#and! if saying that an animal is evil is shorthand for the animal being dangerous or unpredictable; why not just say that!!??

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

Hot take, I really don’t think we should assign human morals onto animals and call them bad or evil. Fishblr has internalised this idea really well with sharks, and I think that’s good! Sharks don’t deserve all the fearmongering they suffer from in media. But… can we please remember to extend this to other animals too? Even to intelligent animals like dolphins (most commonly bottlenose dolphins) and orcas. It seems to be a counter to pop culture’s tendency to show dolphins as complete angels when they partake in some messed up things, but like…. Dolphins are still animals? They may be able to recognize themselves in mirrors and they may have language and culture and know how to use tools but their intelligence is still on the level of a human child (and how empathetic are those!!??). I see people talk about how evil dolphins are but I never see people talking about other animals the same way, like, why aren’t sea otters and their “evilness” the topic of discussion? :/

[tangledbea]

I feel that the "Chris believes evil is inherited, which I hate" arguement embodies how the TTS team dropped the ball when dealing with Cassandra and Gothel's legacy. A better writing team would have made it clear that Cassandra has not "inherited" Gothel's evil, she is simply reacting to the trauma caused by it in a dangerous and unhealthy way. However, that gets lost too often in the plotting of Cassandra's Revenge and the "Now I'm The Bad Guy" rant of Once A Handmaiden.

I understand what you're saying, but I heard from crew that Chris did say that Cassandra inherited Gothel's evil, and her story was overcoming that. It's not just something that I'm seeing on my own or interpreting, based on my opinions of Cassandra's character arc.

There are a lots of little ways in which the production/writing team tend to show that no apple falls far from the tree, no matter how long ago they fell. I can't say that this was all Chris' doing, because I know that the writing team did get a say on how various characters (the more minor, the better) ended up being portrayed. Rapunzel has Arianna's adventurous spirit and thirst for knowledge, and Frederic's artistic streak. (This is based entirely upon the breakfast scene in "What the Hair?!" when Frederic was shaping his pile of scrambled eggs into Corona castle while playing with his food.) Eugene has a lot of Edmund's mannerisms and tastes. Chris said that, in his opinion, Varian got his "dark streak" from his mother. All of these things say that, regardless of the circumstance of your upbringing, you're going to be like your biological parents, whether you knew them growing up or not. Which is bunk.

I understand that these things are easy shorthand, especially in animated media, but maybe I'm just at an age where I'm tired of the clichés. And that cliché absolutely extends to Cassandra and her being made the villain of the show, based entirely on who her mother was.

[electronicyarn]

REALLY Not Live Blogging RWBY Vol. 8

Yes, I’ve FINALLY finished watching Volume 8. I’m only months late to the party. Well, for the sake of tradition here are my thoughts. The short version is thus. What an awful start. What a spectacular finish.

I’m not going to lie. For a while there I thought we might have another Volume 4 on our hands. Although I guess that’s not entirely fair. Volume 4’s big crime was being aggressively mediocre, something RWBY should never be. The first five episodes of Volume 8 were really bad. Not any-scene-with-Caroline-in-it-in-Volume-6 bad, but still pretty bad. The opening in particular I found to be forced and artificial. The disagreement between Ruby and Yang didn’t really come from anywhere, and half the team seemed to be divvied up based purely on the needs of the narrative rather than any proper character motivations.

Other highlights (lowlights?) include them twice using “falling from a great height” as a shorthand for danger (something that the principal cast proved they could handle early in Volume 1 with the landing strategies scene) and The Hound’s introduction where he kidnapped Oscar. I get what they were going for with The Hound’s big debut, but Team Yang really didn’t fight back. At all. They just kind of stood there with their mouths hanging open. It wasn’t a good way to credibly establish The Hound as a threat. For point of contrast, see The Neo vs. Yang fight way back in Volume 2. There was no doubt after that was over that Neo was a very real threat.

I also found everything surrounding the first Penny vs. Cinder fight (Neo vs. Maria, Emerald, etc.) to be distinctly underwhelming. It’s a problem that RWBY’s had for a while now. The less important fights in a volume are rather poorly thought out and animated. But maybe I shouldn’t complain. They do still do a great job on the primary battles. Maybe RWBY needs fewer fight scenes? Feels weird to even suggest that.

But now that I’ve ragged on Volume 8 for three paragraphs…. Wow, what a turnaround. Everything from about Episode 6 on was spectacular. Oscar and Ozpin’s relationship. Everything involving Hazel. The reveal that, yes Cinder had a horrible childhood, but she was always evil. Establishing a more personal connection between Salem and Yang, mirroring the one that Salem and Ruby already have. The destruction of Atlas. I could go on and on. And I will. But there are several things I want to talk about more specifically.

I guess first up is Nora and Ren. They’re now fully-fledged characters, having completed their slow transition from caricatures. I’ve got to be honest. I’m kind of neutral on Nora and Ren. I’m not really invested in their story, but it doesn’t annoy me either. I did however find it amusing that they simultaneously confirmed and shut down Ren/Nora being canon. Two characters in an official relationship? In our RWBY? No way! Leave it for the fanfic writers. But they did say I love you. That’s more than any other potential pairing’s gotten. (I think? I could be forgetting something.) So there’s that.

As an aside, I’m pleased that we got our requisite dose of Bumbleby subtext but also frustrated that they don’t have the stones to do more than that. I’m not surprised however. This is exactly what I predicted would happen.

Also as an aside, when Team RWBY was summoning Ambrosius, I literally said out loud something to the effect of, “Alright, Rooster Teeth. Let me see the sexy man counterpart to Jinn.” I was not disappointed. Good job, Rooster Teeth.

The next topic is Penny’s and Ironwood’s character arcs for this season. I loved both of these. Ironwood’s was one of pure tragedy. Plus it had the side effect of clearing out extraneous characters, something I always approve of as RWBY has precious little running time for what it’s trying to do. And Penny got to complete her more-literal-than-I-expected Pinocchio story. I have no doubt that some people were upset with her death, but while probably not strictly necessary, I think it was done well. It was the culmination of her self-actualization as a person. I’m not going to lie though. I thought the Winter Maiden power was going to go to Weiss (since Ruby had been conveniently dropped out of reality by that point). Way back in Volume 3 when we first learned about the Maidens my second thought was, “Four Maidens, four main characters. Hmm.” It’s pretty obvious now that’s not going to happen. Or if it does, it’ll be in the last volume.

(For the record, my first thought was, “Did you come up with the idea of the Maidens before or after you named one character ‘Summer’ and another one ‘Winter’.” And hey look. You saw what happened this volume.)

And that brings us to Neo. Neo-mother-effing-politan. Neo- “I’m going to steal from the literal devil because I know I’m going to get away with it” -politan. Yang may be my favorite character, but Neo is the best character. If she wasn’t before, this volume has sealed the deal. I loved everything about her this volume. From her meeting Salem and obviously thinking “Oh hell no.” to her skipping through a field of death showing Prometheus how stealing fire from the gods is supposed to be done. She is the most strongly characterized character in the whole show (barring possibly Torchwick himself) and she doesn’t even speak. Aaand now she’s left Remanent along with Team RWBY. I did predict back before Volume 4 started that Neo would ultimately end up teaming up with Ruby and company. It was really a just-for-fun prediction. Buuut….

Well I guess there’s nothing left to talk about except the ending. I do admit, I was a little panicked when Yang took the plunge. I don’t pay attention to any of the official social media or news surrounding RWBY. Stuff like that usually ruins a show for me. So I was worried that maybe Barbara had decided to leave the cast. But then Ruby and Blake fell off too, and I was like, “Ah. This is what we’re doing.”

But what’s going to happen to Team RWBY? I can tell you what I hope’s going to happen. I think it’s time for Team RWBY to get a power up. Maybe it’s time for some intense training in a world removed from Remanent à la the Hyperbolic Time Chamber from Dragon Ball Z? My dream scenario is they spend a year or two or three doing something and then make it back to Remnant to find only a few days have passed. But we’ll see. All I know is I’m excited. In my opinion, the second half of Volume 8 was just the shot in the arm RWBY needed. I’m really looking forward to whatever comes next in a way that I haven’t in quite a while.

[heavymetalchemist]

So I gotta say that I agree 100% on your take on “are demonic cultivators innocent? I don’t think so” and I’m so glad someone else thinks that bc it’s a surprisingly rare take?? (Even tho I think it makes sense) PS: Can u rant to me about it? Bc I kinda wanna read about it :p

Ha ha I SURE CAN!

So first a disclaimer: I myself am not Chinese (or of Chinese descent). I’ve been doing a lot of reading because I love digging into the meta of things, but I am no authority on Chinese culture, historical or modern.

This post here which summarizes this twitter thread explains how culturally Demonic Cultivation is kind of fucked up, and that’s one of the best and most concise explanations for the cultural argument.

However, leaving aside that cultural shorthand, I feel it’s pretty clear in the show (CQL) that Demonic Cultivation is bad.  Some of this is muddied thanks to censorship rules, which, so I’ve heard, require a bit more black-and-white morality in the shows - our bad guys are Very Very bad, and our good guys may be misunderstood but they’re always really heroes. In the Donghua it’s a lot more gruesome thanks to the magic of animation (and this is true of the original book as well).

First, what is demonic cultivation? Basically it’s the idea that WWX had way back in the classroom at Cloud Recesses, when Lan Qiren threw a scroll at his head - the fourth way to handle hauntings, essentially.  The traditional method is first liberate, then suppress, then eliminate.  This means, first try to appease the spirit so it can move on (to, presumably, reincarnate). If that doesn’t work, put it in spiritual time-out (suppress) which I think means more-or-less that you’re hoping a long enough time will allow whatever resentment is keeping it here to dissipate, so it can move on eventually on its own. Finally, if you can’t put it in time-out, you have to eliminate it so that it can’t go around hurting people - which would mean that there is no hope of reincarnation, to my understanding.

The fourth way that WWX suggests boils down to “Ghost Fight!” In the classroom example, an executioner is haunting people and wants revenge by killing a lot of people. WWX suggests digging up a hundred corpses, chopping off their heads, and then using the angry ghosts you just created to fight the executioner ghost, so he gets to have his revenge “killing” a lot of people (that is, all those people you just dug up) and dispersing the resentment that way.

Except, like, hold on, you want to dig up a bunch of graves and make the ghosts fight each other??? Almost every culture has taboos about not desecrating the dead, but even aside from that, he’s proposing deliberately dismembering corpses in order to create resentful energy to fight some other resentful energy. Remember how everyone was shocked and appalled that NMJ was dismembered, and how it really increased his resentful energy and turned him into a terrifying fierce corpse that wanted to kill everyone? Yeah that seems like a bad idea. Plus, imagine that happening to your grandma that you buried, gave normal funeral rites to, and then some asshat comes along and digs up her grave to fight some other ghost? That asshat is not going to be on your friends list.

But WWX is basically like, look I made this seal so I can control it! I have everything under control it’s FINE.

Except that the resentful energy is, itself, a corrupting force. We see WWX’s deterioration in CQL, but notably in CQL we still have other people influencing things about Jin Zixuan’s murder and what happens at Nightless City. In the book/donghua, he straight up loses control. WWX’s death in the book is being torn to shreds by the ghosts he had enslaved.

Because that’s the other thing - he’s enslaved the ghosts. You can make the argument that using the ghosts to fight other ghosts is really effective, and it IS, but it also means that as a ghost, you got conscripted into a Ghost Army by someone who does not seem to be trying to liberate you at all. Is it any wonder that they turn on him at the end?

Then there’s the other aspect of demonic cultivation, which is in contrast to regular cultivation. In regular (orthodox) cultivation, one cultivates one’s own spiritual energy. This is developing the golden core, and it’s also learning to use that spiritual energy for cultivator stuff - when LWJ plays Inquiry, he’s using his own spiritual energy to lend it power. Demonic cultivation doesn’t use one’s own energy, it uses the resentful energy of the restless dead, which means that someone who has low personal cultivation can get real powerful real quick because they don’t have to spend years developing their golden core and a personal repository of spiritual energy to use. You just need a little bit to direct the resentful energy, and suddenly you’re able to wield a lot of power. But that’s power that comes at a cost, because as stated before, it’s a corrupting influence.

So here’s this new cultivation method that can make almost any random chucklefuck super powerful, and if, no, when they fuck it up, it’s going to cause a Ghost Explosion that will rend everyone in the splash zone limb-from-limb as the angry ghosts escape control and lash out at whatever’s close by.

It’s one thing for WWX, who was originally traditionally trained in cultivation and had developed a strong golden core, who is a prodigy and a genius, to play around with this. For a person without that background? They’ll be haunted as fuck much faster, have worse control, and be far more dangerous.  Or they’ll just sacrifice their entire spirit to summon an evil being to murder their whole family (Mo Xuanyu). Or they’ll curse someone and then be hit with the backlash of the curse themselves and suffer that way (Su She).

The person we see who manages to copy the Stygian Tiger Seal is Xue Yang, who uses it to control a bunch of people poisoned by corpse dust to make them into shambling living corpses, and control fierce corpses like Song Lan, and try to forcibly resurrect someone who was desperately trying to escape the situation he was put in. It’s very easy to be sympathetic to Song Lan because we know him, but realistically, EVERY controlled spirit and corpse is in kind of the same situation - being manipulated to do things that they wouldn’t choose to do themselves.

WWX invented demonic cultivation because he is an inventor, a pioneer, an experimenter, and also because he could no longer use traditional cultivation methods. He infused papermen with spirits and used them to bully teenagers. He kept ghosts in a spirit pouch and brought them out to shove into paper dolls and fight for him. He turned Wen Ning into a fierce corpse, and yes he managed to retain his consciousness, but he also turned him into a creature that could be controlled like a puppet and forced to kill people that Wen Ning himself would never kill.

As badass as all the necromancy is, there’s always the part where it requires using ghosts who used to be people to further your own ends. If you’re using them to try and neutralize resentful energy overall so that you can defuse spirits down to the point where you can actually liberate them, which seemed to be the point WWX was trying to make all those years ago in that classroom, then it seems like a good thing to do.  But we don’t see any demonic cultivators actually doing that, instead, we see it being used for vengeance, control, murder, power, and as Lan Wangji points out when he keeps trying to get WWX to come back to Gusu, no matter how good your intentions, it’s only a matter of time before the resentful energy consumes you. And in the end, that is what happened to WWX, after all.

EDIT bc I hit post too soon: And so anyone who practices demonic cultivation, knowing what happened to the Grandmaster and all of the rumors about him, is almost certainly not doing it innocently to just try to resolve a haunting near their home, but because they want power, want to hurt their enemies, want vengeance and don’t care who gets hurt in the splash zone. I would argue that in terms of what justice they should face would depend on what they’ve done, not necessarily just the use of demonic cultivation itself, but signs point to demonic cultivation almost never being used altruistically in practice, especially not by someone who chooses to practice it in place of traditional cultivation (with, again, the notable exception of WWX).

[walaw717]

“The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.” ― Black Elk

I heard the phrase “you are the Indians now” over three decades ago.  

I do not remember exactly who said it, I think it was in a conversation with Russel Means,   if was said in a speech or to me privately, but that does not matter much. I heard it the other day in a commercial Hollywood production, “You are the Indians now” and realized that  industrial colonial commercial America was finding one more way to take the strength and power out of the words we need to survive. When a phrase is taken out of human context it begins to lose its power. When a thing is commercialized it quickly become trite.

We must understand that this phrase, “you are the Indian now” actually does have meaning and power. It is a reality we all need to understand as we are demeaned, bullied , locked down and social distanced by those we have given economic, military and political authority to – what Eisenhour called “the military industrial complex”.  To understand this all we need to do is look at how the authority of the military industrial complex that stretches  back through American history has been used to the “profit” of the few at the expense of the many.

America was opened  by the ever-expanding greed of the Euro-Asians.  The Spanish who had recently broken the rule of what they considered an occupying Afro-Asian power, Islam, began to assert itself and in its assertion of its power created the voyage of Columbus not as a voyage of discovery but as a voyage of economic power and expansion. Columbus’s voyage was quickly followed by Cortez, Pizzaro and a multitude of the leaders of Spain’s military industrial complex. ( Even though this term had not been invented yet it is the appropriate shorthand for those who would rule.)

Push forward barely 300 years and  South America, plundered as thoroughly as the Spanish could in their own areas of captured authority saw another economic power create a myth of shaking off the plunderers to the north, the English, and form a new  “non colony” colonial power.  

It was a strange combination forces that created the United States – men of considerable economic authority created an economic war but based upon  human principles of freedom and self-governance. The reality is they laid the foundation a great colonial power. They used  the power of myth and spirituality to unite the colonials  and in time won an economic war against the mother corporation. These were smart men and oddly sincere, with possibly only Jefferson understanding the dangers inherent in the authority of economic power. Jefferson spoke strongly about  not giving  economic power and control to bankers, yet Hamilton did, and created the source of the force that was to colonize north America through the military industrial complex that slowly grew, in it’s need and greed for land and all the resources it contained – animal, mineral, lumber.

“So Indian policy has become institutionalized and the result has been that American people have become more dependent on government and that the American people have become more dependent on corporations.” ~ Russell Means

The devastation that followed for the American Indian nations was total and it was accomplished at first by outright war and disease and  later by confinement, control of movement , isolation and most of all by breaking the power of the spiritual structures of each community that was conquered. This occurred in America while the European economic powers did the same to Africa and Asia.

It is important to understand that behind all this “colonization” were corporations – powerful economic institutions controlled mostly by men, institutions  built upon the love of “growth, development, money, possession” feeding their narcissism. These were and are men (and women) who truly believed that they were creating a better world though pillage of communities around the world and breaking the  local social and spiritual systems they encountered.

And today – here we are again.

The corporations are supporting political authority that use that authority to again break people to the will of the power of corporate economics.  

Do not be fooled by thinking that the corporate war between Donald Trump and the Globalists is in your interest.  It is a war about who will control the economy of the world. And it is not a race war – though the corporatists want you to think that.  The heads of the corporations are as much Chinese, Arab and African today as they are American, French , Swiss and German.  Race becomes the bait for the conflict which allows them to distract us while they remake the few institutions, we have that are foundational for us to not all become slaves to their consumer machine.  And just as they did with  American Indians, African and Asians, one of the fundamental tenets of corporate power is that  we need to be separated from the land and from each other and the social and spiritual cohesion that  healthy societies have.

Are these people knowingly evil?  Not really . Well maybe some are.  

They do meet together at places like Davos and the G – summits, however many are part of the economic powers at the moment and discuss how to wring the greatest “wealth” for themselves out of the earth. Do not think for a moment however that they are really concerned for your welfare other than as a commodity which they can exploit.

The activist/poet John Trudell says this well –

“It’s like there is this predator energy on this planet, and this predator energy feeds on the essence of the spirit.”

The worldwide lock downs have crushed the poor, increased domestic violence, suicide and  fear. We all know this – at least those who continue to not trust a government that they understand is the hand maiden of the industrial/commercial/ colonial ruling class.

“The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?”― Kurt Vonnegut

This has played out it the media as a racist battle, but it is no longer, if it ever was, about race. It is about exploitation. It is about breaking the populations of the world into a weakened consumer serving class.  

The economic authoritarians have used a broken economic theory, socialism, to create turmoil with its false promise of  a new age and we, now educated by the schools they took control of fifty years ago,creating a watered down curricula that discourages thinking and enhances  emotion, have used Marxism to create a fundamental break in our society.  The people founding and  running BLM are as much operatives for the colonial driven Chinese oligarchy as the Chinese scholar spies in our universities. But again, it is not just the Chinese nor just rich white people – it is the authority class – those who control the flow of information as well as the power of the ability to work.

We are all Indians now, and African and Asian who have felt the power of the colonial might of the corporations to lock us in our homes, to cover our faces live oppressed muslim women, to comply out of fear. 

Colonialism is not new, and it is not white, though its latest  historic manifestation was white beginning with the Spanish rape of central and South America. Colonialism is historic, it does not know race – it is when one people believe they have the right and the authority to  use other people to  gain wealth for themselves.  The Mongols who swept out of Asia into Eastern Europe and India, the  Muslims who charged out of Arabia and north Africa were as much colonizers as the Persian , Romans, Greeks, Egyptians.  The real tool that all colonizers use is the dehumanization of other men women and children and  create them as commodities either on the slave block  or on the corner of the block talking about the latest phoney fad created in shoes.

When one looks at world history there seems to be a certain inevitability to this colonial oppression.

There is really only one hope and that lies in the spiritual path of  turning to a larger power than all of us whether we call it god, grandfather, mother earth – and becoming fully human in our relationships. To do that means we turn away from  consumerism and turn toward our relationship with all life that we share on this earth. And we fight back, we refuse to surrender our individual faces, our shared life and death and grief.  Although the churches, mosques, synagogues and temples have at times been as much of the problem as the solution  the fact that  those in authority do not want us to gather there speaks volumes to the power of the spiritual life and the need to gather there to good purpose. 

Again John Trudell - “We have power… Our power isn’t in a political system, or a religious system, or in an economic system, or in a military system; these are authoritarian systems… they have power… but it’s not reality. The power of our intelligence, individually or collectively IS the power; this is the power that any industrial ruling class truly fears: clear coherent human beings.”

[blackcatanna]

Kinky TB Adventures (probably) with Okita Part 1: Kyoto Winds

Finally playing another Hakuoki route because I spent 10 hours travelling yesterday and I deserve some imaginary romance, damn it! Choosing Okita because he seems fun and I hate that he disappears from the story pretty early on in most routes and then dies off screen :'(

WARNING: I wrote a lot :) 

Intro:

I don't know why but Kodo's evil old man face made me laugh so much during the intro.

Playing the prologue because it has a hearty chunk of Okita in it and it's been a while since I played the game.

Chizuru talking about the invisible wall between herself and other people is relatable af :')

"I'm not sure if I belong here... No. No, that's all in my head." < < < ME. Hello imposter syndrome, my old friend :')

I now feel like a li'l bitch for complaining about my journey yesterday when Chizuru WALKED nearly 500KM from Edo to Kyoto X_X

I'm loving this old timey film effect on the Kodo flashback.

I feel like Kodo's actions and motivations change depending on the route so I'm not going to try too hard to wrap my head around them here.

I love that "Ronin" is basically shorthand for "Evil Douchebag Thug" in this game X_X

Yukimura: "Be careful, father! Kyoto is a dangerous place!" Also Yukimura: "I have nothing to fear because I look like a BOY :) " Selfless but foolish X_X Although, you could argue that being reckless is selfish because it disregards your loved ones' feelings, should you get hurt.

At least the game gives these ronin names :') although... they don't have eyes. I think I'd rather have eyes, if I had to choose.

"I could still hear the ronin cursing loudly" I just have an image of these three guys running through the streets of Kyoto yelling, "FUCK. SHIT. PISS. ASS."

This game invested a lot in blood effects and sounds and I respect and appreciate that.

"He died with the first blow" Silver linings?

"They were... broken" :'(

Awe, the furies look so happy to see me :') JK, this scene is appropriately chilling. They do have big smiles, though.

More blood splashes and visceral blood descriptions :')

Okita, your sadism is showing.

Or maybe he knows that Saito doesn't like killing his comrades and that's why he wanted to kill them first :O :O :O

"if you just sat back and let them kill the kid, you could have saved us some trouble." -_- I enjoy Okita's banter but I have a feeling that it's going to be a bit one sided because Chizuru doesn't do back talk X_X

WAIT A FUCKING SECOND, WHY IS OKITA NOT BLINKING?!??

Oh here we go. Let's take a moment to worship Hijikata. I still think that Saito and Okita are better looking but sure, let's take a break to gush about "smooth, dark hair" in the moonlight and "the wistfulness of flower petals" "as if the cherry trees were blooming out of season" X_X ick.

HEY. CHIZURU. REMEMBER WHO RESCUED YOU. IT WASN'T THIS FUCKER.

OH GOD, IT CONTINUES, "His voice was cold and quiet, like a blade of ice. Blue-white moonlight lit his slender face.." blah blah ick.

OH, WE'RE STILL NOT DONE?!? "But it wasn't the sword making my breath catch. It was his eyes. They were fierce and hard, but somewhere behind them... I could catch a glimpse of... something else." Blah blah, troubled, mercy, blah

"Run, and I will kill you. Do you understand?" SPLOOSH (yes, I have been watching Archer)

I was sort of joking about being aroused by threats of violence but swords are definitely sexier than... whatever that whole flowery passage was...

Okita still is not blinking O_O

Hijikata telling Okita to shut up is a mood. Sorry, Okita.

Okay, NOW Okita's blinking. Guess all it took was Hijikata suggesting that they're going to kill me for a change. Apparently, only Okita's allowed to threaten to murder me X_X

Side note: if anyone reads this and is wondering if I'm aware that I switch between "You", "Me" and "Chizuru" then yes, I am and no, I don't care.

Apparently, Okita blinking was a fluke. Maybe he only blinks when he is pushed off stride or, like, flustered or surprised?

Also, I don't tend to think of Okita as being especially tall but he's taller than Hijikata!

"So we should just kill people now?" Um... you don't do that?

"What?! Come on, you can't be serious" HE SAID, BLINKING AND THUS BACKING UP MY THEORY.

"Almost as if I was being... drawn into their world..." Oh dear! We wouldn't want that to happen, that's not why we bought the game at all! :P

"A world where there is nothing strange in carrying on a normal conversation in the dead of night with corpses for company." Edgy. Although, I hope that this conversation is far from normal O_O

"As you wish." Hijikata is Saito's Princess Buttercup. I'm not jealous.

WHOA. I was just musing about death as usual and now Okita's RIGHT UP IN MY FACE.

"We did save you, didn't we?" WELL, TECHNICALLY, Saito saved me. You suggested letting the furies KILL ME.

"I didn't realise right away he was speaking to me." How? He's taking up the entire screen?

"Thank you very much." Fair. "I apologise for not thanking you earlier." Okay, calm down. It's not like they gave you a chance to speak in between death threats.

"The man called Hajime also looked confused. His eyes were wide and he had an expression I couldn't place." Then allow me: STARTLED ERMINE. Hijikata's is DISGRUNTLED HORSE and Okita's is SMUG LYNX. Aka: how three different animals react to the discovery that their prey is a girl. I know that horses don't hunt prey. However, they do have to deal with it when their animal subordinates unwittingly capture it.

"He broke out in laughter again, so much so that he was forced to wipe a few tears from his eyes" I'M SO GLAD THAT YOU'RE HAVING SUCH A JOLLY TIME, YOU ASS.

Now that he's figured out that I'm a girl, he's suddenly keen to introduce himself :P

"The one you should be thanking for saving you is Hajime Saito" CORRECT.

Is he deliberately trying to let him kill me by giving out as much info as possible? O_o

"His fingers like iron cables around my arm." Kinky.

"The cause of my horror wasn't the gruesome end that awaited me, but something else entirely." Hanging out with these crazy fuckers.

Chapter 1:

Damn, I wrote a lot more than I had expected for the prologue X_X

"My limbs were tightly bound in tight knots" I wouldn't be surprised if Okita was a shibari expert...

"This is no way to treat a guest of ours" Obviously, Inou-bae is trying to be kind but this feels like something a supervillain would say after their minions bring you to their lair X_X

"he smiled at me and winked" get this man a route! Actually, wait, how old is Chizuru... OKAY, FORGET I SAID THAT. NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO FLIRT WITH THIS 16 YEAR OLD GIRL. Although, maybe a dad route? No romance, just familial love. He's a better dad than Kodo. NO DADDY KINKS ALLOWED.

Apparently, Harada and Nagakura being "lively" is supposed to reassure me?!

Ah, Okita and his hilarious jokes about invading my personal space.

I'm so glad that Saito doesn't let him get away with this nonsense <3

And now we're sticking up for Saito and calling out Okita's bs <3

"the smile lingered through his bright eyes" Oo-er

"He looked more like a boy than a man." Says you!

The baka trio look so done X_X

"Their faces were still blessed with youth" Phew. Looks like we'll have some eye candy while we're brutally executed.

A STICK?!? THEY'RE CALLING ME A STICK?! HAVE THEY NOT SEEN THE ANIME INTRO?! CHIZURU HAS TITS!!!

"The hell I will, boy!" Calm down, Kratos.

"You could be taken for interrogating" not if you assholes don't make such a song and dance about me witnessing your shady activities! How would anybody know to interrogate me in the first place?!

"Let's just kill the kid" How about no!!!

"I was just kidding." WERE YOU, or did you just change your tune because daddy Kondou told you off? -_- I don't think Saito's buying your shit.

"Hehe." XD best response!

Side note, how am I the first person to witness the furies in action?! They run around the streets, chopping people up and there are already rumours about the Shinsengumi committing brutal crimes.

Also, how often do they sentence men to death? There are a lot of men in the fury corps and I bet that some choose death or try and run for it and die in the process.

"I think that Souji has a point" BOO, HARADA!

"Uh-oh. Well, this is going to make it even harder for us to simply let you go..." He's doing the not blinking thing again! Maybe that's because his prey is in his sights... O_O Also, thanks a lot, Heisuke X_X

"A man should always be ready to face death. You should make your peace with yours." Okay, first of all, I look like a child to you! Secondly, bit sexist! Not all men choose the path of the warrior. Thirdly, AS IF, I'm just going to lay down and accept my POINTLESS murder just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. No, Nagakura, I am NOT okay with being MURDERED. How dare you imply that I'm a coward for not wanting to die for this BULLSHIT.

Not sure if I mentioned this last time but Sano's casual suicide comments remind me of being at uni :')

"there's something I want to look into." Is it my stuff? Are you going to go through my stuff now? X_X

"I... I'm sorry." I forgive you, Heisuke! As for everyone else who's acting like this is all my fault and you've done nothing wrong, fuck you. Y'all shouldn't be doing evil science in the first place, especially if you're then going to try and justify MURDERING everyone who glimpses the evulz.

This whole bit reminds me of a DnD party where everyone's arguing over whether or not to kill someone. This is definitely more like a DnD argument than your average movie argument X_X

"All right, Saito, take care of the kid." 😍 Yes, Saito, take care of me :D NOT IN A MURDERY WAY O_O

Time to RUN THE FUCK AWAY. Maybe, if they hadn't acted like murdering assholes, I wouldn't be doing this but they don't seem to give a fuck about me so AWAY I GO.

"I knew it was rude, but I had no choice but to try and open the sliding door with my toe." Priorities X_X They kidnapped you, tied you up and threatened to kill you countless times. Honey, you stick it to those fuckers with your shady toe opening.

WE DIDN'T EVEN MAKE IT OUT OF THE ROOM!!!

"Sorry," No your not -_- "but now we've got to kill you." No you don't!

"Then you may do whatever you like with me." Um, why is this the Okita romance option? XD Don't say those words to that sadist, who knows what he wants to do to you! O_O

"We aren't going to eat you or anything." ...Damn X_X I hope that your stance changes if we get married.

"Heh. Never seen such an innocent girl like you." Ugh. As if. Running around dressed as a boy. Can't be that innocent. Certainly not if he read my last comment :P . Anyway, YOU SOUND CREEPY, TALKING LIKE THAT XD

"All right, all right. Now, tell your big brother... Why were you cross-dressing around Kyoto?" THA FUCK DID YOU JUST CALL YOURSELF?!?? And MIND YOUR DAMN BUSINESS XD DON'T KINK SHAME ME!

"Well, 'she' claims to be a girl, but it's not like we have any actual proof, right?" Um, I'M not the one who said that I'm a girl and I DON'T LIKE WHERE THIS IS GOING. I WILL FIGHT YOU FUCKERS IF YOU COME NEAR ME >:(

"My apologies, but I took the liberty of checking through your belongings." I wouldn't mind, except NOT ONCE did they give me a chance to explain myself or plead my case. He could have just asked whatever he wanted to know and then checked my bags to verify it X_X

"Hey now," HEY NOW, NOW, sing this corrosion to me... No? I'll be quiet :(

"So, you've been withholding information from us?" YOU BARELY GAVE ME A CHANCE TO SPEAK, YOU DICK!

Welp, they've agreed not to kill me and yet Okita's still taking it upon himself to threaten me with death while fixing me with his unblinking, predatory stare X_X

"Gee, didn't take long for you to change your tune once you knew she was a girl, eh Shin?" TRUTH

"Having a lady here at headquarters is sure to brighten things up." Joke's on you: I'm a goth ;P

"you can't just pawn her off on someone else." Okita, nooooooo! Don't make me work for this grumpy bitch!

"I hope you you'll take good care of her." Wink wink, nudge nudge. What's the matter, Hijikata senpai? Am I not pretty enough for you? :'(

"You sons of BITCHES." HEY. HIJIKATA. NO NEED TO INSULT THEIR INNOCENT MOTHERS. Just call them straight up bitches :)

"The Shinsengumi keeping a woman here... If such rumours were to spread, tongues would begin to wag." Yeah, yeah, so we might as well just all fuck. People are going to say we're doing it, regardless, so let's get this over with...

Or I could keep pretending to be a man. That could also work.

"You're gonna get a room, and you're gonna stay in it." FUCK YOU

"I could have sworn we decided she was going to be someone's page" O_O FUCK YOU EVEN MORE, OKITA.

So... lonely... must... find... friends...

Okita and Saito friends :D

When I first played this game, I was really keen to find my "father" but now that I know what he's like, it's hard to muster quite the same level of enthusiasm X_X

"Draw your blade, unless it is merely decoration." Spicy! I'm glad that Yukimura is not so easily goaded into fighting.

"I'm not lying." You tell him, girl!

Saito and Okita's stunned faces when you suggest that you might accidentally hurt Saito are priceless! X_X I guess this shows that you take this seriously, though.

"Excuse me... You don't have to laugh..." XD Is this almost sassy?

Surprise, Okita likes it when I do what he says despite understandable reservations XD

Saito looks way too happy to be doing this XD was this just a chance for him to show off? :P

IS HE LAUGHING AT ME?!? XD RUDE!

WHA THA FUCK. I think that it was a glitch but there were suddenly about seven Saitos on screen. Maybe that's what it feels like when you're fighting him.

Woah, it happened again, only this time there were two and one was squashed.

I'm fine with there being more Saitos.

Aaaaand he's holding a sword at my throat... Sploosh? Shut up, swords are sexy. I probably watched too many period and fantasy films as a child...

"In the blink of an eye, his face was only inches from mine," O RLY? 😏 WAIT, I'm supposed to be playing Okita's route X_X Must... stop getting distracted...

"Your master should be proud." SAY IT AGAIN 😍

"I then noticed how wildly my heart was beating." Though not from fear, right? ;)

"You all right?" Kind words? FROM OKITA?!?

"polite applause" FROM OKITA!?!

"If you want, we'll keep you company." Yes, Okita, obviously I want that :D

First sign of madness: talking to your own head!

Okita could look less smug about catching me talking to myself -_-

"I wanted to scream, but before I could open my mouth, Saito stepped out from behind the door." X_X Well, they did say they'd keep me company.

"I think that's enough fraternising, Souji." Wait a second...

"I figured if I left the two of you alone, it would be longer before I saw either of you," ... Why does that sound slightly risqué? -_- I feel like this scene changes slightly depending on your affection levels...

-_- The only reason Heisuke is short is because Nagakura's stunted his growth by constantly stealing his food.

"How are we to deal with accepting such insanity?" MOOD.

Wait, does Okita subsist entirely on sake?! O_O

"Try not to worry about eating too much or being a freeloader or something. Just eat your little heart out, okay?" Surprisingly wholesome content from Okita :')

Takeda! <3 My douchey doppelganger!

"your adorable page" -_- Watch it, "big brother"

"I'm not having any of your insolence today." Hijikata temporarily transforming into a villainous English aristocrat.

And after aaaaallll that, I'm just going to stay behind to spend some quality time with Okita, probably X_X

"Huh!? Why? You're finally getting the chance to search for Kodo." GOOD POINT. However, gotta get that dick, amirite?

"Perhaps, I should have gone..." YUP. PROBABLY.

"Are you regretting it? If you are, then you should've just gone with them." TRUTH.

"He smiled wryly before continuing while touching my chin." WEEEEOOOOA WEEEEEOOOOA PHYSICAL CONTACT ALARM. WE HAVE INITIATED PHYSICAL CONTACT. IT WAS WORTH STAYING BEHIND AFTER ALL!

"You don't regret it at all? Not even if you knew that Hajime and I went out of our way to convince Hijikata?" Aw, y'all did that for me? Yeah, this is a terrible decision X_X Except for the part with the chin touching. I guess stalking you overrides all logic?

"I was surprised. Saito did make that promise" and what? You thought he was a liar? Girl.

"It was actually Hajime that convinced Hijikata." Not sure if Okita's being modest but this is making it reeeeally hard for me to stop myself fangirling over Saito. Again.

"When I see Saito later, I need to apologise and give my thanks to him." YOU BETTER. >:(

Did he just call me useless (in a battle)? XD I mean, he's not wrong... As we will no doubt soon find out...

Wait, wait... He just said that if I'm in danger, I will become a nuisance and he'll FRICKIN' STAB ME. WHAT?! DOESN'T THAT MAKE YOU THE GREATEST DANGER, OKITA!??

Chapter 2:

Did we ever apologise to Saito? X_X

"Please allow me to continue looking for my father!" Where was this enthusiasm earlier -_-

"If you want that risk, feel free to join us." Ooooooh, scary.

"Remember that you're here to keep me company" Um, excuse me!?

Burn down the city and kidnap the Emperor while everyone else is "losing their shit." This seems like the plan of crazy people o_O

"Would you care to join us." Kondou's making this raid sound like a dinner party X_X

Chizuru getting distracted by the more "elegant" night uniforms while preparing for the raid is a Big Mood.

Am I going crazy or does this game normally give me more choices here? Am I being paranoid or is it now shipping me with Okita? Can't I normally choose to go with Hijikata or stay behind?

"Giving the enemy a good, loud warning that he's about to kick the tar out of them. That's Kondou for you..." Okita kind of has a point X_X

"They sauntered towards the inn" Quite the image.

Oh shit! Okita's fighting Kazama O_O

"Okita was battling a ronin." Damn, you're lucky that Kazama can't read minds X_X

"Thanks for the dance, chump." -_- Kazama's such a dick.

"You're our enemy, so you've gotta die." Okita's philosophy is simple and elegant.

"His sword moved in large, crude arcs, while Okita fought with skill and finesse." Wow, SUPER glad that Kazama can't read minds O_O

EXECUTE PLAN: HURL BOWL AT KAZAMA.

IT'S SUPER EFFECTIVE: OKITA SENPAI NOTICED ME.

Wait... WHAT WAS THAT "WET CRUNCH" WHEN KAZAMA KICKED OKITA'S CHEST!??!? O_O IS THIS HOW HE GETS TB?!? O_O

"Wet, tearing coughs." OH FUCK O_O

"I like watching children squirm." WTF, Kazama. BEGONE, THOT.

:'O Injured Okita is trying to put himself between me and that crazy bitch <3

Oh damn, he is coughing e blood :'O

"What a fool" UUUURRRRGGGGH KAZAMA IS THE WORST. SOME PEOPLE CARE ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE, KAZAMA. AND SOME PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO PUT THEMSELVES IN DANGER BECAUSE THEY CARE ABOUT MORE THAN THEIR OWN SELFISH NEEDS.

"I... I can still fight..." NO.

"You always said you'd kill me if I got in your way..." OOOOOOOOOOOH! HERE WE GO! THE FAÇADE BEGINS TO SHOW CRACKS *munches popcorn*

Iba... y u no mention our shared childhood?

ISHIDA POWDERED MEDICINE.

Nagakura says that it's delicious... I wonder if it tastes like cough medicine. Cough medicine is delicious. And addictive...

"I would never have thought that Toudou or Okita would return from a fight injured..." Why, Inoue? Are skilled and strong warriors invincible?

"The injured are a burden, so we shall remain here and guard the compound like obedient soldiers." O_O Ouch, Sanan!

Wait, I don't get a choice to go with them?! I KNEW IT. THIS GAME KNOOOOOWS! I'm too far down the Okita path to turn back now, I guess.

"Um... " Chizuru is me trying to make small talk.

Weird isn't necessarily a bad thing, Chizuru! Take it as a compliment!

I feel bad for not realising how badly injured he got during the raid during my other playthroughs X_X

I thought that I'd somehow missed the scene with the children because this playthrough's taking so long because I'm making so many fricking notes X_X Turns out, I have a lot more to say when you actually get to spend time with the chosen boi.

"Oh, don't worry. I didn't kidnap them or anything." ... GOOD!????

"I was bored" Hey, I get lonesome too! Why can't you come play with me? D:

"They take care of me." Pretty cute. :3

"You wanna come play with us?" Duh!

"No" GURL

He really does look like a happy cat when he smiles!

Wow, these children have a lot of attitude.

"It's a place for men to do, um, work." Yes, just normal human work. Nothing funny going on here.

"They're catching bad guys and keeping Kyoto safe" "No, they're not. They're just killing people." These kids are SAVAGE :')

"Can't deny that" ... Way to back me up, Souji...

"I probably hear him talk about death everyday." Wait, really? What exactly does he have to say about death?

"The Shinsengumi are a bunch a weirdos." :') And that makes them extremely lovable!

Last time, I tried defending the Shinsengumi and Okita ended up terrorising a child so LET'S PICK THE OTHER OPTION AND SEE IF THERE'S LESS CRAZY...

"Don't tell me you're taking this seriously?" CHILDREN ARE THE FUTURE, OKITA!

"They all look like bad guys." Why? Because they're hot?

"I didn't know what I was supposed to do..." Uh, maybe tell this childries not to judge a book by its cover? Idk, maybe try and suggest that the world is not so black and white? Definitely don't mention the bloodlust.

"Grinning like an idiot." You're just jealous of his happiness, you cynical-ass child

"He's a wuss." UM, pretty sure he's the most powerful member of the Shinsengumi so stfu :P

"He grabbed the child" Oh dear... Here we go...

Okita! Use your words to teach the children a lesson! Not whatever this fucked up shit is X_X

Ah, ruling with fear! :') When has that ever backfired?

"I'll tell them I'm sorry. Then I'll tell them how awesome Kondou is." GUD. >:(

Uuuuugh, I'm so so tired and I've written so much CRAP so I will SLEEP and play the next bit tomorrow! :D

[woossexyponytail]

The Nature of the Beast (Part 26)

Masterlist

As the group made their way to Yonsei University they split up in two groups Jin, tae and hobi said they'll ask around campus while Namjoon, Yoongi, y/n, jungkook and jimin went to talk to the roommate

Jin, Taehyung and hobi stood on the football field talking to the head cheerleader on the campus

"I hope she's dead in a ditch." The cheerleader said crossing her arms

"Wow. That's extreme." Hobi frownd at the girl

"Yeah, well, you know what? That's the only excuse I'll take. I mean, I can't believe Lilly would just take off without Katie! Arms up! And then right before the big game, too?" She yelled getting heated

"So, Lilly, your mascot, just left school?" Jin asked

"Yeah Sure. Happens all the time." The girl shrugged

"Just like every other college, one in five students just disappear and transfer out in the middle of the night." Another girl said walking up to the group

"The usual." The head cheerleader nodded

"Actually, super unusual." Jin said as hobi and Taehyung shared a look

"I still don't get why Lilly left, though. Oh! Maybe she found where the volleyball team ended up after that away game." The new girl said turning to them

"All we found was a bus full of empty clothes."

"Great prank, huh?" The girls smirked high fiving each other

"And, you know, we didn't even have, like, a weird wart outbreak this year. You know, those warts that give you screaming nightmares?" The girl said

"Also not a thing." Jin said

"Okay, and now the cheer!" The head cheerleader said running over to the group of girls

"Five, six, seven, eight! Appareat! Diabolus Ignis!"

"What?!" Jin asked shocked

"Appareat!"

"I'm sorry. W-What are you cheering?" Jin asked interrupting them

"That's our school motto. We've been cheering it forever." The cheerleader said smiling at him

"Yeong-ho was right Yonsei equals weird." Jin said to tae and hobi

"Appareat! Diabolus! Ignis!"

"Do we even want to know what they're cheering?" Hobi asked

"No. You do not." Jin said shaking his head.

Namjoon, Yoongi, Jungkook, Jimin and y/n spoke to Katie the missing girl roommate at her dorm

"Have any idea where Lilly was heading that night?" Namjoon asked the girl

"With the big game this weekend, Lilly was making the party rounds. Fraternities hires her to be the mascot at their party, pump up the crowd. The night she disappeared, she was supposed to go to Omega Theta. Man, does that house have a weird history." Katie said

"By 'weird history,' you mean they throw parties without beer?" Yoongi asked

"No. Like, you need an invite to get into the house on paper. And there's all these rumors about rituals in the basement animal sacrifices and stuff. Lilly heard all this from Professor Bancroft in her architecture class." The girl said

"Professor Bancroft? Professor Amia Bancroft teaches here? Are you kidding me?" Namjoon asked

"Professor Bancroft is the authority on Colonial American architecture, man. You are so lucky! I-I-I would I would have killed to have taken classes from from from And you you don't even care." Namjoon said looking at Yoongi, Jungkook, Jimin and y/n

"Nobody does. But I would love to know where this Omega Theta house is." Y/n asked

"My experiences with frat houses are limited, but I don't think evil rituals are supposed to sound like a kegger." Namjoon whispered to the group

"I wouldn't be so sure." Jimin asked looking at the invite on the table

"What is that? Was someone roasting marshmallows?" Yoongi asked looking up at the celin

"Nothing! Urm I mean I dunno hasn't been there before?" Katie said panic in her eyes

"It's definitely a burn mark." Jungkook said looking up also

"It's more than a burn. It's a glyph." Y/n said now looking at Katie narrowing her eyes at the so called innocent girl

"Sorry, what?" Jimin asked

"17th century. It's a Puritan symbol." She said keeping her eyes on katie who found her shoes quite interesting at that moment

"What does it mean?" Namjoon asked

"Devil."        

The group meet up in the court yard making a plain.

"We got to find the origin of this house. All right, I bet you anything Professor Bancroft would have something to say about these symbols." Namjoon said

"Okay, so, divide and conquer?  Taehyung, jimin, check out the house. Namjoon and hobi go talk to the professor. Yoongi and I will see what Yeong-ho has to say about any of this, y/n and Jungkook stay with the roommate you mentioned her hiding something, find out what"

"Admit it You just don't want to go to a frat party." Taehyung said pointing at Jin

"I really don't. Come on, yoongi." Jin said walking away and the group slip up.

As jungkook and y/n made their way back to the dorm to find katie, jungkook grabbed y/n arm stopping them as he looked off staring at someone

"Hey whats wrong?" Y/n asked looking at jungkook as he stood frozen "Jungkook? seriously whats wrong?"

"We gotta go now" he said pulling her along the campus as quickly as possible

"Jungkook?"

A voice they both recognize as jungkook cursed under his breath and y/n squeezed her eyes shut hoping that voice was in her head

"Hey Seohyun what are you doing here?" Jungkook asked gripping y/n's hand tightly

Seohyun to their surprise was standing right in front of them with non other then katie standing next to her, the girls eyes wide with shock looking at the two who where asking about h roommate 

"I go to school here now, what are you and ...THAT doing here?" Seohyun said with disgust in her voice as she looked y/n up and down judging her with her eyes

Jungkook pulled y/n behind him as he growled at Seohyun as y/n rubbed his back trying to calm him down

"Our business is to do with her NOT you" y/n said walking in front of jungkook but still keeping a hand on him

Katie flinched with the glare she was receiving from y/n as her body shrunk down feeling small, Seohyun stepped forward to y/n getting closer to her face narrowing her eyes at her as jungkook growls got louder

"Don't you fucking speak to her like that you slut" Seohyun yelled

"DON'T YOU DARE SPEAK TO MY GIRLFRIEND LIKE THAT YOU PATHETIC PIECE OF SHIT" jungkook yelled with more fury then anyone has seen from him

Y/n rubbed his arm once again calming him down while Seohyun stepped back eyes wide and terrified of jungkooks anger

"We still have questions for you katie about your sister can you please talk to us?" Y/n asked distracting attention from the two wolfs

Katie nodded her head as she looked back between Seohyun and jungkook

"That won't be necessary" a man came up from behind the two girls katie looked at him terrified as she started trembling in fear but before y/n and jungkook could register what was going on jungkook was knocked out and y/n had a bag placed over her head

"Thank you for the information about this witch Katie" the man said

As the man left with y/n now unconscious and being dragged by another man Seohyun stood shocked frozen by what happened.

Jin and Yoongi stood next to each other while Yeong-ho  walked around with a book in his hand reading it

"So that thing you found meant devil?" Yeong-ho asked the two wolf as he stopped and looked back at them

"That's what y/n said" Yoongi shrugged his shoulders looking bored as Yeong-ho nodded going back to the book

"Hmm, when I was talking to the cheerleaders they yelled out their motto Appareat, Diabolus, Ignis" jin said looking up at Yeong-ho as he stopped again brows raised in shock

"What the hell does that mean?" Yoongi asked looking back and forth between them confusion showing on his face

"Fire appear Devil" Yeong-ho said closing the book and putting on the table while rubbing his head

"Your shitting me, so now we have to deal with the devil" Yoongi said sighing slumping to the floor

"Sadly not Mr Min, Though many evil creatures throughout time have taken the name 'devil.' You know, kind of a shorthand, right? But make no mistake very powerful foe." Yeong-ho told the two boys

"Well, what do they want?" Jin asked

"Souls, hence the whole devil thing. They feed on souls." Yeong-ho answered

"Well, is it like does it take human form? Or is it like a weird-ass monster or what?" Yoongi asked

"Mr. Min, the thing to remember about devils is that they will never appear in a red cape and horns. They will come dressed as everything you ever wished for." Yeong-ho answered

"So we should look for?" Jin asked

"Could be anything, anyone. Though I have to admit I do not believe that demons are involved with this.." Yeong-ho said rubbing his chin

"Meaning?"

"I've been looking through all the people who have gone missing and there is a Patten"

"What's the Patten?" Yoongi asked

"Their all young witches"

"So whatever it is, it's only taking witches?" Jin asked

"Yes and no. You see I have a theory, years back potential young powerful witches would be sacrificed for their power, if they die on sacred ground their blood would flow through the earth granting more power to that coven" Yeong-ho explained

"So what a coven of evil witches are kidnapping their own people and killing them for more power?" Yoongi asked getting up from the floor

"Like I said theory, I truly hope not, that would be barbaric and not to mention highly illegal. Theory or not witches are being targeted and we know a very powerful young witch on campus right now who could be in danger" Yeong-ho said now thinking

"Y/n!!"

"Okay, so, the roommate said that we needed an invitation to get in right, so what do you want to do?" Taehyung asked Jimin as they walked up to the frat house

"Do you want to sneak in the back door or Ooh, ooh, ooh! We could pretend that we're delivering pizzas!" Tae rambled on

"Or the invitation I stole off the mascot's desk. She wasn't using it." Jimin said holding the invite  

"I really should lecture you on the morality of stealing from a missing person, but I know that I would do the same" taehyung said smiling as he knocked the door

The door opened as a guy came walking out "Hm. Invitations?" He asked

Jimin showed the invitation

"Ooh. Invitations are non-transferrable, bro. I got to keep out the riffraff." The guy said looking at it seeing it wasn't the right date

"Riffraff?! Riffraff?! Riffraff? Mate? I'll have you know I'm With-" jimin got interrupted by a girl walking up to the door

"me! Hey, Justin." The girl said smiling at the guy at the door

"Oh! Hey, Lucy. Uh, really? They're with you? Sure! Come on, guys." Justin said letting them in as the girl walked off leaving the two looking around

"Ah!" Taehyung jumped looking at the gargoyle that appeared out of nowhere jimin walked up to him not noticing the gargoyle

"Spoke to one of the brothers. Said they hired a mascot, but she never showed. And then he asked me about getting his deposit back." Jimin told taehyung

"That's cold." Taehyung said still looking at the gargoyle

"Yeah. I thought so, too, so I stole his watch." Jimin said holding up the watch

"Okay, well, did you happen to find any evidence of a missing mascot?" Taehyung asked

"Well, I haven't checked upstairs. Gonna guess that these rich frat brothers keep their electronics out in the open." Jimin said

"Wait why do they have a gargoyle in the house? isn’t it an outside thing?" Jimin asked now noticing the gargoyle

"Uh dunno?" Taehyung shrugged

"Weren't there rumors of rituals in the basement?" Taehyung asked turning around to jimin

"You're -" jimins phone rang as he picked up the phone and answered

"Hey yoongi-" jimin paused listening to yoongi on the phone as Taehyung strained his ears to hear but couldn't

"Right we're on our way" jimin said grabbing Taehyung arm running out the house.

Namjoon and hobi entered the classroom that professor Bancroft was teaching

"All right, there he is" hobi said pointing at the professor at the front of the classroom

"Okay, now, listen. Professor Bancroft's analysis is radically aggressive. Okay, he's he's a brutal academic." Namjoon warned to hobi

"Ooh! Then I'll be on my guard." Hobi said nodding sarcastically

"Yes. Uh, excuse me, sir. Professor Bancroft?" Namjoon calls walking down the stairs to the front of the room

"Yes." The professor said turning around to the two boys walking up to him

"Uh, yeah Uh, we uh Can I just start by saying what a huge fan I am?" Namjoon said smiling at him

"Hmm? Seriously." Hobi whispered rolling his eyes at namjoon reaction

"Your analysis on how the American residential dwellings changed during the 18th century just I mean, mind-blowing." Namjoon said

"That was so long ago, I'm surprised you found it." The professor said surprised

"Well, I, uh, actually wrote a small critique off of it. Uh, Kim Namjoon" he said looking down at the floor bashful

"That's you?" He asked while Namjoon nodded  

"I believe I read it. Yeah, that was a delightful little spin on my groundbreaking work. Thank you." He said smiling at Namjoon

"I-I-I-I was I was just, you know I went off of what you were doing, so it was very We hear you've been lecturing on the architecture here on the campus." Namjoon asked

"I have"

"we we were gonna we were wondering about the Omega Theta house and the occult history." Namjoon asked

"Ohh. You're one of those." The professor said rolling his eyes

"One of who?“ Hobi asked raising an eyebrow

"One of those people who believe all the nonsense about Yonsei. Listen, I hate to burst your bubble of delusion, but magic does not exist. It doesn't exist in architecture, it certainly does not exist here. There is no such thing as magic." The professor said walking off leaving them standing there shocked

"Well that went well" Hobi said glaring at the door

"I I can't believe he he just" Namjoon was shocked at what happened

As the two stood in silence Namjoon phone rang

"Hey jin whats up?" Namjoon asked still upset over what happened

"What!?, yeah we'll meet you now" Namjoon said hanging up

"What happened?" Hobi asked

"Jungkook and y/n aren't picking up, jin thinks something happened to them" Namjoon said as they ran off.

[queenofthecommunistcannibals]

@yikes-trademarked

i mean yeah, the post has nothing to do with it just comes across as a bit of a slap in the face to people who are genuinely oppressed in a modern day society. how are asexuals ‘neglected’ and ‘isolated’? so most people experience sexual attraction and you don’t, whoop de doo. nobody actually cares if you do or don’t experience sexual attraction. if you could please give me an actual, real life, not someone-calling-you-a-plant-online example of asexual discrimination then i’ll take back my words

___

@yikes-trademarked I super love how instead of apologizing you are doubling down. Okay. I'll give you examples. Here are some general prejudices that affect aro and ace people. They aren't in any real order.

•Until the DSM V asexuality was considered a mental illness. Despite the fact that now we are "allowed" to "identify" as asexual HSDD (Hypoactive sexual desire disorder) is STILL considered a disorder. So instead of trying to help a person accept themselves as asexual allosexual (nonace) doctors will try to "fix" someone if they want to. Asexuality is still seen as something to be cured. It is still a dysfunction in their eyes, they just hide their prejudice a little better.

•Asexuals have been harrassed and raped in an attempt to fix them. Asexuals and aromantics are often seen as a "challenge" to be harassed into affection.

•Mainstream Christianity discriminates against asexuals as they do other queer identities. Here is one quote from a document called "Asexuality and Christianity" produced for Asexual Awareness Week (the fact that we get "awareness" rather than "pride" ain't great either)

"While celibacy is officially considered a good stance in religion, declaring oneself disinterested in sex is often met with disapproval. Asexuals have been told that they are rejecting God's gift of sexuality, that they are just as bad as homosexuals because they are not 'normal'...or people decide to pray to God for them to be fixed or for the Almighty to send the right person for them to fall in love with."

Or from the horse's mouth "Question: What do you call a person who is asexual? Answer: Not a person. Asexual people do not exist. Sexuality is a gift from God and thus a fundamental part of our human identity. Those who repress their sexuality are not living as God created them to be: fully alive and well." This was written by two Jesuit priests David Nantais and Scott Opperman. In other religions this is also often true. I know more about Christianity personally but I know similar doctrines exist in Islam and Orthodox Judaism. Not to mention the notion that marriage is the only acceptable option in these religions (unless you are Catholic clergy) and children are a necessity. Hell, according to the conservative traditional gender roles of these religions even an otherwise gender conforming aro/ace doesn't fit (not marrying, no kids, no family, all that).

•Dehumanization from all sides. We are told to be human is to love and that love is nearly always put in romantic or sexual context. Indeed NOT being capable of or experiencing romantic or sexual love is often used as shorthand for someone being a bad person (As Dexter [from Dexter], for example, becomes more sympathetic he develops the ability to feel sexual/romantic love. Robots in fiction can be asexual and aromantic but only if you want to show them as apart from humanity. Once you want to make it clear they have a soul they have to experience some kind of romantic urge or longing. Like Data from Star Trek) An article in Psychology Today by Dr. Gordon Hodson Ph.D. (who specializes in studying dehumanization) postulates (with a study to back it up) that asexuals are the most dehumanized sexual minority.

•On the specifically romantic asexual front in many places do not consider a marriage valid until it has been consumated.

•In media in which asexuality and aromanticism are not proof of evil they are judged to be not real. Here is one of if not our first actual representation in media. In the film Nymphomaniac the SELF-PROCLAIMED asexual character turns out to be a rapist who the protagonist murders in what is supposed to be a "woo! You go girl!" moment. AT BEST this says asexuals aren't real. We're just sexually repressed misanthropes. It might also imply that asexuals are base animals who are waiting to strike. THAT IS ONE OF THE FEW TIMES THE WORD ASEXUAL IS EVEN USED IN MAINSTREAM FILM! I cannot think of a single other.

•We are erased constantly in real life and in media. Here are two examples of active erasure, Jughead Jones (canonly aro/ace in the comics and coded as such since day one) was straight-washed for Riverdale. You may say "oh maybe they didn't know" (which is bullshit) then consider example two: Sherlock Holmes. Holmes (who I adore) has long been one of the few characters that has been "allowed" to aro/aces, but when the creators of BBC's Sherlock were explicitly asked if he was aro/ace they said he absolutely wasn't.

This is part of what I am talking about. We are not allowed to exist. We are invisible.

•Asexuals and aromantics are somehow toxic in our mere existence. We make kids think it is okay to be like us and are poisoning their young minds. We hate sex and thus are against the sex positivity movement.

•"Virgin" is an insult and we are treated as constant children. Somehow we have failed to grow up and cannot be treated as adults.

•And here is what I was really talking about SOCIETY IS NOT MADE FOR US! CULTURE IS NOT CONDUSIVE TO OUR EXISTENCES! I didn't know asexuality was an option until I was about 24. And before that I, like many aro/ace people, put myself in a lot of situations and relationships to "fix" myself. To make myself normal. My first and only sexual encounter was one of the things that sent me spiralling into a serious depression. I didn't know that it was okay to not be interested and to say "no.". So I said "okay" because I thought it was what I had to do to be a normal teenager. I don't know if I ever shared that online before so congrats you got me so mad I revisited my personal trauma. From childhood we are told falling in love is the ultimate reward. As teens we are told we gotta get laaaaaid. As adults not being involved in a sexual/romantic (often indistinguishable) relationship is WEIRD and TROUBLING. I have been told by people who don't know I am asexual that asexual people are "too weird" or even "creepy." The idea that someone might not be capable of romantic love sets off people's red flags that said aromantic might be crazy.

•We are surrounded by sex and romance constantly. Constantly. It is inescapable. In your real life I want you to pay attention to romantic or sexual imagry and storylines around you. There is no break. No alternative. This is what I mean by "invisible at best."

•Also, we are denied a history. It is very hard to prove absence but often sexless figures are immediately dubbed to be gay/lesbian because of their lack of interest in "appropriate" gender. Forgetting entirely that asexuality and aromanticism are options. Then when the question is raised they maybe a figure WAS aro and/or ace we are told that we are """"stealing"""" history. There is like one person in history we are allowed: Nikola Tesla. I love him very much, but he also fits the bill as a weirdo asexual. Because anyone who was the least bit acceptable to society must be allosexual. An example in reverse, Queen Elizabeth I, Britain's most beloved monarch, who never married, never was romantically or sexually involved with anyone (aside from being assaulted as a teenager), and was in her era very famously THE VIRGIN QUEEN who used her virginity as part of her persona to great affect. She is not considered asexual or aromantic and never has been. I have seen a biographer bend over backwards to get away from that accusation including using an incident where an elderly Elizabeth flashed a dignitary to make him uncomfortable as proof that she was allo. We can't have this awesome historical figure be one of those creeps right?!

•i am not even going into the history of how "sexlessness" was historically treated, especially in women. Let me just say that "spinsterism" was considered a danger to children and young women.

•NOTICE I WENT THIS WHOLE POST WITHOUT MENTIONING ASSHOLES WHO USE THE DISK HORSE AND BAR US FROM QUEER CIRCLES EVEN THOUGH SOME STUDIES FIND ASEXUALS HAVE LOWER SELF ESTEEM THAN ANY OTHER QUEER GROUP AND WOULD REALLY BENEFIT FROM A COMMUNITY!! THIS POST IS ENTIRELY EXAMPLES OF NON ONLINE PEOPLE BECAUSE SOMEHOW YOUR CONSTANT ABUSE OR REFUSAL TO RECOGNIZE ABUSE IS A-OKAY BECAUSE IT IS PART OF "THE DEBATE" BECAUSE SOMEHOW OUR EXISTENCE IS ACCEPTABLE DEBATE!

These are just some examples. People are free to add more but I am tired. If you want links I will dig them up.

Sincerely,

Fuck you.

I apologize for the "fuck you" but the exclusionist attitude is so disheartening. It is bad for not only aros and aces but also the queer community in general. We should be in this together! Fighting for one another side by side! We should be there for each other for hardships and for celebrations. I think it is vital that exclusionists really examine what and who they are actually fighting against.

[innuendostudios]

After four months of work, my video essay Bringing Back What’s Stolen: Fury Road and the Avenging Feminine is online. A nearly hour-long dive into the cinematic language of feminine violence in action and horror films. You can also watch this playlist of all 8 parts if you don’t want to click through manually. I will share a supercut of the whole thing as soon as I deal with a copyright block.

This was a crapload of work so, please, if you want more like it, consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Mad Max Fury Road has three principal characters: Imperator Furiosa, Immortan Joe, Max Rockatansky; protagonist, antagonist, deuteragonist (it’s a word).

Each character is introduced from behind, as a body first and then, later, as a person.

We meet Max at a remove, practically a silhouette. Wrapped in cloth and buried in wild hair, it takes several moments before we glimpse human skin. Almost immediately, he’s disappearing into his V8 Interceptor, and it’s not until his pursuers roll his car that we get a shot of his face, covered in sand and a matted beard.

Max is a person who has abandoned all markers of his humanity to live alone in the desert. His obscured face makes it easier to relate to him as a feral animal than as a man, and that’s the life he’s chosen; living like an animal insulates him from danger and buries his guilt and trauma. Throughout the first chunk of the film, Max’s face is remains obscured, first by the beard, then a gag, then a muzzle. We get only one unobstructed shot of his face, and it’s framed by the bars of a cage. The protections he built around himself, the war boys have stripped him of, and replaced with chains; humanity is no longer something forsaken, it's something denied.

It’s not until 45 minutes into the movie, having escaped Joe and formed a tenuous alliance with Furiosa and the wives, that he starts to look to the audience like a recognizable human.

We meet Furiosa in the opposite fashion. Where Max was a wide shot of a silhouette that is all cloth and hair, Furiosa is an extreme close-up of brightly-lit human skin. She carries Joe’s brand, and she has her hair cut short, which implies everything we just saw Max go through, she has gone through as well. They’re both prisoners. [“I was taken… stolen.”]

Where Max is invisible inside his car, we follow Furiosa inside the war rig. Max is like a hermit crab receding into its shell only to have it pried off, where Furiosa has complete mastery of her vehicle (it even has her missing arm drawn on the driver’s side door, as though the war rig were an extension of her body). Clear windows, her face unobstructed, the greasepaint on her forehead making her eyes - the windows to the soul - pop, making her expression more readable.

Everything Max takes the first act to become, she is from her first scene. The time between her introduction and getting a good look at her face is just over two minutes.

Joe’s introduction is the sick inversion of the others’, closer and fleshier than Furiosa’s yet more alien than Max’s. Where Furiosa’s skin humanizes her, Joe’s tumorous body does the reverse. Where Max has his layers of protection stripped from him, Joe is kitted up with armor and finery. Where Max struggles to make his face visible and Furiosa’s expressions are accentuated, the distance between Joe’s introduction and seeing his face uncovered is the entire movie; we only see Joe unmasked when half his face has been torn off. And three minutes later the credits are rolling.

What makes these characters accessible has been distorted to make Joe a grotesque. (I don’t have room to get into the troubling ways Fury Road uses atypical bodies as a shorthand for inhumanity, so I’ve written a small, additional essay, link in the down there part, or at the end.)

So here we have it, from the opening shots: protagonist, antagonist, deuteragonist; human, inhuman, half-human.

The things I’m describing are filmic techniques for creating or denying audience empathy. Humans relate to other humans, and filmmakers employ dozens of tricks to portray inhumans as human and thereby relatable, and portray humans as inhuman to make the otherwise. By this rubric, empathy with Max is built, empathy with Joe is denied, and empathy with Furiosa is simply expected.

The female action star being the one for whom empathy is most freely given is by no means unprecedented, but it’s not the norm. In the tradition of Blow Shit Up movies, the “relatable action heroine” is often approximated, approached asymptotically, but rarely depicted. Some don’t seem to believe she exists. Yet, here she is.

Furiosa is our white whale.

If, in a rom-com, the Thing What Solves Your Problem is love, in an action movie, The Thing What Solves Your Problem is violence. Something is wrong with the world, and the plot is structured around amassing the strength, tactics, or allies necessary to smash your problem until it goes away. That’s how things get fixed. And the idea of punching the world back into shape is deeply tied up in our notions of manliness.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of archetypal action protagonists, from the Everyman Against the World to the Hulking Brute to the Dapper G-man to the Stoic Killing Machine, and, while occasionally cast with women, they are all, by default, men. There’s maybe no other genre more deeply associated with masculinity.

The longstanding assumption is that women complicate violent movies the way we used to say they complicate sea voyages. The movies are manly, the audience is male, and a male audience will not identify with a female character as a matter of course. This assumption goes into the writing, the casting, the filming, the editing, and the marketing. Demographics do bear out that violent movie audiences are, primarily, men, but this assumption existed before we tracked demographics. So, then: if we’ve been making the movies for men, and marketing them to men, should we really be surprised if it’s mostly men who end up seeing them?

For a variety of reasons, action filmmakers can’t just make movies without women in them: a) there are still at least a few women in the audience, and their money spends just as well as a man’s, so best not to completely alienate them, b) they’d rather not get yelled at too much by feminists, c) sleeping with beautiful women is part of the power fantasy a lot of male action heroes are supposed to cater to, and d) absent any women, the fixation with the male physique might read as just a wee bit gay, and we can’t have that, apparently.

So if women in action movies are unavoidable, perhaps the audience’s sympathies, if not freely given, can be earned. For this purpose, action filmmakers have invented a handful of female archetypes.

Between these six women, we can chart the cinematic language of feminine violence as it is most commonly codified. I’ll stress that they are not the sum total of womanly presence in violent movies, but, if you’re a fan of violent film, you’ve probably been in a room with them dozens of times and never been formally introduced.

Each has something to teach us about how men are expected to relate to a woman in a violent context. Let us discuss each in her own turn, and, with each, how Fury Road’s avoidance, subversion, or rejection of these expectations are key to what the film is about.

Let’s get y’all acquainted.

The Innocent: Helplessness

There is a beat common in action movies called The Kick The Dog Moment. Kicking a dog is how screenwriters signal to the audience just how bad the bad guy is, because only a monster would harm something so precious, so loyal, so helpless as a dog.

An even more common beat for exposing a villain’s evil nature is the Strike The Woman Moment, or the Grope The Woman Moment, or the Shoot The Woman Moment.

This is the role of The Innocent: precious, loyal, helpless, and serving the same narrative function as a puppy. Her proximity to violence spurs the plot forward, and reveals things about violent men, but the story’s never really about her. It’s about the men. She’s there to get threatened by men, to get kidnapped by men, to get killed by men. Also, she’s there to get rescued by men, or, failing that, to be avenged by men. The Kick The Dog Moment isn’t about the dog, it’s about the villain. The dog is a device.

The Innocent is not wholly incapable of enacting violence herself. She will, on occasion, fight back against her captors, which serves to communicate to the audience that she’s feisty; but it rarely accomplishes anything. Occasionally, during the falling action, she is granted an act of symbolic violence, sometimes even landing the final blow on the villain, but this is only after the dramatic tension surrounding the villain has resolved.

The Innocent is an onlooker to violence, she is often the site of violence, and though she is sometimes allowed to perform violence in an honorary capacity, she’s not a full participant. She is a symbol of what is good and worth protecting, and what is good is innately peaceful. Violence is a burden that violence is used to spare her from. It is the solemn duty of men. She can only enter this domain as a victim.

She is, by far, the most common female action movie archetype. There’s even a variant I call The False Innocent - the woman who plays off people’s assumption that women are powerless in order to kick their asses. You know, what if that 90-pound, doe-eyed waif being threatened by the big strong men is secretly the toughest person in the room? (Joss Whedon is, shall we say, fond of this one.) This serves as a direct rebuke to the assumptions baked into The Innocent, but it says something about how pervasive the archetype is that you can build an entire second archetype around everyone assuming all women are Innocents.

In Fury Road, as soon as our protagonist and deuteragonist meet, it is made clear that Furiosa can hold her own in a fight with only one arm. This scene serves the same function as the Thor-Iron Man-Captain America fight in The Avengers: “Hey, these folks are pretty evenly-matched. Wouldn’t it be cool if they were on the same side?” And Furiosa’s not the only woman who can fight: Later, we meet fearsome warrior tribe The Vuvalini.

So where we normally see a divide between violent men and passive women, here we have a split between multi-gendered warriors, and people who don’t fight - in this case, the wives.

And not being a warrior doesn’t ipso facto make the wives useless, unlike some damsels who, growing up, made you or possibly your older sister yell “DO SOMETHING WOMAN” at the TV. People who can’t throw a punch can still throw you a weapon, they can pull your enemies off you, they can keep ammo away from your enemy’s gun. They can reload a rifle, they can stop a bullet from being fired. They can make you a new ally. Even when people try to turn them into helpless prisoners, as happens to so many women in so many movies, they don’t have to submit; they can surrender and then help you board the enemy’s caravan, or, even taken captive and held at gunpoint, they can still help you take down the Big Bad.

In isolation, any one of these could be just another “feisty damsel” or “false innocent” moment, but, in their totality, they start to imply that the reason the wives aren’t fighters like Furiosa is the same reason they don’t drive the war rig: They don’t know how, because they’ve been kept in a safe. There is nothing innate about the difference between a warrior and a non-warrior, and certainly nothing gendered; just training.

If the usual framing is active, violent men protecting or possessing passive, innocent women, no one in this movie is passive. No one. Even if you aren’t shooting the gun yourself, there are still ways to contribute. You don’t have to sit around waiting to be rescued, there’s work to do.

It’s important to recognize that the wives are never rescued by anyone; not Max, not even Furiosa. [“they begged her to go” clip.] Violence may still be the way things get done in an action movie, but it’s not synonymous with agency. They set the plot in motion. This whole thing is their plan. It’s not a rescue, it’s an escape.

The Vasquez: Masculinity

Meet The Vasquez, the masculine woman, named after Janette Goldstein’s character in Aliens because all the other words I could think of carried the wrong connotations. (Also, Goldstein? Really?) The Vasquez is rough, she’s tough, she’s hard-drinking, she’s foul-mouthed, she’s gun-savvy, she’s sexually aggressive, and, most importantly, she’s one of the guys. If the most common coding is that men are violent and women are passive, and the action screenwriter assumes a male audience won’t like their female character because they can’t stand to think violence could ever be feminine, the obvious solution? Make the lady man up. If she resembles a man, she can be fashioned into any number of existing male archetypes, from military grunt to double agent to assassin.

Her closest male counterpoint is The Hardbody, a staple of the 80’s action milieu. In a hardbody movie, we either meet a man who’s a pillar of masculine strength, or we watch an ostensibly regular guy spend the movie becoming one. Similarly, The Vasquez is sometimes introduced fully-formed, but, more often than not, we watch her emerge from the body of a traditionally feminine woman. And where a Hardbody’s training montage shows what is soft becoming hard, The Vasquez shows what is feminine becoming masculine. [G.I. Jane clip on not menstruating.]

In either gender, we can call this process “ruggedization,” and it’s not only physical. As a character acclimates to violence, there is often a change in presentation. Most especially with a woman, ruggedization may not be the gaining of muscle but the shedding of feminine signifiers. Note how Ripley, over the course of three movies, goes from having all the hair to a lot of the hair to none of the hair, thereby resembling all the men in the movie, as she becomes more of an action heroine. Note how, as Thelma goes from neurotic housewife to a woman who robs liquor stores and holds up policemen, we see her go from frilly white dresses to denim to dirty sleeveless tops. Note the scene where Louise sits down at a truck stop, takes off every piece of jewelry she owns, and trades them for a man’s cowboy hat.

Also, in correlation with becoming violent, there tends to be, call it a shift in patterns of speech: [“suck my dick” montage].

The Vasquez maintains the association between powerlessness and womanness codified by The Innocent because, as the woman sheds her weakness, she also sheds her womanness; the two are treated as the same thing. Violence stays masculine; women get violent when they become honorary men.

Fury Road‘s trick is to take its plurality of female characters and scatter them across the entire gender spectrum. In terms of presentation, you’ve got the highly feminine wives, the traditionally masculine garb of the Vuvalini, and Furiosa somewhere in between. The film subverts the spectrum further by softly rejecting the notion that a person occupies any single position along it. Toast is very feminine and also knows her way around guns; the Vuvalini are a leather-wearing, pants-sporting biker gang, and also are The Many Mothers, who care about feminine-coded things like cooperation, empathy, gardening. Masculinity and femininity are not an either/or. Many traits exist, in varying proportions, in all people.

Traditional femininity is valorized in our male heroes as well. Traits like healing, softness, deference to superior skill, self-sacrifice, these things are treated as inherently valuable irrespective of one’s gender, and absolutely mission critical to their success in battle. Basically every time a man does something that Human Embodiment of Toxic Masculinity Joe would disallow, it helps them win. This goes a long way towards elevating femininity, but also breaking up the male-female dichotomy, allowing anyone to possess any trait from anywhere along the spectrum and still be strong.

The fact that Joe does treat gender as an either/or, that he does not foster community nor empathy with his followers, that he only maintains loyalty by imposing a Norse-inspired death cult that leads his war boys into reckless behavior and crumbles instantly if it’s ever challenged, these things are liabilities.

Men and women are at their strongest not at their most masculine - at their most like Joe - but when they are free to be as masculine and as feminine as the situation requires of them. What’s wrong with Joe isn’t masculinity - masculine signifiers abound on both sides of the fight - it’s a malignant masculinity that rejects all but the most extreme of one end of the spectrum. This narrowness is what gets Joe killed.

The Dominatrix: Sexuality

The sensual murderess, ass-kicking in catsuits, high heels, and chokers. The ostentatious fusion of the two greatest spectacles: Sex & Death, Pleasure & Pain, Eros & Thanatos. If you want to leave behind the idea that the only way to be violent is to be manly and you worry your straight male audience will revolt, consider writing someone every straight male is already familiar with.

Consider The Dominatrix.

(Note that I am using the term “dominatrix” a little loosely here. In real life, there is a distinction between highly sexualized violence and actual BDSM iconography. How do I know? Mind your own business.)

The Dominatrix is a violent - often hyperviolent - character who is still, unmistakably, a woman. I mean, say what you want about Bayonetta, she’s not mannish. Most men are at least passingly familiar with what a dominatrix is, so it’s not a far leap to refashion a woman’s bedroom violence into action movie violence. But she comes with some baggage.

The femininity she displays is specifically the subset of femininity most appealing to men. She’s not a nurturer, not a healer, not soft, and rarely cooperative. Her womanliness begins and ends with sexuality. And sexiness creates its own context. There may be loose justification for why she’s dressed the way she is: you know, she can’t wear armor like a normal person because she needs to leap around - gymnastics being another familiar image of female physical excellence, and an excuse to whiz the camera around her body. But much of the time we don’t even get that much. The movie holds no pretense: She’s dressed that way because the audience likes it.

The thinking here seems to be that if straight men consider violence the domain of men, and, therefore, a violent woman an affront to their masculinity, they’ll willingly take a blow to their male ego provided their heterosexual ego is, to speak indelicately, getting stroked. For what does a dominatrix do? Strike, dominate, and degrade, yes, but for their partner’s own pleasure. It’s, at least in part, a performance; there’s a reason your dalliance with a domme is called “a scene.”

The dominatrix-as-action-heroine turns violence into a kind of elaborate pole dance, inoffensive to a man because it’s for him, a woman trafficking in male signifiers made acceptable because she does it sexylike.

Of all the characters we’re talking about, The Dominatrix demands the least empathy of the male audience. An action movie offers a power fantasy; James Bond is supposed to be a character men want to be. Men don’t want to be Barb Wire. Men are supposed to look at Barb Wire, not walk a mile in her pumps. The Dominatrix is most commonly a villain or an antihero. Perhaps it should come as no surprise: Bad Girls aren’t Good Guys.

Now, this is a bit of a subjective statement, but Fury Road doesn’t sexualize its women.

Let me paint you a picture: A man lives for some indeterminate length of time at the very bottom of a rigid social hierarchy wherein only the man at the top has access to beautiful women. Prior to that he lived for years alone in the desert. We don’t know how long it’s been since he’s even spoken to a woman. After a thrilling escape, he, alone, happens upon the five women deemed by that society the most beautiful and fertile, the “prized breeders,” clad in white, cutting off their chastity belts, and spraying each other with a hose.

This is how Max meets the wives. Most Hollywood directors would shoot this scene like a wet t-shirt contest.

Man Of Social Caste That Would Never See A Beautiful Woman Naked Stumbles Upon One Or More Bathing Out Of Doors has been shot hundreds of times. This is every hot springs episode of every anime ever drawn. Movie peeping is the essence of the filmic experience, because a man watching a woman bathe is doing the same thing you are doing as an audience member: looking at naked people who can’t see you. The way you traditionally shoot this scene is to lean in to the voyeurism. If there’s going to be bathing and then a fight, why not sexy bathing and sexy fighting?

In Fury Road, Max lusts only for one thing. Water.

During this scene, Furiosa is fully-clothed, and look at how she’s framed. Now look at the shots favored for the wives: long shots and tight close-ups. As in: their breasts and hips are either filmed at a distance or cropped out of frame.

I don’t want to overstate things. That framing is not enforced, merely favored. And there’s no denying these women are, by conventional standards, beautiful - I mean, for fuck’s sake, Zoe Kravitz is in this movie. I’m not, like, kinkshaming you if you do find this scene erotic. But it seems to me that effort is being expended to downplay the obvious potential for eroticism. A chastity belt coming off could easily signal sexual availability. [Men in Tights clip] But this one has teeth. To I’m thinking, “I would want that off me, too.” I feel I am being asked to walk in the wives’ shoes.

If what you need to feel OK with a woman holding a gun is some hint that she’s doing it to turn you on, Fury Road won’t give you that. If you want to see women as sexy bodies before you consider seeing them as humans, Fury Road won’t give you that, either. That’s how Joe sees them, and they left that perspective behind before frame one, and make one thing clear in their very first line of dialogue: [“We’re not going back.”]

The Mama Bear: Motherhood

A common action movie character is the man who’s love interest is kidnapped and/or murdered, and he is spurred into violence so that he can rescue her and/or punish everyone responsible. Swap the man for a mother and the love interest for her child and you’ve got The Mama Bear, the woman who will stop at nothing to protect her cub, a la Jodie Foster in Panic Room or Jodie Foster in Flightplan, or, occasionally, the woman who avenges another member of her nuclear family, a la Jodie Foster in The Brave One. (Jodie’s got a thing that works for her.)

Believe it or not, most men, growing up, had moms, and it’s a cultural narrative that children feel safe under their mother’s protection. So The Mama Bear is a violent woman who is, once again, both feminine and familiar. She’s the ideal of what we’d want our mom to be if something bad happened to us.

By nature or circumstance, The Mama Bear is a single mother, either recently divorced, recently widowed, or possessing a husband who is simply someplace else. (And if he shows up he tends to get his ass handed to him.) Occasionally she’s just single, or even a surrogate whose motherly instinct kicks in upon contact with an orphan. In all these cases, she springs into action without a lot of assistance from men. You can read this as an independent woman who does not require men to help her, or you can read it as a woman who acts, not because she’s suited to the task, but because there are no men to do it for her. Most are a little bit of both.

But this is a strong character who’s not only allowed to be feminine, she is strong because she’s a woman. She has entered the domain of men with her femininity intact. This is not to say that motherhood and womanhood should be so closely tied in our cultural consciousness, simply to acknowledge that, at this moment in time, they are. Mothers are thought of as women whom we not only accept but demand strength from.

But, if she’s our idea of what a mother should be, then our point of identification isn’t necessarily her, but, at least in part, the moppets. Because what warm-blooded mammal can look at the quivering lips of children in danger and not root for anyone trying to save them? The Mama Bear, often enough, gets a kind of collateral empathy, the spillover of our concern for her kids.

She is, also, in contrast with The Dominatrix, almost completely without fail, sexless, another consequence of having dead or absent husbands. She doesn’t have sex, kiss, or even flirt, because, naturally, our ideal mother would never make us think about her banging anyone. That, the assumption seems to go, is the price for our respect.

Between one obvious pregnancy, the wives’ escape to “the green place of many mothers,” and the words they left scrawled in their cell, motherhood is a central theme in Fury Road. The symbology of motherhood is all over fiction written by men. You know the “women and children first” trope in disaster movies? That’s not just chivalry. It’s also men preserving the mechanisms by which they pass on their genes. [Up In The Air: “Because you can’t have babies.”]

Immortan Joe is kind of the ad absurdum of this thinking, having literally turned motherhood into a commodity-producing industry. Outside of Furiosa’s relative privilege and a few unnamed proles, the only women in Joe’s hierarchy are babymakers and dairy cows. The wives’ escape is, at least in part, about providing a better life for them and their children, where bodies and babies are not property.

What’s absent in all this is any actual children. Save for some nameless warboy youths at the beginning and end - some of whom, for all we know, may have been born to the wives - children are not party to the action. There are no wee ones with their eyes welling up to get you caring about their moms by proxy. The wives and the Vuvalini may all carry the title of “mother,” but it’s abstracted. What’s at issue isn’t children but the idea of motherhood, or, more accurately, the right to motherhood, celebrated on its own terms and for its own sake, not as a service to men. And, by focusing more on pregnancy than child-rearing, motherhood is not quite so divorced from sex.

Motherhood and strength coexist in the characters, but the one does not derive from the other. Motherhood is not correlated with fighting ability. The wives’ rebellion is about the rights of their babies no more than it’s about their own rights to not be things.

The Final Girl: Specialness

[“Do you like scary movies?”]

OK, this one… is a lot.

A gaggle of young folks - usually horny teens - is terrorized by a monster - usually a man in a mask - who represents a kind of pure, unwavering evil and kills with a bladed weapon. One by one, every character is picked off or incapacitated until there’s only one left, a young woman who, in spite of her terror, finds the strength to fight back, and, often enough kill the killer. If you’re not familiar with the slasher movies of the 70’s and 80’s, you might not even know, at first, who of the initial posse is supposed to be the protagonist, but if you’re a fan, you’ll recognize her instantly: Responsible, resourceful, and pure, she is The Final Girl.

The slasher is an interesting case, because, breaking with the traditions we’ve established,  it’s an entire genre where a presumably male audience isn’t expected to accept a violent woman, by the end of the film they are expected to be screaming for her to pick up the chainsaw and kill the fuck out of the bad guy.

Because The Final Girl is special, damn it.

What sets her apart? Well, a lot of it is to do with what The Final Girl symbolizes and how it contrasts with the symbology of the killer. Of all the characters, she is the most suited to survive and combat the villain, which is why she outlives her friends. We can start with the most obvious difference: [“She’s a virgin”].

Virginity means a lot of things in the movies. Purity: If the killer represents all we consider evil about the world, the antidote to that is someone who is, metaphorically, “unsullied.” Youth: If sex is considered a rite of passage into adulthood, then a virgin is, in some ways, still a child, and we’ve already discussed how relating to a child is considered a smaller ask than relating to an adult woman. Desirability: As a society, we haven’t fully escaped the puritanical narrative of “bringing a virgin to the altar,” at least not in our movie symbolism, and codifying a woman as “untainted goods” invites the male audience to, well, crush on her. There also tends to be this subtext of sexual violation to the murders, which lends the whole thing a Chaucerian concern for preserving a young woman’s maidenhead.

There are other ways The Final Girl, even if not explicitly a virgin, is virginal. She doesn’t drink, or, if she does, she’s a lightweight. She doesn’t smoke pot, or, if she does, she’s inexperienced. She doesn’t flirt, or, if she does, she’s comparatively demure. She’s also usually a bit brighter than her friends: The one who first senses something is wrong, the one who makes a plan of action, the one who figures out the killer’s identity. She may not be “one of the guys,” but she’s “not like other girls.”

This emerges slowly over the course of the film. The more characters die, the more The Final Girl appears to individuate from the rest. It is the ways in which they are not like her that get the other girls killed. They’re too dim, too horny, too oblivious. The empathy you build for The Final Girl - in part by having every other potential point of empathy systematically removed - you are not asked to extend to the other girls. You empathize with a woman, not with women. If she is special, they are unspecial. Their deaths are scary, but titillating. You’re not expected to root for them the way you root for her. You’re here to watch them die.

Then there’s the killer himself. In the early going, the camera is more closely aligned with him than any of his victims, often showing the murders literally through his eyes. It’s only as The Final Girl grows more active in the story - and, eventually, becomes violent - that we gradually come to see the killer from the victim’s perspective.

Each slasher villain is a snapshot of what society thought an image of evil incarnate would look like at that time. The things they have in common are telling.

The killer is almost always a man - Friday the 13th Part I notwithstanding - but is commonly, by societal standards, an insufficient man: Physically deformed (The Hills Have Eyes), gender-nonconforming (Psycho), or just really, really hating sex (Jason X). This is often blamed on being too close with his mommy. Meanwhile, The Final Girl’s disinterest in the activities of other women makes her a little tomboyish, and it’s really common for her to have a boy’s name: Stevie, Marti, Terry, Stretch, Ripley, Taylor, Sidney. Couple this with her tendency to kill the villain with his own intimate, penetrating weapon - and I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of phallic imagery in slasher movies because, frankly, I think most writers make too much of it, but it’s there - and you can read The Final Girl’s assault on the killer as becoming a better man than him.

We still haven’t escaped the fixation with violence and masculinity. This isn’t to say The Final Girl is another Vasquez - even if she is ruggedized, it’s not by forsaking femininity. Instead, the distinctions between masculinity and femininity are more permeable; the killer kills what is feminine, and then fails to kill what is, in some ways, less feminine than himself. And that failure leads to the reversal of who commits violence against whom.

Fury Road borrows a lot of imagery from horror films, most especially in imagining Joe as huge, misshapen, and masc’d. But Joe’s monstrosity is not a lack but an overabundance of masculinity, by no means the ideal male body but a body that idealizes maleness. If masculinity is a performance then he’s Kenneth fuckin’ Branagh. He hides his welts under fake abs, war medals, and - ahem - whiteness, and hangs a gear from a muscle car from highly symbolic places. [It’s drivin’ me nuts!] And he’s defeated not by appropriation of these signifiers but by rejection of everything they stand for.

But if the core of The Final Girl is a specialness that does not extend to other characters, can we talk about how not one person on Furiosa’s side of the battle is special? Not a one of them.

If we wanted to argue Furiosa is “not like other girls,” which other girls would we even be referring to? The femmes in white or the granny biker gang? The elderly matron, the full-bodied milk mothers, or the suffering proles? Furiosa has commonalities and differences with all of them. They all have commonalities and differences with each other. There is no “normal” from which to deviate. Even within a single type, there is variation: the wives alone have the leader, the nurturer, the weird one, the scared one, and the tough one (or: Gobo, Mokey, Wembley, Boober, and Red). No one is interchangeable.

At the same time, no one is special. The war rig is chock full of redundancies: Multiple people who can drive, multiple people who can shoot, multiple people who can fix what’s broken. Which is, again, necessary, because there’s too much to do not to have backup. [“I’m going to need you to drive the rig.”]

We don’t know a lot about Joe’s society, but we can infer it’s a caste system that stratifies everyone by specialness, here defined by their usefulness to Joe. At the bottom are possessions: wives, blood bags, and milk producers. Above them are the masses, and then the war boys, who believe they will be awaited in Valhalla if they perform their duties well. Next is Furiosa as a leader in Joe’s army, and then Joe’s immediate family, and, finally, Joe himself, singular and all-powerful. [“He grabs the sun.”]

Furiosa’s alliance counters this verticality with a lateral power structure - I mean, it’s literally the difference between a tower and a convoy - where specialness is not a prerequisite to rights, privilege, or empathy. A cooperative, where no one is fungible or disposable, and on one is special or elite. People form interdependencies with each other of their own free will, and may leave at any time if they wish. No one earns a place in society, or the empathy of the audience, by proving themselves unique. It is simply assumed that everyone is deserving of both.

Also, remember when I said this scene mostly kept the camera away from the wives’ breasts and hips? Here’s one of the only exceptions: [not a virgin clip]

The Rape Revenger: Suffering

I’m going to spare you the explicit footage in this section.

The rape revenge film is the subtext of the slasher movie made literal, the kick-the-dog moment if it took up an entire reel, what would happen if The Mama Bear fought as passionately for herself as for her kids. A number of men target a particularly vulnerable woman - usually isolated, sometimes even deaf or mute - and rape her. And then, one by one, they meet their fate at the hands of The Rape Revenger.

Most commonly, The Rape Revenger and the victim are the same person, though, sometimes, she is avenging a loved one, or even a member of her immediate community. (Yes, among other things, Alien is a movie about rape. The rape is metaphorical.) Her often sadistic killing spree is female-against-male in response to the most quintessentially male-against-female act of violence, and not only is the male viewer supposed to find this violence acceptable, he is supposed to find it righteous. He is supposed to clamor for the deaths of the transgressors. In these films, there is no retribution too cruel for a rapist.

The genre was most popular around the same time as the slasher, and carries much of the same coding: There’s the same lurid fascination with female bodies as objects of beauty and sites of extreme pain, the same earning of sympathy over the course of an entire movie rather than it being assumed, and the same implication that men are the source of a violence that women can become imbued with by being the victims of it.

The biggest difference is just how much the woman suffers in these movies. She suffers a lot.

There’s no collective of dipshit teens to spread the violence across; everything the villains do, they do to one woman. The genre banks hard on the idea that one can’t help caring for a person as one watches her go through hell. Often, what makes the villains monstrous isn’t their cruelty but that they lack this compassion, that they hardly even notice the pain they’re causing. To them, sexual violence is rarely even about the woman, but jockeying for status with one another. It’s performative, men proving they’re alphas. And the movies treat this apathy towards female suffering as among the most heinous acts a man can commit.

If your heart does not go out to a woman in pain, you are implicated in her suffering.

Not that the male-fronted rape revenge film doesn’t exist, but this is another of the rare violent genres where the protagonist is a woman by default. It is deeply rooted in the (at least, presumed) experience of being a woman. And, for all the genre’s trashiness and exploitation - and they are very trashy, and very exploitative, and usually written by men - the most ambitious of them point fingers not just at the male villains but at masculinity itself.

So if a rape revenge film is seen as a workable way to get a male audience member to not only align with a violent woman but against the worst aspects of maleness itself, the question is: Does the woman have to be nude, filthy, beaten, and degraded for him to get there?

Fury Road assumes otherwise. Female suffering is conspicuously absent from the movie.

Make no mistake, the wives have all been raped by Joe. That’s why he kept them. At least two are pregnant with his children. But there are no scenes of them inside the cell, no flashbacks, no tearful descriptions of what was done to them. Even over the course of a very violent movie, it is surprisingly merciful when it comes to violence inflicted on women: When Angharad dies, the camera doesn’t show it [“she went under the wheels”]; when Organic performs an emergency C-section on her body, the camera tilts away; a scene where Joe leaves her and Miss Giddy in the swamp to be eaten by crows was wisely cut from the film. Even the worst beatings Furiosa suffers are not dwelt upon.

It is crucial that the only person we see suffer Joe’s indignities is Max.

Male-on-male violence carries neither the social baggage of what real-life domestic violence usually looks like nor the grindhouse edginess of watching women get hurt. It’s allowed to just be violence. We see Max stripped of his autonomy, his car and his blood put into service in somebody else’s war. We see him captured, sheared, and branded, and then we’re shown Furiosa, with all evidence of the same, and it’s clear whatever empathy we’ve built for him in the safe space of male-on-male violence, we owe to her. We’re never asked to pity the wives, and we’re never given a cheap thrill at the sight of their suffering. We’re asked to respect them, and to take them at their word. We’ve seen their cell, their pregnant bellies, the scars on Angharad’s face. We don’t need to see them suffer to know it happened.

Cruelty is the hack writer’s shorthand for evil. That’s what all those Kick the Dog moments are for. But a man can be evil without being cruel. [Cheedo scene, “he was kind.”] Joe withholds plentiful resources to keep his subjects in line. He keeps young men as battle fodder for his wars. He keeps slaves for blood and breeding. Would it matter if, in person, he was sweet, gentle, soft? The system he’s built to benefit himself is inherently cruel. The wives don’t write “you treated us like shit” on the walls when they escape, they write “we are not things.” We don’t need to see, or even know, how Joe treated them to know he’s a tyrant.

The Avenging Feminine

Before the comments fill up with taxonomical debates over whether this or that character truly fits the definition of a Mama Bear, the way folks still argue over what is or isn’t a MacGuffin, let me disclaim: The study of tropes is the study of patterns. The Mama Bear is not a character, she’s what a host of different characters all have in common with each other. We note a trend, and we give the trend a name so it can be discussed. Not every character will have all the traits we associate with the pattern; arguably most won’t. But the reason we give the pattern a name is because, if there’s a trend, it must be serving a purpose. The assumption is that men won’t like the image of a woman with a gun. The purpose of the trope is to say, “It’s OK, this time, because she’s a mom.” And it’s a lot less relevant that Charlie Baltimore doesn’t perfectly fit the definition of a Mama Bear because she’s also kind of a Vasquez than that her motherhood serves that same purpose.

The assumption is men will accept that any male character, no matter how soft, if stripped to his essence, will become violent, but, with women, they need to be convinced. These are six different ways of contending with that assumption. Though, you will, I hope, have noticed, that almost every woman I’ve discussed here has been white. This is because, if filmmakers assume a male audience needs to be convinced that a woman will become violent, a countervailing assumption is that a white audience doesn’t need to be convinced that a person of color will. POC have their own set of tropes to contend with, tropes that have far less influence on the action movie as a whole, because violent Black women are even rarer than violent white ones. Because the codification of movie violence is deeply informed by the presumed whims of straight white men.

It’s an open question whether many straight white men actually need these reassurances to enjoy a violent film, though it’s clear a lot have come to expect them.

Action movie violence isn’t just violence, it’s power, and power in the hands of the disadvantaged is very threatening to those with privilege. Fury Road’s very interested in the flow of power. In it, women may possess violence, but lacking it does not make them helpless. It does not insist that masculinity is the only way to wield power and vilifies those who do. It refuses to objectify its female characters but doesn’t strip them of all sexuality in the process. It valorizes motherhood without pretending what makes a woman powerful is her ability to provide men with babies. It offers many models of femininity without treating any one as more normal or valid than the others. And it engages the way women suffer under patriarchy without using that suffering as cheap pathos or easy thrills.

In short, the assumption baked into all the tropes we’ve discussed, that violence - power - is the domain of men that women can only enter in exceptional cases is flatly ignored. Feminine presence in this masculine space is not treated as a transgression, men who would consider it one are personified in the villain, and no attempt is made to soothe the male ego at the sight of women holding guns and crossbows.

This alone would make a movie remarkable. But I don’t think we can stake a movie’s greatness on what it doesn’t do, so, if you’ll permit me, I’ll get to the goddamn point.

No matter how many women are in it, the core of an action movie is about solving your problems with violence. That an appropriate show of force will put things right again. Fury Road is no different in this respect. And, in our society, this is understood to be the male power fantasy, one that has been enforced by thousands of repetitions. So what, then, does it mean to portray a woman living out that fantasy? Does her presence decouple the association between violence and manliness, or is living out a male power fantasy a kind of drag? Is performing that fantasy performing masculinity? Is every action heroine, in a functional sense, a Vasquez? Is the action film too thoroughly encoded male to be reclaimed?

Can movie violence ever truly be feminine?

I don’t think I, or any single movie, can answer that question. However, if you said, “Let’s just assume the answer is ‘yes’ and imagine what that movie would look like,” you might imagine Fury Road. And I’m going to explain why without using the phrase “Deleuzian corporeality.” Let’s talk about the two bags.

When Max lets Furiosa and the wives into the war rig, he does not yet trust them, so, for safety, he collects all the weapons in the cab and puts them in a bag that he keeps with him. A satchel full of Chekhov’s guns, and you will see every one of them fired. Later, after Angharad’s death, the wives take stock of its contents. [“anti-seed” clip]

When the wives stay the night with the Vuvalini, a woman called The Keeper of the Seeds has this exchange with The Dag: [bag of seeds clip]. She shows this to The Dag after a conversation about murder: [“thought you girls were above all that”]. And here’s what the bag means to her: [“there was no need to snap anybody then”]. This bag symbolizes an idealized vision of the past, when the savagery of the post-apocalypse wasn’t necessary. When peace was, at least, possible. This is the bag that is pointedly taken with them when they go to overthrow Joe’s society, being the only place around that could actually sustain plant life and abundance.

So there you have it, a bag of seed and a bag of anti-seed, one full of weapons from the Citadel and one full of sprouts from the Green Place of Many Mothers, one representing the toxic masculine warmongering directly implicated in the fall of civilization, and one representing a potential rebirth of society spearheaded by a pack of moms and highly symbolic pregnancies. Fury Road ain’t good because it’s subtle.

So, yeah, Joe fights to maintain the savagery of the post-apocalypse, because it’s where he’s amassed his power, and the Vuvalini fight to bring and end to it. That’s the difference between toxic masculinity and egalitarian feminism, right? Women represent peace, so we should put them in charge, and a little blood must be shed along the way. That is a reading fully supported by the text. And you might well respond, “Hey, most every action movie insists that The Good Guys’ violence is justified and will lead to peace and only The Bad Guys’ violence leads to continuing violence. There’s nothing particularly subversive about that.” And you’d be right.

But let me give a different reading.

Joe’s power derives from controlling the water supply and arable land and, thereby, agriculture. His power dissolves if someone else can provide his people with resources. So a bag of seeds can represent a feminine rebirth, or it can represent liberation at the hands of women from the existing power structure. Not an end to violence, but an end to unjust violence. Not an end to scarcity, but an end to false scarcity. And end to subjugation. And end to autocracy. Violence as a tilling of the soil, destructive of what was but generative for what will be.

It’s not about “violence good” vs. “violence bad,” but “what is your violence in service of?” I don’t think anyone’s under the impression that violence will not exist in their new world, because, in Fury Road, violence is often justified. As in the real world, people rarely earn their freedom without getting a little bit rowdy.

It’s about who gets to wield violence and to what end. Is your violence about consolidating power or distributing it? Is it possessive or protective? Does it enforce a vertical power structure or a lateral one? This is why I feel saying women represent peace is too simplistic. This is where I feel the movie crosses from ignoring the “violence = masculinity, peace = femininity” coding at the root of so many female characters to countering it:

Furiosa was born to a clan of warrior women, kidnapped, enslaved, and put into service of a warlord. And the wives she fights to liberate have been kept in a cell to keep them from revolting against their captor. Violence - power - is not a thing Joe possess that women learn, or absorb through contact. It’s something he’s expended considerable effort to keep them from. Something he controls their access to the same way he controls the water.

Violence is something he stole from them.

In Fury Road, violence is egalitarian, and any imbalance between who is its owner it and who is subject to it is an unnatural state imposed from without. Joe, patriarchy itself, forces women into subservient roles to dissuade them from reclaiming what is theirs by rights. Violence is human, the vicarious thrill of watching violence is human, and empathy with those who enact violence in service of a righteous cause is human. The idea that any of these things are male is a product of men - warlords, movie producers, audiences - overly-invested in a narrative, because the narrative benefits them.

I would like to dub Furiosa The Avenging Feminine, a new trope: The woman who takes back what’s hers. The woman who fights because it’s her right to fight and against men who tell her it’s not. The woman who makes no affordances to men in the audience and implicates them in her struggle if they don’t like it. The woman who fights to bring the same freedom to other women. I would like to dub this a new archetype, because I think it’s one the action film sorely needs, and I selfishly want another Fury Road. That’s what I would like to do, but wishing doesn’t make it so.

I can, if I try, point to a few characters who have some of the necessary qualities, but it’s not enough to make a pattern. Tropes aren’t tropes just because I say they are. The Avenging Feminine remains, not unprecedented, but all too rare.

Fury Road cannot, on its own, reclaim the action movie… but all it takes to make a trend is volume. If people keep asking, “What if the answer to this question is ‘yes?’” and keep imagining what that movie would look like, maybe folks can get their heads around the idea that violence is not masculine by nature, only by custom.

And, with enough time, enough guns, enough cars, enough explosions, customs can change.

[tk-duveraun]

The Same Moonlight 1/?

Title: The Same Moonlight Fandom: SWTOR Rating: T Genre: Romance & Drama Summary: Cakara’s life has been a combination of bad luck and bad choices. She’s on her second fresh start, but maybe this one isn’t as fresh as she thought it would be. Notes:

I’ve made a lot of personal headcanons for echani because there is so little in canon. So don’t try to look stuff up.

Mandalorians in this time are officially allied with the Empire and, according to the Empire, this makes it illegal for them to have Force users in their ranks. They see it as a capital offense and will punish it as such regardless of the fact that Mandalorians are their own state and not actually subject to Imperial Law.

Mandalorians by tradition also don’t allow Forcers in their ranks regardless because of something terrible that happened in the past.

yaim = clan home/camp

alor = clan leader (more literally clan mother/father)

aliit = clan/family

cin’vhetin = the Mandalorian phrase meaning that your past is irrelevant and wiped clean.

beskar = Mandalorian iron, also shorthand for armor.

This is in the continuity of the Morning Comes AU wherein Rathi and Fox both live.

Meshurok’s yaim is in the middle of a thick forest. It’s not too different from Tiyaar’s. The wood making up the temporary defenses is less green and the twisting, creeping ivy is further up the ramshackle walls, but it’s not a complex with roots deep in the ground. The camp guards wear their armor as bright and polished as any other Mandalorian’s, though Meshurok’s grey gemstone sigil is more prominent than most clan symbols.

Cakara’s sunset orange armor doesn’t have Tiyaar’s mark. They had taken her in when she needed it, but she’d never felt like family. And she never would as long as people flinched at the first sight of her. She removes her helmet as Meshurok’s guards check her credentials, but neither one reacts nor comments. A green laser flashes over her armor, scanning for beskar and then the gate opens and she’s instructed to speak to the alor.

Eyes follow Cakara as she walks through the camp, but the expressions show only mild curiosity and the stares linger more on her weapons than her face. The command tent is impossible to miss, with its two meter tall standards. The grey gemstone is flanked by two smaller standards depicting the silhouette of some animal wearing a crown. It’s completely foreign to Cakara, but it’s no stranger than most symbols, so she doesn’t waste time thinking about it before nodding to the sentinel that lets her enter the tent.

The Hound of Meshurok is a tall, human woman with black hair so thick it fights against the braids keeping it in place, despite her undercut. Her expression is carefully neutral as she looks Cakara up and down. The muscles in her face twitch just the slightest bit, just the smallest movements that only an echani would catch, but aside from signifying that she has some thoughts, they don’t tell Cakara anything.

Cakara gives her new alor a shallow bow. “I’m Cakara. Wat Tiyaar said you’d be expecting me.”

“I was. Sit,” Hound says. Once Cakara is seated, she sits as well, her face still betraying nothing. “He said you were interested in joining our melee corps.”

“There was some tension because of my blood, as well,” Cakara says. Under her black tattoos, her skin is whiter than any sun-bleached bone. Even if the Hound is unfamiliar with echani bone structure and faces, there’s no other subhuman race with white irises like Cakara’s.

“Tiyaar are a hard lot. Good at what they do. Traditional,” Hound says. Her tone is slightly clipped, but not enough to suggest anything other than brusque professionalism.

“They took me in when I needed it. That’s what matters.”

Hound nods at her. “Good. I’ll tell you right now, if you’re looking for glory and constant engagements, you’re in the wrong place. We fight and we do it well, but we’re conservative with what jobs we take and our profits go to the children, not necessarily the newest weapons and the fastest ships.”

“I’m not here for glory. I’m here for…” Cakara hesitates, but finally says, “aliit.”

That puts a smile on Hound’s face, though it’s quickly wiped away. “That’s what I like to hear. I don’t tell newcomers what I’m going to say next, but with your training, you’d notice and it’s best to avoid any unpleasantness.”

It’s only her perfect muscle control that keeps Cakara from reacting. She doesn’t know which of the many things Cakara’s been trained in Hound is referring to. Nor does she have any idea what kind of unpleasantness the clan leader is imagining. She allows herself a single, quick nod.

“We don’t break up families for having gifts. The ideal warrior is one using all of their best abilities. If we don’t have a teacher for whatever they’re good at, we’ll find one. Even if someone has to leave for training, Meshurok will always be their home,” Hound says.

Cakara counts the steady, perfect beats of her heart as she mulls over those statements. There’s some specific talent Hound is referencing. One Cakara would recognize on sight. One she doesn’t want to talk about directly. Cakara fights off the urge to narrow her eyes in thought and leaves her face unchanged as her brain makes suggestions and tosses them aside. Despite her best efforts, an involuntary gasp escapes Cakara when the pieces fall into place. She whispers the word, barely giving it the breath for any sound. “Forcers?”

“No child will be ripped from their family for having a gift,” Hound says.

Cakara feels cold inside her armor, but also clammy and too warm all at once. More than half of her training in her old life had been to counter Thryssian sorcerers. They were evil, corrupted and couldn’t be trusted. She forces her eyes closed and shoves the old thoughts aside. Cin’vhetin. When she opens them again, Cakara meets Hound’s eyes and nods. “I understand.”

“The details aren’t something we discuss openly, even here, but rest assured, Mandalore already knows. That said, should the Empire take exception to our clan, we’re on our own. That’s what’s best for our people. Cerar and D’narr could have a place for you if that’s a problem.”

Wat had offered Cerar and D’narr to her, too. The four clans are close and often send warriors where they fit best. Everyone speaks highly of Meshurok, but the clan has no reputation… by design, clearly. They don’t want word getting back to the Empire that they’re ‘harboring’ Forcers. If the Empire finds out, summary execution is on the docket and Mandalore won’t intervene. It’s a dangerous position, but it could be worth it to find a family that accepts her for what she is and only what she is.

“I’d like to make a home here,” Cakara finally says.

“Excellent. You’ll be bunking with Zali for now. She’ll get you sorted and settled in. If you need more privacy after that, we can discuss it and work something out. I don’t anticipate any interpersonal issues, but should one arise, you are to bring it to my attention immediately so that it can be resolved before a true problem can arise. Arbitration doesn’t favor longevity, so do not hesitate to speak up.”

Meshurok is on the small side for a Mandalorian clan, but even so… “Your attention, personally?”

Hound grins. “Zali will tell you who can speak for the clan. She should be waiting for you outside.”

Cakara nods at the dismissal and stands. Just before she can step out, Hound stops her with a few words.

“One last thing. Welcome home, Cakara.”

“Thank you, alor.”

---

Meshurok’s mess tent is loud. Despite there being empty tables scattered around, the warriors are crowded onto the tables closest to the firepit in the center. The main ruckus seems focused on a red-haired human man that’s gesturing wildly as he tells a story. He has a long, intricate braid just as fancy as Hound’s pulled over his shoulder. Even from the distance, Cakara could easily read his lips and ‘listen’ to the story, but she doesn’t because she’s terrified. She has to imagine that no one else can see what she does, but they’re warriors, surely they should be able to recognize an apex predator.

It’s not that his smile doesn’t reach his eyes, because it does, there are even crinkles in the skin around his eyes that prove he smiles a lot. No, it’s the way he sits and how perfectly he moves his arms. Non-Echani shouldn’t have that kind of muscle control, especially not people in full beskar with its limited joints and lagging pneumatics. In order to compensate for those factors, the man would need years of training. Cakara’s been a Mandalorian for three years and she only has base proficiency at what this man does so carelessly.

Something of her fear must make it past her control over her expression because Zali puts a hand on her shoulder.

“Are you okay? Do you want to go back to the bunk?”

Cakara can’t take her eyes off the danger, so she doesn’t look at Zali when she speaks. Each word is deliberate and torn from her chest because she’s sure he can hear her, even from the distance, even over the crowd. “That man is-”

“Gorgeous, right?” Zali gives a wistful sigh. “Wherever alor got him, I want one.”

She chokes and feels weak in the knees even though she’s sitting. “Are you out of your mind? He could tear you apart with his bare hands.”

“Fox would never. He and Morathis, that’s the chiss on his left, they’re alor’s partners. They wouldn’t hurt anyone in the clan. You’re fine. Fox is the best person to go to with problems. Alor tries to make it a lesson and ensure we learn from our mistakes, blah blah, but Fox’ll just fix things.”

Zali sounds so confident that Cakara glances at her. “He’s a monster.”

“Well, yes, you met Hound, didn’t you? They’ve gotta be monsters to keep up with her.”

“Are you really not worried?” Cakara ask as she turns back to watch Fox.

Zali shrugs next to her and loudly picks up her plate. “Of course not. He pulled me outta the rubble on Balmorra and brings me food when I’m sick and stuff. Doesn’t matter that I’m not officially adopted, he’s basically my dad now.”

Cakara lets a frown sit on her face. It’s slightly reassuring that he’s apparently affectionate under his terrifying strength, but that’s almost completely negated by the clear devotion on everyone’s faces. Power comes in many forms… “I suppose I just have to trust you.”

[renee-niles]

The Civil Folk

So then. I tend to revise my work a lot, and that can extend to these little brainstorm-y posts. I previously went on a three-part ramble about standard magic rules, the nature of the afterlife and exactly what creature qualifies as one of the standard Five Races(tm) in my usual fantasy setting, but have since reconsidered. I’ve decided to extend the definition of ‘the Civil Folk’ to any creature capable of speech while still restricting the categories themselves to five.

The subcategories tend to be shorthand for the sake of not needing to explain too much, but in canon, an ogre is just as fey as a goblin is just as fey as a fairy and so forth.

I shall elaborate.

Beastfolk/Beasts

This category refers mostly to humanoid monsters with animal- and occasionally plant-like features. This includes classical mythological monsters (fauns/satyrs, centaurs, gorgons, harpies, merfolk, etc.) as well as shapeshifters such as werewolves or selkies- and even the occasional dragon (bi- or quadrupedal,) as long as it’s clever enough to talk. As such, creatures that were previously called hulder are counted under this category. The important thing is that the beast is sapient.

As a side note, humans can be cursed to become beasts themselves- three or four out of every ten dragons is a formerly human thief who stole some artifact or wronged some fairy.

Fey

This category generally indicates pointy-eared humanoids born with inherent skill in magic. They range from the elven and painfully arrogant fairies to the dwarfish, crafty goblins to the fierce, orc-like ogres. But just like previous posts, fey identified as goblins and ogres tend to be friendlier to humans than fey identified as fairies. Fetches are biologically fey and changelings are biologically human, but both are counted colloquially as something in-between.

Humans

Seeing as we’re all human (right?) this should be the easiest category to explain. Hell, I don’t really need to beyond saying that they’re non-hairy, upright primates that are able to use magic, but have to learn it unlike the fey (this is where empaths, magi and witches come into play.)

In fact, the sheer diversity of real humans is what got me to revise the Civil Folk in the first place. If humans and the former hulder are so varied, then why not have the same apply to the fey and so forth?

Spirits

Angels (fallen and otherwise,) demons, devils and other celestial/infernal, spiritual creatures are covered here. As stated before, a ‘vanilla’ spirit is non-corporeal, what makes a sapient creature sapient and risks becoming corrupted if a deceased one doesn’t pass in to its deserved afterlife. A demon is an evil spirit that has grown powerful enough to create a physical, but mindless and monstrous form. A devil, meanwhile, is even older and powerful enough to regain sapience. Many still have monstrous appearances while others prefer humanoid forms. Despite their age and malicious nature, however, devils are not purely chaotic beings of evil. They are actually strikingly lawful, more punishers of the wicked than wicked themselves.

... That doesn’t make the masters of the Inferno safe for mortals to bargain with, any more than the inhabitants of Paradise are.

An angel, meanwhile, is a completely sinless being that has been purified of all their wrongdoings in the fires of the Inferno (or somehow proven their worth in Purgatory) and as such, is inherently considered wrong in the mortal realm of trials. Fallen angels are seen as less so due to their own sinful nature, whereas their unfallen variant is just... Incomprehensible, and dangerous to be around- like looking directly at the sun. They may be inherently pure, but they are stil dangerous... And as evidenced by the existence of their fallen variants, capable of regaining a flawed nature.

The most important thing to remember is that any spirit can still find redemption, from the purest angel to the most fiendish devil.

Undead

And finally, we come to the fifth category of the Civil Folk, rounding out your standard Five Fantasy Races(tm) with dead bodies that got back up and started walking around. Unlike animated constructs puppeted by necromancers, the true undead (mostly) retain their faculties. They are less understood than the other five Civil Folk, if only because of... Understandable mistrust from other mortal Folk. I mean, vampires may not need to kill to treat their illness and it takes more than just a bite to transmit vampirism, but even the friendliest neighborhood vampire runs the risk of ghoulification if they don’t feed regularly enough.

Curiously enough, it would appear that only fey and humans can become undead, and little is truly known about the former- the ankou, the banshee, the dullahan and so forth.

As a final note, the key difference between a spirit and one of the undead is the fact that the former do not retain connection to their former, corporeal bodies and, in some cases, develop new physical forms. The latter retain both the spirit and the body.