#because it's a phrase about coffins and therefore about death

[hephaestuscrew]

I just read this poem by Rick Barot and I want to make Wooden Overcoats fans read these lines:

I know the difference doesn’t matter, except in poetry, where a coffin is just another coffin until someone at a funeral calls it a wooden overcoat, an image so heavy and warm at the same time that you forget it’s about death.

[strictlyfavorites]

They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were "piss poor."

But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn't even afford to buy a pot; they "didn't have a pot to piss in" & were the lowest of the low.

The next time you are washing your hands & complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s.

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June. Since they were starting to smell, however, brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women, and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it . . . hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water!"

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof, resulting in the idiom, "It's raining cats and dogs."

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed, therefore, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, leading folks to coin the phrase "dirt poor."

The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way, subsequently creating a "thresh hold."

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire.. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while, and thus the rhyme, "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the "upper crust."

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial.. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up, creating the custom of holding a wake.

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive, so they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer.

And that's the truth. Now, whoever said History was boring?

[heavenlybackside]

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June. Since they were starting to smell, however, brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women, and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it … hence the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the Bath water!”

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof, resulting in the idiom, “It’s raining cats and dogs.”

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed, therefore, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That’s how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, leading folks to coin the phrase “dirt poor.”

The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way, subsequently creating a “thresh hold.”

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire.. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while, and thus the rhyme, “Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old.”

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, “bring home the bacon.” They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and “chew the fat.”

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the “upper crust.”

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial.. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up, creating the custom of holding a wake.

They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were “piss poor.”

But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn’t even afford to buy a pot; they “didn’t have a pot to piss in” & were the lowest of the low.

The next time you are washing your hands & complain because the water temperature isn’t just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s.

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive, so they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer.

And that’s the truth. Now, whoever said History was boring?

[the--morning--room]

Fury of a Warchief Scorned: Narrative Smoke and Mirrors, or How to Brainwash Your Audience

By the time "Reckoning" takes place, Sylvanas has been so thoroughly demonized that nearly everything she says will be immediately discounted as yet another sign of her innate villainy. So when she says "the Horde is nothing," the other characters (as well as most of the players) are spared the challenge of wondering what exactly she might have meant and whether there might be a deeper reason for such an outburst, electing only to label her a traitor.

But imagine the same line coming from any other character, in a different tone, under different circumstances. Characters' words and actions are judged first through the lens of our preconceptions of that character as told to us by the relevant media, then by their actual content. For example, the reason so many players (including myself at one point) have fallen into the trap of believing Saurfang's empty rhetoric about honor and forgetting his many past crimes, including his substantial role in the destruction of Teldrassil, is that Blizzard's writers have framed him as a noble antihero and tricked us into processing everything he says and does through that lens. The many narrative smoke and mirrors used to do this include placing him in alliance with other sympathetic characters and playing up his trauma from years of war as well as losing his son in order to garner empathy.

Sylvanas has received the opposite treatment since the beginning of Battle for Azeroth. Rather than gifting her with any meaningful relationships or alliances with other characters, Blizzard writers have slowly and systematically been alienating her from every other character who may have been sympathetic to her (the death of Nathanos being the final nail in the coffin, pun not intented). Even the Forsaken, her people in every sense of the phrase, have been taken from her and given to Calia Menethil as a consolation prize for Calia having misplaced her personality somewhere during her time away from canon. Sylvanas is thus left with no one to sympathize with or stand up for her when other characters get together to discuss how much she sucks. Isolating her also helps to create an illusion of her as a narcissistic tyrant.

Of the many characters Blizzard has set up in opposition to Sylvanas, Anduin and Jaina have been particularly useful as weapons with which to tear her down even further. Anduin has been Blizzard's favorite good boy since his first appearance, and is known throughout Azeroth and its fanbase as a kind and fair king with an open mind and a desire for peace. Given that Anduin tried to sympathize with Garrosh Hellscream of all people, saving his life and even voicing his belief that Garrosh could change for the better, his hatred of Sylvanas is a notable departure from his established character model. It was shocking enough to read the line, "I believe that Sylvanas Windrunner is well and truly lost," even without knowing that this would be only the tip of the iceberg of Anduin's vitriol toward Sylvanas. He threatens her life. Anduin Wrynn, the consummate pacifist, tells another person to "surrender or die." This is HUGELY out of character for him, and yet we are meant to view it as necessary and even noble solely because of who he is talking to. By making him the "good guy" driven to act against his nature by the sheer awfulness of his enemy, Anduin becomes the perfect weapon for Blizzard to use against Sylvanas's reputation.

Jaina is the character most likely to be able to sympathize with Sylvanas, given the many similarities in their backstories, but in giving Jaina a redemption arc (and I'm being quite generous by calling it an "arc"), Blizzard has inherently placed her against Sylvanas, their chosen villain. Jaina's past crimes are acknowledged and addressed, she even begins to receive comeuppance for some of them, but this is done in a way that turns her into a victim and a martyr. The narrative sympathizes with Jaina, therefore we sympathize with her...and this contrasts nicely with the way Sylvanas's trauma is used to drive a wedge between her and her audience.

It would be understandable to mistake the flashback in "Warbringers: Sylvanas" for an attempt to inspire sympathy and understanding toward Sylvanas, but on the contrary, her death and resurrection/transformation are actually used to further dehumanize (for lack of a better word) and vilify her. Prior to being stabbed by Frostmourne, Sylvanas is a brave and selfless leader fighting not for her own life, but for the lives of all her people. To fully hammer this point into the ground, she is shown trying to save a civilian woman and her baby. After being raised into undeath, one would expect her to keep this admirable character. She's still Sylvanas, after all. But of course, no. This image, along with the sound of a savage roar, is the last thing we see before returning to the present:

..Yeah. It's a far cry from the sweet little child!Jaina hugging her father goodbye. And of course, we all know what happens just after this flashback ends: Sylvanas and Saurfang capture Teldrassil as planned, satisfying their common goal of commanding the greatest naval force in Kalimdor and increasing Azeroth's chances of maintaining a lasting peace in the future. And Tyrande dies from tripping over her own messiah complex.

Right?

Anyway, the implication of cutting the flashback just after presenting this monstrous portrait of Sylvanas snarling like an animal is that the noble Ranger-General is dead. She's the Banshee Queen now, a completely different person who shares nothing in common with the J. Crew model who mourned that mother and baby. And with her former self dead, we are freed from the burden of having to try and empathize with her. We can hate her without guilt and without feeling the need to question why she pulls so many erratic stunts over the course of BFA, despite her long history as a master strategist and leader. Blizzard just gave themselves a get-out-of-jail-free card, and it reads "idk she's just crazy."

And so we arrive at "Reckoning." Our cast of main characters is established, each one set in our minds exactly the way Blizzard meant them to be: Saurfang, the grizzled old soldier with a heart of gold, who lost his son and therefore is absolved of all his past crimes. Thrall, who may have blood on his hands but he admitted it himself while overlooking a lovely vista so it's cool. Angel Boy Anduin. Zekhan, who, let's be honest, exists mostly to "humanize" Saurfang by showing us his softer side while serving as a constant reminder of the son he lost. And of course, Sylvanas.

I'm not going to go into a full analysis of the cinematic itself, because that's been done many times in a much better way than I could ever pull off. What I am going to do is briefly call attention to Saurfang's most glaring nuggets of BS before finally getting to the crux of this essay, my interpretation of Sylvanas's infamous line, "the Horde is nothing."

I'm also not going to drop everything and gush about how beautiful Sylvanas is in all her CGI glory, because...oh come on, who am I kidding. I just - she-

It's - I - just look at - I can't- (chokes on tears) (falls on floor) (gurgles) help

So let's get Saurpatchkid’s BS out of the way first. "You cannot kill hope...you tried at Teldrassil, you failed." First of all, where did all this stuff about hope come from anyway? Last time I checked, Sylvanas and Saurfang didn't even mention hope when they were planning the attack on Darnassus together in A Good War.

Oh yeah, they planned the attack together in A Good War.

Wait, so if Saurfang deliberately omitted himself from the narrative in order to gaslight Sylvanas and their entire audience at the mak'gora, then wouldn't that make him...a liar?

No, of course not, because Saurfang only helped plan the attack. It's not like he actually followed through and led the armies and gave orders and stuff, right?

Oh.

But that's still just giving orders. It's not like he actually killed anyone, right? And if he were to kill someone, it would probably be another old guy like him with equal strength and fighting experience, right?

...Oh. But he was sad, so that makes it okay, right? I mean, it's not as if he actually ENJOYED-

Oh.

"You set us to kill each other at Lordaeron." I assume this is just a bad translation or something, because I don't think even an orc would normally mistake defending your own city against an attack for setting everyone to kill each other. It's almost as if Saurfang (read: Blizzard) is just hoping their entire audience will suddenly forget the entire decade of WOW content that happened before BFA and replace the memories with a slideshow of a shirtless Saurfang flexing his biceps in his bathroom mirror. If you think that sounds a lot like gaslighting, you're right.

"Here we stand, and you just keep failing." He must have a different definition of failure, because from where I stand, it looks like the closest thing to a "failure" for Sylvanas happened when Saurfang failed to kill Malfurion.

"The Horde will endure. The Horde is strong." This is her Horde he's talking about. She's still the warchief. Imagine how condescending it must sound to her ears, to have a man who previously worked under her and took orders from her, only to betray her later, now lecturing her about the quality of her own faction, which he abandoned. If you think that sounds a lot like mansplaining...yeah, so do I.

We've finally arrived at "the Horde is nothing." But before we zoom into Sylvanas's headspace at that moment, I want to try out a little experiment. Take those four words, "the Horde is nothing," but hear them in Saurfang's voice. Change the emotion, too. Make it sadder. Add in some regret with a pinch of hopelessness. Then change the scenery. Let's put Saurfang on top of a big hill, overlooking a lovely sunset. Anduin and Jaina are there, and we can also throw in Zekhancody for good measure. The three of them are looking melancholically up at Saurfang as he sighs, says "the Horde is nothing," and sighs again. Then the sun goes down just as he finishes the line, because Cinema.

The same four words suddenly have a very different meaning. Saurfang's "the Horde is nothing" would come across as lamenting the loss of the "honor" of the "old" Horde under Sylvanas's leadership. And even without the hill and the sunset and the presence of the other characters, I would wager that Saurfang's "the Horde is nothing" would still be met with a more sympathetic ear than Sylvanas's, simply because of their respective roles in the story. Once a character is firmly established as a villain, the audience will view them first and foremost as Villain.

Now we're going to try that experiment the other way around. Remember when Saurfang said he's never known honor? Let's pretend Sylvanas said that. She says it to Anduin probably, and where Anduin is in BFA, Saurfang can't be far behind. The other Horde leaders are most likely there too, along with Jaina. Let's just say Sylvanas has a HUGE audience for this, because that's what villainesses love, right? But it's important that she doesn't have any allies in this scene. Everyone there hates her.

So there she is, standing before her throng of enemies, and she says "honor?" (scoff) "I have never known honor." Her tone is somewhere between sarcastic and boasting. Rather than regretting her past sins, she's celebrating them. Not only is she acknowledging herself as a villain, she's saying she enjoys being a villain. And again, even without the context of the rest of the scene, this line spoken by Sylvanas would probably always have the same connotations of arrogance and pride and disdain for others, because that's what the villain filter does.

Therefore, in "Reckoning," the line "the Horde is nothing" is presented to us in a way that tries to manipulate us into interpreting it the way Blizzard wants us to. Specifically, we should view it as Sylvanas finally showing us her "true colors." That tiny little cut from Shalamayne was a metaphorical shedding of a mask of deception, pulling away to show us the "real" warchief, a maniacal tyrant who never cared about anything except power for herself.

"Dude," you're probably typing in the comments this very second, "you just said yourself that this is exactly how Blizzard wants us to interpret it. Blizzard makes the canon, so if they want us to see Sylvanas as a maniacal tyrant, that must mean she's actually a maniacal tyrant.” But if Blizzard makes the canon, they also made the web of circumstances that would turn Sylvanas against the Horde and bring her to a breaking point.

Imagine you work with this person you respect and who seems to respect you in return, and he's pretty much your right-hand man for this major project you're working on, but then he messes up a big part of the project and ruins everything and you have to scramble around to make a last-minute replacement project, even though all your last-minute options REALLY suck and the one you end up picking happens to suck even more than all the others, and then your former right-hand man suddenly decides he doesn't want to have anything to do with you or the project anymore. But instead of just fucking off quietly, he goes crying to the enemy team about how terrible you are, and he tells all kinds of lies about how he had nothing to do with that really terrible project at all, it was all you because you're an evil mastermind.

And then he gets all the other main leaders from your team to join him in hating you and blaming every bad thing that ever happened on you and you alone, and burying every fault of their own under pretentious rhetoric about peace and honor and shit, even though literally all of those people had followed you without complaint in the past. So why, you want to ask, did they never speak up about their concerns back then? The answer, of course, is that they didn't actually care about their precious peace and honor at all. Their real concern was with their own reputations, and it wasn't until this former-right-hand-man went tattling to the other team that they realized "oh shit, if those other people believe what he says then that'll make us look pretty bad, but hey, good thing we have a convenient scapegoat in the form of our evil mastermind leader!"

Oh, and by the way, this other team? They're the ones you and your team tried to join YEARS ago, that turned you away in your most desperate time of need. So yeah, the fact that your right-hand man went to them when he decided he was done with you? That hurts a lot.

So you're over in your corner just basically trying to do damage control, but since there's only so much control you have over your own public image even when there is more than just one (1) person in the entire world who actually likes you, you still end up looking like an evil mastermind no matter what you do because that's what all the other important people have decided to paint you as. Then one day you hear someone yelling your name outside your door, and it's that goddamn guy from work again, and suddenly he's challenged you to a fight to the death??? And there's a whole-ass army lined up in front of your house????? And the weapon this guy wants to fight you with is a sword that belongs to a COLLEGE KID, but wait, it gets worse, this college kid inherited the sword from his father, who you knew and actually freaking liked, and he liked you too, and you saved his life once but then later you had to abandon him for complicated reasons and then he died, possibly because of you, and you had to watch him die from this ship you were on, and you didn't even get to go to his funeral and stuff because all his friends hate you and also as soon as you got home your boss dumped a gigantic promotion on you that you didn't even want, and then you had to go to literal fucking war. But even though he's dead, that sword still belongs to him as far as you're concerned, and it literally destroys you to see it used against you by a former colleague who hates your guts.

Then the guy trying to kill you starts spewing lies at you in front of hundreds of other people (all of whom hate your guts too, by the way), calling you a failure and blaming you for things you either didn't do at all or did only with substantial help from him, then he has the audacity to start mansplaining to you about how great your organization is, the one you are in charge of and have devoted your life to since receiving that unwanted promotion, and even though you know you could overpower and kill him easily in less than a second, you also know it wouldn't do you any good because he's already got the whole crowd on his side and dying will just turn him into a martyr. So you really have no choice but to keep letting him yell at you, and just as you're thinking this can't get any worse, he hits you in the eye with your dead friend's sword.

And you are NOT the kind of person who gets hit in the eye. You're just not.

So this is humiliating, right? Unbearably humiliating. So you tell yourself the first thing you can think of that might try and make you feel the smallest bit better. You say, "well, fuck it, they're nothing!" But oh shit, you accidentally said it out loud. And you kind of yelled it really angrily. But you know what? You don't care. Because they are nothing, and you should say it again, and you're honestly kind of pissed at yourself for not realizing it much earlier.

In other words, why are you booing her? She's right. The Horde sucks. (And so does the Alliance.)

"But dude, attacking and occupying and then burning a whole city isn't the same thing as a 'project'" -I don't care.

"You can't talk about war and life-and-death issues as if they're just everyday work problems" -I don't care.

"Sylvanas is a murderer and murder is bad and" -I. Don't. Care.

The game is called World of WARcraft. Literally everything about this story and its characters revolves around war and violence. And besides that, it's fiction. It's not. Real. But you know what are real? The experiences real people like me and you gain from interacting with this fictional world and its stories and characters. I'm not a "champion" when I play WOW, I'm my real self, and my real self happens to be a lonely, mentally ill woman with a boatload of traumatic baggage in my past. Sylvanas's treatment in BFA and Shadowlands (from Blizzard, players, and the other characters in the game) has a real, tangible, hurtful meaning for me that goes far beyond just being salty that the story isn't going the way I want it to.

But damn it, there's just something about "Reckoning" in particular that haunts me almost to the point of agony. I thought it was the open hostility from Saurfang, and the fact that despite all his lies and hypocrisy he got to die a hero. Then a few weeks ago something really terrible happened to me irl, and when I got home and went back to WOW I suddenly knew exactly where the pain was coming from. I felt it distinctly when I watched the gates of Orgrimmar part before Sylvanas as she walked out to meet her fate, alone, knowing she wouldn't have a single sympathizer waiting for her. I felt it when she dissolved into blackness and escaped, knowing the only reason anyone regretted her going was that they wouldn't be able to kill her on the spot. But I felt it most deeply after Saurfang gave her that goddamn cut on the eye, and she said "the Horde is nothing."

You don't have to be a filmmaker to know the intense power a close-up can hold. Just look at the buildup from shock and hurt to full, murderous rage. I find these few seconds so damn painful to watch, that capturing and posting screenshots of them may actually constitute some kind of self-harm.

The closeness of the shot in her most immediate moment of pain, zooming out only as she scrambles to regain her dignity and then blows it by yelling "you are all nothing," that is ultimately what haunts me. Because she is just. So. Alone. And so hated. And she knows it.

Of all the things Blizzard has put Sylvanas through in the last two expansions, I think isolating her from anything that could possibly resemble a support system might be the most damaging. One simple reason for this is that without friends or supporters, there is no buffer between Sylvanas and the villain bat. But even more depressing is the fact that loneliness is something too many women like Sylvanas can relate to in real life because of harmful attitudes our society holds toward women with severe trauma, women with mental illnesses and disabilities, and even just loud, opinionated women - attitudes perpetuated every day by popular media like video games. And those real-life women don't get spiky armor to protect them.

Whatever Sylvanas is going through emotionally right now in the Shadowlands, I hope she's secure in her belief that her decision to leave the Horde was the correct one. Because she was right: The Horde is nothing. And hopefully one day the rest of the Horde will realize it. But this is Blizzard, so I'm not holding my breath.

[theloneliestshipper]

Boba/Leia AUs

Something like...oh four years ago I invited people to send me prompts based on a trope or an AU idea and I wrote various Boba/Leia scenes based on the prompts. I have reopened that collection for requests because they are a heckin’ fun writing exercise and so I’m kicking off Round 2 with a request by @nyelung for a Vampire AU.

AO3 Link

Vampire AU

Rated T

It’s dusk when Leia leaves her room, lamp in hand. With the curtains parted there is still enough light to see by, but in all common areas of the house the drapery is drawn tight. The master of the house suffers terrible headaches from light and so prefers shadows and gloom.

It’s a good story. She believed it once.

She slips quietly into Rey’s room first and tucks the blankets in around the sleeping girl. She never thought being a governess would suit her, especially after her uncle thwarted her true ambitions, but she has grown genuinely fond of Rey. She’s an orphan, as Leia is, both with solitary men as their guardians. She has her uncle and Rey has Mr. Fett, who took her in after both of her parents were slain in their beds by an unknown assailant.

The people of Mossbrook praise his kindness but all admit he’s a strange man. A handsome man, who apart from his headaches, gives every appearance of vigor. Yet he seeks no wife or companion. The only visitors to his manor house are the staff, who do not live on the premises and his attorney, who often brings along his son Finn along to play with Rey.

When Leia took the position, his instructions were explicit that Rey should not fall into his isolated patterns. “She must have an education and friends. She is an active child and she should be outside as often as the weather allows.”

This suits Leia well, as she was an active child herself. She takes Rey beyond the garden walls and they roam the woods. They climb rocks and wade into streams. They come home with muddy hems, hair askew and no one aside from the laundress looks askance. Every morning and evening Leia brings Rey to Mr. Fett’s study, a dire, windowless room she feels certain was meant to be a pantry. Rey doesn’t mind the stuffy atmosphere. She reports happily on their plans or activities and then wishes her guardian good night or good morning.

Sometimes she confuses the phrases, wishing him a good morning at night and a good night at morning, but he never corrects her. He responds in kind no matter what she says.

Leia would be more inclined to believe him to be a kind man if he were a man at all.

She suspects that he is not.

From Rey’s room she turns down the hall. His bedchamber is at the very back of the house. The lamp quivers a little in her hand but she keeps on, determined to persist. Perhaps if she were just a woman avoiding the title of “spinster” by seeking employment she would be content with her pay and the roof over her head. Perhaps she would not notice that she has never seen Mr. Fett eat or drink, and that he rides out at night and does not return for hours.

She has begun to track these occurrences. While Rey is at her music lesson in the village she reads the paper and takes note of any events within a certain distance. Disappearances. Deaths. People and animals found drained of blood. Strange markings found on the throats of people who don’t remember how they occurred.

The door creaks as she pushes it open. It’s a large room, well decorated, with a four poster bed. A fortnight ago she tucked a copper coin in the bedding, carefully concealed in a place where it would be easily dislodged by anyone using or making the bed.

She sets her lamp on the nightstand and feels for the crease in the brocade coverlet. The coin is still there, just where she left it.

There is a certain humor in the fact that Uncle Ben refused to train her in the ways of her ancestors, a long line of Skywalker monster hunters. It’s no life for a young woman, he told her emphatically. I cannot lose you as I lost your father. So she took a posting as a governess instead and now finds herself in the lair of a vampire.

He’ll have a coffin somewhere. That’s his true bed.

Her heart pounds as she looks down at the coin in her hand. If she slays this unholy being, her uncle will have no choice but to see her destiny.

“Miss Skywalker?”

She reacts on pure instinct and adrenaline, dropping the coin to the floor and reaching into the pocket of her skirts. Fett is behind her and then in front of her and then sprawled out on his bed with Leia on top of him and a sharp-tipped wooden stake poised over his chest.

She whittled it herself in the woods while waiting for Rey to climb down from the top of a tall fir tree.

The attack might have taken him by surprise, but once his eyes fall on the stake the transformation is instantaneous. Dark eyes heat to a glowing gold, like an ember in a smithy’s fire and sharp fangs emerge from his parted lips. “I knew you were clever,” he says. “It almost seems a shame to undo all of your hard work.”

“You can’t mesmerize me.” With her free hand she opens the hook that closes her bodice at the neck. Her hands are shaking and two more hooks pull free. Why should she care if he can see the top of her corset and chemise? The important part is the birthmark just below her clavicle. The same mark her father had.

“A trueborn hunter,” he says in a measured tone. “Remarkable.”

“I am Leia Skywalker, the daughter of Anakin Skywalker, slayer of demons. And today you will meet your end.”

“You appear to have me at a disadvantage,” he acknowledges. “But your mark only protects you from enchantment. At any point I could throw you into that wall and bury my teeth in your throat, but I have not.”

She would laugh if she weren’t still breathless. “You claim to have spared me while I hold a stake to your chest?”

“Aside from this unfortunate incident, you have been an exemplary caretaker. I would prefer not to deprive Rey of your company.”

“You have no heart or soul. How can you claim to care for a human child?”

“And yet, I have cared for a human child since the day she was orphaned. Her relatives abandoned her. The people of the village said she was cursed to madness because she witnessed her parents’ murder. I took her in and made her my heir.” A smile curls his mouth, baring more of his deadly teeth. “I also found the man who killed her parents. The blood of killers in a fine vintage, Miss Skywalker.”

“Do not speak my name, you monster.”

“What should I call the woman who has me in such a compromising position?” His hands move to her hips, a touch she can feel even through her bunched skirts. “Perhaps you would prefer ‘wife.’”

“How dare you.” She presses the stake into his shirt, her face flushed hot.

“Consider this, little hunter. Rey cannot legally inherit my estate until she comes of age. Kill me now and she will once again lose her home and security. If you can abandon her to that fate, you are the monster, not I.”

“First you question my honor and then you play on it.”

“I do not play with my daughter’s future, Miss Skywalker. You know the truth about me now. If you marry me you will have control of my estate and can therefore protect her.”

“This is only an appealing case for being your widow.”

“If you marry a dead man, what else are you? You may try to stake me again as often as you wish. I would not deny you the opportunity to hone your skills.” His tongue briefly appears, running along the edge of his fangs. “But in the future you should expect me to defend myself.”

Her breath catches in her throat. She should drive the pointed tip into his undead flesh. He’s a wretched, unnatural being who only feels warm and solid beneath her because he drinks the blood of other human beings. But she cannot argue with his logic. If she slays him Rey will be orphaned for the second time in her young life. And if she marries him-

No. It’s madness to even consider it.

Fett drops his hands to the bed and pushes himself up with no regard for the stake she still holds loosely in her hand. Their faces are inches apart and his eyes are still glowing with the fire of the immortal. “If it is monsters you want to hunt, I can help you find them.” One hand rises to touch her cheek and then lingers at her throat, caressing her skin just over her hammering pulse. “There are many in this part of the world, some human and some not. People want them gone, so badly that they will pay handsomely for their disposal. Marry me, and we will hunt them together.”

[uss-bigsurprise]

Let's get back to The Books™

This time:

All Quiet on the Western Front

Stats:

Author: Erich Maria Remarque

Age group: adults

Genre: war novel

Pages: 200

Warning: This is a book that is to be taken serious. It is fiction, though it contains graphic depictions of violence and traumatic events that to some degree happened (especially on the battlefield) during WW1, as it is meant to show the reality of a soldier's experience.

Note from the author:

The screencap reads: "This book is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will simply try to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war."

Blurb:

In "All Quiet on the Western Front", the protagonist describes his and his friends' "everyday life" at the Front. Quotation marks, because emotional numbness due to constant fear, stress, and trauma can neither be called "everyday" nor "life". There are many parts in the book in which Paul Bäumer (and sometimes his friends, too) realizes these kinds of things.

This is what the author lets Paul think and the other characters talk about:

Who benefits from war if not the soldiers who die for it?

Do animals belong in war?

How can people talk of honor and duty when all the soldiers experience is death and destruction?

How does war change a person?

What will become of the soldiers who do not find back into their normal life?

What happens to the soldiers' youth?

Is it insensitive to ask a dying friend to give you their boots because they will be of more use to you than to him?

If both sides of the war believe to be in the right, then who is really?

Those are some heavy questions. But instead of listing them and answering them one by one like with a test at school, Remarque answers them through his characters, in a way that actual people would talk and think. It all stays very real and sober throughout the book, which makes some passages outright scary.

The writing:

The reader is tied to the book, even though there are no typical cliffhangers, suspense-building devices or other things of that sort. That what keeps you reading is a fluent narration with varying sentence structure and phrasing that fits the situation.

The author uses big words for big emotions. The language stays collected and sober when nothing happens and then suddenly the words hit as hard as the grenades that drive the soldiers into madness.

There is a lot of suspense, but there are a few scenes in which the characters (and therefore the reader, too) get to take a break from it. In those scenes, the focus lies on emotions, and thinking, and looking back on things that happened.

One scene right at the beginning is about someone dying in the field hospital. Usually, the death of an unknown character does not have the same impact on the reader as a character dying that we "know". However, Remarque manages to make this scene so heart-wrenching that it is just as bad.

Also: the book does not glorify. When someone dies, they die, and it is horrible. There are no heroes — characters that went through a lot and are still going are not made to look good; in fact, it is emphasized that none of them are particularly strong but that they are all broken.

Quotes from the book:

"Before he died he handed over his pocket-book to me, and bequeathed me his boots— the same that he once inherited from Kemmerich. I wear them, for they fit me quite well. After me Tjaden will get them, I have promised them to him."

"The shelling is stronger than everything. It wipes out the sensibilities, I merely crawl still farther under the coffin, it shall protect me, though Death himself lies in it."

"We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial — I believe, we are lost."

"We sing. Behind us shells are sending up fountains from the now utterly abandoned village."

"Crouching like cats we run on, overwhelmed by this wave that bears us along, that fills us with ferocity, turns us into thugs, into murderers, into God only knows what devils; this wave that multiples our strength with fear and madness and greed for life, seeking and fighting for nothing but our deliverance. If your own father came over with them you would not hesitate to fling a bomb at him."

"We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces."

"Stacked up against its [the school-house's] longer side is a high double wall of yellow, unpolished, brand-new coffins. [...] 'That's a good preparation for the offensive', says Müller astonished. 'They're for us', growls Detering."

Sorry if some of the quotes are too long, but the book is full of sentences like these.

There are also two (?) films about it. I recommend the one from 1979 (main actor Richard Thomas) because this is the one I have watched and it is almost exactly like the book; you even recognize the dialogue from the respective scenes in the book. Here again the warning: it is violent (even though the minimum age to watch is 12). Don't feel like you have to watch it because of solidarity to the victims of war or anything, you can inform yourself in other ways. :)

[maduabuchukwu]

Very interesting & informative

They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot & then once a day it was taken & sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were "piss poor."

But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn't even afford to buy a pot; they "didn't have a pot to piss in" & were the lowest of the low.

The next time you are washing your hands & complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s.

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May, and they still smelled pretty good by June. Since they were starting to smell, however, brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women, and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it . . . hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the Bath water!"

Houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof, resulting in the idiom, "It's raining cats and dogs."

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house. This posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could mess up your nice clean bed, therefore, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, leading folks to coin the phrase "dirt poor."

The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they added more thresh until, when you opened the door, it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entrance-way, subsequently creating a "thresh hold."

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire.. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while, and thus the rhyme, "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man could, "bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or the "upper crust."

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial.. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up, creating the custom of holding a wake.

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a bone-house, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive, so they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the graveyard shift.) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be, saved by the bell or was considered a dead ringer.

And that's the truth. Now, whoever said History was boring?

[jumpydolly]

Still Alive: Connor RK800 x Reader

I joined the Detroit: Become Human bandwagon even if I have a whole imagines blog to work on.... oops. Anyway, here’s angst, even if half of you were expecting smut from me :)))

“Unlike him, you didn’t deserve anyone with the heart to put you back together.”

Fear—a word that proved too powerful for any human or android to understand. The shivering of one’s bones or the trembling of one’s fingertips left those polarized in an attempt to fight or flight… it was a formidable wall that you somehow dared to cross. You climbed out of your bed fit for just a simple, destitute individual, throwing that silk comforter aside knowing that it would be the last time you would ever feel as secure. Your arm flung back to swing open the door to your apartment, boots stepping past the threshold in a world that didn’t know you were of use; your gaze lingered on androids that no one but you desired to comprehend, quirks hardly beyond their programming reminding you of why you chose to pursue a career where everyone at your office spread childish rumors about you and questioned your existence at the Detroit City Police Department.

With your fist stretching at the skin of your cheek, elbow resting on a charcoal yet translucent desk dirtied with lines of white scratch marks and carved in phrases—with a knife, no less, so obviously they liked you—spelling out ‘android sympathizer’ or ‘fuck you’, normally you would have shrugged your shoulders and blew out the longest suffering sigh you could upon your new desk except the words were followed with a, ‘Gavin was here’. Not only were you forced to continue working on your desk, one pile of reports and papers that were none of your concern sitting at the corner of your furniture, you were obligated to unscrew the spiral of your notebook holding your files of androids working with you together to use the edge to cross out his name and replace it with your own. The paragraphs littering your computer screen would have been nothing but gibberish if the spirit of Gavin Reed remained in your room, and by God you would have called an exterminator if it meant the rat was out of your office for good.

Unease, you were sure the feeling prickled at your skin upon your first meeting with the police officer; his stature towered above you and a smirk was tugged on his full lips as you coughed out your reason for being at the department. Arms wrapped around your figure, you were in no hurry to come to the realization that, because you were a psychologist fixated on the behavior of androids, your career was never meant to mesh with a personality built on the hatred of them. In fact, you remained naïve to the mutter under his breath or the refusal to heed your input on any Deviant—androids with the ability to feel as humans do, although you wondered why none of their hands were wrapped around Reed’s neck with the treatment they received from him—and waved off whatever disappointment that accompanied such a bully until an android by the name of Connor pulled the leather seat across from your desk back and his gaze met your own for the first time.

Upon his thirteenth time of visiting your office—ever the attentive one, he counted—you were far past throwing your life away for some police officer, especially when one call to Detroit’s representatives would have solidified your superiority against him. Like his past appearances, Connor’s fingers were intertwined with the others as his eyes followed the rapid click of the black keys on your keyboard abused by your fingernails. His knees were mere centimeters away from the other, ever still with his thought processes focusing on just you. His coffee brown irises became lost behind his eyelids before finding themselves in the splatters of rain upon your window, then at you, then steadily into a sea of nothingness as he effortlessly blinked and opened his eyes to a changing city.

“You’re not due for a visit, Connor,” you chided, “and you’re staring again. That’s weird.”

Your name fell from his lips in an apology. “Captain Fowler and Lieutenant Anderson agree I should—”

”Screw off?” Shaking your head, your grin complemented the frown that formed upon his lips.

“Well, yes. They also believed it would benefit my relationship with humans if I took the time to get to know you, considering your career.”

Squinting your eyes, your hands halted their assault on your keyboard as you directed a furrowed brow at your coworker. Lips pursed, you swallowed the urge to mention that neither of them could care less of Connor’s adaptations to human behavior, and that no one in this office showed any interest in your relationship with him. As puzzled as you were, the android was ever persistent, his behind nearly at the edge of his seat as if he wasn’t confident of the probability stacked against you. The odds were in his favor, as you were a pushover in need of deviancy. Also, you could hardly reject someone wanting to know more about the world, especially one with you in it.

His first question: “Do you own a dog?”

“Do I— What do you think?”

“Fair enough. What is your middle name?”

“… Connor.”

“How about this one? What day were you born?”

The questions snatched your attention away from the work ahead of you, enticing your gaze towards the tilt of Connor’s head as you grew weary of such questions… even if you answered none of them. One lingering glance your way could have answered all of them, remedying the curiosity that existed through no means of wonder, yet he sat idle in your office to waste your time and his. If you ceased to respond to him, there would be no repercussions; there was always the thought that his code caused him to never relent in his search for the truth, yet no relationships or feelings would be affected if you did. What being sat before you lived with no consequences because he would die and return from CyberLife with merely his body a token of what he used to be. Whose mind were you in the process of examining if every inch of it belonged to a company of people fueled by capitalism and technology, rather than an individual taking claim of their own thoughts?

Your name left him in a plight to drag you towards reality. “Do you… Do you believe that machines should have the capability to love, to feel?” Connor shook his head. “Damn it, perhaps I should have worded that more efficiently.”

The hesitance in his choice of words resulted in your arms to cross over the other, feet pressed into the floors so your back could recline your beloved computer chair into a more comfortable position. His question was undoubtedly one that fueled your way of being, yet the presence of this android interrupted whatever intelligible thought that could reach your lips before you said something you desired not to believe. The scent of fresh rain trailing down leaves of varying colors beyond the cracks of your windows crawled into your nostrils in an attempt to pull whatever train of thought you could possibly muster. However, the only semblance of sanity within you was accompanied simply with the call of his name, “Connor.” The summarization of your thoughts awaited what would follow when you found and retained his attention, yet all you wanted out of him was for him to find the answer to that question somewhere else.

Connor was a man who deserved to feel everything; he remained oblivious to the tensions growing between androids and humans, preferring to work with the latter to capture those who threatened his survival and his being. He drifted in a cause that wasn’t his own, and was a man driven by his superiors forcing him into a mission from which he could not escape from. His gaze fell on you for longer than necessary with no ulterior motives behind it, just a sea of questioning and nonsense that you could only fear living. Connor felt nothing and prepared himself for the unknown; unlike him, those with blood that stained like red feared the unknown. Humans would become brave despite desperate odds, finding the courage to pull through even if the thought of failing terrified them.

The answer to his question did not come; your response festered into something that elicited bumps trailing across your skin. You were born with the essentials for survival, grown to equip such tools to allow you to live a life free from broken hearts and coffins. Therefore, it was an instinct within you to fear death itself, to hesitate on the path towards it, since it was a fact instilled in humans that they had to live long enough to make a lasting impression on others. Perhaps that was why Connor’s life meant so little in the world; a Deviant’s curl of his finger resulted in a gunshot destroying his LED and state of mind, except everyone in the interrogation room that witnessed his death pushed what memories involved him aside so quickly… a peek into the bullet hole at the center of his head proved how minuscule and pathetic this body was compared to everyone else. Connor had no choice in how to live his life but humans had the choice: to leave behind nothing but photos and personal belongings with remnants of a soul still attached or to live with the intention to remain despite living in the same mundane cycle that allowed security yet an unconscious dissatisfaction with the world.

“I… I don’t know.”

That was the difference between you and Connor, your imprint was left on the world the moment you stepped into the office of Elijah Kamski’s pride and livelihood; your actions were reckless and foolish yet somehow they brought you a plaque with your name on it. Your hard work allowed you a degree to adapt on an Earth that finally valued humans yet disrespected how special they were. If Connor failed to find the source of the rise of Deviants over the past month—his mission, one that conflicted with his people yet pushed him to perform such despicable acts in line with those who lived and breathed—he would remain unaware of how significant his actions were in the case. His creators would take his memories and his existence from him, prodding at traces of people like you or Lieutenant Anderson in his being as they saw fit to snatch a life that just began.

Now, of course androids should learn what it meant to feel, or to love; sometimes you found it difficult to bring yourself from such stupors. How much more bearable would life be if you found someone to spend it with, to overcome its trials with? How extraordinary would it be if those unlucky enough to never become lost or confused were given the ability to find a partner that, no matter what, they would search for them and ensure that they remained found? What was an android’s life it they were all content with never moving forward or backwards—just being? Who were you to belong to a race that held onto such emotions, one selfish enough to think that the thought of wanting more was an idea that only belonged to them?

You allowed this.

You sat idle as androids like Connor were reduced to nothing, and for what?

Perhaps this was the path to insanity; you had never desired to venture on this road or wanted to lose yourself in the most pathetic way possible. How ironic was it that you could never cope when the world proved too great for you? This must be terror, this shivering in your bones—terror that Connor would one day make one mistake that perhaps wasn’t his, and that the only imprint of his left in the Detroit City Police Department would be his fading fingerprints on your desk. Maybe his fingers would sink into the material over your shoulders as he attempted to pull you from oblivion, your name hanging in the air as you remained unresponsive to a man who, unlike you, could one day never be fixed.

Unlike him, you didn’t deserve anyone with the heart to put you back together.

[hufflepuffhollander]

high scores: a tom holland music-al love story // part two

welcome back! glad to see you again

here’s part two!!!

again...please please spam me with feedback or hellos i’ll take anything and want to hear from you people

contains: language

part two

If there was one sound I could send to hell, it would be that of my alarm going off on the day I’m meeting with hollywood’s best and brightest to discuss how I’m supposed to turn their movie into a success. Can she do it? The world may never know.

Now, to say I’m just average and incapable of the job would be an understatement, even coming from me, my own worst critic. I went to Berklee on a full scholarship, graduated at the top of my class, and already had performed in Carnegie Hall (every musician’s most fantastical wet dream). I was approached by a handful of independent movie contractors who wanted my talent in the music in their films. So, I’ve done well for myself thus far. And I’m confident that if I can do it once, I can do it again. However, there have never been so many potential people to hear what I have to say (or compose), and that alone scares me shitless. What if the world hears it? What if the world doesn’t like it? I’m only 23. Will my career just end right then and there? At the premiere of Growing? I started thinking about all the horrible things that could happen once I open myself up to the possibility of bad reception by the public and ended up with not only fear, but soap in my eyes by the end of my shower.

I just wanted to do right by this movie. It was on track to be such a hit, a gut punch to the audience that leaves every watcher pondering their own existence and what they can do to make sure that the world doesn’t come crashing down on themselves and their future children and grandchildren. It’s really pushing an amazing save-the-earth agenda hidden inside a star studded blockbuster flick, which I couldn’t love more. And better yet, everyone starring in it has their own personal agenda to help better humanity by either being an advocate for conservation, lobbying political groups, or running charities of their own. No pressure, Emma. You’ve also donated your time to great causes -- you used to volunteer for the animal shelter that one time in college.

I put my best effort into a relatively professional casual and headed out to start my interviews.

After interviewing some walking icons such as Tom Hanks and Mark Ruffalo, my head was spinning. Here are these incredibly well regarded actors, with so many successes trailing behind them, talking to a relatively recent college graduate with little to no fame to her name. I was able to take some notes after getting over the nerves, and hopefully some of what they said will come back to me later when I’m composing (it fucking better).

After a few interviews Leah and I grabbed lunch and talked about the next few I had coming up, the most notable one being with Tom Holland. I couldn’t tell you why I was so amped up about it, either. This guy is probably the least accoladed person on this cast list. But Leah was able to play therapist and help me work through some of what was going through my head.

“Emma, it makes sense. He’s the only actor you’re interviewing who’s your age. And he’s hot.

“Walk in there with enough confidence to convince him that you’re not just an assistant setting the table before the real movie composer comes in. You are that movie composer. That head bitch.” 

She always knows just what to say.

After lunch I swigged some mouthwash in the bathroom, tried to pass it off as a breathing technique, and walked into my office to wait for Tom to get there. He was my last appointment of the day, and then it was off to writing for me. I passed by a friendly face and said hello, entering the office, face turned down the hall. I immediately walked over to my desk and checked my phone before putting it down, not even noticing that there was definitely another person in there with me. It lit up right before I set it on the desk.

*text from Leah*

go get em tiger!!! drinks later at Sav?

*insert tiger and wine emojis*

I laughed at the thought of a tiger sipping on a glass of wine a little too audibly.

“Do I get to see what you’re laughing at over there?”

I whipped around and saw him sitting on a chair in the corner of my office, smirking at the sight of me giggling to myself over a text.

My worst fear has just been realized.

“My god, I’m so sorry, I had no idea you were sitting there--”

“Not a problem,” he laughed. “I’m just here early for a meeting.”

I decided to see how much fun I could have until he figured out I was the one he was meeting with. Leah was right, I definitely didn’t look like anything more than an assistant.

“Who are you meeting with?” I asked.

“Uh, I think her name is Emma...? She’s writing the songs for the film. I guess I need to give her some tips on how to write music, I dunno,” he chucked.

I can write music just fine, asshole. I got a little annoyed, but my own subconscious cut itself off. That accent makes me want to melt.

“Well, if you’re ready to start, I just have a few questions up front--”

he cut me off.

“Doesn’t she need to be here? Is this just preliminary stuff?” he looked confused as to why the receptionist was about to interview him.

I walked over to the door, and said “Sorry, Emma will be right in.”

He nodded and turned to his phone. I walked out the door, and then walked right back in.

“Hi, you’re Tom, right? I’m Emma, it’s nice to meet you. I’m the film composer for Growing, the movie you’re starring in.” I stuck out my hand. “I hope I’m not taking up too much of your time, I just needed some help because I forgot how to read music and I heard you can play guitar and therefore would be able to help me.”

His cheeks turned bright red and he stood up and shook my hand. “It’s, uh, nice to meet you for the very first time.” He shook off the embarrassment faster than expected and threw my sass back at me with some good old fashioned charm. “I can tell we’re going to be fast friends.”

It took everything in me not to roll my eyes. We sat down and got started with the interview.

“So, I’m basically talking to you to get a feel for how you’re putting your own personality into your character, which will help me translate just what type of feeling I want my music to lead with in your scenes,” I started. Tom didn’t know what to say.

“You want me to act out a scene for you or something?”

Why is he so snarky?

“Only if you feel so inclined.” I said, not looking up from my paper as I jotted down some unimportant notes just so I could be busy with something, anything other than participating in this horribly uncomfortable conversation.

“Listen, I’m just trying to do my job. I can’t just write generic music for a sad movie scene if I don’t know what kind of emotion is going into it. Music is a lot more complicated than you may think. If the score doesn’t perfectly mesh with the message you’re portraying on screen, it will throw off the whole overarching feeling and message of the scene, and will be lost on the audience. It can disfigure entire movies when the music isn’t right. I’ve had single phrases actors have told me inspire me to write entire compositions for their scenes. Therefore, I’m relying on you to take what the instruments behind your words are sounding like just as seriously as you take learning your lines.”

I didn’t realize I had essentially just given the poor boy a lecture. He looked at me, eyes wide, clearly just now realizing that there is actually way more thought to put into this than he would’ve expected.

“I never thought of it that way. You’re completely right...I’m sorry to not have taken it more seriously.” Tom said quietly. 

While I had proven my point, our relationship in its current state was not everything I’d hoped it be. I needed to figure out a way to mend the conversation, but I had literally no idea how. His phone went off- his agent was calling him. The ringtone was a soft piano melody that I hadn’t heard before. And then, it hit me. I waited for him to get off the phone, and held my hand out.

“Come with me, I want to show you something.” 

He hesitantly took my hand, looking confused as ever, and I led us out the door, down a series of hallways and stairs, until we arrived in the big wooden coffin that was the music chambers. The baby grand piano I had already become very close with sat untouched, waiting for me. I closed the door behind us and sat down on the piano bench, while Tom stayed standing by the door, clearly not understanding why I’d brought him in here.

“Generic song for a generic death of a main character in any given movie. No context.” I said as I started to play a tune that I had written ages ago for a midterm exam (yes, we have those in music school). Minor chords followed by more minor chords, an eerie and unified sound rung out from the inside of the piano, filling the empty room with an overarching feeling of sadness. I couldn’t see his face, but Tom slowly started walking over to the piano, and then sat down on the bench next to me. We exchanged a fleeting glance as I continued to play through the simple melody. With every changing note I could feel him becoming more and more enthralled by the song. Then suddenly, I stopped. He fell out of his trance and looked at me expectantly.

“Is it over?” he asked.

“Now,” I started, “A song for the death of a beloved main character who is losing his battle to cancer, surrounded by the family he created and loved more than anything, his youngest daughter holding his hand.”

Tom looked confused. I started to play again, slower this time. Somehow, these minor chords echoed out even sadder, even more profound than those before it. This time, the melody was different. This time, you could truly envision someone you care for dying. As I continued to pour out emotion into this piece, Tom’s breathing slowed, his eyes glossing over. I could see the emotion flowing through him. I ended the song on an unresolved note, turning to catch his gaze as I did. His mouth was slightly agape; his words caught in his throat.

And that’s the power of music, ladies and gentlemen.

“Do you see the difference between knowing the story and knowing the characters within it?”

He silently nodded, trying to regain his playful composure.

“Did you write that?” he asked.

“Yes, while I was in college.”

“It’s...it’s incredible.” 

Blush.

“I want my scenes in Growing to evoke that much emotion in the audience.”

“Well, let’s get talking,” I said. Without another word he got up and walked out of the room.

Where the hell is he going?

I was sure I had just blown my chance to get to know this cute asshole.

The door didn’t even fully swing shut when he came back in, big smile on his face, running his fingers through his hair, approaching me, still sitting at the piano. He stuck out his hand.

“Hi, I’m Tom. You must be Emma? I heard you’ll be writing the scores for this movie, and I’m so excited to help.”

I cocked my head to the side and looked at him, puzzled.

“I’m starting over,” he leaned in and winked at me.

I reached out to shake his hand.

“Hi, Tom. It’s so nice to meet you for the very first time.” I tried to hide how happy I was.

“So, we’ve got a lot of work to do. When do we start?”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

and that wraps up part 2! I hope it was worth the read. Let me know what you thought/any directions you think I should take the story in!

[oumakokichi]

What exactly is this "Hope's Peak remember light"?

It’s not an exact name so much as it’s a phrase I’ve coined to describe the remember light that Tsumugi uses in Chapter 5 specifically. It’s unarguably the most important remember light in the entire game, as it manages to singlehandedly kickstart the killing game back into action again after Ouma’s attempt to grind the game to a halt.

In Chapter 6, Saihara’s exploration of the classroom where the remember lights are made confirms the fact that the remember lights are fake, and that information on them can be decided at will by the person creating it. There are multiple options for memories to be input on the computer setup, and many of those memory options contradict one another. Since there can be only one truth, the existence of multiple conflicting “memories” proves the fact that the “memories” they’ve been receiving all the way from Chapter 1 and onward are, in fact, lies.

Tsumugi uses many of these remember lights to provide the characters with motives and inspiration to keep them going throughout the killing game, both in order to make the game more exciting and to present them with incentives for trying to get back outside. However, no remember light was more extreme or over-the-top in presenting fake information than the one she creates in Chapter 5. She pieces together a remember light in a very short amount of time and leaves it in secret on one of the cafeteria tables for one of the other group members to find.

Presumably she guessed Maki would be the one to find it, since Maki was the one least affected by “the truth of the outside world,” because she was already fairly desensitized to death and loss from a young age. And she wasn’t wrong—Maki is the first one to find the remember light, and after doing so she rounds the rest of the group out, even though Saihara and the others don’t even want to come out of their rooms. Himiko even point-blank asks if Maki will just kill her and put her out of her misery, to which Maki gives an agreeable, “sure, but at least we should watch this remember light first.”

The contents of the remember light are as follows: that all the characters are actually students of Hope’s Peak Academy, that they were chosen not only as the “last 16 survivors of humanity” but also as “the last hope of humanity,” and that even though the rest of humanity might be dead and gone, they still need to carry that “hope” on in the future. The remember light causes them to “remember” that Ouma is actually the “leader of the Remnants of Despair,” an acolyte “following in Junko’s footsteps” who worshipped and idolized her. Convinced that Ouma represents “despair” and is, quite literally, the embodiment of “Junko 2.0,” the rest of the characters step into their role of bringing “hope” to the world even more willingly.

All of this information we know to be 100% false. Regardless of whether Hope’s Peak did or did not exist in the ndrv3 universe, Ouma’s existence is nonetheless pretty solid proof that the ndrv3 cast have nothing to do with Hope’s Peak academy. The only two characters who don’t use this “Hope’s Peak remember light” in Chapter 5 are Ouma and Momota—because they weren’t present to use it in the cafeteria at the time, since Ouma had Momota holed up with him in the machinery bay. Consequently, the only two characters who know absolutely nothing about Hope’s Peak, Enoshima Junko, the Remnants of Despair, or even the entire “hope vs. despair” dichotomy are also Ouma and Momota.

When Maki barges into the machinery bay to kill Ouma, she uses a slow-acting torture poison to attempt to glean information from him first. She questions him about being the leader of the Remnants of Despair, but he quite literally has no idea what she’s talking about. Similarly, during the Chapter 5 trial, Momota reads off lines from a script prepared for him by Ouma—but there’s absolutely nothing about Junko, the Remnants, Hope’s Peak, or anything along those lines in his script. Momota, posing as Ouma, even repeats lines like “Enoshima…?” and “Hope…? Despair…?” when such words come up at the trial. He and Ouma had no clue what any of the rest of them were talking about.

Finally, Ouma’s motive video in Chapter 6, discovered in his own bedroom, puts the final nail in the coffin and proves that Ouma had absolutely nothing to do with the Remnants of Despair, and that their “memories” in the remember light were therefore fake. Ouma’s so-called “secret evil organization” is nothing more than a band of 10 other pranksters, called DICE, and they ran around committing “laughable crimes,” with their most important motto being “we don’t kill people.” Saihara uses these facts to piece together the fact that Ouma was not actually associated with the Remnants or with Junko during the Chapter 6 trial—about 5 hours and 15 minutes into Chapter 6. Yes, I counted. Yes, it really took that long for them to catch on.

The Hope’s Peak remember light is important to the plot because Saihara notes in the Chapter 5 post-trial just how conveniently things worked out for the real ringleader because of it. Due to the things they all “remembered” as a result of that remember light, Maki herself admits that she was spurred into action. What she thought was a course of action of her own choosing was actually her being manipulated once again, used as a tool in order to kill Ouma the same way that she’s been used as a tool for killing her whole life in her in-game backstory.

Without the remember light, she certainly would’ve still hated Ouma, and thought that he was the ringleader—but she wouldn’t have made the conscious decision to eliminate him from the game. Specifically because she thought he was a Remnant of Despair and following in Junko’s footsteps, she decided that she had to be stopped. This outcome was exactly what Tsumugi wanted, and it did eventually lead to Ouma’s elimination from the game. So really, the Hope’s Peak was a brilliant counterattack to Ouma’s attempts to stop the game. Ouma tried to crush everyone’s willpower and grind the killing game to a halt by making them “despair” at the state of the outside world. And Tsumugi’s counter to that plan was “hope” itself.

I hope this helps explain it better! No one in-game actually refers to this specific remember light as the “Hope’s Peak remember light,” but I do so on this blog just to make it easier to know which remember light I’m referring to! There are other important remember lights, particularly the slow-acting flashback one that Monokuma uses at the end of the Chapter 5 post-trial, but I’d say the Hope’s Peak remember light is still easily the most important and plot-relevant of the bunch.

Thanks for asking, anon! I hope I could answer your question!

[richmegavideo]

We won’t get out of the Second Gilded Age the way we got out of the first

A historian explains why we keep comparing today to the Gilded Age.

Andrew Carnegie, steel magnate and one of the 19th century’s richest men, made an offhand remark while bragging about his wealth to a newspaper reporter in early 1892: “It isn’t the man who does the work that makes the money. It’s the man who gets other men to do it.”

Several months later while on vacation in Scotland, Carnegie sent a telegram approving of his deputy’s decision to unleash a private army on strikers and their families at his steel mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania, sparking a bloody gun battle that left at least 10 dead and dozens seriously wounded.

Carnegie was getting other men to do the work.

Accounts like these pepper tales of the Gilded Age, the period in US history roughly from the end of the Civil War to the start of the 20th century. They have made the term “Second Gilded Age” a convenient shorthand for affluent arrogance and economic inequity today.

The term “Second” or “New Gilded Age” has been appearing in print for nearly four decades, describing everything from the junk-bond 1980s to the internet-bubble 1990s, and the Collateralized-Debt-Obligation 2000s to the top-1-percent 2010s.

As a historian of US class relations, I understand the appeal. The comparison — though superficial — keeps working because economic inequality keeps growing, and most Americans associate the Gilded Age first and foremost with excesses and egotism of great wealth.

But those who use the phrase “Second Gilded Age” to criticize contemporary inequality are also paying unintended tribute to Carnegie’s logic. They are trying to get a previous historical era to do the work of offering critiques and solutions for this one’s problems. Our grasp of both eras suffers for it.

The Gilded Age comparison beguiles us — and not even as much as it could

The temptation of the comparison is understandable on storytelling grounds alone. Gilded Age elites cut a detestably memorable and therefore useful profile, from shipping tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt spitting, “The public be damned!,” to financier Jay Gould boasting that he could “hire one-half the working class to shoot the other half to death.”

Railroad sleeping-car king George Pullman knew how loathed he was: he arranged to have his coffin sealed with lead and buried at night in a steel-and-concrete vault 8 feet deep, lest workers desecrate his corpse in revenge for the way he exploited them in life.

Even Gilded Age parties rankle democratic sensibilities. Amid a global depression in 1897, New York millionaires including banker J.P. Morgan and real estate heiress Caroline Astor spent several fortunes impersonating ancien régime royalty at a Waldorf Astoria costume ball while the unemployed huddled in the streets outside.

The very phrase “Gilded Age” conjures cartoon visions of such individuals. They seem an ideal historical comparison for today’s “bailout billionaires” who purchase politicians, award employees accused of sexual harassment with rich exit packages, and spend millions to hire rock stars for birthday parties.

Yet historians such as Steve Fraser and James Livingston have rightly objected to the notion that today we are in a second Gilded Age. They point to the stark economic contrasts in the two eras: industrialization, rising working-class wages, and violent class conflict in the first Gilded Age; de-industrialization, falling working-class wages, and what Fraser calls “acquiescence” to exploitation — including modern phenomenons like mass stock ownership, the gig economy, mass indebtedness, and more — today.

Recent wildcat strikes and the election of democratic socialists to Congress have made this last claim somewhat less tenable than it was before 2016, but relative to the Gilded Age’s literal class war, the upsurge in resistance remains mild.

Yet the problems with the “Second Gilded Age” idea don’t end with the flawed historical similarities. In some ways, those it omits are more telling.

It was during the Gilded Age that African-American men — who had just secured voting rights in the 15th Amendment — were disenfranchised through legal chicanery and racist, state-sanctioned violence. The Supreme Court’s 1883 gutting of the first US Civil Rights Act opened the way for the subsequent consolidation of Jim Crow law.

A hundred and thirty years later, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, enabling a flood of state-level Voter ID legislation targeting low-income voters of color. Meanwhile, the pairing of a wantonly violent and racist criminal justice system with laws that impede felon and ex-felon suffrage decimates the black vote.

Soon after the Civil War, the US Army accelerated long-running efforts to expel Native Americans from ancestral lands across the continent, sometimes claiming to be fighting “barbarism and terrorism” as a pretext for Gilded Age projects of occupation and natural resource extraction.

Such justifications for imperial military action echo from the 1870s to the 2000s, whether serving to target Sioux gold in the Black Hills or black gold in Iraq.

The Gilded Age also included white nationalist, anti-immigrant movements. Their legislative culmination was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned the immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States.

Last year, President Donald Trump succeeded in imposing restrictions on immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. He continues, as he has since his 2016 campaign launch, to make political hay by demonizing migrants from Mexico and Central America.

These surface historical parallels seem so obvious. Why don’t they tend to come up in columns decrying our “Second Gilded Age?”

Solutions for Gilded Age inequality won’t work for ours

It might have something to do with how the first Gilded Age ended.

In the liberal historical imagination, the economic reforms of the Progressive Era and New Deal years in the first half of the 20th century — primarily higher taxes, stricter regulations of business and finance, and greater government investment in public enterprise — vanquished Gilded Age inequality.

This happy version of the story has many heroes, most of whom tend to be middle-class intellectuals and technocratic politicians: muckraking journalists like Ida Tarbell who exposed robber barons, government appointees like Frances Perkins who fought to protect workers, and seemingly anti-laissez-faire presidents like Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts.

Little wonder that the usual proposed solution for the “Second Gilded Age” is either a “second Progressive Era” or a “New New Deal.”

But this understanding distorts the history of the demise of the Gilded Age’s inequality and misleads us today.

Although middle-class philanthropists and technocratic politicians gave voice to policies that began to curtail inequality, they did not generate the conditions that made such policies either politically possible or effective. That took decades of widespread, sustained, and explicit anti-capitalist organizing from working people — in labor unions, youth groups, radical political parties, and coalitions of mass protest — from the 1870s through the 1940s. Cold War liberalism’s backlash against such radicalism was fierce and helped fuel the rise of the right.

Progressives and New Dealers also achieved their reforms by reaffirming the Gilded Age’s ideological and legal commitments to white supremacy, imperialism, and xenophobia. The mainstream labor movement marginalized radicals and underwrote imperial nationalism. Signature New Deal legislation — the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act — discriminated against women and African Americans by excluding domestic and agricultural workers, valorizing the white male family wage earner.

The “solutions” that ended Gilded Age inequality, in other words, became a crucial seedbed for our own era’s historically distinct expressions of inequality.

The “Second Gilded Age” is a gilded analogy. We have not been through all this before. We won’t emerge from it by reanimating the politics of the past. New solutions are wanting.

Unlike Carnegie, we don’t have the luxury of getting others to do the work.

David Huyssen is the author of Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890-1920. He is working on a new book about the socialist who created the hedge fund, and teaches Modern American History at the University of York in the UK. Follow him on Twitter: @davidhuyssen.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

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