#So its difficult to think of arbitrary things to draw him doing while i put off saying the specifics or working out the specifics at all | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mcbex · 1 year

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**All The Pennies**

I recently listened to a message from Chuck Swindoll about the creation of the universe. Well, it wasn't about the universe but he does go on for a bit about the chances of creation. He explains about having 10 pennies in your pocket numbered 1-10. He tells of the odds of pulling them out in order first #1 then #2 and further tell us how the odds grow exponentially as you go down the line trying to pull the next numbered copper out, 3 then 4 and so on. He explains that the creation of the earth would be 1000 times more difficult to create in the order the steps need to happen for us to exist.

I found it moving and the very next day I started seeing pennies pop up everywhere. Behind my jewelry box, next to the phone, down at my feet as I walk into a building, etc. All of them usually placed. A week went by before I started noticing them, then collecting them. Pennies are the most abundant monetary value in our country, they are also the least used. I personally throw mine unnumbered into a jar where if they're lucky I may roll them up one day in exchange for a dollar bill or a bank credit. I guess you could say I loosely keep track of them in that way. So the fact that I started seeing them all around has made me pause every single time to consider creation. I thought to myself, once I get to 10 I will number them and keep them in my pocket to remind myself how precious we are. I was up to 5 cents and yesterday while outside taking in the beauty of the end of winter I had a moment of reconsideration about this challenge. Of course I don't need this reminder. Creation reminds me all the time about its purpose and my place in it. Stopping here I thought when I get home I'll put those pennies I set aside with the rest and just move on from this.

I had yet to do that when I sat down this morning and dug into my bible, as I do most mornings. Every now and again I have this "lead me" moment with the Father. I'll pick up my bible, close my eyes and say 'Lord, where do I read'. It's a set aside moment beyond anything else. It's not lead by a devotional, chat or something I heard and want to reinforce it's lead by flipping the pages until he opens the page for me. Side note: once I did this feeling overwhelmed. I prayed "where to begin", we opened up to Gensis 1:1...He certainly has a sense of humor. This morning however it was Hebrews 1:2-3. Which states that the universe was created through the son of God. I have one of those bibles with the little asterisk that will lead you to matching verses. It helps solidify that we are reading truth. Although I don't know how I ended up in the next few verses they were all about Gods majesty and might. (I will post those verses below for you to check out later if you like.) They showed me that God is bigger than the universe. They reminded me not to put him in a jar where only I can access him. He deserves more.

My favorite part about faith and belief in God is how he cements these truths for those how have found the path. I love how the Bible written so completely separate still tells us such an integrated story of what ever "this" is. I don't claim to have even one answer to the why we're here. I only know I have every reason to have faith in this truth.

I finished reading, still having yet to put the pennies on my dresser with jar of nameless ones. Still processing what he's saying to me. I got up and made pancakes for my son. Opening the draw next to the stove to look for some arbitrary thing I found all the pennies. Not only the other 5 pennies for my challenge but in true form he over did it and sent me more than I had been waiting for. This makes me think of so many things. It's hard to share. I think 'change the pennies into people' and think of all the souls lost or looking that are peppered around us. I turn the pennies into 'reminders' of prayer and think of faith and the support of our Father and looking on maybe it's just random change left behind waiting to be spent on something undetermined. But I firmly believe there are no coincidences and maybe they are all of these things combine pending our perspective.

One thing is certain, he speaks to us and with us if we only just take the time to hear his message. Sometimes we just need to be open to the message and he'll show us. Other times we need silence and prayer to center. Either way the stream of love is never ending. I will be numbering these pennies, 1 -11. As a reminder that he is great. He is the creator. He always gives us enough, but usually gives us more than we need.

Hebrews 1:2-3 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.

2 Chornicles 2:6 Yet no one can really build a temple for God, because even all the vastness of heaven cannot contain him. How then can I build a temple that would be anything more than a place to burn incense to God?

2 Chronicles6:18 “But can you, O God, really live on earth among men and women? Not even all of heaven is large enough to hold you, so how can this Temple that I have built be large enough?

1Kings 8:27 “But can you, O God, really live on earth? Not even all of heaven is large enough to hold you, so how can this Temple that I have built be large enough?

#godthoughts

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stormy-caffeine · 2 years

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CW Childhood Vent

i repress emotions a lot of the time instead of expressing them and i wanted to draw them but i just cant so writing instead

vent under the break, just skip it honestly it doesnt matter

to birthgiver, you are less than the bare minimum and you should fucking know that

you think because you brought me to this existence you can tell me what to do and who to be and what you expect of me

i didnt ask to be here

nobody asked to be put here on a dying planet with arbitrary rules only enforced to make us hate each other, to fight against our nature of being kind and helpful when we can

i was a social creature and you made me hate and fear so much i cant even remember the day i stopped being social, cant remember entire years of my life

you showed me things at such a young age i shouldnt have seen so i wouldnt question you, wouldnt argue when you said i couldnt leave or go to others or do things on my own, you showed me terrible things to scare me into not realizing my own house was really a cage you shut me in so youd have a service animal instead of a child

you made me your fucking therapist at an age i was supposed to be learning multiplication and made me expect the worst out of others so you looked better in comparison cause of course you had to be the best person in the room, the righteous one the one who could never do anything wrong its always someone elses fault and someone out there is always worse so you must be amazing actually

you continue to try and mold me into a second you when i used to cry for days at a time years ago whenever someone mentioned how much we look alike our hair our faces our smiles

i never wanted to smile like you again so i just stopped

i still dont "smile right" for pictures like grandma insists because id rather be scolded than look more like you

the earliest memory i have in the fog is you and dad fighting, crying for both of you to stop it and for dad to not leave, not because he shouldnt have but because then id be stuck with you just me and my brother, the real second parent i had

if he got to leave i should have had the choice to go with him but instead we're both still stuck with you, because you already make things so tremendously draining and difficult imagining you in a court case over anything leaves us both rather being dead, instead tending to you day in and day out while you make me question if im a good person

a good person shouldnt wish for someones health conditions to take them away in the night, so i get to wake up to a calmer reality to a world where i can slowly forget you were ever the one to create me to make me to use me for all the tasks you couldnt be bothered to do or to show me how to do so you could just yell more to show me off like a trophy of being such a good parent when you didnt teach me a damn thing

a good person shouldnt have to question if they would actually call for help if you needed it if you passed out in your own drunken fucking haze and knocked your insulin out of wack or your pump stopped working right

i want to be a good person and i shouldnt be haunted every time i consider if your christian creationist god exists not because of his cracked out doctrine or his shitty followers but because hed look in my head and my heart and see that i legitimately wish for one of his creations to be annihilated and made unrecognizable to her own children

at first every yell made me flinch and question what i did wrong, tip toeing around my own room so you wouldnt have a reason to come in and complain or remember i exist i didnt learn how to play at home cramped in my room not because i didnt have toys but because being too loud would make you come in and not doing something right would make you be loud instead and pretending too hard would be too disappointing knowing just down the hall i could still feel your footsteps and when the dip of the bed meant you were getting up

now you dont need to yell, the sound of your breath of you existing in the same space as me is enough to make me want to scream instead the sound of you being alive when your very presence makes me anxious brings me closer and closer to ending my own, i can tell where you are in a crowded space by the sound of you existing cause i had to fine tune it so well

i dont know what my breath sounds like but i know yours, i can hear it down a hallway, across a house, through walls and vents and floorboards

ive had to listen so thoroughly i started hearing other things that shouldnt be there, seeing things that shouldnt be there when i strain my eyes in the dark wondering if youll burst in the second i close them

every day youre given the chance you take credit for me being where i am today

if it was only you getting me anywhere id be in the ground already

the only person who kept me going through your worst time was the same person you dont trust in our house because theyre a n***** as you love to say, oh they cant be trusted because they were too nice to you? complimented you having nice things when they themself didnt have anything to their name?? well let them be fucking mean to you then cause when i told them how you really were, they swore they might kill you the next time you raise your voice to me

if laws wouldnt take my soulmate away from me id probably join them

every time i question my gender i worry im not trans enough because of you and only you, me discovering myself in my own time isnt enough for you, i need answers or im faking i need to know every detail and be able to dumb it down for you without making you feel insecure about yourself despite it having nothing to fucking do with you i need to be able to convince you of my own feelings because youve so thoroughly trained yourself to expect me to shut up and say i feel however you think i should because for so long it made it easier for everyone if we just agreed with you and seethed later, gotta look good for everyone who doesnt know youre a miserable spiteful drunk at home who amazes me that shes able to carry a service job with how little tech AND people skills she has

out of the maybe 5 childhood memories i have i remember you constantly shoving me in short dresses i was uncomfortable in and couldnt play in because i had to look nice for family or friends you invited even on days i was supposed to be able to have fun and relax like the others, you had to pick the one thing i couldnt be myself in still you had to pick the one i would make a fuss about so you had an excuse to make me feel like a bad ungrateful child, cause god forbid i claim i like dresses and then not adore the one you picked out for me on my own fucking birthday

you wanted to show me off sure but you didnt want them to see who i was, you dont like who i am now either you just dont want to be put in a home when youre turning grey and people could never in this economy be paid enough money an hour to deal with you like our family has

you always try to make me feel guilty when youre reminded that im past the phase of believing you when you say you did your best and you were the best you could have been for me, are being the best you can be for me while im trying to actually grow into the person you should have been helping me become this whole time, youre always so quick to play the victim when i dont run to your side and tell you how good of a mother you are when you havent been a mother since the day i came out of you, if you were even good to me then

guess its hard to be good to a child youve blamed all your problems on since they were born, for things they cant control, not like its your own pessimism and demanding others basically wipe your own ass for you that would make anyone want to bang someone else who doesnt scream like a banshee the second something mildly inconveniences them or drinks themself into a coma multiple times a week

its hard to feel guilt for making you feel insecure as a parent when youve done nothing to make me feel like your love wasnt purely conditional by obedience from the start

you try to act so high and mighty, saying youre such an amazing parent for not throwing me on the streets when i came out or for not beating me as a child or for not making sure i was always fed and clothed and clean

you act so proud of not even coming close to achieving mediocrity that its genuinely fucking pathetic you narcissistic homophobic racist fucking disappointment

#vent #tw vent #cw vent #parental abuse #child abuse #neglect #storm.vent

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yandere-daydreams · 4 years

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A Yandere!Takuto Maruki/Reader commission for the very lovely, very patient @furudolove for Persona 5 Royal. I’ve never played a Persona game and I don’t plan to, but I can hope I got the majority of Maruki’s character, in this. He’d so idyllic, and so delusional... He’d make a wonderful Yandere, if I knew a little more about the series.

Word Count: 3.0k

TW: Imprisonment, Emotional Manipulation, Gaslighting, and Isolation.

You could feel every detail of the cot underneath you.

It would’ve been impossible not to. Prominent, pointed springs poked through the thin mattress and prodded at your back, biting into your arms, your legs, any patch of open skin they could find and force themselves into without objection. You took it in, for a moment, your body too sore and your mind too drained to do anything but lay back and let the chilled air wash over you, too cold to be natural, too sterile. When you opened your eyes, you did so reluctantly, but there was nothing to ease your anxiety. Above you was a plain, tiled ceiling, glowing with an artificial light you couldn’t quite name the source of, not unlike the lamp you might place above the cage of a reptile, and the rest of the room seemed to fall into place as your eyes found it, a desk and a pair of chairs coming into existence as you struggled to comprehend the world you’d fallen into. They were white and unmarked, your bed bolted to a floor speckled with grey dots. Like the presidential suite of a freshly renovated asylum.

You weren’t certain where you were, but you were sure you’d never been here before.

And you knew you didn’t want to be any longer than you had to.

Slowly, you pushed yourself up, your back aching under the strain, protesting any slight shift, as if you’d fallen too far and landed too suddenly. A similar pain was quick to make itself known in the back of your head, and thoughtlessly, you brought up a hand to try and soothe the knots of pressure tying themselves in the back of your skull. You hissed as your fingertips made contact with the worst spot, the area tender, bruised, but you didn’t have much time to investigate.

As soon as you’d begun to examine the area in earnest, there was a hand around your wrist, pulling your arm away gently and hesitating to release it when you failed to resist. Your attention turned to the man now standing above you, and suddenly, you were startlingly aware of just how muddled your mind had become, how difficult it was to formulate any thought beyond general observations about your current predicament. His features, although vaguely familiar, were blurry, unfocused, and you couldn’t bring yourself to try to put a name to his face. You didn’t have to, though, not when his voice was more than enough to identify him.

“You shouldn’t push yourself,” Your counselor, Takuto Maruki, explained. “I’d hate to see you hurt yourself this early on.”

You opened your mouth, but he was quick to hush you, letting your hand fall into your lap and repositioning himself, smiling as he lowered himself to your height. It was all you could do to stare in his direction, a million questions playing on your tongue, the least indescribable of which had to do with his attire, suddenly too formal, and the grin he was barely trying to conceal, wide and welcoming, only broadening at the slightest hints of your acknowledgment. “I know this seems strange,” He began, his speech rehearsed, as if he’d been preparing it while you were unconscious. “But there’s no reason to be afraid, anymore. You’re in a better place, now, a better reality, one where you can be what you’ve been trying so hard to be, with my help.”

“I don’t understand,” You whispered, drawing your knees to your chest, your voice smaller than you’d like it to be. The creak of the ancient bedframe threatened to drown it out. “I can’t… You want me to change?”

“I want you to be what you’ve always wanted to be.” This time, when he took your hand, he held it close to his chest, a wide, self-satisfied smile spreading across Maruki’s lips. As if he couldn’t be more proud, and expected you to be just as exultant. “You’re in so much pain as you are, (Y/n). I want to take that away. I’ll satisfy your desires, make you the person you want to be. Assertive, brave, confident.” He paused, squeezing your hand a little too tightly for the gesture to go unnoticed. “We’ll rule this place together. You’ll have everything you’ve ever wanted, and I’ll have you by my side. We’ll be happy.”

You blinked, once, twice, your gaze flickering from your knees, to the ground, to Maruki’s face, still alight with anticipation as he waited for your answer. You could only think to say the obvious.

“I’m sorry, but… I’d rather not.”

Maruki visited twice a day.

Or, it felt like twice a day, at least. It was difficult to tell, when the sky outside your windows was always dark and the lights were always on, remaining bright and untouched regardless of how many times you threw your few, meager possessions towards the unfaltering ceiling. You were given books to occupy yourself with, games and consoles to play them on, but the hours were long and he seemed to be the only company you were allowed. You were tempted to complain, but it was difficult to find your voice, when he was around. When anyone was around, really, but you tried not to think about that. Not when there were so many other things to keep your concern yourself with.

For example, the location of your prison, relative to the world you should be a part of. And, preferably, how you got back to the latter of the two.

When you asked, you didn’t dare think. You swallowed your nerves and spit out the words, keeping your eyes narrowed on the pad of lined paper in front of you. Maruki had handed it over the moment you expressed an interest in the object, but you had yet to decipher its contents. To you, it just seemed like a list of names, only a handful of which you recognized. “Where am I?”

“It’s complicated,” He answered, automatically. As if he’d expected you to ask this question sooner. “It’s… It’s my perfect reality. One where everyone can be exactly what they want to be, and have everything they long for. There’s more of it than-” He motioned vaguely around the room, clearly unimpressed with its contents. You couldn’t say you blamed him. “-this, but I didn’t want to smother you. I know how overwhelmed you can get, sometimes.”

“I’m working on that,” You mumbled, immediately longing to take it back. If anyone knew what you were working on, it was Maruki, the man who you considered to be one of your closest confidants less than a week ago. He was a kind man, and you’d trusted him… You still trusted him, honestly. It was impossible to stop, once you’d already allowed yourself to open up. “And there’s no way out of… ‘your reality’, is there? Without your help, I mean.”

Maruki took offense to that. He’d been seated at your desk, for the duration of this visit, maintaining a professional distance, but he stood when you brought up the topic of leaving. You heard a sigh as soft, measured footsteps made their way to your side. He hadn’t tried to close the distance between you two since you first woke up. Rather, he slid onto the end of your bed, his back coming to rest against the barred footboard, his legs left to intermingle with yours in the space between. It felt intimate, and as if by instinct, you were against it. “I don’t want you to feel like your a prisoner--”

“I am a prisoner,” You interrupted. “I can’t leave, so I’m a prisoner.”

“You’re a guest.” He sounded disappointed, but firm, his eyes flickering over your face and attempting to meet yours. You looked away, once again attempting to focus on his many, nonsensical lists. “I wasn’t lying when I said I wanted to make you happy. I can make people different, here, and I can make you different.” He finished with a bright, broad smile, only realizing his mistake a moment after your hurt became palpable. “Wait, that’s not what I - You won’t be different. You’ll be what you’re meant to be.” He leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees, beaming forward like there was nowhere in the world he’d rather be. “Nothing about you will change. If anything, you’ll be more you than you are now. Everyone here is. I can show you around, if you let me help you.”

“If I let you control me.” He opened his mouth, ready to provide another repetitive rebuttal, but you didn’t let him, biting the inside of your cheek as you fought to continue. “That’s what it is, right? You know I won’t fight, not once you’ve got me trapped in your little, perfect daydream. The only thing I can’t think of is why you don’t just-” You waved a hand in some vague, arbitrary gesture, attempting to vent your frustration physically. The effects were minimal, at best. “-do it, already. If this was really your reality, you wouldn’t keep asking for my consent.”

“It has to be your choice.” The declaration wasn’t triumphant, or altruistic, or anything less than pained. As if it hurt him to admit it. “I know you need to make progress. You want this to be your accomplishment, and I’m not going to take that away from you. I want you to be proud, (Y/n), I do, but I can help. This can be our achievement. I can make it so--”

“So I forget I hate myself?” Before you knew it, you were on your feet, your fists clenched at your sides and your vision red. You were angry. There wasn’t a point in denying it, why would you? He was the only person you’d spoken too in weeks, and it wasn’t like there was much to discuss. You had no one to protect your reputation from, and you refused to strive to prove yourself to Maruki. He didn’t deserve that. Regardless of how badly he wanted to try to act like he did, he didn’t. You were sure of that.

You had to be sure of that.

“I don’t want to be some brainwashed doll you can tow around as a shining example of how wonderful your fucked-up therapy is. I’m not who you want me to be, I’m not who I want me to be, I’m me. I have to be the one to deal with that, even if I have to do it on my own. There’s no quick-fix, or magic solution, or ‘cognitive wrap’, whatever you’ve been calling it. That’s not what I need.” You gasped, if only to stop yourself from losing your temper. You’d started to pace without realizing it, and when you came to a stop, you were facing one of the dull, white walls. It was fitting, you guessed. You didn’t want to see his response, not right away. “Remember the first time we met? When I went to you for advice?

His reply was delayed. It came with a soft exhale, ragged, but tamer than yours. Nostalgic, even. “You shook like a leaf. How could I forget?”

“I was terrified,” You admitted, letting a fraction of the tension in your body dissolve. “I was in a bad place, and it took me days to scrape up the courage to tell someone about it. If you’d made your offer then…” You let out a sad, breathy laugh, the sound as humorless as it was dry. “You said I had to believe I could make progress before I relied on anyone else. That’s what I’m doing. You can’t guilt me for following your advice.”

There was a beat of silence, a moment where you genuinely could’ve thought he’d begun to understand. Then, Maruki opened his mouth, and you were snapped out of that fantasy as abruptly as you’d been thrown into it. “I loved you back then, too. As much as I do now. If I could’ve done anything to end your suffering, I would’ve.”

You didn’t hesitate, your voice just loud enough for him to hear. “I think you should leave.”

“(Y/n), I--”

“Please, Takuto,” You interrupted, your nails beginning to dig into your palms. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

There was a huff. A sigh. But, you didn’t look over your shoulder until the metal-plated door had swung shut, a lock clicking into place from the other side, leaving you more alone than you had been before he made his daily visit.

For whatever reason, you had a feeling you wouldn’t be getting a second, that day.

Isolation was a tenuous thing.

You couldn’t keep track of time. Not here, not in this room, not when the sky never changed color and you never really felt hungry or thirsty or much of anything at all, if it didn’t have to do with Maruki and his ‘perfect world’. But, after your first real argument, Maruki had stayed away long enough to make his absence known, rather than just a particularly long lapse between tense encounters. It might’ve been a day, a week, a month, but you didn’t care about the specifics.

It was long enough to make you miss him. You supposed that was all that mattered.

There was a unique intimacy in the hand he rested on the center of your back, the steady fingers of a practiced professional rubbing slow, deliberate circles into the space just below your shoulder-blade. He hadn’t gotten this close before. He could’ve, you wouldn’t have had the courage to stop him, but after so much time spent alone with your own thoughts, this was the first time you truly embraced his presence by your side, his knee almost touching yours. Anything to make it feel like you weren’t trapped inside your own head.

He allowed you to sit in silence for a moment or two, your face buried in your palms and your legs crossed, keeping you perched on the edge of the bed, allowing you to wallow in your own self-pity and a fraction of his, too. Maruki didn’t seem to mind. He smiled, the expression nothing short of nurturing, pushing you a little close to the cliffside between you and the flawless, guilt-ridden submission he so very much to shove you towards. The way he spoke wasn’t any better, just as kind. As sickeningly tender as the rest of his facade. “I pushed you too far,” He admitted, a half-hearted laugh lacing the edges of his confession. “Too much ground to cover, never enough time. I should’ve let you think.”

You sighed, the sound desolate, miserable. A poor imitation of something that should’ve brought relief. “It’s not… It’s not just that. I’d never really adjust to…” You trailed off, swinging your legs over the cot’s side, kicking idly at the well-scoffed tiles. “...Whatever this is. Maybe you should work on that. Make a Visitor’s Center for your next abductee.”

“I’ll make you the host,” He added, prodding your side with an elbow. “My offer still stands, if you’ve changed your mind.”

You leaned against him. You leaned against him, and you rested your head on his shoulder and you let out another labored, languid sigh, somehow more sorrowful than your last. “I think you know what I’m going to say, Takuto.”

His collected grin pressed against the top of your head as he pushed a kiss into your scalp, a gentle hand coming up to draw you into a one-sided hug. You allowed it, indulged it, even, smiling up at him as he pulled away. Maruki took his time standing, stretching idly and holding out a single hand, letting something long and golden appear in his palm, a staff that tapered off into a sharpened point on one end, and sprouted into a shining, petaled star on the other. You were shocked for a moment, both by the gaudiness of the object and how wrong it seemed in Maruki’s hand, but you didn’t have much time to linger on the new addition. Not when he was so quick to draw your attention away.

“I think I’m too nice to you,” He started, still facing the furthest wall. “That’s the common factor. I get ahead of myself, and then I try to make it up to you with time and understanding and all the things I assume you’ll want. That just makes you hostile, though. I’ll try something different, next time. Something less… personal. On my end, at least.”

There were a dozen things you could’ve said. Accusations, questions, everything in between and a handful of options you hadn’t thought of, yet. But, as soon as you opened your mouth, your eyes were closing, your body collapsing and a supreme sense of exhaustion washing over you, traveling hand in hand with dizziness and every other sensation that could’ve urged you to sleep. Every other tortuous thing Maruki could’ve forced onto your mind to bend you to his whim.

You felt yourself fall to the floor just as your vision went black.

You woke up on a cot that squeaked when you moved.

It was an awful noise, rusted out and worn down, and it only got worse as you forced your body to move, pushing yourself into a more respectable position with arms that didn’t want to cooperate. They ached, argued, screamed, and you had a feeling they would creak too, if they could. The room around you was blurry, blurry and smudged and alien, and you realized rather numbly that you didn’t know where you were.

You realized you didn’t know where you were, and alarmingly, you realized you didn’t care.

You didn’t have to. There was already a familiar face at your side, one hand clamped around your bicep and the other resting on your shoulder, holding you up when you failed to do so yourself. It was your counselor, Takuto Maruki, smiling as brightly as ever.

“I have an offer for you,” He said, once you’d regained your balance. “One I have a feeling you’ll like.”

Without thinking, you found yourself nodding along.

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dontgofarfromme · 4 years

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While we're on the subject of redemption arcs, what were your thoughts on the ones in Oathbringer? I wasn't on Tumblr yet, so I think I missed your hot takes, and I'm really curious!

Ohhhhh man okay I love Oathbringer so much but also it's been like 2 years since I read it in full so I do NOT have a fresh memory of it, so this'll be a little vague maybe.

In terms redemption arcs....this book kind of kills it? Like. Okay I dont wanna shit on Zuko but everyone always brings Zuko up as the 'ideal redemption arc' and I'm not saying it was bad because it wasn't it was well done, but I've also seen people saying that the reason Zuko's redemption arc works is because he wasn't totally evil, and because he didnt commit super horrific crimes so he was on the redeemable side of some arbitrary line we've drawn. Like a requirement for a redemption arc is being on the correct side of that line otherwise there should be no stories that investigate how or if a person can be redeemed and what that would look like.

Anyway. I think thats kinda bullshit. I love Zuko and I love his arc but also....its like lukewarm in terms of where we can go with a redemption arc because Zuko is never the real villain, he's never just clearly evil, he does bad things and hurts the mcs but he's conflicted and regretful and showing signs of wanting to change and always a secondary bad guy to someone else.

And those things might make his arc more palatable and easy to draw on as an example of an effective redemption arc to some people, but also they allow you to skirt around a lot of the most interesting questions that can arise in this sort of arc. Like. I dont wanna say that it's boring but. It's sad to me that it's most people's go to (maybe only??? The things some people reference as being redemption arcs actually drive me up a wall) example of a well done redemption arc bc the questions you can pose about this are limited when the set up is a generally soft hearted boy from a messed up family is trying SO HARD to please his dad by being evil but also his really chill uncle is there to mitigate his worst ideas the whole time and hes super inefficient at being bad because he's 16.

IN CONTRAST. Oathbringer takes a character we thought we knew as good and turns him on his head. It gives us a past Dalinar and shows him as chaotic, uncontrollable, angry, warmongering, the extent of his bloodthirst contrasted against and shown to be greater that of characters we currently hate in the present day series. It shows us his anger and his violence and his lack of care for anyone and his failure at fatherhood and husbandhood and then his absolute darkest moment in which he unflinchingly directs the massacre of an entire city in a fit of rage.

And then it turns and it asks not only Dalinar himself, and the other characters, but also--by virtue of this being the third book, after we've already known current, measured, thoughtful Dalinar for 2 books--asks us if we can accept him as being redeemed. It presents us with a character who has done things that are so horrendous he would make for a terrifying and effective villain in basically any setting you put him in, and has him screw up massively, break down, spiral, hate himself, be mentally magically altered so that he can live with himself and try to become better rather than collapsing in on himself and becoming an utterly nonfunctional person, and then takes that protection away and asks him who are you now?

Who are you after everything terrible you've done and everything you've tried to make yourself into following that and can you be a person again? Will you crumple in on yourself or will you blame your failures on magic because that's the easy thing to do or will you ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE THINGS YOU HAVE DONE AND MOVE FORWARDS? And does doing so make a person redeemed? Or are there things so terrible that nothing you do can ever make it right? Even if you believe that to be the case, is it worth it to try anyway? And how do the answers Dalinar finds to these questions and the answers we find to these questions impact how we as readers view Dalinar compared to how we thought of him for the first two books?

There are tons of other things I could yell about for hours wrt OB including how Moash is an extremely effective foil for not only for Kaladin but also for Dalinar to an extent because his arc is a spiralling character degradation into NOT taking responsibility, and what happens when you have an outside force influencing some of your actions (like Dalinar's being influenced by the thrill, Moash's experiences of discrimination ARE a factor in his actions) and you push ALL the responsibility from ALL your actions onto that force and how that can hinder both your ability to redeem yourself AND to move forward and progress positively as a person.

And I'm also very capable of yelling for hours abt non-redemption arc related aspects of OB BUT. This book is a brick and my thoughts on it are probably that times 10 and I do want to sleep tonight and I have no real conclusion other than that this is a really frickin good book that has the guts to explore a lot of extremely difficult and complex topics and it's great.

#stormlight archive #cosmere #dalinar kholin #this spiralled into a shitty essay #on why i like redemption arcs #but eh oh well #someone tagged my post on mtendere #something like 'im not into war criminals being redeemed'#so im kinda worked up abt this #HI IM DANA AND I LOVE WAR CRIMINAL REDEMPTION ARCS #SUE ME #also aksja i love u refereing to this as a hot take #most of my takes are lukewarm i think #bc i have an intrinsic need for EVERYONE TO LIKE ME oop #ask #szethsmom

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consummate-deviant · 5 years

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Why I Think Entrapdak is Pretty Neat

Hello! How’s the family? Cat treating you okay? Isn’t autumn just...like… the best? Anyway, so, my Hordak thing turned out to be kinda popular. I’m flattered, really! If there are people out there willing to reward me writing stuff with positive attention, then I’ll just have to write more stuff. I mentioned back then that I had a similar write-up about Entrapdak, as a ship… and there seemed to be a little bit of interest in hearing my thoughts on the subject. So, here ya go! I’m Lancer, by the by. Not a lot to me. I’m a guy who likes things, and who enjoys articulating why I like things. I don’t really do it for any particular reason. I’m not trying to pwn haters or convert nonbelievers… As you may recall, though you might have missed it (I tend to be very lowkey and subtle about it), I’m not your dad and have no interest in the position… unless it pays. I just feel like the internet doesn’t have enough positivity, and the best way to remedy that is to produce some of my own.

As fate would have it, I like Entrapdak. A lot. I don’t ship often... a relationship has to really sync with me on a profound level to make me invested enough in it to want to write about it, but this one did it. Now, I’m not really promising originality here. As someone who explores the tag frequently, I know that plenty have expressed feelings I’m going to share with you here, many of whom did so better than I ever could, but sometimes you want to share your perspective, even if others whose opinions mirror yours have done so in the past, y’know? It’s a human thing! The relationship is a little… polarizing with people, though, I’ve noticed. A lot of people hate it, and have various reasons for doing so. Again, I ain’t here to convert you if you feel that way, but I did feel like the best way to kick things off would be to look at some of the major reasons other people tend to react to the ship like it were horseradish on a hotdog, and why those reasons don’t really bother me. A part that I, in my infinite wit and adorned in my clever pants, have dubbed:

Part 1: Entrapdak- Why I don’t hate it

***EXAMPLE THE FIRST: “HORDAK, THE AGED”***

By now it’s fairly well known that Entrapta is somewhere in the range of her late 20s to her early 30s. Now a few people refuse to accept this, citing her behavior as childish and accusing the creators of lying. I’m not really going to engage with that perspective. Hordak and Entrapta have appeared together in creator works and concept art dating back to 2017. Their interactions were intended to be a part of the show from the early stages of its creation. If you have so little faith in Noelle that you believe she planned for her story to have a romantic-coded relationship between an adult and a minor… I don’t know what I can even tell you.

Rather, the perspective that interests me comes from people who accept Entrapta being in the stated age range, but who still find themselves repulsed by the relationship on grounds of age. ‘She’s an adult, sure, but how old is Hordak? He could be in his fifties or sixties, or even be hundreds of years old.’ This point of view is at least interesting to think about, so I reckon I can share why this deal-breaker for some doesn’t really bother me.

To begin, assigning human ages, and the stigmas thereof, to an alien bat clone just feels strange to me. The Horde doesn’t seem like the type of place to want to waste resources on alien bat clone daycare... was Hordak born as an infant, or was he artificially developed to his current age? If it’s the later, do we consider him 0 years old at the moment of his birth, or already an adult? We don’t have a timescale provided to accurately determine his age, so investing too heavily in trying to learn it seems somewhat tedious and a lotofwhat pointless.

If we do, though, my next question is: what is the element of an age gap that makes it inappropriate? Now, that’s a personal question, of course. Morality isn’t something that really lends itself to objective declarations, but there are a few answers you can offer. ‘Morality’ isn’t really the operative word here anyway... since it has more to do with taste, though this particular taste does come from what you believe… Y’know, it just occurred to me, but… People who believe that their taste in ships makes them morally superior, and that ships they dislike are supported by moral degenerates, seem like people who just aren’t a lot of fun to be around or think about… but that’s a digression, I’ll refocus my thought-lazer.

For me, with age gaps, it comes down to two things:

1.) Both parties being on the same side of the child/adult divide- I should hope this one sounds reasonable, right? The ships that really powdered sugar my poptart are the ones that feel like equal partnerships, and relationships that try to cross this line tend to not be especially equal.

2.) What stage in their lives they’re at- It’s difficult for even a wizard of self expression like myself to state plainly, so let me give an example: If I saw a 25 year old dating a 50 year old, the 25-year age difference isn’t so much what makes it off-putting, but rather what those 25 years represent in this circumstance. At age 25, people are still struggling to find themselves. They’re adjusting to independence, gaining an identity, maybe finally finding an entryway into a career path that suits them. By 50, a person is already established. They likely have a career, they have a firm grasp on who they are as a person and what they want to be, and they almost certainly have a greater degree of financial stability. Thus, if they enter a relationship, which is supposed to be equal, it doesn’t feel that way. One side has a stronger position than the other, and over time that could become power they use to sway and control the other.

I don’t see Hordak as being in a more advanced stage of his life than Entrapta. They seem to be at about the same place when it comes to self actualization. In fact, Hordak is a bit more arrested in his development than Entrapta is, simply because he’s never really thought to question what would make him happy or why. Hordak rules the Horde, which Entrapta is a part of… which could lead to an imbalance, if Entrapta, like, could be bothered to give even the slightest toss of a salad about status or promotion, but she doesn’t. Neither of them holds higher ground over the other in a way that’s significant to the two of them. In terms of life stage, they’re perfectly equal. The fact that Hordak might be physically older than her by some unspecified amount is, by itself, completely arbitrary and meaningless.

*** EXAMPLE THE SECOND: ‘ENTRAPTA, THE MANIPULATED’***

A second, rarer discussion point for those who are unfond of the ship is that it’s unhealthy, on the grounds that Hordak is manipulating Entrapta. Taking advantage of her naivete to coerce her into aiding the forces of darkness despite not caring for her at all. Now, as I mentioned above, I ain’t writing this to change anyone’s mind. If you’re reading this, and this is a viewpoint you hold as valid, do what makes you happy, homie. That said, the issue I ran into when I tried to think of why this perspective didn’t bother me was a vexing one. See, I like to fancy myself an empathetic dude. I try really hard to consider other people’s perspectives when I have a disagreement, and avoid judging anyone too harshly if I don’t know their full circumstance… but even with all that alleged empathy at my disposal… this hot take about Entrapdak is… kinda completely incomprehensible to me? Like, I have no idea how anyone could have seen the interactions between the two and draw this conclusion?

Part of it has to do with how Entrapta is written. She’s both ADHD-coded and Autistic-coded, and there’s a tendency to perceive the behaviors of both those groups of people as childish. People who see that ‘childishness’ extrapolate it further to a general innocence/stupidity, and assume the character in question lacks the faculties to engage with other people evenly.

Look, I don’t have ADHD, but I am super, duper autistic. Having lived with myself for a lifetime, let me just say, I kind of get why this happens. We get extremely focused on our hobbies, we’re bad at reading social nuance, we have very simplistic body language, we tend to express our emotions in a very blunt and straightforward manner… I get that, for most neurotypical people, the only other group they ever encounter who shares these traits are children, and thus they tend to subconsciously connect the two. I understand why it happens, even if I do find it awkward and condescending.

…but y’all are underestimating Entrapta. She’s not helping the horde because she’s helpless and being manipulated. She’s helping them because she has no moral compass to speak of, and will eagerly assist with any scientific endeavor she finds interesting, without care for its ultimate application. In season 1, she knew well in advance the damage her actions would have on the world, and followed through with them anyway. In season 2, she happily assisted in the creation of a portal, knowing full-well that its opening would invite a colonialist military force into the vicinity of her home, and only withdrew her support for the project… hesitantly… when it became clearly evident that activating it would eradicate all life on the planet. At no point is she ever acting while the applications of her actions are being hidden from her by Hordak. She’s not an innocent child.

The thing is, though, I agree that Entrapta would be incredibly easy to manipulate… if someone knew what buttons to push. She is very self conscious of how difficult it is for her to form lasting emotional bonds with other people. She tends to blame herself when she feels she’s been abandoned by others, and feels that her inability make friends is a sign that she’s a defective failure. If someone wanted to manipulate her into doing something she didn’t want to do, they would probably find success if they offered her friendship and then fed into that self loathing, emotionally abusing her by implying that she was indeed a failure, and would be abandoned again if she didn’t obey. That is totally something someone could do to her, and I would absolutely not enjoy any ship between her and such a person. Good thing Hordak… y’know… did literally the opposite of that.

***EXAMPLE THE THIRD- “ENTRAPDAK, THE PLATONIC”***

A nice short one to balance out the longer examples above. Quite a few people just deny that there are romantic implications behind their interactions, and see them as a friendship instead. I do disagree with this assessment, but honestly, even if it were true, this would still be my favorite relationship in the show.

Something that has always boggled me about people on the internet is their tendency to treat friendship like some ‘equal but opposite’ force to romance… a status independent of a romantic relationship rather than literally the foundation upon which all successful romantic relationships are built. Genuine friendship is a beautiful, underrated thing, and acting as though the bond of friendship is inherently less worthy of appreciation than romance is silly.

So… yeah… platonic Entrapdak… I disagree, but even if you’re right and I’m wrong in the end… I’ll be pretty okay with that, too. Movin’ on.

***EXAMPLE THE FOURTH: ‘HORDAK, THE IRREDEEMABLE’***

For the last dealbreaker I want to consider today, I figured I’d bring one up that’s a lot like the platonic argument, in my eyes: that an evil guy like Hordak can’t change his ways, even with the power of love. Thus, the relationship is bust, because what’s the point of of a villain x heroine ship, if not to redeem the villain?

...

So, recently I wrote this whole big thing about Hordak, where I argued in favor of his redemption, and why I felt like that was where the story is going… I stand by the opinions expressed there, but I’d like to ask any who read that to push it out of their mind for now. Hordak’s redemptive potential is largely irrelevant to my feelings about this ship. When it comes to entrapdak, when confronted by the possibility that Hordak may remain a villain, my reaction is the most intense and passionate of shrugs.

...I just don’t care.

There’s a tendency to assume that redemption is the aim of a villain ship, and I suppose I can see why that is. There’s a bit of a stereotype for female fantasies where they fix a broken man with the power of their love, and when people ship villains, that’s probably the first assumption an outsider will make as to why. I cannot speak for others, but that’s just not a factor in the appeal of their relationship for me.

When you allow yourself to be vulnerable in front of another person, you open yourself up to the risk of being completely devastated by them. When you show vulnerability to another person, and they accept that side of you, and express vulnerability of their own, you establish a genuine connection with that person, and those connections are kiiiinda one of the most important elements of the human experience.

That Hordak was a villain who did terrible things was always kinda aside from the point of what really makes Entrapta and Hordak such a bewitching pairing for me. It was always the serendipity of two people who privately believe they’re alone in the world realizing they resonate with one another in a meaningful way. Resonance is the appeal of Entrapdak, not redemption.

I tend to hope for Hordak’s redemption, I won’t lie, and I do think it’s likely, but I don’t think it’ll be love that redeems him, nor would I want it to be… not entirely. I like seeing flawed, morally dark/gray characters overcome the obstacles that deny them self actualization, and watching them grow as a result.

That’s got nothing to do with him and Entrapta, though. Whether the story ends with the pair of them riding into the sunset to collect data and invent shit, or with the pair of them leading the Horde in the name of galactic conquest and terror… I’m down with it either way, dude. In the context of the ship, I care that Hordak is an evil overlord… about as much as Entrapta does.

However, pseudo-responding to naysayers is a bit negative for my tastes. I prefer to focus on the positive in life, like the smell of soil and rain on a crisp autumn morning. I… I’m in a very fall mood, okay? Sue me. Y’know what else I like, though? Entrapdak. Lemme wax poetic for a bit longer, and I’ll tell ya why this ship is, like, the peanut butter on my blueberry pancakes.

Part 2: Entrapdak- Why I love it

So, uh… If brevity is the soul of wit, I may be something of an idiot. I’ve made my peace with that, of course, I’m just sayin’: I’m many things, but I’m not pithy. If someone were to put a gun to my head, though, and demand that I describe the shipping aesthetic I love the most in life in a single sentence… I would probably respond with this:

My favorite ships are ones in which awkward, lonely people bond over a shared fondness of nerdy hobbies.

Now, that sounds super narrow, and it totally is… I don’t get new OTPs very often… but hearing that, I imagine you can see why Entrapta and Hordak immediately appealed to me. It goes a bit deeper, though.

The bonds between people are a major part of the story of She-ra. We see how characters are changed, positively or negatively, by the connection they share with other characters. Just like in real life, these connections are a mixed bag; some of them are positive, and some are negative. Some characters, like Hordak and Catra, resonate strongly with one another, but the resonance is a negative force in their lives, which draws them deeper into darkness, and for many of the characters in the show, their character journeys are about breaking free of such toxic relationships and forming healthy bonds.

The bond between Entrapta and Hordak is unique among all bonds in the show though, in that it is the only one that isn’t mixed. It is an unambiguous positive influence on both of them. Let’s break it down a little bit.

***ENTRAPTA***

Entrapta, at first, seems like the kind of person who isn’t super connected to other people. At the princess prom, she mentions that she finds observing the relationships of others far more fascinating than forging relationships of her own, and she spends much of the early seasons working alone with her robots, buried in whichever task happens to have her interest in that particular moment.

Later seasons gradually tear this facade away, though, and reveal a fairly tragic truth hidden behind it. I mentioned above that she internalizes her failures to form lasting bonds with other people, and is genuinely distraught about it. When she’s exiled to Beast Island, her frustration at her inability to make friends was the driving force that chained her there, even more so than her love of technology and invention. It becomes clear that, to some degree, she buries herself in her work to escape her feelings of inadequacy.

This is a relatable and sad thing to realize about a character, but it also has the unpleasant effect of making events that were played for laughs earlier in the show somewhat tragic in hindsight. Seeing the way she interacted with the Princess Alliance, you could see how she would have come to a very soul-crushing misunderstanding: That, among other people, she was someone whose presence was… tolerated- at times even appreciated- but never seemed to be enjoyed by anyone. She was the friend everyone sought out when they needed her help, then forgot about.

This wasn’t the case, of course, and clarifying her value to the group was what ultimately helped her escape the vines in season four, but from her perspective that was how it appeared, and likely how all her previous interactions with other people had gone before that. Some people complained about how easily Entrapta was able to believe that the princesses had left her behind, but it’s the same reason Hordak was so easily able to believe that Entrapta had betrayed him: In the eyes of someone who hates themselves, it’s only a matter of time before others abandon them.

That said, it also goes to show why Hordak became so special to her. For the first time in her life, she had a friend who joined her in her workspace, instead of leaving her to a task after giving it to her. Someone able to converse equally with her about subjects she was interested in. The elements of herself that made it so difficult to draw closer to others were the very same elements that caused her to get so close to him. Her intelligence and hyper-focus upon science made her the intellectual peer of a space-faring alien, her lack of awareness of social subtext helped her to see beyond the barriers he put up to keep other people away, and her past experience with failure and rejection helped her to empathize with his pain.

It’s perfectly pleasant to find someone who accepts you and enjoys your company despite not understanding the idiosyncratic elements of your personality, but that pales in comparison to how it feels to find someone who accepts you precisely because they understand those elements.

***Hordak***

Hordak didn’t really have ‘peers’, per se, for most of his life. We don’t know the level of autonomy the average clone has in the Horde… but I feel comfortable assuming that the level isn’t very high. Thus, his circumstance differs quite a bit from Entrapta, in that, rather than trying to form bonds with others, and feeling like he failed, for much of his life he never had the chance to try to form them in the first place.

He is, at first, deeply dismissive of the people of Etheria, whom he regards as primitives who are beneath his acknowledgment. Much of this, as with much of everything that dictates how he treats others, is born of projection… dude has some pretty major self-loathing issues… but regardless of cause, it results in a kind of self-imposed isolation.

Unlike Entrapta, who knew, on some level, that her lack of ability to bond with others troubled her, Hordak kept most of his emotions bottled up... Locked so deeply inside him that not even he really bothered to try to understand them. That was where her disposition and his meshed perfectly for him. Because Entrapta was defined by her curiosity, and her lackluster awareness of his attempts to keep her at bay, she was able to metaphorically crack him open, forcing him to vocalize and confront his own motivations.

Sometimes you need someone to just… like... grab you with their hair, push you up against a vat, and demand you tell them everything, man.

I’ve already discussed Hordak fairly extensively in my first blog blurb thingy, and while I repeat myself by accident quite frequently, I’m loathe to repeat myself on purpose. I just wanted to take the opportunity to marvel at how well their personalities fit together. Perhaps I’m just high on this feeling: I’ve never actually shipped something a creator so clearly intended to be there, before!

*** In Conclusion***

We’re all born imperfect, and we’ll all die imperfect. Our imperfections are similar, but never uniform. Each of us bears jagged cuts and missing sections of many shapes and sizes. Humans are social creatures, and it’s in our nature to constantly seek one another out. We keep trying to find people who are strong where we are weak; someone whose missing sections happen to lie in a pattern compatible with our own.

We’ll resonate with many in our lifetime. Sometimes, the melody will be harmonious, and guide all involved higher and higher into the light of self actualization. Other times the sound will be discordant, and pull us down into self destruction. Sadly, from our perspective in the middle, it will always be difficult to tell which is which.

I love the relationship between Entrapta and Hordak because it’s a dynamic that elevates both of them. Not in a moral sense, but in a personal one. In a series defined by toxic and uneven relationships that wear others down and tear them apart, these two have a dynamic that shelters and reinforces them. Giving them an opportunity to be glad they were born the way they were, instead of cursing their misfortune.

It’s the kind of relationship that makes me muse about how imperfection really is beautiful. It’s because we’re imperfect that we never stop trying to harmonize with other people, and if there’s one theme I can’t help but feel that the show itself is building toward, it’s this: Two in harmony surpass one in perfection.

*** So hey! Thanks for reading all of that! Sorry if it was a bit of a mess. Saying nothing with a great deal of words is a talent of mine, but I really do love these guys, and if you love ‘em too, don’t let anyone grind you down over it!

Let me know if you enjoyed my work, though! If so, I’ll be happy to share my thoughts on other things, since I’ll be stuck with this series on my brain until I see how my new obsession plays out. In the meantime take care of yourselves! If you do heavy lifting, make sure to do so with your knees, not your back. Tell someone who makes your day a little brighter how much you appreciate them. Then, take some time to savor the greatest of all winter beverages: hot apple cider.

#entrapdak #liking things #Entrapta #hordak #you try killing 8 hours at this job

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leovevo · 4 years

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featuring: @cindyeggers mentions of: @rhcdesx, @romanwalsh, @rileyyxkim, @marcodiangelo, @sureivan

the video starts with leo arranging the camera, before flopping on the couch. leo: "konnichiwassup, guys! welcome back to my channel! today, we'll be doing a q&a with a very special guest." he waggles his eyebrows at the camera before gesturing for cindy to seat on the spot next to him, "welcome, welcome!"

cindy: literally jumps onto the couch, throwing up double peace signs, "sup y'all! i'm arizona blues of... can i say it on your channel? i don't wanna get you demonetized." she makes a jerk-off motion instead, "this is the only clue you're gonna get."

leo: nodding, leo turned to the camera with a knowing look, "she is, like me, a content creator, and if you've been on other streaming websites besides youtube, then you definitely know her. so, before we get into the main course..." he grabs the makeup kit from the coffee table in front of them, "to make this q&a a wee more interesting, i'll be putting makeup on ari and make her look even prettier while we answer your questions!"

cindy: "hell yeah bro fuck me up," she says excitedly, turning towards leo as a good little canvas. "so what kind of look are we going for today?"

leo: "something glamorous, obviously. maybe a glittery, pink look?" he rummaged through the bag, face instantly scrunching up. "the fuck is this? where do i start?"

cindy: "you're asking the wrong person, broseph. good luck," she says as she grabs a random product and tries to figure out what it's supposed to do. at least it's shiny. "anyways, while leo mua here figures this shit out, should we just get into the first question - what's the number one thing you want to do at the resort?"

leo: "i'm sure we have to start with foundation. but your skin's clear enough, and i don't want to choose the wrong shade." he pulls out a brow pencil. "okay, we can start with your eyebrows." he scooted closer to cindy, uncapping the pencil and beginning to... well, thicken cindy's brows (rather roughly). "eat. eat loads. and just bask in the sunlight 'cause i don't get much of that anymore. how about you?"

cindy: “so what you’re saying is that my brows suck,” she teases, but she sits still and lets him do his thing. “i was gonna say troll people but honestly, i’m gonna tag along with you on that. food is the answer.”

leo: once he was finished, he pulls away to examine his work. alright, they looked fine. just... a little thicker than usual. "like, we're staying in bougie-ass houses, and we get to do whatever we want. it's the life." he tosses the brow pencil back in the bag, before pulling out a random palette and some brushes. "next question! do you see a future with anyone on the sloth?"

cindy: "it's the shit," she concurs, oblivious to her new thicc brows. "uh, this sounds like it's asking me if i want to like, get married and have babies with someone. which, nah i'm good. but i'm gonna take my bromance with ivan to the grave. and i'm also gonna harass kieran forever."

leo: "the question is too ambiguous, so i'm going to worm my way around it. i'd really like to grow old with roman, kieran, and riley." he silently motions for cindy to close her eyes, before experimentally skimming a hot pink shade across her lids. it was pigmented as fuck. leo grits his teeth. "d...don't know what i'd do without them."

cindy: "god you're such a coward," she tells him, her eyes closed while he undoubtedly stains her poor eyelids for life. still blissfully unaware. "that's cute though, i can respect that... why do you sound all weird though? are you gonna cry?" she blindly reaches out and starts touching his face to check.

leo: he gingerly attempts to tone down the colour with his thumb, only smudging it and making it worse. "yea, no, there was just, uh, fallout from the palette." inwardly panicking, leo dabs on a darker shade (red) to her eyelids. oh no. ohhhh no. she looked like a cirque du soleil cast member... only with... shitty makeup. "third!" deciding not to ruin the look any further, he sets the palette down, reaching for the eyeliner. maybe he can salvage it with a classic wing. "do you believe in forgiveness?"

cindy: "what kinda philosophy shit is this," she says with a confused huff, no longer able to ignore leo's frantic smudging, "what's going on? what are you doing to my face?"

leo: "you're not allowed to look until i'm finished!" he retorted, "i'll do your eyeliner now. come on. answer the question."

cindy: "that's like the least comforting thing i've ever heard," she replies, but she lets it go because... if nothing else, it's probably good for the views, "i guess i do believe in forgiveness? like, if we're being real i've needed it sometimes so, yeah? but i also think it's fair to just snip snip, cut people out of your life so. depends. i don't fucking know, leo."

leo: this was a difficult question, but he was so focused on trying to draw a good wing that he couldn't sugarcoat his answer. despite so, his hands were trembling. he hopes cindy doesn't snip snip, cut him out of her life for fucking her face up. "i think it's important." he whispered, eyes narrowing in concentration. "i just suck at forgiving."

cindy: "i get you," she nods in agreement, realizing too late what she's done. despite all of leo's efforts, her movement sends the eyeliner out of its path and up towards her forehead, "shit i'm sorry.”

leo: at the disruption, he lets out a scream, "NOOOOOOOO!" was it ideal to throw a tantrum in front of the camera? not exactly. but he had been doing SO well! "wwwwhhhhyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!"

cindy: "I'M SORRY," she yells, grabbing a concealer from the kit, "can't you just like... paint this over it? it's fine, look..." without grabbing a mirror (because the rules forbid it) and with absolutely no idea what she's doing, she starts applying concealer in arbitrary areas.

leo: "no! NO!" leo shrieked, taking the concealer away because now she was getting concealer in her eyebrows, which he had worked so hard on! "no, no. sit there and relax," he insisted, "it's fine. we're fine. you're fine. let's move on." all leo had to do was to slap some lipstick on cindy's face and finish the job before it could get any messier. he grabs a random shade—all of them looked similar and started to apply it on cindy's lips. "who is the one person you would kick out from the sloth? wait, we already answered this question in your video, which i am not allowed to link down below because... well, of reasons..."

cindy: tries to answer but because leo is putting lipstick on her, it's more of a series of sounds than words. when he finishes, she purses her lips, "i think we did but... fuck it, i'd also kick out that victoria girl just to see what she'd do about it."

leo: "she'd kill you, probably. i'd still kick marco out. we're almost done with the makeup," he laughs nervously. the lipstick looked clean enough, though. thank god. "i'm gonna finish it off with some o' these," he raised up a blusher, "and, uh, i'll..." he trailed off, smearing it slowly across her cheeks. cindy looked like a straight-up clown. "last question: you are about to get into a fight, what song comes on as your soundtrack?"

cindy: "i've never felt more beautiful," she says, but only because she's the only person who has no idea what he's done to her face. "shit this is the easiest one. it's clearly gotta be that one that goes like..." she starts singing horribly off-key, "i don't give a damn about my reputation. the one from the tournament scene in shrek 1."

leo: "okay, okay, that's valid," leo laughed out, putting all of the makeup back in the kit and stowing it away. "mine would be the walmart fight song." he could feel his palms getting sweaty, "okay. uh." he slid the mirror towards cindy. "feel free to... take a peek at your look of the day."

cindy: "also a valid choice," cindy agrees as she grabs the mirror and comes face to face with her new clown self, "how did you even achieve this look? i look like shit leo." she looks at leo, then at the camera with a mix of amusement and true horror. "by the way," she adds to the camera, "we didn't tell you guys but.... i said i'd wear this for the rest of the day."

leo: relieved that cindy took her spankin' new look rather well, he visibly relaxed. "you're still smokin' hot, don't worry," he pinched her cheek, accidentally getting some blush on his fingers. "shit. well!" he looks at the camera, giving a thumbs up. "aaaaand that wraps up our q&a, thank you for humouring me—us, miss ari! anything else to add before we head off to the mall?"

cindy: "uhh, like and subscribe or whatever," she mumbles as she grabs the eyeliner and meticulously sketches out a penis on leo's cheek, "50,000 likes and leo will eat a live octopus." leo: "arigathanks for watching, everyone," he said, staying still for cindy. "check out mtv's sloth in paradise—as well as my channel—for more content!" cindy: "yeah check us out or else," she throws another round of peace signs and gets off the couch, "later dickface."

#this shit got LONG #— tasks.#— au week 001.#THHIS IS A WHOLE ASS THREAD #bigbeartask2 #— hallo.....salut. ; ft. cindy.#— youtube.

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commandtower-solring-go · 5 years

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The Multi-Thing, Shoestring, Downswinging, Tin Street King Pin

With such a heavy focus on Planeswalkers in War of the Spark, we can see a notable difference in the power level of some Legendary Creatures in this set compared to others. They aren’t weak, by any stretch. But they offer unique effects that seem almost limited by their colour identity. Many cards that scream to be 2 colours are limited to 1 and some multicolour cards I feel, generally, weakly about. So I want to explore a few examples of this. But also work toward building up these cards as fantastic Commanders within the colour identity they do have. Today, we’ll start with Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin.

Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin

Living in the shadow of its older self, it is easy to look at this new Krenko with a heavy brow. Compared to a creature that could double your Goblins (an already overwhelming creature in Magic), there is a heavy expectation for this new incarnation. And with all due respect, there is no way anything could live up to Krenko, Mob Boss. He is the most ubiquitous Mono-Red Legendary Creature (according to EDHREC) to lead Commander decks ever. So to look at Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin with the scope it deserves we need to move away from Mob Boss.

Instead, let’s break down the card. Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin is a 1/2 for {2}{R}, Legendary Creature – Goblin. He has the ability “Whenever ~ attacks, put a +1/+1 counter on it, then create a number of 1/1 red Goblin creature tokens equal to Krenko’s power.” An interesting take on a familiar aspect of the character, but in a way that is much harder to abuse. For, you see, putting +1/+1 counters on arbitrary red creatures comes few and far between. Most creatures can only put these counters on themselves and this speaks in large part to why I wish Krenko involved another colour. Most likely white for access to cards like Cathar’s Crusade and even better Battle Cry creatures. But, lo. We have what we have. And what we have is a creature that strives to create a wide board while also building itself tall to do so. Keeping it simple, the best plan should lean into this, focusing on a mix of cards that can build up Krenko, and use the creatures he creates.

One of the key pillars of Commander comes in the form of card draw engines. However it may present itself, a card that is able to draw you multiple cards with little investment is powerful. Necropotence is one of the strongest representations of this fact as, despite it requiring you to pay life to draw any cards, giving them to you at your end step and costing {B}{B}{B}. It still warped the standard season it was a part of. Perhaps then we need to ask ourselves what we are willing to pay for card advantage in a colour that doesn’t get it. It doesn’t need to be efficient if it is cheap and effective. And, most importantly, works in line with our deck.

Grenzo, Havoc Raiser

I present Grenzo, Havoc Raiser as a potential solution to this problem. A weird card from Conspiracy Take the Crown he is a legendary creature, Goblin. As a 2/2 for {R}{R} he represents a solid and efficient body in our deck. Creature type is relevant, but what’s most important is his two abilities. Whenever any creature you control deals combat damage to a player, for each creature that dealt damage you get to choose one of two different effects. The first is you get to exile the top card of the defending player’s library, giving you the ability to cast it and spend mana as though it were of any colour. The second is that you goad target creature, forcing it to attack, and attack someone other than you if it can.

The card advantage is obvious here. We’re stealing our opponent’s spells. Perhaps it isn’t true card draw. Perhaps we are at the mercy of our opponent’s deck. But look at it this way. Red is limited in a lot of ways. Mono red, especially. With no way to deal with enchantments, ineffective card draw and a lack of powerful spot removal and creatures. What we lose by the very nature of the colour we play, we can make up for from our opponent’s deck. But what makes this ability all the more fantastic is the versatility of it. We also may choose to goad. Goading sets up a loop. If you’re in a multiplayer game it forces a player to leave their board open. Meaning you can consistently deal more combat damage safely. But it also helps fill in the limitations of Red as well. Big creatures? Who needs them. When you can deal with your opponent’s by forcing them to attack each other. It’s a neat piece of politics and gives Red the edge it needs.

And hey, worst case scenario, Mono-Red Mill can totally become a thing.

With a card like Krenko we can often find ourselves in a stalemate. Face it, red isn’t good in the long game. It goes hard quickly, uses it resources and often finds itself unable to deal with an insurmountable force before it. An army of a million 1/1s may be able to chip in damage past beefy blockers, but eventually that game of attrition will end in favour of those can play X/2 creatures. We can resolve this issue in a few ways. The first is, we can go around the blockers. The second is we could use burn damage to avoid the need for blockers at all. There is an inexpensive solution that can achieve both.

Goblin Bombardment

Goblin Bombardment is an enchantment for {1}{R} that reads “Sacrifice a creature: ~ deals 1 damage to any target”. Not only does this allow us to turn each goblin we control into a single point of damage to whittle down blockers, but it allows us to extend the damage our board of creatures represents to be twice it. Goblin Bombardment gives us added versatility in ways that not only threatens to slow down our opponent, but also simply close out games before your opponent has a chance to recover.

Hero’s Blade

Finally my last inclusion is nice and simply and brings us back to the underlying strategy that Krenko asks us to follow though with. Hero’s Blade is an artefact, equipment for {2} which gives the creature its equipped to +3/+2. And although it may equip for 4, it will automatically attach itself to a legendary creature when it enters the battlefield. The effect hear is subtle, but it pertains to fantastic tempo plays. At most you will only ever have to pay Hero’s Blade’s equip cost once. And if you manage to get it into play turn 2, then you’ll never have to pay it. Because now, if Krenko dies and you recast him, Krenko it’ll attach itself right away. And hey, indulge me in magic Christmas land as you Blade on turn 2, Krenko on turn 3 and swing for 5 power turn 4, making 5 goblins. It’s a cheap effect and a completely fair card, and its one that can so easily be overlooked when deck building. And if it finds a home nowhere else, I believe Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin will be the best place for it.

So when looking to construct a deck for Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin, I found the best plan is to focus hard on aggressive strategies. Which is difficult in EDH. Krenko begs for more colours and familiar archetypes found therein. But as Mark Rosewater himself says, limitations breed creativity. I don’t think there will be many Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin decks floating around, but I think the best of them will be fantastically interesting decks. Working hard to strike the balance between enabling Krenko, but also using the resources he offers in useful and powerful ways. And this is where we should look when deck building. Aggression, but in a unique way.

#mtg #magic #magic the gathering #edh #commander #Elder Dragon Highlander #krenko #mono red #red #war #war of the spark

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rahkshirock · 6 years

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Andromeda thoughts: midnight edition

mass effect is an interesting topic because it is a lot of people’s formative game series. i can respect that

personally I grew up with educational homeschool games like leapfrog, reading rabbit, cluefinders and fucking zoombinis

I got pretty deep into bionicle too but my folks wouldn't buy the games for me.

my first experience with a real plot was starcraft, which was pitch black toned sci-fi with a straight up villain victory at the end

in highschool i finally got some freedom and got portal 2, deus ex: human revolution and a little later, dishonored. throw in a little bioshock mass effect and halo, but only the first of each. mostly i watched let’s plays

so recently, since i’m not financially or educationally drowning, I am catching up on the series i kinda missed. most recently, Mass Effect.

I first played Mass Effect 1 in freshman year of college while procrastinating. I didn’t have a lot of fun, and it was the steam version that doesn’t have any dlc, so I stopped a few missions into 2, since the draw of the series is porting your character and decisions into the next game

3 years later, I finally acquired the entire mass effect series, including all dlc, and played through beginning to end, 100% completion of all quests, all side content, romancing garrus with femshep

and it was good. I enjoyed it. objectively speaking however, it has some issues. there are a few series retrospectives on youtube that explain this better than I can, but to put it simply:

mass effect 1′s intro is ham-fisted and frontloads you with 3 bad guys (including the reapers with no setup) in the first 30 minutes, before you even take control of the Normandy. structurally however, it was sound. the mako sections broke up the main missions, and so the pacing was alright despite only having 5 main missions (getting liara, stopping the thorian, stopping benezia, virmire, illos/citadel) and most people didn’t like the mako levels because the levels didn't like the mako and its stupid physics model. the ending was solid however, and ended on a fun optimistic note

mass effect 2 managed to have at once a more realistic, down to earth setting, a more personal story, and the most highlights of the series. Most people consider this to be the best one, and for some of the game, it is! however, the main plot and the suicide mission broke down for me because 1. you only fight the collectors 3 times, 2. legion, an intensely interesting squad member was locked behind the threat of losing my crew by getting him before 2 missions from the end, and 3. I put zaeed as the secondary squad leader in the protect the engineer part, and tali got shot in the face with a fucking rocket launcher. it took me out of the whole experience because I had to load a previous save, and looking it up, the assignments feel arbitrary. Miranda can lead the mission despite jack JUST saying she’s a horrible leader? but the founder of the blue suns can’t? what? what clues did I have to sniff out to prevent a VERY IMPORTANT CHARACTER from dying?

all I'm saying is, me2 is great, but it’s structured badly. it is a series of short stories, not all of which are even tangentially related to the existing universe.

also Jacob Taylor “I didn't think the alliance was doing enough to help people so I quit and joined a FUCKING TERRORIST ORGANIZATION EXPLICITLY FOR HUMAN SUPREMACY” “also if you romance me I cheat on you in the 3rd game” is the worst character in the game and I had to LOOK UP how not to trip into accidentally romancing him because just being nice can trigger that flag and his loyalty mission is FUCKED as far as implications go.

and ME3, while having the highest hights in the series (Tuchunka, Rannock) also undeniably has the lowest, with an ending that will be recorded as the worst ending to a good series of all time, and its main plot is inconsistent and generally poorly written before it completely breaks down in the 3rd act.

all of this proves that good games don't have to be perfect, and that a game can still be fun even if you hate the way its written (ME3)

so then I saw that Andromeda was only 20 dollars, and even though I had heard it was a tire fire of a game, I picked it up

after 115 hours, I can say that I do not understand gamers. this is not only a worthy mass effect game, it is the best one in its entirety. the volume of joy I’ve gotten from this game is equivalent to what I got from the ENTIRE original trilogy. the space you explore is tightly focused, and yet deep and richly detailed.

after 2 games, they finally reintroduced a working vehicle and designed levels around it. they tightened the cast and made your entire crew, not just your squadmates, interactable and fun. gone is the pseudo-military backdrop of the first game: npcs and squadmates come from a variety of backgrounds, from rescuing people from natural disasters, a human who trained with asari commandoes, or a turian smuggler who you would EXPECT to be the new Garrus, but instead puts on a minigun and tech armor. drack and peebe are definitely archetypal of the asari adepts and krogan battlemasters weve had through the series but heres the thing

tropes are not bad

take one facet of the new villain: the kett. they like to make more kett by injecting other species with a serum that causes them to mutate into them borg stile

now mass effect has had this as a plot point since minute 3 of the first mission of the first game: humans are turned into husks.

however, how do characters react to these revelations?

just joking. in the original mass effect there is exactly one asari who is scarred mentally after she was attacked by a banshee that used to be part of her squad.

1 character, at the end of the series reacts to the tech zombies in a meaningful way.

meanwhile, every squad member has thoughts on this revelation. jaal, the Angaaran squad mate, who has been fighting kett for decades French resistance style, grapples with the revelation for the rest of the game. you see many other resistance fighters give up, unable to kill those who used to be Angaarans, others you find are galvanized by the atrocity. every plot point has people in-game debating the implications. every party member of course gives you a personal loyalty mission, but they also ask for small favors, ask stupid questions, go on their own with big plans and need to be helped out of sticky situations. even if you think that the characters are cliché (which they aren’t) they have such a volume of interactions that each is fully fleshed out only a third of the way through the game, and continued to grow and change perspectives, arguing and falling in love. the loyalty missions are often main-plot relevant and sometimes wacky one-offs that bring in minor characters. I heard that if you want, you can steamroll through the game without stepping foot on 3 different planets, but that's not my style, and the final battle incorporates the allies you’ve made into gameplay seamlessly, tying off nearly every single combat capable person from the story’s plotline, in a sequence that puts HALO to shame.

on hard difficulty with 100 percent completion, I got the golden ending, and saw a LOT of people come to help me. even so, it was excruciatingly difficult, and I had to utilize every bit of skill and preparation I had to make it through

so to people who said that there are no consequences in this game for your actions? its the first entry in a new series so sure they can only kill minor characters. I get that.

so they went for pure gameplay effect on said final battle. you can have very few people assist you at all.

I at least would not have made it without my effort, and so it was worthwhile and necessary to have done those sidequests. in my book, THAT is what ME3′s ending should have beenlike in the first place.

I don't really have a conclusion other than that yes, Andromeda adds just a few new ideas into the series, and more than a few recycled ones

but iT does it with skill, style, and occasional subtlety. it is, I’d say a GOOD FUCKING GAME, better than the original trilogy except for the very best of 2 and 3.

except for the inventory and weapons crafting system, that can go straight to hell

good night!

#mass effect andromeda #mass effect #mass effect 3

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tessatechaitea · 4 years

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Darkstars #1

Of all the thousands of comic books I own, this is probably the most 90est of them.

I don't remember too much about this comic book but I'm pretty sure the pitch was this: "Imagine Green Lantern but with more police brutality and drawn by one of those Image boys!" Then four guys in suits dropped their pants and began jerking off into their briefcases full of money. Just look at this gorgeous artifact of 90s comicdom! A super hero with a testicle for a head, full of gritty, sketched-in shade lines. His fists don't attach to his arms because that kind of perspective is difficult. Better to have flaring blasts of power or big wrist cuffs on their gloves! His thigh is nearly as thick as his chest. There's a huge fat guy that is just drawn in that Kingpin fat guy Tweedle-Dum style because actually drawing obese people isn't something 90s artists practiced. Although I'm not sure how much they practiced actual anatomy either and that didn't stop them from drawing and inventing all sorts of musculature. Anyway, I'm sure I picked up this issue not because the art blew me away but because it was 1992 and there was a "Sensational 1st Issue!" blurb on the cover. It was an investment! And judging conservatively by the fine price of this comic book at Mile High Comics, I've made more than double my money! This series was written by Michael Jan Friedman whose name first made me think, "Wait. It was written by the Renegade guy?" But that was Michael-Jan Vincent. My next thought was, "Didn't this guy write Babylon 5 too?" But that was J. Michael Straczynski. This is just some guy who wrote a bunch of Star Trek novels. The artist is Larry Stroman whom I didn't recognize by name but judging by this cover, I wasn't surprised to see he worked on X-Factor for awhile. The issue begins with the testicle-headed Darkstar on space patrol trying to pull over some low level criminals. Why were we all so obsessed with stories about space cops? Not that I was! I just bought this for investment purposes! Besides, I've always been critical of the role the Green Lanterns play in the universe. If they were a space EMT force, I would hardly have any problems with them. But when they're portrayed as space cops trying to keep some kind of intergalactic Guardian law, they just seem like a bunch of fascist dicks. Especially when one of the human Green Lanterns uses lethal force simply because the criminal is non-human. I'm pretty sure that's something that happened and I commented on it in a past review and not just a strawman I made up to justify hating on the Green Lantern Corps. Do I really need rational reasons to hate on space cops? I hope not because I'm really getting excited to hate on the Darkstars!

Aha! So he's a disenfranchised Darkstar who's going to need to be reminded why what he does is important. Or maybe he'll just be a gruff asshole to his young new partner I'm sure he'll be getting soon.

Apparently this Darkstar had a case go bad on some planet called Jenuwyne. So now the job has lost its shine and he's not even sure what he does helps in the slightest. It probably doesn't! Who needs any kind of police force that oversees so many different cultures across such vast distances in space?! How do they keep all the laws straight?! You know they occasionally get confused and beat some guy for not signalling and later find out that signalling is a huge insult to that race. I mean, I get the appeal of a pitch for an adventure comic book about space cops. But ultimately, it seems to just expose the fascism behind forcing people to follow arbitrary modes of behavior. At least in the Star Trek universe, the laws are decided by a federation of civilizations that have willingly joined the community. In Green Lantern (and presumably Darkstars though I admit I don't quite remember what kind of space cops they are), the laws have been decided by a group of little blue men who think they know better than everybody else. I'm pretty sure, with the exception of a few of the adjectives, that describes fascism. There are three huge differences between the Darkstars and the Green Lanterns. The Green Lanterns are mostly green while the Darkstars are mostly red. The Green Lanterns use a ring on their fingers and the Darkstars use rings on their entire hands. The Green Lanterns create constructs out of emotional light energy while the Darkstars just blast shit with an orange beam that goes "VEEEEEP!" There might be more differences but I'm only on page 3.

I'm not going to cynically decide, on page 5, that Colus is exactly like Hal Jordan. I mean, Hal Jordan's head doesn't look like a testicle so that's one big difference between them.

Now that Colus has cracked the case of the hijacked medicine, he's being put on the next case: investigate Earth! He probably has to look into the concept of "love" and find out why these humans, with all their emotions, are so special. Meanwhile on Earth, some cop with the head of a typical Chicagoan totally wants to rough up the person he's talking to for information but she's a nun so he's all, "Fuck. Can I get away with that? I can probably get away with it, right? But, I mean, I guess I believe in God and that slim belief is really all that's keeping me from doing whatever the fuck I want. I mean, the law ain't gonna stop me from beating this nun senseless for information. Last I checked, the District Attorney liked the police being cooperative and is smart enough to know that sending a police brutality case to a grand jury would mean a lot of cops are going to suddenly stop helping the District Attorney's win percentage. So I could probably beat this nun but there's that possible God and heaven thing. I guess I just have to let her disrespect me this one time. Just this one fucking time." Then he goes off to intimidate some homeless people because who's going to advocate for them, you know?! I feel like I remember this Chicago-headed Dallas cop becoming a Darkstar. He's investigating the same case as Darkstar Colos: an alien drug called Loco or Loku being sold on Earth. Colos arrives on Earth to discover the homeless guy who was intimidated into being an informant to Detective Chicago Head, Mo, trying to save some other homeless people from being attacked by people on Loco. Colos intimidates him into being his Earth informant as well. Hopefully Mo will get his own Darkstars band too. The Dallas cop raids the warehouse where Mo told him the Loco was being distributed. What he finds is a huge alien creature and a brush with death. Or maybe death since the issue ends with the creature attacking him. But I'm pretty sure the guy becomes a Darkstar himself. I don't think I'd have an image of a Chicago-looking cop with a thick mustache and thicker head in a Darkstars uniform in my head otherwise and I'm not laughing at your perverse alternative reason for it. Darkstars #1 Rating: B-. It's just a cops in space comic book but more so than Green Lantern. I'm revising my pitch to this: "So if the Green Lanterns are sort of space cops, imagine Green Lanterns that are even more space copier! They'll be so much like cops that they'll hire an Earth cop immediately!" I think this was before John Stewart was known as a marine and Guy Gardner was known as a cop (or son of a cop? I'm so bad at remembering the DC history I should remember. I blame my brain having to react to all the retcons and crises). So having a legitimate cop on the space force would have been a novel idea. Oh, also, it was a mediocre cops in space comic book.

#Darkstars #Michael Jan Friedman #Larry Stroman #Scott Hanna #DC #DC Comics

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rassilon-imprimatur · 7 years

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‘The School of Doom,’ by Lance Parkin

(Originally published in Myth Makers # 12, “The School of Doom” is set within the time intermission in Parkin’s Father Time, and stars the amnesiac Eighth Doctor and his adopted daughter (and biological daughter from the future) Miranda. Besides being a lot of fun and a dive into one of my favorite corners of Dr. Who ever, the story also adds yet another layer of mystery and excitement to the Four Elementals of the Post-War universe. A big thank you Richard Salter, former Myth Makers editor, for sharing this story with me! Please enjoy!)

It was a foreboding place, a vast complex behind an unclimbable metal fence.

There was only one entrance, a vast wrought iron set of gates. The gates gaped open, like the black toothed mouth of some terrible creature. Its throat was a long tarmac drive, leading to the heart, a collection of ugly, squared-off, brick buildings. To add to the effect, the September sky was grey, oppressive.

The Doctor was smiling at his daughter, Miranda. ‘You look nervous.’

‘Of course I’m not,’ she replied.

‘Just remember those exercises I taught you to bring your adrenaline and breathing under control.’

‘I don’t need them, I’m not nervous.’

The Doctor nodded.

‘Were you nervous on your first day at big school?’ she asked.

The Doctor couldn’t look at her. ‘Probably,’ he said at last. ‘Don’t worry, though – everyone’s in the same boat.’ Miranda looked around. There was a steady stream of children her age. There was a range of emotions on display – but there was a common theme. There was straightforward nervousness, shyness, a couple were laughing, but that looked like a display of bravado. But the Doctor was right – everyone was a little scared.

She got out the car and set out to follow them down the drive. At the end of the long walk, by the entrance to the largest building, there was a teacher – or at least someone in a dark suit who she took to be a teacher – greeting everyone in turn and handing them a sheet of paper.

As she got nearer, Miranda got a good look at him. He was of average height, and looked very smart in his black suit and pressed shirt. He had neat black hair, greying at the temples and a small, pointed beard. But that wasn’t what Miranda concentrated on – she was struck by his eyes. They were black, but they burned into her, like he could read her mind. Like black lasers.

He smiled, but there was no warmth in it. ‘Hello, Miranda, my dear. I am the Headmaster.’

The Doctor watched his daughter walk down the school drive, saw her pass into the main building. But there was something wrong. As ever, he couldn’t tell precisely what was out of place, but there was something in that building that needed his attention.

He slipped out of the car, forgetting in his haste to close the door properly.

The assembly hall wasn’t quite large enough to hold every pupil in the school, but there must have been five or six hundred people here. About a third of those would be first years, like Miranda – and they were easy enough to spot, because they needed to be told where to sit. It had already taken five or six minutes for everyone to find their seat. Miranda was sitting down, looking around the hall. There were old photographs and even paintings – previous headmasters, old sports teams, a couple of the ex-pupils who had gone on to bigger and better things. All the pictures were hung up really high, leaving the impression that the mundane world of the school was slightly beneath them, now. The people in the pictures certainly looked serene compared with the bustle on the assembly room’s floor.

A group of teachers were watching the pupils struggling to find their place. They sat together on a raised stage at the front of the hall. Behind them, and above them, in an old, carved chair that looked like it had been salvaged from a church, was the headmaster. He looked down on proceedings with what seemed like Olympian detachment.

He was looking at her. And once he realised she’d seen him, he didn’t look away, not for a moment or two.

The Doctor used the sonic suitcase to open the door to the Headmaster’s office. Everyone was in main assembly, and he’d hear them come out of there, so he knew he had a few minutes at least.

There was a small reception area – a big oak desk for the Headmaster’s secretary. A place for naughty boys and girls or parents to wait until they were called into the office itself.

The office lay beyond a thick wooden door. The Doctor tried the handle, but the door was locked. The sonic suitcase wouldn’t open it, either, which was unusual, but not unprecedented.

The Doctor knelt down and tried to peek through the keyhole. There was nothing behind there. It wasn’t that the keyhole was blocked up. There was literally nothing beyond the door.

The Doctor stood up, and wondered what to do next.

On the whole, British schools, even the very best-equipped, shouldn’t have interstitial space-time voids. As the Doctor understood it, such things couldn’t exist in nature.

‘Obedience,’ the Headmaster said. ‘Obedience is the key to this school’s success. You children are among the finest minds in the land. You are the future leaders, academics and captains of industry. You are all very gifted, or you wouldn’t be here. But always remember that those gifts mustn’t be squandered, they must be harnessed. You must learn that there are rules, and that there are rules for a reason, however strange and arbitrary they might sometimes seem. But for the brightest students, those that apply themselves, those who show excellence in whatever field, there will be rewards beyond measure.’

Miranda was listening, honestly she was, but not as intently as some of the other children seemed to be. She only perked up when the Headmaster stopped speaking, and the other children and teachers applauded his little speech.

From there, it was simple enough. Everyone’s name was called out in turn, and they were told which class they would be in. As Miranda’s surname began with a W, she would have to wait for ages to find out where she was going.

The Doctor had managed to get the door open. Beyond it was solid darkness. A wall of black, but a wall with no substance to it.

Instinctively, the Doctor reached in.

His hand vanished into the void, but – to his relief - he could still feel it. It was cold, but there was something there, just on the edge of his perception. It just wasn’t in front of him. He raised his hand, but it didn’t move up, or left or right, or down. He swished his hand around.

It was almost as though his hand was moving forwards or backwards in time. Almost. This was difficult to explain. Not up. Not down… not in any of the three dimensions. Or the fourth.

The Doctor turned his hand again, marvelling as it moved along an entirely new axis. It was like discovering an entirely new colour, then trying to describe it. It wasn’t turning… or pitching or yawing. He’d have to come up with a new word.

He realised he was grinning.

A moment later, before he could stop himself, he’d leapt straight through the door, and gyred into the fifth dimension.

‘You’re only supposed to put a tick by the ones you’re interested in,’ Miss Hargrave told Miranda. ‘You’ve ticked almost all of them.’

‘I’m interested in all of the ones I ticked,’ Miranda insisted.

‘Everyone puts swimming and chess,’ Miss Hargrave said. ‘Hands up the people that did.’

Most hands went up.

‘I’m sorry, Miss, but I was on the swimming and chess teams at primary school.’

‘I see. You’ve not put down for any languages. Or the science club.’

‘No. I think I’d probably be a bit too advanced for them.’ ‘You think you’d be wasting your time in my French class?’

‘I’m already fluent,’ Miranda said.

‘Are you?’

‘Not just in French.’

Miranda looked around. Some of the other pupils were laughing a little nervously.

‘I mean… I’m not sure I’ll learn something.’

The Doctor was disappointed to find himself in a perfectly ordinary Headmaster’s Office, or at least something doing a very good impression of one.

A large oil painting of the current Headmaster in academic robes glowered down at him as he began a quick search of the room. There was a grandfather clock in one corner… but there was something odd about it. Something wrong with the way it had been made – it didn’t look quite finished.

Opening the desk he found a glowing sphere, the size of a cricket ball. Space twisted around it.

‘A dimensional stabiliser,’ the Doctor heard himself saying. It was responsible for moving the office into the fifth dimension. No-one native to Earth could possibly enter the room while it was active.

He picked it up, found it responding to his thoughts. He could hear it talking to him. Yapping, like a loyal dog.

The Doctor asked it to go into standby mode, then slipped it into his pocket.

He quickly found a set of official school notebooks, like registers. But they were full of mathematics symbols, what looked like Greek writing, and a number of very interesting drawings. One looked remarkably like a scale diagram of a black hole. Another was a spiral, like a five dimensional whirlpool.

The Doctor scowled – he knew he should be able to read this, but he couldn’t. If it had been Greek, it wouldn’t be a problem. And he wasn’t sure he could ever decipher it – very few of the symbols were repeated. If it was an alphabet, it was a huge one.

‘It’s called the omegabet,’ a voice told him. ‘It has a million letters…’

‘…but only five vowels,’ the Doctor completed.

‘So you do remember?’

The Doctor frowned. ‘No…’

Then he turned. The Headmaster was there, covering him with what looked for all the world like a laser pistol. ‘

I knew you’d track me down, my dear Doctor. But you’re in the same boat, aren’t you?’

‘Boat?’

‘Where are you from, Doctor?’

‘I don’t know,’ the Doctor admitted.

‘Not this planet, though?’

‘No…’

‘Neither am I. We’re from the same place. Something’s happened to time. Something’s happened to… to…’ The headmaster squeezed his eyes together, tried to concentrate. ‘Wherever we came from, it’s gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘It never existed. That’s my theory.’

‘Of course it existed. Otherwise, how could we exist?’ ‘It’s paradoxical, it’s mindbending and upsetting. But… it’s exciting. Liberating. Full of potential. We can push things further, how far only depends on us.’

The Doctor looked at this strange man. He wasn’t a tall man, but there was something about him – his bearing, those eyes. He was a born leader.

‘And where do you want to “push things”?’ the Doctor asked, already suspecting what the answer would be.

‘If we don’t take control, someone else will,’ the headmaster insisted. ‘This is a perfect opportunity.’

Miranda and Miss Hargrave had been arguing with each other in French for five minutes, now. The rest of the class were utterly bored. Miranda told Miss Hargrave as much.

‘You will study French!’ Miss Hargrave told her, in French. ‘You will learn!’

‘I don’t want to!’ Miranda replied, fluently. ‘I don’t need to.’

‘You are a disruptive element. You must bow to our will!’ Miranda felt a little startled by that. ‘Pardon?’ she said. The others in the class weren’t following this at all.

Miss Hargrave’s eyes were like… they were like black lasers. They bored into Miranda, who felt her mind slipping away. It was weird, like being really tired. But a moment ago, she’d been…

The Doctor was edging back towards the door.

‘We can’t do this alone. We have to recruit other… other people like us. We’d also need to root ourselves into this reality. I don’t know how yet, but we don’t have long. I don’t think there are many of us left. It’s why you’re special. It’s why your daughter is so special.’

‘Miranda’s adopted, she’s -’

‘I know who Miranda is, Doctor. I know the truth. There’s no need to hide it from me. I know.’

The Doctor tapped his lip. Until the Headmaster had mentioned Miranda this had been a game. But he was threatening her, now.

‘And you’d be our leader?’

‘We would have a universe, Doctor. A whole universe. The whole of space and time. Even I don’t think I could rule all that alone. We’d need an army, and what better place to raise an army than here on Earth?’

‘Then we’d divide up the universe between the three of us?’

‘Four. There’s another.’

‘Another time traveller?’

‘Someone else like us.’

‘But you said yourself that you don’t know what we are.’ ‘Precisely. But I know what I am not. I’m not a slave, not a servant, not a subject. I was born to rule, as were you. It’s our birthright, Doctor.’

‘…birthright, Miranda.’

She couldn’t make out the words. Not properly.

‘Genetic destiny… can’t fight it…. it’s our duty….’

Miranda was aware she’d slumped. Fainted. She could feel the cold parquet floor against her cheek. Her eyes were open, but they were sightless.

She tried to concentrate.

A year ago, she’d gone on holiday with the Doctor and Debbie. The Doctor had just adopted her, after a legal battle she didn’t fully understand. They’d gone to the sea to celebrate. Australia. Wasn’t it?

White sand. Blue sea. She’d been swimming, showing off. She’d got out of her depth.

Then the wave had come. It had been vast, and caught her out. She’d not had time to breathe, not even to close her eyes. Suddenly the world was blue, the whole world was blue and she was being swept along.

She tried to swim, but none of the rules of swimming seemed to apply. Nothing she did made any difference. And a moment later, the wave had passed over her, and she was alive. A little humbled, and very keen to get back to the beach and her father and his companion. But also, for a moment, she was invincible.

She could see again. Miss Hargrave was right in front of her face, staring down at her, trying to control her, trying to destroy her.

‘Not even the ocean could drown me,’ Miranda told her.

The Headmaster faltered, distracted.

‘No! You will obey me!’

The Doctor took his chance, and a step forward. He batted the gun from the Headmaster’s hand, catching it, slipping it in his pocket in one movement.

‘No!’ the Headmaster said again, lunging forward, grabbing for the Doctor’s coat.

They wrestled for a moment, but the Headmaster was surprisingly strong, and pushed both hands into the Doctor’s coat pocket. A moment later, he had his hand round something. He took what he thought was the pistol out.

It was the dimensional stabiliser.

The Headmaster stood there, aware how foolish he looked, pointing the thing at the Doctor as if it was a gun.

The Doctor asked the dimensional stabiliser very nicely to take the Headmaster away from here, and to make sure he never came back.

And, like a loyal dog, the sphere did just that.

The Doctor looked up at the clock. Twenty to four. Time flies, he thought. Probably a side effect of all that dimension-bending. He was meant to be picking up Miranda in five minutes!

‘How was your first day at school?’ the Doctor asked nonchalantly, five minutes later, opening the car door for his daughter.

‘Oh… fairly uneventful,’ Miranda told him. ‘My French teacher and I hit it off on the wrong note, but by the end of the lesson she was almost a different person. What have you been doing with yourself?’

‘I met an old school friend,’ the Doctor said.

‘Oh. Right. Will you be meeting him again?’

The Doctor smiled. ‘I doubt I’ve seen the last of him.

#Eighth Doctor #Lance Parkin #Eighth Doctor Adventures #Miranda Dawkins #Father Time #The Master #Doctor Who #long post #The Book of the Ceasefires

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prepare4trouble · 7 years

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Star Wars Rebels fanfic - Catching up (1/1)

(Part of the Little by Little AU)

Zeb exited the ship and turned in the direction of the base supply depot. If he was lucky, AP-5 would be busy with something else, and not only would he be able to get the equipment he needed without having to endure a barrage of insults, he might be able to snag another packet of waffles while he was at it. He probably wasn’t going to be lucky, though. He rarely was.

He stopped himself a split second before he accidentally brought a foot down on one of the dokma that made up the swarm that had suddenly and inexplicably descended onto the base. Instead, he stepped carefully around it and trained his eyes on the ground to avoid the rest of the things.

As he walked, or rather, picked his way among them, he glared down at them with a mixture of confusion and frustration. It hadn’t been so bad a few days back; there had still been noticeably more, but they hadn’t begun to impact operations. Now, the population had exploded for no apparent reason, and he was having to think about what they were going to do if it just kept getting worse.

From a security point of view, it had the potential to be a major problem. If people couldn't freely move from one part of the base to another, that would slow reaction times in an emergency, and potentially put lives at risk. Even in non-emergency situations, it wasn’t useful to have the ground filled with moving obstacles just the right size to get underfoot.

He stepped around a cluster of four of the things, and over a fifth that was traveling slowly past them, then took a few more steps, taking care not to raise his eyes from the ground just before his feet, and almost walked straight into Kanan. He was saved from an actual impact by the Jedi’s quick reactions; Kanan dodged out of the way, expertly avoiding another group of dokma as he did.

Zeb cursed under his breath. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m so busy trying not to trip, that I forgot to look out for other people.”

Kanan nodded. His lips stretched into something that resembled a smile, but it faltered and disappeared almost instantly. “I know that feeling,” he said quietly.

Right. He would. In a way. Zeb glared down at the dokma again. “Yeah, well the little bogans need to clear out now, it’s getting beyond a joke. Someone should tell them this is our land. They can crowd out the whole planet over there in spider territory, but we need to be able to move around our own base without having to dance around them.”

“Technically,” Kanan said, “they were here first. We just came along and built a base on top of them. We can’t blame them for doing what they’ve always done.”

Typical Kanan response. Or, typical response from Kanan now. A year or so ago he’d have been leading the charge to get rid of the creatures.

“Yeah, well it’s ours now,” Zeb told him. He sighed and nudged one of the creature’s shells with a toe. “Where’ve you been anyway? Haven’t seen you all day.”

Kanan visibly hesitated, then shrugged. “I spent most of the afternoon with Sabine," he said. “She’s… trying to teach me something.”

“Teaching you?” Zeb grinned. “I bet that’s a change of pace, isn’t it? No offence, but I can’t imagine you as the student.”

Kanan shrugged. “I was a padawan once,” he said. “And I’ve learnt a lot these past months.”

That was true; when Zeb thought about where Kanan had been four months ago and compared it to now, the difference was incredible, but he had been his own teacher; there had been nobody around to tutor him. Ezra was lucky in that regard.

Well, ‘lucky’ might be the wrong word.

“So what’s she teaching you?” Zeb asked. The only thing he could imagine Sabine knew that Kanan didn’t, was how to paint and draw, and if she was trying to teach Kanan that...

“She found something. An alphabet that...” Kanan licked his lips and folded his arms. He looked thoughtful, as though he was trying to think of the right way to explain. “It’s a way of reading by touch,” he said. “It’s interesting, as an exercise, but practical applications? I’m not sure.”

Of course. Sabine had shown it to him once, the night after Ezra had told them. Half excited by her discovery, half embarrassed that she might have made a mistake by pinning her hopes on it, she had talked him through the basic information, explained how it worked, told him how she thought it might help. He tried to remember what she had called it. Something about tactics, or… no. The tactile alphabet, that was it. He didn’t know whether that was its real name, or simply the words she had used to describe it.

She had only spoken about giving the information to Ezra, she hadn’t even mentioned Kanan. It made sense though, he’d benefit from it just as much.

How a person was supposed to learn something like that, though, was beyond him. That night, she had shown him the printed version of the alphabet, then a few days later, a sheet of bumps she had gotten from who-knew-where. The patterns of the dots appeared completely arbitrary; though he figured there must have been some kind of a pattern to it, he couldn’t figure it out. Not that he had tried particularly hard.

“So she got you as well as Ezra,” he said.

Kanan hesitated again, then shook his head. “Not exactly. Ezra’s got a lot going on right now. Maybe he’ll try it later.”

Translation: the kid had thrown it back in her face. Zeb couldn't exactly blame him, the whole thing had looked incomprehensible, and Kanan was right, Ezra was dealing with enough already, the last thing he needed was to have to take on some kind of academic study as well. It wasn’t like he was a big reader anyway. Probably figured it’d be a lot of effort for no real gain.

“Yeah,” Zeb said. “Doesn’t look like an easy thing to learn anyway.” He raised a hand and wiggled his fingers demonstratively. For all the good that would do around Kanan. “I mean, for me it’d be impossible; you should try reading those tiny bumps with these things. I gave it a go, but I could feel two lines at once. Or one line, and the bottom and top of the two on either side. Either way, you’ve got the right sized fingers for it.”

Kanan flexed his own fingers, as though testing them out. He nodded, and Zeb wondered, just for a moment, whether he even remembered how Lasat hands looked.

“I might be able to learn it by sight, though,” Zeb said, then stopped abruptly, embarrassed as the ridiculousness of that statement struck him. There was no reason to be embarrassed, of course; he could see, of course he was going to do things by sight. Still, recent events had made him very aware that that was not a privilege that everybody shared. “Uh, but of course that’s not what it’s for, is it? I’ve got normal writing for…” He stopped again, not wanting to imply that the tactile alphabet wasn’t normal. But then, it wasn’t, was it? That was why none of them had even heard of it a week earlier. “I’m just going to stop talking now,” he said.

Kanan grinned, then let out a laugh that sounded genuine. He clasped Zeb on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. And there’s no reason you can’t learn it that way, if you want to. Sabine is. I mean, I assume she is.”

But Zeb did worry. He especially worried about saying something like that in front of Ezra; the kid’s emotional state was precarious enough as it was, without people he was supposed to be able to trust hurting him by accident.

“So what about you?” Kanan asked him. “What have you been doing today?”

Zeb glared down at the dokma again. “Dodging obstacles, mostly,” he said. “I’ve put a few teams on collection duty, Hera’s idea. We’re basically picking the things up, transporting them off the base and dumping them. It’s pointless, they’re only gonna come back again. But at least it feels like we’re going something about it.”

“They might not,” Kanan said. “It depends where you’re putting them, and if it’s the direction they came from or the one they’re heading in.”

“Heading in?” Zeb frowned, wondering if Kanan genuinely didn’t know what was happening. “They’re not heading in any direction, Kanan. They’re just wandering around aimlessly getting in everyone's way.”

“Ezra’s got a theory about them,” Kanan said. “If he’s right, they might not be a problem for too much longer.”

“Oh?”

Kanan took a few steps backward, avoiding dokma as he did, and leaned against a wall. There was no hesitancy in his steps, and he didn’t even reach behind him to check that he was in the right place before trusting the wall to be there to take his weight. Zeb watched, fascinated; not only could Kanan navigate the base without sight, he could do so backwards, and surrounded by trip hazards. Even after so many months, it was impressive.

“He thinks it’s some kind of a migration,” Kanan said. “They’re trying to get somewhere, but they’ve noticed the spiders don’t come onto the base and so decided to stick around for a while. He thinks eventually the drive to move on is going to win out and they’ll be on their way.”

“Huh.” Zeb mulled that over in his mind. As a theory, it was as good as any. “What made him come up with that?”

Kanan shrugged. “Ezra has a talent for making connections,” he said. “I asked him if he’d see what he could find out about our new houseguests. I wasn’t expecting much, to be honest; it was just supposed to be a distraction for him. He’s been having a difficult few days.”

Zeb felt an unexpected spike of protectiveness at that. “Why?” he asked, “Did something happen?”

Kanan frowned, looking thoughtful, then shook his head. “Nothing specific,” he said. “People… talk. Some of them talk to him.”

“Yeah,” Zeb muttered. People had been talking the previous day when he had overheard a conversation about the Force. The whole thing had left a bad taste in his mouth, and he wasn’t even the one that it had been directed at.

“Did it work?” he asked. “Did you distract him?”

“For a while.” Kanan sighed, and Zeb got the impression that that wasn’t the only thing that was bothering him. “By the way, it’s dark now, right?”

The question, such an unexpected change of subject, took Zeb by surprise. Before he realized what he was doing, and despite the fact that he already knew the answer, he found himself looking around to verify his response, double-checking as though it might have been a trick question.

Of course, there was no trick. It was strange to think that Kanan wouldn't know something that simple, or couldn’t be sure of it. It was such a basic thing; to know whether it was day or night. He wondered how losing that ability might mess with your sleeping patterns. That, combined with feeling down anyway, there was little wonder Kanan had retreated to his room for so many months.

“Yeah,” Zeb replied. “Pretty much dark. Why?”

“So, say… ten minutes ago, how dark was it then?”

Zeb frowned and shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not an easy thing to describe,” he said. Even putting aside the fact that he knew his Lasat eyes perceived things differently than Kanan’s human ones had, without visual references it was difficult to describe a level of light. “Not quite there, but almost. I think the sun had set, but it wasn’t fully dark yet. Twilight, you know? Why?”

Kanan shook his head. “No reason.”

Translation: he didn’t want to talk about it. Or he couldn't talk about it. Zeb could understand either reason. The most likely explanation was that it had something to do with Ezra; and with the condition currently stealing away his sight. It affected his night vision…

Zeb forced himself to stop thinking. If Kanan didn’t want to talk about it, he probably didn’t want people working it out instead. He wasn’t getting any of those ‘I don’t mind if you guess’ vibes that you sometimes found around a secret from him.

“Can you do me a favor?” Kanan asked.

“If I can.”

Kanan didn’t continue right away. He took a slow, deep breath, and folded his arms, the fingers of one hand tapping on his own arm. If his face hadn’t been partially covered, and if his eyes could see, Zeb imagined that he would be staring off into the distance; not because there was anything there worth looking at, but just to avoid looking at Zeb.

“I can’t be there for Ezra all the time,” he said, “and even if I could, I don’t think it’d be helpful. There are things he needs to learn to deal with that I can’t help him with.”

That made sense. Zeb remained where he was, waiting for a continuation.

“But if you notice anything. Like if you find he’s spending too much time hiding away, or anything like that, can you let me know? Just be on the lookout for odd behavior. Keep an eye on him when I can’t.”

Zeb resisted the temptation to make the obvious joke. He could do that with Kanan, but right now it didn’t feel right. Instead, he nodded. “Already doing that,” he said. He wasn’t sure how good a job he was doing, but he was doing it, and he didn’t need to be asked to look out for his family.

Kanan nodded too. “I figured as much.”

Actually, now he thought about it, on the topic of ‘looking out for his family’, he wondered how Kanan, too, might react to the thing he had overheard the previous day; the idea that the Force was responsible for what was happening to Ezra. There had been an implication there that it had also been responsible for Kanan’s blinding. It was nonsense, of course; all of it was, but just the idea of it made Zeb angry. He didn’t know whether he should mention it, or whether that might make things worse.

He usually found that the best thing to do in those situations was to say something else, and put off making a decision until he knew what might be best. “Hey, talking of odd behavior,” he ventured. “Two guys I barely know came up to me this morning with sketches of Chopper, asked me which one was best.”

Kanan frowned, confused either by the sudden change of subject, or by the strangeness of the request.

“I mean, they were both okay. Not up to Sabine’s standards, of course, but they were just rough sketches, you know? Like they’d just been done to get some ideas down.” It occurred to him as he spoke that drawings and art might be a sore subject. It was too late to back out now, and Kanan didn’t appear to be bothered, but Zeb added it to the mental list of things not to mention to Ezra.

“Sketches of Chopper?” Kanan repeated, sounding confused.

Zeb nodded. “Yeah. One of him just standing there, the other of him delivering a pretty brutal-looking electric shock to some guy. I said that one was best.” He grinned. “It captured his essence.”

Kanan smiled back at him. “You probably made the right choice. Any idea why they asked you?”

They hadn’t actually said, and he had gotten the impression that had been deliberate, but Zeb was smarter than people gave him credit for. “One of them mentioned having some of the sparks of electricity traveling down the sides of the ship,” he said. “Sounds crazy, I know, but I think they’re planning on painting it on one of the fighters.”

“Oh…kay. Interesting choice.”

“I might ask Sabine when I see her, see if she’d heard anything,” Zeb added.

Kanan nodded, then stood up straight, moving away from the wall that he had been leaning on, like he was about to leave. “Sabine could use a distraction,” he said. “Everybody’s a little on edge lately.”

It was tough to argue with that. Zeb sighed, and made a decision; it was better to tell Kanan about the rumours than leave it and let him and Ezra overhear it for themselves. “Hey, Kanan,” he said.

Kanan turned back to face him.

“People have been saying stuff. You know that, right?”

Kanan didn’t respond, he waited silently for Zeb to continue.

“Stuff about Ezra, behind his back. I know it’s probably be be expected, same thing happened when you…” he paused, did Kanan know about that? “Same thing happens every time anything big happens,” he amended.

Kanan nodded. “It does,” he said. “What have you heard?”

Zeb folded his arms — a human gesture that he had picked up somehow without noticing — and tried to think of the right way to explain. “There’s a rumor going around. I did my best to stamp it out, but I can only do so much by standing nearby trying to look threatening while people talk…”

He paused, leaving time for Kanan to make a joke about that. Nothing happened.

“Anyway, they’re talking about the Force making Ezra… you know. Like something’s gone wrong with it, and anybody who uses it ends up…”

“Blind,” Kanan finished for him.

Zeb sighed. Why was it so hard sometimes to say that word? Moreso recently, but it had never been easy. “Yeah,” he agreed.

Kanan half-turned away, as though staring into the distance again. He folded his arms, then went very still and said nothing. Zeb watched him warily, unsure how he was about to react.

“You okay?” he tried.

“Yes,” Kanan assured him. He leaned against the wall again, falling back and allowing it to catch him, then shook his head slowly from side to side. “That’s ridiculous,” he said.

Zeb continued to watch him. He didn’t appear to be angry or upset, he didn’t appear to be anything.

“The Force doesn’t work that way,” he said.

“I know that.”

Kanan nodded. “But I can see why they might come to that conclusion.” He took a breath and sighed deeply. “I should have anticipated this.”

“No reason why you should,” Zeb told him. Kanan had had more than enough on his mind the past couple of weeks, without trying to guess every little thought that might pop into the head of every idiot on the base.

“Whether I should or not,” Kanan said. “I need to decide what I’m going to do about it. And I need to speak to Ezra, that’s not something he should have to hear.”

Zeb shrugged. “In that case, is it something you want to be telling him about? You know the kid, it doesn’t matter where he hears it from, he’s going to end up wondering whether it’s true.”

Kanan appeared to consider that, then turned to face Zeb again. “You’re saying I should let him hear it from somewhere else?”

“No, not exactly,” he replied. He thought about it carefully, running scenarios in his head.

There may be a few idiots around, but for the most part everybody on the base was a decent person who would never deliberately do something to harm another person. Unless that other person happened to fight for the Empire, of course. Nobody was going to go running to Ezra with their theory, not without a good reason.

“Not telling him doesn’t guarantee he won’t hear it,” Zeb said. “But telling him guarantees that he will. Maybe it’d be better to try to contain it, stamp it out. The whole thing might just blow over without anybody noticing.”

Kanan considered that for a few moments. “Okay,” he said thoughtfully. “Can we contain it?”

Zeb shrugged. “We can try.”

For a moment, Kanan looked as though he wanted to argue, or at the very least add another point to the conversation. He didn’t. Instead, he nodded decisively. “Okay, we’ll try it your way,” he agreed.

Zeb grimaced. Like with so many things, they were working by trial and error, muddling through, trying their best, hoping not to do too much damage along the way. It was how things had always been, it just felt like the stakes were higher sometimes. He sighed. “Fancy a drink?” he asked. “I know I could use one.”

Kanan hesitated, like he wanted to agree but had something he thought he should be doing. Something Ezra-related, Zeb assumed. He wondered where the kid was. At the races, probably, it was where he spent most of his evenings.

Or, he had used to. Everything had changed recently, maybe that had too.

“Weren’t you on your way somewhere?” Kanan asked.

Zeb shrugged. “Just the supply depot, but I could see if I can I could find a bottle of something while I’m there.”

“Going to restock your stash?” Kanan asked him.

Zeb glanced at him sharply. “What do you mean?”

“Your secret stash of waffles,” Kanan clarified, with a completely straight face.

Zeb didn’t know how that had gotten out; whether it was just a rumor that had taken on a life of its own somehow, or whether someone actually knew about his personal supply. Either way, it was annoying. It made him feel like people were watching him all the time, trying to prove it true. He folded his arms defensively. “You mean the made-up one that I don’t have?”

Kanan smiled. “That’s the one,” he said. “Anyway, sure. A drink sounds good. I tried the first of the new batch from the improved still the other day, it’s not bad.”

“That’ll do,” Zeb said, grudgingly. “But I was hoping we’d be able to find a bottle of something real. You know the supplies we got from the shipment heading to the Imperial Fleet? I heard a rumor there was some Corellian whiskey among it.”

“That’s true,” Kanan said. “Unfortunately, most of it disappeared pretty quickly. You’ll have more chance of winning a bottle on the races than finding it at the bottom of a supply crate.”

Well, so much for that plan then. Zeb took a deep breath and released a sigh. “Figures. Well, if the still is all we have, the still will have to do. Maybe I will place a bet on the dokma while I’m there.” If he was lucky, he might be able to get his hands on a bottle of the good stuff after all.

#little by little #star wars rebels #swr fanfiction #kanan jarrus #zeb orrelios #dokma #comments are loved

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bisoroblog · 6 years

Text

Teachers’ Strategies for Pronouncing and Remembering Students’ Names Correctly

Sandeep Acharya answered when his teachers and classmates called him Sand-eep, even Sandy, for 12 years before he decided he couldn’t take it any longer: “Junior year of high school, I walked up to the blackboard in every one of my classes and drew a circle with lines radiating from the center. ‘Sun-deep,’ I said in a loud, firm voice. ‘Sun. Like a sun.’ ”

The memory returned to Acharya, CEO of a health care startup, recently when he noticed his 2-year-old daughter introducing herself differently. “To white people, she’d say Savita, with a hard ‘t’ like in ‘torch.’ To everyone else, she’d say her name, Savita, where the ‘t’ makes a soft ‘th’ sound, like in ‘the.’ ”

Rita Kohli, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Riverside, explains the Hindi phenomenon as it applies to her own name: “It’s like Aretha Franklin but without the ‘uh.’ ”

While mispronouncing a student’s name may seem minor, it can have a significant impact on how they see themselves and their cultural background, causing feelings of anxiety, invisibility, shame, resentment and humiliation, all of which can lead to social and educational disengagement. Kohli documented these findings in a 2012 article she co-authored with UCLA professor Daniel Solórzano titled “Teachers, please learn our names!”

Aspirations and motivation can suffer from the cumulative effect of these “mini-disasters,” which also set the tone for how students treat each other. On the other side of the coin, correct pronunciation can help “develop trust and rapport,” according to Christine Yeh, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Education.

That’s why California’s Santa Clara County Office of Education created the “My Name, My Identity” campaign. The initiative asks community members to take a pledge to pronounce names correctly in order to foster a sense that students of all backgrounds are valuable and belong.

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The names of white and nonwhite children alike are mispronounced, Kohli and Solórzano write, but the experience is much more damaging for a child who “goes to school and reads textbooks that do not reference her culture, sees no teachers or administrators that look like her, and perhaps does not hear her home language,” since these cues (plus advertisements, movies and other indicators of societal values at large) already communicate “that who they are and where they come from is not important.” For one Latina study participant, having her name mispronounced made her wish her parents were more Americanized; a Sri Lankan American reported feeling that his name was “an imposition on others.”

They’re not imagining things. Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, a sociolinguist at The Ohio State University, says the effort we put into overcoming a “barrier to communication” depends on (and communicates) social values. “You see the difference if you think about the way Americans typically respond to somebody with a heavy French accent versus somebody with a heavy Mandarin accent,” she explains. When it comes to names, an American who mispronounces the British surname St. Clair (think “Sinclair”), she says, will tend to have a sense of, “Oh, they have a fancy, special language, and if I don’t know how to handle that, it’s a flaw in me.” Whereas a Chinese name might provoke the reaction: “Those names are really hard to understand, and it’s not my responsibility to engage with that.”

The latter also “happens a lot with white teachers responding to names that are seen as typically black,” Campbell-Kibler says. According to Robert Bjork—a psychology professor at UCLA who is a leading scholar on human learning and memory—there are several reasons why names of all cultures can be difficult to remember. For starters, they’re arbitrary labels, as opposed to a nickname like “Red” or “Tiny,” which a person’s physical appearance might trigger. Then there’s the fact that “other demands often occupy our attentional and memory processes when we are meeting somebody new.” Whether that’s at a cocktail party or in a classroom with 33 children, distraction can make it impossible to recall a new name just minutes later. Even when initial storage is successful, Bjork says, retrieval is hampered because we accumulate a huge number of names over our lifetimes, many of which are similar.

On top of these difficulties, there can be linguistic barriers to pronouncing names that aren’t in one’s native tongue, particularly when dealing with differing sound systems. Professor Campbell-Kibler offers up Korean as an example. She says there are two separate sounds that occupy what an English speaker would think of as the “s” space, and a teacher might not have the cognitive capacity to perceive the difference between them.

“If I don’t go and actually learn how to speak Korean extensively for years, I may just always get that wrong,” she says, but this type of real linguistic constraint “doesn’t come up all that often.” In other words, teachers are capable of pronouncing most names correctly.

How then can educators overcome the hurdles to doing so?

It’s tempting to put the first key practice—mustering a legitimate interest in the name—into the bucket labeled “duh” by Samantha Giles, a special education teacher at Hill Elementary School in Garden Grove, California, but it stems from neural complexities. Say you were to ask Professor Bjork how to spell and pronounce his last name. He explains that if he replied “Bee-york” you might ask why it is not pronounced “Bah-Jork,” after which he would tell you that it is a Scandinavian name, similar to the word “fjord” where the “j” is pronounced like a “y.” Or he might add that “Bjork” means “birch,” as in the tree. An exchange like this, he says, “will exercise the very types of processing that enhance memory.” In other words, it overcomes the cocktail party problem. The second essential step, he says, is “to produce—that is, actually say, someone’s name, because retrieving a name makes that name more retrievable in the future than does just hearing it.”

“How would you like me to say your child’s name?” is the specific wording Professor Kohli recommends for parents, and the following for students:

“I don’t know how to say your name yet, can you explain it to me? I’m working on learning it, and it’s important to me to say it the way it’s meant to be said, the way your parents say it.”

Then try the name. Ask if you’re right. Try again, “no matter how long it takes.” Once you’ve got the proper pronunciation, repeat it aloud. Eighth-grade science teacher Carry Hansen, who also coaches cross-country and track as well as coordinating the advisory program for Trinity Valley School in Fort Worth, Texas, recommends using kids’ names as much as possible, almost as obnoxiously as a telemarketer would, until they sink in.

If that whole process sounds awkward, good. Professor Bjork’s research, conducted in partnership with Elizabeth Ligon Bjork, shows that difficulty learning something gives the thing being learned a sense of importance, and errors that trigger elaboration produce better retention. This concept of “desirable difficulties” means the discomfort of admitting you’re having trouble pronouncing someone’s name could actually aid in recall, and Bjork says “that such a clarifying exchange has a positive effect, not a negative effect, on the person whose name you are having trouble pronouncing.”

Thanks to the power dynamic that makes it hard for a student to question a teacher, the onus of initiating this type of conversation falls on educators, in Kohli’s view, and she says they should take a learner’s approach in doing so. Start with a little soul-searching:

Is this name hard to pronounce, or is that just my vantage point? (Susan Balogh, a teacher at Baker School in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, reminds herself, “Unless our names are Lakota, Penobscot or Apache in heritage, they are all ‘foreign.’ ”) Then, be explicit, Kohli says, telling the class “that this is our limitation, not any fault of the student.” Use the “I” statements suggested above and avoid the frustrated looks and embarrassed laughs that tend to accompany pronunciation difficulty. Hansen gives students permission to correct her; in fact, she advises, “tell the kid that they MUST correct you if you are saying their name incorrectly.”

Many teachers report playing “the name game” and Professor Yeh, who teaches school counselors with caseloads of 200-500 students, takes a similar approach, asking each of her graduate students to share the story of their chosen name and its proper pronunciation on the first day of class. Then she, too, gets frank about it, declaring that “we won’t consistently mispronounce a name because we are too afraid to ask, or too afraid to correct ourselves.”

Yeh draws attention to another tactic that can help with pronunciation: learning the basic rules from a variety of languages, “like an ‘x’ in Chinese is pronounced as an ‘sh’ sound, with the tip of your tongue down, below your lower front teeth.” (Just as “a” in Savita makes the “uh” sound thanks to Hindi origin, and the letter “j” in Spanish makes the sound English speakers attribute to the letter “h.” If this seems like too much to wrap one’s head around, remember the classic example of “ghoti” as an alternative English spelling of “fish,” because “gh” makes the “f” sound in “enough,” “o” makes the “i” sound in “women,” and “ti” makes the “sh” sound in “nation.”) Campbell-Kibler, the linguistics professor, confirms: “You can go find that out. Each language is a system, just like English, but the question is, is somebody willing to do that, and what influences how willing they are to do that?”

Even those who know how to say a name like a native speaker may hesitate for fear of cultural appropriation: “It might be socially a little strange to perfectly produce somebody’s name as if I were saying it in the language,” Campbell-Kibler says. That’s why this diverse group of experts all come back to the same bottom-line recommendation: Ask the student and family which pronunciation they prefer.

It won’t always be the one used at home. It is not uncommon for students to choose an Americanized pronunciation or a new name entirely. “At the end of the day, I have to respect the person standing in front of me,” Campbell-Kibler says, “and if they are saying, ‘Call me Joe,’ OK, I’ll call you Joe.”

Just so long as it isn’t for the expediency of school personnel. Professor Yeh says that in the early 2000s, she was told by students at Lower East Side Preparatory High School that they had been assigned an American name or asked to choose one. When kids “basically said, ‘We want our Chinese names back,’ ” Yeh talked to teachers and administrators and was told they “couldn’t possibly learn 300 Chinese names.” And yet, when the students hosted a brown bag lunch where they offered to teach the proper pronunciation of their names, Yeh says, “almost every single teacher and counselor and staff member showed up.”

In the absence of a similar initiative, teachers report using time-honored tricks to remember name pronunciation, like word association (which addresses Bjork’s arbitrary label problem), writing down each syllable in English phonetics, and rhyming (“Alazaeia = Princess Leia” is one Giles uses), as well as new-fangled ones like name pronunciation websites (e.g., www.pronouncenames.com).

What if you witness a mispronunciation by another adult?

Kohli says a classmate of her daughter benefited from a Latina kindergarten teacher who referred to him as his parents did. His first-grade teacher, however, changed both the sounds and inflection. (Professor Yeh reminds, “With many of the names that have tildes or umlauts or little markings, that is actually really important, too.” When making name tents and folders, she says, remember “it’s not just the spoken word; it’s the written name as well.”) While Kohli encourages parents to be direct in advocating for their own child’s name, she sought balance in her dual role as a professor and parent of a classmate, figuring, “I can’t just go in there and slap down my research.”

Instead, whenever the first-grade teacher was in earshot, she made a point to properly pronounce that student’s name. Eventually, it worked.

And that might be the most important lesson Kohli and Solórzano have to offer: “[Since] students will often take the cue of fearing or celebrating difference from the climate set up by teachers, … educators are in a unique position to shape the perceptions of their students” about themselves and others. In the age of growth mindset and “marvelous mistakes,” teachers, counselors, literacy specialists, social workers, administrators, yard staff, PTA members and any other adult who interacts with children at a school can reframe name pronunciation as an opportunity rather than a challenge.

Balogh, the Boston-area teacher, sums it up: “If I can’t make a consistent, good-faith effort to pronounce a name correctly, the implicit message is that I can’t be bothered.” Those who show that they can take an important step toward making all students feel seen and respected, necessary prerequisites for an engaging social and academic experience.

Teachers’ Strategies for Pronouncing and Remembering Students’ Names Correctly published first on https://dlbusinessnow.tumblr.com/

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perfectzablog · 6 years

Text

Teachers’ Strategies for Pronouncing and Remembering Students’ Names Correctly

Rita Kohli, a professor in the Graduate School of Education at UC Riverside, explains the Hindi phenomenon as it applies to her own name: “It’s like Aretha Franklin but without the ‘uh.’ ”

youtube

How then can educators overcome the hurdles to doing so?

“How would you like me to say your child’s name?” is the specific wording Professor Kohli recommends for parents, and the following for students:

What if you witness a mispronunciation by another adult?

Instead, whenever the first-grade teacher was in earshot, she made a point to properly pronounce that student’s name. Eventually, it worked.

Teachers’ Strategies for Pronouncing and Remembering Students’ Names Correctly published first on https://greatpricecourse.tumblr.com/

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fashionoutfit6 · 6 years

Text

Day time from the Old Essay: Custom and also Holy bible

Some customs make individuals shudder. Many people in the us and in reality worldwide pay off plenty of awareness of Halloween season. Nonetheless, a lot of them even now feel that it must be sacrilege.Moment of this Old holiday vacation has also two several aspects.Through the 1 side area this is basically the fest of candy and excitement. With the other part it will be the fest of darkness and bad. This situation captures recognition of countless men and women. Moment for the Gone is of those a superb effects and relevance that this has recorded your entire community. On this Period within the Dry essay we are going to take a look at a useful facet with the celebration.

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