#and what would happen at such a heinous emotional violation

[melishade]

This is more of a PSA announcement if anything. A warning of people you should DNI. Like at all! Because this situation is getting so fucking ridiculous the longer I learn about this shit.

There was this Youtuber that I followed: Lily Orchard. I used to follow her for years. I started following her...between the fourth and fifth season of My Little Pony Gen 4. So since I was in high school. I followed her for at least a decade. I looked up to her and her work for years and thought she was a good role model.

I was wrong.

I've heard rumors about some of the accusations and chose to ignore it when I was younger, thinking it was slander. But it wasn't true. I had actually found out about all the shit she's done just a few months ago from @asunnycoffee and it is absolutely horrid. I mean there's:

Racism Sexism Homophobia Transphobia Brownfacing Lying Support of slavery through her written fanfics Grooming of her fans (BTW she's thirty) Stalking Harassment Hard Implications of Incest in her work Manipulations Gaslighting Emotional abuse Mental Abuse Complete and utter narcissism of this bitch. And so much more that I'm certain one of it could violate some international law.

She's like a fake liberal Catilyn Jenner. But as far as I know, Jenner didn't fucking molest her sister. Because that's exactly what Lily Orchard did to @pleasetiemyshoe AKA Courtney Orchard.

I can't believe I actually looked up to her I feel so fucking sick

Now because I am new to this and really just an outsider perspective learning about this, I'm going to botch any and all explanations of this in detail. Luckily there is a masterpost of all the shit that Lily Orchard has done in detail. https://www.tumblr.com/lily-orchard-gossip-blog/692978295298572288/a-quick-summary-of-lily-orchard?source=share

And there are a bunch of trigger warnings to this and it will be in the tags if you cannot handle it. That is fine to avoid.

But instead of Lily, ya know, owning up to her mistakes and possibly explaining her side of the story, she's done nothing but double down and accuse everyone that come out to expose her for her shit behavior as 'stalkers', 'TERFs', 'Racists' (even though she's fucking brownfacing. Which by the way, fuck her. I already deal with blackfacing enough as it is and she wants to appropriate a culture for views. GOD WHY DID I LOOK UP TO HER WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?!) She will slander anyone that doesn't agree with her and do everything in her power to destroy them. And she will use her fanbase to do so. If the fans so much as harass, slander, misgender, and tell people to off themselves that have critiqued Lily in the past, she does nothing. She lets this shit happen. And usually when a creator or a person of power doesn't say anything to stop their fans from doing heinous actions, it's basically giving permission to the people to fucking do it. A perfect example of this is how Trump weaponized his own people to attack the US Capitol.

And it's not just Orchard. It's also her wife Mikaila Orchard, and a former ex now friend, Ginger. Both have followed Orchard's behavior, refused to call her out on anything and have also actively used their platforms to harass people that Orchard deems as an enemy.

And I wish I was fucking joking about any and all of this fucking nonsense, and if I'm wrong I would take it all back! But there are so many people who've come out against her and explained how much of a shit person she is including:

@as8bakwthesage (BTW check out their art it is lovely. And Sage I'm on a transformers forum if you want to join. We have fun.)

@britts-galaxy-brain

@asunnycoffee (A sweet delight. Who's 18, BTW! So Orchard is not above harassing fucking teenagers! And she's not above grooming them either!)

@opinated-user

@pleasetiemyshoe (Her sister. She also posts pictures about cats. But the stuff she talk about with her sister gets really fucking intense. Proceed with caution.)

@glyphosatesolarize

@thetimelordbatgirl

@lily-orchard-gossip-blog

Lizzy Orchard (Which in summary, was Orchard former girlfriend. Orchard claimed Lizzy abused her when really it was the other way around. Lizzy was harassed and bullied off of tumblr and Orchard took her last name which is weird because why the hell would you take the last name of your abuser.

Blake (Lily threatened violence on Blake's fiancee)

Josh Scorcher (An MLP fan. He and Lily used to be friends and there was a fallout)

Patch (IDK if Patch is on tumblr or not)

Poppy and Zena

And that's from what I can remember! That's over ten people that is ringing out warning signs to avoid Orchard at all costs. If it was one person, I'd be skeptical. But 10?! 10! That should be enough to avoid her at all costs! Another perfect example of this situation is when 30 women came out against Cosby and said he SA'd them. Again, when it is multiple people telling different stories that come to the same conclusion, then it's not something that you can deny.

Orchard is a terrible, human being, and you need to avoid her at all costs, and Mikaila and Ginger. These are the names of the channels you should avoid (because sometimes she'll use other people to spy on accounts that critique her and make alt accounts herself to spy on others and make herself look better:

lily-orchard mikaila-orchard lily-orchard-fanart sucky-boi (an alt account) lexyr-kryo (not an alt of Orchard, but the user misgendered Sage and I don't take kindly to that) ginger-snap-talkin-nonsense (Gringer has been known to harass Sunny, who is 18) So block those accounts and follow the others that I mentioned above. Please boost this post as much as you can to help other people avoid them. Although there will be some heavy stuff in some of those accounts, so please proceed with caution. also there's evidence that she wrote an incest story called Stockholm

[ewingstan]

Finished the Byron interlude.

I will say that wildbow is very good at portraying hell. Byron's circumstances feel incredibly bleak. Thinking about what it has to be like for Tristan is also fucking bleak. All Byron's descriptions of how sickening it can be to experience other's taste, feel their emotions, be disoriented by their gaze—and then think about what its like for Tristan when Byron starts stabbing himself in the thigh. Ugh. I realize that Byron would hate me for turning that into a Poor Tristan thing but y'know. Can't be helped. We got Byron's perspective, thinking about what Tristan's must have been like is the obvious spot for analysis.

That said, while his execution of hells is stellar, his base ideas for some of the details.... I've seen criticism of how the writing of Byron and Tristan's situation is set up in such a way that the act of having gay sex necessarily is a selfish and harmful violation of others. I think those carry water, especially given how the text draws attention to it in a very weird way by having Mr. Vaughn go "I think Byron is fully in the right but alas I can't say that because of cancel culture." And having Moonsong be homophobic so Byron could kinda-sorta-not-really distance himself from that. And Tristan starting his revenge plot after being released to go fight the homophobic serial killer supervillain. And this happening in the next chapter:

You didn't need to draw attention to how both the queer siblings did something morally heinous related to their sexuality. You were already putting these chapters back-to-back, you didn't need to make it that explicit.

I do think this is incredibly written psychological horror that becomes more and more effective if you think about what it would be like living in such a situation. Never getting to be alone. Not being able to hurt yourself without knowing you're hurting someone else. Never getting to experience a pleasure without subjecting someone else to you doing so. It just didn't need to specify that pleasure given all the other ways it could set things up. For all that I can say the specifics of it makes Tristan into a more fleshed-out character than he might otherwise be, it comes at the expense of writing a scenario where the right-wing "think of what you're subjecting me to with all your flamboyancy and rubbing what you're doing in our face" thing gets justified.

[pow3tage]

A Mother's Betrayal part 3

Sarah stood beside her mother's bed, a needle trembling in her hand as the tempest of anger surged within her, threatening to engulf her like a wildfire. In that fraught moment, her thoughts drifted back to that fateful night when her mother's betrayal had left an indelible mark on her, both mentally and physically, a chilling reminder of her mother's heartless ways.

The memory was as vivid as the present, a nightmarish scene etched into Sarah's consciousness. She recalled the night when her innocence was mercilessly stolen by the man her mother had brought into their lives. It was a cold, dark night, and the room was shrouded in obscurity, so profound that Sarah couldn't even discern her own hands before her.

The coarse, violating touch of her stepfather sent shivers down her spine, and she stood frozen, her voice imprisoned by fear. When the ordeal was over, the sound of her mother's footsteps on the wooden floor sent her stepfather into a frantic scramble. Sarah's mother had stepped outside briefly, and she could hear her returning, her voice echoing in the darkness.

"I left the bar of soap," her mother had said, reaching out to find it. Sarah held her breath, relief momentarily washing over her. Now, her mother would surely confront her stepfather. But to Sarah's shock, her mother did nothing of the sort. Instead, she dragged Sarah from the bed, pulled her outside, and began to unleash her wrath.

"Why don't you have any clothes on? What's happening in here?" her mother's voice rose with anger. Sarah was flung to the ground, her mother's words echoing in her ears like a cruel refrain. Her mother repeatedly struck her with a stick, accusing her of heinous intentions. Sarah couldn't fathom her mother's response. She was only eight years old at the time, and the pain she had endured that night was etched into her soul.

With a jolt, Sarah snapped back to the present, her fingers clutching the needle. A profound sense of disappointment washed over her as she realized that she would never find safety within her own family. Her lips quivered, and the words tumbled out, "I was only eight years old," a heart-wrenching admission that conveyed the depths of her suffering.

Her sister Ann's voice interrupted the somber moment, grounding her in the present. "You're giving Mommy her medicine?" Ann inquired, her gaze filled with innocence. Sarah nodded, her emotions a tumultuous sea beneath a façade of normalcy, and handed over the needle.

[duckuwu]

I, uh, I'm too in love with the concept of long game slow burn Imogen/Laudna to even enjoy Dusk asking Laudna out tonight.

I don't know if it's purely because I just hate love triangles, or if I'm against it because we know that Dusk has a hidden agenda and their niceness is just a front.

As a multishipper, I'm leaning towards it mostly being the second one. I know it's partially Erika having some fun, which I'm not really against. But idk...

I'm glad Laudna left. Not only cause it was directly choosing Imogen (because Imogen is all she really cares about), but also like... I already wasn't liking the whole notion of Laudna potentially being interested in something romantic with Dusk only to inevitably find out that they've had an agenda this whole time. Dusk's inevitable betrayal was already enough for me to place a Do Not Ship this label on the relationship, but then you've got Laudna saying she's never been asked out before...

...and all my protective instincts just took over. I absolutely do not want Laudna being taken advantage of. And that's what Dusk would be doing at this point.

Listen, as a storyteller, I absolutely understand how this sort of betrayal could bring about a whole bunch of interesting narrative paths. And I'm sure it was more of a throwaway line for Laudna/Marisha, and again I know it's all a bit of fun for Erika and potentially a genuine (somewhat fun times) interest for Dusk. But given the context of what we've been given wrt Dusk, and now Laudna... it's coming really close to the first time CR has ever made me feel uncomfortable/unsafe in terms of storytelling. I've come to cr knowing I could trust that certain things just won't happen in game...

...but boy howdy Dusk taking advantage of an innocent and inexperienced Laudna is absolutely not a thing I want to have happen / watch.

((again, I know it was mostly just having fun and throwing chaos into the mix, and that Erika probably wasn't really thinking in terms of anything THAT nefarious. but wow. That got so uncomfortable and unfun super fast for me.))

I sorta wish we got to have that sort of a moment between them PRIOR to learning that Dusk is not a friend. Because seeing the kinda adorable, and innocent seeming, Dusk asking Laudna out probably would've been really cute and fun to enjoy. But context is everything.

[idreamtofmanderleyagain]

Morality Focused Frameworks of Discussion as Acts of Control (Part 2)

Okay, so initially I decided not to make a part two instead to follow up with some conversations more directly, but there are some further thoughts I have that I want to get out that have a more general tone.

I want to talk about fandom discussions as a whole more, because I think we need to address something in terms I don’t think I’ve seen acknowledged much. Specifically, I want to talk about the How of “discourse,” and not the What.

Disrespect And Boundary Violation As The Socially Expected Norm:

I think that all too often, we focus on what a specific conversation is about at the expense of talking about how we are interacting with each other - and this is in turn often at the expense of personal boundaries, benefit of the doubt, and ethical, empathetic conduct.

I think this is a huge problem, because the combination of those elements is basically a recipe for harm, particularly for unaddressed and repeated patterns of harm that is often essentially consequence free, or even outright celebrated.

At the very least, these kinds of behaviors have been normalized to the point that questioning them is sometimes equated with tone policing or “crying victim.”

And yes, that is a problem, even if you think there is a “moral issue” with how someone engages with a piece of media.

Furthermore, it’s worth talking about the fact that social media today is structured to allow interactions with strangers that can and do often happen without your consent. The disregarding of social interaction consent has actually become extremely normalized.

Now, that’s a complex issue, I’m not arguing that trying to talk with strangers is an automatic heinous consent violation. But it is worth noting that the ability to maintain control over one’s own boundaries is much more limited in these spaces. Blocking is a site mechanic, it is not really a socially ingrained method of boundary establishment that everyone respects without being forced to do so. And even then, people will absolutely copy and paste your words for their own use, entirely without even consulting you or allowing you to have agency in the situation. This allows them to maintain their own framework around you and your words and interactions, with your consent being a non-factor. Again, disrespect is completely normalized.

With Disrespect As A Baseline For Engagement, Moralized Frameworks Establish A Struggle For Conversational Power:

When you come into a conversation without respect for your conversational partner, you are more likely to assume that their disagreement with your principles is an indicator of their inferiority, intellectually or ethically.

When you are seeking the means to dismiss the thoughts and feelings of someone who disagrees with you, you are more likely not to come into a conversation willing to be open and understanding to alternative perspectives. The assumption that another person’s perspectives automatically aren’t worthy of your time creates a mental feedback loop where it’s easy to reinforce binary rules around what thoughts and feelings are acceptable.

Furthermore, the intent to maintain one’s own perspective as an impermeable truth makes a person predisposed to rejecting complexity. But the reality is that people are inherently complex, and their reasons for what they enjoy or how they enjoy something will not always match the political strawman image you might have in your head.

All of this establishes a conversational environment where the baseline of the discussion relies upon a kind of moral power struggle. Instead of trying to understand and converse from a place of full understanding, we are trying to make the other person either adopt our viewpoint as the only acceptable framework, or make the other person feel ashamed for essentially disobeying the rules we value.

Using my first post as an example, people who discover that I like Hellraiser and ship a couple that includes Pinhead and a trauma victim might make some very unsavory assumptions about what exactly it is that I’m doing. Someone who assumes I have no moral character based upon my interests is unlikely to ask me about the complex nuances of how and why I engage with the material that I do. They would not understand that I’m an abuse victim engaging in art that deals with abuse in a way that I find introspective and healing and meaningful.

However, lets say that I actually told them so.

Marginalized and Traumatized People As “Exceptions To The Rule”:

A few people have spoken recently about the ways in which fandom discourse is essentially starting to pressure trauma victims to publicly disclose their trauma as a means of establishing the right to be respected in one’s own perspectives, and I think that point is extremely relevant to this conversation.

Furthermore, this inevitably forces people who are marginalized to openly disclose and discuss (sometimes to the point of it being grueling and stressful) the ways in which they are marginalized and how that interacts with the media they enjoy and the ways in which they engage.

It’s worth noting that these conversations are often about fictional interests, and how insidious it is that this kind of thing is happening in a space where people should be free to have safe, uncomplicated fun if they wish to.

Because we have established disrespect, boundary crossing, moralization, and power games as baselines for conversational engagement, we’ve essentially created a space where traumatized people feel this intense pressure to dredge up painful experiences as a means of establishing the right to their own power and boundaries in conversations.

Interestingly, when these conversations involve two traumatized people or two marginalized people on the opposite sides of an argument, this can sometimes result in a “more traumatized than thou” battle, where each party tries to establish which abuse experience or which axis of marginalization has more value in the establishment of conversational power, ultimately resulting in both parties getting hurt and/or silenced in some particular way.

Hypocrisy and Self-Respect:

The amount of cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy I’ve seen in these spaces is kind of astronomical. It’s hard to engage in a single conversation on this site without somebody pretending they are somehow superior in their engagement to others. Consider this the “Twilight Sucks” phenomenon. We will pick out groups we consider the lowest denominator and use them as leverage in conversations. “I’m a Tru Blood fangirl and I think X and Y, but thank GOD I’m not like those Twilight fangirls who think X and Y! *eyeroll*”  People who engage in exactly the things they condemn don’t seem to see the parallels in their own interests and behaviors. They will even bring these pet bully topics into conversations that have nothing to do with them in order to establish personal respectability value.

By always making this moral framework about the What, aka the media itself, and not the How, aka the myriad unique and individual ways in which people engage with that material, we establish an environment where not only is nuance completely lost, but entire fan groups are dehumanized and derided conversational leverage.

Furthermore, people seem to use this dynamic as a way of establishing their own self-respect. If they see any parallels between themselves and the dreaded X fangirls, those considerations must be dismissed and rationalized away in order to maintain a respectable self-image.

And continuing with Twilight as our example: there are major things to criticize about Twilight. But very often, those things would be secondary in the conversation to the condemnation and bullying of the teen girls who enjoyed it, or those things worthy of criticism would be used as justifications of the cruelty, disrespect, and total dismissal of those fangirls.

This is a problem, because it should be obvious that when media criticism revolves around a social power game, then the social power game becomes the emotional focus of all discussion, and no real ground is actually broken - at least not without casualties. A winner implies that there is also a loser.

The Re-establishment Of The Social Power Status-Quo:

All of this works to establish a kind of status-quo of acceptability, where instead of doing the hard work of uplifting each other’s complex, potentially very different or even opposing experiences and perspectives as valid aspects of fandom engagement and a reality of the human condition, we are constantly fighting for power over each other, more specifically for the right to be respected.

In other words, the right to be heard and allowed to exist and enjoy ourselves without harm or alienation.

I don’t feel like this toxicity necessarily even comes from a place of wanting to oppress others, although for many that seems very much part of it. More often, I think this comes from the desperation to be respected and heard that comes from the experience of marginalization. And sometimes, in our urge to do so, we can throw each other under the bus to get there.

Sometimes we can be cruel and disrespectful out of frustration, or paint people with a too-wide brush because we’re just done with how certain people have been acting, or because we’re expecting the worst out of people and unwilling to give the benefit of the doubt anymore. Sometimes I think we fall back on childish mean-girl tactics of engagement just because it makes us feel powerful when we’ve often felt powerless.

And to be honest, I completely understand. I think that in my time online, I myself have engaged in ways that I regret. I fought petty battles with the wrong people, or failed to offer the benefit of the doubt, because it felt like a righteous battle. It felt like I was fighting for justice. There were times when I failed to try and understand an “argumentative opponent.”

At the end of the day however, I believe that this form of “critical engagement” is not only highly uncritical of the self, it is an extraordinarily weak and destructive way of trying to create progress in fandom spaces that ultimately harms more people than it uplifts. It encourages abuse, gaslighting, and disingenuous, dishonest ways of social engagement. It encourages hiding, and lying, and toxic tactics. It encourages misreadings, willful misunderstandings, and silencing. And I think that identifying and naming power games when we see them might go a long way towards empowering people to have conversations of genuine substance, where respect is established and valued.

[ruby-whistler]

This is targeted at your dream apologist post, just to be up front. Just wanted to give my two cents in on some of the stuff w/o doing a whole rebuttal, since… I don’t really want to lol. To start off, I had an issue with how you framed the beginnings of Lmanberg. How Lmanberg formed wasn’t colonizing, it was just independence from the greater dsmp from a set of members that disliked the way things were ran by Dream (and by more direct extension, the rest of the dsmp citizens, namely sapnap.) Dream was protecting his power, not any kind of attachment made to the server, I’d argue, becuz in the end the way he relinquished control was by gaining more; by getting leverage over one of the original members, Tommy, via taking his discs.

Another thing, you shouldn’t be angry at ppl for not feeling sympathetic for a character that’s done such heinous things against other characters. You’re more then welcome to feel bad for him yourself, but no one else has to. After watching the whole of Tommy’s exile arc, it’s very clear to see the Dream was cruel and horrible to a child that hardly deserved it. Dream was dehumanizing to Tommy. Making him put all of his self earned items into a hole every visit and promptly destroying it all, telling Tommy that his friends don’t miss him, blowing up Logstedshire after finding Tommy’s secret room (that he hid from Dream to stop him from destroying it) filled with Tommy’s resources for escaping, not even allowing him to leave, these aren’t the actions of a good person put into a hard place, or a person with trauma dealing poorly with said trauma. That isn’t justifiable. Dream shouldn’t be allowed to hurt and inflict trauma onto another person becuz he has trauma. What he did to Tommy and to his friends (saying he didn’t care about them, saying he only cares about Tommy’s discs, Sapnap even had that sad moment of “you don’t think he meant it did you?” which. Yknow. Look between the lines methinks) was awful and doesn’t have to be forgiven by either the victims or the fans of said victims.

My opinion on the prison stay is…. I don’t really care lol. I definitely do see it as he deserves it, because what he did to Tommy was horrific. I don’t have any real sympathy for an abuser, especially one that does shit that I’ve had done to me before and done against a character I relate to heavily. So. Sue me if I think that Dream should have his shit rocked. Ignoring that Dream had very clear reasons as to why he was put into the prison and the fact that many characters have reasons to hate his guts and also not feel sympathy for him is…. Definitely the Dream apologist mantra. Noah fence ^^

One last bit since this ask is getting real long, but it was narratively cathartic to see Dream actually receiving punishment for his actions. Cathartic quite literally means “psychological relief through strong emotions” so. Yeah. Sorry ppl were getting it mixed up with catharsis, but there’s the word they probably meant to use. Didn’t realize it would be such a crime to mix up two very similar words but what can you do with a younger audience.

This isn’t meant to be an attack, or mean, so I’m sorry if I’ve been a little passive aggressive in my wording, but to be fair. Your post was as well ^^ Cant wait to hear your response, if you feel like giving one.

Alright, so first as a quick disclaimer, I’m going to out a summary of the original post’s points, just to ensure that we’re on the same page;

The post does say:

- don’t dehumanize c!Dream because it continuously hurts people who relate to and/or sympathize with him, also dehumanization in general is an inherently wrong mindset

- don’t attack people who sympathize with him because he’s a victim of abuse besides other things

The post never says:

- you cannot hate c!Dream and not sympathizing with him is wrong

- the things c!Dream has done are to any degree excused

- don’t dehumanize c!Dream because he’s a good person

- people who dehumanize c!Dream are real life abuse apologists

If you read the post and didn’t get these points from it, i advise you to reread it as I made pretty much all of these abundantly clear.

I don’t know why you’d start talking about L’manberg, but sure; I never said it was colonization. I said some people who have had their country colonized relate to him because he had his home torn apart and is desperate to return it back to its original state. This is a completely valid reason to relate to him as it is a pretty big part of the character.

Dream wasn’t protecting his “power”, because he didn’t actually have any power on the SMP besides technically owning it. Before L’manberg, all he’d do is walk around, fix creeper holes and the prime path, jump into conflicts and end them if they got too pointed - he even fixed Tubbo’s house once after Tommy burnt it down, he got unfairly mugged by Sapnap and Tommy because he had weaker armor etc. He never used his position as landowner unfairly and was on the same level as any other member; his only concern was too keep the community united and semi-peaceful. Of course he had an attachment to the server, it had been his home for months, maybe more on the SMP timeline.

Do you genuinely think listing the bad things he did is going to do anything to my empathy or the empathy of other c!Dream fans?

I saw the entirety of the exile arc live, and I saw what was happening, and I hated it, and I hated c!Dream. Yet I’m sympathetic to him when he goes through a similar situation, perhaps because I’m not a biased hypocrite.

I never said c!Dream was a good person. Saying “these don’t look like actions of a person with trauma” doesn’t make sense to me because, as you said later on, it isn’t justifiable either way. I’m not saying anyone has to forgive him. You don’t need to forgive an abuse victim for their prior actions to recognize their situation is messed up. You’re making up points to fight against in your rebuttal that I never actually said.

I’m not saying “don’t dehumanize c!Dream because he’s a good person”. I’m saying “don’t dehumanize c!Dream because he’s a person and dehumanization is wrong” and “people who relate to him shouldn’t be hurt or harassed”.

He didn’t even do “terrible things” to his friends, by the way. Tommy has said like five times that he doesn’t care about anyone but the discs but when he said that isn’t true his friends believed and forgave him. Dream says it once while something that matters to him is being threatened, so that it doesn’t get destroyed, and suddenly he’s hurting his friends (double standard methinks). As if he didn’t repeatedly try to help them and care about them up until that point and they abandoned him even despite his prior actions. He did things that might’ve hurt them, but that doesn’t compare to the amount of things he did for them. Saying he doesn’t care is blatant mischaracterization.

If you think (fictional) people who have done bad things deserve to be horribly abused and have their basic human rights violated, you know what, you do you. Be a fictional abuse apologist, be as bad as the people who say c!Tommy deserved it, go on. I disagree with you however, and I’m sure many people who are actually sensitive and care about/relate to fictional abuse victims (I have seen many c!Tommy apologists say the torture is awful and he doesn’t deserve it, thankfully) will disagree as well, so why should I care about your wrong opinion? If you’ve dehumanized him and are failing to see you’re incorrect and hurting people, bad for you. You’re just proving me right that this is a very real problem that this community has to do something about.

[princeescaluswords]

Invalidating Interpretations

I’ve been on a tear recently about my view that people’s belief in ‘all interpretations are valid’ not only misrepresents what interpretation means but also serves as a cover for racism, sexism, and other immoralities.  Fandom has lionized the idea that the consumption of media can be solely an emotional exercise which comes with no responsibility whatsoever.  On a certain level that’s true -- when a person sits in their home and thinks ‘wouldn’t it be cool if Stiles Stilinski was actually a god’ it has no consequence beyond their own entertainment.

But the problem is that it doesn’t remain there.  People are shaped by the media they consume, unless you don’t think any politician has allowed media’s representation of life in the 1950s to inform their vision of how the world should be.  I don’t think it would be very hard to find real examples of people’s ideology conforming to a fictional representation.  How many people’s ideas about the colonial-era relationship between European settlers and indigenous natives were formed by the story of the first Thanksgiving?  

We are influenced by the stories we consume, and we influence others by the stories we tell.  That bears with it responsibility, whether the story is on MTV or AO3 or Tumblr or any other public space.   This means that the interpretation of those stories should not simply depend on emotional response.  Anyone can tell canon to go f*ck itself, but that action brings with it commensurate responsibilities depending on what they do afterwards.

Let me give you two examples of what I’m talking about from my own fandom and use it illustrate this. 

Derek Hale held the act of turning someone into the werewolf in high regard -- “The Bite is a gift” -- which made Scott forcing him to Bite Gerard especially heinous.  This interpretation is not only unsupported but it is also used as a cover for racism and abuse apologism.  

The phrase was uttered three times on the show -- once by Derek in Wolf Moon (1x01), once by Peter in Visionary (3x08), and once by Scott in The Benefactor (4x04).  Every single time it was used to manipulate others, and none of them were sincere.  Derek used it to try to get Scott to help him find the person who murdered his sister; Peter used it to get Derek to ask Ennis to bite Paige; and Scott used it to try to repair the damage he did to his and Liam’s relationship by panicking after Biting Liam in Muted (4x03).   None of them meant it.  

Derek did not believe that the Bite was a gift, because his actions didn’t treat it as a gift.  When telling Scott how cool being a werewolf was didn’t make Scott do what he said, he abandoned the gift approach and told Scott how being a werewolf would endanger everyone he cared about.  If the act of the Bite is  something solemn and sacred, why did he charge Jackson like a horror-movie villain and then how did Jackson get in the lake?   When Jackson rejected the Bite on his way to Kanima-dom, why did Derek abandon him?  Why did he not get angry when Scott accused him of Biting Jackson to kill him? Why did he give the Bite to some kid he met in a graveyard when chasing an omega?  Why did Derek not even check on Lydia until Venomous (2x05), six episodes after Peter gave her the gift?  Why did Derek Bite Victoria in the middle of a battle? Derek didn’t treat his betas as if he had given them a gift.  He didn’t object when Peter described the Bite as “increasing his power and numbers?”  There is not a single instance where born-wolf Derek treated the Bite as special.  

Why then is the interpretation that Derek held the Bite as a sacrament so popular?  Because it justifies their racist condemnation of Scott as hero and justifies Peter’s and Derek’s abuse of Scott.  Scott’s antipathy toward lycanthropy is not a reasonable reaction of a teenager who had been told that not only his life is now and will forever be in danger, but he will also become a threat to everyone he cares about, but instead  it becomes ingratitude.  And of course, it allows them to dismiss the reality that Scott had little agency in that scene in Master Plan (2x12), that he was being forced to do Gerard’s bidding, and to concentrate on intensifying the violation of Derek (when they aren’t busy trying to turn it into rape).   

It also a defense for Peter’s and Derek’s abuse of Scott.  Scott’s lycanthropy stops being something horrible that happened to him, and starts being a reciprocal obligation he has to Derek and Peter.  Derek isn’t stalking and manipulating Scott into helping him find Laura’s killer, he’s punishing him for being ungrateful.  Peter didn’t ruin a teenager’s life and then gloat about it; he gave him a gift.   If you treat Scott’s Bite as a “monkey’s paw” scenario -- as one racist anon did -- then he’s simply got what he wanted and is unhappy about it.  Derek and Peter shouldn’t have to waste time being kind to this selfish prick.  Derek lying to Scott about the cure isn’t that bad if Scott insulted the Gift that he no longer wanted.

The above interpretation is unsupported by any actual scene or any actual script excerpt or anything really, but it does serve the purpose of excusing Hale-style abuse and undermining Scott’s position as heroic protagonist.

Scott McCall had a strict no-killing possibility which was a result of his own sense of moral superiority and a black-and-white view of the world.  This interpretation is not only directly contradicted by canon but it is a fundamental aspect of the racist idea of the Left Hand, by which is meant that White Men Can Kill Whomever They Want.  

Scott McCall didn’t have a strict no-killing policy.  Not in Season 1, not in Season 6.  He didn’t get upset at Derek for killing Peter (he got upset because Derek deceived him about the cure) or mourn Kate’s death, in Season 1.  He didn’t stop Derek or Peter from killing Gerard in Season 2.  He did object to Derek executing Lydia and Jackson for things that were beyond their control.  His rise to being a True Alpha in Season 3A wasn’t due to him not being willing to kill; his rise to True Alpha was partly due to his refusal to let others manipulate him into killing.  He was certainly willing to threaten Gerard and Jennifer with death.   He didn’t argue that killing the Oni was wrong in Season 3B; he did argue that killing Stiles was wrong.  He didn’t hold his father in contempt for killing the Chemist, or get upset about dead Berserkers, or tell Satomi, Chris, Derek or Braeden not to use lethal force again the hunters-turned-assassins.  His objection in Season 5 was about -- once again -- killing those taken and turned against their will into monsters.  The show literally addressed this in The Beast of Beacon Hills (5x19):

Scott: Deucalion? You shouldn't trust him. 

Theo: And you're the one who let him live. 

Scott: I'm not a murderer. 

Theo: You still think you're gonna get through all this without killing anyone? 

Scott: I didn't say that.

He didn’t say that.  He never said “no killing, ever.”  Derek had killed.  Chris had killed.  Theo had definitely killed, including him.  Stiles had killed.  He didn’t consign them into the outer dark.  He didn’t refuse to work with them or listen to them.  

This ‘interpretation’ is about nothing less than justifying Peter’s murderous behavior and Derek’s attempted imitation.  By pushing Scott’s moral stance to an unrealistic extreme, they try to demonstrate it as unworkable and arrogant, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.  The problem is that they’re not doing this to ask serious questions about when it is a valid option to kill; they’re doing it to justify Peter’s and Derek’s and Stiles’s supposed (but not real) and Theo’s and sometimes even Deucalion’s casual approach to murder.  They re-interpret a nuanced position about the value of every individual life into a some sort of arrogant white knight platitude.

And they will do this, even if they have to discard 90% of canon, if that is what it takes to enable Sexy White Men (and only Sexy White Men -- they never use this to justify Kali, or Monroe, or Gerard, or the Doctors) to be treated as the heroic protagonist in their tales.   That’s why, mysteriously, in all those Steter fictions where they execute Scott for not being willing to kill (in one of the most ironic tropes in history, which has become quite popular), they never have Stiles or Peter kill police officers for objecting to their murder sprees.  They never have Stiles shoot down deputies saying “you would stop me from protecting who I love, you must die!”  Weird, isn’t it?

It’s not weird at all.  These interpretations are not meant to be serious investigations of the production; they’re meant to serve emotional needs which if they admitted openly might subject them to censure, and rightly so.   In conclusion, not all interpretations are valid.  

[whetstonefires]

Hi Whetstonefire. I have a question about the comic where Nightwing cheats on Starfire with Barbara: What happens directly after that? Does Starfire find out that Nightwing cheated on her? And, if so, how does she react? I've read online that (according to Marv Wolfman) Starfire is the opposite of everything Batman taught Nightwing to be and that Batman taught Nightwing to be repressed and cold. What did Nightwing contribute (emotionally) to the relationship between him and Starfire? (Cont.)

(Cont.) From what I can tell, from online, Nightwing was adamant about standards of mercy and monogamy - how do you think, if Starfire were to be written as her own character and not written around Nightwing and his emotional needs, she would handle and react to that? (This bit is an FYI for other readers: this is just speculation, not hate. Sorry about that.) Sorry about the questions! Have a nice day! 

Okay there are so many separate questions packed in here! I may miss some of them lol and I do not want to put in the hours it would take to produce an orderly response to all this, so this post is going to be a mess.

Initial query and important point: the cheating story was out of continuity. Like, literally, not just by ‘being rejected by the fanbase,’ it was just this weird retcon oneshot that seems to have been some sort of fuck-you to Nightwing or his fans or something. So no, it had no in-setting fallout lol. It, in more ways than most comics, didn't exactly happen.

It was just this weird thing where Dick hooks up with Babs before giving her a wedding invitation, which is both out of character for him in general and out of step with where he was leading up to the wedding--he was desperate to get married so they could have some Normal Stable Adulthood Happiness; the choice to recharacterize him as a fuckboy who regards it as a loss of freedom isn’t congruent, on much more than the level of principle.

As far as how Kori would feel about it, if she had learned...that is very hard to say. Apart from how it would require her to reinterpret everything about where their relationship stood at that point, the data is very unclear, and I don’t even have all of it. Gonna back up to cover some of the rest of the ask, get some context here.

So this actually brings up two of my biggest gripes with Wolfman’s NTT--weird Kori characterization and the weirdly negative interpretation of Batman as parent that backwashed heavily into other titles and influenced the character for the worse, in ways we're very much still dealing with today. 😩

The latter is pretty self-explanatory, though Wolfman’s take that the main thing Bruce taught Dick was repression does shed light on some writing choices and make others funnier. But Kori. Oh my lands.

So, item one, I wouldn't say that Kori is overall opposite Bruce, or even of his philosophy? There are just some very major points of opposition. She isn’t emotionally buttoned-down like at all, especially about positive feelings, although considered realistically with all the bullshit they’ve piled into her backstory she absolutely leans on repression to cope and stay positive, which makes her a lot like Dick actually.

To an extent, she was clearly written around foiling Dick’s Batman-derived traits in the same way that Robin was written to foil Batman, bright and glad and aerial. A Flamebird to his Nightwing in theme if not in name.

You could do some interesting stuff with that, and the bildungsroman aspects of this period of Dick’s life, like he has two roads forward in terms of how he’s going to define ‘adulthood’--does it necessarily require becoming more like his mentor-father, for good and ill, or can he make Kori in part a destination, as it were, and create an adult self that is derived from who he has always been as well as the man he’s modeled himself after?

To an extent I think this even was one of the things going on in ntt but like. Only a little bit.

(Given how much like Bruce Babs is in most of the ways Kori isn’t, especially once she’s Oracle, you could make a case for her as love interest being like. Symbolic of his not being in a rebellious phase? That gets weird and oedipal really fast tho lol.)

Okay stepping down one meta level lol, the thing about answering the 'what would kori' question here is that her character is deeply bound up in her culture, about which we are told and shown a great many contradictory things. Any attempt to read her as an independent character has to tackle not only the gender stuff you allude to and these inconsistencies, but how much of the sheer mess of her is rooted in racism.

'Fantastic' racism, technically, because Tamaraneans aren't real, but the 'taming the savage' narrative that kept surfacing between them and the language used in reference to it is just. The existing racism of presumably the writers, placed in Dick's mouth, and it's super gross. I hate it so much.

(I had a faint hope when they cast her for live action it was with a deliberate intent to directly tackle and better that history, but lollllllll nah. At least they didn’t double down in it tho! Can you imagine, with a black actress, in this day and age....)

So to predict and comprehend Kori, you have to make a lot of calls about Tamaran as a civilization. I like to slightly privilege stuff established earlier if there's no good reason not to, so while much is made over time of her inappropriate rage and the violence she was raised to normalize, I think what she says in her first appearance is good to keep in mind: in her culture, kindness is for friends and cruelty is for enemies. She doesn't understand why the Titans seem to have this backwards.

Kori is not a merciless person. She’s very empathetic, as a rule. With people she loves, she is self-destructively forgiving. That's not a trait only Dick benefits from--her family keeps betraying her in new exciting ways, and she keeps letting them.

Her arc of growing away from that habit is however greatly crippled by centering Dick in the narrative and by the awful 'civilizing' overtones that keep coming into it. When she comes back after the 1986 breakup, still married to Karras, she brings with her a commitment to doing things the Earth way--to eschew lethal force as more than a compromise with her friends’ values, but as a deliberate choice.

This deserved a lot more space and time than it got, and the fact that it didn’t get it is only somewhat due to her being subordinated to Dick and to general writing fail; a lot of it’s just the team book problems of everything happening to everybody all at once.

I mean, Dick’s journey later on to deciding he loves her enough to date her even though she’s married and it’s technically against his principles was packed into this absolutely heinous issue where he was inspired by a woman refusing to separate from her husband who’d just threatened to kill her and their kid with a knife, until being stopped by Nightwing. Because he’s apologizing for what he did.

This is his inspiration for accepting Kori’s marital status! It’s supposed to be heartwarming, as far as I can tell! Not heavyhanded messaging that this is a self-destructive terrible choice in which Kori will inevitably harm him somehow! This issue is pro ‘consensual open relationships under certain circumstances’ and also ‘giving abusers another chance’ as expressions of love. Welcome to the 80s ig.

(Notable is that the wife in this issue was black and the husband and son both looked very white, so it’s probably her stepkid and she probably wouldn’t get to keep him if they separated; this is not even vaguely treated as a factor.)

Point is, everyone was getting too little space to actually go through the amount of development they were getting, and it was clumsily handled; it’s not just her.

In an overlapping period Gar processed his issues with his adoptive father with whom he constantly fought and their shared trauma over the rest of their family (the Doom Patrol) having died violently not long ago via a batshit several-issue storyline where Mento went crazy, created supermutants, and abusively mind-controlled them to attack the Titans. It is literally all like this.

Back to the infidelity thing, now. So much to unpack. So like I mentioned above, their first big breakup, while partially driven by Dick’s existing conflicted feelings about their different ideas about things like ‘killing in battle’ and ‘her identity and loyalties being tied up with her home planet,’ is explicitly over different takes on monogamy.

When Dick is breaking up with her, Kori makes it clear she thinks it’s totally reasonable to have both a husband and a love, since Karras also has someone he loves and they’re both fine with it, but the story doesn't really explain how nonmonogamy works on Tamaran, or even if it's practiced outside the context of political marriage. They do do a sort of...soulbond fusion dance...thing, as part of the ceremony, so marriage is definitely serious business. There are so many levels of cultural difference that get poor to no development.

But to return to the weird ooc retcon cheating story: because of this context, no matter what her personal norms are, Dick specifically casually sleeping with someone else would be something for Kori to be mad about, because of the hypocrisy.

Then there’s the Mirage Incident, which I haven’t read through properly and which was very poorly handled by the writers. Kori is upset about Dick having slept with someone impersonating her and there’s a general vibe of this being treated by Dick’s social circle as unfaithfulness even though he was in fact sexually violated by deceit; it famously sucks.

We still don’t learn a lot here about Kori’s ideas about monogamy, from what I have seen, because her focus is mostly on feeling like Dick doesn’t care about her enough or in the right way since he couldn’t tell the difference. Which is an understandable feeling, even if it’s not an appropriate reaction to have at him at this time.

What Nightwing contributed emotionally........hm. This is a mess, honestly; he was all over the map, and not just because of having Brother Blood in his head. I cannot speak definitively on this, it’s too inconsistent.

For most of their relationship, Kori was the more intensely invested one, the one to initiate and the one who was shown at length to be excited to come home at the end of the day to their shared apartment because her boyfriend was there to see and talk to. If we set aside his more egregious white male bullshit, Dick was pretty emotionally available most of the time, though? They were cute.

Since they split up a lot of ink has been spilled making him less into her in retrospect, but he was pretty invested--leaving her coincided with mental breakdowns both times, and it wasn’t even mostly because she was doing his emotional processing for him, because she wasn’t, although it’s fair to say he often fell into using the relationship as an emotional crutch. Kori was definitely doing the same thing though so...it wasn’t the most balanced relationship in fiction history, but apart from slight codependency and the racism, it was decent enough.

She gets more evenhanded development than most superhero love interests, honestly, because she was costarring in a team book. She had her own storylines. She had other friends.

Mostly both of them just needed some space to finish growing up and stop being retraumatized long enough to process some of the existing trauma better, and I think they could have gone on being good for each other for a long time.

[allyvampirelass29]

Murder at Cripple Creek

A NOS4A2 Review By: Allyssa J. Watkins

A boomtown swimming with ghosts Dead eyes can't hide Their hedonist living Drinking, debauchery and sinning Scarlet ladies having babies But a whorehouse is not a home Trading flesh for coin Tempting patrons, at the sacrifice of your boy Little Charlie grew up in the hellish dark The sins of the mother Scarring the son's heart Murder brewing in this simmering fleshpot Oh Hateful Harlot, Mother Manx Is is to your neglect and bitter thanks Your baby boy, molested, and you can't protect Your little dreamer from the wicked world you wrought for him Blood on a beautiful boy's hands But the only thing murdered here Is his innocence. Sending his rapist and that lustful bitch Back to hell Charlie, Charlie you're not a villain You had to save yourself.......

Is...... anyone alive out there? It's been days, and I'm still sobbing, my heart desolated by the roiling emotional turmoil, my ignited rage murderous. I don't know about you guys, but...... I'm an absolute wreck. WHY are you DOING this to me, NOS4A2!?!? After the brilliant turn of last week, the sleek sophistication, and glamourous entrapment, "Cripple Creek," was a backhand strike, a blatant violation that I never saw coming, and I spent the entire episode, quivering, sobbing, pleading desperately behind my hands plastered over my face, watching between my fingers, helpless to stop the punishing abuse My Charlie suffers in two different timelines, his bruises of an abused childhood mingling with the fresh wounds of now, as he is tortured, beaten and berated by Bing Partridge!!!

I hated this episode. I HATED it. There, I said it. But I think you're supposed to, I think that was the sole purpose of this traumatizing ordeal. However, as far as Bing (GO TO HELL YOU FILTHY BASTARD) is concerned, the writer's motivation seems drastically convoluted. If this was supposed to be Bing's Big Epiphany, his "redemption," (Ughhh seriously?) This episode fails miserably in accomplishing that. And if this episode was meant to do, what I had predicted back in Season One, cement him as the actual villain of NOS4A2, making him the more immoral evil, be his rise in notoriety, his coming of age as it were, into the monster he was always going to be, giving Charlie and Vic someone to unite their hatred against, it fails to do that too. The biggest misstep of the series, after so elegant a triumph, I'm going to drown my sorrows in ice cream, and try to forget that any of it ever happened. Close your eyes, and think of Christmasland........

I audibly groaned when we opened onto Bing at the Lake House. After so much needless repetition in an otherwise FLAWLESS episode, I REALLY did not want to relive Bing's point of view of the siege, unless it was him getting shot by white knight Chris McQueen over, and over, and over........ Thankfully, the rewind didn't last too long, but I was having NONE of his, "Are you there, God, it's me, Bing Partridge," moment!!! On his knees in the graveyard, (Why...... why are we in a graveyard?) Bing appeals to the heavens, proclaiming his own innocence, asking God to show him what he should do next. I snickered coldly, the whole thing melodramatic, and absurd, as he cries, "I've been so good!!!" Secretly, I was fantasizing about Buffy SLAYING his creepster ass in the graveyard, beating him bloody, before staking him in the heart with a witty saying like, "It's been a gas, Bing, but I get the last laugh!!!" Alas, alack, no such luck. His appeal to the heavens was answered not in divine intervention, but with bird droppings splattering in his mouth, which of course, translated in Bing-A-Ling Logic to, "Kill the FIRST person that tries to help you, bury him in the freshly dug grave, and take his keys!!!" It's PRAYING Bing, you dolt, not preying!!!

While the side quest FINALLY explains how Bing was able to catch up to Charlie and Wayne, after previously believed to be on foot, not to mention shot, which would have been IMPOSSIBLE, supernatural car not withstanding, it's altogether unnecessary. It was the less than scenic route to get to last week's blood-curdling cliff hanger, and I really think we could have done without all the maudlin hullaballoo, and picked right up from there. Also, it creeped me out BIG TIME hearing Bing Partridge say, "Hidey holes," because that's what I called them last week, when Charlie was adorably telling Wayne about his hiding places. "Look at you with your hidey holes, Babe!!!" Needless to say, Bing has ruined that phrase for me FOREVER!!!

"Charlie, Charlie, telling lies, soon he will be crying cries......" A chilling foreboding that was like ice in my veins........ I was definitely crying cries...... I literally WEPT with this horrid little rhyme, and even still I was so naïve, unprepared, for the gut-churning horror that waited in the shadows of a broken little boy's murdered childhood, and the degradation of the beautiful soul that survived it. It's one of the most grueling, and disturbing things, I've ever watched, and like my Darling Boy, strapped to the chair, enduring forced interrogation by gassing, brutal beatings by Bing's homicidal, ham-fisted punches, and some....... deeply unsettling sexual innuendo, I felt like I was the one getting tortured.........

I did utterly enjoy Charlie's feigned relief, as he uses that silver tongue, in valiant effort, to slip his way out of this sickening predicament. "Bing, My Dear Fellow, thank the stars! I thought you had been done in by those wretched McQueens!!" Charlie gasps, thankfully, knowing full well he'd left Bing behind to die, and for good reason. Any other time, this would have worked, Charlie would have used his coaxing charm, and Bing's oafish gullibility, twisted them into a breathtaking manipulation, weaving the lie that he had no choice but to leave him behind, and Bing would have eaten it out of the palm of his hand, because he wants that badly for it to be true. But Bing watched it happen, his face falling, as Charlie sped off without him, and he's DONE playing. Charlie's pleas fall on deaf ears, as Bing drugs him for answers, revealing the fatalities of every single one of Charlie's former accomplices, and with the finality of one apocalyptic truth....... Bing descends into a frenzied, foaming madness.

"Cripple Creek," is the double edged sword that none of us were meant to survive. Switching between the stabbing scenes of Charlie's withering assault, his lifeline to The Wraith, cruelly severed, and the slicing violation of his childhood self, his innocence massacred before our very eyes, our bleeding hearts never stood a chance. I always knew that Charlie's childhood was going to be horrid, downright Dickensian, devoid of magic and light, unloved by his drunk, whore mother, but I had no idea the HELL this beautiful boy endured at so tender an age, forever scarred, betrayed by the one person he trusted, respected, desperately in need of a father figure, only to be exploited in the most heinous way. It's a MIRACLE My Precious Love can even function as an adult, much less still manage to find wonder and beauty in the world, clinging, clawing to hold onto his ember, his remnant of pure light that persevered in a life of darkness.

The inexplicable joy at seeing a young Charlie Manx, aged 11 or 12, tapdancing on stage, along with the giddy marvel that this young actor looks just like our leading man in miniature, is short-lived, as a stranger takes an uncomfortable interest in him....... I don't know how, maybe it was the intent way he watched him dance, or the way he touched his shoulder a little too long, but I knew........ I KNEW this man was going to sexually abuse Charles, I felt it gnawing in my stomach, instantly unnerved, and I hoped with all my heart, my first instinct was wrong....... I'm devastated to say........ it was not.

Not only does this manipulative pedophile Son of a BITCH molest my baby, he first uses him to persuade other boys to flock to his house, knowing full well how much the young ones look up to Charlie, as their leader. He wins Charlie's favour and trust by befriending him, and giving our little darling the one thing he wants more than anything else. Escape. Escape from the vulgar, gratuitously sexual environment, that no young boy should have to endure, a chance to make money, have an honest, respectable living. A chance to have a father figure, a man to look up to, learn from, and take him under his wing. The shop owner offers all of that, with a crooked smile, the charade falling dangerously away, as he knocks back a shot glass, eying our boy, and then says in the cruelest, most chilling voice. "You've earned yourself some fun........"

Thankfully, NOS4A2 was not overly graphic in this lewd portrayal, but the innuendo was enough to make me ugly cry, and seethe, as this sweet child is violated by someone he admires so much, realizing in horror, that he led all of his friends to be mishandled in this same disgusting manner, like lambs to the slaughter. But our brave little Manx was NOT going to let this sin go unpunished, and I clapped, cheering him on, as he uses his sled, now tainted by its means of acquisition, to kill the shopkeeper, dark fire flashing in his eyes, blood splattering on the shot glass, and I've never been so happy, or nervously relieved to see someone die.

His mother comes to him, and instead of crying, and taking her boy in her arms, stroking his dark curls, soothing his fear, and assuaging his guilt, she just scoffs at his accusation, the picture of apathy, and places the blame back on him. "You knew too, Charlie!!!" You WHORE-ABLE Mother!!! Your son was just sexually ASSAULTED, and YOU DARE make it his own fault, like he'd turned a blind eye, and therefore deserved to get raped!?!? Charlie might not have killed her, if she'd actually had a maternal bone in her body, if she'd done SOMETHING, shown any sign of regret or compassion, but she doesn't, and I feel nothing but proud as he finishes her off too. Her death was surprising, given the admonishing way Charlie talks about his mother, creating the impression that she'd been a bane on his existence his entire life, and yes, as a writer, I wanted to see more of a direct conflict between them to make that defining moment that much more satisfying, but as a viewer, I was just grateful she was dead, and Charlie was free. The only murder perpetrated, the only death I mourned at Cripple Creek, was that of Charlie's innocence, his childhood slaughtered.

Meanwhile, Bing continues to torture Charlie in the present day, my chest shuddering with every thrown punch, and I have to bite my lip to keep from screaming. What was the deafening truth spoken that sends Bing Partridge into a flailing rage, you ask?

"Christmasland is for children. We are special...... That's why we can't go......."

Charlie was never going to take Bing to Christmasland. All that this poor dope had lived for, dreamed of, for eight years, amidst his conning his way into dentists' offices, and offing mothers, and it was always a lie. I had suspected it the entire time, especially after the mention of a, "special feast," but what SHOCKED me the most, was the unimaginable heartbreak of Charlie's own deepest secret coming to light, and as Bing draws it forth, it's like drawing blood. In spite of being the architect of his lifelong dream, and greatest solace from a life full of abject misery, Charlie doesn't think he deserves Christmasland, because he sees himself as ruined........

I broke down sobbing, that pain, that anguish, that he's so long carried with him, ripping through me, and I'm tearing up even as I write this, remembering....... Charlie denying himself his own dream, seeing himself as a ruined article that might profane its pure vision, is a tragedy that I can't come back from. It's a sorrowful, aching confession, and yet somehow it explains so much, and in this, his greatest pain, his darkest secret, I felt intimately closer to him. At last........ we see why Charlie never stays long in his Christmas kingdom, why he's so focused on the next child, and the next, sacrificing time with his own daughter, because they deserve Christmasland, and he doesn't. Always the courier, never the partaker. Christmasland is for children, and Charlie Manx never got the chance to be one.

The searing pains of his past still guide so much of who he is today, placing a strict emphasis on propriety in every aspect of his person, in manner, speech, and dress, because he was robbed of his dignity as a child. I also, FINALLY, after two seasons, understand why he turns the children into vampires, a contradiction to his love of them, that has remained frustratingly elusive to my grasp. Charlie's childhood was taken from him, brought to a vulnerable, violent end, and by turning the Lost Children, theirs becomes eternal. They never have to grow up, and lose that purity, that innocence. I also realized, that by giving them their bite back, they are able to defend themselves, meaning no one can ever hurt them again.......

There was so much awful going on, so much inflicted misery, and disorienting chaos, that I was sure I'd heard wrong when Bing decides on an even more dehumanizing method of torture. Did Bing just...... call Charlie a BITCH!? I shook my head, but there it was again, and at this point I'd HAD it. Somebody give me a GUN, I will WASTE this SICK BASTARD myself!!! The skeevy sexual threat against Charlie felt like overkill to me, utterly ridiculous, a cheap shot at adding dramatic effect, especially in the face of his childhood shame. Bing has exhibited absolutely no inclination of...... swinging that way, as it were, before, and yeah they kind of threw in last minute that he'd done this to Mike's father, offscreen, but I don't know WHY he would do that, especially given his particular affinity for Mike. Charlie, himself, pointed out that there was no indication in the Graveyard of What Might Be that Mike needed saving, or that his father deserved punishing. It's awkward, and disturbing, and there seemed to me no method in this madness.

"If I'm a monster....... who deserves to die....... You deserve so much worse." BAM. Hell yeah, Babe!!! Thank GOD, Charlie's quick enough to convince Bing that he too is a monster, and we are spared any further asinine innuendo. Bing, after these series of unfortunate events, beating, berating, and threatening Charlie with rape, suddenly, deus ex machina-esque has a change of heart, and an epiphany that comes a LOT TOO LATE!!! We're both monsters, we BOTH deserve to die....... What we're doing is WRONG. Was I happy when Bing urged Wayne to go, and tell a police officer that his mom is Vic McQueen? Yes. Do I believe he did it out of the goodness of his heart, and has finally seen the light? Freaking HELL NO!!! Bing, after losing Christmasland, has nothing left to live for, and this is his way of giving up. If I can't go to Christmasland, Wayne can't go...... and he decides a bizarre murder/suicide in The Wraith is his final act of redemption.

Before they even showed the car crusher, I was already sobbing profusely, losing my freaking mind, because I had figured out exactly where Bing had taken Charlie.

"There's going to be two less monsters in the world........"

Meaning to crush them both, and kill the Wraith irrevocably, Bing puts on his mask, and presses the button. At first Wayne laughs, and thinks it's a game, his inner vampire child coming out, but when it hits him that Charlie's in actual danger, he realizes he has a choice to make....... Save Charlie Manx, or let him die, and go home safe to his Mom and Lou.

"No, My Boy, this isn't a game, it's time to play, Save Father Christmas!!!"

Charlie calls out frantically, coaxingly to his young charge, and I loved that so much, my heart overwhelmed with emotion. Yes, Wayne, PRETTY PLEASE save Father Christmas!!! A lot of people despised him for what happened next, screaming at Wayne for his choice, even calling him a stupid kid, but I, myself, felt even more love in my heart for that already dearly cherished little lad, as he smiles, and slams down on the button, halting the crusher, and saving Charlie from imminent death.

It's a profound moment, the abductee choosing to save his kidnapper's life, and many cried out strongly against it, but you have to understand....... Charlie Manx has become so much more to Wayne than the scary face in his mother's paintings. Here is a man that has shown genuine interest in his life, his hopes, his dreams, who has treated him gently, fussed over him, concerned, and who has come to love him like a father. Couple that with The Wraith's effects on Wayne, slowly tying the two of them together, it makes perfect sense to me, how this unexpected bond has formed. Yes, had Vic been there, herself, he would have chosen her over Charlie in a second, but when faced with the reality of letting Charlie die, our tender-hearted Bats just couldn't do it.

"Do think of me at Christmastime, won't you?"

CHARLIE. LIKE. A. BOSS!!!! The single greatest moment, and brightest scene in an hour of plunging darkness, is definitely Charlie, snapping back into his delectably dark, unrivaled perfection (although, I must say I still found him incredibly dashing in his distinguished grays) charging Bing Partridge, murder striking in his wild, smouldering eyes, stabbing him, with a reveling whisper, twisting the knife, with this most PERFECT line, that gave me wonderous, reverberating chills!!! I also LOVED how Charlie glowers in his lumpy face and says, "You were never special." DAMN that's HOT!!! My only grievance with an otherwise ENTHRALLING moment, was that inexplicably, yet again, CHARLIE DIDN'T KILL BING!!! Charlie has KILLED for so much less, and while he did offer a vague explanation about prison being so much worse for Bing than hell, it felt like hell frozen over that Charlie would ever let Bing live. I know this is the writers wanting to keep Bing around to creep another day, but MY GOD, hang that Partridge from a pear tree, and HAVE DONE already!!!!!

This was an especially dark episode, but there were flashes of some really beautiful, albeit fleeting moments, first with Wayne and Craig, and then with Millie and Cassie, though the reoccurring theme, the common thread, did seem to be Innocence Lost. I was startled with the The Wraith's sneaky trick of causing a child to forget their parents the longer they are in the car, and BLESS YOU, Craig for helping your son remember his mother, and fight the transformation!!! He tells Wayne that Vic's favourite movie was Jaws, and Wayne tells him that her favourite holiday is the 4th of July. (Which is really cool, because it's my favourite too!!!) This slows the Wraith's effects on Wayne, and becomes a very special moment between father and son, as they fight to keep Vic's memory alive.

"How do you know my mom?"

"She was my best friend."

More overwhelmed sobs, because apparently I haven't cried enough this episode!!! Craig decides not to tell Wayne that he's his father, but our little Bats is ingeniously clever, and I think he's going to figure it out before long!!! Another mini heart attack comes with a second lost tooth. The suspense of Wayne's slow turning, mirroring the tender emotion in this scene was fantastic.

Millie and her mother have a similar moment, and I thought that was BRILLIANT of her to introduce Vampire Millie to her former human self. The two play with dolls, and human Millie talks about how she can't wait to go on a date, and have adventures when she grows up! It's such an endearing scene, and also incredibly sad, as the pale, gaunt shell of Vampire Millie envies her bright, and bubbly human counterpart, seeing the hope and innocence that she's so long been bereft of. "She's me...... Who I'm supposed to be." Cassie explains that her father's sad fantasy is depriving Millie of the gift of growing up, and explains that there's nothing Charlie Manx fears more than a woman with her own mind, and that's the LAST thing he wants his beloved daughter to become. A woman that would eventually leave him. More tears. Poor Millie. Poor Charlie!! Can I just give everybody a hug!?

"Cripple Creek," lingers like BAD Dream, and all I want to do right now, is curl up with Charlie Manx, hold him in my arms, stroke his cheek, soothe him with the tenderest hands, and softest words, tell him he's beautiful, and that he deserves Christmasland, and the world, that he's not ruined, but PURE!!! This was my least favourite episode in the entire series, and just like, "The Gas Mask Man," will be skipped indefinitely in the re-watch, but like I said, it endeared Charlie even more to my heart, and I feel fiercely protective over him, over that goodness that still glows in his dark eyes, despite lifetimes of feeling unloved, and in ever-present pain. All I ever wanted in Season One, was a glimpse into the past that crafted my mysterious and refined vampire chauffeur, and this entire experience, My Darlings, is an exercise in, "Be Careful What You Wish For..........."

[mouseyfox]

[Video description] A white woman with dark brown hair down to her chin and black horn rim glasses sits in front of a cream wall with a string of mint drying behind her. She is holding a pillow with a geometric design as she turns on her phone's video camera.

[sigh] Hi, my name is Krystal. I am a disabled queer woman and I am here to have a talk with you today about what it's like being disabled in the United States and trying to keep a job. 

[Transcript Below]

So [sighs] there's some major issues with how we as US citizens and people in general, um, deal with disability and how it relates to the job force and how [thoughtful pause] we are treated as employees. Now the Equal Opportunities, um, Equal Employment Opportunities Act, um, was a major step forward as were similar things such as the, you know, Disability Rights movement, and the Americans with Disabilites Act, and even, you know, the Affordable Care Act. Those have all had positive effects on the Disabled Community as a whole, but there's a lot more that needs to be done. Now, disabilities are not just physical. They can be emotional, or psychological, and they can also be intellectual. That means you could see someone with a wheelchair, or a missing limb, or someone who has Parkinson's Disease, or someone who has dyslexia, or someone who has PTSD, someone who's missing an eye, someone who's deaf, blind, the list goes on, honestly.

For me personally I have been disabled for ohhh well over fifteen years at this point. I have experienced over fifteen years of abuse in my life which has triggered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, um, DID, um, Anxiety Disorders, Major Reoccurring Depression, I have Trichotillomania, Excoriation Disorder, I also have physical disabilities as well. I have Poly Cystic Ovarian Syndrome. I also have Chronic Pain and Fatigue, I have hips that don't sit right, and a back that doesn't like sitting straight, and I also have migraines that have gotten to the point where I'm having about a migraine every week or so even with medication. I'm going in for more treatment options with a neurologist to figure out why they're happening. Now, I am a person who would benefit greatly from things like Universal Healthcare, and uh Universal Basic Income because at the end of the day I am a queer woman who is disabled and who is supporting a partner who is totally disabled as much as I can, and even just saying that could cost him his benefits, and that is heinous. We are not married, if disabled people marry and they have benefits they can loose them entirely, legally, within the US as it is today. I have a Bachelor's degree I got from the University of Louisville this spring during COVID and while I am very happy that I have finally achieved something ten years in the making for a lot of reasons it was horrible on my health both mental and physical.

As a student who is independent and was relying entirely on loans aside from very few scholarships that did in no way cover the full cost of tuition. I worked [sigh] a full time job while being a full time student at a call center uh who violated my rights as a disabled person in a number of ways and when I eventually left that job and applied for full time disability benefits, which I was denied, by the way, uhm, [the call center] lied to the SSI department, and said that I had never once filed accomodation letters to them, which is very untrue as I had spoken with an HR Director on multiple occassions, I had emailed them, I had spoken to them on the phone, I had one on ones with supervisors about how the job was affecting my physical health, as well as my emotional and mental health and how it was worsening my disabilities.

I had applied for short term disability, which is something that in the United States, is only offered by certain employers and is something that you have to pay into. There is no short term disability department with the SSI. There is no way for an American citizen currently as it stands to have short term disability to get some of the medical issues under control in the US unless you have already paid into a pool.

Now, some of you might be wondering what about FMLA, the Family Medical Leave Act? I applied for that, and they really don't like you using that for short term disability unless if it's something that was happened at the job or outside. For example, if you undergo an amputation, you might be someone who would qualify for FMLA. But, for me, a person who was just dealing with further issues with my chronic disorders that are never going to go away, um, at this point my issues are so deeply imbeded that I will have to be on medication for the rest of my life to handle my disorders and as with many people, as I age, I am as likely to get more disabilities on top of everything else.

The way that our economy, the way that our healthcare works right now we don't accomodate or help or you know just give disabled people a way to live and work without highly unfair and horrible ways of treating them. I have been gaslit by employers. I have, uh, very highly insinuated that I was lying about issues with my health just so I could go home and "be lazy", or I've been told or implied by coworkers that I was lying about my disabilities and there are all sorts of negative public stigma about people who lie about disorders so they can like get benefits. And, honestly, here's a news flash for you, it's virtually impossible to get full time SSI benefits if you're lying. I have friends who have disorders that can kill them before they turn fifty who are considered not disabled enough to qualify for SSI benefits. And these are people who are dealing with horrible diseases that will kill them or just make it really impossible for them to ever work. Like, physically, mentally, some education, uhm, or not education, intellectual disorders there's no way they're going to be able to hold a full time steady job and you know with the way that our economy works part time jobs don't cut it.

Most people are working two to three jobs because our minimum wage isn't high enough. And if you're disabled you spend so much money on taking care of yourself, and spending days at home, and that's just part of being disabled. I don't like calling off of work. I don't like being drug into my supervisor's office to get you know reprimanded for constantly having to call in or leave early. I don't like inconveniencing my coworkers either because I know that makes it harder on them, but you know what's also harder on them? If I decide to power through a day even when I'm feeling like garbage, and I make more mistakes, I will get less things done, I'll be worse off with my customer interactions, and there are days where I have worked through on ten, twelve, even thirteen hour shifts as a disabled person, and it has absolutely wrecked my health.

I have been working for ten years and I've been a caretaker for even longer, and my ability to perform at a full time job has drastically diminished in just ten years of trying to support myself in the way our current economy works and I've worked in a variety of different jobs. I've done physical labor jobs, I've worked in factories, I've worked in call centers, I've been a barista, I've been a cashier, I have been a bourbon steward, I have worked in healthcare in a variety of fields, and I have worked in library science which is what I'm hoping to get for a- for my- my education goal is I want to be a librarian. I want to be someone who helps people with research and reference work, and helps with their community. I love being engaged with my community. I love helping people. I like going to work. I do genuinely enjoy going to work! But when I have to keep working to a point that would make even a- you know someone who's not disabled overly worked and wreck their health... What do you think that does to those of us who have disabilities? Huh? Cause I can promise you it's a lot worse than you initially think. And the accomodations that they offer at most jobs are a fucking joke. They really are.

Most jobs aren't even accomodating for people in wheelchairs, for people with physical disabilities, and not to mention people who have hearing problems, or who are blind, and don't get me started on psychological problems. We could have an entire separate discussion on that one because the way that workplace cultures work and the way with microaggressions with racism, and all sorts of other factors like homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, yes that counts, okay, because a lot of disabled people are just big, and you know what a lot of them are also really skinny, because their medical problem might be tied into that in ways that you can't understand either without a medical degree, or without being disabled yourself and having to do research.

Because at the end of the day the people who are most educated about their own disabilities are often the disabled person themselves. Yes doctors are very educated. Yes they know a lot. But you know who also knows a lot about the disorder, the person who's fucking experiencing it. I have friends who have been dismissed by doctors for years. Whose illnesses and issues have been completely mishandled and not at all treated by doctors because they wouldn't fucking listen to their patients. Okay. And, that's not something that we should be proud about as a country.

The way that we treat disabled people is horrible, and that's not even considering the problem with eugenics in this country because there are a number of people who are very interested in the fact of created designer babies, or aborting [disabled] babies, or you know, just throwing disabled people away until they die in a corner so you don't have to think about them. And that's a historical problem with this country and it hasn't gone away. We haven't fixed it. And it's something we need to work on.

But you know what? We're never going to be able to address those harder issues until we address the fact that working and having to hold multiple jobs to live for abled people that's inexcusable. It's even worse when you're disabled.

I can't tell you the number of times I have been almost homeless because my job had fired me because I had to call in too often, or I just had to leave a job because it was horribly wrecking my health. I have played yo-yo with all of my jobs for the past three years after I tried filing for disability, and you know what? They told me no. They told me I'm too young. I can't possibly have the disorders that I have or I'm just not disabled enough.

And you know what? You can be disabled at any age. And that possibility only increases the older that you get.  Because the older you get your systems start failing and you will be disabled at one point in your life. Period. Everyone will experience disability before they die in some way shape or form. So when we talk about disability rights it's not just about me. It's not just about friends of mine who are being killed by our healthcare system, and by our government, and by our economy, every single day. It's also about you. So when I ask you to give a fuck about disabled people and work and listen  to what we're asking you to do this is about you too. Because one day you're going to be in our position, and you know what? It sucks. And no one should have to deal with this.

[Emotional Pause] We need healthcare reform. We need it. Very badly. And when I say that it goes from everything to my own father who has been insulin rationing, and dealing with completely ludicrous insulin prices since before I was born.

It goes to my mother, you know, whose liver shut down because of black mold in a church my father preached at. I watched her slowly die for a year because she refused to go to the hospital because if she did, and she got the care that could have saved her, it would have killed my father because we wouldn't have been able to afford his insulin.

You know, and I'm not the only person, who's had situations like this, there are elderly people all over our nation who are dealing with similar issues all day. There are people who are disabled, there are families of disabled people, who are working to support people. There- Did you know that it's actually illegal for disabled people to marry and keep their benefits? Did you? Because I have a pertner who is disabled and even just saying that could rob him of his benefits.

That's not including issues with disability and, you know, being queer. Because being queer complicates everything. You know I don't say that because it's fun and I get "all the social benefits it brings" as Rosalarian would say because you know what? There really aren't any.

I'm queer because I'm queer. I'm disabled because my body is a pain in the ass, and because I've gone through things that no one ever should have had to go through and it has completely wrecked my mental health.

And I've gotten so much better than I used to be! I used to be so much worse off and put up with stuff that was absolutely wrecking my mental health and physical health because your mental health does a lot of stuff with your physical health that you might not be aware of. [Cat sneezes]

The United States as a nation is literally working itself to death, and that doesn't just affect able bodied people. It affects disabled people a lot worse. And you know what, I like working, but I like living a lot better. [Turns off video]

[bladekindeyewear]

Bloggin’ bout HS^2′s second upd8 continued.  > (==>)

And it had felt so real, almost like he could have reached out and touched him--

--Yeah, the next page is gonna be BGDirk just standing there like I saw before I read the update, right?

> (==>)

> (==>)

Two pages. Close enough.

> (==>)

Hah!  Get fucked, Dirk.  (Even if you’re supposedly one of the better Dirks.)

> (==>)

Yep, all see-thru and everything.

DIRK: You passed out in a puddle of your own drool. And what the fuck is that on your face? JAKE: My face? What do you mean on my face? DIRK: The moustache, Jake. Who’s idea was that. JAKE: Oh! You dont like it? DIRK: I didn’t say that.

Oh come the fuck on.  He looks good in a mustache, Jane-influence or no Jane-influence.

DIRK: We’ve had this conversation before, dingus. I’m you. And I’m me. But I only exist because of your powers. The fact that I’m manifesting here, in the new universe, outside of a dream, is evidence in itself for just how absolutely boned you are.

Now what exactly do you mean by that last part?  How is this a sign of trouble?

--Is it because this Dirk thinks he’s needed?  And therefore shit will be going down?

DIRK: You’ve been a useless sack of shit for two decades. I’m here to kick your ass back into active duty.

...Hm.

I mean, Jake MIGHT be able to help stop this stupid goddamn war, but this IS Dirk trying to help him, so...

JAKE: And what side am i supposed to be fighting on? for jane or against her? DIRK: Against her. Obviously. What the fuck, dude.

Pffff.

JAKE: But you were the one who wanted her to run in the first place! You wrote her bloody speeches! DIRK: Yeah, I did. And every single one of them kicked ass. I wanted Jane to be the democratically elected president. Not a cake-slinging Jeff Bezos with a great rack.

Pfff.  I mean, you didn’t do a great job the first way, either.  It’s heavily implied things in Canon-land were about to go to shit too.

Not as FAR to shit, nor as quickly, but still to shit.  So, really, how DIFFERENT is this from the way you wanted it done, Dirk?  How can you claim this isn’t half YOUR fuck-up too?

DIRK: Don’t worry about it. The point is, you have a chance to make a difference. You’re in the perfect position to infiltrate her operation.

Oh hell no.  Don’t send him back in THERE you utter horse’s ass!  How could THAT be good for his mental health!? What the fuck about Tavros?!?

DIRK: That’s horseshit and we both know it. Jane would take you back in a second. She loves you.

I think Jane’s definition of “taking him back” would be a bit broader than his body or soul could fucking afford.

> (==>)

Eugh.  You really liked the Condesce’s way of doing things right down to her style, huh?  To think you used to love the spoon.  Is that a fucking spork?  Is that zilly Battlespork your go-to weapon now?

Also, it took me a moment to realize those green and orange silhouettes were Jake and BGDirk.  I was a little like “how did Rose get here?!?”.

> (==>)

Have I mentioned how good all this art is?  So much attention being paid to the use of color, to making everything look so soft and streamlined?

Looks like she’s going in for at LEAST a hug.  And the art style might be mercifully light on showing us indulgent details of just how asset-laden Jane is supposed to be.  Shots of Jake’s manly bod aside, something in me doesn’t like the traditionally-sexualized stuff pushed like that in a canon that’s been light on it for so long...

> (==>)

Oh, that... THAT looks fake.  Or like, she’s about to turn around and happily wail on his ass or something.

JANE: Boo hoo hoo! Oh, Jake! Something awful has happened! JAKE: It--it has? You mean more awful than usual? JANE: The opposition has taken Tavros, Jake. They’ve finally shown their true colors. I knew it was only a matter of time before they attacked our family directly!

.....Ah.  Well, that explains it.  She’d never cry like that about HIM returning AFTER STEPPING OUT ON HER.

It’s then that Jake realizes that Jane isn’t mad because she’d never realized he was gone.

Poor pages, huh?  All their most dramatic gestures always undercut.

...It seems like we might see Candy kind of resolved in less of a fucked-up worldstate after all, at this rate?

She seems to have forgotten that she’d been cross with him the last time they met, because now that Gamzee is gone, there’s no one left to talk to.

It’s true. Gamzee’s absence always improves things.

> (==>)

All of it is made worse by the occasional wry glint in her eye, or moment of self-deprecation in the slant of her mouth. It reminds him of the Jane he used to know. Or the Jane he thought he used to know.

Ambition is a hell of a thing.  Seems like she’s drunk of it almost as deeply as Prince Dirk.  I’d imagine this could be a pretty consistent thing with really active Life players when they get actual power, huh?  The way it just gathers to Life players in all its forms -- power over others, status, wealth -- it’s easy to start to leverage it in ways that constitute abuse of power over others from a Riddle perspective.

At first Dirk stands at Jake’s elbow, a one-ghost support staff, before he appears to lose interest in Jane’s rant and wanders off across the office, reading the spines of books and spending way too long staring at a startlingly phallic piece of installation art,

--PLEASE let us see it.

, the provenance of which Jake doesn’t know, but could hazard a guess it wore a codpiece.

Nope, never mind. Interest lost.

> (==>)

Then he settles on Jane’s desk, propping his ghost butt there and sort of just...well. Here’s a picture of what he does.

Um.

Where is this going?

> (==>)

Oh, so the BEST option, then.  :D

Okay. That’s a bit of an exaggeration.

Boooooo.

> (==>)

--Alright, forgiven.

he’s thoroughly exhausted from attempting to pay attention to his supervillain wife while trying not to look at the crotch of a ghost man from his brain.

...Okay, hold up.  BGDirk, are you trying to steer him into doing this for self-indulgent, non-comedic purposes? Or is this a bit of Prince Dirk in there?  (I mean... I can’t definitively say Jake wouldn’t have wanted this.)

And I’m still wondering how all of this is going to be relevant.  IF it’s going to be relevant.  Despite promises to the contrary that are seemingly being ignored.

> (==>)

DIRK: All according to keikaku.

Fuck you.

JAKE: i really didnt think id fall off the wagon so quickly. I dont think being here is good for my emotions to be honest. DIRK: Yeah, probably not. But that’s okay. They don’t matter. JAKE: Oh.

Yeah, Dirk, you suck at this more than you know.  This ain’t going to go as well as you “hope” I don’t think.

DIRK: Don’t know anything about stiff lips, dude. But that’s not what I mean. It’s not because you’re a man. You’re a god. JAKE: Oh right. That. DIRK: The world comes first, even at the expense of all your relationships and personal happiness. That’s what being a hero means. JAKE: I guess...i never really thought about it like that.

You’re also not guaranteed to be fucking right, you know.

There are definitely dichotomies where what was best for the world wasn’t best for the person, so far, and vice versa in Homestuck.  But Dirk’s taking his anime-flavored principles as gospel as usual, and ignoring, oh I dunno, the impact of the heart in all of this.  Some people, ESPECIALLY JAKE and other Pages so far, CAN’T operate at their best until they’re at least reasonably healthy and sure of themselves, and investments to that effect are essential to letting them slowly realize their full potential.  Brain Ghost Dirk is likely making the same goddamn mistake he made with his overbearing Dirkbot back on Jake’s island.

> (==>)

DIRK: Think what you want about Jane, but at least she realizes that none of you can ever be normal, and she never bothered to try. Can it really be a god-complex if you’re actually a god? DIRK: People like us don’t get happy endings.

...Yup.  This is the fucked-over part of Dirk’s worldview coming in full play, here.  And he believes in it so strongly that he couldn’t even fucking leave NON-CANON alone anymore.  Fuck.

JAKE: Thats bleak dirk i dont think i could possibly believe that!

Mmmhmm.

DIRK: Yeah. That’s probably more a Dirk thought than a Jake one. I told you, it’s hard to tell sometimes. JAKE: Is...is that really how dirk felt the whole gosh darned time?

Mmmhmm.

> (==>)

Last page of the upd8.  Well... all I can say is, it’s a good thing he’s a fucking ghost here.  And half Jake, at that.  At least that can limit the damage.  Hopefully giving Jake just enough of a kick in the doing-something direction without being so overbearing that he makes things worse, making for a balance of...

...Wait.

Wait, is that why we’re here?

Maybe that finally makes some sense of all this.  Of this cut, of this small violation of that last sentence in Meat, of--  ah, yeah, I might be on to something here!  Only maybe, but still--!

We’re quite possibly bearing witness to a realm of influence where, through measures outside of his control, Dirk has a balanced impact.  Where this same ideology of his, tempered by Jake’s hopeful mindset and Dirk’s inability to take direct action, might just manage to make things better and actually make everyone happier by the end, while solving Earth C’s fucked-up Candyland state at the same time.  It’s possibly to show the readers (through the lens of a Hope player specializing in positive possibility) that Dirk, had he been restrained, COULD have had a positive impact, even at the same time that we’re shown Prince Dirk at his soul’s most overblown and heinous.

And, if we want to be optimistic..... perhaps this’ll show Dirk, too?

Canon and Non-Canon may not “meet” again.  But that doesn’t stop Dirk, via this fragment of his multiverse-spanning soul, from seeing Non-Canon.  From seeing how well things COULD have worked out, had he held back.  And if we keep cutting like this -- back and forth between the “real” story and these events in Candyverse -- perhaps the moment at which Brain Ghost Dirk realizes what he’s accomplished, realizes how much better things are because he could hold back, will coincide at the end with Prince Dirk finally, belatedly, realizing just how fucked his plan was, and understanding at the very, very end why he has to fucking die?

THAT would be interesting.

I guess we’ll see?  Talk to y’all next upd8.

[rutilation]

Does mulching a prisoner of war into shiny little woodchips before burying them alive indefinitely count as a violation of the Geneva Conventions?  Asking for a friend.

(Hi guys, I’m back, and I brought 4,400 words with me.)

First of all, my apologies for the nearly five month wait.  Ever since last spring, I haven’t had much time at all to devote to writing and I’ve only been able to work on this essay in small increments.  And yet, despite the fact that I don’t have the time to do so, this essay somehow turned into a bloated treatise on the failings of gem society.  Truly, I am a slave to my obsessions.

I’ve refrained from reading chapter 80 because I just know that if I do, it will insinuate itself into my brain like a tumor and I won’t be able to concentrate on finishing this essay.  (That said, I did happen to see someone on twitter make a joking reference to third impact in regards to said chapter, so I am certainly Afraid.)  Though my takes may be ice cold by this point, I hope that there are some nuggets of insight to be found in this.  With that said, here are my thoughts on chapters 78 and 79.

While the past two chapters have certainly been…hard to read, I think that their contents have been a long time coming, primarily regarding the parallels between Phos and Kongou, and the uglier undercurrents of gem society reaching their logical conclusion.  (And I gotta say, this display of—for lack of a better term—inhumanity on the part of the gems jives quite well with all the Shirley Jackson I’ve been reading lately. When I get tired of one display of flagrant mob violence, I can quickly flip to another.)  

And then there’s the matter of the gems on the moon…  I remember that when I first got into hnk, which was right around the time when Phos and the others left for the moon, everyone was afraid that Phos would go off the deep end and the gems stuck on the moon would end up as collateral damage in Phos’s quest for vengeance.  But since Ichikawa is too powerful us, she said “what if it was the other way around, and Phos is the one getting thrown under the bus while the moon gems start a death cult?”

So there’s a lot to talk about, but let’s address the earth gems first, because these characters sure do live in a society.  (In order to make my prose more tolerable, I encourage my readership to take a shot every time I write the words “gem society.”)

First of all, I’ve seen a number of people interpret Kongou’s line about the gems forgetting Phos very literally, and assume that the earth gems all have Phos-specific amnesia. I highly doubt this is the case, and he probably just means that Phos is now out of sight and out of mind.

As bleak as the situation is, I think it’s been a long time coming.  From the beginning, one of the major philosophical elements of the story has been how the gems’ desire to give meaning to their long lives has compelled them to create a society in which only those with a concrete purpose have value.  The characters see themselves and each other as instrumentally but not inherently valuable.  With so much of the story focused on how this ethos hurts those individuals who aren’t seen as useful, how much it fosters shame and self-hatred, and how much it makes the gems unable and unwilling to help each other through hardship and depression, it makes sense to me that this inhumane mindset would eventually boil over into something truly cruel, and thus the other shoe has finally dropped.  In a strange way, I have more respect for Rutile’s attitude towards the situation than I do the rest of the earth gems (sans Euclase, who I’ll get to in a moment.)  Rutile is treating Phos like an enemy that must be vanquished, whereas the others are treating Phos as a kid treats their dirty clothes when they don’t want to do laundry—by shoving it in the back of a closet and trying to forget about it.  The former strikes me as less dishonest and dehumanizing than the latter.

Even before chapter 79 made it official, I had a gut feeling that the timetable for figuring out what to do with Phos was nonexistent.  I’ll be generous and assume Cinnabar was being sincere in the moment when they implied that they’d put Phos back together eventually.  But just like how everyone ignored Cinnabar’s suffering because there was no compelling incentive to do anything about it, or how they all turned a blind eye to the Kongou/Lunarian situation for millennia, I figured that Phos would end up as another problem they wouldn’t bother solving. (Regarding Cinnabar, while I hope they’re still on good terms with everyone after the time skip, I would not be the least bit surprised if the earth gems started ostracizing them again once it became apparent that there would be no new attacks from the moon and thus no further reason to tolerate their mercury.)

(Bort, please stick up for them.)

And to be clear, this is a problem that the earth gems are refusing to solve in exchange for a short-term sense of security.  If Phos and Kongou had been allowed to hash things out, and this stalemate hadn’t festered for 220 years, then maybe the moon gems wouldn’t be entertaining the idea of starting that aforementioned death cult.  (Tbh, this mostly applies to 84, Yellow, and Dia, since Cairn has been their own personal death cult since chapter 33.)  Even leaving aside how bad things have gotten already, if this state of affairs had continued to drag on, I think the situation would have gotten very ugly the second Aechmea got tired of waiting.  While playing fruit ninja or whatever with Cairngorm, he says something to the effect of losing a battle here or there isn’t important as long as you win the war in the end, which I’m pretty sure is meant to communicate to the audience that Aechmea is playing the long game.  And since he hasn’t done anything in the interim other than reluctantly and incrementally humor Cairngorm’s pet project, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that he’s biding his time specifically for Phos, and that he’s counting on them eventually being reawakened.  In that case, what would have happened if Kongou had been too meek to interfere, and the gems succeeded in getting rid of Phos for good?  If Aechmea eventually gave up on his current scheme, scrapped working with Phos, and came up with a new plan, I’m betting things would quickly devolve into heinous war crimes since he’s only played nice so far in order to keep Phos on his side.

In chapter 78, we get to see two instances of the most common nugget of gem wisdom: only act when you’re guaranteed to succeed, and never take risks.  It been a common refrain, with Antarc, and more subtly, Dia being the only gems aside from Phos to push back against that sentiment.  And to be clear, I’m not saying any one of these iterations necessarily are bad advice, but it’s become increasingly obvious that it’s the only acceptable mode of dealing with problems in gem society.  More on that in a minute.

So, uh, regarding Euclase, here’s an exclusive picture of me, after I’d spent months writing: “Gee, this Euclase character seems pretty shady, but I have faith in Cinnabar, Bort, and Jade to act humanely!’

That said, I think I got at least one aspect of their characterization right in my Euclase-focused essay—that they have a greater comprehension of their mortality than most.  Unlike the other gems, they’re not childishly naïve enough to believe that ignoring their problems will save them; they understand that death is always around the corner, and that the (mostly) tranquil life the gems lead requires constant maintenance.  Simply sliding down the path of least resistance will come back to bite them all in the ass later down the line, and Euclase knows it.  That’s probably why they at least went through the motions of asking Kongou to pray every day for two hundred twenty years.

This is a bit of a tangent, but regarding my earlier point about the gems not commiserating at all, Peridot and Sphene come across as anomalies in that they helped each other through their grief over their lost partners, but that doesn’t seem to happen all that often.  As we see in the aftermath of the winter arc, it seemingly did not occur to any of the gems who had lost friends of their own to try and help Phos through their grief.  And I think it’s likely that they weren’t given much comfort in their hours of need either.  Yellow bottled up their grief, Alex and (presumably) Red Beryl threw themselves into their work to the point of obsession, and Ghost seemed to have largely withdrawn from everyone else.  But none of them really healed or helped anyone else heal.  Despite their society placing a high value on interdependence, the gems are truly alone when they have to reckon with complicated or inconvenient emotions.

It may be hard to remember, but Phos was once influenced by all these toxic mindsets as well.  Recall Phos’s conversation with Benito in chapter two: it implies that Cinnabar did live with the other gems during Phos’s lifetime, recently enough that Phos expects to find them in their room.  From this we can infer that our kindhearted Phos never reached out to the clearly lonely Cinnabar while they were actually around, and didn’t even notice when they left the school for good.  They may have had the potential for kindness from a very young age, but it was only when they were hit with with the stark truth of Cinnabar’s suffering that they snapped out of the fog of apathy that seems to surround the gems.

In fact, it almost seems like the struggle to drag the gems kicking and screaming out of their comfort zone is a macrocosm for what Phos had to grow out of at the beginning of the series.  You’ll recall that once upon a time they were lazy, wanted easy solutions to their problems, and had no faith in their ability to effect change.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say that in the eyes of gem society, the problem wasn’t really that Phos was lazy, it’s that their laziness manifested in the wrong ways.  They were supposed to be fastidious and reliable about things like crafting, or fighting, or writing reports, but apathetic towards anything that requires more nuance or imagination than that, kindness or cruelty be damned.

All this is cast into even sharper relief if you think back on the arc with Ventricosus.  She was in far more dire straits than the earth gems are now, and had a compelling incentive to throw Phos under the bus.  But in the end, that wasn’t a line she was willing to cross.  Her final line: “If we’re not willing to change our ways, we’ll end up just like the Lunarians,” seems quite portentous in retrospect.  I don’t think Ichikawa is positing that being immortal makes you a sociopath, otherwise characters like Kongou, Yellow, and Padpa wouldn’t be such cinnamon buns.  But I think she is insinuating that someone who refuses to change is dooming themselves to a state of perpetual immaturity, and that being truly kind requires growing up a bit.  It’s a harder for someone who knows they’ll die one day to remain in a state of arrested development than it is for someone who could indefinitely procrastinate on growing up, and just focus all their mental energy into making paper or whatever for all of eternity.

And this seems as good a point as any to stop harping on gem society and start talking about the gems on the moon, starting with my muse, my most problematic of faves.

I brought up in my chapter 77 essay that Aechmea may not be willing to divulge what he was about to tell Cairn, and that was exactly what happened.  Since he’s only willing to share this mysterious information if he literally would not be around for the fall out, I’m guessing that whatever this secret is, it’s not benign.  And while Cairn has probably put it out of their mind by chapter 79, it’s clear that it’s bugging them before the time skip.  I smell a shocking revelation brewing and I dread to imagine what could possibly top mind-control eyeballs.  Make no mistake, I’ve devoted an embarrassing amount of brainspace the past nine months or so to contemplating what it will look like when the other shoe finally drops for Cairn’s character arc.  (Is there a German word for the ambivalence that arises from wanting to call future plot twists for bragging rights, but not wanting to look like a dipshit if your predictions are wrong?)

Their line from chapter 78 that I alluded to earlier in this essay is rather interesting to me, because although they’re referring to Phos, they might as well be talking about Aechmea.  They exhausted themselves to their breaking point trying to look after someone who didn’t take care of themselves, but they’ve nonetheless latched onto someone who is also seeking self-destruction.  And as I pointed out earlier in this essay, this line also serves as yet another iteration of the defeatist sentiment that the gems often espouse.  But, for a while, it had seemed like Cairn was moving away from that.  The decision Cairn made in chapter 67 was certainly…fraught.  But, one can’t deny that it wasn’t a brave one on their part, to leave behind everything they knew and cared about for a shot at living authentically; the only problem was that they undercut that step forward by returning to their chronic doormat tendencies.  And again in chapter 70, they took a risk by sneaking off to earth knowing that Aechmea would pitch a fit later.  But ever since chapter 75, they’ve been backsliding.  As said chapter pointed out, their wish has shifted from wanting freedom to wanting what amounts to eternal codependency.  I also find it interesting that Cairngorm apparently hasn’t bothered with getting a new name, and is just copying Aechmea’s shtick of going by his title.  They’ve gone from sharing a name with Ghost, to having their own name, to not having a name at all.  In conclusion, my child is a god damned mess.

I know I said I was done talking about gem society, but I guess I’m not.  Going back to what I said in the last paragraph, about Phos not taking care of themselves, that’s been a reoccurring element throughout the series, and in my opinion, it was a significant contributor to the breakdown of Phos’s relationships.  The reason Phos never just tried to make friends with Cinnabar—which is what the latter really wanted, and only focused their efforts on following through on their promise, was because Phos’s self-loathing runs so deep that it doesn’t occur to them that anyone would actually want their company for its own sake. Chapter 14 is the most direct allusion to this in my mind.  Phos clearly wants to talk to Cinnabar, but instead they hide away and mutter that they’d have nothing to say to them.  And as I touched on a moment ago, Phos’s self-destructive tendencies wore down Cairngorm over the course of their partnership.  

But, here’s the thing: Phos’s self-loathing isn’t some immutable part of their nature, it was instilled in them by their society from the moment it became apparent that Phos couldn’t slot neatly into a role.  This is very apparent in the early chapters, in which no one ever misses an opportunity to remind Phos of their uselessness (except Dia, bless their heart.)  Back then, they pretended to not care about it by way of snark and bravado, but in truth, I think it warped their self-perception in an incredibly negative way.  

There’s also something that illustrates this which has been on my mind for a while, but I haven’t had the opportunity to talk about it.  When Phos was trapped by their arms during Antarc’s fateful capture, the insult they yelled at their arms to get them moving is the same one that Bort lobbed at them a few times in volume one.  I usually see different translations of the word between the two scenes, but to my non-Japanese-fluent ears, it sounded like the same word to me when I watched the anime.  It was a striking way of implying that this moment of personal growth had been seeded with something more insidious, that their self-loathing is a taint that has followed them across their many incarnations.  I’m not the first one to point this out, but there’s always been a certain tension within the text regarding Phos’s changes.  On one hand, their courage to change is framed as admirable and heroic, but on the other hand, they’re also hurting themselves because of social pressure to avoid being useless, which is kind of awful.  I think the narrative resolves this tension by making Phos’s quest for validation something which would eventually lead them to try and tear down the status quo that they hurt themselves for in the first place.  

Okay, back to the moon gems.  I’ve reread the part of chapter 79 focused on the moon several times, and it just feels more ominous with each iteration.  What exactly was their idea of administering therapy for Yellow?  Why is Amethyst on board with Cairn’s death bullshit?  Why is Dia okay with it?  Why did they stop fixing the dusted gems?  And most concerning, where are the other three gems—especially Alex who would probably be extremely opposed to halting the gem restoration?  It feels as if there’s something terrible just out of our field of view and chapter 79 is dancing around it.  (But hey, my intuition was wrong about Euclase so maybe when I read chapter 80 Ichikawa will tell me that Alex, Goshe, and Benito were at moon-disneyland the whole time, and that Aechmea is a real swell guy, actually.)

(No, I’m not bitter in the least.)

I also find it interesting that in chapter 79, Cairn is espousing a lot of the same sentiments as poor Yellow, but since they can mask the dysfunction better, they’re treated as an expert rather than a victim.  In reality, both of them are in serious need of a therapist, which is apparently non-existent in the post-post-apocalypse.

And finally, Barbata continues to be the truest audience surrogate.  I find it interesting that he clearly doesn’t approve of all the bullshit going on, while at the same time being too reticent to do anything about it, aside from some side-eyes and passive-aggressive comments.  Perhaps there will be some payoff to this down the line?

At this point, let’s talk about Kongou, because both his actions and his role as a sort of parallel to Phos in the narrative are fascinating.  I think this is the first time in the story that he’s really done something proactive.  I touched on this in a cursory character analysis I did for him, but to reiterate, the impression I got from his at times obtuse and contradictory behavior was that he had completely given up on trying to solve the Lunarian problem long before the series had begun, and that the only thing cutting through his despair and compelling him to get up in the morning and not just “meditate” forever was the prospect of spending a little more time with the people he loves, even knowing that he couldn’t protect them in any way that mattered.  But watching Phos’s struggle reignited a tiny bit of hope in him, enough that he wanted them to succeed in their efforts, but not enough for him to believe that he himself could make a difference.  To me, that seems like the only explanation that accounts for both his obstinacy when Phos directly confronted him along with his casual acceptance of the path Phos has been walking.

So for him to go behind everyone’s back to fix Phos is quite the departure from his usual passivity, and it tells us that he’d rather subject himself and everyone else to Phos’s brand of chaos than endure stasis that comes with their absence.  And it really does seem like the world enters a stasis along with Phos whenever they end up comatose.  Nothing moves forward, and the only thing to mark the passage of time are small deteriorations: Morga and Goshe are captured, and Cairn quietly becomes suicidal, and this time around, Yellow gradually loses their mind, the Admirabilis that Phos tried to spare overcrowd the tiny waterways they were released into, and the gems on the moon stop caring about whether they live or die.

For a while now, various characters both gem and Lunarian have called Phos their hope, or their savior, or some variation thereupon, and with each new iteration, the sentiment feels more and more ironic.  Time and time again, Phos rises to the occasion only to buckle under pressure, their noble intentions haven’t gotten them good results since, like, chapter 10, and everyone who at one point had faith in them is completely done with them.  And at the end of it all, they don’t have it in them to ask Kongou to pray on anyone’s behalf but their own, as if they’ve become so exhausted that they don’t have the energy to be kind anymore.  And just to rub salt in the wound, their ambiguous phrasing makes it unclear whether Phos is asking to Kongou get rid of the Lunarians or themselves.

All of this seems to mirror what Kongou is implied to have gone through.  He was created to save the souls of humanity, but was ill-equipped for the task, and he’s spent god knows how many millennia dogged by his failure to deliver.  Aechmea’s line in chapter 55 about how his human creators didn’t bother to think about what would happen to him after everyone was gone, in my mind, parallels how Phos has been abandoned by the people who once supported them once they became too much of an inconvenience.

So now that these two failed saviors are finally confronting each other with no lies to hide behind, and nothing to get between them, what’s going to happen?  I get the feeling that chapter 80 is going to give us some long awaited catharsis, for better or worse.  (Please Ichikawa, make things a little better for once.)

On a related note, I’m hoping this possible catharsis might clarify something else for me.  For all that the series is steeped in Buddhist symbolism and philosophy, I’ve never been able to tell what Ichikawa actually thinks of Buddhism.  On one hand, the assumptions that life boils down to suffering and that the self is ephemeral and illusory are certainly present, but on the other hand, the characters who lean most heavily on the Buddhist aesthetic are villains, the characters most invested in reaching nirvana are portrayed as…let’s say misguided at best, and as I’ve already noted above, our two would-be Buddhas are chronically ineffectual.  If I had to take a stab at it, I’d guess that the aspect of the philosophy that she takes issue with is the idea of relying on a savior figure and the idea that there exists a nirvana that could save anyone from samsara.  But if the Lunarians’ wish were a complete pipe dream, then Shiro et al wouldn’t have already disappeared?  Unless that was a misdirection and their souls were actually reincarnated?  Idk, I don’t have enough brain cells to parse The Most Viable Interpretation at this juncture in the story.

Lastly, assuming Phos doesn’t ascend to nirvana via pure rage next chapter, I think their next replacement is going to be imminent.  All of Phos’s other changes have been accompanied by death and birth imagery: they lost their legs out at sea, which is where inclusions are said to emerge, they lost their arms and their head at the site of their birth, the time they spent comatose evoked the image of a shrouded corpse in a morgue, their first trip to the moon in which they got their new eye apparently lasted the length of a Buddhist funeral, and now, they’ve literally been buried.  (On a side note, it’s interesting that there’s a lot more death imagery for their later transformations, while their earlier changes alluded to birth.)  I’m not the first person to point this out, but it seems likely to me that Rutile made good on their threat to throw Phos into the ocean, and discarded whatever pieces they were assigned to bury.  And indeed, there seems to be a gaping hole in Phos’s torso.  I still think Padparadscha is the most likely candidate for a replacement—the red stone from the lotus sutra has been alternately described as ruby, carnelian, amber, or coral, and Padparadscha is the closest we have to any of those—but who knows.  Ichikawa might even decide to stop short of all seven treasures in service of some greater thematic purpose.

And with that, this belated essay is finally done.  Except it isn’t.  This is a complete tangent, but I recently looked up the one and only region where gem-quality phosphophyllite was briefly mined, a mountain in the Bolivian Andes called Cerro Rico.  Hundreds of thousands have died there since the 16th century while mining silver, and that figure may be lowballing it, as some scholars think the death toll is actually in the millions.  It is colloquially known as “the Mountain that Eats Men,” and the miners pay tribute to this fellow in hopes of avoiding cave-ins and pockets of toxic gas, but are otherwise doomed to die young from silicosis.  According to a forum post I found belonging to a mineral collector, the mineshaft where all the phosphophyllite came from had to be walled off with a concrete bulkhead because the poisonous gases that accumulated in the tunnel had killed a number of miners.  The idea of gem mining already conjures up images of exploited workers in abject conditions, but I must say that Maneater Mountain exceeded my expectations.

Okay, now I’m actually done.  I’m going to get some sleep on account of the fact that it’s 2 AM, but afterwards I shall read the new chapter and repeat this whole grueling cycle over again, but like, in a timely manner.

[sasorikigai]

Ten Most Pivotal Emotions for Hanzo Hasashi and Kuai Liang. 

1. Happiness (or lack thereof): One of the first core emotions Hanzo experienced was happiness; when he was younger, happiness was an emotion derived from a sense of safety and security from his parents. It arose from the knowledge that he was being loved and being taken care of. as he grew older, he began to associate it with feelings of contentment and emotional connection originated from building solid, trustful relationships with his peers and later, with Harumi. Joy, pleasure or satisfaction all existed to remind him of what it is he values the most. Kuai never got to experience the true sense of happiness, at least the safety and security aspects that he could get from his parents, since he was orphaned at a very young age along with his brother. 

2. Sadness: Sadness is probably the most complex and nuanced emotions that they can go through; because they can vary in degrees and manifest in a lot of different ways. And it also helps them to process grief and disappointment. Feeling sad allows them to take a step back and allow themselves to take a look at themselves and their situations to better understand what it is that’s causing them such pain. It teaches them to be introspective, resilient, and to learn from their mistakes. Hanzo’s rebirth as a hellspawn specter was originated from the very guilt and incompetency that he could not stop not only his family’s death, but the Shirai Ryu’s complete extinction. Kuai has lost so many of his peers, and notably Bi-Han (in the hands of Scorpion) and Smoke (in the Netherrealm) due to the corruption of the Lin Kuei. Sadness is one of the most raw, visceral and persistent emotions they would experience throughout their lives, only exacerbated by their PTSD and depression. 

3. Anger: Clenched fists, tense muscles, flushed face may constitute as negative somatic sensations, but anger could be a learning experience if they take their time to introspect in their own ways. Anger definitely does more than beg an individual for it to be unleashed; it forces them to act and fight against the problems that they’re facing. One of the most associated emotion towards Scorpion had been anger (along with vengeance), deeply originated from his guilt and incompetency to protect his loved ones. That manifested and exacerbated his need to be manipulated and misguided by Quan Chi, to stand against the Forces of Light protecting the sanctity and sustenance of the Earthrealm to fight for the Forces of Darkness. While Kuai was turned towards the evil’s side against his volition, he too, is, like any other human, is susceptible to be prone to anger, mostly at himself for killing the innocents. 

4.  Anticipation: It is the psychological state of arousal, that they experience when excited, anxious, or uncertain about what’s to come. It’s mind’s way of reminding them to plan ahead of time and better prepare themselves for the future. It’s less of nervous excitement that pushes them outside their comfort zone, because they both has mounted spectrum of experiences that define them as capable, hardened and ferocious warriors. As both of them being mortal humans with only supernatural powers (pyromancy and cryomancy) as their weapons, both Hanzo and Kuai obviously cannot predict anything for the future, but as they are prominent figures in the Earthrealm as two of the most popular clans in the Earthrealm (the Shirai Ryu and the Lin Kuei, respectively), they do their best in their abilities and capabilities to prepare for what’s to come. 

5. Fear: Evolutionary psychology tells them fear is the basic survival mechanism of their ancestors, which is meant to keep them safe from potential danger. That’s why they have innate fight or flight response that is triggered whenever they feel physically or emotionally threatened by someone or something. Most often, they feel fear towards something that are not lethal; such as failure, uncertainty, emotional vulnerability, and loss of control. Both Hanzo and Kuai never let fear take complete control, despite highly probable to experience such fear mentioned above (Hanzo much more prone to all of them compared to Kuai), preventing them from taking risks, challenging themselves and going after what they want. Hanzo tends to experience extremes of such, for his depression runs more bone-deep and he still faults and blames himself for being turned into the wretched Netherrealm spectre. Despite his fear of all those four aspects mentioned, he is paradoxically more likely to take risks, jump into danger to protect another and act on his aspirations quicker than Kuai. 

6. Loneliness: Loneliness results when they feel isolated even with people around them. One of the most basic human needs is the need for belongness, along with the physical needs for food, water and shelter. As a human being, one of the deep-seeded requirements is social interactions, and feeling of loneliness tells them they need to reconnect with their loved ones and attend to relationships with those who they care about. While loneliness is a common emotion they both go through, Hanzo had more luxury of experiencing various kinds of relationships, including platonic, fraternal (with some of his peers, as he was an only child), romantic/sexual (Harumi) and paternal (Satoshi), and even serving as a surrogate father for Takeda Takahashi. Obviously compared to Hanzo, the scope of Kuai’s relationship lacks both depth and spectrum, as loneliness is more of a Kuai’s deep-seated fear that he has accepted as his fate. 

7. Jealousy (or lack thereof): Jealousy gives way to insecurity and lower self-esteem, because it makes you to think that you are not good enough to have everything that you want. It’s important for you to pay attention to what sparks that very feeling in you, because it speaks volumes about what exactly is missing from your life. Jealousy isn’t something both Hanzo and Kuai feels; because they are confident, proud, assertive in their mannerisms without coming off as too imposing and commanding (although their gravitas as the Grandmasters of their clans may exude such aura), and when they get into any relationships, they are based on utmost trust and devotion. 

8. Disgust: Disgust is another emotion rooted in their evolution; they could feel repulsed by things they consider unclean or disease-ridden. Most likely, they often feel repulsed by things that go against the most fundamental social norms, such as heinous crimes or abnormal sexual behaviors. Feelings of intense dislike and aversion and disgust are emotional responses they feel towards something that is unhealthy for them. Since they have faced other nonhuman kombatants and literally been hell and back, both of them find repulsed by amorality and lack of honor and code of ethics; for example, they both find D’Vorah disgusting, not only because she is a non-human insect who has ovipositors, but her morality is abominable and contemptible. 

9. Surprise: Surprise is something they feel when something unexpected happens to them, or those around them. Shock and surprise can intensity their current emotion, like happiness, anger and despair. When they become surprised, they become more curious and alert, because it forces them to change their perspective, and adapt to new situations. While Hanzo and Kuai has experienced ample positive emotions, such as for Hanzo, when he married Harumi, he watched Satoshi being born, and when he rebuilt the Shirai Ryu multiple times and watching it thrive and prosper etc. Kuai has only experienced shock in such negative connotations. He has came to acknowledge Bi-Han’s death, had gone through excruciating change from being cyberized, back to turning into a Revenant, and losing so many loved ones to evil including Smoke and Frost. And he also lost Hanzo in MK11 storyline. Hanzo also has fair share of dealing with negative shocking, as mentioned above, including his own death and reliving his family’s death and clan’s massacre over and over again. 

10. Trust: While trust isn’t as an instinctive feeling as the other emotions, it is still a feeling that they both experience in daily to daily basis. Trust is an emotion built on their experiences; and it’s meant to remind them both the good and the bad that the other people have done to them, so that they can better protect themselves against emotional pain. Often times, trust and love go hand and hand. In the end, the self-exploration towards emotional awareness towards the other through trust will help gain more emotionally fulfilling lives. For both, trust is a hard-earned trait; they had been deceived, manipulated and violated as pawns doing the bidding of the darkness and evil, and as protectors of the Earthrealm, the one that serves the light even in the midst of the dark, they are loyal and fully devoted almost to a fault once such hard-earned trust solidifies and anchors. 

[pearwaldorf]

I don’t go here but apparently melancholy codas are things I like to write? Vague spoilers for all of GoT S8. 

--

After many weeks of nothing but water as far as the eye could see, the sight of land elicits shouts of joy, even among the Unsullied. Grey Worm looks through his spyglass, unsure of what he’ll find waiting for them on the shores of Naath. There are people gathering on the beach, but it is too far to see if they had weapons.

“May I?” Marselen holds his hand out for the instrument. Grey Worm hands it over, and he looks through the glass for a long moment before taking a deep breath.

“What do you see?”

“Something I remember, from before we were taken.” Marselen’s voice is thick with emotion. “The-- my people give hospitality to all who arrive on the island. It is small and remote, and the water is the only way trade and news comes.”

“Also slavers,” Grey Worm mutters.

Marselen tilts his head. “They would come whether we gave hospitality or not, and this way, we have satisfied the obligations the Lord of Harmony has placed upon us.”

Grey Worm frowns. “To violate guest right is truly heinous.”

“In addition to the slavery? Indeed.” Marselen’s lips twist in a not-quite smile.

Grey Worm reaches out, touches his shoulder. “It will never happen again. We will see to that. Not just for us, but for your sister and brother.” Marselen nods, squeezing Grey Worm’s hand before departing to order preparations for dropping anchor.

The Naathi gathered on the beach greet them like old friends long unseen, and share breadfruit and salt. Somebody hands Grey Worm a cup of something. He does not recognize the taste, but it is cool and refreshing after weeks of flat water and dried meat.

After they have been greeted and fed, a woman of middling age approaches them. “What is your business here?”

“For some of us, it is return, to a land from which we were cruelly taken,” Marselen replies.

The woman stares at him for a long moment. “Your face is familiar to me. You had a brother and sister.”

Marselen nods, his eyes bright. He describes what he remembers of his village, and the woman confirms the details.

“It was razed to the ground, and naught of it stands. But we took in those who were left, made them part of our houses and homes.” She takes Marselen’s hand in both of hers. “And if it is something you wish, we shall welcome you and your men the same way.”

“That is a generous offer, my lady,” Grey Worm replies. “We hope to prove worthy of belonging, perhaps after we earn our keep.”

She looks skeptical. “We grow or make most of what we need. The rest we trade for when a ship passes by. What else could you offer?”

Grey Worm shows the hilt of his dagger. “The gentle ways of your people are known to me. We will not ask you to take up arms yourself, but rather let us do so on your behalf.”

The woman looks out at the water, where ships crowd in the harbor so closely the shimmer of water can barely be seen. “How many men have you?”

“Many, many hundreds. Perhaps thousands. Our numbers were vastly reduced before we came here.”

She looks thoughtful. “With protection and ships, there are things we can do again without fear.” She holds her hand out to Grey Worm, and they clasp arms.

As they watch the rowboats ferry Unsullied from the ships, the woman turns to him. “Tell me, what was your impetus for coming such a distance?”

“I met somebody from Naath. If the land she was from was a fraction as beautiful, clever, and strong as her, I would be content to live there the rest of my days.”

She pats his shoulder. “Do you miss her?”

He thinks for a moment. “I do, but being here helps lessen the ache.”

She smiles. “Our land is good for that.”

[thoughtfulpaperback]

SPOILERS!!!! CHARMED 1x19

Okay y'all, I've finally seen the latest episode of Charmed.

So... overall I actually like the episode. I like that we are getting into the lore more. I like that connection to and the differences between the OG Charmed.

So in the OG Charmed magic isnt necessarily neutral. There is good and evil magic but (at least in the first few seasons) there was the idea that magic had to be balanced which is why there was a council made up of elders and demons to protect that balance and ensure the secrecy of magic.

Reboot Charmed I like the idea that all magic comes from one source and it is the actions that determine evil or good. Which just reaffirms what Harry has told Macy. By the same hand, there are some plot holes in all that. Macy is having a little bit of trouble with her demonic side since they said demon blood acts as an infection (and apparently Parker didnt always have it) that would mean that although witches are born demons are not or at least special conditions have to be met, maybe? So not sure how they will explain that. Also Macy is obviously having trouble with her demon side now. I dont know if her emotional state after the break up is contributing to that since her confidence is probably shaken as well as the fact breakups suck.

I actually don't mind the opening scene showing the Sarcana deaths. Hold on! Let me explain. The big villains of the show are white, I dont know if that is on purpose. I see they are trying to be diverse by having non-white witches and non-witches. So when you are trying to have diverse casting and people have to die and you only have white villains, your POCs are always gonna be on the chopping block. Which is why i think having diversity on a show is hard because you cant be callous with any of your characters (in general I dont think you should be, but i feel a lot of show writers write for shock or angst) because you have to remember that certain storylines take on a different meaning when the actors are non white. For example, OG charmed wasnt a stranger to mass murder. Season 4 started with the slaughter of the Elders and whether you were pro or anti elder that was still shocking as heck. Which I think the reboot was trying to do with the Sarcana. The issue is that in the OG we had 3 seasons of elders exploring thier faults and the good they do, and both the slaughters(titans) and elders were white (well primarily white, I think we only got to see like 2 non white elders in the entire series if I remember correctly). Here you have a white villian and mostly POCs being slaughtered. I totally see how wrong that looks and I think the writers or the casting directors either missed that or they are being heavy handed with the idea of abusive white villains against POCs. I think the scene was about showing how aweful and abusive Fiona is, also revealing her main motivation, that they dropped the ball on the whole "you are murdering most of you POCs here which arent main characters".

Speaking of abusive. I still want Villian Charity. I want her to take out Alastair and be an active villain not a passive one. I mentioned before that see would probably be a passive one before, but I said I wished she wouldn't be. I like villains. I like well written villains mostly. I think Charity has the perfect set up to be good villian. She began her own fall from grace (although the structure which taught her had a hand in it too), she fell into bigger evil under a tyrannical and abusive character, if she goes Lilith (CAOS reference) and decides to replace Alistair some way as the big bad I will be happy. Because I dont want to watch her be a meek used and abused character to then either be killed or do some sort of self sacrifice thing. She straight up murdered people and is a villain in spite of mostly being passive. Cole was killed in the OG charmed because at some point (we can argue about exactly where) his actions were irredeemable. Yes his story was complex, yes a lot of miscommunication and power dynamics went into all the issues there but the line had to be drawn. Charity, at least in my mind cannot go back to being "a good guy". She is getting in deeper and deeper. She obviously has emotional ties still to her sister and probably Harry, just as Cole did with Phoebe, and I want to see where those ties lead her. But I will be disappointed if after murdering a bunch of people and helping out a demon to try and bring on the apocalypse, they make her an abuse victim who dies. Not cool. Stop hurting abuse victims for emotional reactions on television! I know many abuse victims are killed by their abusers (RIP Dr. Wagner although Hunter did it we know who ordered him to). I dont want to see it overdone on the same show within a few short episodes. Charity shouldnt get off free for her murders either even though she is obviously in an abusive relationship now with Alistair (not talking romantic relationship) she has been set up to become a villian, tragic back story yes ,but her choices were made and she has to live with the unintended consequences.

Macy was being super toxic this episode. Let's at least call her out for it. Yes, imo Galvin hasnt been that great of a boyfriend except for a couple of cute moments (the really didnt get enough screen time to say whether the good outweighed the bad). But Macy needed to leave him alone. Like the whole time watching this episode I was just like "so are they spreading out the Cole and Phoebe arch to everyone?". He obviously is traumatized. He already told her he was out. I know she is hurting, imo they way he broke up with her made it worse and messed up her confidence even more than it could have, but she still seeks him out even though that is a violation of his boundaries. I dont like how he attacked her personality when he said that he couldnt compartmentalize the way she can. Macy does do that, I agree that they probably would have broken up because of that, but again he could have just said "I dont see it that way, please understand that". That also said, Macy trying to convince him other wise also rubbed me that wrong way. When he questioned her thoughts and actions over her demon side it was hella wrong! Equally for her to question him over how he feels about what happened to him. They are his feeling and she needed to respect that. I think that they arent right for each other and are kinda bring out the worst in each other. If Galvin gets killed because of magic I will be upset, because he firmly expressed that he wanted out, and if Macy or his lingering feelings for her get him killed that would be unfair. Just as unfair as charity dying doing something good after being abused and manipulated (abuse should never be a punishment I dont want a theon grey joy on Charmed characters shouldnt have to be abused to convince the audience that they deserve to be redeemed).

Parker and Maggie...I feel for Parker. I do. But your decision to not play a part in bringing about the apocalypse shouldnt be based on whether or not your girlfriend wants to be with you. I get it, he is freaked out and he thinks he killed his mom. Charity killed elders out of panic and I didnt cut her slack. I called her story a tragedy but didnt suggest her actions werent heinous. Parker is the same. I am getting Romeo and Juliet vibes here. Like stupid kids making stupid decision based on misunderstandings and feelings beyond thier Ken (or at least infatuation and adolescent hormones beyond thier knowledge). I never liked Romeo and Juliet so that could just be me.

I dont know. When my brother passed away I felt dead, my whole world and future as i saw just crumbled. I was depressed and had some PTSD (according to my doctor). Even though I had suicidal ideations, I still feel that in Parkers place I wouldnt do something that would involve hurting other people. I wanted to go away or disappear, but the idea of hurting others would be too much for me. And Parker is supposed to be this nice guy who has been fighting his demon side before he met Maggie. Maggie gave him the motivation to break away from his father but he was never into hurting people. So to go from that to, "let's destroy the world, I've got nothing to lose" ....except you might end up killing Maggie and a whole bunch of other people in the process. Considering he was horrified thinking he hurt his mom, it doesnt seem to be in character. Again Romeo is not thinking things through, but like not thinking things through was kind of Romeo's thing whereas for Parker not so much.

So like Mel and Niko should be the new Piper and Leo. Like they should be the one couple that despite there issues (only if it is done better than leo and piper was) makes it til the end from the very beginning. I am a Hacy fan but as the episodes go on I feel that they both need a lot of growth before that happens.

Speaking of Harry. I love him. He has recieved the best character growth within a season I've seen. So like he is an established good guy (not good as in not evil, but like a genuinely not trashy person) but obviously his faults kind of go along with his emotional boundaries. He gets attached really fast and that can cloud his judgment. His whole Charity relationship was so teenager in nature that I wanted to slap him upside the head, but I think he is ment to be compared to Fiona. In spite of being created and used as a tool of the Elders and being tossed aside coldly (although he was an idiot in many ways where Charity was concerned) after years of loyal and good service, he doesnt turn into a trash monster. He doesnt use being abused as an excuse to abuse others. Fiona is so angry (not gonna say she doesnt have a right to be) at being a tool for others that she uses and abuses people and feels justified in it.

I totally get her wanting to extinguish magic. But like ber issue is that magic made people want to use her as a tool and that power and having power ruined her life.... wouldnt it make more sense to just bind your powers and wipe you mind? Like less carnage and you get the same result. A life without magic. See doesnt seem to be doing it to protect others, it seems more like she wants to hurt them by taking thier power.

The episode was ok. Things moving along and I will be watching. I really want to know where they go from here and what the big finale will be.

The lore needs some help, maybe with the new staff coming on board that will be ironed out next season.

I think the last episode was better pacing wise. This one felt a little slow to me. Anyone else feel that way. Lots of problem introduced this episode I am hoping they will lead to satisfying conclusions. Or at least a super good itch for the next season. I will probably still continue to watch either way next season because for its faults I think this show is doing some really great things and i am still excited for them.

How are y'all feeling though?

[sisterspace]

A CAUTIONARY TALE AND MANY DREAMS DEFERRED

               On early Sunday morning August 16, 2015 my ex-boyfriend Lamar Davenport murdered his girlfriend E’dena Hines. The other day he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for first-degree manslaughter. It made headlines because she happened to be Morgan Freeman’s granddaughter. I have been having nightmares since she lost her life because I was very well aware of her. He made it official with her right after him and I ended so many years ago. There were many articles that poured out immediately after the murder but none of them touched on what really needed to be said. None of them took the chance to make a statement that would matter. None of them took the opportunity to make sure E’dena Hines’s death was not in vain. Unfortunately this type of crime happens every day, perhaps not as gruesome, but women are killed by people they were in relationships with every day, and there are usually signs. If we can learn to notice these signs then maybe we can prevent more senseless deaths. That is my sole reason for speaking out.

             I wavered back and forth for a while on whether I even wanted to speak on this matter. I am not interested in bashing Lamar (a lot of that has already been done). I am also not interested in defending him. He committed a heinous act and should suffer the consequences for his actions. My only interests are to speak to other women to help them recognize the traits of a potential abuser or an abusive relationship so they can get out, help individuals recognize those signs in their family member or friends so they can push them toward getting help, and to encourage those who are abusers themselves to seek help before they do something they regret for the rest of their lives. I feel my relationship with Lamar could serve that purpose. Many people who are in abusive relationships do not even know it. As with me, this could be happening in your life right now but the picture looks a little different than you expect so you may not notice it.

            I was involved with Lamar for approximately 3 years. We started out as friends and he eventually became my best friend. He was sweet, smart, attentive, and very religious. When we would hang out we would write songs and brainstorm ideas off of each other. My creativity was at its peak when we were together. He was able to make me feel like I was the most special person in the world. I do not know if it was real or not but out of all people I have met I think he believed in me the most, and I believed in him as well. His passion fueled mine. Even with such a positive impact on each other there was still a destructive element to our relationship. Often times our time together included drinking and getting high. Something I would indulge in when we were together because I felt safe with him. Whenever I would get too drunk he would always walk me all the way home. He could be a gentleman like that.

            One night at a mutual friends party I got so drunk I could barely walk without assistance. He wrapped his arm in mine and proceeded to walk me home like usual, but this time I noticed us going toward the roof instead of downstairs out of the building. I remember him laying me down on the floor so I could sleep it off, and waking up to him inside of me. I said to him “What are you doing?” He leaned down and kissed me and said, “It’s alright.” My mind couldn’t decide if this was sweet or was I being violated? But I never imagined violations being so tender. The mixed emotions caused tears to stream down my cheeks. I liked Lamar; in fact I had a serious crush on him at the time. I had imagined us making love one day…. just not that way and not without him actually being my boyfriend first. I tried to push him off but couldn’t muster any strength in my arms. He kissed me again as to comfort me and again assured me it was okay. So I relented. The next morning, not being sure if I dreamed everything I asked him “did we have sex?” He told me “yeah” with a huge grin on his face. It would be some time before I realized that’s actually rape.

             I convinced myself I had an equal part in that night due to being inebriated. So when I found out I was pregnant I decided to “give him a pass” because I loved him and felt he didn’t really mean any harm. The only problem is it later happened again. I say this to say; I have seen how Lamar could get when he is intoxicated so it wasn’t hard to picture what occurred on that fateful August night. If you are someone who notices that situations get out of hand when you get intoxicated then that is something you need to make the sober decision to stay away from. 

            After that night Lamar and I continued to be involved. I figured we had already had sex so we shared a special bond now. I grew more attached to him. As I fell deeper and deeper in love with him the more he seemed to resent me. He constantly spoke of his love for another woman. He was having sex with other women as well which I was in serious denial about. He made disparaging remarks about my appearance and in an effort to find out why he would not commit to me I would ask him what was wrong with me and he would tell me. There was always something wrong or something I was not doing. It killed any remnants of self-esteem I had. “At least he was being honest” I would tell myself. My mind was so mixed up there were times he would physically hurt me and I would end up apologizing to him. Even with all of that, he would always do or say something that would give me hope that one day he’d be committed and I would get all the love I saw he was capable of. I hoped him spending so much time with me would reveal to him that I was the one he needed. Sitting here older and wiser I say to all of the women reading this, if “hope” is a big part of your relationship, let it go. Hope isn’t real. Your relationship needs to be based on the good that is actually happening and not the hope that things would get better or return to the way they once were. If hope is the main ingredient of your relationship take the steps needed to walk away.

            One of the most confusing things is being abused by someone you love. No matter how much you are being hurt, your heart tells you to protect them. We must recognize this and fight those tendencies. One time he punched me in the face in front of his friends and a few days later they were pleading his case to me. “You know Lamar would never intentionally hurt you.” Everyone made me feel like I was overreacting. I did not trust my gut but went along with what was easiest to believe. If these actions mirror those of your friends, please get new friends. Your well-being should be any true friend’s priority. Do not allow anyone to stay in your life that enables your victimization. Also if you have a friend that you constantly witness disrespect their partner, ignoring it or “minding your business” is only encouraging them. Your speaking out maybe what they need in order to get help.  

            One of the things that could have helped me was the school we both attended. When he punched me in the face, instead of counseling me on abusive relationships the staff at the school made it seem like it was a mutual fight. We were not asked any questions to find out the dynamics of our relationship. No one took me aside to talk to me privately. The staff at the school let me down and it also let him down. This could have been an opportunity to teach him anger management techniques that would have saved his life down the line.

             I eventually became pregnant. I was so sick during that pregnancy that I loss the baby and my doctor told me not to have sex for at least 6 weeks. Lamar came over to my house that night extremely high and drunk and tried to have sex. I told him that I could not have sex for 6 weeks. That did not register with him and he took it by force. I was pushing and kicking him off and he overpowered me and had sex with me anyway.  After it was over I was crying and I said to him “You just raped me.” He was furious yelling “how could you say that to me?” “How could you think I would do something like that?” He was so angry that it made me feel guilty for hurting his feelings. I spent the rest of the night apologizing to him and doing things to try and “make it up to him”. This night resulted in my second pregnancy, immediately after the loss of my first one. I endured all the disappointment from my family and friends without saying a word. I allowed everyone to think I was just irresponsible because I wanted my child to have a father. If they were to view Lamar negatively it would turn into a huge mess that I wasn’t ready for.

              Despite us not being in a perfect place I looked very much forward to having my child. One day Lamar told me he would come with me to one of my ultra-sound appointments. I was excited because this was the first one he had been to. He was a little late but he did show up, but he also showed up high. His eyes were glassy and he was acting spacey. I was angry and disappointed that on such an important day with our new life he would bring old habits into the equation. I needed to see him grown up. I needed to see that he could be a responsible father and he was proving otherwise. When we saw our baby on the monitor it was magical and I saw his eyes light up. I knew it meant something to him. When the doctor left the office he started going through the drawers and stealing miscellaneous items. That is when I knew he would not be able to be a responsible father. If I had this baby I would never get away from his destructive behavior and I would be including a new innocent life to the equation. I could not do that, for once I was going to use my better judgment. I told that to Lamar and he said flatly “If you kill my baby, I will kill you.” Part of me believed him but I knew what I had to do. Aborting my child was one of the hardest decisions I have ever had to make. One I regretted until three years ago. I overlooked what he said but threats should always be taken seriously.

            What finally gave me the strength to leave was reading something he wrote in an online journal all our group of friends had access to, where he described having to “will himself to sleep with me” and how “ sleeping with me was good practice for the woman he actually loved”. Deep down I always feared he felt that way, but it was something about the public humiliation of it and seeing it in writing that cemented it into my heart. Truth is I should not have had to read it to finally get the hint. If only I recognized all the things that all lead to the same destination back then. But hopefully I can prevent someone from needing proof set in stone before they walk away. Your instincts are enough.

            There are many reasons a person maybe attached to a relationship that is not good for them. The up and down feelings can be so intense it is like adrenaline. The connection I had with Lamar was nothing like I had ever felt before. Even today, it is something that I look back on as uncanny. Most people do not understand me, but he got me. Being around someone who understood me without having to say a word was refreshing and something I desperately wanted to hold on to. It was so valuable to me and I never thought I could find it again. But now as I sit here in my 30’s I can say with over 7 billion people in the world there are many people out there who will understand you. It is all about being patient enough to wait until they come into your life. Your life is worth that wait.

            One of the saddest things in this whole situation is all the unrealized talent. Who would be open to Lamar’s talent now? And his talents were breath taking. He was an avid writer. In the years we spent together he had filled about 8 full composition notebooks with songs. Thoughts now run across my mind about his family and all the people dependent on him. He was great with kids and appeared to be nothing but a doting father. His immediate family adored him and he was very much the apple of their eye.

            So is this man who murdered his girlfriend in cold blood evil?  Is he crazy? Did he have some sort of undiagnosed mental illness? Was it the drugs? I don’t know. I have not examined him nor do I have the expertise to diagnose him. I can definitely say he was disturbed but we all just looked at it as part of his quirky personality. There was a lot of missed opportunity for us to get him some help. There were a lot of missed signs. I wonder if others are experiencing as much guilt as I am. We all could have done more to prevent this. He was a powder keg.

            After I got the strength to walk away from him a year or two went by when I received a text message from him out of nowhere. It was an apology. He said he was sorry for everything he put me through and told me I did not deserve any of it. His words seemed sincere. I had not pushed for an apology nor did I hold my breath for one, but I would be lying if I said it did not help with the healing process. It is difficult for me to see someone with remorse as pure evil.

            After his apology there was contact via social media but I stayed out of his life. Lamar is easy to love and a part of me still loved him, but I did not trust his ability to not let chaos into our relationship and I did not trust myself not to slip into the darkness with him again. I knew I had to love him from a distance. That was not easy for me so I developed a tactic to help give me the strength where there wasn’t any. I wrote down all the bad things he had ever done to me and all the negative emotions I felt being with him and I read it every day for a year. Whenever I felt like reaching out and calling him I would read that list and it reminded me what I never wanted to feel ever again. Eventually it got easier and I did not have to look at the list anymore. I suggest whoever is bound to a toxic relationship to develop different techniques that would keep them safe and keep them from going back. 

            A relationship should feel good. You should not feel like you are walking on eggshells, never knowing if you and your partner will have a good day or a bad one. You should not feel anxious that you may say the wrong thing. You should not have to maneuver around their moods.

            I must also say we focus a lot on the woman in domestic situations; teaching women how not to get raped and how to leave abusive relationships, but who is catering to the men? One thing I take from this is that Lamar should have had places to turn to. Men with anger issues sometimes do not know they have a problem because society encourages aggression in men so fits of rage are seen as normal. I would love to see workshops, classes and programs where abusers can go to get help without shame. The only way we end this epidemic is if we include men in the treatments and solutions. Just calling them evil won’t make any man get help, and our goal should be solutions. I would love to see men who overcame this affliction speak out and talk to other men and guide them on how they can rid their violent urges and become better men. 

            Friends and family should speak out when they notice this destructive behavior and when they do they should have a place to refer their family member to, to get help. So far in society we only work on half of the problem.

            I implore women to notice the signs and do not ignore the tales of other women involving your guy. They aren’t just “hating on you” or “mad that he won’t be with them”. I happen to know that E’dena was contacted by other women and in an effort to stay above the fray she chose not to indulge it. I wish she had.

            Lastly the focus of this article was about men abusing women, but abuse can happen between any gender and orientation. Women can abuse men, abuse can take place between same sex partners, inside the LBGTQ community and it can also happen within platonic friendships. Abuse does not discriminate. This is my personal story but I hope this is read and applied to whatever relationship is relevant and I hope it speaks to the heart and gives those who need it the strength required to find peace within themselves.

            As far as Lamar is concerned I would like him to get the help and counseling he needs. I would like to see him not touch drugs ever again. I would like to see him live with a clear mind. I would like to see him get to the bottom of his issues and understand all his mistakes and actively work to not revert back.  Most of all I wish healing for his family, healing for E��dena’s family and for her to be at peace and her life still be able to have an impact.

This can help if:

your partner tries to control your behaviour

your partner threatens to harm you, your pets or people you love

you’re scared of your partner.

Girl facing away from upset boyfriend

Key signs of an abusive relationship

An abusive relationship isn’t just limited to physical violence. It can include sexual, emotional and physical abuse, and may involve control of your finances. Here are some signs to look for.

Possessiveness

They check on you all the time to see where you are, what you're doing and who you're with.

They try to control where you go and who you see, and get angry if you don't do what they say.

Jealousy

They accuse you of being unfaithful or of flirting.

They isolate you from family and friends, often by behaving rudely to them.

Put-downs

They put you down, either publicly or privately, by attacking your intelligence, looks, mental health or capabilities.

They constantly compare you unfavourably to others.

They blame you for all the problems in your relationship, and for their violent outbursts.

They say things like, 'No one else will want you.'

Threats

They yell or sulk, and deliberately break things that you value.

They threaten to use violence against you, your family, friends or a pet.

Physical and sexual violence

They push, shove, hit or grab you, or make you have sex or do things you don't want to do.

They harm you, your pets or your family members.

In Need of Help?