#and more to the point what fascinates me is the disconnect between what the endless think and what they do

[onehundredandeleventropicalfish]

never gonna stop thinking about the fact that desire is the only one of dream's siblings who has never ignored him when he's asked for help

[llamagoddessofficial]

Thank you @eldritch-and-tired for commissioning this lil’ /Reader piece of @megalommi‘s Sans, Baggs. I will ALWAYS be a simp for this sexyman. Enjoy!!

Tw: injections, unwilling hypnosis/mind control

...

You giggled.

The light was so pretty. Swirling, undulating, cyan and magenta warping and shifting in and out of one another in an endless hypnotising rhythm. It made you think of a funfair... spirals everywhere, from the tops of the stalls to the decorations on the rides, to the signs leading you around to those huge lollipops that tasted tooth-meltingly sweet. Happy memories, carefree, far away and non-solid but still wonderful. What were you doing? You couldn’t remember anything. You liked blue and purple, they were everywhere, all around you, such pretty colours. 

Pretty, pretty...

“... there we go. easy now.”

... You didn’t realise he was even there until he (somewhat cautiously?) spoke. Your senses were just colours. The voice was odd and a bit disembodied at first but slowly, slowly, you became aware of its source- a face hovering just over you. The awareness spread to your body, too... you were bent at an odd angle with your feet just barely lifted off the floor, your back flat on a rather uncomfortable table, gravity pulling your hair and cheeks. And he... he was just a few inches over you, pinning you by one of your wrists.

...

A tight and tense, cutting smile, clear signs of stress around his face and shoulders making it obvious that this was the smile of a man on the edge and not one of any particular joy. Deep sockets, so wide they looked borderline painful, glaring down at you with so much intensity...

... You could feel his body heat. And his breath against your face. Your heartbeat, your slightly itchy nose, how tight he was holding your wrist.

“... Mh... Huh?” You said, ever-so articulately, vision spinning in the same direction as the swirls emanating from his left socket. A similar way to how the world rocked when you were dizzy... except for you, it never righted itself. It just kept spinning and spinning and spinning. Everything was so bright, as you fell under a pleasant fuzzy sensation burrowed into your chest and mind, blanketing your thoughts as if you were just in the middle of a nice dream where nothing much mattered.

“shh...” 

When he gently closed his gloved fingers around something you had gripped in your pinned hand, you put up no fuss, loosening your hold and allowing him to take it... when did you pick up a scalpel? What an odd thing to have. The back of your head hurt and your knuckles felt the telltale aches of having been tense a few moments ago, even though they were now just an unwound coil like the rest of you.

... Dr. Baggs let out a long slow, breath. You could feel it against your nose and neck, he was that close... his mouth open barely a crack, the magenta hue of his tongue glinting against his fangs. 

“... alright.” He said, voice silky, gentle on your thrumming ears and head, sockets easing around the edges as he calmed down. The bluish shadows of sleep deprivation under them became more apparent as the tension in the room, face and posture waned. “that’s better.”

... Yeah. You thought, relaxed and calm. It is.

... He gave you the bare minimum of personal space, leaning back and helping you to sit, lifting you with the perfect combination of gentle but firm as if he knew you’d immediately feel so dizzy when you became upright. Your hands moved up and held onto his shoulders to steady yourself- the fabric of his lab coat was surprisingly soft, it was very nice to touch. 

... He was so close. Supportive but strict hands on your elbows, your knees on either side of him, he smelled like... the artificial flavouring they added candy that just wasn’t quite natural. And a specific, scented brand of antiseptic; clean and sterile and prepared.

“... well.” He hummed, reaching out of sight for something with one hand. Your forehead would bump his collarbone if you leant forward any more. His voice was so soothing and calming, especially since you were only a few inches from his clavicle... you were getting pretty close to shutting your eyes at this point, but a prick in your arm kept you from completely nodding off- you barely noticed it, too busy studying the aesthetically pleasing purple trim to his coat and enjoying the funny fuzzy sensation in your chest and temples. Oh, he suddenly had a full syringe in his hand that he was putting a cap on... where did he get that? 

“i knew from the start you’d be uncooperative, but... not that kind of uncooperative.”

He held something up to your face. You opened your mouth, (wait, why am I opening my mouth...) and he quickly placed it on your tongue. You swallowed, again, without knowing why... it was like your body was following a list of instructions that you couldn’t see or hear. Someone else had taken the wheel; tugging the right strings to make the right parts of you move when they were needed. 

... You didn’t think about it much. No panic, no confusion, no considering the implications. The thoughts were disconnected... just ships in the night, sailing by your muffled brain. All you could really think about was how whatever he’d given you was very strange and bitter and ew, you cringed, an odd acrid taste lingering in the back of your throat.

... Another prick in your arm. That’s weird, he keeps pricking me. Oh well. This time, you looked just in time to see him removing a now-empty syringe; he wiped where he’d poked your forearm with something very cold, then placed a little circular red band-aid over it.

...

There were six other band-aids on that forearm. Two green, three navy, one black... and now the red one.

Hm... I feel like I should be alarmed by that...

Again, all you could think about was how nice you felt right now. Dizzy, warm, safe. Like you’d had a little too much to drink, but now you were laying out in the sun with your friends... I miss the sun...

“most of my ‘patients’ are at least... consistent.” Baggs hummed, continuining to hold you carefully by the elbows, predicting your post-jab swaying. He didn’t seem to realise he was talking aloud, just a scientist observing his experiment, and you weren’t really paying enough attention to what he was actually saying- too many words to process, boooring. “uncooperative awake, uncooperative under. you’re always displaying aggression toward me... and yet as soon as you have no control, there’s an obediency so immediate it’s borderline subconscious. rather fascinating.”

Instead, you...

“... Sexy voice.”

...

...

“... what?” 

Apparently, that was enough to finally break him out of his thoughts. You glanced up at Baggs’ face, still only a few inches away, you kept forgetting where things were around you... the cushion around your soul never wavered but for a moment there was a little blip in the swirls. A slight interruption.

“Mmmhm.”

...

... His expression sort of... well, ‘melted’ was the wrong word. It was more akin to the sun peeking out from between two clouds. The detached, observational, scientific air to him thinned and began to evaporate... revealing something a little more warm.

The razor and unfriendly edges of his smile were rounding into something organic. Perhaps even, daresay, resembling forward. 

“my.” He purred. “how forward of you.”

“S’very nice. Very smooth...” Your tongue felt... eh. And your arm, where he’d poked you, was starting to itch. “And you have a nice face too... handsome man. I think so.”

...

His smile started growing even more, and he leaned back an inch or two as if to look at all of you and make sure you were really the same person he’d brought into this examination room less than an hour ago. “... oh really?”

“Yeah...” ... Your hands had been just holding onto his coat... but, spurred on by your sudden drunken confidence, you properly looped them around his neck.

... He blinked, but he only let himself appear taken aback for a moment or two. Despite how ominously his magenta eyelights glowed in his dark, shadowed sockets... you could tell he was enjoying himself, and this sudden turn of events. “i’m flattered.”

You laid your head on his chest. It was getting kinda hard to stay upright. 

... Your nose scrunched.

“Funky smell, though.”

That was enough to get an actual laugh out of him- albeit shortlived, his skull cocking like a curious mirthful bird. “are you... genuinely telling me that i smell, darling?”

“Yeah. Because it’s true. You’re gremlin.”

 “i’m... gremlin?”

“Mhm.”

“stars. i wish i could tell pap about this.”

Your body shifted, enough to make you lightly squeak- things were spinning so much that it took you a minute to realise Baggs had picked you up, an arm hooked under your legs and another around your back.

“you’re all done for the day, pet.” His eyelights had become a thrumming, almost amethyst colour as he looked at you, a far gentler shade of purple than his previous headache-inducing magenta. You weren’t sure what’d caused that but you weren’t complaining. You weren’t sure what’d caused him to carry you either, considering he usually just brought someone to collect his ‘patients’ for him... but, again, not complaining. “it’s time to get back to your room.”

“I feel funny.” You mumbled.

“that’s normal.”

He started walking. The halls all looked the same, as he moved through them, blending into one another... white and sterile, a few doors dotted inbetween if you were lucky but mostly just the exact same tiles and patterns and lack of anything that would clue you into the fact that people had actually (at some point) existed in this area. 

“Hm... is this where you work...?”

A little chuckle. He was sounding further and further away. “yes. this is my job, dear.”

“It’s so g... ug-ly.”

“oh? you think so?” Baggs’ tone had become... light? Perhaps a little teasing. 

“Jus... put up some nice posters, or something.” Your head was so heavy. Since when was it this heavy? You had to rest it against his chest, feeling that nice fabric against your cheek, hearing an equally nice humming sound from inside his ribcage. “Paint the walls. It’s so... white. Clini... ...clinicic... Calic...” 

“clinical?”

“... Yeah.Tthat.”

A gloved phalange touched your arm. It was probably an attempt at a comforting gesture- stroking the skin. “good to know. i’ll make sure to pass that eloquent advice along to the decorating team.”

“Good.”

He brought you to a cell-like room. It was... vaguely familiar? A bed with one pillow, thin white sheets... some strange posters and a window with bars over it. You felt like you’d spent a long time in there, but it was impossible to think straight enough to actually muster up any memories.

Baggs laid you down on the bed, slowly, handling you like you’d fall apart at any moment. You made a little noise- it wasn’t a very soft bed... but it was good enough. And your body felt so strange and tired that any soft surface honestly was nice enough to lay down on forever.

“comfy?” He asked. Since when did he inquire if you were comfy?

“M... no. S’whatever.”

...

You peeked at him, crouched by your bed... and you reached out, pressing your inexplicably heavy finger against the top of his nasal cavity in a booping motion. You mumbled a little victorious “Silly skeleton.” 

...

He took your hand in his gloved one, gently, before it could go limp and flop down. You couldn’t really make out his expression at this point.

“don’t tell the other subjects...” He murmured... he sounded amused, at least. “but i think you’ve become my favourite.”

“Course.” You shut your eyes. “I’m... m’amazing.”

“... yes. course.” 

A feeling, like a kiss on your hand, before he placed it by your side.

“... go to sleep.”

...

And just like that, your body obeyed him before your head could even process what he’d said, and you were asleep.

[impressivepress]

Rivera, Kahlo, and the Detroit Murals: A History and a Personal Journey

The year 1932 was not a good time to come to Detroit, Michigan. The Great Depression cast dark clouds over the city. Scores of factories had ground to a halt, hungry people stood in breadlines, and unemployed autoworkers were selling apples on street corners to survive. In late April that year, against this grim backdrop, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo stepped off a train at the cavernous Michigan Central depot near the heart of the Motor City. They were on their way to the new Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), a symbol of the cultural ascendancy of the city and its turbo-charged prosperity in better times. The next 11 months in Detroit would take them both to dazzling artistic heights and transform them personally in far-reaching, at times traumatic, ways.

I subtitle this article “a history and a personal journey.” The history looks at the social context of Diego and Frida’s defining time in the city and the art they created; the personal journey explores my own relationship to Detroit and the murals Rivera painted there. I was born and raised in the city, listening to the sounds of its bustling streets, coming of age in its diverse neighborhoods, growing up with the driving beat of its music, and living in the shadows of its factories. Detroit was a labor town with a culture of social justice and civil rights, which on occasion clashed with sharp racism and powerful corporations that defined the age. In my early twenties, I served a four-year apprenticeship to become a machine repair machinist in a sprawling multistory General Motors auto factory at Clark Street and Michigan Avenue that machined mammoth seven-liter V8 engines, stamped auto body parts on giant presses, and assembled gleaming Cadillacs on fast-moving assembly lines. At the time, the plant employed some 10,000 workers who reflected the racial and ethnic diversity of the city, as well as its tensions. The factory was located about a 20-minute walk from where Diego and Frida got off the train decades earlier but was a world away from the downtown skyscrapers and the city’s cultural center.

I grew up with Rivera’s murals, and they have run through every stage of my life. I’ve been gone from the city for many years now, but an important part of both Detroit and the murals have remained with me, and I suspect they always will. I return to Detroit frequently, and no matter how busy the trip, I have almost always found time for the murals.

In Detroit, Rivera looked outwards, seeking to capture the soul of the city, the intense dynamism of the auto industry, and the dignity of the workers who made it run. He would later say that these murals were his finest work. In contrast, Kahlo looked inward, developing a haunting new artistic direction. The small paintings and drawings she created in Detroit pull the viewer into a strange and provocative universe. She denied being a Surrealist, but when André Breton, a founder of the movement, met her in Mexico, he compared her work to a “ribbon around a bomb” that detonated unparalleled artistic freedom (Hellman & Ross, 1938).

Rivera, at the height of his fame, embraced Detroit and was exhilarated by the rhythms and power of its factories (I must admit these many years later I can relate to that response). He was fascinated by workers toiling on assembly lines and coal-fired blast furnaces pouring molten metal around the clock. He felt this industrial base had the potential to create material abundance and lay the foundation for a better world. Sixty percent of the world’s automobiles were built in Michigan at that time, and Detroit also boasted other state-of-the-art industry, from the world’s largest stove and furnace factory to the main research laboratories for a global pharmaceutical company.

“Detroit has many uncommon aspects,” a Michigan guidebook produced by the Federal Writers Project pointed out, “the staring rows of ghostly blue factory windows at night; the tired faces of auto workers lighted up by simultaneous flares of match light at the end of the evening shift; and the long, double-decker trucks carrying auto bodies and chassis” (WPA, 1941:234). This project produced guidebooks for every state in the nation and was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal Agency that sought to create jobs for the unemployed, including writers and artists. I suspect Rivera would have embraced the approach, perhaps even painted it, had it then existed.

Detroit was a rough-hewn town that lacked the glitter and sophistication of New York or the charm of San Francisco, yet Rivera was inspired by what he saw. In his “Detroit Industry” murals on the soaring inner walls of a large courtyard in the center of the DIA, Rivera portrayed the iconic Ford Rouge plant, the world’s largest and most advanced factory at the time. “[These] frescoes are probably as close as this country gets to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” New York Times art critic Roberta Smith wrote eight decades later (Smith, 2015).

The city did not speak to Kahlo in the same way. She tolerated Detroit — sometimes barely, other times with more enthusiasm — rather than embracing it. Kahlo was largely unknown when she came to Detroit and felt somewhat isolated and disconnected there. She painted and drew, explored the city’s streets, and watched films — she liked Chaplin’s comedies in particular — in the movie theaters near the center of the city, but she admitted “the industrial part of Detroit is really the most interesting side” (Coronel, 2015:138).

During a personally traumatic year — she had a miscarriage that went seriously awry in Detroit, and her mother died in Mexico City — she looked deeply into herself and painted searing, introspective works on small canvases. In Detroit, she emerged as the Frida Kahlo who is recognized and revered throughout the world today. While Vogue still identified her as “Madame Diego Rivera” during her first New York exhibition in 1938, the New York Times commented that “no woman in art history commands her popular acclaim” in a 2019 article (Hellman & Ross, 1938; Farago, 2019).

My emphasis will be on Rivera and the “Detroit Industry” murals, but Kahlo’s own work, unheralded at the time, has profoundly resonated with new audiences since. While in Detroit, they both inspired, supported, influenced, and needed each other.

Prelude

Diego and Frida married in Mexico on August 21, 1929. He was 43, and she was 22 — although their maturity, in her view, was inverse to their age. Their love was passionate and tumultuous from the beginning. “I suffered two accidents in my life,” she later wrote, “one in which a streetcar knocked me down … the other accident is Diego” (Rosenthal, 2015:96).

They shared a passion for Mexico, particularly the country’s indigenous roots, and a deep commitment to politics, looking to the ideals of communism in a turbulent and increasingly dangerous world (Rosenthal, 2015:19). Rivera painted a major set of murals — 235 panels — in the Ministry of Education in Mexico City between 1923 and 1928. When he signed each panel, he included a small red hammer and sickle to underscore his political allegiance. Among the later panels was “In the Arsenal,” which included images of Frida Kahlo handing out weapons, muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros in a hat with a red star, and Italian photographer Tina Modotti holding a bandolier.

The politics of Rivera and Kahlo ran deep but didn’t exactly follow a straight line. Kahlo herself remarked that Rivera “never worried about embracing contradictions” (Rosenthal, 2015:55). In fact, he seemed to embody F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notion that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function” (Fitzgerald, 1936).

Their art, however, ultimately defined who they were and usually came out on top when in conflict with their politics. When the Mexican Communist Party was sharply at odds with the Mexican government in the late 1920s, Rivera, then a Party member, nonetheless accepted a major government commission to paint murals in public buildings. The Party promptly expelled him for this act, among other transgressions (Rosenthal, 2015:32).

Diego and Frida came to San Francisco in November 1930 after Rivera received a commission to paint a mural in what was then the San Francisco Stock Exchange. He had already spent more than a decade in Europe and another nine months in the Soviet Union in 1927. In contrast, this was Kahlo’s first trip outside Mexico. The physical setting in San Francisco, then as now, was stunning — steep hills at the end of a peninsula between the Pacific and the Bay — and they were intrigued and elated just to be there. The city had a bohemian spirit and a working-class grit. Artists and writers could mingle with longshoremen in bars and cafes as ships from around the world unloaded at the bustling piers. At the time, California was in the midst of an “enormous vogue of things Mexican,” and the couple was at the center of this mania (Rosenthal, 2015:32). They were much in demand at seemingly endless “parties, dinners, and receptions” during their seven-month stay (Rosenthal, 2015:36). A contradiction with their political views? Not really. Rivera felt he was infiltrating the heart of capitalism with more radical ideas.

Rivera’s commission produced a fresco on the walls of the Pacific Stock Exchange, “Allegory of California” (1931), a paean to the economic dynamism of the state despite the dark economic clouds already descending. Rivera would then paint several additional commissions in San Francisco before leaving. While compelling, these murals lacked the power and political edge of his earlier work in Mexico or the extraordinary genius of what was to come in Detroit.

While in San Francisco, Rivera and Kahlo met Helen Wills Moody, a 27-year-old world-class tennis player, who became the central model for the Allegory mural. She moved in rarified social and artistic circles, and as 1930 drew to a close, she introduced the couple to Wilhelm Valentiner, the visionary director of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), who had rushed to San Francisco to meet Rivera when he learned of the artist’s arrival.

Valentiner was “a German scholar, a Rembrandt specialist, and a man with extraordinarily wide tastes,” according to Graham W.J. Beal, who himself revitalized the DIA as director in the 21st century. “Between 1920 and the early 1930s, with the help of Detroit’s personal wealth and city money, Valentiner transformed the DIA … into one of the half-dozen top art collections in the country,” a position the museum continues to hold today (Beal, 2010:34). The museum director and the artist shared an unusual kinship. “The revolutions in Germany and Mexico [had] radicalized [both],” wrote Linda Downs, a noted curator at the DIA (Downs, 2015:177). Little more than a decade later, “the idea of the mural commission reinvigorated them to create a highly charged monumental modern work that has contributed greatly to the identity of Detroit” (Downs, 2015:177).

When Valentiner and Rivera met, the economic fallout of the Depression was hammering both Detroit and its municipally funded art institute. The city was teetering at the edge of bankruptcy in 1932 and had slashed its contribution to the museum from $170,000 to $40,000, with another cut on the horizon. Despite this dismal economic terrain, Valentiner was able to arrange a commission for Rivera to paint two large-format frescoes in the Garden Court at the new museum building, which had opened in 1927. Edsel Ford, the son of Henry Ford and a major patron of the DIA, pledged $10,000 for the project — a truly princely sum at that moment — and would double his contribution as Rivera’s vision and the scale of the project expanded (Rosenthal, 2015:51). Edsel also played an unheralded role in support of the museum through the economic traumas to come.

A discussion of Rivera’s mural commission gets a bit ahead of our story, so let’s first look at Detroit’s explosive economic growth in the early years of the 20th century. This industrial transformation would provide the subject and the inspiration for Rivera’s frescoes.

The Motor City and the Great Depression

At the turn of the 20th century, Detroit “was a quiet, tree-shaded city, unobtrusively going about its business of brewing beer and making carriages and stoves” (WPA, 1941:231). Approaching 300,000 residents, Detroit was the 13th-largest city in the country (Martelle, 2012:71). A future of steady growth and easy prosperity seemed to beckon.

Instead, Henry Ford soon upended not only the city, but much of the world. He was hardly alone as an auto magnate in the area: Durant, Olds, the Fisher Brothers, and the Dodge Brothers, among others, were also in or around Detroit. Ford, however, would go beyond simply building a successful car company: he unleashed explosive growth in the auto industry, put the world on wheels, and became a global folk hero to many, yet some were more critical. The historian Joshua Freeman points out that “Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) depicts a dystopia of Fordism, a portrait of life A.F. — the years “Anno Ford,” measured from 1908, when the Model T was introduced — with Henry Ford the deity” (Freeman, 2018:147).

Ford combined three simple ideas and pursued them with razor-sharp, at times ruthless, intensity: the Model T, an affordable car for the masses; a moving assembly line that would jump-start productivity growth; and the $5 day for workers, double the prevailing wage in the industry. This combination of mass production and mass consumption — Fordism — allowed workers to buy the products they produced and laid the basis for a new manufacturing era. The automobile age was born.

The $5 day wasn’t altruism for Ford. The unrelenting pace and control of the assembly line was intense — often unbearable — even for workers who had grown up with back-breaking work: tilling the farm, mining coal, or tending machines in a factory. Annual turnover approached 400 percent at Ford’s Highland Park plant, and daily absenteeism was high. In response, Ford introduced the unprecedented new wage on January 12, 1914 (Martelle, 2012:74).

The press and his competitors denounced Ford — claiming this reckless move would bankrupt the industry — but the day the new rate began, 10,000 men arrived at the plant in the winter darkness before dawn. Despite the bitter cold, Ford security men aimed fire hoses to disperse the crowd. Covered in freezing water, the men nonetheless surged forward hoping to grasp an elusive better future for themselves and their families.

Here is where I enter the picture, so to speak. One of the relatively few who did get a job that chaotic day was Philip Chapman. He was a recent immigrant from Russia who had married a seamstress from Poland named Sophie, a spirited, beautiful young woman. They had met in the United States. He wound up working at Ford for 33 years — 22 of them at the Rouge plant — on the line and on machines. They were my grandparents.

By 1929, Detroit was the industrial capital of the world. It had jumped its place in line, becoming the fourth-largest city in the United States — trailing only New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia — with 1.6 million people (Martelle, 2012:71). “Detroit needed young men and the young men came,” the WPA Michigan guidebook writers pointed out, and they emphasized the kaleidoscopic diversity of those who arrived: “More Poles than in the European city of Poznan, more Ukrainians than in the third city of the Ukraine, 75,000 Jews, 120,000 Negroes, 126,000 Germans, more Bulgarians, [Yugoslavians], and Maltese than anywhere else in the United States, and substantial numbers of Italians, Greeks, Russians, Hungarians, Syrians, English, Scotch, Irish, Chinese, and Mexicans” (WPA, 1941:231). Detroit was third nationally in terms of the foreign-born, and the African American population had soared from 6,000 in 1910 to 120,000 in 1930 (WPA, 1941:108), part of a journey that would ultimately involve more than six million people moving from the segregated, more rural South to the industrial cities of the North (Trotter, 2019:78).

DIA planners projected that Detroit would become the second-largest U.S. city by 1935 and that it could surpass New York by the early 1950s. “Detroit grew as mining towns grow — fast, impulsive, and indifferent to the superficial niceties of life,” the Michigan Guidebook writers concluded (WPA, 1941:231).

The highway ahead seemed endless and bright. The city throbbed with industrial production, the streetcars and buses were filled with workers going to and from work at all hours, and the noise of stamping presses and forges could be heard through open windows in the hot summers. Cafes served dinner at 11 p.m. for workers getting off the afternoon shift and breakfast at 5 a.m. for those arriving for the day shift. Despite prohibition, you could get a drink just about any time. After all, only a river separated Detroit from Canada, where liquor was still legal.

Rivera’s biographer and friend Bertram Wolfe wrote of “the tempo, the streets, the noise, the movement, the labor, the dynamism, throbbing, crashing life of modern America” (Wolfe, as cited in Rosenthal, 2015:65). The writers of the Michigan guidebook had a more down-to-earth view: “‘Doing the night spots’ consists mainly of making the rounds of beer gardens, burlesque shows, and all-night movie houses,” which tended to show rotating triple bills (WPA, 1941:232).

Henry Ford began constructing the colossal Rouge complex in 1917, which would employ more than 100,000 workers and spread over 1,000 acres by 1929. “It was, simply, the largest and most complicated factory ever built, an extraordinary testament to ingenuity, engineering, and human labor,” Joshua Freeman observed (Freeman, 2018:144). The historian Lindy Biggs accurately described the complex as “more like an industrial city than a factory” (Biggs, as cited in Freeman, 2018:144).

The Rouge was a marvel of vertical integration, making much of the car on site. Giant Ford-owned freighters would transport iron ore and limestone from Minnesota and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula down through the Great Lakes, along the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers, and then across the Rouge River to the docks of the plant. Seemingly endless trains would bring coal from West Virginia and Ohio to the plant. Coke ovens, blast furnaces, and open hearths produced iron and steel; rolling mills converted the steel ingots into long, thin sheets for body parts; foundries molded iron into engine blocks that were then precision machined; enormous stamping presses formed sheets of steel into fenders, hoods, and doors; and thousands of other parts were machined, extruded, forged, and assembled. Finished cars drove off the assembly line a little more than a day after the raw materials had arrived at the docks.

In 1928, Vanity Fair heralded the Rouge as “the most significant public monument in America, throwing its shadow across the land probably more widely and more intimately than the United States Senate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty.... In a landscape where size, quantity, and speed are the cardinal virtues, it is natural that the largest factory turning out the most cars in the least time should come to have the quality of America’s Mecca, toward which the pious journey for prayer” (Jacob, as cited in Lichtenstein, 1995:13). My grandfather, I suspect, had a more prosaic goal: he needed a job, and Ford paid well.

Despite tough conditions in the plant, workers were proud to work at “Ford’s,” as people in Detroit tended to refer to the company. They wore their Ford badge on their shirts in the streetcars on the way to work or on their suits in church on Sundays. It meant something to have a job there. Once through the factory gate, however, the work was intense and often dangerous and unhealthy. Ford himself described repetitive factory work as “a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind,” yet he was firmly convinced strict control and tough discipline over the average worker was necessary to get anything done (Ford, as cited in Martelle, 2012:73). He combined the regimentation of the assembly line with increasingly autocratic management, strictly and often harshly enforced. You couldn’t talk on the line in Ford plants — you were paid to work, not talk — so men developed the “Ford whisper” holding their heads down and barely moving their lips. The Rouge employed 1,500 Ford “Service Men,” many of them ex-convicts and thugs, to enforce discipline and police the plant.

At a time when economic progress seemed as if it would go on forever, the U.S. stock market drove over a cliff in October 1929, and paralysis soon spread throughout the economy. Few places were as shaken as Detroit. In 1929, 5.5 million vehicles were produced, but just 1.4 million rolled off Detroit’s assembly lines three years later in 1932 (Martelle, 2012:114). The Michigan jobless rate hit 40 percent that year, and one out of three Detroit families lacked any financial support (Lichtenstein, 1995). Ford laid off tens of thousands of workers at the Rouge. No one knew how deep the downturn might go or how long it would last. What increasingly desperate people did know is that they had to feed their family that night, but they no longer knew how.

On March 7, 1932 — a bone-chilling day with a lacerating wind — 3,000 desperate, unemployed autoworkers met near the Rouge plant to march peaceably to the Ford Employment Office. Detroit police escorted the marchers to the Dearborn city line, where they were confronted by Dearborn Police and armed Ford Service Men. When the marchers refused to disperse, the Dearborn police fired tear gas, and some demonstrators responded with rocks and frozen mud. The marchers were then soaked with water from fire hoses and shot with bullets. Five workers were killed, 19 wounded by gunfire, and dozens more injured. Communists had organized the march, but a Michigan historical marker makes the following observation: “Newspapers alleged the marchers were communists, but they were in fact people of all political, racial, and ethnic backgrounds.” That marker now hangs outside the United Auto Workers Local 600 union hall, which represents workers today at the Rouge plant.

Five days later, on March 12, thousands of people marched in downtown Detroit to commemorate the demonstrators who had been killed. Although Rivera was still in New York, he was aware of the Ford Hunger March before it took place and told Clifford Wight, his assistant, that he was eager “not [to] miss…[it] on any account” (Rosenthal, 2015:51). Both he and Kahlo had marched with workers in Mexico and embraced their causes. Rivera had captured their lives as well as their protests in his murals in Mexico.

As it turned out, they missed both the march and the commemoration. Instead, the following month Kahlo and Rivera’s train pulled into the Michigan Central Depot, where Wilhelm Valentiner met them. They were taken to the Ford-owned Wardell Hotel next to the Detroit Institute of Arts. The DIA was the anchor of a grass-lined and tree-shaded cultural center several miles north of downtown. The Ford Highland Park Plant, where the automobile age began with the Model T and the moving assembly line, was four miles further north on the same street. Less than a mile northwest was the massive 15-story General Motors Building, the largest office building in the United States when it was completed in 1922, designed by the noted industrial architect Albert Khan, who also created the Rouge. Huge auto production complexes such as Dodge Main or Cadillac Motor — where I would serve my apprenticeship decades later — were not far away.

Valentiner had written Rivera stating, “The Arts Commission would be pleased if you could find something out of the history of Detroit, or some motif suggesting the development of industry in this town. But in the end, they decided to leave it entirely to you” (Beal, 2010:35). Beal points out “that what Valentiner had in mind at the time may have been something like the Helen Moody Wills paintings, something that had an allegorical slant to it. They were to get something completely different” (Beal, 2010:35). Edsel Ford emphasized he wanted Rivera to look at other industries in Detroit, such as pharmaceuticals, and provided a car and driver for Rivera and Kahlo to see the plants and the city.

But when Rivera visited the Rouge plant, he was mesmerized. He saw the future here, despite the fact that the plant had been hard hit by the Depression: the complex had been shuttered for the last six months of 1931, and thousands of workers had been let go before he arrived (Rosenthal, 2015:67). His fascination with machinery, his respect for workers, and his politics fused in an extraordinary artistic vision, which he filled with breathtaking technical detail. He had found his muse.

Rivera took on the seemingly impossible task of capturing the sprawling Rouge plant in frescoes. The initial commission of two large-format frescoes rapidly expanded to 27 frescoes of various sizes filling the entire room from floor to ceiling. Rivera spent the next two months at the manufacturing complex drawing, pacing, photographing, viewing, and translating these images into large drawings — “cartoons” — as the plans for the frescoes. He demonstrated an exceptional ability to retain in his head — and, I suspect, in his dreams — what he would paint.

Rivera’s Vast Masterpieces

Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” murals are anchored in a specific time and place — a sprawling iconic factory, the Depression decade, and the Motor City — yet they achieve the universal in a way that transcends their origins. Rivera painted workers toiling on assembly lines amid blast furnaces pouring molten iron into cupolas, and through the alchemy of his genius, the art still powerfully — even urgently — speaks to us today. The murals celebrate the contribution of workers, the power of industry, and the promise and peril of science and technology. Rivera weaves together Aztec myths, indigenous world views, Mexican culture, and U.S. industry in a visual tour-de-force that delights, challenges, and provokes. The art is both accessible and profound. You can enjoy it for an afternoon or intensely study it for a lifetime with a sense of constant discovery.

Roberta Smith points out that the murals “form an unusually explicit, site-specific expression of the reciprocal bond between an art museum and its urban setting” (Smith, 2015). Over time, the frescoes have emerged as a visible and vital part of the city, becoming part of Detroit’s DNA. Rivera’s art has been both witness to and, more recently, a participant in history. When he began the project in late spring 1932, Detroit was tottering at the edge of insolvency, and 80 years later, the murals witnessed the city skidding into the largest municipal bankruptcy in history in 2013. A deep appreciation for the murals and their close identification with the spirit and hope of Detroit may have contributed to saving the museum this second time around.

I still vividly remember my own reaction when I first saw the murals. As a young boy, the Rouge, the auto industry, and Detroit seemed to course through our lives. My grandfather Philip Chapman, who was hired at Ford’s Highland Park plant in 1914, wound up spending most of his working life on the line at the Rouge. As a young boy, I watched my grandmother Sophie pack his lunch and fill his thermos with hot coffee before dawn as he hurried to catch the first of three buses that would take him to the plant. When my father, Max, came to Detroit three decades later in the mid-1940s to marry my mother, Rose — they had met on a subway while she was visiting New York City, where he lived — he worked on the line at a Chrysler plant on Jefferson Avenue.

One weekend, when I was 10 or 11 years old, my father took me to see the murals. He drove our 1950 Ford down Woodward Avenue, a broad avenue that bisected the city from the Detroit River to its northern border at Eight Mile Road. Woodward seemed like the main street of the world at the time; large department stores — Hudson’s was second only to Macy’s in size and splendor — restaurants, movie theaters, and office buildings lined both sides of the street north from the river. Detroit had the highest per capita income in the country, a palpable economic power seen in the scale of the factories and the seemingly endless numbers of trucks rumbling across the city to transport parts between factories and finished vehicles to dealers.

We walked up terraced white steps to the main entrance of the Detroit Institute of Arts, an imposing Beaux-Arts building constructed with Vermont marble in what had become the city’s cultural center. As we entered the building, the sounds of the city disappeared. We strolled the gleaming marble floors of the Great Hall, a long gallery topped far above by a beautiful curved ceiling with light flowing through large windows. Imposing suits of medieval armor stood guard in glass cases on either side of us as we crossed the Hall, passed under an arch, and entered a majestic courtyard.

We found ourselves in what is now called the Rivera Court, surrounded on all sides by the “Detroit Industry” murals. The impact was startling. We weren’t simply observing the frescoes, we were enveloped by them. It was a moment of wonder as we looked around at what Rivera had created. Linda Downs captured the feeling: “Rivera Court has become the sanctuary of the Detroit Institute of Arts, a ‘sacred’ place dedicated to images of workers and technology” (Downs, 1999:65). I couldn’t have articulated this sentiment then, but I certainly felt it.

The size, scale, form, pulsing activity, and brilliant color of the paintings deeply impressed me. I saw for the first time where my grandfather went every morning before dawn and why he looked so drawn every night when he came home just before dinner. Many years later, I began to appreciate the art in a much deeper way, but the thrill of walking into the Rivera Court on that first visit has never left. I came to realize that an indelible dimension of great art is a sense of constant discovery and rediscovery. The murals captured the spirit of Detroit then and provide relevance and insight for the times we live in today.

Beal points out that Rivera “worked in a heroic, realist style that was easily graspable” (Beal, 2010:35). A casual viewer, whether a schoolboy or an autoworker from Detroit or a tourist from France, can enjoy the art, yet there is no limit to engaging the frescoes on many deeper levels. In contrast, “throughout Western history, visual art has often been the domain of the educated or moneyed elite,” Jillian Steinhauer wrote in the New York Times. “Even when artists like Gustave Courbet broke new ground by depicting working-class people, the art itself still wasn’t meant for them” (Steinhauer, 2019). Rivera upended this paradigm and sought to paint public art for workers as well as elites on the walls of public buildings. By putting these murals at the center of a great museum in the 1930s through the efforts of Wilhelm Valentiner and Edsel Ford — and more recently, under Graham Beal and the current director Salvador Salort-Pons — the Detroit Institute of Arts opened itself and the murals to new Detroit populations. Detroit is now 80-percent African American, the metropolitan area has the highest number of Arab Americans in the United States, and the Latino population is much larger than when Rivera painted, yet the murals retain their allure and meaning for new generations.

Upon entering the Rivera Court, the viewer confronts two monumental murals facing each other on the north and south walls. The murals not only define the courtyard, they draw you into the engine and assembly lines deep inside the Rouge. The factory explodes with cacophonous activity. The production process is a throbbing, interconnected set of industrial activities. Intense heat, giant machines, flaming metal, light, darkness, and constant movement all converge. Undulating steel rail conveyors carry parts overhead. There were 120 miles of conveyors in the Rouge at the time; they linked all aspects of production and provide a thematic unity to the mural. And even though he’s portraying a production process in Detroit, Rivera’s deep appreciation of Mexican culture and heritage infuses the frescoes. An Aztec cosmology of the underworld and the heavens runs in long panels spanning the top of the main murals and similar imagery appears throughout the frescoes.

On the north wall, a tightly packed engine assembly line, with workers laboring on both sides, is flanked by two huge machine tools — 20 feet or so high — machining the famed Ford V8 engine blocks. Workers in the foreground strain to move heavy cast-iron engine blocks; muscles bulge, bodies tilt, shoulders pull in disciplined movement. These workers are not anonymous. At the center foreground of the north wall, with his head almost touching a giant spindle machine, is Paul Boatin, an assistant to Rivera who spent his working life at the Rouge. He would go on to become a United Auto Workers (UAW) organizer and union leader. Boatin had been present at the Ford Hunger March on that disastrous day in March 1932 and still choked up talking about it many decades later in an interview in the film The Great Depression (1990).

In the foreground, leaning back and pulling an engine block with a white fedora on his head may have been Antonio Martínez, an immigrant from Mexico and the grandfather of Louis Aguilar. A reporter for the Detroit News, Aguilar describes how fierce, at times ugly, pressures during the Great Depression forced many Mexicans to leave Detroit and return to their homeland. The city’s Mexican population plummeted from 15,000 at the beginning of the 1930s to 2,000 at the end of the decade. If the figure in the mural is not his grandfather, Aguilar writes “let every Latino who had family in Detroit around 1932 and 1933 declare him as their own” (Aguilar, 2018).

A giant blast furnace spewing molten metal reigns above the engine production, which bears a striking resemblance to a Charles Sheeler photo of one of the five Rouge blast furnaces. The flames are so intense, and the men so red, you can almost feel the heat. In fact, the process is truly volcanic and symbolic of the turbulent terrain of Mexico itself. It brings to mind Popocatépetl, the still-active 18,000-foot volcano rising to the skies near Mexico City. To the left, above the engine block line, green-tinted workers labor in a foundry, one of the dirtiest, most unhealthy, most dangerous jobs. Meanwhile, a tour group observes the process. Among them in a black bowler hat is Diego Rivera himself.

On the south wall, workers toil on the final assembly line just before the critical “body drop,” where the body of a Model B Ford is lowered to be bolted quickly to the car frame on a moving assembly line below. Once again, through his perspective Rivera draws you into the line. A huge stamping press to the right forms fenders from sheets of steel like those produced in the Rouge facilities. Unlike most of the other machines Rivera portrays, which are state of the art, this press is an older model, selected because of its stylized resemblance to an ancient sculpture of Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of life and death (Beale, 2010:41; Downs, 1999:140, 144).

On the left is another larger tour group, which includes a priest and Dick Tracy, a classic cartoon character of the era. The Katzenjammer Kids — more comic icons of the time — are leaning on the wall watching the assembly line move. The eyes of most of the visitors seem closed, as if they were physically present, but not seeing the intense, occasionally brutal, activity before them. Rivera, in effect, is giving us a few winks and a nod with cartoon characters and unobservant tourists.

~ Harley Shaiken · Fall 2019.

[battlekidx2]

Star Wars the Clone Wars (2008) Thoughts and Review

With season 7 of the clone wars fast approaching I decided to give the series a second shot. The first time I started watching star wars the clone wars I dropped it. I am so glad I gave it a second chance. I watched it chronologically this time around which made a significant difference in the experience. The first time I watched it the show felt incredibly disjointed with characters who had died much earlier suddenly getting introduction episodes and the timeline was all over the place with closing episodes for arcs happening before opening ones. I couldn’t understand why so many people liked this show that was so all over the place, but now that it’s been a few years and there are many lists on how to watch it chronologically returning for the show seemed like a must. This is a truly great cartoon with amazing writing, animation, and characters. It’s a deeply tragic tale where the heroes don’t win every battle. You know the outcome and yet you can’t help but be enthralled by everything that happens. The show becomes steeped in grey the longer it moves along and decidedly doesn’t deal with the absolutes of black and white, light and dark. This show managed to blow me away even though I came in having heard all the praises that were thrown its way. I highly recommend that anyone who hasn’t watched this show go out and start right now.

Animation:

There was a rather large jump in animation quality in season 4. That’s not to say the animation before wasn’t impressive just that it became even better. The character animation is where it was most noticeable. I wasn’t a big fan of Count Dooku or Chancellor Palpatine’s character models at the start, but after the animation bump they were much better. From the clothes, to the hair, to the facial expressions. The character models for everyone were much better. The hair moved now! All jokes aside the clone wars seems to have an endless well of finances for the animation. There were so many different planets and character models utilized throughout the show’s run that there’s no other way they could pull it off. (It was rather famously financed by George Lucas) Considering the last season was released in 2013 I can easily say the animation still looks better than a lot of shows today. I had heard that the animation was good, but I wasn’t quite prepared for how good.

Standout Arcs:

Landing at point rain - This is the episode that really hooked me and made me think this show was something special. There were losses and the plan didn’t go the way our characters wanted. Obi Wan was struck out of the sky and put out of commission because of his injuries. The large scale battles and 3 separate storylines following the 3 generals were all juggles very well and, while not the morally nuanced storytelling that the Clone Wars became known for, it was still a well made war episode that showed the grueling nature of it and what was the start of what was to come. 

Padawan Lost arc - This arc made me realize how much I loved Ahsoka. Not saying I didn’t like her before just that I hadn’t realized how much I had grown to love her character. These episodes did a good job of showing Ahsoka’s growth and how capable she was without her lightsaber, master, or army. The intercutting of the discovery of the other taken padawans that were never searched for with the council telling Anakin not to look for Ahsoka, but to trust in the force shows the disconnect that the Jedi council was beginning to have even with its own order. It shows that their rules against connection was, in a way, pushing them away from the light. This was the beginnings of showing how the order has lost its way. I found myself worrying over Ahsoka and her well being. I wanted her to succeed and come out the other side with the other “prey”. Which was an excellent juxtaposition to the council. Ahsoka lets her attachments help her protect the other prisoners and they get to escape because they act as a unit disproving the council’s decisions on connections. It’s fascinating that an arc that seemed at first to be disconnected to the main theme of the series became intertwined with it. I really like how the clone wars can turn your expectations on its head.

The Umbara Arc - What can I say about this arc that hasn’t already been said. Wow, just wow. This arc is incredible and showcases everything that makes the clone wars great. The animation in this four episode arc is phenomenal and some of the best 3D animation I’ve seen put on TV. The clone wars excels at showing large scale fights and this is no different. It was a marvel to look at. There were so many dark themes that were within this arc. The clones having to come to grips with the corruption of their leader and their own ability to choose despite how horrible the choices they are left with are. The revelation that they were shooting on their own troops in “Carnage on Krell” was harrowing and my shock mirrored that of the clone troopers themselves. The betrayal and hurt that all the troopers were feeling was clear as day and the realization at what they had to do to Krell, a leader they were programmed to trust, not only foreshadowed order 66 but also showed that casualties of war aren’t just people but also beliefs and worldview. The growth that the clones, especially Rex and Fives, underwent was amazing. These two became some of my favorite star wars characters with this arc. Fives with his staunch beliefs that he and all clones should stick to what they believe to be right and Rex with his realization that his loyalty and programming were misplaced, that everything that he believed and fought for may have been a lie and corrupt all along. We’ve seen the senate treating the clones like objects and products, but to see the reality of it on the battlefield was a different experience entirely. When they took Umbara it didn’t feel like a victory for the clones or to me. It felt hollow and saddening. We know how this all ends and having the clones humanized in such a way makes everything that happens later all the more hard hitting. This arc was truly great and it alone makes watching the clone wars worth it.

I also really like how it was a reversal of order 66 with the jedi general betraying his clones. It showed that clones banding together can take down even a prepared jedi, alibi an overconfident one. The conflicting emotions that the clones go through when disobeying their orders opens nuance to order 66 and their possible refusal to carry it out. The struggle of going against their programming is at the focus of this arc. The eventual retcon of this struggle by having the control chips in their brain is simultaneously something I don’t like and something I think makes sense. I don’t like it because it removes the implications and possibility to disobey the order on the clone’s end, but it also would be poor planning on Palpatine’s part to let everything hinge on the clones obeying their programming and not question it. The chips also lead to some of my favorite episodes with fives discovering order 66. This doesn’t effect my love of this arc I just wanted to voice my opinion on this point.

Darth Maul Ascendant arc and the Lawless - This arc was phenomenal. I don’t know what to say. I loved just about everything about this arc. From Darth Maul and his revenge against Obi Wan to the fall of Mandalore by its own hands. This arc was beautifully tragic. Nothing went right in this arc for anyone. Obi Wan couldn’t save Satine, Bo Katan couldn’t save Mandalore, Maul couldn’t save his brother or himself. The most popular shot from the episode “The Lawless”:

Perfectly encapsulates how futile and (once again) tragic this episode is. Obi Wan is just a silhouette against the backdrop of explosions and fighting. He’s so insignificant and small. He can’t win. He can’t save Mandalore. No matter how hard he tried. He’s just one person in the middle of this mandalorian civil war. This entire arc is filled with shots and scenes that are like this one, beautiful to look at and yet portraying immense tragedy. And I think this juxtaposition was intentional. You can’t take your eyes away despite all the horrible things happening before you. I think these episodes were some of the best animated content I have ever consumed. There are quite a few clone wars arcs that make me feel this way, but I think this is my favorite or at the very least contains my favorite episode in “The Lawless”. It is easily something I will never forget.

Ahsoka on Trial - This arc is masterful in how it juxtaposes Ahsoka and Anakin’s journey’s. Both have to deal with their disillusionment with the jedi order and the perceived lack of trust the order places in them. With the ending shot (shown below) of Anakin and Ahsoka foreshadowing through lighting the path their choices will bring them down. Ahsoka has a lit up sky behind her while Anakin has the looming, dark jedi temple behind him. Ahsoka continues down the stairs into the light having turned her back on the growing darkness within the jedi order and tentatively towards a path we cannot see but has at least some brightness and hope. While Anakin is stuck going back to an order he doesn’t have faith in feeling like he has failed his task in protecting Ahsoka. This arc is what the show felt like it was culminating towards with Ahsoka. We knew something was going to happen that would take her out of Anakin’s life before the events of Revenge of the Sith, but the way this played out was better than I could have imagined. I couldn’t help getting emotional over Anakin and Ahsoka parting ways and knowing how Anakin’s story plays out just added to my sadness over it all. There is also a very interesting parallel between Ahsoka and Ventress. They are both force wielders that were betrayed by the order that they followed and seeing their interactions after all this time was fascinating. I also couldn’t truly argue with Barriss when she voiced her reason for attacking the jedi temple. We’ve seen through all our main characters the shortcomings of the jedi and the corruption within the senate that the jedi work with. What Anakin says in Revenge of the Sith “From my point of view the jedi are evil” suddenly makes so much more sense after watching this series and especially this arc. This managed to add so much to the prequel trilogy, at least in my opinion.

Fives and Order 66 - I can’t believe the show decided to show someone actually discovering the truth behind order 66. I was rooting for fives throughout this entire arc and was shocked and sad to see he died so close to getting out the truth (despite knowing that he wouldn’t succeed). I had grown very attached to fives with all the episodes he was a part of and liked how his sense of duty was to doing what was right and saving as many lives as he could showing how despite the clones being programmed they all had different interpretations of their programming. This arc showed how capable the chancellor was at covering his tracks. He had a hand in every event that transpired during this series and yet has everyone fooled in one way or another. No one really knows the truth about him. After the episode “Orders” I had to pause the show, sit back, and let what had just happened sink in (like with many other episodes). How could this show tell storylines that I knew were doomed to end only one way and yet still completely emotionally invest me? And I think that question is just a testament to how good this series really is and how good this arc is. 

I will say that easily the weakest episodes to me were the ones focusing on the droids such as R2D2 and C3PO. I like them as support characters, but their spotlight episodes were a slog to get through and I probably won’t rewatch any of them. The good news is that these are far and few between, but there is an arc with them in season 5 that I’m not too fond of especially since the rest of season 5 was phenomenal. There were also a few senate based episodes I struggled through, but most of them I was interested by because of how you could see the corruption and how the senate themselves had begun to see the war as a chance to profit and saw the clone troopers as disposable, easily renewable weapons. It was at times fascinating.

Characters:

Ahsoka - I love Ahsoka Tano. I’ve heard that she wasn’t well received upon her introduction. I’m not entirely sure why because I didn’t have a problem with her in the clone wars movie. She wasn’t my favorite, but she had a lot of room to grow and I wanted to see what they would do with her. The very premise of Anakin having a padawan is fascinating to me because while we know what she isn’t around for revenge of the sith we don’t know why. Is she killed? Does something drastic happen that removes her from the story? Does she stay a jedi or fall to the sith? These were all possibilities and thoughts that I had when I started watching the clone wars. I made sure to stay away from spoilers because I like it when I get to watch something unfold. Ahsoka’s arc is fantastic. We get to see her transform into an idealistic, overconfident youngling to a calm and confident jedi. She, like Obi Wan and Anakin, goes through trials and sees her faith is the Jedi order shaken. The disillusionment and what paths it takes them all on is really interesting. Unlike Obi Wan who still wields and believes is the light side or Anakin who wields and falls to the dark Ahsoka becomes something in the middle, not light or dark. They all portray the different paths that their disillusionment can take. Ahsoka’s decision to become something in the middle echoes the sentiment that you should not deal in absolutes, which is a message within the series. Ahsoka’s decision to leave the Jedi order and forge her own path is what I feel the story was always culminating towards with her. This is why I’m excited for Ahsoka vs Darth Maul in season 7. They are both former apprentices that were betrayed by the order that they had sworn their loyalty towards, but while Maul focuses on vengeance and continues down the path of the dark side, Ahsoka focuses on the future and taking her own path separate from the light or dark. They are perfect opposites to one another in how they dealt with their similar situations. Ahsoka is the perfect example of the idea that the power doesn’t matter, it’s what you do with it. She chooses to still do what she knows is right despite not wielding the dark side. I’m really happy that she survived the series and the empire’s reign. I can’t wait to see what they do next with her.

Obi Wan Kenobi - I really liked what they did with him in this series. We got to see how his emotions did clash with his rigid adherence to the jedi code. His most telling moments were in his greatest failures. Even in the darkest times he didn’t lose hope. He continued to believe that a better future was possible in spite of all of his loss. And I think that is admirable. Because we are so often given characters that are either overly idealistic or overly pessimistic and I can understand both of these archetypes, but Obi Wan has seen the worst of people and lost so much and yet he still maintains hope and I think that is powerful. It may also be because I am a huge fan of Obi Wan. But his hope also has its downsides even within the show because it extended to his belief in the jedi order and their code. It prevented him from being with the one he loved and creates a divide between him and Anakin where they can’t really see eye to eye. The dynamic between him and Anakin is amazing and made my rewatch of Revenge of the Sith and their battle within the film so much more heartbreaking. Obi Wan is a character that has to do something and help where he can, much like Anakin, but where Anakin is brash and reckless Obi wan is calm and diplomatic. They are set up as amazing foils to one another. I just love how much this show fleshed out Obi Wan’s character and showed more to him than the movies got to. This show did a fantastic job with Obi Wan and made his transformation from who he is in the prequels to who he is in the original trilogy make much more sense. (I highly recommend SUPER FRAME’s review of this show. I really agree with his thoughts on Obi Wan in this show)

Anakin - Anakin is a character that unlike Obi Wan I wasn’t the biggest fan of coming into this series. I didn’t hate him, but I much preferred his Darth Vader counterpart. This series changes this and I now like Anakin much more and find his fall to the dark side to be just as fascinating as his life as Darth Vader. We get to see that he really does want to save everyone and how his attachment and possessiveness lead to him doing horrible things even from the very beginning to protect those he cares about. His protectiveness becomes closer and closer to possessiveness as the series progresses. This is most noticeable after Ahsoka leaves the order and Padme decides to work with Clovis. Anakin is controlling and demands/orders her to not work with Clovis. He tries to take away her choice in the matter. This is eerily close to who he is in revenge of the sith even if it is just for a moment before it gets shoved back down. All of these moments (once again) make his turn in Revenge of the Sith very believable because it’s clear that he can be capable of the things he does in that film and onwards. He was always teetering on the edge and he just needed a push to start his descent. The tragedy of Anakin Skywalker actually became a tragedy.

This entire show seems to be a story of disillusionment, of loss, of tragedy. What starts out to seem like a tale of triumph and valor is revealed to be a facade for the bleak reality that is war. Even the “good guys” have lost their way. Time and time again we see the council and senate make decisions that aren’t what would be considered the right thing to do. The senate looks at clones like products. Disposable, reorderable weapons to wage a war that they themselves are safe from as long as they stay on Coruscant. The Jedi order has lost their way. They are no longer peacekeepers, but weapons and warriors that perpetuate war by siding with the republic. They can’t help planets like Mandalore because they side with the republic, planets that tear themselves apart and are their own worst enemy. They are supposed to help the people and the further into the war they get the less people they can protect and the more people that die. The clone wars is known to be a tragic tale where neither side wins and both were manipulated. This show perfectly captures the tragedy. I couldn’t help, but understand Barriss’ scorning remarks about the Jedi Order by the end of the series while still sympathizing with Anakin, Ahsoka, and Obi Wan’s desperate attempts to do what is right in spite of their terrible circumstances.

There is too much about the show that I want to talk about and this could probably continue for much longer, but I can’t endlessly add to this if I want to get it out before season 7 airs. There were some fantastic arcs like the mortis arc that I didn’t talk about and that’s because I wasn’t sure where to start with them. I would like to maybe later come back once I find the words and talk about them. I found this show got better with almost every season with season 5 being the best, especially since almost every episode was in the correct order. There were many highs within the series and it managed to expand a lot on the Star wars world, characters, and mythos. I liked how they brought Maul back and what they did with Ventress. Maul was something that easily could have gone wrong and Ventress is a character they easily could have just written off or killed. These are two risks that I felt paid off and there were many more. It took risks and managed to effectively comment on the justification and morality of war. It has arcs I find to be some of the best I’ve seen in animation and left me awestruck. I cannot wait for the 7th season. I’m so glad this show is getting the opportunity it deserves to end properly and tie up its loose ends. I will watch the episodes as they drop and I hope everyone who reads this will as well.

(I apologize if some of this seems jumbled. I think I may have a concussion so writing this was a bit more difficult that it should have been) 

[karilamari]

Psychoanalysis + Film

Freud/Lacan> Julia Kristve/Mikkel Borch

Lacan’s definition of anxiety

Anxiety: is the sensation of the desire of the other; feeling of the over-proximity of the desire of the “other” (the other could be you)

We get anxiety when we don't know what we are for the other. That your expected to give something to them based on how they say you. If I don't know how they see me, I don't know who I am. When i don't have the crutch of my image to lean on (and the belief that image is me)  I don't  know what place I have as an object in their desire. 

Desire is something that sneaks in under the guide of demand. 

Our strategies to mange anxiety really need to be strategies to negotiate our relationship with the desire of the other. What they want from us, what we want from them and our ability to control the proximity to that desire and carve out a space of our own.

Applying a psychoanalytic framework to film. GOOD summation of Lacan’s theory and how its been applied re male gaze

The mirror stage is fundamentally narcissistic “because narcissistic identification is incomplete, Lacan argues that it needs to be filled in through imagination. Imagination is a self-gratifying image through which the individual sees himself/herself as perfect. For Lacan desire points to a fundamental lack in the structure of the subject that we try to appease through temporary gratifications and demands that we place on ourselves (consumerism, sexual satisfactions, careerism, etc)

Symbolic identification pertains to how the big other sees us, judging us and pushing us to give our best satisfying his commands (god, parents) 

Symbolic order > meaning to our lives > identified by how the BIG OTHER (god) sees us

Laura Mulvey applies Lacanian concepts to film analysis in “Pleasure and Narrative” 1975Fetishization arrests the flow of action, threatens the unity of the narrative

The male director is the one who controls “the gaze”

It s an erotic look of the male hero who moves the action forward, which is a REFLECTION , of “the ideal ego” of the spectator

Woman in this context, contrasts the male and is a screen for the male fantasy 

A source of anxiety that needs to be investigated, punished, or forgiven

OR can be idealized (fetishized)

Fetishization arrests the flow of action, threatens the unity of the narrative

In the book, “Endless Nights: Cinema and Pyschoanalysis, Parallel Histories”, the focuses of the work of Freud/Lacan theorists, does not surpass the year 1962 and excludes more modern theories inclusive of queer sexuality and post-colonial subjectivities. Book Review 

Julia Kristev, challenges or supplements? Lacan’s theory by adding a feminist/women’s perspective:

"according to Birgit Schippers, the semiotic is a realm associated with the musical, the poetic, the rhythmic, and that which lacks structure and meaning. It is closely tied to the "feminine", and represents the undifferentiated state of the pre-Mirror Stage infant.”

Symbolic v. Semotioc

SYMBOLIC "Upon entering the Mirror Stage, the child learns to distinguish between self and other, and enters the realm of shared cultural meaning, known as the symbolic.”Kristeva describes the symbolic as the space in which the development of language allows the child to become a "speaking subject," and to develop a sense of identity separate from the mother. This process of separation is known as abjection, whereby the child must reject and move away from the mother in order to enter into the world of language, culture, meaning, and the social. - ASSOCIATED w the male, the law, structure

Semotic: Kristeva departs from Lacan in the idea that even after entering the symbolic, the subject continues to oscillate between the semiotic and the symbolic. Therefore, rather than arriving at a fixed identity, the subject is permanently "in process”.

Because female children continue to identify to some degree with the mother figure, they are especially likely to retain a close connection to the semiotic. This continued identification with the mother may result in what Kristeva refers to in Black Sun (1989) as melancholia (depression), given that female children simultaneously reject and identify with the mother figure.

After abjecting the mother, subjects retain an unconscious fascination with the semiotic, desiring to reunite with the mother, while at the same time fearing the loss of identity that accompanies it. Slasher films thus provide a way for audience members to safely reenact the process of abjection by vicariously expelling and destroying the mother figure.

Mikkel Borch- Jacobsen

"In this paper, Borch-Jacobsen presented evidence that psychoanalytic transference is a form of altered state of consciousness, comparable with those that had existed in the work of pschotherapies which predate psychoanalysis, from Shamanism to the hypnotism of the Nancy School, by way of animal magnetism. He averred that "le phénomène du transfert n'est rien d'autre, de l'aveu même de Freud, que le resurgissement, au sein du dispositif analytique, de la relation (du « rapport ») caractéristique du dispositif hypnotique : dépendance, soumission ou encore… valorisation exclusive de la personne du médecin" ("On Freud's own admission, the phenomenon of transference is nothing other than the resurgence, in the bosom of [psycho]analytical techniques, of the characteristic relationship (of 'rapport') of hypnosis techniques: dependence, submission, or again... exclusive worship of the doctor").[4] He emphasised that there is consequently an important risk of suggestion on the part of the psychoanalyst, even more so when the psychoanalyst himself is not conscious of these phenomena.”

Bertrand Méheust rebuked Borch-Jacobsen for accepting without further discussion a dated view of hypnotherapy, bequeathed by the positivist institutional medicine of the 19th century.[6] Furthermore, he argues that hypnosis follows a state of absolute passivity and therefore hurts well-being, and that hypnosis is induced in someone in which all consciousness is disconnected, a being totally immersed in the inner self, indeed a puppet who thinks and lives totally by the workings of another.

[leafenclaw]

Tag your 10 favorite characters of all time

They can be from every book/movie/TV show/Video game, then tag 10 people.

Tagged by @jamlocked, thank you! :D

But also, oh god. XD

Early on as I was making that list, I encountered three problems: 1 - Most of my favourite characters of all time are actually variations on a single character archetype, with a whole damn lot of them even wearing the same name (or similar enough lol). 2 - Most of the ones that don’t fall under this category are from the same 2-3 source material, unless... 3 - ... they’re from sources that I cannot in good conscience recommend anymore, like for example books from MZ Bradley or OS Card that were extremely significant and shaped who I am, but considering what their authors turned out to be, enough said lol.

So instead of a “my favourites of all time” list, I just picked characters that made a significant and lasting impact on me, even if they didn’t turn out to be my absolute favourite from their media source. I hope that’s okay!

Cut for length, because as usual I got chatty.

In no particular order, aside perhaps for the first two: 

1 - Jamie Moriarty from Elementary. My everything. <3 She’s made of... honestly, pretty much all the archetypes I inevitably fall for, male or female, but somehow she rises above the sum of her parts and I cannot even start expressing how much she means to me. Other characters in the same general type would be of course all the Moriartys, Magneto, Gellert Grindelwald, Red John, Alice Morgan, etc. A lot of those characters are heavily defined by their sky-high intelligence and deviousness, but more importantly by the shapes they leave behind when they aren’t on screen/on the pages or when they’re hiding behind masks and facets that never encompass them as a whole, and by the way they always make a extremely lasting impact on the protagonist. When it’s a TV show or a movie, the use of camera language (lighting, colour schemes, camera plans, etc.) around them is always tightly defined and significant, and when it comes to literature, the same effect is applied through metaphors and symbolism. It makes the layers to those characters absolutely endless and when it comes to storytelling, it’s the one thing that’s guaranteed to hook me straight away. (Jamie is also obviously my favourite from her source material, even though Sherlock comes high in second place, and Watson a close third. And I also have a baffling soft spot for Joshua Vikner that probably deserves a mention lol.)

2 - Vegeta from Dragon Ball. Started a genocidal alien who regularly committed mass murder, ended a devoted, self-sacrificial husband and father of two (three if you count his son from the future). Still the best redemption arc I’ve ever seen (and probably will ever see) in any kind of media ever. (He is also -by far- my favourite from his source material.)

3 - Luna Lovegood from Harry Potter. My fae child <3 Literally the only female character I ever identified with in that whole series. People close to me still regularly tell me I channel her lol. (Favourite from her source material: it’s a toss between Gellert Grindelwald and Severus Snape.)

4 - Jareth from Labyrinth. My (other) fae asshole child found in a trash bin lol. Love of my life before I was 10, kept me sane and believing in magic when I most needed to. I learned contact juggling because of him. (He is my fave, although I love Sarah even when she’s being a dramatic whiny teen.)

5 - Rebecca Anderson from The Mentalist. I have a strong and everlasting love for pretty much all characters in TM, but this one extremely minor character made a chilling impact on me by the fact she’s exactly who I would have turned out to be had I not made one tiny little change at a crucial point in my life. So she makes the list if only for that. (My fave TM character is Lisbon, but the way she acts and reacts baffles me on a daily basis. I understand and identify with Jane much better. Fighting hard in third place would be Lorelei Martins and Madeleine Hightower, I think, but I truly love them all and by this point it’s just nuances.)

6 - Erik from Phantom of the Opera. This one stabbed me with a spoon and ate my heart out lol. I care a lot more for the original Leroux version than the Broadway/movie version, but the absolute top iteration of this character is written by Susan Kay in the pastiche Phantom and I bet every serious PotO fan will agree. (He is -by far- my fave, with the Daroga a distant second.)

7 - Eurus Holmes from BBC Sherlock. This one took me completely by surprise. One of the shittiest character arcs I’ve ever seen, and yet. She’s the one that pulled me out of the meta mindset I had been stuck into since season 2 and gutted me like a fish before I had time to realise what happened. (Jim and Irene share the top spot for their source material, but all three Holmes siblings are fighting for third place.)

8 - Hans from Frozen. The one character that made me realise the storytelling & camera language studies paid off lol (”wtf Disney doesn’t design its princes that way, there’s something off about him!”). I genuinely hated him right off the bat when I saw that movie because he made my gut twist with so many red flags, but the moment he revealed himself as a villain things clicked into place and now I love him lol (I’m so predictable xD). He shares the “hiding behind smoke & mirrors & facets of himself” with the Moriarty archetype, which makes him fascinating to watch and analyse, and for that alone I hope to see more of him in Frozen 2 because I never get enough of that kind of character. (Elsa used to be my favourite, but lately there’s been a disconnect. I’m not sure if I just out-grew her or if it’s a depression thing. As for Hans, it’s a strange kind of love/hate/fascination thing that I couldn’t define.)

9 - Clarice Starling from Silence of the Lambs. For the sole reason that her fascination for Hannibal and the pull that makes her come back even though she knows he’s terrible for her mental health made me feel seen, and also validated my own fascination and love for villains, which people around me always found strange. (Obviously, my fave is Hannibal. I wish the recent show about him wasn’t so gore. Can’t watch it because I’m too sensitive to on-screen violence and body horror.)

10 - Laure/Mickaël from Tomboy This one is a little harder to explain, and to be honest I’m not sure I really want to. That movie is... questionable lol but maybe you’ll have an idea why that character made such an impact on me if you saw it. (Or maybe not. It’s okay.)

Runner-ups: Link from A Link to the Past, Sheik/Zelda from Ocarina of Time, Jake from The Dark Tower, Scotty Valens from Cold Case, Scar from The Lion King, Billy Elliot from Billy Elliot, Arya Stark from ASOIAF, Garraty from The Long Walk, L from Death Note, and many many others.

I have exactly 10 followers, one of them tagged me, and I tagged 5 of you earlier on something else so I’m not going to harass you people further. XD Steal this if you want to!

[itsclydebitches]

Dragon Ball. Dragon Ball Z Dragon Ball Super. Which is your favorite?

Oh, anon. You poor soul. You’ve activated my current obsession. Okay. I preface this by saying that DBZ, imo, is the CLASSIC. Frieza, Cell, and Buu? Iconic. DBZ is what I think of as the core of the DB franchise and I adore it accordingly. That being said… I’m really, really loving Dragon Ball Super. 

(And I’m totally gonna tell you why because you made the mistake of starting this conversation in the first place :D)

I’m just? A sucker for lore filled with fallible gods?? This is my long-lived love of Greek mythology rearing its head. Even back in DBZ the Supreme Kai was instantly a favorite of mine. Yeah, yeah, the whole fandom rags on him for supposedly being “useless,” but that’s precisely why I love him? He starts out as this mysterious, incredibly powerful figure–powerful enough to scare the crap out of Piccolo–and then very quickly falls off that pedestal, making him relatable and humanized. Shin clearly has a shit ton of trauma from, you know, watching Buu kill and/or absorb his entire family. He’s been forced to take on a job meant for five and he definitely hasn’t been trained (or at least fully trained) for this particular position. He comes to Earth expecting to use mortals as a tool, as one would expect from a high-ranking god, and is just totally blindsided by how powerful they are. It’s an instant double-edged sword. On the one hand hell yeah defeating Buu just got a whole lot more likely. On the other hand, existential crisis much? Who am I–who are all the gods–if we’re not intrinsically more powerful, knowledgeable, or spiritually sturdier than the mortals we watch over? Goku, Vegeta, and especially Gohan upset the presumed hierarchy. It’s why we get such a good dichotomy between Shin and Kibito. Shin rolls with this new information and embraces it fully. Okay. Mortals are stronger than us in so many ways, how wonderful! We can learn from them and rely on them, forming equal partnerships to achieve our goals. Kibito is stuck in his assumptions. How dare you set foot on this world? How dare you think you can pull out the Z Sword? How dare you think yourself equal to a god? 

It’s a familiar theme for DB: humanizing the latest, all-powerful entity. And each new introduction becomes more extreme.

Kami was our original god… who got some awkward moments. Then King Kai is the top guy…who loves lame jokes and lets Goku tear up his sacred planet in the name of training. Then Shin, Supreme Kai of the whole damn universe… who is also an anxious bean Just Trying His Best. It’s a theme I love because it upholds humanity (or in this case Saiyans adopted by humanity) as beings of endless potential. DB is all about pushing past your limits, but that doesn’t just apply to physical power. It also ties into upending the status quo; showing those who think themselves arrogantly better–in this case the gods–that no, we all have worth here. When the chips fall it’s mortals who consistently manage what the gods cannot, reaching a point where, ki-wise at least, they’re indistinguishable from gods, raising the question of why they were ever above them in the first place. They’re not. We’re all on equal footing once those assumptions are acknowledged and done away with. Ancient Kais can like dirty magazines. Supreme Kais can have panic attacks. Destroyers can love pizza as much as the next, average anime watcher.

Indeed, we see in the Tournament of Power that these rules now apply to Goku in his god state. He might have reached incredible power that everyone else thought impossible… but that doesn’t make the rest of the cast “below” him. It’s only because of his friends–presumably “useless” friends like Krillin and Tien–that allow him to enter the tournament and get as far as he did. It’s his old mentors who he has far outpaced that remind him he still has much to learn and who help Goku tap into Ultra Instinct in the first place. It’s a simple android we haven’t seen in years who manages to win the whole damn thing. The story consistently applies that same message of equality and worth to everyone, including our original paragon who has now reached the status of the very beings he’s worked to outpace. Rather than turning Goku into the hypocrite, DB keeps reminding him that no amount of power is going to change his or anyone else’s worth. He’s still BFFs with Krillin. Still married to Chi-Chi. Still needs other “weak” people like Bulma to help him when things get tough. No time machine, money, or strategic smarts? Sorry, no win.

In short, Dragon Ball Super takes that fantastic message and dials it up to 11. Now suddenly we’ve got a scary Destroyer God… who is easily swayed by tasty Earth food and a good nap spot. Angels who are equally humanized in their humor and love of mortal creations. An omnipotent ruler who is recognizably child-like. It both makes Zeno lovable and downright terrifying. He’s human enough to form friendships and use his power inappropriately. Zeno has the capacity to fall in love with a simple handshake as well as destroy an entire universe with the same detachment that we might, say, walk through an ant hill. Why did I do it? Because I could and no one has taught me yet that this might be something I shouldn’t do. Everyone has the capacity for growth.

And it’s so goddamn funny? Literally this scene is everything to me because it slams godly assumptions together with simplistic, mortal friendships, then lets that contrast play out. The most powerful being ever, creator of it all, the god that makes every other god shake in their boots wants… a friend? Okay! Our equally intimidating Grand Priest cracking up at this development? Whis losing his shit in the background? Shin straight up fainting? Goku pressing his shiny new god button because who DOESN’T press a button when you’re suddenly presented with one? All of it slays me. Forget stories where you endlessly bow before your supposed betters, knowing that you will never be able to even fathom their power. I want more stories like this, where the hero introduces enough kindness and brazen communication that it upends everyones’ expectations and fun, crazy new relationships form. Goku moved from utter shock at learning the Supreme Kai even existed to hoisting him over his shoulder like a drunk friend who is still refusing to head home. I love this weird-ass family.

All of which of course introduces the opposite as well. What if we’re given Zamasu, a fallible god whose imperfections don’t result in him becoming another quirky family member, but lead him down a path that endangers the entire multiverse? Though Super hasn’t commented on it explicitly yet, we’re also starting to toy with the idea of exactly how “human” the top gods are and how much growth they are capable of. For example, I’m fascinated by the Grand Priest. The anime makes him out to be far darker than he is in the manga, and I know there’s a disconnect between the two, so I’m not currently inclined to think that he’s the end Big Bad. Rather, he seems to actually have a stronger moral sense than Zeno–he comments on how awful it is that mortals riot and kill one another after learning about the Tournament–but as Zeno’s subordinate, and being well aware of how easy it can be to displease him, he’s not in a good position to sway him. We see him introducing tiny bits of logic to the Zenos (like stopping the fight between Goku and Toppo in the anime), but that’s a far safer thing to suggest then, say, “How about we don’t erase a ton of universes at once, hmm?”

Like his angel children, the Grand Priest ultimately exists to serve his Lord… but Goku and his friends are in no such position. Not as overtly, anyway. Created through evolution and developing their own ideals, they have the freedom to challenge and ultimately teach all those high-level gods, including Zeno. He says it himself in that clip: “No one will try. You can do what no one else can do!” Goku, both as a mortal and a very straight forward one, has the capacity to charge past those expectations and hit on something grand.

However, we see with Whis that, wow… maybe angels really are so far removed from us that they don’t care in any meaningful way. Whis seems like a friend, but when push came to shove he wasn’t very upset about his entire universe–and a Destroyer he’s known for who knows how many thousands of years–getting destroyed. We can attribute this apathy to him assuming it will all turn out alright (if anyone would realize that whoever wins can just use their wish to revert everything back to normal, it’s Whis), but even if he actually doesn’t care much right now… he’s learning too. Whis went from shrugging about Beerus destroying the Earth (at least he has his leftovers!) to telling Trunks and Mai how to break more time rules–rules Whis originally thought were more important than anything else–just so they could get a happy ending. We’ve seen him form a legitimate friendship with Bulma. He does little things like waving a Universe 7 flag and having them hold hands that demonstrate care, outside of practicalities (like delivering Bulla so Vegeta can fight). He seems more invested in challenging the status quo than his brother and even his brother, notably, slips up and uses “Father” instead of “Grand Priest,” demonstrating a certain level of familial love that can sometimes override pure duty.

Vados copies Whis and sits with the Universe 7 team, shrugging off the other gods’ disgust. Whis then shows legit pride in Goku managing Ultra Instinct. It’s GREAT watching these beings move from seeing mortals as inconsequential specs in the multiverse to individuals worthy of their time, attention, and respect. We’re seeing that development with Whis most of all, slowly but surely.

And it helps that our protagonist is really worthy of that respect this arc. Beyond his innate capacity for kindness, Goku is wonderfully smart in Super. I myself have mentioned that being naive and battle obsessed to the point of endangering others is kind of his thing, but Super hits a wonderful middle ground. Goku is the one who thinks to use the future Zeno to destroy Zamasu. He figures out a good portion of Zamasu’s plan. He thought up the idea of using dead warriors in the Tournament of Power and instantly has a way of negating the danger Frieza would pose: let’s use Baba so he can only come back for 24 hours. The anime (strangely…) emphasizes how the Tournament is supposedly Goku’s fault, but Vados reminds everyone that Zeno planned to erase the universes regardless. Though he didn’t intend the outcome, Goku’s suggestion of a tournament gave all universes a fighting chance. Much more importantly, it introduced the reward that would ultimately save them all. Goku’s got a good head on his shoulders this time around and the story emphasizes that it’s his capacity to care that saves far more than his brute power. Sparing enemies leads to them turning over a new leaf. Cultivating a diverse family results in a team with the strength and strategy to win. The ability to look at anyone–even Zeno–and smile as you shake their hand results in allies who can save the day when your own strength fails. IT’S ABOUT LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP AND I’M A WEAK GOODY-GOODY.

I just… fucking love DBS. It takes all of the best underdog themes of the DB franchise–Can a low-class warrior become the best? Can a normal human woman gain the love of a prince? Can mortals ever stand side-by-side with gods?–and homes in on those questions, emphasizing them to an almost meta extent. I could give you another hundred reasons of exactly how much I’ve enjoyed these new stories… but I should stop now lol

Last note though Ultra Instinct is AWESOME

[douxreviews]

The Good Place - ‘The Book of Dougs’ Review

By Lamounier

"We're four Oreos from heaven."

It turns out the Soul Squad landed on a side sector of the Good Place, just not the main area.

And that was enough to make Eleanor super anxious. How can you be this close to heaven and not make it? After all they have been through (and she just remembers a tiny portion of it), it's understandable that all she wants is just to rest in peace.

But there is more going on in Eleanor's mind, and it's brought to the surface when Chidi tries to cheer her up (by dressing up as a mailman and looking damn fine) and she bursts into tears. Because she has never been this happy and she fears it will go away. Eleanor never had a meaningful, lasting connection with anyone in her lifetime like the one she has with the members of the Soul Squad, especially with Chidi. She freaked out earlier in the season over the possibility of losing them, and her insecurity pops out here again. But as Chidi tells her, she should focus on the now. I love that quote by Tolstoy because it's so truthful. The past can't be changed and it's naive to think that we can assure the future will be a certain way. We never know what's coming next, and best we can do is live the now, the only time we have any power over. Eleanor gets the message, and since she can't guarantee she will be with Chidi forever, she decides they better off consume their love while they can. And so they hit the sheets.

Another character who has trouble dealing with her emotions is Janet, and it happens after she learns that Jason and Tahani discovered she has feelings for him. She's still exhausted from keeping the four humans inside her void and doesn't want to deal with emotions while pretending to be a Neutral Janet. I loved Tahani trying to take care of the situation, particularly her misguided attempt to end her marriage with Jason. Her certificate was adorable, albeit incorrect. I mean, death literally didn't part them, in fact, it brought them together in the first place, but, okay, that second part she doesn't remember.

I liked the resolution to that subplot, which focused more on the ladies and less on the man in the middle, and I also liked how the three of them just ended up group-crying, no matter how silly Jason's inclusion in the moment was. These people can keep being rebooted and they'll still grow the strongest ties to one another. Although, since we are talking about it, this season better not end on another reboot.

While the humans and Janet worked their issues, Michael continued his journey to save humanity and it was a rather frustrating experience since the Useless Committee of Uselessness did nothing to help him. I mean, 1,400 years to select and align an investigative team? I know the writers were poking fun at endless bureaucracy and supposedly good people that just sit around and do nothing useful, but come on. There you have a demon trying his hardest to save humanity against a bunch of self-proclaimed good guys who do nothing more than pass memorandum to each other saying how concerned they are (that was totally a jab at social media activists, right?). Are those guys just that clueless or are they not really good to begin with?

In any case, Michael realizes through a quick chat with Tahani that the Bad Place isn't tampering with the points system, but in reality the world has become so complex and people so interconnected that being a good person became harder. Buying your grandmother roses would earn a few points 500 years ago, but now it will actually lose you some points, because such an action will indirectly condone pollution of the planet and slavery.

Okay, so, I want to nitpick this a little bit. First, even though we are very connected now, there are still a few groups who are largely disconnected or completely isolated. I understand that the writers of The Good Place live in the super connected side of humanity, but that's not how it is for everyone. However, this is a fantasy show and I can let that issue slide if I assume that in the world of The Good Place everyone is connected, no exceptions. My biggest problem with the logic behind Michael's realization, though, is that our stand against slavery, for instance, is rather new. 500 years ago, slavery was normalized and voices against it were dissonant noises, not the choir. So if today the biggest problem for humanity is how complex the world has become, back then it would be the lack of a more consolidated notion of human rights. In both eras, though, I can see a handful of people making it to the Good Place.

But, again, this is a fantasy show and I'm probably being too dense, because, leaving logic aside, I was rather fascinated by the concept of how far the ramifications of our actions should be taken into our account. People become vegan when they stop and think about how much their eating habits contribute to the abuse of animals. I have a colleague at work who is a vegetarian, so not really a vegan, but he told me he has a few rules, such as buying the most expensive eggs (according to him, the cheaper the egg, the more the chicken suffered). But he'd still be totally forked in the points system, because transportation of the eggs probably polluted atmosphere and so on. We have been speculating for a while the likelihood of the points system setting the bar too high, and now we have proof that's exactly what it does. However, in our real world, should we put our actions under the microscope? Are we to blame for the unintended consequences of our good deeds? I love how this show keeps asking some really interesting moral questions as it takes us along the ride.

Favorite Things/Smells

Eleanor: Typhoon Falls, her favorite water park. "Chlorine, suntan lotion, Band-Aids and a thick cloud of teen hormones."

Chidi: either warm pretzels or the smell of absolute moral truth. They do smell alike, Janet confirmed.

Jason: Black Bortles holding the Super Bowl MVP trophy. Also, weed.

Tahani: a curtain closing between first class and economy.

Doorman: frogs, obviously.

Bonus: Eleanor's tears tasted like the nacho cheese from her favorite movie theater.

Too bad we didn't learn what Janet's and Michael's favorite things/smells were. Janet's would certainly have something to do with Jason.

Other Bits

- There is only one door for humans to enter the Good Place, the official entrance.

- Everything Eleanor used to try to unlock the other door to the Good Place turned to glitter.

- Jason spoke of the time they were in Janet's void as if it had been ages ago.

- Janet worried that her emotions would come out of her butt.

- Michael's jawline is indeed great.

- I'm usually annoyed at characters who are too naive, but Gwendolyn was adorable.

- The note on the champagne Eleanor and Chidi opened said: "Gwendolyn, here's some champagne for you for thanking me for thanking you for thanking me for thanking you for thanking me for the champagne you sent me." I wonder how many champagne bottles Gwendolyn and the writer of that note gave one another.

- Was it me or Jameela's delivery of "but we really didn't deal with my thing" was very Buffy-esque?

- Next stop: IHOP, Interdimensional Hole of Pancakes.

Quotes

Tahani: "Are you sure we're in the actual Good Place? It's rather carpeted."

Jason: "What kind of messed-up place would turn away refugees?"

Tahani: "Jason, you seem thoughtful. And that concerns me."

Jason: "It's nice to know I can talk about girls with my wife."

Chidi: "It's like when my parents would go to a symposium and I would sneak into their office and read the unabridged dictionary." Eleanor: "I can't believe I'm attracted to you."

Chidi: "Is this a horny cry?"

Chidi: "There is a quote I like by Tolstoy. 'There is only one time that is important. Now. It is the only time when we have any power.'" Eleanor: "I know that quote. An unverified Tyra Banks account posted that meme on Instagram." Chidi: "Well, now I hate it."

Michael: "The Titanic is sinking, and they're writing a strongly-worded letter to the iceberg."

Tahani: "There are so many unintended consequences to well-intentioned actions. It feels like a game you can't win."

Janet: "Why are you crying?" Tahani: "I don't know. I'm British, I never cry."

It's so unfair that there are only two more episodes left this season. Three out of four closed doors to heaven.

[saints-row-2]

film watch day 31: Every Halloween Film

happy Halloween today i watched every Halloween film currently available to me. i couldnt get to rewatch Halloween 2018 but i already wrote about it a couple of weeks back so feel free to revisit that post. anyway, i watched ten Halloween movies today. It took around 17 hours. i started at 11:15am and im writing this now at 6 am.

so lets get to the post. for the most part i went in chronological order, except i chose to start with Rob Zombie’s remakes because i knew if i didnt id be finishing the day by watching them at the break of dawn and the idea of doing that was so fucking putrid to me that i decided to get them out of the way first.

Halloween (2007)

i hate this fucking movie. i mentioned in an ask the other day but im happy to repeat here, i dont hate the idea of expanding on Michael’s backstory. like the fact is we largely know his backstory, the issue is how this film chose to portray it. the original Halloween is frightening because its based around the idea that the seemingly safe, quiet suburbs are not as safe as they seem; you can be on a street youve known your entire life, only a few metres from your own home, and still at risk. the whole idea of showing Michael as a murderer when he was six is to tell us that anyone could be a threat, that our conventions that all killers are a particular kind of person is false.

Halloween 2007 says fuck that, we know what serial killers are, and theyre those poor kids who come from shitty neighbourhoods and have abusive parents and mothers who are sex workers. everything that Halloween brings to the table is fucking tedious, played out, and massively uninspired. it wants to bring us the truth about why Michael is like he is, but Rob Zombie’s only understanding of serial killers is in the cliche and exploitative. he has nothing honest about human nature to show us, only the exact same stories that have been fed to us by crime and horror movies past.

this film is incredibly loud and in fucking constant motion. even on steady shots of still scenes the camera constantly shakes, and in every other scene its always whirling around from tracking shot to panning over the scene to just idly zooming in and out of nothing. Zombie’s favourite shot is to have something large and out of focus in the foreground -- like some plants -- and to shoot the characters standing about six feet away muttering to themselves. every single fucking shot in this movie lingers too long, every scene drags a little longer than it needs to. this film moves with the pace that i would describe as “family guy gag”.

and this film is so loud. people are always talking or screaming, largely about nothing important or interesting. theres always music, but it never particularly adds anything; for reasons i fail to fucking understand the entirety of the original theme plays over mostly uninteresting tracking shots of a minor character walking around yelling filler lines about nothing.

the writing is horseshit. everyone in this film is vile, no one talks or behaves like real human beings. almost every exchange in this movie is the characters saying the exact same thing back and forth inanely, frequently punctuated by screaming FUCK as loudly as possible and talking about sex in a way that 40 year old men really really wished teenage girls talk about sex. Halloween (2007) is thoughtlessly gross and mean and nasty, disconnected from any kind of human sensitivity and empathy. it wants to be complicated and to be deep but its crushingly simplistic and stupid. the only thing that redeems it is that its not Halloween II (2009). speaking of which...

Halloween II (2009)

jesus christ this movie is so fucking boring. Halloween II is two hours long but feels like its about twenty hours long. i felt like i was watching this film for twenty days and twenty nights. i was trapped in an eternal purgatory with this movie.

i really cant fucking emphasise how boring this film is. endless scene after scene of nothing of consequence happening, uninteresting death scenes that add nothing, and Michael wandering around doing jack shit. Halloween II fucking made Michael Myers boring, and im saying this as someone who (as i repeat once every 8 seconds) has a tattoo of him. this film couldnt hold MY interest in two of my favourite characters of all time.

the big fun new addition from the first movie is the presence of Michael and Laurie’s mother as a kind of weird goth ghost guiding Michael to kill. i dont know why Michael had to be Jason Voorhees and be a mommy’s boy all of a sudden, but this addition brings absolutely nothing of interest to the film or to his character. its meant to be symbolic of fucking... something im sure, but it feels meaningless. somehow Michael and Laurie are both able to see and interact with this ghost and the ghost has an agenda to do... something? it feels about as intelligent and coherent as the bullshit cult of thorne shit from 6, but a lot less fun. at some point Michael Myers apparently has mind control powers?

not to repeat myself a hundred fucking times but this film is insanely unpleasant to watch. every scene someone is screaming, generally wailing “fuck you bitch” at anyone in their vicinity. this is two hours of people howling swear words at each other and not infrequently making rape jokes. Rob Zombie loves rape jokes! almost as much as he loves putting sexual assault in his movies over and over again for no reason.

there is nothing to enjoy in this film. theres nothing to gain. there is too much slow-mo and far too many strobe lights and absolutely nothing of any intelligence or grace. Halloween II is a thirteen year old boy in a korn T-shirt calling his mom a bitch while he draws zombies on  the back of his homework, which he will get an F for because the only thing he wrote was “reading is for faggots”.

Halloween (1978)

what the fuck can i say. this is one of the greatest horror movies ever made, if not the greatest. its one of my favourite movies. its forty years old and still just as chilling and frightening as it ever was. it has some shot composition and cinematography thats up with the best ive ever seen, all while being shot on a budget of $300,000. it does more with less than just about any film, launched the slasher genre, shot Jamie Lee Curtis to stardom and created a pop culture icon that stayed strong for decades. its a masterclass in tension and suspense, a lean-cut perfectly paced film with heaps of atmosphere and character.

i love this film with a frantic passion that makes me unable to talk about it in a particularly helpful way. i cant “review” Halloween. I love this film beyond reason and sense and you either get it or you dont.

Halloween II (1981)

Halloween II is largely one of the less remembered entries in the franchise; its a decent enough movie, neither matching up to the highs of the original or the lows of the later films. its a pretty enjoyable little film, created under the logic of ‘well the first one did well, lets do the same thing again’. Carpenter wrote the script but didn’t direct, and while the film has a solid story, the directing lacks his signature flair. its hard to pinpoint, because the film is generally fairly well-shot, but lacks a kind of eye for shot composition that Carpenter made look easy, doesnt have as much patience for suspense.

on its own merits, theres still some great shots and great scenes in the movie. and a lot of really cool kills; II got a lot more creative with what Michael was capable of, and i think the boiling water drowning kill is rightfully pretty infamous.

this was the last Halloween movie Carpenter wrote, and it was the film where the idea of Laurie and Michael being siblings was introduced. and believe me ill defend this fucking decision to the grave. adding the human connection between Michael and Laurie gives a whole other layer to their relationship thats so fascinating to me, and i love that other films try to expand on the themes of family. in general, deciding that this film would continue to focus on Laurie and not do what later slashers did with bouncing around between different casts was a great fucking move, ironically for a franchise that was intended to be an anthology.

quietly exploring the aftermath of the first film was a good idea for a follow-up, and i especially really enjoy Loomis’ role in this movie, and his discussion about who Myers is. the biggest disappointment for me personally is that Laurie lacks a lot of presence in this film. Curtis is great, as always, but the movie dawdles on some side characters who are too disconnected from her to get a sense of what shes going through.

all that being said, Halloween II is decent. the ending is really great, with some really powerful shots. Michael bleeding from the eyes of his mask after Laurie shoots him is one of the best fucking images in horror and him swinging blindly as Laurie and Loomis slowly orchestrate his death is a fucking amazing scene. i have an immense fondness for this movie, with all its flaws. it brings a lot of really cool concepts to the table, and i think it deserves some appreciation.

heres a question tho; where the fuck were Laurie’s parents. theres a suggestion theyre missing, but theres no explanation why and we never hear from them. did michael kill them too? hello? mr and mrs strode? your daughter just fucking killed a guy and all her friends are dead. where the fuck are you.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Halloween III is infamous as being the Halloween movie that isn’t about Michael Myers at all. when it first released it was wildly unpopular and remained so for quite a while, but has had a surge in popularity over the last few years. i think just about every horror critic i know now considers Halloween III one of the best in the franchise. and to be fair to it, its a great little movie. not a slasher at all but rather a conspiracy thriller, Halloween III is all about the mystery of what the Silver Shamrock mask-making company are really up to, and why people are disappearing. its a weird and creative little movie, with some really fucking great practical effects that turn it from just being a thriller to being an all-out horror film. it has a few too many ineffective jumpscares and some of the plot twists are kind of disappointing and feel a little too much like the easy option -- and then others are so wildly bizarre no one would see them coming because theyre fucking completely out there. but i kind of love that sort of nonsense in a horror movie. like lets just have a fucking good time in here for once in our fucking lives.

Halloween III is not a perfect or even a really great movie, but yknow, fuck it. the idea that only perfect films are worth watching is dumb. i appreciate the weird shit this film tried and i think it deserves a lot more respect than what it got; if it had been released under another title it probably would have gone down as a classic instead of being derided for years, you ask me.

now things start going rapidly downhill

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers

Halloween 4 is when Jamie is introduced as the new final girl; Laurie’s seven year old daughter, after Laurie herself died off-screen in a fucking car crash. the decision to kill off Laurie came from Jamie Lee Curtis decided not to return to the character and instead of recasting her, they went with just having her… die. off-screen. in the franchise where the previous two movies were about her triumph and determination to stay alive. like its the casual thoughtlessness of this that, the idea no one would give a shit a character returned, that in my eyes epitomises how fucking little anyone cared about this franchise going forward.

man the idea of Laurie dying completely irrelevant to Michael… thats a lot. anyway continuing on his quest to erase anyone related to him, Michael starts targeting his niece Jamie for the three movies in the franchise. this is where the series started rapidly losing any grip on reality. while Michael always had some kind of superhuman elements to him (he took six bullets to the chest and survived in the first movie) these became increasingly wildly exaggerated. now hes crushing peoples skulls with his bare hands shit like what the fuck. first of all do that to me and secondly, it was this kind of slide into unreality that let the supernatural elements of the series creep in further until you end up with the shitshow that is Halloween 6. like it was the decrease in the impact of violence and human life that really fucked this franchise over.

this film is not great. its a definite decline in quality after 2 and was on the slippery slope downwards. it has some high points, primarily in Dr Loomis. Donald Pleasance is a better actor than most movies deserve and brings gravitas to a role that in the hands of a less capable actor would be laughable. his sincere plea to Michael at one point to just kill him instead of going after Jamie is honestly fucking tragic.

outside of that, the film isnt massively interesting. Michael himself isnt particularly threatening or engaging, and his mask looks like shit in this film. the characters in this film are largely very stupid, also, which doesnt help anything much.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers

if theres a Halloween movie people talk about the least, its this one. II has the sibling twist, III is the black sheep, 4 is the return, even 6 gets talked about for its troubled production history. no one has anything to say about Halloween 5. and thats mostly because there is fucking nothing to say about Halloween 5. it is a relentlessly fucking dull movie that pads out its 100 minute run time with endless unnecessary scenes of shit that does… nothing. this film is dull in a way that i find incredibly detestable. i cant even watch it through a haze of impassioned anger like i can with the also incredible dull Halloween II (2009). its just fucking boring. every single scene drags like its trying to walk on two broken legs. the plot is so bare bones its nonsensical. it constantly adds new characters and new elements but all that does is makes it more incoherent and confusing. watching this movie i literally found my fucking eyes glazing over in my skull. if this film was edited correctly it would be twenty minutes long. i cannot fucking emphasise enough how much of relentless slog it is. Halloween 4 was dull but even that had the lifeline of ‘some cool ideas’. Halloween 5 is nothing. Halloween 5 is puddle dirt water.

Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers

if Halloween 5 is puddle dirt water Halloween 6 is just a fresh hot glass of piss. there are two versions of Halloween 6, the director’s cut and the theatrical release, and both are wretched. this film went full ham with introducing the supernatural elements, telling us that Michael was his whole life psychically controlled by a pagan cult called the Cult of Thorne in order to make Halloween scary again or summon the devil or who fucking cares. this movie is fucking insufferably dull, totally absurd, and wildly unsympathetic. i loathe Halloween 6 and every terrible, stupid plot decision it makes. Paul Rudd defeats Michael Myers by drawing druid symbols on the ground and Michael just gives up and lies down. theres a baby that does nothing and serves no purpose. Halloween is apparently banned in Haddonfield, which makes this more closely related to Footloose than Halloween i think. this film takes itself incredibly seriously while spouting nothing but total fucking bullshit drivel and i dont believe that anyone involved in this movie, from the cast to the cameraman to the guy who served the lunch had any faith in this movie outside of the vague hope it might make money and i wish this movie had been burned at the stake. also i hate Paul Rudd.

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later

oh thank fucking god finally some good fucking food. Halloween H20 took the decision to retcon all the sequels (except II) twenty years before Halloween 2018, proving that everyone knew 5 and 6 were fucking mistakes.

this film loses a lot of the Halloween feeling in favour of making a more generic late 1990s/early 2000s style horror. theres nothing particularly interesting about the way this movie is directed or shot, the music is largely very generic, it has a generally uninteresting glossy quality to it that studio movies always do. its very obvious this movie was inspired by Scream and it looks a lot more like Scream than it does Halloween. all of this makes me kind of sad, but other films in the franchise have proved that other directors generally are not capable of imitating Carpenter’s style so maybe its better they dont really try.

what H20 does so well, and the reason i love it so much, is that it explores the relationship between Michael and Laurie, which is something im endlessly fascinated with. this was the first movie to have Laurie shake off her fear and rise up against Michael, and while it doesnt do it with quite as much depth and intelligence as Halloween 2018, it still has a fucking good crack at Laurie’s character, and its still powerful watching her turn on the man who terrorised her for years. Michael is great in this movie too; while he has a terrible mask, watching him back on his shit as a furious force of nature who wants nothing more than to destroy anyone who gets in his way.

honestly i kind of enjoy having a Halloween in a different style; theres something fun about seeing characters recontextualised and done with justice and empathy. most of the Halloween sequels before this one (and after, looking at Resurrection) are shallow, unconcerned with any kind of emotional depth or personality. and while a lot of the stock filler characters in H20 who are lined up for the chopping block arent that interesting and dont particularly standout, watching Jamie Lee Curtis’ performance and seeing her interplay with Michael is enough. and most of the side characters arent particularly annoying, which is more than i can say for half this franchise.

this film also has what is one of my absolute favourite endings in a movie ever; the final confrontation between Michael and Laurie has a particular interaction between them that i absolutely adore and that alone is enough to make this movie one of my favourites.

H20 isnt perfect; it weirdly feels like a blueprint that Halloween 2018 would later refine into a better movie, but the idea its going to be completely disregarded for Halloween 2018 in the future makes me a little sad. in the face of so many fucking mediocre and awful Halloween sequels it did the right thing in trying to focus on what actually mattered; the connection between Michael and Laurie, although i dont feel like it succeeded in making Michael as scary as 2018 would much later. that said, the shot where Michael and Laurie just stare at each other through the glass of a window? that gives me chills every time. and hearing the Halloween theme kick in as Laurie marches off into the school with an axe looking for Michael is so fucking triumphant.

i love H20 even if Michael’s mask looks like his hair was dunked in a bucket of water and then gently blow-dried. i have no idea why it looks so fucking stupid in this movie. why is it so hard to get Michael’s mask right. you wouldnt think it was that fucking hard. anyway, i really fucking love Laurie Strode a lot, which didnt help to make Resurrection any easier to swallow.

Halloween: Resurrection

so whats the obvious thing to do after you have a movie where the power and emotion all comes from the emotional catharsis of seeing a woman get her vengeance on her tormentor? you, uh, make a sequel in which she is immediately defeated and pointlessly killed after its revealed her victory at the end of the previous film was entirely false, and then you never return to focus on her and instead introduce a horde of entirely uninteresting stock characters. yeah, makes sense.

Resurrection is fucking incredibly stupid, in the kind of fucking hysterical way only really bad horror movies can capture. theres absolutely nothing of Halloween in this other than the presence of Michael, who just as easily could have been replaced with anyone or anything. the story has a group of people on a reality show staying in the Myers house to… stay there? its not entirely clear what the challenge is meant to be, other than to just be inside the house, which i imagine gets to be pretty dull viewing pretty quickly. theres no suggestion theyre like, hunting for ghosts or something along those lines, theyre just… looking at stuff.

Michael slopes around this movie like he doesnt fucking understand where he is or whats going on, an entirely out of place relic of better times past while the cast cavorts around him doing nothing of interest and having no plots or characterisation to speak of. the film has exactly two or three funny moments, including the legendary ‘Michael Myers getting electrocuted in the dick by Busta Rhymes’, but youre way, way better off just looking that up on youtube instead of watching this movie. there is an hour of pointless plot development about characters no one cares about until Michael starts fucking killing people. this movie shouldnt exist and we should all go back to pretending it doesnt.

and thats it. thats all the halloween films. i can die now.

[zealoptics]

Catch up with Zeal Snowboarder, Surfer and Environmentalist, DCP

We caught up with Zeal Athlete, DCP, to discuss the surfing, his favorite ocean memories and the Pura Vida lifestyle. 

Can you tell us a little bit how and when your interest in the ocean and surfing started?

I grew up in Quebec and started Skateboarding when I was probably 8 yrs old. Also during the summers, we would spend 2 months at our cabin at the lake (St-Jean lake), so I grew up learning sailing and windsurfing. Then the movie Point Break came out and my friends and I really wanted to surf someday. The seed was planted. Then I got pretty serious about snowboarding, traveling, competing. Through my travels, I met my soul-mate-wife-to-be Megan and she took me to Kauai in the fall of 1999 This is where I first attempted surfing in the Ocean. I was hooked right away! It was hard, I was learning and progressing every sessions. It was fresh to me.

Then in 2002, we started to travel to Costa Rica and got a little surf Shack at Playa Dominical where I would go spend 1-2 months yearly At that point, Internet was very limited and we loved to just come down to Costa Rica, disconnect and almost hide from the snowboarding world. It gave us a chance to meet new lifelong friends , discuss other life subjects and get inspired and connected in a deeper way to nature and especially the Ocean -Beach life. We realized pretty early that we needed to help contribute to preserve this beautiful paradise as well as the world oceans, what became our most beloved playground.

Can you tell us one of your favorite memories from an ocean related adventure.

There is so many, I am truly in love with the Ocean, its creatures, its ecosystem and I am totally fascinated with the action and creation of waves. So every time I have the chance to spend anytime in the ocean, feeling, riding the energy of the waves created by a strong far away storm, I am creating a lifelong memory.   But here is one that sticks out from this last year. I went on to solo-camp on the OSA peninsula of Costa Rica for 5 nights during a big swell and full moon cycle. The Osa is home of the most bio-diversified animals, insects and trees in the World. So, to say the least, this area is well alive at all times of the day, especially at night ;-) So, I camped right in front of the wave and surfed 8 hours a day, drank water, ate only a few fruits and snacks. I felt feral and for that week, I was truly living the nomad surf life. The swell was pumping and I surfed alone at least one-third of the time... it was incredible. Then, one night, it was a full moon and I was sitting down at my campsite and noticed how bright the waves were and how clear the sky was. So I picked up my head lamp and board and made my way to a different point that worked well at lower tide. I managed to surf for 2 hours between 10 pm and Midnight and it was one of the most memorable session of my life. It was over head and pumping and reeling down the line and the whole face was lite up ... It is ingrained into my sub-conscious forever. 

Have you noticed a change in the ocean and its surrounding environments in your lifetime? If so, what do those changes look like?

I have seen many changes in the climate and ocean, I have noticed the rise of temperature, more blooming of Algae creating Red Tides, coast erosion. I also noticed, with more constructions, more lights on the shores along with the costal erosion, there is less sea-turtles being able to come back and give birth. I have notice a lot of plastic in every coast I go surf at. Indonesia being 1 of the worst. It's ironic, it's such a beautiful paradise, waves are near perfection but the coast is littered with plastic, every tide cycles bring in more ... it seems endless, even with the many beach clean up I have been part of and the initiatives that many other local organization do... In Costa Rica, we often get the kids and us involved in cleaning up the beach, almost after each week ends, groups of kids and surfers are contributing. I always pick up a few pieces of Glass or plastic when I get out of the ocean. On the daily... 

Do you have any practices in your daily life to try and help reduce ocean pollution?

-I use Yeti or Mizu bottles for all my water , coffee, tea etc 

-I try eating organically as much as possible and use my own grocery bags.

-I use Covid Mask that I can wash and were multiple times

-I never use plastic straws, instead I use avocado or Glass straws 

-I discussed it with my kids and feed their awareness and contributions 

-I am thankful and practice gratitude everyday towards the ocean, mother ocean and all its living organisms 

-I contribute and promote Costa Rica Carbon Trees Costa Rica, through planting bio diversified trees along rivers ... it prevents the erosion and the sediment to travel to the ocean and therefor possibly kill the reef, etc... 

You’ve spent a lot of time in Costa Rica. Can you tell us a little bit about the Pura Vida lifestyle and how we could all apply it to our daily lives and sustainability practices.

Costa Rica is an amazing country that practices a lot of sustainability and is the first ever carbon neutral country. They have wind, hydro, thermal power. Most places banned the use of plastic straws and bags.

We usually are able to buy great local fruit, vegetables and fish so that we can support the local economy but also, there isn't the transportation impact on these products.

Pura Vida is an attitude, a greeting, a way of life. Pura Vida means pure life and this is how people live here. Simple, happy, generous, friendly and everyone enjoys some time to relax. Every Sunday is Family day. Family is number one and it is very important in my life too. I always have been attracted to the lifestyle and the community around Dominical, and the southern zones of Costa Rica. I feel at home, and though I will be splitting my life between the Canadian mountains and Costa Rica, I am preparing for the future. I want to have a sustainable farm situation here to come for years to come. I want to be able to host my grand kids and surf with them when I retire someday ... in the meantime, I am living the Pura Vida life and I sure will be taking the attitude with me, wherever I go and travel to.

As part of our Connect & Protect program, for every sunglass, goggle or accessory lens purchased globally through the month of April, Zeal Optics will partner with Plastic Oceans International to clean 93 square meters of coastline for a year. Celebrate the outdoors and help protect the wild waters we love.

[ninja-bears-being-ninjas]

Gill

It was quiet that night. The airship hovered over the mountains, just above the trees that blanketed the peaks. I sat out on the deck, taking my shift in giving the ship the power to stay airborne. It was easy when we stayed suspended in the air like this. The great red balloon tethered to the ship did most of the work; all I needed to do was give it that extra push to keep us afloat. I thought of buoyancy, felt it lifting in my chest, and then let it seep out into the ship. It was easy to let my mind wander.

My eyes trailed the patterns of clouds and stars in the sky. The characters that lived in the constellations provided endless stories to my imagination, like the ones Fox used to tell me when we watched the stars in the city. There were fewer stars there, always obscured by the smog of one factory or another, but we made do.

Now that I’d seen how beautiful the sky could look out here, far from any cities, I didn’t understand how Fox could have stayed. I had spent most of my childhood dreaming of escape, and I thought Fox had, too.

The wind brushed through the trees, the pine needles singing almost like chimes. It was a pleasant release from the summer heat that clung to my skin even at night. It could be cold on the airship when we sailed. Then, the wind would seem to go right through you, frost building up on your bones. But here, closer to the earth and with the sun’s warmth still churning through the air, my clothing wasn’t light enough to enjoy the heat.

Before I had started sailing, that had always been the problem: clothes too heavy for summer and too light for winter, every year on the brink of freezing to death or collapsing from heatstroke. Fox and I had done our best to keep ourselves comfortable. We swam in the river during the summer despite the dark brown of the water, and sought shade from the trees in a small park. We spent all day at the library in the winter, and when they closed down for the night, we’d take refuge in whichever bar would take us. Usually they would only tolerate us kids for a night or two, and then we’d have to find a new haven or sneak into one of the back rooms and hide there. We never slept much on those days.

Fox had always talked a lot about his parents, about how they’d been sent off to war and about the bravery of their deaths. I couldn’t remember my parents, but I used to spin stories about them too. My mother was a florist, a teacher, the first female pilot to ever join the top ranks. My father was a mechanic, a fireman, a dancer. The stories changed every time, but Fox still let me tell them.

The truth was probably that my parents had caught me using magic and thrown me out into the street. It had been decades since the uprising of magic-users that had threatened to topple the government of my home nation of Kyrus, but magic remained forbidden. Harboring me could’ve gotten my parents arrested or worse, but that was no excuse. I had been only five. I no longer tried to tell myself that they were good people.

Below, through the net of branches and needles, an orange light flashed once, twice, and then flared up into a flickering flame. I was immediately on my feet, running to look over the railing on the side of the ship. Either there was someone nearby making camp, or we needed to get the hell out of there. It was hard to tell from up here whether the fire was growing like a forest fire would; I would need to investigate.

The magic I fed the ship usually came in a slow, steady stream, but now I opened the tap and sent a surge of magic into its gears, enough to sustain the ship while I dropped the long rope ladder over the edge and descended into the trees. I stayed hidden among the branches and did my best not to draw attention to myself. The Kyrus Guard occasionally sent patrols out to these mountains, and if they were camping beneath our ship we were in big trouble.

The fire turned out to be small and harmless, contained within a circle of stones that would help keep the flames from jumping to the grass or bushes nearby. The three people milling about the camp seemed to be ordinary travelers; the only weapon they had was a hatchet and their gear was unmarked by any insignia.

I could have just left it at that and returned to the ship, but for some reason I lingered, watching the flames dance upon the logs. The fire crackled, sending sparks into the darkness like shooting stars. The travelers were illuminated in flickering light that cast strange shadows across their faces, and suddenly, vividly, I was reminded of the night I first met Fox.

It was the first thing I could remember with any clarity. Before that day, my life was vague images of floral-patterned couches and my chubby little hand enclosed in someone else’s.

It must have happened shortly after I was abandoned, for how could I have survived without him? He’d had the luck to grow up a little before his parents died and he had to learn to fend for himself. Fox was clever, and caught on quickly that the only way to survive life as a homeless orphan was to fly under the radar.

I had been stupid and winter was beginning to set in, so I tried to use my magic to create a fire.

I remembered huddling in an alleyway to shelter myself from the wind. My hands were cupped in front of my face as I tried to coax some fire out of them, but I had not yet learned to control the magic, so I got nothing but a few sputtering sparks.

Frustration and desperation smoldered inside me, but I was a stubborn child, so I furrowed my brow and put all of that tension into one more try.

The flames leapt from my palms, igniting all at once into one big plume. I had been holding my hands too close to my face. The fire scorched my chin, my neck, my cheeks, and I shrieked in pain and surprise. The tears that streamed down my face only made my skin sting worse.

Fox saw the flash of light and heard the startled scream and came into the alleyway with his penknife drawn. When he found me, his arm dropped to his side, his lips forming a small, unsettled “oh.”

He was only a few years older than me, but it was enough for him to have learned the art of lock picking, and so he broke into an apothecary’s shop and stole some burn salve. He dabbed it onto my face, sloppy like he was finger painting, and it soothed away most of the pain and kept my skin from scarring too heavily.

According to Fox, the scars looked like gills, and so that would be my name. Gill.

I learned everything I could from him, how to steal, how to beg. The places in town that would be friendliest to us and the kinds of people to avoid. None of it was easy, but we had each other, which made us lucky. Fox warned me that most magic-users like me were either killed or captured and handed over to the authorities to be imprisoned for life. He told me horror stories about the street kid he’d known who had been caught using earth magic to build a shelter on a rainy day, and urged me never to use my powers again.

So instead of practicing magic, I read about it. My nose was stuck in a book every hour that we spent at the public library. I became fascinated with the fantastical worlds that the authors spun, but best of all were the stories from our own world, from other lands where magic wasn’t outlawed. These made excitement bubble up in my chest.

“When I grow up, I’m going to live there,” I said with a grin.

“Ushela’s all the way on the other side of the world. You’ll never get there!”

He said it with a laugh, but it stung.

Even when we weren’t at the library, Fox and I would be telling each other stories. Fox had the most incredible legends of pirates who roamed the seas and skies in search of adventure and gold. The pirates used magic to make their ships fly, and so they were faster than all the other ships. My eyes would go wide with fascination every time he told me of the engineers who used their magic to sail through the clouds, exploring distant lands in search of treasure.

Fox and I dreamed of becoming pirates like the ones from the stories, and we could talk for hours about the adventures we’d go on. At some point we’d talked about it so much that it became a promise. But as we grew older, the stories were fewer. Fox would go quiet when others came into earshot.

“What happened next?” I urged when they had gone.

“Maybe I should tell a different story,” he brushed me off. “We shouldn’t talk about magic here.”

Eventually all talk of magic and pirates faded, but the stories lived on in my imagination. When I couldn’t sleep at night or when Fox was off picking up shifts at the factory, I practiced my magic. At first I could hardly muster a flame or move the smallest rock. There was a disconnect between the outside world and the magic pulsing around my heart. I would tell the magic to do something and it did not listen. But I learned to let that feeling of power flow out to the tips of my fingers, where it brushed against the energies of the elements around me and could bend them to my will. I created little whirlpools in the river and halted the wind in its tracks. I practiced moving fire from one finger to the next. I pulled earth from the ground and threw it across the water without ever touching it.

Each new thing I mastered excited me, and I swore to myself that I would get out of this city and go somewhere I was free to use my powers.

I was sixteen when I met Captain Harrington at a bar I was finally old enough to drink at. It was a seedy place, so he could boast freely of the loot his crew had just scored. Without thinking, I sat down at his table, my beer sloshing over the sides of the mug as I thumped it down.

“Are you looking for new crew members?” I demanded, to which he raised an eyebrow, somewhere between skeptical and impressed.

“That depends. What can you bring to the table?”

For a brief moment, I was terrified of confessing that I could use magic, and that I’d actually gotten pretty good, but then I was just blurting it out, and the captain’s lips spread into a grin.

Fox was meant to meet me at the bar, and when he showed up I was bouncing with excitement. I told him he’d just been hired, that we were finally doing it, we were going to be pirates, and he only snorted with laughter.

“Yes, and I’ll wear dresses and sing songs for the crew,” he said sarcastically, as if he was going along with a joke. I rolled my eyes, amused.

“No, I’m serious. There’s a pirate captain here who’s going to hire us,” I said, and Fox’s expression turned wary.

“Come on, that’s not funny,” he said under his breath. “Those guys are criminals.”

Confusion twisted my face. “But you always said--” I was at a loss for words. “We’ve been dreaming about becoming pirates for ages.”

“Those were just stories. Stupid stories. It was never going to actually happen.”

 “But it can!” I protested, gesturing to Harrington. “He’ll hire us. We can leave this place. I’ll be able to use my magic.”

Fox was stunned. We hadn’t talked about magic in years. “No. You need to forget about your powers. It’s the only way you’ll be safe. I mean, look at how much magic has hurt you already.”

My hands moved to touch my scars involuntarily, but then my fingers slipped away as they curled into fists.

“No! I’m not going to keep hiding my entire life! I’m going to learn how to control my powers, and Captain Harrington’s engineers are going to teach me how,” I told him. My throat was tight with the betrayal, but I forced myself to speak clearly.

Fox and I didn’t part on good terms. He tried to convince me to stay, but I wouldn’t hear it. Our shouts made even the rowdiest bar patrons turn their heads to see what was going on. We were supposed to be best friends, but that night he saw me as a child clinging to fantasies. So I left with the Captain to start a new life, and Fox stayed in the city to work in the factories.

Over the years, Harrington’s crew became my family, but it was hard sometimes not to feel like something was missing. When I had dreamed up wild tales of my pirating feats, Fox was always supposed to be there.

[thetrashbang]

Brigador and the Art of Sky-High Storytelling

“GREAT LEADER IS DEAD. SOLO NOBRE MUST FALL.”

The first spoken words of Brigador, synthesised through a muffled speaker and emblazoned on-screen in bold, unadorned, searing red letters, are all the exposition it strictly needs: it is a time of great upheaval on the frontier colony of Solo Nobre, and you, with your ten-ton armoured mercenary mech, are here to do some heaving. Narrative and lore are strictly confined to downtime; to dense slabs of text filed neatly away in the codex, to be optionally purchased and read at one’s leisure. There’s no place in the combat for direct storytelling, between the rumbling of diesel engines and the whip-crack of electromagnetic slugs, and even if there was, it’d be little more than poorly embellished justifications for “go here, destroy those buildings, go there, destroy those units, leave.”

But to dismiss Brigador as pure context-free action is to fail to recognise how it speaks. When we think of environmental storytelling, we think small. We think of unconvincing graffiti on crumbling walls, half-finished meals, abandoned chess boards, desks piled high with papers, carefully-placed bookmarks, downed tools and barricaded doors. We think of skeletons in compromising poses, and trails of blood that laugh in the face of a bucket of bleach. Personal stories are made when people leave personal imprints, as taken to extremes by, say, Fullbright’s shtick of giving you a whole night to rummage through your family’s household belongings unfettered. For this very reason, the most popular examples of experiences with environmental storytelling are largely those that enable you to get up close and pick it apart, preferably without being too rushed. There’s a special kind of intimacy in it, almost voyeuristic, as you sift through the documents of a person who would certainly have objected to your intrusion if they weren’t lying slumped against a nearby desk with an alien birthing cavity where their guts used to be.

Brigador is the antithesis of that. Its sky-high isometric viewpoint, panning silently over the streets, gives you little such insight into the fine details. You can’t tell the story of a person from up here—at least, not easily—but you can tell the stories of people. And war is all about people, collectively; people fighting, people fleeing, people dying. Stories of lone figures, unless they hold huge power or significance, are swept away in the tide of shared tales, told through numbers rather than poignant letters to mother. You can pluck lone individuals out, humanise them and piece together their fate, but chances are that they were just one of a hundred, or a thousand, or a million people in the same boat, going through the same motions. Those collective motions, and their collective effects, are the ones that Brigador’s environments make us privy to.

One major target objective recurs through your missions: the orbital guns. Solo Nobre’s surface bristles with these skyward-pointed cannons, designed to obliterate any spacefaring aid that so much as entertains the thought of helping liberate the colony. Naturally, they’ve got to go, but it’s the way they impose on their surroundings, irrespective of context, that fascinates me. Taller than a city block, frequently ringed by sheer defensive walls and expanses of flat asphalt, their incongruousness isn’t just stark; it’s deliberately exaggerated. They invade the space around them, like alien landing craft, making no effort to compromise or integrate no matter where they are. To us, the player, they drive home the extent to which recent rampant militarization has dominated the lives of Solo Nobre’s people. What’s it like to have one of those things in your back yard? On your block? In your cemetery? Looming threateningly, a permanent reminder that the entire colony was, and is, ruled through military force. It’s all too easy to imagine them just springing up one night in a flurry of jackbooted activity, confusing and unnerving locals who understand nothing of the political situation, only that they’re now the unwilling neighbours of the biggest, juiciest, most explosive target in the district.

Most of Solo Nobre looks as if it sprung up overnight, to be honest. Many of the maps have a decidedly frontier air to them, sharply contrasting undeveloped wastelands with industrial and agricultural estates—or outright shanty towns, on occasion—and even developed zones are often distinctly utilitarian, as if the first construction efforts focused solely on establishing the functional basics and nobody’s had a chance to do a second pass. Why is that important? Because it means that whatever worldly influences went into the colony’s initial construction—the decisions, the constraints, the goals—are still relevant. Spaces change meaning over time; they get repurposed, recontextualised, rebuilt, and in the process the original intent of their structure gets muddled. Solo Nobre hasn’t had a chance to get especially muddled yet: everything on the landscape feels as if it has a current, relevant reason to be there. The story of the colony is coded into its infrastructure, fresh as the first coat of gunmetal-grey paint. Roads, buildings, fences, zones.

And wouldn’t you know it? That’s the part that you, with the omnipotent eyes of a SimCity mayor, are perfectly situated to deconstruct—in the analytical sense, I mean. You see the way the streets are laid out and the way blocks are divvied up; the way patterns and biases have formed in the overarching organisation—or lack thereof—of the urban sprawl. What becomes noticeable almost immediately is… lines. Often games with isometric grid presentation will seek to break up the grid; to introduce chaos and noise to obscure the perfect, infinite parallel lines that give their environments such an artificial, manufactured air. Brigador relishes in it. Brigador loves the grid. It goes out of its way to propagate unbroken, arrow-straight walls and roads for miles. They speak of an ultramodern, efficient, painfully austere development process; the kind that rolls out state utilities like a titanic machine, paving anything that stands in its way with no regard for landscape or lives. To be more exact, they make it clear that they’re not the product of democratic civil planning, but of orders from on high, carving up and commodifying the colony like the centrepiece of some debaucherous banquet. In a more striking fashion than any graffiti decal or audio log, these pieces of Brigador’s public infrastructure illustrate the disconnected, totalitarian whims of its administration. A casual flick of a cufflinked wrist and suddenly a neighbourhood is living in the shadow of five storeys’ worth of reinforced concrete. Are you in the way? Time to relocate, Mr Dent.

But apathetic architecture isn’t the same as thoughtless architecture. One of the clearest intents behind much of Solo Nobre’s urban planning is its concerted effort to distance the haves and the have-nots, coddling the former and shutting out the latter. Cramped slums frequently sit side-by-side with idyllic American Dream suburbs, divided by district walls—once again, we return to walls—that have been coated on one side with improbably tall hedges, so their viewers may entertain the fragment of an illusion that all is well in their slice of freshly-mowed Eden. Such proximity between the wealthy and the poor suggests that space is scarce on Solo Nobre, but not so scarce that the former can’t afford to have sweeping lawns and tacky, towering neoclassical McMansions. You could be forgiven for starting to wonder if something’s wrong with the scale, when your titanic walking weapons platform that could put a foot through a tower block suddenly has to crane its neck to shoot over a family home, but no—it’s just another way of illustrating the yawning gulf in privilege to your eye in the sky. One mission takes you out onto the green expanses of a country club, which—along with a sizeable occupying force, obviously—also features imposing gun turrets built into the landscape, poking out the top of more hedge-covered fortifications. Why would a golf course need such entrenched defensive measures, in what we’ve been led to believe was a relatively peaceful time? They can only have been a means of deterrence; of scaring away the riff-raff and making the privileged feel secure, without the excessive use of unsightly district checkpoints and barricades.

Yet even with this sweeping disparity, there’s a common thread in Solo Nobre of humanisation of oppressive spaces. Between hulking pipelines, paved concrete expanses and endless bleak industrial estates, there’s mounting evidence that Great Leader’s priorities were not the well-being of his workers, but here and there are tiny, isolated reminders that people still manage to engage in recreation. A single basketball hoop at the end of a loading dock, lined by rows of identical storage units; a children’s climbing frame in the middle of a muddy plot, ringed by skeletal steel pylons; a lone fifties-style diner, complete with a scattering of those cheap white plastic chairs, bleached by the halogen glow of a communications mast. They’re fragments of lives, not destined to be pieced together into a cohesive narrative, but to simply remind us that even in the city’s coldest, most utilitarian corners, people are not drones. Until now, we’ve focused on tales of communities and collectives, but to view people only in the plural like this is to risk treating them as so many trivial organisms under a microscope, always moving in tides, their individual impulses lost in the swarm. It’s details like these that keep us grounded, so to speak, even while gazing down at the sprawl.

That’s all just history, though, innit? That’s stuff that happened over months, years, decades even. But some of the imprints on Brigador’s landscape are more temporal, left by events far more relevant to your current mission. Solo Nobre’s liberation takes place over a single night—or so it’s implied—and while you may be the first to fire a shot, you’re certainly not the first to make a move.

Traffic. It’s the traffic. You could initially be forgiven for thinking that the streets of Solo Nobre, despite their spaciousness and high standard of upkeep, don’t seem to be getting a lot of use; they’re utterly devoid of active civilian vehicles, trodden only by the assorted war machines of your opponents. Brigador doesn’t feature non-combatant units—other than the tiny raincoat-clad civilians who mill around helplessly until being crushed carelessly underfoot—but nevertheless, you’ll soon find remains of traffic jams around the maps: gridlocked, bumped-to-bumper, clearly long-since abandoned when it became apparent none of it was ever going to budge an inch further. Why would it be so tightly packed, and trail so far back, in a city where the highways are so wide that you could triple-park an interstellar freighter across one without making everyone late for work?

Once again, placement is the key. Brigador’s abandoned traffic isn’t randomly distributed, but concentrated around particular points. Lanes upon lanes of gently cooling automobiles are regularly found clustered in front of district checkpoints, around spaceports, even outside train depots, seemingly stopped in their tracks. A picture forms; a picture of a reeling state power rushing to regain its faculties, crack down on sudden unrest, minimize chaos. Of people hearing the news, sensing the forthcoming conflict, choking the roads with their attempts to flee. Of the two forces colliding in the lengthening shadows of a checkpoint, a cacophony of horns and furious shouts assaulting a grim military police barricade. Evacuation efforts scuppered. Deadlock. Until the Corvids turn up in their scrapyard siege engines and flatten a few city blocks, obviously.

But the exodus of Solo Nobre isn’t a complete failure. As your trail of destruction spirals out towards the edges of the colony, from the urban sprawl to its inevitable, oft-forgotten by-products, signs of relief begin to manifest. Nestled up against neglected pipelines and crumbling walls are clusters of blue tents—the kind of blue they only ever use on tarpaulins and concert port-a-potties—propped up with flimsy poles, dulled by the mud of the wastes. They’re ramshackle, disorganised, and frequently located in spots of dubious tactical importance, all of which suggest that while the materials might come from a Loyalist source, they’ve certainly not been set up under any kind of military coordination. Indeed, their most unifying quality seems to be that they’ve been pitched out of the way of populated zones—presumably by people who have had quite enough near misses with cluster mortar strikes for one night. These are camps set up by refugees, no way around it; people fleeing the power struggle, one way or another, trying to hole up somewhere so backwater that nobody would waste time fighting over it. Alas, as the presence of you and your enemies implies, they’re disastrously wrong. But that can’t be helped now, can it?

I suppose the only thing left to wonder is what, if anything, Brigador hopes to make us feel with all this effort. It leaves features on the landscape to tell us that these things happened, but despite our inarguable involvement, never ties those events back to us; never blames us for displacing innocent people, destroying their homes and gibbing them in the streets with careless cannon fire. In a game that encourages you to look at your environment in terms of little more than the cover it offers, it’s easy to tune out such ghastly side effects, particularly when the only feedback you get from razing civilian buildings to the ground is a miniscule bonus—yes, a bonus, perplexingly—to your end-of-level payout. No guilt, no joy, just a matter-of-fact occurrence. But as a mercenary, fighting first and foremost for a sodding huge cheque, perhaps it’s only appropriate that the only stimulus you get from needless destruction is an insignificant increment on your score counter. What better metaphor could there be for the faint flicker of acknowledgement, cold and distant as the shores of Titan, in a mind focused entirely on the task at hand?

It’s not easy, communicating using only the features that are visible to passing airliners, but Brigador plays to its strengths. It focuses on sweeping trends and dramatic shifts—which are, of course, common during times of unrest—using them to speak of the effects of dictatorial regime and violent power struggles, but scatters around visible one-off details too, as humanising fragments for those who stop and take notice. Nobody could ever describe it as an epic narrative tour-de-force, but I find it to be a fabulous example of working within limitations; of understanding how sociopolitical transformations can embed their effects in the landscape, and how we can read them back again—so long as they aren’t demolished by a Killdozer first, anyway.

[princely-dots]

Let Me Tell You About Homestuck

AN ILLUSTRATIVE PHENOMENON

- a midterm essay about Homestuck and how it impacted illustration- 

don’t repost or whatever- this is solely evidence of how I am trash and I would like to keep it that way.

“If I have to name one thing I find infinitely important about Homestuck, It would be the way in which it pushes the definition of “webcomic” unlike any other work ever created.” Known to many and few, Homestuck by Andrew Hussie is one of the world's greatest examples of hypermedia utilized to its maximum extent. An instrumental piece in the popularization of hypercomics, the massive multimedia story was a seven year-long marvel spurred by what many consider to be an illustrative masterpiece. Known for both its doltish ‘cartoon casual’ style and its stunning imagery alike, Homestuck spanned 8126 pages, included over four hours of animation and music, and featured twenty mini games; a feat no other comic or work has ever come even close to matching. Somehow this gargantuan, uselessly complicated, mess of a creation myth built an audience of millions and inspired a culture of internet art that had previously only been in its infancy. Likely this was due to Homestuck’s unique ability to encapsulate the millennial experience, as well as its seemingly endless penchant for seamlessly mixing irreverent and profound content and how this hypercomic tackled the nigh impossible task of illustrating life. With its mass appeal and astounding popularity, the right timing, and its miscellany of illustrative strategies and media- Homestuck changed the definition of “webcomic” and was one of the most influential pieces of illustration of the internet.

In order to truly grasp the reach of this Webcomic of webcomics one must understand its roots. This infamous ‘interactive’ epic started on an MSPaint Adventures forum and among the Gangbunch threads of the Penny Arcade forums. Andrew Hussie, the elusive mastermind behind the MSPA endeavors, started his fifth project, Homestuck, after the conclusion of his previous project Problem Sleuth, which had a small degree of success but was essentially still an incredibly niche comic whose fans were predominantly those active on its specific forums. Using an ‘enter command/ suggestion box’ format, Hussies projects imitated adventure based click through games and command based rpgs. Following the template of other interactive webcomics such as RubyQuest, Hussie experimented with smaller scale works before undertaking the epic that Homestuck would become- 1-Jailbreak, 2- Bard Quest (which ended in 24 days), 3- Blood Spade (which was a single page that would later on be elaborated on in Homestuck itself,) and 4- Problem Sleuth (the only other large-scale work Hussie completed). Jailbreak was a simple exercise in puzzles and taking commands for story direction from readers; Problem Sleuth started in the same way but throughout its course its seemingly nonsensical leanings began to demonstrate a strict logic for its own world.  Amongst the array of ridiculous suggestions from the forum, a plot and complex world evolved. Homestuck started with the suggestions of readers as well, but when it began to gain traction and the number of suggestions increased to number in the thousands per page, Hussie stopped taking direct “orders”. The only difference that this made was a slight decrease in some of the more absurd commands. However,  Homestuck fundamentally was created through a confounding process of scattering random features along and going back later on to tie them in, which gave the comic the appealing open endedness that it was known for. To describe what Homestuck  is known for is to describe Homestuck itself, which is almost an impossible feat. The fascinating thing is that it can’t really be described, which is part of the enigma. To define it would be to limit it, because it is so expansive and so complex that Homestuck is impossible to confine to one statement well. The three closest descriptors are still devastatingly vague when compared to the work they’re attempting to define. The first and second are from the author himself, “A creation myth about kids in houses” which is equally inaccurate  as it is accurate, and “ a story that’s also a puzzle.” The third is from the tumblr user Wakraya, who said “This isn’t a story about Four Kids playing a Game, getting involved in shenanigans and trying to live a happy ever after as villains try to plot on destroying them and reality. Homestuck is the tale of the characters from a webcomic, becoming self-aware, and escaping the grasp of the author and the narrative.”

As interesting as it might seem alone, a huge part of Homestuck’s rise to popularity  was indebted to Tumblr, which at the time of Homestuck’s release was only about two years old. Remarkably enough, the popularity and overall success of both Homestuck  and Tumblr are directly correlated.  In October of 2009, Tumblr only had about 90,000 users, that number skyrocketed in May of 2010 and then more than doubled by October of the same year- notably a sharp increase happening after/during June. On the last day of May in 2010, the first ‘long’ animation panel, [S] Descend, was posted. The ambitious panel was four minutes, thirteen seconds long, and was accompanied by original music.The excitement over the update heralded a rush of interest, but not nearly as much as on June 10th, 2010, when Homestuck started a new section called Hivebent, a part of the story which introduced an additional cast of characters and could be understood without previous canon knowledge. Both of these points in Homestuck correspond eerily close to the sharp changes with user numbers in Tumblr. Being that most of the interaction and dialogue within the fandom happened on Tumblr posts, it can be concluded that, in the least, the relationship of the two was symbiotic. Of course this is only a testament to how massive Homestuck was merely fanbase-wise. One of the most famous panels, [S] Cascade, was posted to the hosting site Newgrounds to avoid the MSPA servers that were unable to handle the mass of people flooding it after each update. However, it was popular enough that the sheer number of simultaneous hits on the animation actually crashed the Newgrounds servers as well. In short, Homestuck had a colossal fanbase that at one point registered in one million unique visitors to its site every day.

Indubitably, this maximalist hypercomic had a reach long enough that it could influence a massive audience and leave a lasting impact. Most notably, this impact was to revolutionize what webcomics were understood to be. Homestuck pushed the boundaries of common illustration by completely exploiting the media in which Hussie made it, “The result is an unusual media hybrid. Something that reads like a heavily illustrated novel [...] It’s a story I’ve tried to make as much a pure expression of its medium as possible.” It became the definition of hypercomic through its extreme use of multimedia and hyperfiction, a work written and presented electronically encouraging nonlinearity due to the disconnect between panels/pages via hyperlink. In other words, since the reader has to click on the next hyperlink to proceed in the story, it becomes interactive. But it wasn’t only through its hyperlinks that Homestuck changed the delivery of its illustration, it was in its presentation. Most famously, the comic was made predominantly with only one panel per page. These illustrations would often be emphasized as gifs, occasionally with music, and sometimes the pages would be full fledged animations. However, Hussie did not stick to only a strict construction of one panel size per page; he utilized the medium to its utmost extent, sometimes going so far as to even manipulate the webpage itself in different parts of the story, often breaking the fourth wall. Panel walls were also frequently broken to enhance the story- some pages would be scrollable instead of confined to a small rectangle,some would have guided movements, and sometimes during updates the button to click to the next page would be seen as glitching out until the next pages were available to read. Sometimes the reader would even have the opportunity to choose between several different hyperlinks to different storylines. Hussie’s innovative use of the medium didn’t stop at just page composition, he also was one of the first to use spoilers (chat logs) to show the text, versus using speech bubbles as traditional comics and most previous webcomics would have. This allowed for a staggering amount of text to be included in a single page, as the majority of the story in Homestuck was conveyed through IM dialogue.

What more, the innovation and genius didn’t stop at just the mechanics. The depth and freedom of the story itself as well as the interaction between the comic, author, and fandom pushed creative boundaries. Categorically, the most significant aspect of Homestuck was the sheer expansiveness of the story and the hundreds of characters within it. The world building was so intensive it easily rivals the big names of fiction such as Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings. Hussie created grounded cultures, believable backstories, and the legacies of multiple timelines with stupefyingly thought out motifs, archetypes, and symbolism woven throughout. Most importantly, Homestuck presented a very real and relatable use of the internet, contrasting most modern media which often presents an outdated understanding of how young people are using technology. The majority of the relationships between the characters in Homestuck are substantiated purely over startlingly realistic IM conversations over the internet rather than in person- something that hasn’t really been successfully portrayed yet. “For kids who grew up on IM and chatrooms the rambling cadence of Homestuck dialogue is immediately familiar.” The characters are also beautifully realistic and diverse; they are by no means perfect, they all have successes and failures, and overall they are dimensional and built as though they are real people. Dave, a main protagonist, said, “rose we dont have fuckin “arcs” we are just human beings” which plays out extensively. Hussie uses alternate timelines, time loops, and other various time shenannigans to explore character reactions for hundreds of pages, only to wind up making the entire “arc” invalid by switching to a different timeline and saying the other one died. Interestingly enough however, these time capers weren’t just arbitrary, Hussie used multiple timelines and time travel between these to justify how most of the important plot events happened. They were legitimately vital to the ultimate timeline of the story, for without them and their endless intricacies the story would be so riddled with holes it would make swiss cheese look solid.

The remarkable tangle of plot devices and characterization wasn’t the only thing to make Homestuck such a memorable piece though. It was also the experimental, testing, push and pull between Hussie’s writing and the fandom reactions. Oftentimes Hussie’s future decisions for the comic were affected by the fandom’s opinions, whether he was inspired by their headcanons or was trying to get a rise from them, it resulted in a constantly engaging exchange that kept the fandom active when the comic was. The fandom’s in depth examination of the comic and speculation in between updates created a web of comprehension that made understanding the complexities of Homestuck possible; it also made a culture that far surpassed what could be expected of just a normal work of illustration- it became a movement.

The openness of the world and the sheer amount of material there was to work with, paired with the analytical vigor of the fandom to understand every aspect of its universe created endless sources of inspiration for old and new artists alike. Not to mention, every fan-made character and headcanon was confirmed canon by Hussie, which added a massive amount of encouragement to anyone with an idea.

Hussie took advantage of the enthusiasm of the fanartists, even inviting many onto the project to feature guest art, compose music for, and even illustrate some of the animations and video games in Homestuck. This type of collaboration was another enchanting characteristic of the comic that not only made Homestuck all the more special for its fans, but also made it a huge source of inspiration that spoke great lengths to the achievements possible through the internet, and the opportunities out there for illustrators and other artists when they are persistent. After all, Homestuck started off practically unknown.

It was this unknown webcomic that would eventually grow to leave an undeniable legacy in illustration. After gathering a community around it, it is no surprise that thousands of artists were influenced by its anthology of styles and ideas. For one, it completely remodeled what was considered a “webcomic” and popularized the use of massive multi-media and hyperfiction. Hundreds of webcomics followed in its tracks, all of them showing signs of Homestuck’s influence. Some of the most memorable of these being Ava’s Demon, Thunderpaw, Spacepaw, Neokosmos, Living When Dead, The Black Road to Oz,  and  Prequel. Many featured the hyperlink format, single panel design, simplified art styles-ranging to highly rendered art (like Homestuck did), insert command styles, animation and gifs included to forward the stories and add to the effectiveness of panels or communicate without words, spoilers to include more text, modifying scroll capabilities in the illustration, the web pages, and more. The fanartists could also find considerable renown online due to the immense popularity of the comic, several artists got noticed and hired by Hussie, and/or by other companies because of their art getting shared around by the hoards of ‘homestucks’- the colloquialism for the fans of the hypercomic. Artists such as Ikimaru, Lemonteaflower, Viivus, Shelby Cragg, Hillary Esdaile, and Emptyfeet, gained loyal followings and were able to pursue illustration thanks to the support that spawned along with their roots in the fandom that blossomed from Homestuck. By far the most well-known of the artists that came from underneath Homestuck’s influence/ employ is Toby Fox, the creator of Undertale, an actual click through adventure like the ones Homestuck was modeled on. Even if they didn’t make it to the big lights themselves with success, countless illustrators/artists were influenced by some aspect or another of homestuck or its fandom , and that legacy can still be traced through tumblr.

To a really astounding degree, so much art came from the fandom and permeated through the internet illustration culture. Pure multimedia is being used on such a grander scale now that illustrators have been exposed to works like Homestuck, and it’s truly multi-layered illustrations and stories with more than just drawing.  Pixel art and talksprites also experienced a surge in popularity. Homestuck even resulted in two forms of illustration that were rarely seen, if not seen at all online, previously: pieces dubbed “lyric-stucks.” These were collections of illustrations that corresponded with lyrics, oftentimes using large amounts of the content/symbolism from Homestuck to drive meaning. These types of series were designed solely for the tumblr scrolling format, where the images would connect on the tops and bottoms to each other so that they could be experienced naturally on the web. These evolved into solely long art posts without the lyrics, and although both of these forms of illustration might have existed outside of the Homestuck umbrella, their frequency beneath it is irrefutable to anyone who inhabited tumblr during the years the comic was most active.  A final artistic tool that surfaced with the Homestuck inspiration storm was the character template that it supplied for future illustrators struggling to develop fully realized characters. This template followed a very basic schematic, a symbol for the character, a typing quirk which demonstrated their personality, a color to be directly associated with the character, a classpect (a more accessible personality qualifier than the Myer Briggs format), and a series of quadrants for categorizing interpersonal relationships. Interestingly, the quadrants have managed to soak into social media and fandoms that aren’t even close to Homestuck- the idea was so easily applicable.

It was this type of universality that made Homestuck such a global success. Fans could be found everywhere from Korea to the Netherlands to Brazil and on. Its reach and the participation of all these cultures consolidating into a single community for a single work of art is what embodied the spirit of Homestuck.  This hypercomic, in the plainest sense, was an illustrated culmination of the internet experience. It was a seven year event that can never be experienced again, as waiting for updates and the happenings in between was a necessary part of this near performative art piece. Those that participated were touched by it. The beauty of it was endlessly interpretable, and while the readers were waiting for the next pages to be released, they were discussing it. The fandom was not confined to just illustration, they explored the possibilities through every form of art. It encouraged conspiracy and intense transcendental examination to see it as more than just a webcomic. It was an actual adventure; it was a happening. This was part of the illustrative genius of Homestuck:  Hussie wrote the comic reflectively for the fandom’s reactions. To a degree, it was a social experiment. It was an illustrative motion, manipulated to see how far the medium of hyperfiction could be used, the humor could be pushed, the drama could be taken, and how absurd and complex it could get before it started really losing its momentum. Miraculously, the only periods in which it lost its vigor were during the hiatuses that Hussie took. Unfortunately, his hiatus between 2013 and 2016 took a huge toll on the population of the Homestuck fandom when updates were so drastically sporadic that even the movement known as “Hiatus-stuck”, which provided the fandom with increasingly nonsensical memes and art, couldn’t keep it afloat. But just because the fans migrated to other fandoms  doesn’t mean that they didn’t take Homestuck and its influences with them. The meaning of “webcomic” was still changed in their eyes, and the ideas that they generated in the light of Homestuck’s groundbreaking demonstration of the extent of illustration in the hyper world can still be credited to Andrew Hussie’s masterpiece: a subcultural phenomenon of the internet. (( if you want to read the doc itself, with the photos and the citations: read it here. ))

[jonsa-creatives]

This week’s Author of the Week is Lemoncake_Chioni ( @jen-snow on tumblr) !

We’ve long been a fan of Jen’s work (click here for her fics on AO3). Her angsty stories are beautifully written and her sexy smut is blush-inducing! 

Do yourself a favour and head on over to devour her stuff - and leave her some kudo and comment love whilst you’re at it! Oh - and if you’re not already following her - get on that too! @jen-snow

As always, below the cut you can find some excerpts from our Author of the Week....

Baelor

She blinked and held out both of her arms to him. He kicked off his boots and climbed onto the bed, pulling her into his lap. She wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his neck. As he held her to him, he made himself ask the question. "Did he hurt you?"

She shook her head. He swallowed. He wouldn't be able to handle the answer to his next one. "Did- did he touch you?"

He cursed himself as he felt her hesitate. All you have to do is listen. She had to endure more than that. "No," she said eventually, "well, he did, but, not, not like- he couldn't. He said he wouldn't."

Jon sighed in relief, but he could feel Sansa tense up in his arms. She pushed against his chest, pulling away from him. "But what if he changes his mind? Tomorrow or the day after? A fortnight from now, or in a moon's turn?"

He stared at her, mouth hanging open. "And that's not even the worst of it," she whispered, clasping a hand over her mouth as soon as she'd said it. He grabbed her by the shoulders, forcing her to look at him. "What, Sansa? Tell me!"

She was close to tears now. "Joffrey came to me, after you left. He said if his uncle was not up to the task, he'd show him how to do it. He said he'd put a babe in me himself and make you and Lord Tyrion watch."

It seemed his anger had been depleted for the day. He could only stare at her, his own face undoubtedly reflecting the horror and disbelief on hers. She seemed to understand his inability to respond to her, but then her hands started clawing at her long white throat. "I can't- I can't breathe, Jon."

He pulled her to him again, trying to ignore the feel of her soft, warm body against his and started rubbing her back. "I'm here, sweet girl, I'm here."

After a while she took a couple of deep breaths and he felt her go rigid again. "I can't, Jon, I can't. I can't let one of them take my maidenhead. I don't want either of them to put a babe in me. Help me, Jon, please!"

Unintended

She's looking around the café, probably trying to find a good table and Jon tries to sink back into the wall. She must think he's an idiot or a creep after yesterday. In those first few months after Ygritte died, it used to happen more often. He'd see a flash of red hair or hear a voice that sounded like hers, and he'd draw in a sharp breath, his heart starting to beat faster and for a moment he would think it was her. It had been months, but yesterday it happened again. It was the messy red hair that did it this time. He'd never seen the girl like that, her hair was usually sleek and straight. He liked that wild look on her, especially combined with the way her cheeks were flushed pink.

Of course he blew any chance he might have had with her with his awkward bumbling. It's unbelievable, he thinks. He meets so many women in his line of work, but talking to a pretty girl off the job reduces him to the shy teenage boy he once was. It doesn't matter. He's dated other women before, but he always ends up feeling guilty and disconnected. Even the few casual encounters he had felt wrong.

She's spotted him and for a moment she stands frozen in place, but then, to his surprise, she's walking over to his table. He can't help but take in the way her hips sway when she moves those endless legs, which are exposed from the ankles all the way up to her mid-thighs. He takes a gulp of air and tells himself to stop staring and meet her eyes.

She's standing at the other side of the table, lifting the strap of her purple bag higher over her shoulder and biting her lip. "Hi," she greets him with a shy smile. He tries to smile back at her and chokes out: "Hi."

The upper half of her body turns away from him, facing the counter. A blush is creeping up her cheeks. "I- I was really sorry that I couldn't stay yesterday and I- um- was wondering if your offer still counts?"

She's looking at him expectantly. He clears his throat. "Err- offer?"

She looks down at her feet and licks her lips. "Well- I think I remember you offering to buy me a coffee..."

He stares at her for a moment. "Oh, I did. Yeah, sure, I- ah"

"I mean- you don't have to pay for it," she cuts him off, waving a palm at him, "and I understand if you changed your mind. Maybe you were just being nice and - I don't know what I'm trying to say..."

Give Me Your Heart and Your Soul (smut)

He used his fingers and lips and teeth and tongue to lavish attention on her breasts, taking his time. When he released her right nipple from his mouth, she cried out. He glanced up, dread crushing his heart, but her eyes were blown wide with desire and she was grinning at him.

He refocused on her body, admiring his work. Her skin was flushed and littered with darker red spots from his beard and teeth and there was a large purple bloom on her neck. Her nipple was blue, fine lines spreading out onto the white flesh of her breast, resembling a star.

He lowered himself onto his knees, adjusting himself through his breeches and let his hands rest on her hips. This was it, the image from his dream. Her scent was intoxicating. He nuzzled his face into the hair covering her mound and inhaled deeply, breathing her in. She opened her legs and he released his breath at the sight of her soft pink flesh, letting it wash over her damp folds, drawing a whimper from her lips.

At the first swipe of his tongue, Jon groaned and Sansa's knees buckled. He steadied her and rose to his feet again. He released her pushing off his boots and deciding to rid himself from his ever-tightening breeches. She blinked at him. "Lie on the bed," he instructed her. She shook her head. "No, not the bed."

He nodded, kicking off his breeches. "Alright then," he growled, scooping her up and carrying her to the desk. He sat down on the chair and hooked his hands under her knees to pull her to him. "Now watch," he told her, "I'll show you how a man pleasures a woman with his mouth."

She propped herself up on her elbows to follow his instructions. He held her gaze for a moment, before inclining his head to focus on the feast before him. He nearly sobbed at the sight and smell of her arousal. A wicked grin spread across his face as a thought occurred to him.

"Perhaps something else first," he mused. Her brow furrowed. He slipped his fingers between her folds and wiggled them, collecting her wetness. He felt the muscles of her cunt twitch against his hand. A whimper of protest escaped from her lips as he pulled his hand away, tendrils of her juices forming between her lower lips and his fingers.

He drew his wet hand down over his face, nuzzling into it. He heard her gasp. "See?" he asked her, taking in the look of bewilderment on her face, "I'm yours."

He flicked his tongue out to lick his hand clean, groaning at the taste of her on his tongue. "Don't look away."

He hooked her legs over his shoulders, holding her steady with one hand on the small of her back. He started lapping at her folds, lightly at first, only teasing his tongue around her clit, carefully avoiding direct contact. He suckled and nibbled at her lower lips, dipping his tongue into her from time to time. He could tell from her moans that she needed more.

So did Jon, so he ripped away his own smallclothes to fist his throbbing cock with his still lightly damp hand and closed his lips over her nub. Sansa bucked her hips and mewled, sending shudders down his spine. At his answering moan, she threaded her fingers through his curls, pulling hard.

The sharp pricks of pain sent jolts of pleasure down to his groin. He hummed and sucked and licked as his hand tugged harder and faster and he could feel both of their bodies tensing up. Sansa lay back and started grinding her hips against his mouth and he had to still his hand to keep himself from finishing then and there.

Her back arched off the desk and she peaked with a cry, almost tearing out his hair and soaking his beard with her juices. He kept sucking until she stopped shuddering. He removed her legs from his shoulders and moved her up the desk, standing over her.

Her flushed face was the loveliest things he'd ever seen, her bottom lip bleeding from where she'd bitten it to stifle her moans and her eyes dark and heavily lidded. He forced himself to keep the strokes on his cock slow and soft so he could ask her: "Do you want to be mine?"

She nodded, so he growled and climbed onto the desk to straddle her waist. Finally, he increased the pressure and accelerated the movements of his hand, until he could feel his balls tighten and the coil at the base of his spine snapping. He watched his seed spill onto her pink nipple and the blue one and the soft skin of her breasts, grunting and howling. Mine! Mine! Mine! he chanted as wave after wave of pleasure crashed over him.

He braced his hands on either side of her head and bent down to kiss her and lick the blood from her lips. He pulled back to rub his seed into her creamy skin, sighing contentedly. Suddenly, he remembered to ask: "How did you like the demonstration, my lady?"

She pulled her fascinated face away from the hand that was still moving between her breasts. She smirked before assuming her queenly expression again. "Well enough, Your Grace, but I'm afraid I lost my focus at some point. You might have to do it again sometime."

Also highly recommend Discord & Unions because it is EPIC and Silk & Fur purely because Jon is wearing stockings!

[impalaanddemons]

Good Girl - Part 9

Summary: Werewolf!Reader Story. Readers a young doctor and uses her skills to keep her condition hidden, until she transfers to the Enterprise and tries to deceive a certain grumpy Doctor

Bones x Reader

Wordcount: 2300

A/N: Ah, yes. That’s emotional. Sorry, guys. I read through this a couple of ties now over the last two days to kill any typos and errors, but as far as I know how this works by now,spelling mistakes and the like will start to pop up as soon as I post this. Anyway. ENJOY!

This could be AOS and TOS

Warnings:  Angst, Fear

PART 1 PART 2 PART 3 PART 4 PART 5 PART 6 PART 7 PART 8

They said that an empty room echoed your human self in it and that therefor it was one of the hardest things to endure alone. Funny, as the Enterprises systems didn’t even recognize you as human - or anything else. You had never thought that the slight difference, that this one thing was enough for you to not really count any more. Maybe it was somewhat like with the Romulans and the Vulcans. You sat there, hands folded and shivering, not from cold or illness, but something deep within you shaking and rattling against your confinement. Your cell. Your cage. And there was your triumvirate ready to pass judgement over your maculate soul. Spock was collected and reserved, hands folded behind his back, watching.  Kirk was pacing, thinking, watching you with two parts interest and one part caution. Bones was working himself through one emotion after another, you couldn’t bear watching it, though it was his voice that spoke first after you had settled down in your cell.

„I’ll need a blood sample, Doctor Y/N“, his voice was pressed as he stepped forward to open up a window in the glass wall. „Put your arm through here, will you?“ there was a ‚please‘ hidden in his voice, nestled in the barest hint of his southern drawl. You felt his affection more than you could actually observe it. Obeying you put your arm through the opening in the glass wall and watched Kirks careful step as he got closer, baby blue eyes piercing you. „So, Y/N, feel free to explain any time.“ Not wincing as Bones drew blood from you, but still smelling the fluid, you turned your face to watch the Captain. „I don’t know, what I am, Captain“, you said. A phial filled, but Bones took another one. You’d have done the same in his place. „That is a rare thing in the universe, not knowing what you are.“ he lifted his eyebrows. You raised your shoulders in defiance. „You can call me a werewolf.“ you offered and he laughed a short, cut back laughter. „So you are a shapeshifter.“ the cold monotone was Spocks and you turned your attention to him. „I guess. I can change shape - by will, but I must by force and under .. circumstances I can only barely determine. I only have one other shape, too.“ your breath left you as a long sigh. Bones was finished with drawing blood, his warm hand held your arm for a moment longer then was absolutely necessary. You felt grateful for it. „Were your parents shapeshifter too?“ „No .. I .. you know what - access my room, you’ll find a book with notes under my mattress and I’ll give you the password to access a couple of encrypted files on my PADD. They’ll explain everything I know.“ McCoy closed the window in the glass and took a step back behind his questioning captain. „How did the incident with Bancroft happen? Did you get in trouble?“ „I barely know him, Sir. He’s probably been to the sickbay once, can’t really remember, but that’s it.“ „Then why hurt him? And how?“ „I don’t know, Sir.“ „You don’t know how you hurt him?“ „No, I don’t know why I hurt him.“ He shot you a quizzical look. Spock was taking notes on the PADD, looking up to you ever so often. The doctor had crossed it’s arms in front of his chest. You could see his teeth working, jawline tense, eyes staring at a spot several meters behind your back. „Please elaborate, Doctor Y/L/N“ „Sir,“ you began - a thought pounding against your forehead, as if trying to escape your mouth and break free of this horror show. Just show ‚‘em. Show em. ShowemShowemShowem. „God no,“ you muttered, closing your eyes and pinching your nose. „What was that, Doctor?“ „Nothing, Sir. I .. it’s just hard to explain, that’s all.“ „Try me. I’ve seen stranger things.“ Another sigh and then you tried to explain - the disconnect between you and your animal half („So you lose your consciousness?“ - „No, it’s different. I know who I am, Sir. My wolf self is as aware of me being me, as I am being a wolf.“ It sounded rubbish the moment you spoke the words.), the change (They didn’t believe you, you could see it in their eyes) and the memories, the emotions, how things were and weren’t at the same time. Futile. It was as if to explain to a deaf child the sound of waves crashing onto stone. Maybe … Show em. Show em. You groaned again and stared at Bones. The other two - you didn’t care. But Bones? „I will show you. The change.“ you said and straightened up. „But Leonard will go. Security will go. I don’t want them to see.“ „Security will go - „ „Sir, I don’t think it’s advisable to - „ „Spock, Security will go - but Bones here will stay.“ You shook your head. You would not basically flay yourself in front of your boyfriend. Or ex-boyfriend. You weren’t exactly sure about that. „I will not go, Y/N“. That was his voice - he was addressing you, finally - just you. You opened your mouth to protest but he was having none of it. „I am your Doctor, Y/N. Listen to me.“, his voice had lowered to the soft murmur reserved for frightened children and wild animals. You forced yourself to look at him. „I am your Doctor and whatever … illness you’ve got there, we’ll figure it out.“ He didn’t understand.

Nor did the thought stem from the primal part of you, neither was it driven by your boiling emotions. It was a simple fact. He didn’t understand. That this was no disease, no illness, but a fundamental change down to the last molecule in your body. „Okay“, you said and your voice fell flat. You grabbed the hem of your blue uniform dress and pulled it over your head, effectively revealing your underwear. „Ahem, Doctor Y/L/N, is that - „ - „I will damage my clothes if I don’t, or will get trapped. Just watch.“ You slipped out of your shoes, your underwear and a red touch flashed your cheeks, but as soon as you got rid of your last piece clothing you got down on all four and tried to arrange your limbs in a way that one could refer to as „doggy style“. In theory, this would help with the whole process. In reality you’d end up panting, lying on your side and whining like always. But it was ritual, and rituals kept the pain at bay.

You’d never seen the change through someone else's eyes, but today yours would focus on the dark pair that belonged to Bones. Thickheaded, passionate Bones. This time you felt the pain only as the horror in his eyes by the sound of your cracking bones. You felt the pain as he drew on his composure as a trauma surgeon when your limbs rearranged. You felt the pain as an endless stream of pity and compassion in his face. And as the wolf took over all your eyes could see was a mate. Your mate. Would he be your mate after witnessing this? Could he ever lie next to that cursed body of yours? The abomination you were? In the end you laid whimpering on your side, your sides heaving as they desperately drew air in. You stomach was clenching with hunger. You had barely eaten and already changed twice in such a short time. Not to mention that injury. Legs shaking you got up with all the dignity a wolf on a starship could muster. Spocks voice was an incoherent stream of complicated words on which you’d have to concentrate to really understand them. „Fascinating“ was what you understood as he kneeled down in front of the cell. Kirk seemed uneasy about what he had seen - and compassionate. Nothing you had expected. And Bones. You turned around and heard the clicking of your claws on the ground. He spoke - again the slow singsong. You sat down in front of him and cocked your head, staring up at him, tail curled around your feet. There was no need to remember exactly what he said. The exact words were of no matter to you now. They began to discuss with each other and long minutes passed. You watched them for a while, sniffed the ground and finally decided there was nothing to do - you jumped on the bed and curled up there, sticking your nose into the sheets and smelling the comforting odor of Starfleet Standard issue detergent.

You woke up hours later to the sound of two persons arguing, immediately realizing that one of those persons was Bones. Stretching on your bed you realized another thing - that you were human again. A pleasant surprise. One of the few you got. „You cannot go in there, Sir. I am afraid I can’t allow it.“ „Can’t allow it?“ he huffed and made an aggressive step forward. „I’m sorry, Sir“, the security officer straightened up and tried to keep his point blank stare just above McCoys shoulder. „You know who I am, son? I’m your CMO. Your chief medical officer.“ his hand gestured wildly into your direction: „We’ve got a young woman in there who has just gone through a series of traumatic injuries. Repeatedly.“ he was basically shouting now, towering over the poor man. „I will go in there and treat my patient and there’s nothing on this ship capable of stopping me.“ he strode over to your cell, shooting a look over his shoulder as if to see if the Security officer would try to actually do anything. He didn’t dare. A smile crept on your face as he approached the glass, you had just managed to put on your underwear and were reaching for your blue uniform. „Don’t even bother getting clothed, young lady.“ he opened the cell just wide enough for him and his medical equipment to fit in. „And stop grinning to yourself, I’ve not even begun with you.“ His movements were methodical, but there was a certain edge to him, a sharpness you had not seen before. „Sit down, I want to have a look a you.“ Not daring to say a word you sat down as he put his medical recorder to your face. It beeped. „I’ve calibrated a new setting according to your notes.“ A moment of silence. „Yeah, even with this new settings, your data’s off the chart.“ There were dark circles under his eyes, emphasizing the lines on his face. Something hard glistened in the corner of his eyes. „Listen, Len …“ you began and were immediately interrupted „What? What, Listen, Len?“ his voice seemed only an inch away from shaking with fury, loaded with emotions so mixed up with another that they were indistinguishable. „I’m… sorry.I didn’t want to… lie to you.“ „But you did“ he answered and bitterness dropped into every word he said. „You lied to me.“ „Yes, yes I did.“ you took a deep breath as he was taking your pulse and angrily nodding to himself. „And I am sorry. I just … never told anyone what I was and … I wanted to go to starfleet so badly and… „ you stringed one word after another, afraid that if you didn’t vocalize them now, you’d never get a choice to say them again. „They’d never have let me and at some point I was so used to hiding it .. and I was so afraid if people would find out what a freak I am …“ He stopped in what he was doing, got a hypo out of his jacket and simply punched it into your arm.  „Are you out of your goddamn mind?“ Your mouth fell open, the silence following booming in your ears.

„Are you, Y/N? Because I think you must be. We’ve got all sorts of aliens on this fucking ship - that’s always one hull breach short of killing every single one of us anyway“ he took a deep breath. „You think one person who occasionally changes into a fucking wolf would make any difference? Jim would’ve probably bought you a dog bowl as a birthday present.“ He stuffed the empty hypo angrily in his pockets and got another one, punching it into your arm with considerable force. You winced, both from pain and his words. After putting the second hypo back into his pockets he ran his hand through his hair, muttering under his breath before addressing you again. „Fucking. Starfleet. Y/N. Imagine … Imagine what would’ve happened if you’d gotten injured. Nobody would’ve been able to treat you. WORSE.“ he raised his voice, a fire burning in his eyes now: „We would have treated you to death because we would’ve known nothing about your physiology. I would have killed you, with my own hands and out of good intent, just because you thought that next to that green blooded goblin and a piece of metal hurling us through space you …” he stopped himself in mid sentence and turned his face back to you. All of a sudden his face softened. The lines on his face smoothened. You felt tears in your eyes but too proud to shed them. „I was afraid, Len. Don’t you understand?“ He walked over to the bed where you were still sitting, shoulders slumping down. „I .. thought they’d never .. I am alone, Len. I don’t even know what I am.“ His dark eyes watched you and you could see the rage that he’d been feeding for the last couple of hours slowly ebbing away. „I’m sorry“ you said. „Don’t“ his hand cupped your face for a second, his thumb gently caressing your cheek. „I ordered food to be brought. You need it. Eat. Sleep. We …“ he stopped in mid sentence again and shook his head, stepping away from you. Without speaking another word, he left your cell and did not turn around again.

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[lunagalemaster]

Dannymay Day 2: Ice

(I’m late and this was overboard. Is this going to be a theme?)

Setting: Master of Space AU once more, sort of. Astral is narrating. No specific time period. 

Special thanks to @skyereminiscing​ and @ninjagorocksdealwithit​ for letting me use their Ice Sprite and Ice Prince Dannys! 

With that, let’s begin!

There was a huge difference between Cores and cores.

In short, Cores referred to the Dannys. The infinite, unfortunately incredibly important Dannys. Each universe created a Core once in its way too long lifespan (with a minor glitch here and there creating either an odd knock off or amusingly, an actor playing Danny). It was a ridiculous cycle. A Core was born, they lived, and if everything went well, they died after a long eventful life.

Astral noted that things only went well half the time.

The other half either were Cores with boring lives, those who died early, or those who never died at all.

Cores were important for sustaining a universe. No matter what they did, as long as they did something, their deaths would, at the very least, extend the longevity of the universe by a great number of Earth years Astral never bothered figuring out.

(Clockwork probably told him a few times, but considering it sometimes felt like he blinked and missed an entire millennia, the actual number of years were lost to him).

Whatever the actual number of years, it didn’t particularly matter. A Danny lived, they died, and their energy helped to make a universe live longer. Since Clockwork’s and Astral’s goal was to make universes live as long as possible, it was usually in their best interest to make sure that a Core was born.

Not that they could do much to keep the Core alive once he was born, but that was another story for another day, and by another day, Astral meant never.

On the other hand, cores were (with a few exceptions here and there), the lifeline of a ghost. Like Cores helped power universes, ghost cores were the literal center of being for every ghost, holding their power, personality, and essentially their very existence.

Unless you were a halfa, of course, then it had half of your existence...sometimes. Other times cores were in the halfas literal heart, and that really made a mess in some of the universes where a ghost managed to dispose of a Core by destroying their core.

The weirdest thing about cores, in Astral’s opinion, were their elemental effects. For some reason, some cores had elements. Not all of them but some of them. Astral could never figure out why (well, there was always an in-universe reason, but they varied and were way too complicated for his tastes). Of all the abilities ghosts could have, those related to their elemental cores always felt different than other powers. They didn’t relate to a ghost’s past, nor did it particularly relate to ghosts in general. Elemental cores were just another power….for no reason except to have an additional power.

Don’t even get him started on those with “musical” and “adaptive” cores. He tried to wrap his mind around these variations, and he  just came to the conclusion that they sounded cool and so the multiverse made it happen.

The Rule of Cool was a legitimate law, one that Astral himself indulged in quite often.

Generally, Cores tended to have ice cores….for some reason. Again, sometimes the sudden cryokinesis explained and other times, they just generally appear whenever the timeline demanded it. Astral tried to rational it all out, but by the time he found out that at least a fourth of the Common universes didn’t have cores, let alone ice cores, Astral realized that was a stupid thing to try to understand.

This, by itself, wouldn’t be too much of a big deal. Like ghost powers themselves, not every single universe had to have the same abilities. Fuck, the multiverse threw logic out the window as much as Astral did, which made sense when he thought about it. No, the reason why he was hung up on the stupid ice thing had nothing to do with lack of consistency or the consistent lack of consistency.

It was because for some damn reason, universes just loved to center ice as a Core’s main theme, even in Common universes.

If the ice theme was similar to the stars, Astral might have understood. Nearly every universe, with the exceptions of a handful had Core that either loved space or centered space around their universe. Space was loved by all of them in one form or another, and while the stars were simply a backdrop to him now, Astral distinctly remembered his pre-Master days and even his early days just staring out into the great infinity in wonder.

Ice on the other hand? Nothing. There was no reason. It was a theme and nothing less. The Cores didn’t have any attachment to ice, no memories, fuck, they usually hated the winter holiday. (Was this entire thing some great irony in the multiverse?) The only connection to ice they had was to their inconsistent occurrences in their ice core.

Clockwork said it was because the original universe had a Danny with an ice core. Astral preferred to think that the Rule of Cool had evolved into the Rule of Cold.

Whatever the case, it didn’t matter. Ice was a Core’s theme, and as a result, there were several universes dedicated to centralizing it to the point of extremity.

OoOoOoOoO  

Phantom, king of ghosts, leaned leisurely on the armrest of his throne, face impassive, as he eyed the babbling ghost before him. Bright blue eyes, bored at this endless routine strayed to the walls of his palace. The walls, changed to match the reign of the new king, packed to the brim with solid snow to the point only the most powerful of fire cores could even hope to melt it. Icicles clung to the ceiling dangerous, the pointed ends like spikes ready to close down on the rest of the room. The floor was slick and shining. If he wanted, Phantom could see his reflection.

“M-m-m-my K-king?” A voice whispered.

Phantom’s eyes snapped to the ghost, who jumped away in fright. The poor thing was shivering, from fear or the temperature, the king could not say.

Phantom smiled softly, “Please continue. I was just distracted. Not harm done.”

The ghost hesitated a moment, before nodding and continuing on.

The smile dropped from the king’s face, and it was all he could do not to let out another sigh. He wrapped his cape closer to his body, the snowflake design glittering nicely with the rest of the room. If he could, Phantom would be anywhere else, trying to proactively find a way to improve his kingdom.

But no, he was here, listening to some councilman explain boring economic efforts that he’d just hand off to someone who knew what they were doing. It was a boring thing, but a necessary one. He just wished that it wasn’t.

Phantom huffed out a breath and watched it float through the air. Crystallizing, making patterns, before breaking away.

Sometimes being  the Ghost King had a powerless quality to it.

OoOoOoOoO

Astral understood on some level.

On others he didn’t.

It was as much of a symbol as it was a mark of power.

However, for some, it was something new, but just a part of their lives just the same.

OoOoOoOoO

Danny frowned as the little wings fluttered behind him.

They felt...odd on his body, but at the same time, perfectly normal. Like an extra limb that had been asleep for who knew long, it at first was awkward almost painful, but now?

He turned his head to look at them, their fluttering stopping at the moment. Snowflakes trailed up and down the dragonfly esque design of the appendages. The base of the wings were a light blue, almost white, and probably would be if it weren't for the lighting. Even when they weren’t moving they seemed to be shimmering, twitching, ready to take off for a long flight.

Or maybe it was just him.

He shook his head and hopped off his bed. He headed towards his mirror to get a better look at himself again. The combination of morbid fascination mixed with a strange inner peace had him skitting his now, much brighter eyes toward any reflective surface he could find. Even if he jumped at the alien in the mirror (well, sprite), he couldn’t help but think that he looked...right for once.

Fueled by a desire to see his reflection, he felt himself floating off the floor in little hops, wings buzzing excitedly behind him. He couldn’t exactly understand flying just yet, but some deep instincts had him using his wings with whatever limited uses he could find.

He must have miscalculated his jumps because he found himself stumbling nearly on top of his vanity. Grumbling to himself, he gripped the edge and lowered his feet back on the ground.

Then he caught his reflection.

He looked like a Smurf. At least, that was always his first thought. Although, his skin wasn’t that deep of a blue, the shade of blue always closer to a light sky rather than deep blue of the little creatures, the deeper blue of his eyes and the dark blue spots of his freckles made it difficult not to make the comparison.

As he absently poked at his freckles,  his eyes trailed over the rest of his face. More pointed features of his jaw with pointed ears to match. Yet his hair poofed more than usual. Maybe it was to give the effect of powdered snow, but after his transformation, his black hair turned snowy white and seemed to shine softly off his head.

Danny didn’t even realize he was leaning forward until he pressed his hands on the glass. Startled, he looked behind him only to find his wings fluttering up a storm and his body floating gently off the ground. Slightly panicking, he leaned forward towards the glass, and he found his breath creating trails of frost, the ice crawling intricate patterns on the mirror in a way he’d only seen in movies.

Despite his predicament, Danny couldn’t help but smile.

OoOoOoOoO

For others, ice was their very of life. Their identity was tied to the snow and freezing cold just as important to them, as the very air they breathed. It was their story, their beginning, their end. Astral couldn’t disconnect them if he tried.

Yet despite it all, there was a certain innocence when it came to ice, snow more specifically. It should have been mundane, yet as the Cores explored the vast snowy plains, their eyes glittered as they eyed the land

There was an innocence and beauty in watching these Cores love the world around them that Astral appreciated even if he didn’t particularly understand.

OoOoOoOoO

Phantom snuggled under the snow, keeping his breaths low. It was dark and more than a little cold, but that was alright. He knew what he was doing. Paja taught him how to keep warm when he was lost in the snow.

He wasn’t lost now. He didn’t even need to fly very far to go to the village, let alone see it. Yet, quietly, as he could, Phantom camouflaged himself under the light cover of snow. He was sort of cold, and he was pretty sure he had snow in some weird places, but unlike the time he jumped into a giant piles of it only to have his Paja needing to take icicles out of his frozen hair, this time it was different.

He waited, anticipation building, his core buzzing with excitement. He tried his best not to shift too much. To keep quiet. Hidden. Not visible even by the greatest of-

“Found you, Little One!” Suddenly, Phantom found himself being lifted in air by two strong, familiar paws. He screamed in surprise, before the sound turned into a wave of laughter and giggles, as he hugged the Far Frozen who surprised him.

“Paja! You found me!” Phantom exclaimed. He floated up to rest on Frostbite’s shoulders, legs dangling between his head, as his hands held on tightly to his horns. “How did you know I was there?”

“I am a master tracker!” Frostbite said with a chuckle. He started making his way back to the village.

“But how?”

Frostbite sounded amused, as he replied, “It’s not too difficult to find a wiggling pile of snow.”

“Ohhh,” Phantom muttered, pouting a bit, “I thought that I was still enough.”

A giant paw came up and ruffled his hair, causing Phantom to giggle under his breath. The Ice Prince could hear the pride in his Paja’s voice when he continued, “It was a nice start. If you had been farther out, I might not have had that easy a time finding you. But alas, your wiggling and the circumstances made it quite a bit easier on me than you. You’ll learn,” he said, after Phantom gave a little sigh, “But you also need practice, but for now, time to get you warmed up.”

“Wait!” Phantom called out, floating quickly off Frostbite.

He arched an eyebrow, “Oh, what is it, Young One?”

“I just…” He turned away from the village and looked back to the endless snow, “...Can we stay longer? Just the two of us?”

There was a small silence from his Paja, and it made Phantom’s heart hurt. Out here in the snow with no one else around, he was free. No duty, no other Far Frozen, just the Ice Prince and his kingdom, sharing the land with the creature he cared more than anyone else in the Zone.

He looked back at his Paja, eyes wide and pleading, but to Phantom’s despair, he had already closed his eyes, shaking his head no. “I’m sorry. But we must make our way back home. Now come along. I don’t want you to freeze yourself.”

‘You’re my home,’ Phantom thought. And so was Maja and the snowy beyond, but he couldn’t say this, he knew. He didn’t want his Paja to feel guilty for anything. His home was here, and he was happy with his life!

However, as he longed for the vast expanse of the unknown, he couldn’t help but think he could be happier too.

OoOoOoOoO

It was ridiculous. There was no one connection that ice had to the Cores. Yes, there was overlapping ones (how couldn’t there be), but over the many Cores and many universes, they attached themselves to their ice abilities in ways that baffled him. Some for beauty, some for practicality, some simply using them because they were there, and why not? It’s another power, isn’t it?

Astral knew he shouldn’t be harped on the idea of an ice theme or narratives being carried just by this theme of ice, but he has seen the same story so many times and yet the stories of ice could either be completely boring or jaw droppingly emotional.

It didn’t make sense.

But nothing made any sense really, and the multiverse enjoyed beating his sense of reality into little tiny pieces anyway, so why not just go with the flow and enjoy?

Astral supposed the ice thing was just one little problem out of many that represented his struggles as a whole.

If the Cores were enjoying their ice abilities, who was he to judge them?

OoOoOoOoO

It was midnight in the middle of December in what could have been the coldest nights of the year. Danny had zero sleep in the last two days, he failed his world geography test, and he was only one parental late night check-in away from getting grounded for all eternity.

Even so, he found himself floating down towards the lake at the edge of town, the decently sized body of water frozen over for the winter. Despite himself, Danny couldn’t help but smile, clutching the bag in his hand even tighter in his excitement.

Flying was amazing stress reliever, sure, but his favorite pastime was getting riskier by the day. With Valerie and his parents both after his hide, one moment he could be enjoying the rush of air as he rushed toward the ground and the next, he could be plummeting for entirely different reasons.

So, no, with the chaos of his life and his already high stress levels, he did not want to risk being shot at, thank you very much.

Danny gently landed, boots barely making a sound, as the ice gained his light weight. While he was sure it would hold him, just in case, he crouched down, and after shifting the bag, pressed his free hand on the ice. His eyes glowed blue, and there was a woosh of cold air that rose up and unsettled the sparing trees around him.

He got up and pressed his foot down, moving his foot side to side. Danny stepped his foot once or twice, and when he was done, he smiled in satisfaction, giving the ice a little nod. After doing his tests, he floated over to the edge of the lake, made himself an ice bench. He settled himself and his bag down with a plop, transforming back into Fenton.

From here, covered from head to toe with thick winter clothes, Danny opened the bag, revealing a pair of figure skates.

It started out as a way to practice his new ice powers. Some nights, he’d go out, freeze the lake a bit, and try to make some snowmen or something. It wasn’t too big of a deal, and while using his ice powers wasn’t as practical on non-moving objects, as other ghosts, the powers were new enough that anything was helpful.

Although, if Danny were to ever come clean and tell his friends, he will remember never to mention the number of squirrels he pissed off while looking for target practice, or so help him, Sam would fully kill him right then and there.

The reason he started skating was a bit embarrassing. One night he freezed the lake and started sliding around like a clumsy baby penguin. Fenton stubbornness kicked in, and he wouldn’t leave the lake until he could slide around on the ice without slipping. He got the brilliant idea to put skates on the bottom of his boots.

It worked out well for about three seconds before he fell flat on his face.

Normal people would have given up there. However, a combination of dread of coming home and the before mentioned Fenton genes had him huffing, getting back up again, and trying to skate once more. When he got back home, the first thing he did was look up how to make actual skates and, of course, how not to flat out on his face.

He eventually bought a pair of skates when he figured out putting blades on the bottom of his boots was not very effective.

Danny didn’t exactly know what it was supposed to be to him. He never saw himself as a skater. Even if the thought did ever cross his mind, he would have shoved it down, tear it up, and make sure it never did again, in fear of Dash finding out and bashing him in the face.

Good thing Danny stopped caring what Dash thought a long time ago.

If Tucker and Sam ever found out what he did some nights, he’d never hear the end of it. They wouldn’t get it, not exactly, and while they wouldn’t make fun of him (for long), he knew they wouldn’t see this like he did.

It was like flying, except a bit more accessible. Whenever he moved on the ice, the wind flowing, body bending, and twisting, he couldn’t help but feel like he was in a whole other world.

Danny finished tying up his skates. Carefully, he made his way towards the ice,  smile wide on his face, as he started the now familiar motion of skating. He started slow, making sure he knew the motions. The wind picked up, as he went along, as he sashayed back and forth, marking his trail with the cut of his blades.

As time went on, he went faster, nothing too much, but he felt the air pick up around him, the cold holding him like a hug, and he closed his eyes so he could just feel the world turn into nothing but wind, ice, and freedom.

Hours later, Danny sat on the little ice bench once more. He was exhausted, face flushed pink, breath short, and sore from head to toe. He should have stayed home, slept, get some homework done.

Yet, as he stayed at the frozen lake and put away his skates, Danny couldn’t help but feel the happiest he’d been in a long time.

OoOoOoOoO

There may be a big difference between Cores and their cores, but considering their passion, not only with ice, but with the usual hope they had to continue on beyond what should be possible, Astral appreciated them nonetheless.

Ice was a staple of the multiverse. It wasn’t going away.

So why not just sit back, watch the show, and enjoy the winter wonderlands?