous night out at the theatre, and keep you laughing about it on the Overground home." "... speaking for myself, after the last year I’m sick of the darkness, I’m bored by the constant stream of depressive updates about the rise of the Right, I can’t engage with it, the European elections gave a victory to nationalists, we gave a state visit to a racist, homelessness is at an all-time high, and we’re literally cooking the planet to death." "Most theatre companies on the fringe don’t make it to their third show, we’re on our seventeenth. Part of that is sheer stubbornness, there have been points where any rational person would have thrown in the towel, but there was always something in me that would never bend, never break, never give up. It’s part ambition, part not wanting to fail, part wanting to make my father proud of me, part bloody-mindedness, part theatre-addiction." "... knowing I was quitting, and that this was the end for me, was too hard to bear - ultimately I had to face the fact that theatre is my life, and I could never leave it – so I had to find a way to make it work financially, not just for myself but for everyone else in the company, particularly the actors who are so often completely screwed over in fringe, and often end up working for nothing. Which is where the idea to change the model came from." " ... most of all, I’ve been honoured by the patronage and support of Kate and Karl (Jack Studio Theatre) – and they’ve shown me the power of hard work, diligence, and care – if I ended up with anything like the talent and acumen they have, I’d be very happy." In celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, Arrows & Traps Theatre bring their critically-acclaimed approach to a brand-new comedy set in the back streets of a Hollywood lot. One Giant Leap is about the power of having an impossible dream, realising it’s impossible, and then trying your hardest to fake it and hope no one notices.

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cosmos-constellation · 6 years ago

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DID/OSDD-1 Is Not Multiplicity

I don’t know who the fuck came up with calling it that, but it’s not multiplicity. Calling it such dramatically distorts matters and aids the anti-recovery agenda. It creates the impression that anyone who is a system [not HAS, nobody “HAS {implication: person doing having is not same as persons being had} a system”] has been multiplied from the normal amount a human brain can contain. That is a lie. It’s just as much a lie as endogenics believing THEY can be “multiplied” by spirits from imaginary universes jumping into their heads. But it has the ability to hurt the people who believe it instead of just everyone around them, as the endos’ ‘belief’ [which they don’t really believe but want you to think they do so that you cannot question their sanity without questioning your own].

Plurality is still fucking wrong too, though it is wrong in differently emphasized ways. First problem? Nobody refers to fractions as having been made plural. Where multiplicity implies multiplication from an original whole to many wholes, plurality implies to the average human mind two things. 1. That, again, there are multiple whole numbers involved. 2. This plurality existed from the beginning [vs. having multiplied from some original starting point]. See problems with word above, plus addition of implication that it could be naturally occurring and minus the absolute implication that it is a deviation from the original blueprint of one whole human.

There is only one number/calculatory term that has ever been used for DID/OSDD-1 that doesn’t obscure the nature of the disorder(s). That is fragmentation. You are not plural [multiple complete people in one body, possibly naturally occurring]. You are not multiple [multiple complete people in one body, somehow having made more human souls from the raw material found in originally only one]. You are [multiple fractional people— still only people despite being less than a person because ‘person’ is still what their made of — having been prevented from ever assembling and then being thus susceptible to being further] FRAGMENTED.

THAT —Not just the implication from the second word that it was part of the set of PDs— is why the name of the disorder was changed from Multiple Personality Disorder. Once it was identified that this was NOT a personality disorder it became clear that there were not multiple anythings involved. If that weren’t the case, then it would have been called Multiple Identity Disorder. It’s not. Dissociate means to disconnect from. Dissociative Identity Disorder means The Disorder of Being Cut Off From Yourself. The disorder of having been cut apart.

What User Names Can Tell You About A Person’s State of Acceptance of DID/OSDD-1:

Anybody who uses Plurality in their user name is probably endo [fake, and not even trying to hide it] or at least ‘pretendo’ [fake, either not trying to hide it or trying to say they have DID/OSDD-1], or has been strongly influenced by them. These people tend otherwise be in denial of the fact there was or ought ever be one person to have one body.

Anybody who uses Multiplicity in their user name does not accept that their system makes one person and they are parts of the same psyche. This type of person is either somebody has been taken in by the massive anti-integration, anti-recovery campaign of propaganda..... or directly one of the people perpetrating it.

Anybody who uses Fragmentation in their name probably: 1. Accepts that they are parts of one person that has been fractured. 2. Knows a bit about DID/OSDD-1 that did not come from the internet. 3. Actively supports recovery.

In honor of that, and in light of the fact the term system, which is the medically correct term and should be clearly only referring to people with DID/OSDD-1, has been stolen, hijacked, and then co-opted by people who would not know what being a dissociative Identity was like if you hit them in the face with all your memories..... We will be taking a stand against these trends and changing our blog URL from cosmos-system to fragmented-cosmos. I also am starting a tag for all of those who would like to be able to read about DID/OSDD-1 things without having to sift through a bunch of people denying or having been prevented from learning what the disorder actually is. This is #actuallyfragmented. Because we actually are fragmented. Have a nice day.

-Storm

#dissociative identity disorder #otherwise specified dissociative disorder #did #osdd1 #actuallytraumagenic #actuallydid #actuallyosdd #actuallydissociative #actuallypolyfragmented #dissociation #fragmentation #actuallyfragmented

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fdhfjdafdajfa · 6 years ago

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Maybe another reason I'm accused of claiming to be a dalit, despite never EVER having said anything even REMOTELY close, is because I am up front about being affected by caste issues. But the reason I am affected by caste issues is not becauase I in particular belong to any certain caste. The reason I am affected by caste issues is because I live in India (or under Indian occupation, now) and everyone who lives in (or under) India is affected by caste issues.

It is my savarna detractors who are mistaken in their beliefs. Those beliefs are first that they themselves are not affected by caste issues, and second that my social position is similar to theirs.

As regards the first I do not need to go into very much detail about it. As they are the privileged in society it does not require much suspension of disbelief to consider that they might be very mistaken as to the mechanism of their social dominance. The belief that they are unaffected by caste is a simple chauvanism; nothing more, nothing less. They believe that caste means Dalit, that caste is found not in their own families and universities and overseas poc networks and stupid overbearing social media presence, but in rural Dalit households. Nothing new. These are the people who will run countless studies on Dalits and none on themselves, searching up and down and all around, searching for the elusive caste everywhere except under their own noses. Fortunately my second wave training made it pretty obvious to me where I might find it. I was right on the mark in my initial assessment that to Savarnas, caste is an enclosed patriarchy, and caste can be found in what is now called Brahminical Patriarchy, which is something that Brahmins who say stuff like “sex work is work” in a country where prostitution is an ancestral profession can hardly be expected to understand the nature of.

As regards the second, I will dispel it, but not to prove my own victimhood -- victimhood is not the basis of ability to speak and I need no such thing -- but to establish to the Brahmins that we are not and will never be anything alike. This is an assertion of boundaries only.

I need to say that even if the second premise was truethat we did occupy comparable social position, I would still be required to talk about caste and the way it affects me in order to mount a serious social analysis. That they do not do so shows that they are not serious social analysts full stop, but just Brahmins after social clout. As if their choice in "issues" to "discuss" and the ways they "discuss them" didn't already make that obvious.

But the bigger issue is this. As I said in the post that started all of this, upper caste Hindus have this very weird thing about white people. Now as part of this Very Weird Thing, the Hindus have a strong desire for white approval and wrongly consider that their culture has anything in common with white western culture, especially in comparison to groups they consider to be ignorant, backward, and more conservative and less enlightened than them.

This isn’t really true. Hindus have no history of womens’ struggle, no belief in social equality, they love wasting food -- do the people constantly making fun of white people for casseroles really think that we won’t notice or be bothered by the fact that they consider food to be polluted and unshareable once it’s eaten from? It’s viscerally repellant to me to see a Brahmin throw away perfectly good food that’s still warm even -- they hate beef which is at least three food groups for Americans. So we’re talking about two very different groups of people, and while the Brahmins claim that all of these repellant traits of theirs are “Indian things”, that isn’t true, they’re just savarna things, and we have them in common with Muslims, Christians, Dalits, and other groups in society that Brahmins look down and despise because of these traits. A Savarna who turns green at the sight of an omelette doesn’t like it any better because a white person made it. They still ain’t gonna wanna share utensils.

The only reason this stereotype persists at all is due to aggressive propogation of it by Brahmins abroad and all Savarnas in India, made easier by the systemic exclusion of everyone else from English language education.

Not only do Brahmins hate people because of these traits on a personal level, but it is legal, and the rule, not the exception, to discriminate openly based on not only them, but also on race and nationality itself.

Where the stereotype that white people are unaffected by this comes from is that it is true that in places like South Bombay and Gurgaon, where my haters live, there are neighbourhoods (the term we use in India is “colonies”, but without the same connotation, any neighbourhood can be a colony regardless of who lives there) where some very rich white expats live where they can pay a great deal of money to insulate themselves from India. It’s true that they don’t have to worry about discimination in housing, and are nonplussed at everyday occurrances like being charged extra for stuff. These people probably constitute a decent percentage of white people in India; the exact statistic probably isn’t known but they’re highly visible for the same reason all rich people are. What else should be kept in mind is that they may be privileged in society, but no moreso than Savarnas of their income level. All of these traits are things they share with rich Savarnas -- so maybe they have this in common with this particular group of white people.

What is not talked about much is the other two groups of white people that I know to exist in India, those being Israelis and Russians. Now Israelis are actually pretty well integrated in Goa and Himachal, they’re mostly like me -- long term tourist visa stays. The stereotype that they overstay their visa is largely not true. The stereotype that’s even less true is that there’s an “israeli mafia” that runs drugs back and forth between Himachal and Goa, which owns businesses and land in towns like Kasol, and is also heavily involved in other underground crimes. The BJP’s 2017 electoral campaign centred largely around this fictional Jewish Mafia, and it won this campaign. I should also note that antisemitic and nazi imagery is even more common in Himachal than in the rest of India. I even saw Indians walking around with Third Reich flags on their t-shirts a couple times.

So that’s the Israelis. What are the Russians doing? Well, some of them are economic migrants. But more visibly they’re being sex trafficked just like everywhere else in the world. A hookup once told me that in her ex’s apartment building, there was a floor full of Russian prostitutes that would go missing during election season. The political parties openly commit crimes like this and since the parties also control the police there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Their position is very similar to Bangladeshi and Nepali women. Does this affect peoples’ perceptions? You tell me.

So, getting back to the issue of the bizarre Hindu craving for white approval, this takes the form of sexual harassment very, very often. Another thing contributing to this is the widespread use of porn in India; the women in porn are mostly white. Bollywood has this problem too, where it’s a common plot that the protagonist of the film dates a “sexually open” white woman to get his bullshit phases out of the way before realising he needs someone who can cook and clean to spend his life with and marries an Indian woman (implicitly of his caste).

So, acknowledging the following non-exhaustive list of some formal disabilities that I experience BY LAW -- 1. it is legal to discriminate in housing, 2. it is not legal for me to seek employment, 3. I am not allowed a vote or representation 4. There is no available path to citizenship from someone of my socioeconomic class 5. I cannot take advantage of government programs -- we are left with two remaining possible sites in which white privilege could possibly be found.

The first one of these is uncomplicatedly fake. It was RSSBJP propaganda in the late 00′s and early-mid 2010′s that everyone in India is brainwashed by white people to believe that they are culturally inferior. This is pretty clear and flagrant fascist propaganda that has been weaponised to some pretty destructive ends. For example, it was asserted that Hindi is the indigenous language of India and natural language of all Indians (it’s not) and the reason anyone wants to learn English is because white people have brainwashed them into believing it’s superior to Hindi. Actually what this was was RSSBJP brainwashing a bunch of savarnas into believing that they’re race traitors for speaking the “coloniser tongue” (In reality Hindi is the coloniser tongue, and this is again a caste issue, but this is long already) and that this was white peoples’ fault. White people remain a preferred target because the imagination of the colonial era lends itself easily to the claim, because India’s millennia-old obsession with light skin bears a superficial resemblence to colour discrimination in the west, and because the “opposition leader” at the time, Rahul Gandhi, is half-Italian on his mother’s side.

Yes, the party in power criticises the “opposition leader” on the basis that he’s the half-white son of a naturalised citizen of the Republic of India. Yes, it works. Such privilege! Even Obama’s accusers at least had to cloak it, they couldn’t just come out and say “it’s bad that you are that race”.

Anyway, as white people have no such mind control ability, and no control over Indian media or any other resource through which they might promote such an idea, and the source of the claim has a clear conflict of interest, we can not only dismiss it but be reminded to keep a look out for it as it has ingrained itself into social imagination and in fact become another nonsense accusation against which I must constantly defend myself.

The second site is one I am willing to entertain, and it’s that white privilege is extant in relation to other groups of foreigners. If this is the case it’s still something that native-born Indians have absolutely no business grilling me on, because to be a foreginer is itself to face a certain level of social exclusion, which makes them the privileged class on the foreigner/native axis. This one, I’m, y’know, willing to talk about, but only with people who have any damn business bringing it up, not a bunch of Brahmin social climbers. Something often brought up is that people do make room for white foreigners (at least). This is true. I can’t really speak to whether people from other groups have the same experience (except for one or two anecdotal examples, which, for the record, indicate that they do) but even acknowledging that is an admission that such efforts are necessary. What else should be kept in mind is that they are spectacularly unsuccessful.

So returning to the elephant in the room (get it because elephants are a symbol of buddhism which... yeah) is that there are power dynamics in India which matter other than race and class and that’s religion. As already established, this country is run by a genocidal, anti-Muslim hate cult. Now you can argue that because I’m white it doesn’t matter than I’m a Muslim, and I’ll be counted as a Christian, which is a very Hindu conclusion, and the most staggeringly ignorant thing imaginable to say but it turns out Hindus can just say any words in whatever order they want, so I’ll deal with this argument anyway.

The genocidal hate cult that runs the country is also anti-Christian. So, that’s that on that. The only thing is, the Good Brahmins don’t have any more good to say about Christians, particularly white Christian missionaries, than their RSSBJP immediate relatives do. Attacks against Christians, including white missionaries, are a daily occurrance in India being most common in the liberal paradise state of Tamil Nadu, and they are celebrated by Good Brahmin and Bad Brahmin alike as well as their boot lickers on social media, including this website.

But if we want to acknowledge the reality that I am a Muslim, then we have to take into account that BJP rhetoric assumes all Muslims to be infiltrators and foreigners. The only reason this is not taken into account by Good Brahmins on this website is that harbour the same prejudice as their immediate relatives, and so are unable to recognise them as harmful. For instance I’ve been accused of being undocumented or overstaying my visa by several people in the past few days. Careful readers will remember this stereotype from the Israelis earlier. It’s not true for them, and it’s not true for me -- I’m here legally but in a compromised, non-citizen status compromised by widespread discrimination and ground-level lack of access to theoretically available resources on account of my socioeconomic class. If this screams “invulnerable” to you, hoo boy.

TL;DR To quote one of my favourite Urdu poets, “The only thing we have in common is I’m a dick and you suck.”

#And now that we've established that #I'm not going to cotton to any respectability brahmin cordiality shit about my word choice.#I live in a country where there are entire castes of people who have no name which is not a degrading slur.#To get bent out of shape over being called a 'barbarian' is a gross exercise of privilege.#That is if it were sincere and not just you guys playing language-obsessed westerners like fiddles.

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seyaryminamoto · 7 years ago

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Yeah why does Zuko treat his sister like that when his entire character and development revolves around him learning compassion and sympathy?

Because that’s what his entire character and development SHOULD revolve around, what most people think they revolve around… but it’s actually not the case.

There are many instances where the show tries to press on that Zuko has become a kind and compassionate man, and those instances are mainly dialogues and quotes. I’ll list several ones that the fandom seems to cry about back and forth, and then we’ll break everything down bit by bit, so I can explain why I think Zuko’s development isn’t about any of these things…

Examples: The Guru

“It’s a new day. We’ve got a new apartment, new furniture, and today’s the grand opening of your new tea shop. Things are looking up, Uncle.”_____________Iroh: “Who thought when we came to this city as refugees, that I’d end up owning my own tea shop? Follow your passion, Zuko, and life will reward you.”Zuko: “Congratulations, Uncle.”Iroh: “I am very thankful.”Zuko: “You deserve it. The Jasmine Dragon will be the best tea shop in the city.”Iroh: “No. I’m thankful because you decided to share this special day with me. It means more than you know.”Zuko: “Now let’s make these people some tea!” Iroh: “Yes, let’s make some tea!”

Day of Black Sun Part 2.

“No, I’ve learned everything! And I’ve had to learn it on my own! Growing up, we were taught that the Fire Nation was the greatest civilization in history. And somehow, the War was our way of sharing our greatness with the rest of the world. What an amazing lie that was. The people of the world are terrified by the Fire Nation. They don’t see our greatness. They hate us! And we deserve it! We’ve created an era of fear in the world. And if we don’t want the world to destroy itself, we need to replace it with an era of peace and kindness.”

Ember Island Players

Toph: “Geez, everyone’s getting so upset about their characters. Even you seem more down than usual, and that’s saying something!”Zuko: “You don’t get it, it’s different for you. You get a muscly version of yourself, taking down ten bad guys at once, and making sassy remarks.”Toph: “Yeah, that’s pretty great!”Zuko: “But for me, it takes all the mistakes I’ve made in my life, and shoves them back in my face. My uncle, he’s always been on my side, even when things were bad. He was there for me, he taught me so much, and how do I repay him? With a knife in his back. It’s my greatest regret, and I may never get to redeem myself.”Toph: “You have redeemed yourself to your uncle. You don’t realize it, but you already have.”Zuko: “How do you know?”Toph: “Because I once had a long conversation with the guy, and all he would talk about was you.”Zuko: “Really?”Toph: “Yeah, and it was kind of annoying.”Zuko: “Oh, sorry.”Toph: “But it was also very sweet. All your uncle wanted was for you to find your own path, and see the light. Now you’re here with us. He’d be proud.”

Sozin’s Comet: The Old Masters

Zuko: “Uncle, I know you must have mixed feelings about seeing me. But I want you to know, I am so, so, sorry, Uncle. I am so sorry and ashamed of what I did. I don’t know how I can ever make it up to you. But I’ll-… How can you forgive me so easily? I thought you would be furious with me.”Iroh: “I was never angry with you. I was sad because I was afraid you lost your way.”Zuko: “I did lose my way.”Iroh: “But you found it again. And you did it by yourself. And I am so happy you found your way here.”

There’s even a hilarious thing going around in a popular post these days, about his “Father Lord” slip of tongue, interpreting that as Zuko being so aware of the fact that it’s his FATHER who has to be defeated/die… while of course, ignoring the rest of the context. Just the kind of posts I love, as you’ll imagine.

Anyways, with these quotes in mind… what is the main takeaway the general public gets? That Zuko learned kindness! That Zuko learned the Fire Nation was wrong!

And now I ask… if he learned it all, as apparently he did, where’s the proof of it in his actions? When does Zuko show genuine kindness and empathy towards other characters and people, post-redemption?

First of all, the Guru gives us the creepy Zuko who’s happy and chill after getting out of his emo coma. What bothers me about Zuko in these episodes is that his transformation doesn’t feel genuine to me AT ALL. Zuko made the right decision, he let Appa go, after Iroh encouraged him and told him to do that. But reasonably speaking, did he really understand what Iroh was telling him? Iroh scolds him for not thinking things through, and tells him that it’s time for him to think about what he wants, and who he wants to be, basically. Zuko’s answer to that is letting Appa go, and then fainting, and then coming back to life as a happy boy. Which… eh? He should have changed, no doubt, after this experience… but to this extreme? And this fast?

The reason it feels fake is because you can’t really see him pondering Iroh’s words properly. He had a bunch of nightmares and even then we have no idea if he learned anything from them. If there was any reflection on his part over what he was experiencing. Where he SHOULD HAVE asked Iroh for advice, where he should have taken his seat and sipped his tea while asking Iroh about his own experiences, hoping to unravel what his own path should be… Zuko just got happy. That’s that. That’s how he learned kindness and empathy and sympathy and all that. So he becomes a very supportive nephew, but Iroh doesn’t really understand where that came from, and from the looks of it, neither does Zuko because as soon as the stakes are high again, what did he do? Pick his old life over the new. And that, again, reinforces my interpretation that his “change” was him trying to behave the way Iroh would approve of, rather than him actually trying to understand ANYTHING from Iroh’s words in lake Laogai. Rather than him learning a single thing about kindness and peace and good will towards men.

Second, DOBS Part 2. Zuko gives Ozai a funny speech about how they’ve been indoctrinated in the Fire Nation to believe they’re great and spreading greatness through the war. What an amazing lie it was, he says. A lie he believed in and fought for, directly, during at least 3 years. Yet also a lie he set aside for his own benefit, whenever he so wished (see the Blue Spirit, for instance). A lie he apparently stopped believing in when Azula shows up to drag him home as a prisoner. He cuts his hair and discards his ties to his nation…

… And yet still tries to fight Aang in the Chase. Because he’s got to get the Avatar, despite he knows the Fire Nation has listed him as a wanted criminal.

And he still tries to use Appa to bring Aang to him in Lake Laogai, because this way he’s going to get the Avatar for real and still go back to the horrible nation that issued out a wanted poster for him.

When you look back, all the way to episode 3?

“If my father thinks the rest of the world will follow him willingly, then he is a fool!”

Point and case being: Zuko, for one thing, wasn’t as blind to Ozai’s war at every point in the show as most people would have you believe. If he was aware of how Ozai wasn’t going to get the world to follow him, to the point of calling his terrifying father A FOOL??? Then clearly Zuko didn’t buy into the propaganda entirely. His actions during the war are NOT for the Fire Nation’s sake, or for his father’s sake, but for the sake of going home already and putting an end to his banishment once and for all. Nothing in the entire show has ever lead me to think otherwise, and I know for a fact that I’m not the only person who sees it this way. So Zuko didn’t really care about the lies and the greatness: it was NEVER what guided his actions, because what he truly wanted was to stop being banished.

So, now that the whole lie thing is out of the way, he tells Ozai that the rest of the world hates them! And yes, they do! He sees that for himself in Zuko Alone… you know, that episode that comes after he’s been out there, stealing from Earth Kingdom people, OUT OF A SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT. So sorry, I will always bring this up because Zuko NEVER owned up to this and I have no reason to believe he even regretted it. So… ugh. Anyways, point being that Zuko is telling Ozai all about how the Fire Nation deserve the Earth Kingdom’s hatred… which of course, Ozai knows. He’s not THAT stupid, he just doesn’t give a crap about being despised xD But the thing is… Zuko talks about this like he’s seen the world, like he’s watched how Fire Nation people treat Earth Kingdom people horribly, like he’s learned how messed up his own people can be.

But… when did we see Zuko standing up to Fire Nation people who were oppressing Earth Kingdom ones?

The answer is a grand total of zero times. Zuko stands up to a group of Earth Kingdom bullies who are harassing other Earth Kingdom people, and then after revealing who he is, he discovers they hate him even more than they hate the bullies. Zuko also helps Jet steal food on their ferry ride to Ba Sing Se, but who’s he stealing it from? Earth Kingdom people who are oppressing Earth Kingdom people. Zuko didn’t actually see how the Earth Kingdom people hated the Fire Nation, he saw how the Earth Kingdom people hated HIM, all through Books 1 and 2.

Now, why did Zuko help the people he helped? The bullies bothering Lee’s town had bothered Zuko too, the people hoarding food bothered him as well because he was eating crap while the good stuff was kept elsewhere. Zuko NEVER acted the way Aang did, spontaneously deciding to help the oppressed and downtrodden who needed help out of the good will of his heart. Nope, Zuko worked with others when it was convenient, most of all. Lee only gets Zuko to stay after the bully soldiers steal Zuko’s food, convincing him when he offers to feed Zuko’s ostrich horse at his house. Without that offer, Zuko would have just left and done nothing for these people.

In short, Zuko apparently learned that the Fire Nation is despised… when, as I said, going by his experiences, the one he should have learned was despised was HIM. He’s holding the Fire Nation as a whole responsible for his actions, for his wrongdoings, for everything bad he ever did in the Earth Kingdom. I repeat, the only time Zuko saw Earth Kingdom vs. Fire Nation in the flesh was when it was Earth Kingdom people mad at him for whatever he was doing, be it setting their villages on fire, stealing their food or treating them like lesser than him. The only exception I can think of is when the Earth Kingdom soldiers captured Iroh, and what happened there? Zuko and Iroh fought them, didn’t even reflect on how rightful or not these people were to pick a fight with them, and moved on. That simple.

We never get to see Zuko reflecting on how the Fire Nation has harmed these people so badly. We don’t get him reflecting on his own faults and mistakes often, but he certainly never seems to give much thought to how messed up things are and how the Fire Nation has no right to destroy everyone else. His showdown with Ozai, so very awaited by so many people? It, again, feels forced and hard to believe. It comes after we’ve seen Zuko talking to Mai about how he was his father’s perfect son but then he wasn’t HIM… and aside from that? What else did we have throughout the first half of season 3 to show us why Zuko is seeing the world differently than how he saw it before? He heard a story about his ancestors and was told he had good and bad inside him? Well, gee, that didn’t stop him from displaying his entitled side again by boasting to Mai that he can make anything she wants happen because he’s a prince, only a couple of episodes later. It didn’t stop him from wanting to be part of a war meeting desperately, with the attitude of a tantrum-throwing child.

There are SO MANY CHANCES the third season could have taken to portray a Zuko who ponders things, who pays attention to the world around him and realizes that he’s part of the Fire Nation, that he wants to respect everyone different from him too, that he doesn’t care about nation division but about doing what’s right by the world. Instead, he’s out there sending murderous cyborgs to kill the Avatar, he’s yelling at his imprisoned uncle, he goes to the beach and just picks fights both with his friends and with complete strangers, and throws more temper tantrums than anyone ever should.

And that brings up the really essential question: where, in all three seasons, did Zuko learn that peace and kindness were the answer? He says as much to Ozai, no doubt. But HOW is this his conclusion? Why would Zuko think that everyone should be kind and get along when the first person who always jumps into violence/conflict mode is him?

His field trips do nothing to prove he actually changed in this way, if you think about it:

Aang’s field trip: Zuko is aggressive and angry over losing his bending. He’s not very kind and peaceful about it, as far as I can remember. When they reach the Sun Warriors’ place, he’s clever for 10 seconds and stupid right after again, and when told that they have to be deemed worthy by Ran and Shaw? His immediate response to Aang’s doubts and uncertainties is “Well, we’re the Fire Prince and the Avatar. I think we could take these guys in a fight, whoever they are”. Again, responding with violence to a situation that he didn’t even know understand fully. What’s Zuko’s instinctive response to everything? Violence!

Sokka’s field trip: Zuko may know a thing or two about political prisoners, who knows, I certainly don’t know because the show never touched this subject. Tyrants like Ozai can and will imprison people who don’t deserve to be in jail… but as far as we saw? That might not have been the case in the Boiling Rock. We learn no stories of any of the people in this prison. We don’t have any clue about who they are. We don’t know if they deserve to be in there or not. But Zuko not only agrees to help Sokka break out his dad and girlfriend… he also agrees to helping Chit Sang, a complete stranger, who may just be hella dangerous for all they know (the wikia claims he’s been accused for murder and he says it’s not true: if he’s lying that means Zuko helped release a murderer from prison!). While the Boiling Rock is Zuko’s best field trip by far, it still makes you wonder if he gives his actions proper thought. Does he really want to release Fire Nation prisoners without knowing who they are or what they did to end up in there? How does this count as “peace” and “kindness”? Granted, the kind part is letting the guy go, sure, and what about the part where, if he were a murderer indeed, he might just go out there and kill again? How is that still kind, still peaceful?

Katara’s field trip: I barely even need to talk about this because Zuko absolutely condones Katara killing Fire Nation soldiers, who are/were acting UNDER ORDERS OF THEIR SUPERIORS, all because he wants to be her friend. Zuko, Mr. I’m-going-to-be-the-Fire-Lord-of-peace-and-kindness, standing by and even encouraging a girl who’s mad with grief and who wants revenge for her mother’s death, regardless of the cost. Again… is this Zuko’s peaceful doctrine? What sort of kindness do these actions reflect? When Aang says they shouldn’t do this, Zuko SCOFFS, he MOCKS him… and yet six episodes ago he was rambling about peace and kindness to his father, who of course, LAUGHED IN HIS FACE THE SAME WAY ZUKO WAS LAUGHING IN AANG’S FACE NOW…?

My point… Zuko learned some very pretty words that he can’t seem to put into actions. Heck, who knows if he even understands their meaning. But maybe what he meant was that everyone else should be kind and everyone else should be peaceful, and only when they all are nice and peaceful will he become nice and peaceful too. Maybe.

Carrying on after his speech to Ozai, though: as usual, his conversation with Toph only strengthens my belief that his development was about becoming exactly what Iroh wanted him to be rather than growing on his own and genuinely learning to better himself for his own sake. He says that the play rubs his worst mistakes in his face: what did the play show him doing? Yelling at Iroh, sending Iroh away, and I suppose having a weird affair with Katara (is this somehow implying that having a moment with Katara was one of his worst mistakes? Well, okay then, Zuko… x’D)? I can’t remember the play portraying anything else. Oh, well, growing out his hair. I guess he didn’t like his hair much either. Ah, and breaking Aang out of prison, I’m guessing he’s really sorry for that now, for… some reason?

Point is… the play didn’t show a Zuko who was hurting strangers, the way he often did in Book 1. It didn’t show a Zuko who was treating Earth Kingdom people like they owed him stuff just because he was Fire Nation royal, as he did in Book 2. We were shown a Zuko who, above all else, was mean to Iroh: THAT is his biggest mistake. Or so he believes. His remorse, his guilt? It’s all about Iroh. And that he’s acting the way Iroh expects of him is what makes him a worthwhile person now, basically. Instead of Zuko questioning what deserves to be questioned, we get a Zuko who adopts Iroh’s beliefs blindly, and who doesn’t even act on them entirely. He just tries to talk the way Iroh would, but as I said above? His answer to every problem is STILL violence. He STILL doesn’t think things through, he may have set a murderer loose in the Fire Nation on his trip to get out of prison, he thinks murder is fine and dandy in general… but because he will recite Iroh’s creed he’s somehow all good now?

And when Iroh takes him back, everyone’s happy, everyone’s moved, that’s what he deserves! Well, no doubt Iroh was going to accept him as he did, why wouldn’t he? Zuko modeled himself after his uncle, entirely. He wants to be Iroh 2.0, and he’ll do whatever he has to do to earn his approval.

But being Iroh 2.0 doesn’t mean having mercy for everyone, it doesn’t mean believing in peace and kindness as the answers to every ordeal. No, it means stopping the war, at any cost, and by doing whatever needs to be done. And that would be fine, but it also means that BOTH Iroh and Zuko don’t care, ultimately, if their other relatives live or die. Iroh never suggested Aang could find another way to defeat Ozai other than killing him, meaning he probably didn’t think there was another one and, meaning, he didn’t care that his brother had to die. He must have seen it as a necessity. Likewise, Zuko sees his sister unhinged and broken, and his reaction is simply to take advantage of her loss of sanity, and after her defeat, to stand by watching her writhing on the ground. Iroh has already told him Azula needs to go down, and that he shouldn’t get along with her. So he doesn’t even try. He doesn’t really need to freak out about whatever his sister’s future will be, because as long as she’s not standing between himself and the throne, he can easily just discard her.

I brought up that I found that “Father Lord” interpretation ridiculous to no end, but I’ll expand on why now: Zuko isn’t “painfully aware” of the fact that it’s his father who has to die. He’s not shown hesitating, instead, he’s shown hoping Aang can get it done, basically. Zuko isn’t particularly worried about Ozai’s fate, and it shows not only an episode before, where he’s actively scolding Aang for trying to find a solution other than murder. And it shows, again, in the finale when he confronts Ozai in his prison cell by telling him:

“You should count yourself lucky that the Avatar spared your life.”

Does this SERIOUSLY sound to anyone like a guy who was conflicted and sad that his father had to die? I can’t see it. I really can’t. If he was worried about Ozai, if he felt bad about his potential death? That feeling was buried SO DEEP that Zuko wasn’t even conscious of it. And as a reminder.. he has accepted Iroh as his actual father. He outright tells Ozai that Iroh is the one who was a real father to him. So… I don’t know if he’s really that conflicted about Ozai dying. Not when the person who’s most eager in the show to get Aang to kill Ozai is Zuko.

… Anyways.

In short, Zuko’s story was not about kindness, despite what the show would want everyone to believe. Zuko has ALWAYS suffered from a severe disconnection between his actions and his words. It’s something many people have criticized about his character before, and this ask really just ended up turning into a criticism about that, too. Zuko can talk about goodness and honor and kindness and peace all he wants, but when he stands watching his broken sister, with a look on his face that suggests Katara is more affected by Azula’s broken display than he is? You get the feeling he’s really just all talk. That a guy who preaches peace and then goes out to help his new best friend on her vengeful killer spree actually doesn’t care about peace or kindness unless it’s convenient to bring it up. Sure, he poured tea for people once in a while. Sure, he has taken up Iroh’s example and he may become an even better person in the future.

But the Zuko we saw in the show? He’s not changed nearly as much as people want to think he has. His redemption was supposed to be about how he learned better, how he became a good person, and how he’s the ideal Fire Lord for a Fire Nation headed for peace: do excuse me for questioning that, considering that the comics got their start with a trilogy where Zuko was charging against the Earth Kingdom all over again, as if his speech to Ozai had been hollow because here we are again, Fire Nation vs. Earth Kingdom. Who learned anything from the 100 Year War? Not Zuko!

All talk about Zuko’s kindness and good heart isn’t completely unfounded, but the show never developed his best traits the way it was supposed to. And the thousands of times where he shows no kindness, no mercy, where he chooses violence over peace, speak much louder than the handful of times where he decided to do the right thing, for a change. Especially when the merciless, violent stuff happens after he’s supposed to be all redeemed. Zuko’s growth was nowhere near as brilliantly executed as so many people would like to believe. Switching sides while barely changing your behavior and responses to situations is merely switching sides. It’s not a full-blown redemption, let alone is it one based on how compassionate and nice he’s become.

#markhamillz #... I ranted again #I did not mean to #crap

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maddierosipal · 4 years ago

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Excerpt from My Mom The Intergalactic Terrorist

From its place in my pocket, my phone began to buzz, filling the air with the silly ringtone I’d chosen for my mother; the X-files theme, I thought it would go well with the cartoonish alien I’d selected for her contact image. With a sigh, I pulled it out and mashed the answer button in frustration.

“Galileo,” my mother’s voice came.

“What?” I asked.

“What do you want to smell like this week?”

That was her way of asking what scent of body wash I wanted. For some reason, she’s convinced that people bathe to make them smell like something else and they put a lot of importance on said smell.

“Do they have anything like nature-ish? Any waterfall or stream?” I asked.

She went silent on the other end, but I could still hear the background noise of the grocery store, so I knew she didn’t hang up. I could hear her grab a bottle on the other end, making a thoughtful noise as she looked it over.

“How about Ocean Breeze?”

“That works.”

“Wonderful! And what would you like your hair to smell like?”

Groaning, I rolled my eyes, pinching the space between my brows. As I stepped, my foot connected with a loose stone, sending it skidding ahead of me on the sidewalk. I kicked it once again when I caught up to it but after that it was out of my sight.

“Just get me something clear. It doesn’t matter the smell.”

“Alright, but don’t get mad at me if I pick something you don’t like.”

She takes this all too seriously.

“You don’t have to call me every time you go grocery shopping mom.”

“But I do! I want to make sure I get the right stuff,” She complained.

“Whatever, I’ll see you at home.”

“Ok son, beep.”

She thinks you’re supposed to say beep when you turn the phone off. I think it’s because she heard the phone beep and thought it was another person. Whatever, I wish she’d go back to whatever planet she came from, and return me to whatever family she abducted me from.

Before I could put my phone away, it buzzed again, this time it played the text notification sound that I had set for my buddy Nikki; Area 51, an excellent match to the history channel “Aliens” meme, the one with the guy with funny hair, that I had chosen for her photo.

“Earth to space cadet. Come in space cadet,” the message read.

“This is space cadet. What’s the problem?”

Nikki insists on calling me space cadet, that or Stargazer.

“Food supply running low. Requesting backup.” Translation: “My parents are out of town again, and I don’t want to cook for myself, so can I come over and bum a meal off you guys?”

“Of course.”

Mom may be the strangest person in town, but she’s never been one to turn down a hungry child. I could already smell what she was cooking when I walked into the house. It smelled like spaghetti, one of the things she’s actually good at cooking. That’s not saying much though, all you have to do is boil water and make sure you don’t overcook the noodles.

The big pot on the stove was steaming and gurgling. My mother stood over it, watching to make sure it didn’t boil over, holding her soup spoon at her side like a soldier holding her sword.

“Nikki’s coming over, so we’re gonna have to set a place for three,” I said as I opened the fridge to grab a soda.

“Ah! Galileo, don’t sneak up on me like that,” my mother yelled, whipping around with her spoon in the air.

“Sorry, did you hear what I said about Nikki?”

“Oh, yes, we should be good. I made plenty of spaghetti.”

With that, my mother went back to watching her cooking. While she finished up, I got to work getting out the plates, bowls, and silverware. At our house, we have a strange conglomeration of tableware. We have chopsticks, forks, spoons, knives, cheese knives, ice cream scoopers, nutcrackers, tuning forks, fondue forks, and skewers all in the same drawer. A typical family would keep their usual tableware in one drawer and everything else in another, right? Not our family. Mom insists that all of these objects are used for eating and should, therefore, be stored together. What’s funny is watching her eat with a tuning fork.

When I set the table, I make sure to grab what we need for whatever we’re eating. If my Mom does it, there’s no telling what she’ll put on the table. You might end up with a punch bowl to eat your dinner out of with the fondue fork she brought you. That’s why I like it better when I do it. A knock on the door alerted me of Nikki’s arrival. Our doorbell doesn’t work; we don’t have enough visitors to warrant getting it fixed.

“I’ve got it,” I said, leaving my mom to finish up the food.

Nikki is my best friend, but I have to say she’s a total geek. She wears her curly hair up in two pigtails that look more like puff balls than anything, her two front teeth have a tiny gap between them, her bag is decorated in space memorabilia, and her clothes are always covered in alien propaganda. She’s one of those who loves sci-fi movies and staying up late watching alien conspiracy videos. If I have to hear about the Roswell UFO one more time, I’ll probably lose my mind.

“May I come in?” She asked, shuffling in place.

“If you aren’t scared of getting probed,” I teased.

Without a moment’s hesitation, she stepped over the threshold of my house, taking off her shoes hurriedly. Nikki’s Mom and dad own a company that does something with fuel, she explained it to me once, but I forgot. Her mom’s the president and her dad’s the CEO, so they’re often out of town on business. It’s not like they don’t like her or anything, they just don’t want their kids getting caught up in everything.

Nikki is the oldest of five, three boys and two girls, and they’re all a different shade of dark. Nikki’s the lightest, then her younger brother Dave, then John, then Sarah and Jamal are about the same. Her mother’s pretty light and her dad’s pretty dark, so some took after their mom and some their father. It makes a lot of people question if they all have the same dad, but they do.

“I brought something sure to tell us if your mother is an alien,” she whispered, checking to make sure my Mom was nowhere nearby.

“Oh god, what is it?”

Slowly, she pulled the device out from her bag, making sure to keep it hidden. It looked like a calculator and a GameBoy had a crack baby. There were all sorts of buttons and wires poking out in all directions. When she pushed the on button, the screen turned on, displaying nothing but white.

“What do you think?”

“I think you made someone on amazon very happy.”

“Come on Galileo, this is the Invader Finder 2000, does that sound fake to you?”

“It sounds like your parents need to monitor your spending.”

She didn’t like that too much. As she glared at me, she pushed a button, and a tiny little blue dot appeared on the screen.

“This machine scans the area for aliens, if it senses one, the blue dot will turn red. It’s supposed to do a bunch of other stuff, but I haven’t figured it all out yet,” she explained.

Of course she hadn’t. More than likely it didn’t have all the settings it claimed it did. She’d probably get home, push a button and it’d spit out the quadratic formula.

“Time for dinner,” My Mom called.

“Let’s take this baby for a test drive, shall we?” Nikki offered, proudly heading toward the kitchen.

Rolling my eyes, I followed behind her with my arms crossed. At least tonight I’m getting dinner and a show. The kitchen table was set with the large spaghetti pot in the center and the container of sauce sitting next to it. There was also a plate of buttered toast off to the side. My Mom noticed Nikki’s little device immediately, but she didn’t seem alarmed at all.

“Ooo, what’s that?” She asked, taking her place at the table.

“It’s a new game I bought,” Nikki lied.

“That sounds fun.”

There were no serving spoons or tongs for us to get our food with. Reaching into the pot, my mom grabbed a big handful of pasta and put it on her plate before dumping a load of sauce on top. Next to go for it was Nikki, after eating with us so many times, she was used to my mother’s craziness. She kept the device hidden under the table in her lap, where she could check it occasionally during the meal.

Once everyone had gotten what they wanted, we started eating. While Nikki and I twirled our pasta into little bites around our fork, my mother grabbed at her pasta with her hands, shoving what she could into her mouth before slurping the rest up like slimy intestines. Her face was covered in red sauce after only a few bites, making her look like a cannibal.

“Thanks again for letting me join you, Ms. M.”

“No problem Nikki. I don’t mind at all. Speaking of, where’d your parents go this week?”

“France. There’s supposed to be some big alternative fuel event going on,” Nikki replied, glancing down.

“That sounds cool. Did they tell you what it was about?”

“The only thing I remember was that it had something to do with some old algae. I didn’t really catch everything.”

“Algae? That sounds so cool!” My Mom replied excitedly, placing her sauce-covered hands on the table.

“I guess.”

Of course, the little light on Nikki’s screen stayed blue no matter how close she got it to my mother. Occasionally it would beep, but that was about it, and it wasn’t even loud enough to hear. It seemed she was getting desperate as she was trying to lean without looking suspicious.

“Say, Ms. M, wanna try my game out?” Nikki offered, holding out the little device.

My Mom tilted her head in curiosity, taking the device like it was a snake whose pattern she didn’t recognize. I guess since it was coming from Nikki she trusted it. As soon as the little device passed from Nikki’s hands, the dot turned bright red, then the entire screen turned to static before fading to all black.

“Oh no, I broke it!” My mother panicked.

“Don’t worry about it, I’m sure I can get it working again,” Nikki reassured her, trying to hide the triumphant grin on her face.

Groan, now I’m going to have to listen to her talk about how it’s “proven” now. Rolling my eyes, I went back to eating my noodles. Sadly, Nikki proved my suspicions right, as soon as dinner ended, while my mother started cleaning up, she dragged me back to the living room with an insane look in her eyes. Once she made sure my mother hadn’t followed, she pulled me down to sit next to her on the couch.

“Did you see that? Proof! Hard evidence. I can’t wait until my fans hear about this.”

Now when she says fans, she’s referring to the 200 people that follow her blog on Tumblr, although I’m pretty sure at least a fourth of them are porn bots. She’s continuously posting crazy stuff about Aliens on there, and she even has a whole segment dedicated to my Mom, but I refuse to read it. I’m scared to see what kind of crazy stuff she’s done that I don’t know about.

“Yeah, right. You saw how that thing was glitching out, it probably just short-circuited, and that’s why the dot changed color,” I explained.

“Come on, Stargazer, how come it only did that when I handed it to her? It didn’t do that all throughout dinner, so what was different?” Nikki questioned.

It’s hard to argue with her when she gets like this. No matter what I say, she’s going to turn it down because she’s already convinced herself, so I might as well just not even try.

“I don’t know. Maybe keeping it on so long made it overheat or something? It was just a coincidence, don’t get too excited.”

“Yeah, right. You just want to ruin this for me,” She said, already typing up a blog post on her phone.

“Would either of you like a cold cream sandwich?” My Mom said, appearing out of nowhere with three ice cream sandwiches in hand.

“Sure thing Ms. M,” Nikki laughed, taking the sandwich that was closest to her.

I took the one in the middle, leaving the last one for my Mom, who happily took it and sat down in the empty recliner next to the couch. The three of us tore the packaging off and dug into our sweet treats. Nikki and I took our bites slowly, trying not to hurt our teeth from the cold, but my Mom ate the whole thing in just a few huge bites. She visibly cringed, but still continued to take massive bite after massive bite.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Gali. Thanks for letting me come over, Ms. M!”

Once she finished her ice cream, Nikki stood up to leave; her typical dine and dash maneuver. She had to be back home by a particular time, or the nanny would yell at her.

“No problem, my dear, feel free to come again,” My mother offered.

“See you at school, tinfoil head.”

Turning around, Nikki gave me the “loser” hand gesture before running off, nearly tripping on the uneven step that leads up to our front door. I headed up to my room after she left. Without her, I didn’t really have a reason to be out among the living, so I retreated into my sanctuary.

My room is the only place in the house where everything makes sense. Unlike the rest of the home, it looks like a sane human being resides within. The walls are covered in posters of my favorite shows and bands, my desk is neat and organized with my laptop in the middle, my clothes are put up, and my bed has matching pillows and bedding. It’s not a huge room, but there’s plenty of space for me to be me.

The bed creaked loudly when I flopped onto it. I pulled my phone out, plugged my headphones in, and turned on some of my favorite music. Personally, I prefer Techno, but I’m not opposed to a good rap song every once in a while, it all depends on what kind of mood I’m in, and right now I’m in a techno mood.

As my ears were filled with fun technological sounds, I stared up at the ceiling, thinking about Nikki’s stupid device. Not gonna lie, it was odd that it messed up right when my Mom touched it, but that doesn’t really mean anything. That was a piece of junk anyway. My Mom may be weird, but that doesn’t make her an alien.

Wanna see more? Check it out on Amazon.com

#book excerpt #sci-fi books #scifibooks #sci-fi #writerscommunity #writing #writer #writeblr #just a taste #bookaddict #bookblr #bookadvertising #self publishing #MMTIGT

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tamboradventure · 5 years ago

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Here Lies America: An Interview With Jason Cochran

Posted: 01/27/2020 | January 27th, 2020

In 2010, I decided to spend the summer in NYC. I was two years into blogging and was making enough where I could afford a few months here. Still new to the industry, NYC was where all the legends of writing lived and I wanted to start making connections with my peers.

It was that summer I met Jason Cochran, a guidebook writer from Frommers, editor, and the man I would consider my mentor.

Though we never had any formal mentor/mentee relationship, Jason’s writing philosophy, advice, and feedback, especially on my first book, How to Travel the World on $50 a Day, has been instrumental in shaping me as a writer. Much of his philosophy has become mine and I don’t think I would have grown to where I am without him.

Last year, he finally published the book he’d been working on about tourism in America, called Here Lies America. (We featured it on our best books of 2019 list).

Today, we’re going to go behind the scenes of the book and talk to Jason on what does lie in America!

Nomadic Matt: Tell everyone about yourself. Jason Cochran: I’ve been a travel writer for longer than I’ve felt like an adult. In the mid-‘90s, I kept a very early form of a travel blog on a two-year backpacking trip around the world. That blog became a career. I’ve written for more publications than I can count, including for a prime-time game show.

These days I’m the Editor-in-Chief of Frommers.com, where I also write two of its annual guidebooks, and I co-host a weekly radio show with Pauline Frommer on WABC. For me, history is always my way into a new place. In many ways, time is a form of travel, and understanding the past flexes a lot of the same intellectual muscles as understanding cultural differences.

So I have come to call myself a travel writer and a pop historian. That last term is something I just made up. Dan Rather made fun of me once for it. “Whatever that is,” he said. But it seems to fit. I like uncovering everyday history in ways that are funny, revealing, and casual, the way Bill Bryson and Sarah Vowell do.

What made you want to write this book? Before I began researching, I just thought it would be funny. You know, sarcastic and ironic, about Americans going to graveyards and places of suffering just to buy lots of tacky souvenirs, eat ice cream, and wear dumb t-shirts. And, that’s still in there, for sure. We’re Americans and we like those things. Key chains will happen.

But that changed fast. For one, that would have become a very tired joke. It wouldn’t carry for three hundred pages. Things clicked for me early on, on the first of several cross-country research drives I took. I went to a place that I wasn’t taught about at school, and it clicked. I was at Andersonville in rural Georgia, where 13,000 out of 45,000 Civil War prisoners died in just 14 months. It was flat-out a concentration camp.

Yes, it turns out that concentration camps are as American as apple pie. The man who ran it was the only Confederate officer who was executed after the war. Southerners feared the victors would hang their leaders by the dozen, but that vengeance never materialized. Not for Jefferson Davis, not for Robert E. Lee—the guy who ran this camp poorly got the only public hanging. And he wasn’t even a born American. He was Swiss!

But that’s how important this place was at the time. Yet most of us have never even heard of it, except for a really bad low-budget movie on TNT in the ‘90s in which all the characters bellowed inspirational monologues as if they thought they were remaking Hoosiers.

So just getting my head around the full insanity of Andersonville’s existence was a big light bulb—our history is constantly undergoing whitewashing. Americans are always willfully trying to forget how violent and awful we can be to each other.

And Andersonville wasn’t even the only concentration camp in that war. There were a bunch in both the North and the South, and most of them had survival rates that were just as dismal. So that was another light bulb: There’s a story in why our society decided to preserve Andersonville but forget about a place like Chicago’s Camp Douglas, which was really just as nasty, except now it’s a high-rise housing project and there’s a Taco Bell and a frozen custard place where its gate once stood.

And did you know that the remains of 12,000 people from another Revolutionary War concentration camp are in a forgotten grave smack in the middle of Brooklyn? We think our major historic sites are sacred and that they are the pillars of our proud American story, but actually, how accurate can our sites be if they’re not even fairly chosen?

What was one of the most surprising things you learned from your research? In almost no instance was a plaque, statue, or sign placed right after the historic event in question. Most of the monuments were actually installed many decades after the event. In the case of the Civil War, most of the memorials were erected in a boom that came a half-century after the last bullet was fired.

If you really get close to the plaques and read past the poetic inscriptions, it quickly becomes clear that our most beloved historic sites aren’t sanctified with artifacts but with propaganda placed there by people who weren’t even witnesses to the event. There was a vast network of women’s clubs that would help you order a statue for your own town out of a catalog, and they commissioned European sculptors who cashed the checks but privately grumbled about the poor taste of the tacky kitsch they were installing all over America.

We’re still dealing with what they did today. It’s what Charlottesville was about. But most people don’t realize these statues weren’t put there anywhere near the time of the war, or that they were the product of an orchestrated public relations machine. By powerful women!

I wrote a line in the book: “Having a Southern heritage is like having herpes—you can forget you have it, you can deny it, but it inevitably bubbles up and requires attention.” These issues aren’t going away.

Places we think of as holy ground, like Arlington National Cemetery, often have some pretty shocking origin stories. Arlington started because some guy got pissed off at Robert E. Lee and started buying corpses in his rose garden to get back at him! That’s our hallowed national burial ground: a nasty practical joke, like the Burn Book from Mean Girls. Dig a little and you find more revolting secrets, like how the incredible number of people buried under the wrong headstone, or the time the government put the remains of a Vietnam soldier in the Tomb of the Unknowns. They pretty much knew his identity, but Ronald Reagan really wanted a TV photo op. So they sealed all the soldier’s belongings in the coffin with him so that no one would figure it out.

They eventually had to admit they’d lied and gave the soldier’s body back to his mom. But if a thing like that happens in a place like Arlington, can the rest of our supposedly sacred sites be taken at face value at all?

It goes a lot deeper. At Ford’s Theatre and the surrender house at Appomattox, the site we visit isn’t even real. They’re fakes! The original buildings are long gone but visitors are rarely told that. The tale’s moral is what’s valued, not the authenticity.

What can visiting these sites teach us about how we remember our past? Once you realize that all historic sites have been cultivated by someone who wanted to define your understanding of it, you learn how to use critical thinking as a traveler. All it takes is asking questions. One of the most fun threads in the book kicks off when I go to Oakland, a historic but touristy cemetery in Atlanta. I spot an ignored gravestone that piqued my interest. I’d never heard of the name of the woman: Orelia Key Bell. The info desk didn’t have her listed among the notable graves. She was born around the 1860s, which was a very eventful time in Atlanta.

So I took out my phone and right there on her grave, I Googled her. I researched her whole life so I could appreciate what I was seeing. It turned out she was a major poet of her time. I stood there reading PDFs of her books at her feet. Granted, her stuff was dreary, painfully old-fashioned. I wrote that her style of writing didn’t fall out of fashion so much as it was yanked down and clubbed by Hemingway.

But reading her writing at her grave made me feel wildly connected to the past. We almost never go to old places and look deeper. We usually let things remain dead. We accept what’s on the sign or the plaque as gospel, and I’m telling you, almost nothing ever reaches us in a state of purity.

I figured that if I was going to probe all these strangers, I had to be fair and probe someone I knew. I decided to look into an untimely death in my own family, a great-grandfather who had died in a train wreck in 1909. That was the beginning and the end of the tale in my family: “Your great-great grandfather died in a train wreck up in Toccoa.”

But almost as soon as I started looking deeper, I discovered something truly shocking—he had been murdered. Two young Black men were accused in rural South Carolina for sabotaging his train and killing him. You’d think at least someone in my family would have known this! But no one had ever looked into it before!

Here Lies America follows their trail. Who were these guys? Why would they want to kill him? I went to where their village used to be, I started digging into court documents from their murder trial. Let me tell you, the shockers came flooding. Like, I found they may have killed him because they wanted to protect a sacred old Cherokee burial mound from destruction. There was this crazy, larger-than-life forgotten story happening in my own damn family.

My experience with that poet’s grave has a happy coda. Last week, someone told me that Orelia Key Bell and her companion are now officially part of the guided tour of Oakland. The simple act of looking deeper had revived a forgotten life and put her back on the record. That’s what visiting these sites can do—but you have to look behind the veneer, the way I do with dozens of attractions in my book. This is the essence of travel, isn’t it? Getting to a core understanding of the truth of a place.

A lot of what you wrote showed how whitewashed many of these historical sites are. How do we as travelers dig deeper to get to the real history? Remember that pretty much everything you see at a historic site or museum was intentionally placed there or left there by someone. Ask yourself why. Ask who. And definitely ask when, because the climate of later years often twists interpretation of the past. It’s basic content analysis, really, which is something we’re really bad at in a consumer society.

Americans have it drilled into them to never question the tropes of our patriotism. If we learned about in grade school, we assume it’s a settled matter, and if you press it, you’re somehow an insurgent. Now, more than any other time in history, it’s easier than ever to call up primary sources about any era you want. If you want to go back to what our society really is, if you want to try to figure out how we wandered into the shattered shambles we’re in today, you have to be honest about the forces that created the image that, until recently, many of us believed we really were.

Do you think Americans have a problem talking about their history? If so, why is that? There’s a phrase, and I forget who said it—maybe James Baldwin?-but it goes, “Americans are better at thinking with their feelings than about them.” We go by feels, not so much by facts. We do love to cling to a tidy mythology of how free and wonderful our country always was. It reassures us. We probably need it. After all, in America, where we all come from different places, our national self-belief is our main cultural glue. So we can’t resist prettying up the horrible things we do.

But make no mistake: Violence was the foundation of power in the 1800s, and violence is still a foundation of our values and entertainment today. We have yet to come to terms with that. Our way of dealing with violence is usually to convince ourselves it’s noble.

And if we can’t make pain noble, we try to erase it. It’s why the place where McKinley was shot, in Buffalo, lies under a road now. That was intentional so that it would be forgotten by anarchists. McKinley was given no significant pilgrimage spot where he died, but right after that death, his fans paid for a monument by Burnside’s Bridge in Antietam, because as a youth, he once served coffee to soldiers.

That’s the reason: “personally and without orders served hot coffee,” it reads—it’s hilarious. That is our national mythmaking in a nutshell: Don’t pay attention to the place that raises tough questions about imperialism and economic disparity, but put up an expensive tribute to a barista.

What is the main takeaway you’d like readers to take away from your book? You may not know where you came from as well as you think you do. And we as a society definitely haven’t asked enough questions about who shaped the information we grew up with. Americans are finally ready to hear some truth.

Jason Cochran is the author of Here Lies America: Buried Agendas and Family Secrets at the Tourist Sites Where Bad History Went Down. He’s been a writer since mid-1990s, a commentator on CBS and AOL, and works today as editor-in-chief of Frommers.com and as co-host of the Frommer Travel Show on WABC. Jason was twice awarded “Guide Book of the Year” by the Lowell Thomas Awards and the North American Travel Journalists Association.

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