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freddyfreebat · 4 years

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Jack Dylan Grazer Discovers Who He Is in Luca Guadagnino's “We Are Who We Are”

After supporting roles in the It and Shazam!, the young actor shifts gears with his turn as a capricious army brat in the Call Me By Your Name director's new HBO series.

by Iana Murray / Photography by Nik Antonio — September 14, 2020

A few years ago, Jack Dylan Grazer took a trip to the movie theater. He was in Toronto and it was one of his days off from filming Shazam!, the DC comedy in which he plays the shape-shifting hero’s foster brother. He decided to watch Call Me By Your Name, and he immediately fell for it. Grazer took note of the director’s name that appeared in the credits—Luca Guadagnino—and turned to his mother.

“I want to work with him,” he told her. With eerie prescience, she assured him: “You will.”

Whether Grazer, now 17, has a knack for manifestation, or it was all just happenstance, his wish came true in the form of We Are Who We Are, Guadagnino’s coming of age drama which follows a group of army brats living on an American military base in Italy. Thematically, the show is something of a spiritual successor to Call Me By Your Name: Grazer plays Fraser, a tempestuous 14-year-old with a pair of headphones constantly plugged in his ears. He’s the new arrival at the base with his mothers (Chloë Sevigny and Alice Braga), and quickly forms a deep bond with his neighbour, Caitlin (Jordan Kristine Seamon), as they both wrestle with their sexuality and identity in the midst of domestic troubles and teenage debauchery.

“He’s an enigma to himself,” Grazer says of his character. “He doesn’t really understand a lot of the things he does but he’s so forthright so he convinces himself that he knows everything. He feels like other people don’t deserve his intelligence. But he’s also very volatile and aggressive at times, and not because he’s coming from an angry place but because he’s constantly questioning who he is.”

If Fraser is just beginning his coming of age when we first meet him, Grazer is inching closer to the end. Starring in enormous blockbusters including IT, he became the Loser Club’s resident hypochondriac at age 12 and a superhero’s sidekick by 15. His films have grossed a combined total of over $1.5 billion. Suddenly the stakes are multiplied tenfold during what are ostensibly, and horrifyingly, the most awkward years of your life. Every misstep is now being monitored, examined through a microscope of millions. (See: His 3.8 million fans on Instagram, to say nothing of the countless stan accounts.) Child fame is a disarming transaction like that: a stable career and all the other perks of being a celebrity, but at the cost of normalcy. That unalleviating pressure forces a kid to mature fast.

Grazer is acutely aware of this fact, admitting outright that he’s “not a normal person.” But he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I became 70 when I was 7!” he laughs. “I don’t know if I really had much of a childhood. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to grow up really fast.”

Nevertheless, he’s still 17. When we meet over Zoom, his shoulder length curls are damp and disheveled (he just got out of the shower), his black painted fingernails contrast with his brightly-lit, white bedroom as he rests his face on his hand. It’s a Saturday morning and he looks tired: It’s his first week back at school, which has traded classrooms for hours of video calls reminiscent of the one we’re currently on. “It feels like the days are shorter because the teachers don’t want to torture their students by keeping them on a computer for six hours a day,” he tells me. “You do miss the social aspect of being at school.”

If you were to judge Grazer by what’s out there on the internet, you’d expect an anarchic and relentless bundle of energy. A quick YouTube search brings up results like “jack dylan grazer being a drama queen” and “jack dylan grazer being chaotic in interviews for 4 and a half minutes straight.” He trolled a YouTube gamer on Instagram Live. His TikToks are inscrutable.

But here, he’s incredibly earnest, as he excitedly talks about his skateboarding hobby (a skill he picked up after auditioning for Mid90s) and his attempts to learn the flute (“I need to learn how to read sheet music, but it’s like reading Hebrew!”). He’s calm and thoughtful, as if this project we’re discussing requires a shift in sensibility.

For Grazer, acting had always simply been fun. While other kids might take up a sport or get hooked on video games, he performed in musical theater with the Adderley School because he “just wanted to play.” His roles so far have been reflective of his carefree approach to the job: Up until now, he’s portrayed best friends with biting one-liners, or the younger version of the protagonist in a flashback. IT is a prime example of both. In the horror franchise, Grazer plays a neurotic germaphobe running from a fear-eating clown, but in reality, the film felt like “summer camp.” Both films never felt like work; he just learned his lines and got to hang out on extravagant sets with his best friends. Likewise, school amounted to being pulled off set by a teacher in between takes to cram in the mandatory hours.

But with We Are Who We Are, he steps into his first leading role, one that required him to convey longing and confusion through Elio-like physicality and subtext. It’s abnormal to talk about the show as a turning point for an actor who isn’t even a legal adult yet, but Grazer explains that the show required him to radically change his approach to acting. He spent six months in Italy (“It felt like I was in Call Me By Your Name.”) and built up the character beyond what was on the page in collaboration with Guadagnino. “His philosophy is that we know our characters better than anyone else—even the writers—because we are the characters essentially,” he explains.

In many ways, Grazer absorbed that philosophy entirely. He describes the experience less as a performance and more like a “rebirth”—perhaps even an attempt at method acting. Over those months in Italy, the distinctions between actor and character gradually became indistinguishable. “I had no other choice but to act and surrender to Fraser entirely and throw Jack Dylan Grazer out the window,” he says. “I would go out and get a coffee as Fraser and walk like Fraser. That was just me trying to get into [character], but then I slipped at some point and just became Fraser.”

One day on set, he looked at himself in the mirror, and the hardened kid standing there with a bleach-blond dye job and oversized shorts was unrecognizable to him. He could only see Fraser. While talking about his character, he seems to unintentionally switch pronouns, from “he” to “I”, as if the two still remain one and the same.

The process was so transformative that it forced him to re-evaluate himself entirely. “I never really struggled with identity before,” Grazer tells me. “But I think the show opened up my eyes to question myself. Being Fraser forced me to question what I wanted and what I stood for and what I believed in. At some points, the show bled into reality.”

When asked how he has changed, he takes a pause and a pensive swivel in his armchair, unsure of how to answer. “I think I was more ignorant before I did the show,” he says, and he leaves it at that.

Coming of agers are a particularly well-trodden genre, but there’s a naturalistic, raw energy to We Are Who We Are that is distinctive from what we’ve seen before. Each character quietly struggles with their own problems and growing pains—for Fraser, it’s his sexuality. Caught in a fraught relationship with his lesbian mother and an infatuation with another man, his story doesn’t tick off the familiar beats. His personal discovery is instead internal and intimate. "I think every single person born as a boy has this guard. It’s this guard that they don’t even realize they have, where they’re initially like, ‘Being gay? I could never.’ But we’re all born as humans who are attracted to whatever we’re attracted to," he says. "I think that’s how Fraser interprets it as well. Yes, he’s reserved and nervous about it in the beginning because he’s unlocking this new idea for himself. He’s figuring it out, and that’s what you see in the show: him coming to terms with this idea."

As our conversation winds to a close, I ask him if Martin Scorsese ever visited the set—his daughter, Francesca, plays the confident cool girl of the show’s teen cohort—and his eyes widen. “That was actually a really stressful day,” he divulges. Still, he revels in the memory, speaking so fast it’s like someone has put him on 2.5x speed as he shows off his impersonation of Guadagnino. The director was so nervous about Scorsese’s presence that production halted that day.

“Luca was like, ‘I cannot do this today because Martin Scorsese is on my set. I don’t know what to do, this is not good for me. I will have a panic attack before the day ends,’” Grazer says in his best Italian accent. “It’s like if you’re a painter and Van Gogh shows up.”

Admittedly, Grazer is also a self-proclaimed superfan of the Wolf of Wall Street director, and afterwards, he got to spend several days with his idol, as they went on lavish restaurant outings in Italy and talked about anything and everything.

He takes a second to compose himself. A giddy, Cheshire cat smile spreads across his face. The kid in him comes flooding back.

“...Oh my god!” he yells. “I met Martin Scorsese!”

#jack dylan grazer #fraser wilson #we are who we are #eddie kaspbrak #it chapter two #freddy freeman #shazam!#wawwa #luca guadagnino #hbo #hbo max #sky atlantic #interview #gq #wawwa press

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cinearia · 3 years

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The "Morally Grey" in ACOTAR

I decided to write something I have been thinking about since I saw some people saying this when pointing out the wrong attitude of some characters in ACOTAR (aka Rhysand and company), but I think this can apply in general. In another specific story, but I will focus on ACOTAR.

And please, if you disagree, that's fine. This is an opinion of mine that I decided to write and post, because I find it an interesting subject that does not necessarily apply only in ACOTAR, but that is in the saga and I have seen people commenting on it. I don't want to fight with anyone, okay? I put in the tags that fit in.

So...

I love morally gray characters, but just to make it clear right now, I don't think that EVERY story has to have ambiguous characters. It's okay if the story is to follow a line more heroes versus villains line. But one of the things I saw here on tumblr and twitter about the attitudes of IC, Rhysand and Feyre was using that same argument, that they are not perfect, that they have their flaws. I definitely agree with that.

But history itself does not recognize this (and some fans too). Because nobody seems to call their shit out.

Starting from a general view that can include all of the IC. Like, how not to worry about your image while protecting your city? Okay, i get it, we had to be the tHe BaD gUyS, but y'all will suffering the consequences for this, especially if its to protect your own city. Some other people are protecting their citys too. Doesn't mean that you are wrong, but everything has consequences.

Or, how they constantly abuse their power; how Rhysand threatening and using his powers even at a political meeting sound good? How Feyre ended up hurting someone during that same meeting, even if unintentionally, was just fine? No one will call their shit about using their powers? Do you really seek to make allies and friends in the middle of a war by showing abuse of power and threatening others (and not just feysand doing this)? Or saying that they should step over the others so that there is only one king and queen in Prythian (that was right for you, Amren).

And that is partly the fault of writing. Now, more specific:

They lie and steals a valuable artifact from a possible ally and political leader of an entire court? Ah, but it is for a greater good. It will not jeopardize the confidence of a HIGH LORD OF A COURT who was supposed to be his ally in the midst of a war.

Did Feyre decimate an court? Ah, but the leader was abusive to her, she felt trapped in the place that was rebuilding because of a curse of hundreds of years, even though there are innocent people. And, of course, you will have the consequences for this.

(this one more personal and less political) Elain, perhaps the least worst of all, neglected Feyre as much as Nesta did, and also do nothing when she went hunting? Ah, but Elain is Elain.

Did Rhysand hide information from Feyre's pregnancy that she and the baby could die in childbirth? Ah, but he didn't want to worry her, he was scared to lose her and her son. And the whole IC agreed not to tell her anything? Ah, they also care about her, the High Lady.

(And this is the worst and yes, I’ve seen someone say that) Rhysand did it all with Feyre UTM, drugged her, put her in a dress that didn’t cover anything, made her dance all night on his lap? But because he wanted to protect her, we need to hear both sides of the story.

And that's fine because they are the good guys in the story. But it is nothing more than pure hypocrisy, and no consequence falls on them. If it happens, it will be unfair, is just to move the plot.

Do you want us to believe in the heroes of history, do you want us to side with them? Great, we can do that. We could have liked Feyre and Rhysand and the whole IC more, as a group that doesn't always do the right things, except that would have to change literally EVERYTHING (a little bit of charisma would be good).

Instead, for me, it became an egocentric boring FoUnD FaMiLy group that only cares about their own city - and it's not necessarily wrong to be concerned only with Velaris, it's part of their history. But forcing an image on them that doesn't match their actions makes me believe the opposite, especially cause started in ACOSF, again from AMREN, about a King and Queen in Prythian.

So, I came to believe that it was a POV issue. For IC, they are the heroes of history, and think they are better than the rest.

It would be curious, in fact, if the whole point was that Feyre's POV would incapacitate us from seeing the flaws that she doesn't see. And totally proposital. That is why we have to see her as a saint, but at the same time so badass. Wow, no one, i repeat, NO ONE, suspect of me while i pretend to be innocent.

Or how we see her mate so perfect, to the point that history doesn't allow us to stop and think 'wait, this is kind of ...weird'. Or that, as much as there is an error there, but not leat the reader question the characters themselves. Rhysand, for Feyre, is perfect.

We have to see Rhysand as that altruistic, laid-back person who does everything for others, mostly because he did it for Feyre, and that can't be denied. He saved her, took her to her city, her family. What made me stop to think is how Feyre may be reproducing their behavior. How he seems to want her to be part of it so badly. I don't know how to put it into words, but that's more or less what I wrote in another rant I did.

Everything she does is justified by the other characters. At the same time that she, Rhysand and everyone in the IC have hypocritical and very wrong attitudes that history itself does not recognize. And, worst of that, the story seems glorify her POV.

Seriously, when she disobeys the instructions given to her (what she does the most) she has no one to say 'girl, please stop. Just STOP)

And with this said, i add:

We don't have to agree with everything that the characters and the protagonist do. We can love them and still disagree with them, because they are people, or fae, like any other, and there will always be something in them that we will disagree with. It makes them real. They can be heroes and still have their dark side.

The reasons may be as noble as possible, but that will not exclude the consequences, it will not exclude them from being wrong. They do not necessarily need to take a spur or a lesson in morals, but just do not miss out on what every action can bring, especially political leaders in the midst of a war.

Whenever the IC does something, it is for a "bigger" reason, but without giving us the chance to even question it. We don't see them paying for their words, without necessarily moving the plot of the story, in a story that focuses so much on the development of the characters themselves and putting the war in the background (or how should been). Without us being able to question the motivations of the good guys and always doubt the villains.

And this is where I’m going to focus on a more specific point; funny like any character who is "MoRaLlY GrAy" and who "have YOUR rEaSoNs" are men or with history of abuser. Thats funny, right? The new one now is Eris, who was part of Mor's trauma and one of Lucien's nasty brothers, that one who already attacked Lucien, the one who was going to kill Feyre. Who did all that to Mor.

But having Eris saying that she, the victim, didn't tell the whole truth, and the history is now showing that we will see his side...

It just makes me ask, how, in ALL the process of creating and writing these books, passing for her editors, in the books that she wants to pass the message of feminism so much, SJM didn't stop to think, or didn't have a friend to put their hand on your conscience, how wrong does it sound for the abuser to say that the victim is lying?

Why are the men in this saga constantly gaining the gift of doubt?

I can no longer see Rhysand as being morally gray precisely because of what SJM wants us to believe as he is and justifies his actions. What could have been in ACOTAR stopped being completely from ACOMAF, probably because SJM wanted that in her story, the girl would stay with the """villain"""

For from then on, every action of Rhysand is justified and without future consequences, since we are supposed to root for him. Now he is the protagonist's new love interest. So we don't blame him for what he does. So, everything is fine. He's not the bad guy.

And meanwhile, Tamlin comes down to being the bad, abusive guy and... That's it. And no, I don't think he's a good person, he doesn't have to have an arc of redemption, what he did with Feyre is still wrong. The difference now is that Tamlin is just that, those are his only attributes now, while Rhysand has attitudes as bad as, perhaps more, than he had. One is being extremely vilanized while the other is the hero of history, when they are only two sides of the same coin.

I can share this hatred as ALL characters feel for Tamlin, if I didn't see how everyone else did such bad things. Let's remember too, one has the job of torturing people, another has decimated an entire village. They really do what they want and... It's okay.

Doesn't work say that the story has a morally grey area with the characters if the consequences balance it does not lean towards the protagonists.

It costs me less to believe that they are what they are every time SJM reinforces in Feyre's POV how selfless Rhysand is and how much Feyre talks about how badass she is and the two of them such a powerful couple. Literally, I start to think the opposite.

(I did a second part of this rant, but I think it can get a little more personal cause focus in Nesta and Feyre that I decided to split it in two)

#sjm talk so much that rhys is the most beatiful male all the time #that i start to see him with a normal appearence #thats sound so wrong #i swear i cant stand eris #if sjm continue with this redemption arc #rhysand is already wrong #cassian too #azril is more acceptable but still no #anti inner circle #anti rhysand #anti feyre #anti acotar #anti acosf #anti ic #anti amren #morally grey

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yayteaberry · 3 years

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*SFW* Wildflowers (Bakugou)

He hadn’t shown it, but he was very angry with you. An inordinate amount, yet there wasn’t room to do much about it without looking insane.

Your quirk wasn’t something he didn’t notice, it was manipulative and sneaky. The quirk was certainly notable in that he’d never heard of it before that point, someone producing pheromones to influence the people around them accordingly was a powerful thing to have on your side.

But for someone who was trying to become a hero, you had a seriously sadistic sense of humor. He didn’t notice it at first but now it was becoming a problem.

Obviously, you were toying with him.

The reason? He couldn’t say, there wasn’t any discernible gain beyond embarrassing him. Maybe that was the end goal then - keep him from his top performance by distracting him. In the span of two months he’d gone from refusing to memorize any names, to knowing your schedule like the back of his hand, and that was a major problem. It was an unintentional side effect, he wanted to be sure of wherever you were so he could try to prepare himself for your fuckery.

He spent a lot of time trying to recall if he’d known you in the past, why you would torture him like this. Though he never dredged up anything meaningful, at no point before UA had you even attended the same school as him.

At first it was a light annoyance, something he could dismiss as initial nerves brought on by someone who could have power over him.

But it was getting unmanageable, he was wasting his time thinking about your dumbass when he was supposed to be focusing on his studies or counting the number of pushups he was doing.

You can’t be worth all this stress and attention, he knows there has to be an outside source. Why on earth would he feel this way otherwise? Somehow you’ve managed to become his greatest annoyance but also the one person he never minds being around.

Somehow, pft, it was obvious that you’ve been using your quirk to keep him from being a threat, keep him away from being better than you by softening him up.

The worst part of it all was your own passiveness. You acted like you didn’t even know him while doing this to him, rarely looking in his direction and never speaking to him unless spoken too.

He was losing control of his own thoughts, getting visibly upset whenever Kaminari said a single thing about you. For his own sake he just chalked that talk up to Kaminaris delusional teenage antics, as if you’d ever give that freak the time of day. Why did he care? Why should he care? He never felt anything in that degree when Kaminari picked anyone else, what makes you so radically different?

Things were getting messy for him, blurry and confusing, too many questions piling up that had only one answer. You were ruining his mind with your stupid quirk. It’s your own fault! You’ve infested his soul at this point, rewiring him to brainwash him into doing whatever you ask.

Today was the last straw, he can’t take this anymore! Every day he just waits for you to ask him for whatever you’re building up too, knowing in his heart that you’re about to take advantage of what you��ve been planting within him. He’ll be damned if you turn him into a cowering sidekick.

The moment he knew for sure you’d be in your dorm, he made a plan.

Well, ‘plan’ being the surge of adrenaline that filled him at the prospect of tiptoeing around you for the rest of his time at UA, potentially even once he became a pro.

He decided he’d confront you, make you stop, and everything would go back to normal. After this he could finally resume his climb to #1 without your claws pulling him down.

It’s that thought he repeats to himself like a mantra as he speed walks over and kicks the door of your room wide open.

You yelp and nearly jump off your bed, the combination of being scared like that and seeing the boy responsible nearly ejecting your soul out of your body.

“I’m sick and tired of your fuckin’ bullshit!” He stomps inside, kicking the door a second time to close it.

You stifle the urge to scream, scrambling away until your back hits the wall, hands up as you try to defuse the situation. “Wait, wait! Hey now w-whatever you think I did, I swear I didn’t, if you’ll let me-”

“Shut the fuck up! There’s no hypothetical here, you’re fucking with me for fun and if you don’t stop it right now I’m gonna kill you!”, he curls his lip up, sparks lighting up in his palms as he tries to force a confession out of you.

“... What?” You’re completely lost, letting your confusion show as your shoulders drop.

“Don’t you ‘what’ me! Keep playing ignorant and see where that gets you!”, he raises his voice up another notch, taking a step forward. “I’m not an idiot like the rest of those extras, I see what you’re doing! You really think someone as smart as me wouldn’t notice!?”

“I never said you were an idiot! But I swear to god I have no idea what you’re talking about!” You spout anxiously, pulling your knees into your chest, feeling fully cornered.

He just rolls his eyes, closing the gap between him and the edge of your bed. “Oh so now you act all pathetic when I call you out on it to try and get me to feel bad? It isn’t gonna work! I-!”

When he inhales he catches onto the smell in the air, eyebrows knitting together as he feels an instant calming effect from it. “... The fuck?”

“That’s my quirk, that’s what it smells like when I want someone to calm down,” you shakily explain, still holding your hands out like you’re going to have to push him away, sending out as much relaxation pheromones as physically possible.

His shoulders roll back and he stops making his standard ugly expression, face zeroed out in a way you’ve only seen once or twice when he gets invested in something enough to forget he’s around others.

It’s cute, but right now it's more of a sign he’s no longer about to throttle you. “Yeah this is familiar in a way, when we’re in training I think. Guess I never noticed it could be pretty. Usually I’m just pissed that you’re trying to beat me.” For once he’s using an inside voice, which feels oddly personal since you’ve only heard him screaming. It almost seems like whispering in comparison. “So you can choose to make it scented? Masking it so people don’t see it coming is smart. But it’s not so smart now since I know what you’re doing.”

“Mask it? I kinda can’t, the point is that people breathe it in, if they can’t smell it then it doesn’t really work. I really do mean it when I say I have no clue what you think I’m ‘up to’.” You begin to ease off the output, not wanting to knock him out, which you’ve accidentally done before.

“No you have to be, it doesn't make any sense otherwise. You’re doing something or I wouldn’t be feeling this way. Don’t bother lying to me, I’ve already caught you.” He’s still passive but he crosses his arms over his chest, tilting his head.

You give an exasperated huff, “Feeling what way!”

“It’s so fuckin out there that I’m surprised you don’t use this tactic more in training. It’s totally obvious that you’re doing something to make it so I’m the only one who can smell your stink. You’re manipulating me, otherwise there’s no way in hell I’d be so dopey around you. Why the fuck else would I notice whenever you’re gone? Feel compelled to return your pens that you always drop since you’re such a klutz?”, he speaks as if it’s common fact, rolling his eyes as he continues, “You rope me in daily with these little details that you heighten by using your quirk, and then it’s like you have no idea who I am. Since you’re so comfortable living in my head, you should’ve seen this coming.”

That's much more than you expected him to say, a light pink dusting across the bridge of your nose at the confession he has unintentionally given you.

“I-I can’t remember a single time you’ve done that,” is all you can think to say.

He clicks his tongue against his teeth, lolling his head from side to side as he formulates a response. “It’s just like when return all the shit you drop but you pretend to not notice, and you’re doing the same thing right now. It was confusing at first but now I’m just getting irritated that you keep playing dumb. Stop working your dumb stinky magic to turn me into your lackey, get someone else to do your dirty work if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“Bakugou I’ve never done that to you, I wouldn’t!”, you stammer for a half second, making a judgement call on how you should handle this, and deciding to come clean. “I actually… I really like you…. I-I respect your work ethic, how strong you are, confident as well, I wanted to gain your attention through the right ways!” You sit up on your knees and make eye contact with him, trying your best to convey how much you mean what you’re saying. “If I wanted you drooling on my shoes then you would be, but everyone around me would be doing the same, my quirk isn’t selective like that. But I wanted to get noticed by you more than I wanted to chance annoying you as a first impression… I really wanted to have a reason to approach someone like you first.”

“Well that’s a stupid way to go about it. I can’t afford to have these kinds of distractions so if anything you put a lot of effort into just, wasting my time.” He’s nearly hesitating on some words. But he pulls himself together, staring you down for a moment. “So I’m done with this. I’m not doing this anymore, I’m done playing games.”

You can’t understand the logic here.

He comes barging into your room, demanding you stop making him like you against his will, and when he finds out it’s organic plus you feel the same way, he somehow manages to reject you? It stings, a lot.

“Yes or no.”, he sternly interrupts your quickly spiraling thoughts.

“Yes or no..?” Flat out confused for the millionth time, you blink a few times, pulling back the tears that threatened to spill over at his initial rejection.

“I’m not asking again.”, he curtly spits out.

“But what are you asking yes or no for?” You squint at him, unsure and waiting for him to say something along the lines of ‘Yes to dying or no to living’.

“Are we dating or not! Yes or no goddamnit!” He’s blushing brighter than you at this point, eyes pointed to various places in your room where you aren’t, shifting in place uncomfortably.

Suddenly it dawns on you.

Even after hearing your returned confession he doesn’t think you’ll say yes.

“Yes, Bakugou, of course.”, you say with a warm smile, reaching forward to hold his hand.

His sigh of relief as he relaxes his posture strikes you as intensely adorable, though your heart skips a beat when he shoots you a smirk. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

#bakugou katuski x reader #sfw #bakugou katsuki #gender neutral reader #gn reader #bakugou fluff #mha fluff #fluff #a03 fic

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ethrenisnotthehero · 3 years

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@hogwartsmystory is a predator (part 2)

If you haven’t read the first part of the callout, I encourage you to do so here. As before, the normal tags are not included in this post in order to allow this to reach as many people as possible. Potential triggers are listed below, and the main content is hidden to keep sensitive individuals from being unintentionally exposed. TW: Pedophilia, Abuse, Gaslighting, Sexual Assault, Self Harm, Suicide, NSFW Topics, Faked Illness, Faked Mental Illness, Faked Death, Victim Blaming

Ren met Jill sometime between December of 2013 and January of 2014. At the time, he was dating another staff member of the website who will be referred to as Buttercup from now on. Jill was vulnerable in some of the most classic ways a CSA survivor often is. Her home life was chaotic and difficult. She was just finishing middle school. Depression had started to surface, and, worst of all, she had just been diagnosed with a life-altering chronic disease that would require her to change significant aspects of her daily life just to survive. She just wanted a place to fit in and be welcomed, and fell into Ren’s lures without ever considering the danger that lurked behind the screen.

Up until now, it could be understandable to argue that Ren may not have been purposely grooming young girls. Creating a mature themed website might be creepy and inappropriate, but that doesn’t necessarily make someone a predator. No, what made Ren a predator were his motives, his goals, and his solicitation of vulnerable youth into grossly exploitative relationships. What remains the most disturbing to me is that his behavior consistently fits with the profile of an egomaniac desperate to have power over someone dependent on him, fitting textbook descriptions of the methods abusers employ in order to coax their victims in and trap them there.

The Act of Grooming, Part Two: Approach

Even though common luring methods of child predators are well-known within advocate and legal communities, the average person typically has neither heard of them nor is likely to recognize them as they happen. Some behaviors attached to common lures are easily identifiable: a stranger somehow uses a young child’s name to create familiarity and abducts them, or convinces a child that there are prizes to be had if they come along. Methods like these have names, and Ren is guilty of utilizing at least four to his advantage.

The Authority Lure

When Jill first told me about her first interactions with Ren, she was quick to note how starstruck she was with that fact that he wanted to talk to her at all. “I was surprised that admins even RPed down with their peasants on this site,” she told me. Interacting with staff on the site made her feel special and seen, and Ren was quick to start chatting with her. He had a particular interest in her character. Someone of great importance and authority on the site, going out of his way to interact with her out of all people. He held power over her (over most users on the site) and that was something he was keenly aware of. More sinisterly, not only did Ren himself have power over younger users, but he increased his reach and control through the creation of alternative identities. Ren’s main identities were Aaron, Seth, Carter, and Lauren, all of whom he used to form relationships with and manipulate different individuals on the site.

Seth and Carter’s accounts have since been deleted, so unfortunately I was not able to see what kind of people Ren made them out to be. However, he clearly made users believe that these were all existing people, and used their identities to build his authority. When everyone on staff is the same person, it doesn’t leave very much room for dissent.

As for Lauren? Lauren was Ren’s real identity, and the mastermind behind all of it.

As you can see in this post, as of November 11, 2013, Ren was 17 years old. Not only that, but he was in a position of power over children in real life, too. There’s no reason that Ren would not have known better; no one in that position would be able to have a relationship with a small child as a “mistake.” Frequently, Ren claimed to be a babysitter for kids as old as 14, which means that children were fully exposed to him on all fronts. Ignorance is not a viable excuse for him; there’s no way he didn’t realize what he was doing was wrong.

A person might argue that there’s no substantial proof that these identities are fake. That would be a valid question at this point. One of Ren’s supporters (and self-proclaimed partner) has admitted themselves that these “alternate personalities” did not exist. In an attempt to explain away Ren’s toxic behaviors, they offered up a Dissociative Identity Disorder diagnosis as a defense:

However, there’s one glaring issue with this claim. According to the DSM-5 classification of mental disorders by the American Psychiatric Association, amnesia must occur for a diagnosis of DID. Amnesia is defined by the DSM-5 as gaps in the recall of everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events. Ren never experienced amnesia associated with the “switch” of an alter; in fact, he claimed that he and his friends would regularly do activities together, and would even communicate back and forth online with each other during the same lengths of time on AS as he switched between accounts.

I understand that everyone has different experiences with mental illness, and that illness does not have the same symptoms for every person. Regardless, Ren was clearly aware of his actions and the way he used his other accounts to lure/hurt users. Mental illness is not an excuse for hurting children, ever. Ren knew it then, and I can guarantee you he knows it now.

The Affection Lure

Another way predators appeal to their victims is with affection. Pedophiles take advantage of rocky home situations or difficult experiences to abuse the trust a child has placed in them. Jill came to know Ren well through their role-plays. They talked often. Ren made himself available to her, gave her comfort that she desperately needed, and even offered other friends who could be an ear or a shoulder to her. When Ren learned of Jill’s chronic illness, he connected her with Seth, another of his personalities. He coaxed Jill into trusting him, and their relationship became inappropriately intense. Most children are exploited by people that are close to them, by people who they trust and rely on.

At the time, Jill may not have realized how difficult her situation was for her. To her, the chaos of her family life may have seemed normal. Having to compete with siblings and neighborhood kids may have seemed normal. Falling into severe, deep depression may have seemed normal. The truth of the situation is that a vulnerable young woman was falling through the cracks, and Ren saw an opportunity to place himself as the most important person in her life. She needed to belong, so he made sure that she felt like she belonged with him. She needed to be heard, so he made sure that she felt like he was the only one who heard her. She needed friends, so he made sure that all her friends were him.

Not only did he use her trust in him to groom her for a relationship, but he used it to isolate her. If everyone she knew was him, then he would be the only positive feature in her life. If everyone else was an enemy, then she would have nowhere to turn to but him. If he convinced her that she was his world, and that he was hers, she would never believe anyone trying to warn her about him and his behavior. Ren took advantage of a 14 year old child’s insecurities and sickness to insert himself as the most important aspect of her life.

There’s plenty of evidence that this wasn't the first time he’d thought of something like this, either. Ren had an obsession with themes of abuse, torture, and child slavery in his stories and role-plays. Much of his content centered around taking advantage of vulnerable people.

It wasn’t just his role-play ideas that crossed the line. His behavior toward other members of the site was hair-raising at best. His supporters try to paint him as someone affectionate and well-meaning, but he had habits of talking to young users in a manner that borders on profiling.

These aren’t things that someone a few months short of their eighteenth birthday should be saying to children on the internet. His behavior also delved into the realm of victim blaming, too; when a minor on the site was posting about their father going out of his way to make custody as complicated and as disruptive as possible, Ren had this to say:

A man, who would have been 18 at the time, with the audacity to imply that a child was to blame for the controlling behavior of their father. That their father only loved them, and that they might have done something to make a grown man act like a petty child during a divorce.

Ren’s idea of love was as toxic as his need for power.

The Hero Lure

This is, perhaps, the lure that Ren is mostly guilty of. An egomaniac soothed by his own words, Ren saw himself as a hero. In his own mind, he was a faultless deity who deserved no less than the complete and undivided affections of his subjects, but who fabricated false identities at every opportunity. In Ren’s mind, he is the hero. The survivors of his abuse are turned to abusers, those who dare question him are nothing but petty liars, and anyone not completely enthralled by him is nothing but an extra in his story. That’s what Ethren was created to emulate.

Ren has not grown. Someone who has grown would take ownership of their mistakes and apologize for the pain they had caused. Someone truly sorry, truly changed, wouldn’t dare to trample on the feelings of people they had hurt. Ren is no different now than he was six years ago, when he made the decision to change Jill’s life. Instead, he’s turned a survivor into the villain of his world. Instead, he faked his own death so that he could start over with his reputation on AS intact. He never accepted what he did, and instead continues to paint Jill as someone who needed to be “fixed.”

Wanting to be with someone because it feeds a need to “fix” or “help” someone isn’t love. It’s an adult man putting the weight of the world on the shoulders of a little girl. A girl already struggling to adapt. A girl already struggling to fit in. A girl who spent her second week of high school hospitalized because of a sickness that would change her life forever. Jill is a person; she’s a person who’s had to learn to live with restrictions that mean the difference between life and death. She’s a person who’s had to walk alone through the past six years battling depression and trauma completely unheard and unseen. She’s not a character in Ren’s world. She’s not some fixation to help him feel better about himself.

Jill is a real, living, breathing human being with thoughts and feelings and a future: a future that Ren has done him damn best to make about himself for the past six years.

Ren never wanted to help anyone. Ren needed to feel important to other people to have some kind of meaning to himself. His obsession with playing hero went so far that he would torment his victims just so that he could swoop in and be what they needed. He would pretend to be sick or injured. He would go from having a cold, to strep, to pneumonia in under a day.

He would suddenly need a nebulizer for breathing treatments for his false illnesses.

His friends and loved ones would suddenly have life-threatening medical conditions and need to be taken to the hospital.

He pretended to have cancer.

He would use his identities to threaten self harm or death. He used Seth to tell Jill that he was going to send someone to kill her, making her scared for her own life. He made her a part of a world where he was the only one who could help her to satisfy his own sick need to be the most important thing to someone else.

When life caught up to him, he pretended to die.

He knew what he was doing was wrong. He asked Jill to lie about her age and told her that if anyone ever found out about them, he would get in trouble. He used his status as her hero to solicit sexual content online. He knew her age, knew how vulnerable she was, and knew how desperately she needed to fit in. He took advantage of that to fill his own desperate need to be the hero.

The legal age where a person can consent in Jill’s country is 16. When they officially began dating, she was 14. Ren was 18. He was an adult four years older than her, who would have faced charges of child abuse in his own state for their relationship. They had a sexual relationship online, which would be equivalent to soliciting child porn in his state. She never cheated on him; he was her world, because he made every effort to make sure that he was.

She never even saw his face.

She never even knew his real name.

She grappled for years afterwards with trauma, and he wouldn’t even give her the decency of having peace when they finally split. Instead, he came here with his stories. He wrote up fantasies where he was the hero, and she was the one who abused him. Jill was still a minor at the end of her relationship. When I asked her if she’s gotten help, she didn’t think a therapist would take her seriously. Ren took her ability to trust her own voice from her. He took her ability to believe that her own problems were valid. He took six years of her life and made it hell for the sake of his own ego and vanity. Pedophiles will often lie about their age, but most of them make it clear that they’re adults. Their true age might vary by four to five years (like in Ren’s case of claiming to be 21 at 17), but they always make it very clear that they’re adults. Predators know what they’re doing. They’re master manipulators. They’re adept at communication. They seem innocent on the surface, until everything they’ve done is laid out where it can be seen for what it is. Predators rely on persuasion, not coercion (Abrams 2016).

Someone I know asked me if I ever considered, even briefly, that Jill wasn’t telling the truth. I answered back without hesitation that I never did, not even once, because I hadn’t even touched one of the most important parts of my research.

Like other predators, Ren had a type. Buttercup was his first victim. When she and Ren met she was only 13-- Just like Jill.

Continue to Part 3

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tarysande · 4 years

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It’s the Dose that Makes the Poison: Lucifer Thoughts and Speculation

I’m going to throw the entirety of this under a cut because spoilers. I’ve been rearranging the pieces on the table and I have some meta and a plausible(?) theory about how things might shake out.

...this is almost four thousand words long, and frankly? I feel I’ve barely grazed the surface.

Also, I put it on AO3 for ease of reading and/or in case anyone wants to have, idk, threaded conversations ;D

Okay. Here are a bunch of the pieces. (Or the piece is here, as it were.)

First: The show has always been about redemption; the showrunners throw that word around all the time. Second: I don’t think we’re going to see an endgame or a narrative where God is evil. So, how to make the concept of literal Hell work, then? How to explain or justify the idea of a father who a) kicked his kid out of the house and sent him to Hell for-literal-ever and b) created children for specific “of God” purposes.

Hell

In 5x01, Lee says, “Whose Hell is this, anyway?” and ... I think that’s the crux of the matter. In S3, Lucifer realizes he gave himself the face of a monster because he felt monstrous. But the truth is, he didn’t just give himself the face.

He gave himself the place, too. 5x01 is littered with clues that indicate this. Lucifer says “you to your torture and me to mine.” Lee’s entire speech—the one that pushes all Lucifer’s buttons because of course Lucifer’s projecting all over Lee’s “worst memory”—might as well be Lucifer talking to himself (not unlike Uriel in Lucifer’s hell loop). You know, the part of Lucifer that’s starting to understand all the psychological stuff Linda’s been yammering on about.

Lucifer created Hell. To torture himself for what he believes he did. He created the mechanism that you can walk out any time you like—but no one ever does. None of the doors are locked, right?

On some level, Lucifer, who is all about fairness and justice, looked at what he did and decided the Hell as we’ve seen it was the appropriate punishment. And with Lee, Lucifer almost figures out that the goal of “Hell” isn’t to eternally loop through guilt-fueled self-torture but to forgive yourself and apologize or make amends or not repeat the mistakes. Most of all, learn that nothing changes if you stay in the loop and the only way to break the loop is to take risk that you might fuck up and do something that you feel guilty for again.

Names/Family

Something that’s always jumped out at me is that no matter how many millennia have passed, Lucifer—to whom nicknames and names are canonically really goddamned important—always refers to his family by their familial connection to him “brother, sister, Mum, Dad.” When he banished himself from Heaven—and I’m starting to think he did—he didn’t stop feeling like he was a part of his family. Even when he wanted to eat Amenadiel’s heart someday, he still called him “brother.” Even when Uriel was threatening Chloe (and Mum), he was still “brother.”

For that matter, isn’t it interesting that all Lucifer’s estranged siblings refer to him by the name he chose for himself—not the one he was given? Except, of course, when they want to hurt him. We’ve known since what, S1? That Lucifer cannot abide the name Samael. Even Uriel calls him Lucifer. Or Luci. Mum calls him Lucifer. Lucifer was given Poison of God and he chose Bringer of Light. And everyone who loved (and loves) him said, “All right. Lucifer it is.” And though Lucifer is originally a little eye-rolly with nicknames—Luce, Luci—it’s fond, not the “I’m going to rip out your spine and beat you to death with it” response Samael elicits. Essentially, Samael is Lucifer’s deadname. And people who use intentionally are dismissing and rejecting the identity Lucifer chose, which is vile.

When I was researching/writing Taking the Fall and I knew I wanted to talk about the name thing, I came across this quotation ascribed to Paracelsus, and it really resonated: “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison, the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.” The dosage, in fact, is the difference between whether something is a poison or a cure. And if that doesn’t align with the themes of the show, I don’t know what does.

Lucifer has spent all this time thinking he is a poison; he has never imagined that he might be a cure. (To angels embracing their free will; to ending the sharp black and white segregation between Heaven and Hell; to darkness, to fear. Yet the more Lucifer learns and the healthier he gets, the more we see cures in what he does: i.e., Brody and also, you know, solving crimes.)

Michael, on the other hand, means “Who is like God?” It’s meant to be a rhetorical question, but in the universe of the show, I think Michael’s twisted version is that he used the question “Who is like God?” to plant the seed of Lucifer’s rebellion ... and is now answering the question “Who is like God?” with the reply, “I am."

Maze

But just in case we head too far down the Lucifer is Great line of thinking, we’ve got a big old example of how he’s still a poison, too.

Contrast this discussion of family with the lesson Lucifer still needs to learn about Maze—he’s managed to absorb that she’s not his servant anymore, but he’s still clinging to that soulless demon/just a demon dismissiveness. And despite self-worth coming from within, bitches, Maze still hasn’t truly absorbed that. She still looks outside for validation—and resents or backslides when she doesn’t get it. Especially from Lucifer. Because Lucifer was the first being to treat her like she mattered. She admires him. Looks up to him. Loves him. In many ways, Maze is the shadow of Chloe—drawn to Lucifer but never, from his perspective, his equal or his partner.

And he, for all the strides he’s made, still default to “demon” as derogatory and dismissive. Something she can’t transcend, even though all the evidence suggests the contrary. As long as Lucifer sees Maze as just a demon, she can’t truly escape from that identity.

Why does Maze keep “betraying” Lucifer? It’s tempting to think it’s because she’s a demon. Because she doesn’t have “a soul.” But that’s not true. She can learn; she learns from “betraying” Chloe and doesn’t do it a second time. She learns from “betraying” Linda and Trixie. Even she and Amenadiel seem to have reached a real (and much more healthy) understanding of who they are to each other.

She keeps betraying Lucifer because he keeps deserving it.

Servants

The thing is, I think there’s something important in Lucifer’s “You’re not my servant anymore” to Maze. Because I think angels believe they are God’s servants. And I suspect the reason God’s been so AFK is because he really wanted them to ... break free of that. On their own. Without him telling them to—because if he told them, it wouldn’t be choice anymore. It wouldn’t be free will. It would be Following The Will of DadGod.

Here’s another relevant Paracelsus quotation: “No one who can stand alone by himself should be the servant of another.”

Angels self-actualize. They have powers. Sometimes those powers change (as with Amenadiel). I don’t think angels ever lacked free will.

What is self-actualization but literal free will? You become what you believe you are; you do what you think you’re supposed to. You literally change based on your choices and feelings about those choices. Angels basically have human free will on a kind of EXTREME SCALE that they’ve remained mostly ignorant of throughout time. But how do you get your kids to figure something out without telling them how to figure it out when they’ve all got this WILL OF DAD complex? He gave them the tool of self-actualization. When they didn’t ... do that, he created humanity. He tinkered with the model. Took away the names and the powers that were such a stumbling block for his angels and such a shining example of how he failed them. If someone hangs on your every word, if you are not just their father but their master, how can they ever know love? Trust? How can they ever be free? Be themselves? I think God wanted his angel children to learn from his human children and was disappointed when they pretty much decided to just be remote and Angelically Superior All The Time, instead. Of course, that's mostly on him, too.

Except Lucifer. Because Lucifer’s curiosity (yes, from the beginning of time) kept bringing him so close to figuring things out. (Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, amirite, Paradise Lost?) And as close as he was to figuring things out, Lucifer was still prideful and selfish and superior. The result was what happened with (and in) Hell. Things got twisted down there; he was in a God role over the demons and he was not hands-off. Cue endless loops of pain and torture and despair and self-recrimination and poison. Lilith may have started their pain, but Lucifer, however unintentionally or ignorantly, continued it.

At least Lucifer could escape it sometimes. Those poor demons. Those poor abandoned children. They had two rocks.

Pretty sure there’s going to be an echo of Dad abandonment with his angel kids and Lilith of her demon kids, by the by. Because abandonment is a theme. And good intentions or not, well, you know what they say about the road to Hell.

Humanity The more Lucifer interacted with humanity, the more he learned from humanity. And, of course, the entire journey of the series has been about Lucifer learning, growing, adapting, changing because of this. And not in a Superior Angelic Way, but in a person-to-person real way. Not just with Chloe. With everyone. But yeah, Chloe is the catalyst—precisely because (as Amenadiel says) she’s the only mortal who sees Lucifer for who he really is, without her reflected desires getting in the way. No one, no one else can truly reflect back to him his worthiness or lack thereof.

Does Chloe have a power? It’s not laser-beam hands. But I’ve always thought Chloe has the power of seeing things and, in seeing, encouraging others to see, too. And this is most obvious with Lucifer, whose power has never let him be seen. Because of his power, he can never know if the reactions of others are about him or about their own desires.

What agony for someone whose chosen path is bringing light: to be forever hidden in the shadow of the light others see.

Until Chloe.

Michael tells Lucifer his greatest fear is that of being unworthy. We know Lucifer has always feared he’s not worthy of Chloe. But now that she’s told him, shown him, his worthiness? You’d better believe that he will never, ever abandon her—will never, ever let her suffer from her worst fear. Gosh, and by suddenly being invulnerable again, it’s almost like he’s assured that, isn’t it? “You make me vulnerable” was about his walls. “My invulnerability ensures I will never, ever abandon you,” is all about hers.

So, back to learning from humanity. We’ve seen Lucifer and Amenadiel do it. It’s been hinted that Azrael has done it, at least a little. Then we have Michael’s frustrated tale of how the other angel siblings are taking note of Lucifer’s actions—with the implication being that maybe they’re learning, too. Maybe they’re starting to understand that they can be more than they think they have been made to be. More than just a “Something” of God.

Control

Meanwhile, of course, Michael’s concocted some kind of Make Heaven Great Again plot—ironically, it appears, by doing exactly what he accused Lucifer of doing: believing he can run things better than Dad. And, I suspect, by trying to set himself as Master and his siblings (and other assorted peons) as his servants. Only, he’s not doing it in Lucifer’s ultimately forthright (and even honest) way of “This sucks and I’m rebelling” but in a conniving, secretive, Machiavellian way that probably sounds a lot like “Dad says” or “Dad’s not here” or “Who is closer to God than I?” ...

Who is like God, indeed. He even throws down the word archangel when he speaks to Dan: an angel above even other angels. I’m 99% sure that word’s never been used before on the show. Because that’s what Michael desires. To be more. To be everything. To control.

He’s what Lucifer was as the Lord of Hell. He’s everything Lucifer has made such progress toward overcoming.

Incidentally, and also essay-worthy: This is why the progression of the scene where Lucifer and Chloe make love is so incredibly (heh) important: Lucifer of the perfect appearance, perfect pocket square, perfect car, perfectly clean apartment; Lucifer of control control control control ... surrenders. He offers. She accepts. And in these first moments—“Incredible,” he breathes before they’ve done anything more than kiss—she is above him, in control ... and nothing bad happens. Nothing hurts him even though she makes him hurt-able. She doesn’t take advantage of him. She loves him; she treasures him; she protects him. It’s beautiful. It’s everything he’s been so afraid he could never have.

And for the first time (very possibly) ever, he sees himself as worthy. He sees himself as belonging. He believes he is not alone; he is not lonely.

Power

Amenadiel “lost” his power to stop time when he decided he didn’t want to stand apart from humanity anymore. Essentially, just as he lost his wings when he was so horrified and disgusted by what he’d done (to Lucifer, with Malcolm, etc.) he caused himself to Fall. He regained his wings when he made it his purpose to bring Charlotte to Heaven. He stopped time again in S5 when the question of humanity—of his own child being human, and thus ‘not like him’ or ... not that ‘special’—reared its head. With the nuns, he reflects their love of God, right? And in part, that’s because he’s in this father (or Father) role now.

Angel powers, like all power really, are double-edged. In the wrong hands or twisted the wrong way, a good power can bring about evil. Look at the almost throwaway line with Brody in 5x02: Lucifer’s “desire” power—so often spun as about sin or hedonism—brought Brody peace and forgiveness. That Lucifer doesn’t lie or take without giving in return indicates that, on some level, the level that values true justice—and even a bit of mercy—he was never able to use that power against others (the way we see Michael do with his); he didn’t want to use as he felt he’d been used; he also didn’t want to feel used by those whose desires he provided (this is why the parade of one-night stands and “it was just sex—great sex, but just sex” partners upset him so much back in S2). Favors—and even the give and take of sex—were a way to balance that scale. Again, this could be a whole essay all its own.

This makes me suspect that the dark side of Lucifer’s powers played some part in his Rebellion. That he abused desire the way we’ve seen Michael abuse fear.

So, about that power of fear, then. I mean, it just sounds negative. How can FEAR be positive, right? But if Michael were using his powers to draw out fears so they’re named and dealt with (LIKE PEOPLE DO IN THERAPY???) instead of manipulated for personal gain—it could be a very healing power (LIKE THERAPY???).

Greatest Strength/Greatest Weakness

The absolute thematic and narrative brilliance of twin brothers having the powers of fear and desire whilst also being held back BY the “power” of their twin is so amazing it really needs its own essay. But I do want to mention this relative to the overall arc heading forward. Much of Lucifer’s work with Linda has been about addressing his fears; he’s made a ton of progress with this. As I mentioned earlier, with Linda’s guidance, Lucifer has been drawing out his fears in a safe(r) space and learning to deal with them and heal. And, in doing so, his own power of reflecting desire has increasingly been less and less about artisanal honey and car batteries and more about drawing out desires that help others heal, grow, become their best selves, release their inner demons.

Michael is (both literally and figuratively) twisted by his desires (to be powerful, to be stronger/better/more admired than his brother). I’ll bet some cold hard cash that if Lucifer’s the source of the original injury to his shoulder/wing, Michael has self-actualized into keeping that injury—perhaps even magnifying it—to a) manipulate others into feeling sorry for him, b) to remind everyone who looks at him how awful Lucifer is, and c) to trick people into believing he’s weaker than he is.

At the end of the day, fear and desire are two of the strongest motivating forces in the world (universe); the show is showing us all the messy ways those forces come into play. And it’s also showing how connection and love and trust are the forces that both fight the worse facets of these powers and that let these forces be useful in helpful and ultimately healing ways.

Because THERAPY.

Home

So, we know we’re rolling toward what was meant to be a series finale; it’s time to start tying loose ends together, right? Again and again, the question of home comes up. Lucifer only ever refers to Los Angeles as his home. Maze, on the other hand, still defaults to Hell as home.

Hell as we know it is over. But Hell as a place where Maze tries to impart the lessons she’s learned on Earth to her abandoned, twisted-by-hate-and-loneliness-and-Lilith siblings? Perhaps even with Eve “mother of all humanity” at her side to help clean up some of the mess Lilith made when she decided to abandon connection in favor of more selfish desire? I think that’s plausible, while also managing a significant nod at where Mazikeen ends up in the comics and a heavy dash of “the things we learn from therapy and/or being best friends with a therapist.”

Now, I know the question of how things will end for Chloe and Lucifer is contentious in fandom. So, you know, grain of salt. I don’t think Lucifer’s home is Los Angeles; the Los Angeles in Hell wasn’t enough because it didn’t have her in it. In a literal embodiment of “Home is where the heart is,” Lucifer’s home is with Chloe. And since Chloe’s worst fear is abandonment, Lucifer will do what it takes to stay with her—because that’s what’s most important to him. The utterly unselfish choice. I think there’s some pretty reasonable foreshadowing (Lilith’s choice—if that choice was even real, of course—for example) that Lucifer may choose to renounce his immortality. Or to give it to someone else. Or that immortality won’t matter at all anymore.

From his reactions in 5x07/08, we know that Lucifer’s identity and ideas of usefulness/self-worth/worthiness of love are still connected to his identity as an immortal with powers; I think, though, he’s beginning to piece together the complications therein, especially regarding questions of partnership and vulnerability and equality.

Personally, Human!Lucifer has never been my preferred outcome, but I can see how it might work/might be what they’re heading for. Even if I’d still prefer the “you can use me as a bullet shield” partnership with supernatural elements—because those have always been at the heart of their partnership. The strengths of one make up for the weaknesses in the other (and vice versa).

Hell (Redux)

Finally, I’m still pretty sure we’re going to see a complete overhaul of the Heaven/Hell dichotomy. One with a lot less THIS IS THE WAY IT IS BECAUSE CONTROL and a lot more CHOICES MATTER (maybe Linda can have a turn as a salamander after all). And a major catalyst, of course, is Lucifer and his love for the chosen family on earth (and through them, a renewed love for the estranged family he’s never actually stopped loving; 5x01 basically makes canon that it's not that Lucifer hates his family—it's that he's terrified of disappointing them again, of causing problems again).

So why does Hell have to change?

Because right now, every human he loves is sure they’re going to Hell. And after all the time and all these friendships, can you really see Lucifer being okay with that? Okay with Ella or Linda or Dan or Trixie tormenting themselves for all eternity? When he wasn’t even okay with Mr. Said Out Bitch doing so? When he gave this guy who he barely knows every opportunity to change his fate in ways he’s never done for any other tortured soul? Because they had a tenuous connection on earth?

Can you see him being okay with Chloe choosing Hell to be with him?

When it boils right down to it, Lucifer has learned to love others. And I think, especially given his revelations about self-loathing last season, that love isn’t going to let him be okay with or encourage the self-loathing in others. Love—selfless love, real love—is, in fact, the cure to the very concept of Hell.

And it’s also the cure to the very concept of Heaven, too.

How could Heaven ever be perfect if the people you love aren’t in it?

It can’t. It might be more silver and have fewer demons, but I don’t think it’s any less an eternal torture. Eve basically tells us as much.

So, on that note, I’ll leave you with another fine quotation from Paracelsus:

“When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven, as it were, and from it the work that he desires to create flows into him... For such is the immensity of man that he is greater than heaven and earth.”

And that, I think, is going to be the takeaway. We create what we are; we choose what we create. And in the act of that creation, we choose whether we are the poison or the remedy. And if we make mistakes, slip up, hurt people, hurt ourselves—it’s not a Hell-sentence. It’s the dose that makes the poison. We learn, we grow, we apologize, we strive to make things better, we love and love and love and love, and we never stop striving to be the cure.

#lucifer morningstar #chloe decker #deckerstar #lucifer on netflix #lucifer meta #lucifer speculation #lucifer season 5 #lucifer s5 spoilers #who asked for 3K+ of meta speculation?#no one #but here it is #long text post #very very long text post #lucifer thoughts

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gaawachan · 3 years

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Critical Role 127 Discord Discussion

*Content warning, discussions of trauma, toxicity, toxic masculinity, implied projection, violence, strong language, etc*

*this is a conversation between two AFAB people with PTSD about Critical Role. It is a bit uncharitable at times, but try to understand that it's coming from a place of hurt and frustration. There are brief references to our own trauma, and discussions about social pressure and unsafe handling of traumatized individuals. Please note that NONE of this is directed at the Critical Role cast*

Also, sorry to any Veth fans we’ve offended, but it’s not so entertaining when you’ve had people like that in your life messing with your ability to heal in a healthy way. Sometimes the media we consume is unintentionally hurtful... as is the meta surrounding it. Please try to remember who might be reading your posts.

Sibling: (regarding a post about how Veth drew first blood in sanatorium) That's TRUE! VETH SHOT FIRST "oh wow what a cold-blooded murderer" fuck off with that lol

Me: ngl I dislike Veth at this point. She's outright toxic to Caleb in a way that makes me really uncomfortable.

Sibling: How dare she call him that when her first impulse in ANY SITUATION is to kill... and she dragged him to the hall he was abused in and condemned him for killing people as swiftly as he could.

Me: She's by far the most bloodthirsty, the whole group (but especially her) keep pushing him into situations he doesn't want to be in and then they clutch their pearls as he mops up the mess THEY pressured him into.

Sibling: I honestly wish Caddy had gone instead of Jester, but I understand why he couldn't.

Me: At EVERY TURN, even before Molly died, they pushed him and put him in dangerous situations he didn't want to be in and then they're like GASP he kills people really fast oh no!

Sibling: I mean, what I don't get is that... yeah, visually the deaths seem horrible. HE MADE SURE THEY DIED AS QUICKLY AS-AS THAT LADY FROM HITMAN WHO GETS SQUASHED IN THE GIANT PRESSER.

Me: No one else in the party gets pressured to do things they don't want to do quite like Caleb does. Maybe Caduceus, early on. But they are CONSTANTLY doing this to Caleb at every turn. Fjord is probably the only one who consistently tries to avoid doing that. Everyone else gets the whole "we'll support whatever you choose to do" treatment. Not Caleb.

Sibling: but yeah, Beau seems... okayish about it? But I wish she'd kept her mouth shut about Astrid. Why should he have to hear what someone complicit in his abuse and others' is "feewwing"? She's using him and she's using the 9.

Me: It makes me so angry, because Caleb, more than any other member of the party, really ought to be given respect for his own autonomy and wishes, ESPECIALLY with regards to his past! They don't just pressure him to do things he doesn't want to do with respect to his past (and other situations, too) but they demand that he do what they think he should while holding the motives they think he should have while doing so. It's not enough that he go after Trent, he has to police his own feelings and do it for the right reasons. Which is really disgusting because all of them are clearly chomping at the bit to kill Trent out of revenge, but Caleb's supposed to want to kill Trent for the greater good. Like seriously FUCK OFF.

Sibling: EXACTLY. HE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO MAKE HIS OWN DECISIONS. It's the expectation of: "You should feel and do these things in regards to your trauma, because doing anything else makes us uncomfortable." Don't we know that fucking feeling. You don't even have to like how you're feeling and other people still get to dictate what is and isn't acceptable. It's genuinely appalling.

Me: I think it's really gross how supportive the group is of each other when it comes to all their various problems, but with Caleb, they are constantly pressuring and challenging him and NOT IN A GOOD WAY.

Sibling: I felt Veth and Caleb's personal exchange was sweet, but I'm right back to feeling that she needs to go when they go to Nicodranas, just... just stay with your family. Bring back Taryon or something.

Me: If this last episode was proof of anything, it's that forcing Caleb to confront his past because others in the party want him to is nothing short of abusive behavior on their parts.

Sibling: Not to mention the condemnation of how he handles the thing they pressured him to do.

Me: And I have thought this even before he told Beau and Molly about Trent, because Caleb didn't want to participate in that tournament thing in Zadash that put him back on Trent's radar. And after he told them, did he ever get an apology from those who pressured him to participate in that? No.

Sibling: ... I just don't understand the 9. Caleb... It'd be like how they treated Fjord in regards to Avantika, honestly.

Me: But frankly she (Veth) has been repeatedly very cruel to him in a very casual way.

Sibling: Totally, wtf, she says she loves him but she acts like she thinks he’s an awful person- a useful awful person.

Me: And I should be clear, I've tried really, really hard to give her the benefit of the doubt, and she just keeps doing it over and over.

Sibling: Dude, same. I thought we got Nott back, and was feeling good until recently.

Me: And the thing that pisses me off most of all is that Caleb HAS made clear what HE wants at this point, and the party just... glossed over it. Caduceus said he approved of Caleb's stance, but... That doesn't mean anything if you don't actively push back against the pressure the other party members apply.

Sibling: As I've said before, I want Caduceus and Caleb to have this talk and yet I realize that he's not that kind of counselor. I don't see Ducey as an advocate... he has no idea what Caleb went through and doesn't have the skills to help him cope; he's a grief counselor, not a therapist.

Me: What Caleb needs is input from people who aren't so pushy about this. Fjord is a good choice but, like Caddy, he's shown that he won't step in and be like "how about we do what CALEB wants?"

Sibling: And... they're able to semi-acknowledge Beau's trauma but not Caleb's? Fjord honestly is the closest thing to an advocate Caleb has but he... he's also too passive. He doesn't care if Caleb does something he'll regret and also doesn't care that other people are pushing him into doing things he'll regret.

Me: Honestly this is why I was HOPING that Essek would get to know the party better, because for all his faults, Essek generally has a cool head and I think he WOULD push back against the others and say that, especially with his experience with the Assembly. I think that Essek would definitely support Caleb's perspective more than the others and he's not afraid to push back with his opinions.

Sibling: Shadowgast forever. Even if it dismays the Widojest fans, who apparently don't like shipping Caleb with people who are morally questionable. Despite the fact that Jester was willing to dupe a ton of people into putting their lives in danger for an imaginary friend.

Me: (not touching ship wars with a ten foot pole, tyvm) I think if Essek saw the way the party members were pressuring Caleb with respect to Trent in particular, he'd be a bit taken aback because he's seen how amenable to the wants of his friends Caleb is.

Sibling: Essek did what Essek wanted to and it got him into trouble. Caleb is helping other people and doing exactly what others tell him to, feeling what others want him to, trying to please them, and it's getting him into trouble. They could do with a bit of reigning in for each other.

Me: Ngl, if this mess gets Caleb killed, I'm going to lose it.

Sibling: Well, I mean... If Caleb dies at all, I'm going to lose it... especially because his blood will be on the 9's hands and I'm not sure if, like Molly, he would want to come back. Which is awful to say but I wonder if someone so... hurt wouldn't just... let it happen.

Sibling: I sort of got it from a player's perspective in regards to Ducey? The cast was bored and weren't really interested in Cad's story so they messed around and ignored him... But like, this? This is... "We need to see Caleb's story arc because we haven't yet, even though it doesn't make sense right now and we're already on a time limit"

Me: That's true... IT MAKES ME SO MAD. When they finished the spell for Veth and tricked Isharnai, Cale let her take time to think before they removed the curse. He didn't even fully understand why she needed that time but he gave it to her. And again, on Rumblecusp for Jester, he was like "here is what I can offer. What do you want me to do for you? I am here for you." AND THEY NEVER DO THE SAME THING IN TURN. WHEN IT'S HIS TURN, THE PARTY IS LIKE "HERE IS WHAT WE WANT YOU TO DO AND HOW WE WANT YOU TO FEEL ABOUT IT."

Sibling: It's true. I'd go so far as to say Caleb's self-destructive in that respect.

Me: Maybe I'm being uncharitable, but this has been going on for 127 episodes and it hasn't gotten any better! They're STILL doing this and they're not even being half as supportive about it the way they were with Jester's angst about Artagan! And Caleb is almost as young as Jester mentally!

Sibling: No, I don't think you're being uncharitable. They treat Caleb like they know what's best for him and not one has bothered to ask him- SERIOUSLY ASK HIM- "Do you want to deal with this now, later, or not at all? because it's okay if you don't want to deal with it. That's your choice."

Sibling: Can you imagine if they were as supportive to Caleb as they were to Jester about her "pedoy-creeper" imaginary friend? Meanwhile Caleb's backstory has ACTUAL TONES of sexual abuse and they're just like hahaaha, don't you want to go back to the torture prison?? You can get some anti-spy necklaces, it'll be good but don't kill anyone there even if they were complicit in your abuse...

Me: AND THEN RESPECT THAT CHOICE. They do not, DO NOT, get to clutch their pearls over Caleb killing people in the sanatorium after all this time. THEY pressured him to do this, THEY ALREADY KNEW this would be awful for him, THEY'VE ALREADY SEEN WHAT HE'S LIKE in these situations, and THEY ARE JUST AS MURDEROUS AS HE IS. When other party members kill people, it's no big deal, but when Caleb is faced with people who imprison and experiment on and torture people like him (ONLY FIVE-SIX YEARS AGO HE WAS IN THERE) and he kills them and they have the audacity to be upset as if they haven't killed dozens of other people for far weaker reasons!

Sibling: ... Actually, do you think it's a sexism thing? They're not addressing Caleb's massive elephant in the room because there's a cute gal who has mild creeper overtones in her backstory?

Me: Yes, I absolutely do. If Caleb was a cute girl, they would be far more emotionally supportive and would not be pressuring him in this way. It absolutely wouldn't happen.

Sibling: Like, they punched the crap out of Artagan, which like, cool, but what did he do to Jester? He screwed over other people and there's some mild undertones of gross manipulation when she was little. Trent canonically abused the Blumentrio when they were children and then stripped Caleb's ability to say "no" from him for 11 years...

Me: It's not just because he's a boy, but he also looks older than he is- early thirties instead of early twenties, and I'd argue that his five years on the streets barely count for mental maturity, too- so they don't give him the same kind of unabashed emotional support, because they still code him as someone "unstable/misled" who needs to be "guided/controlled," hence the constant pressuring and questioning.

Me: No, and that's the thing. The thing that hangs over this in particular. The party barely knows anything about the abuse he suffered and they, including Caleb, know almost nothing about what he endured in the asylum. I can't even imagine how horrifying it is to be there. Just think about it.

Sibling: I have, and I can empathize

Me: Every time he saw one of those guards, you know he had to think... "Did this one hurt me? Did this one? Do they know? They have to know. There's no way they don't know even if they didn't participate... I was here just a few years ago... Did one of them hurt me? Did one of them touch me? Did one of them see me?! I CAN'T EVEN REMEMBER IF THEY HURT ME BUT THEM JUST BEING HERE MEANS THEY ARE HURTING PEOPLE LIKE ME." How is anyone, even someone who wasn't tortured and brainwashed as a teenager, supposed to handle that?

Sibling: I know how much it can fuck you up IRL to be abused. Can you imagine 11 years of that??? Fuck no, it was awful just the few times it happened but that was his TRAINING before it was his PRISON. And then his "friends" call him a murderer. Cold, cruel. And that's the thing... I don't know if Caleb will ever open up to anyone about it. Maybe Essek, but certainly not Veth. Veth doesn't care unless she can get something out of it.

Me: It's shocking to me that no one in the party seemed to even consider what a horrible thing it was to do to bring Caleb back there. It speaks to how little consideration they actually have for his feelings on any meaningful level.

Sibling: The only person I can think of who might have an excuse is Caddy because I don't think he's had that specific talk with Caddy. And he never will, because those characters never fucking talk.

Me: No, when they were in Rexxentrum, he clarified some things. He told them that Trent would hurt him and then apologize after the fact, and about his parents, and in Felderwin he did tell them about the experiments, and they knew that he was kept in the asylum for eleven years.

Sibling: Ugh, you're right. I mean I feel like I just don't understand the 9 right now. Caleb... It's a lot like how how they treated Fjord in regards to Avantika, honestly. In fact, I keep drawing parallels to Fjord.

Me: Yeah, that was terrible.

Sibling: It's another "ughh he's a boy he needs to deal with it" rather than "that was awful and I'm sorry" "what can we do to help" And honestly fuck that mindset.

Me: And remember; Caleb was the only one to consider that what happened with Avantika would be hard on Fjord, and even said to Beau and Nott that they needed to be supportive... and then they just ignored him.

Sibling: How dare they treat Jester, who... I'm sorry, what's her trauma again? She was stuck inside for a while... nvm, why is she being treated with more care than Caleb and Fjord, who've both had actual abusive experiences... and the answer is that they've got dicks, and that means they don’t need concern and care. They can deal with it themselves, they have to be MANLY and cope with violence, but also violence is bad and you shouldn't engage in it... "how dare you strike back at the abusers we told you to strike back at?"

Me: Yes. That is exactly it, and don't forget this: When the party first met Nott and Caleb, they assumed that Caleb was a FUCKING PREDATOR preying on Nott. Why? Because he's a homeless man in his apparent thirties, and she was small.

Sibling: Critical Role and the Assumed Nature of People w/ Penises

Me: The best thing Nott ever did for Caleb was correct the record on that bullshit.

Sibling: But again, that's Nott, not Veth. God I miss Nott.

Me: That was back when he was a surrogate for her family and her hope for becoming herself again.

Sibling: I just.... I don't understand what changed; she cared for Caleb even if it was for her own gain... why is she still manipulating him if she has nothing more to gain?

Me: It was Felderwin (when it started to change). But she's doing it now because it will make it easier for her to leave guilt free.

Sibling: Then leave... Don't hang around with a "murderer" if you're going to pretend you haven't done your fair share of slaughtering yourself- fuck, she even drew first blood in that fight, WHY?!

Me: You don't get to put someone into a position where they have to kill people and then get upset and call them a murderer when they kill people. If Veth had just shot and killed the guy in one turn, do you think she'd get that kind of reaction? No. But because it's the traumatized young man who was trained to be a murderer as a teenager, it's somehow particularly bad when he kills... when he has no choice but to do so?! Ridiculous.

Sibling: I just find it so weird that the ACTUAL murder hobo of the group is pointing at another member and calling him the murder hobo. He has killed people, he was a hobo, but the people who have truly done disgusting things over the course of the campaign is not the hobo who is a murderer. It's the Chaos Crew. Beau killed a person with acid when she had a knife readily available... and you know... could have snapped his neck to begin with... not that the party knows that but.

Me: That's what I EXPECTED Beau to do!

Sibling: The GROUP was all horrified and shocked when Caleb quickly and swiftly took out the guards of the torture dungeon but Beau let a man suffer for fucking MINUTES while acid burned out his throat and he suffocated and STILL DIDN'T DIE until she had to finish him off... and Beau killed that man near Caduceus' family, threw his head in the water.

Me: Remember when Nott killed that guard in Uthodurn?

Sibling: Veth has killed so many people when they didn't need to, but no. Using quick, lethal methods to dispatch guards (much, MUCH BETTER than burning) is too far.

Me: NONE of them are pushed back on in the same way, and none of them are pressured to act/feel a certain way, and ALSO... The party has ONLY benefited from this side of Caleb. It is the ONLY reason that Fjord, Yasha, and Jester are alive, because he went into that space to save them in the Sour Nest. It is the ONLY reason they took down Avantika as easily as they did, because he went all out in that fight. It is the ONLY reason they got Yeza out and made friends with the Dynasty, because he was willing to do something that got him scolded- SCOLDED- by the group even though it saved them and HE was the one losing out more than any other by giving up the beacon! And it is therefore the reason they were able to use their clout in the Dynasty to END THE WAR. They benefit from this headspace Caleb falls into and then condemn it at the same time. Don't want him to be that way? Stop putting him in situations where he HAS TO BE THAT WAY.

Sibling: Caleb is the glue for the M9, has saved them more times than they can count. Time, traveling and in combat, and they're still demanding he address his trauma in ways that make them comfortable. Despicable, and honestly? Toxic.

Me: And now he may fall back into the hands of his abuser because of it. I've been thinking of this ever since the peace talks that it was such a shame that Essek was the traitor because Caleb really, really could have benefited from having a true safe space in Rosohna. What a shame it is that Essek was working for THEM, and broke Caleb's trust, and now Rosohna doesn't feel like a place he can really go to anymore.

Sibling: He still can. If Essek survives, go live in your wizard tower, resummon it every single day, and live life away from both sides of the war.

Me: No, I agree. Probably the worst thing that people keep pressuring Caleb on is not revenge. It's what they keep implying he ought to do after Trent is dead. He DOESN'T WANT to be part of the government. He just wants the scourger program to stop.

Sibling: He owes the government NOTHING. It has only hurt him. He doesn't need to be forced to pick up the mess that OTHER PEOPLE CAUSED because he was affected by it.

Me: He just wanted to teach magic ffs. That breaks my heart. Like, what a terrible thing... to tell someone who already thinks he doesn't deserve to be happy, that he should spend his life in a job he DOESN'T WANT in order to fix things that PEOPLE WHO WRONGED HIM DID. Because he could cave in and do it; he hates himself, and that's the true grossness of all the pressure the party puts on Caleb. His self-loathing makes him inclined to just give in and do what they say, because his own desires will end up stifled by theirs.

Sibling: I think the thing that's weird to me though? Is that... other cast members don't... seem to see that. Even in the Talks Machina segments. Liam has expressed how profoundly damaged Caleb is and the cast, not just the party just... doesn't seem to mind? And I honestly, HONESTLY think it's sexism.

Me: Yeah, remember how sweet they were to Calianna? >_> Less trauma with actions just as bad, and yet... "CALEB WHY ARE YOU DOUBTING AND DISTRUSTING HER" - said the people who non-stop doubt and distrust Caleb.

Sibling: I do completely agree that the way the 9 have been handling Caleb's trauma is encapsulated by last week's episode... I think it: 1) Has a lot to do with sexism and 2) Has a lot to do with the cast rushing his arc before the Eiselcross arc is completed. This doesn't feel like his choice to enter his arc. This feels like his hand was forced to address trauma before he was ready and I don't think that's a great look for the 9.

Me: It makes me sad, too, because I feel like with the careless way the Nein handle Caleb's past... I just don't see any way for things to end well for Astrid and Wulf, to be honest. There's no way these buffoons won't fuck up any chance at those two being redeemed. And I'm not even crazy about the prospect of them being redeemed, but if there's any chance for it... it won't be Caleb that fucks it up. It will be the other members of the Nein, I just know it.

Sibling: No, they'll force a romance that won't be any less toxic than it was before. Because a woman needs to heal Caleb's wounds. *pukes*

Me: GOD AND THEN... Like, they all want revenge on Trent even as they pretend that Caleb shouldn't and needs to do things for the greater good, but... the thing is that if they really, really wanted justice for Caleb... Why, why, WHY are they not coordinating with the COBALT SOUL to take Trent down?! That is their ACTUAL BEST AVENUE for doing so! And Caleb would be far more safe and comfortable doing that!

Sibling: "Because the Cobalt Soul is Beau's arc and we want to do Caleb's arc"

Me: Beau gets a trial for her trauma... Caleb gets called a stone-cold murderer for being forced to confront his directly. Then stop pressuring him into direct confrontations with his trauma!

Sibling: Sexism, I'm telling you. She's a laddyyyy

Me: And more and more I'm thinking that the 8th floor of the tower is actually a really healthy thing for him to do, because it's obvious that he's never going to be able to healthily process his trauma in a way that's under his control with the Nein constantly pressuring him to confront it in dangerous, unsafe ways that he doesn't want to. It's amazing to me that they balked at the 8th floor of the tower but have no problem MAKING HIM INTERACT DIRECTLY WITH THE ASSEMBLY AND THE SANATORIUM.

Sibling: And here's my thought regarding that... He can change the tower. When he doesn't need those rooms anymore, he will change them. As he has for his friends. That's a sign of healing. It's a scar that will heal, and that he has power over.

Me: Yes, yes, exactly! And the thing about it is... It's like photos, you know? And no one can actually hurt him in that space.

Sibling: He doesn't have the power over his place of abuse. Old photos can be used to safely address old trauma... walking into the torture-prison and whining about the people you hurt in there is just...

Me: ... It reminds me of the sequence in Tales of Berseria, where they torture Velvet simply by revealing hidden knowledge about the past to her, or Tales of the Abyss, where Luke finds out he was made to do something horrible and it breaks his ego. They are literally putting Caleb into situations where something like that could happen to him every time he meets Astrid or Trent or goes to a place where he will be triggered. I mean full-on total mental breakdown.

Sibling: Honestly? that's what I am expecting and it still could happen.

Me: All it would take is some sort of reveal about those eleven years. Or that night. Or something... and he could just shatter to pieces, and they haven't seemed to have even considered that. It's unbelievable. I'm terrified of a "You destroyed the pillar that supported Akzeriuth. You committed more atrocities you can’t even fathom" moment for Caleb. ;_;

Sibling: stop, god, I can't I would literally have a meltdown like this if Caleb was forced to regress because he wouldn't regress like Beauregard... he would regress, like any abused child to being hurt again.

Me: But we don't know WHAT THEY DID TO HIM... Not fully. I mean the asylum, too, because it's not just that they could have done anything to him in that place. It's that they could have MADE HIM DO THINGS.

Sibling: They abused him, experimented on his body with residuum, and broke his mind. Why would any of that have stopped, when he was literally at Trent's summer house?

Me: And worse still, Trent has ALREADY TRIED TO CAUSE SUCH A BREAKDOWN. He tried to blue-screen Caleb repeatedly at the dinner with comments about his parents. We ALREADY KNOW that he wants to provoke some sort of breakage in Caleb, so why, WHY would you pressure Caleb to go back to that place?!

Sibling: Not to mention, (fucking IDIOTS) THAT ASTRID SENT HIM THERE. SHE WORKS WITH TRENT. SHE WANTS CALEB OUT OF THE WAY. What better way to do it than another 11 years to plan?

Me: She told him Trent wasn't there, too. :-/ Now, that still might have been true in that... he might have been called to the place, but I doubt it.

Sibling: What I want to be said... nvm, I'll actually save that for therapy lol. That's too deep and I don't wanna type that out. That's the problem with characters with trauma: what you want for them might hit too close to home LMAOAOOO. Hurts your heart, especially when it's glossed over.

Me: Caleb getting justice shouldn't necessitate his trauma being rubbed in his face 24/7.

Sibling: TRUE. Truest goddamn thing I ever heard. Especially if his choice is to be done with it.

...........

We didn’t really touch on Yasha, who has actually been a good influence on Caleb, imo, and there were other things we could have talked about that are related to this subject, but *shrug*

Anyway, this conversation mostly came from a place of hurt. It’s frustrating to see characters who claim to love a traumatized character consistently, thoughtlessly behave in ways that are hurtful to that character, and in often brazenly selfish ways. We’re not saying you can’t like characters who do that... this conversation was actually prompted by frankly hurtful posts with respect to Caleb’s mental state.

Also sorry for those who are unfamiliar with Tales of the Abyss/Tales of Berseria. Both of these video games have traumatized protagonists and both games explore their growth (or decline) as a result of that trauma, and were useful in our discussion for making my point.

Edit: Okay, so the first comment I got was someone saying that I’m allowed to think what I want but they don’t want to see it. If you’ve read this far, I hope you noticed that this post criticized that sort of attitude... IN THE CHARACTERS OF CR... It’s bad to pressure a person into exhibiting their trauma in a way that makes normies “comfortable,” so of course the first responder to the post decided to prove just that. I deleted that comment... but not before doing what they wanted, like people like me and characters like Caleb almost always end up doing anyway. Thanks for that. I can see why my post upset that poster. *rolls eyes*

#critrole spoilers #critical role #critrole #spoilers #critical role 127 #caleb widogast #fjord stone #jester lavorre #caduceus clay #beauregard lionett #trent ikithon #essek thelyss #abuse #trauma #meta #autonomy #calianna #relevant tag removed upon request

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refriedweeb · 4 years

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UNDERNEATH THE MIDNIGHT SKY (HAWKS + READER FLUFF)

A/N: heyooo! this is a request from the lovely @alexandria-selina about a sweet, nice, slice of life date and evening with Hawks and his S/O! Only a smidge of angst, but generally soft, fluffy feelings of the leader just being loved by their bird brain

Prompt: “Second, a fluff date with Hawks and his s/o. Just a sweet slice of life”

Word Count: 2,133

It wasn’t very often that you and Keigo got to spend much personal time together. You were both incredibly busy with the work you were doing through your respective hero agencies. And what you did was important work, you didn’t think anyone would fault you for the work you put in day in and day out. But in the year or so that you had been dating Keigo Takami, otherwise known to the world as Pro Hero Hawks, you could count on one hand the number of times that the two of you had spent quality time together, going on dates that were romantic and special. Doing things that normal couples did. Except for the fact that the two of you were far from normal, far from ordinary. You had a civic duty to protect people in your community from rising levels of crime, of those who would rather seek out conflict and crime than live in a life of comfort and peace. Your relationship had certainly stood test after test in the early stages of your dating. There’d been missed birthdays, missed dates that had been planned weeks in advance, anniversaries, holidays. At one point there’d been a fight between the two of you that had been so monumental you’d thought a break up was right around the corner.

But there you were, a year and some odd months later. Still together. Stronger and more in tune with one another than you’d been in the earlier stages of your dating. You knew Keigo like the back of your hand now, and he knew you the same. There was a bond between you that ran deeper than anything you’d ever experienced with anyone else in your life before, and you knew that just wasn’t something you were going to give up on. Keigo was a part of you, as much of you were yourself. The reason that your relationship with one another had grown to be so strong, so indestructible, was your ability to understand one another without having to say much at all.

It was something you cherished most about your relationship, and it was something you leaned on when Keigo started to shrink into himself when his emotions started to become too much for him to handle, as they did. After all, Hawks was still a toy for the commission to use, the trauma he’d suffered through as a child still resting fresh on his shoulders. He was much better than he’d been when you’d first gotten to know him, Keigo having gotten much better at communicating his feelings with you over the past year. Still, you weren’t surprised when he started to grow more withdrawn. The flush of his wings drooping a little more than usual, his quiet demeanor when he was no longer wearing his Hawks’ persona a little heavier. It was easy to tease Hawks, your cynical snark another thing that had you two getting along quickly. It’d fallen short in his replies over the past couple of days, and it was all you needed to know that Keigo was hitting a down cycle.

Which, of course, only meant that you were going to go all out for him.

“Keep your eyes closed!” You chided, tugging Keigo along while you led him by the hand. The two of you had just finished having dinner at Keigo’s favorite restaurant, a place that was only accessible through reservation and was booked months in advance. It’d been one phone call, having dropped your hero name as wanting a reservation. You didn’t often use your hero status to get what you wanted, knowing it was morally wrong. But the look on Keigo’s face, how it brightened and the spark returned to his eyes when you oh so casually mentioned you’d gotten reservations, had been well worth it. Keigo wasn’t the only person who could live in a self-serving, morally grey area. If it kept him smiling at you like that, you didn’t think there was much you wouldn’t do for the number two hero.

They’d set you back in a private area of the restaurant, softly lit so that you wouldn’t be disturbed by any other patron walking by and happen to notice who it was dining out together. The two of you had gorged yourself on your favorite meals. The conversation had been quiet, soft, nothing too serious. You lived together, after all, and it wasn’t as if you didn’t see each other every day or in passing. But it didn't need to be any sort of deep conversation. Keigo’s hand never strayed far from where yours had rested on the table, at times his finger coming to trace over the back of your hand, the knuckles there and various scars from your time as a hero. His foot, underneath the table, never stopped resting against yours. The thing about Keigo that people misunderstood at times, was that while a part of Hawks existed in Keigo’s personality, the Keigo that not many people saw at all, was much more subdued. More private. Gentler, though still plenty capable of dishing out the shit you’d throw at him right back.

“Come on, kid, where are we going?” You looked back over your shoulder to see that Hawks had listened to you, his eyes squeezed shut as you led him up, and up. It’d have been easier for him to have just jetted you up the hill you were climbing to the top of, but you wanted this to be a complete and utter surprise for him. It’d been your plan from the beginning and it was going to be your plan until the end. Keigo wasn’t the biggest fan of surprises, and he’d already started asking questions the minute you’d told him that dinner wasn’t everything you’d planned. It was hard for him to trust in the unknown, but when the unknown was linked to you, he was far more willing to accept what was out of his control.

The car drive out of the city had been torture for him, having to keep his eyes closed for the entirety of the ride. Keigo had half a mind to send out a feather or two to do some scouting and bring back whatever it was they could that could give him some kind of clue. He knew why you were doing this, he wasn’t that thick in the head. There weren’t enough words in the human language for him to be able to express what you’d done for him could mean, but he thought the closest feeling was the look on your face when he smiled. It’d been hard for Keigo to have ever imagined that there was someone out there in the world who could accept him for the person he was. For all the good things and all the bad things he’d done, and still love him. Still be able to look him in the eyes and tell him that they were proud of him, that he was safe, that he was loved. You’d brought that into his life out of the blue, and Keigo didn’t think he’d ever be able to repay you for the kindness. Out of all the scary things he’d shown you about himself, his moral compass, his childhood, the fact that sometimes he had to play the villain, you hadn’t wavered once. No...there was nothing that Keigo Takami could do to repay you for what you’d given him.

But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life trying.

“I told you, it’s a surprise, you goof.” Your laughter sent a thrill up and down his spine, and he squeezed your hand in response. He’d be a good bird, for now. The amount of effort you’d put into cheering him up was enough to garner his good behavior. “Besides, we’re almost here.” You’d definitely been climbing upwards, Keigo felt that burn in his thighs and felt a little bit of labor in his breathing. You hadn't brought him...you wouldn’t have...it was so far away. Though, it was certainly far enough away of a drive that lined up with how long you’d been driving...

Keigo felt his heart spasm in his chest, a heart he hadn’t thought worked for so long, as you let go of his hand. If you were where he thought you were... “Just a minute...” you said, sounding off to the side of him. There was the noise of a bag unzipping, of something rustling against grass. Keigo tipped his head back to the night sky, taking in a deep breath of fresh, crisp air that only came at night. He knew this place, he knew the smell of it. Had committed it to memory because it had everything to do with you and him.

“(Y/N),” he said, your name something of a prayer on his lips.

“Almost there,” you said, holding either side of his arms. “Just...slowly sit down. There, just like that, careful, puff your wings out a little so they’re comfortable...” You instructed him, and Keigo rolled his eyes, swallowing the smile on his lips. You were taking your job very seriously and he didn’t want to bring any ruin to your fun even though he’d figured it out the minute he’d gotten a smell of the place. “Okay! Open!”

And when he did, Keigo didn’t think he’d ever seen something more beautiful than the image that had greeted him. There you were, illuminated by moonlight with a million stars twinkling in the background. Your skin glowed, it made you look other worldly in every aspect of the word. Yes. This was exactly where he thought you’d taken him. On the top of the very hill he now sat on, was the first time the two of you had ever met. It was a very different setting than the original, this time there was no villain you’d unintentionally come together to fight off. No havoc that was being wrecked, no immediate sense of danger or peril. It was just the two of you and the midnight sky. The fact that you’d thought to come this far out, just to make him happy...

He didn’t think he could ever love anyone else as much as he loved you. “(Y/N),” Keigo repeated, bright amber eyes fixated on you as you weighed his reaction. He held out a hand for you, which you took. He gave you a tug and you fell to your knees unceremoniously. Keigo was gentle as he pulled you back against his chest, red wings folding around you and acting as a barrier of heat. “You planned all of this.”

His hands smoothed over your hips, wrapping around you as he held you close. The sound of his heartbeat, rhythmic and soothing settled against your back. “Of course I did,” you answered, the top of your head resting against the curve of his jaw. “You were so sad, I just wanted to see you smile again. So...I planned a nice date that would do that.” You turned to look at him, to see him looking at you with widened pupils, and he nudged his face against your head. ”And I think it’s worked.”

Avian eyes shut for a moment, and Keigo hummed a response. There was silence between you in that stretch of time, Keigo holding you against his chest, your eyes turned to the thousands of twinkling stars that seemed to be spying on you the way that you were spying on them. The blanket beneath you added extra warmth, and you found yourself getting sleepy. Keigo was cooing behind you, the sound coming from the back of his throat. You think he’s fallen asleep, until he speaks.

“I’d only be the saddest if I ever lost this moment, right here.” His voice is soft, gentle.

It was still impossible for him to fathom that there was someone out there in the world that loved him, cared about him, like you did. You. In all of the goodness that lived inside of your heart. Unafraid to show and express that you loved a cynical bastard like himself. You intertwined your fingers with his, feeling the rough callus of his palms. Hands that have worked so hard to become the hero that he was today. An unhappy child that had only ever just wanted love, and you’d given all of it to him and then some. His eyes shut when you answer him. “Then I guess it’s a good thing you never will.”

His life wasn’t safe. Neither was yours. But in that moment, underneath the midnight sky, neither one of you felt safer. There was an eternity in that time spent wrapped up in one another, and it was one that he’d carry with him forever.

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fandom-thingies · 3 years

Text

My Complicated Feelings Toward JK Rowling

I think everyone who’s read Harry Potter and likes to talk has written something like this by now. It makes sense, right? She wrote possibly the most influential book series to come out in the last century. For me and many others, those books are an unforgettable part of our childhoods, and it hurts for the person who took us on such a journey of magic and wonder to be so unmagical herself.

So, here’s my take.

I think the thing I hate most about JK Rowling is how close she came to greatness.

There’s a reason her books became so popular, after all. For all her faults, (and there are many) she’s an amazing writer.

Every one of her characters feel like they could walk off of the page at any time and into your life.

Dudley Dursley with his absorption of how his parents treat Harry and how his friends treat him, with his slow growth throughout the books into a person beyond who he was raised to be.

Molly Weasley with her overbearing mother henning, sometimes harmful but oh so clearly coming from a place of love, and her complete willingness to adopt any child that stands still long enough for her to do so. (Except Fleur)

Narcissa Malfoy with her belief in the horrible things she’s doing, without that stopping her from being entirely willing to do anything for her child.

Sirius Black with his tendency to unintentionally echo the sentiments he was raised with, and the tragedy of him losing his chance to ever truly grow as a person after being thrown in Azkaban for twelve years and then dying so soon after, and his complete, unconditional love for Harry.

I could write essays on any of them, and my point is that while JK’s treatment of certain issues and characters makes me want to hate Harry Potter, her characterization itself is both consistent and magnificently human.

Her world, too, is beautiful.

I first read Harry Potter before I turned eleven, and I was one of many across the nation who awaited my letter with eager anticipation.

Can you blame me? The world she created filled so many children with wonder, made so many of us want so badly for magic to be real, to be ours-

It was beautiful, and I hate her for what she could have been.

She had this fully realized system of prejudice that canonically created genocidal maniacs and put them in power every two generations or so, and she had this very realistic way of writing horribly flawed people that pronounces them as people without exonerating them for the awful things she’d have them do, and I can’t help feeling like “the horrors of war”, as well as she wrote it, wasn’t the story her world deserved.

But that’s a big idea to tackle, and I think it will be tackled best if I start small. I’ve spoken now of the beauty of her world, of her characters. Now I’ll speak of what marrs it.

Like I said, I want to start small.

So, let’s talk about the house elves.

TL;DR? Hermione was right. They’re indoctrinated from birth into believing the only thing they’re good for is housework, as well as being raised to abhor any elf who chooses to do otherwise. It’s a neat little self perpetuating system that bears absolutely no similarity in ideology to the mythology JK built it off of, and as such loses the aspect of choice that’s so significant to brownies.

Add to that the socially acceptable abuse, and you’ve got something that looks far more similar to slavery than it does little fairies who come to clean your home and get mad if pay them because they’re doing it as a favor.

And that’s why it’s so concerning, when JK brushes Hermione’s campaigning off in canon so casually.

It’s honestly hard to say when I started to be leery of JK Rowling, except that it was several years before the TERF scandal occurred. I think this was probably one of the earlier areas, though.

The first time I remember wondering if Harry Potter’s greatnesses were in spite of her intentions, rather than because of them, though, wasn’t the house elves.

It was, rather, a different contentious issue in the fandom, and one I’ve always fallen quite firmly to one side of, as someone who’s been bullied myself.

The first time I remember being suspicious of JK’s beliefs was when I realized she didn’t write Snape with the intent for him to be a villain.

Snape is not a person anyone in the fandom seems to be able to agree on. Some see him as a flat, cartoony villain, while some see him as a tortured soul who only did all those terrible things because he was hurting inside, don’t you see?

Personally, I drew the line at him being a child’s boggart, as well as the time he attempted to kill Neville’s toad, Trevor, because seriously; what the fuck.

It had always been my belief that while him being obsessed with loving Lily motivated him to work on the side of good, it was more like Narcissa’s willingness to betray her cause for her son than anything else, being a sympathetic trait without absolving his cruelty.

Then I realized that a bunch of people (likely including JK) view Narcissa similarly to how they view Snape, seeing both as people who do bad but are good, rather than people who do good but are bad, and I honestly don’t know what to say to y’all.

You know having good traits doesn’t make a person good, right? Being capable of affection doesn’t absolve people of cruelty or make it your responsibility to forgive them and try to get them to change, it just tells them that they can do bad things without being punished for it.

Do you guys need an abuse hotline?

Anyway, that’s when I stopped liking JK, since I’ve been bullied myself and seeing her treat such a horrible bully as a good person kinda soured me on her. I’m not mad at her for letting her bullies grow and change- I love Draco’s and Dudley’s character arcs. I’m just mad at her because unlike those two, Snape is an adult and she kinda wrote it like forgiving him was an expectation of Harry, rather than a personal choice (and not an easy one either! Forgiving bullies is hard and it’s not always healthy!)

I’m getting off topic, but I genuinely believe that discussing this kind of thing is important, so I’m leaving that in.

Getting back to what this is actually about, I’m the kind of person who sees potential in things, often before I see the work itself, (it’s why I write fanfiction) and Harry Potter has so much potential it hurts, because so much of it is just wasted.

I said, earlier, that “the horrors of war” wasn’t the story best suited to this world, and I stand by that.

The first reason I believe that is because I don’t think that the black and white morality this kind of narrative often creates was well suited to JK’s writing style. JK has a tendency to put her characters in boxes of “good” or “bad” and as someone who doesn’t really believe in inherent goodness or evil, this will always feel unrealistic to me.

Because in the end, it’s JK’s minor villains, the ones not directly involved with Voldemort’s war, that really shine.

My favorite villains in the series were Umbridge, the Dursleys, Draco Malfoy, and Cornelius Fudge, because they were the villains who felt real, who felt like flawed people making flawed decisions because we’re all fundamentally products of our environment-

These are the villains who stuck with me, who I still want to take and shake because they were the kind of cruelty we’ve all faced.

Voldemort, as the main villain of the story, would have been more powerful if he’d been an amplified version of these people. In fact, the story would have been better in general if Fudge or Dumbledore had been the villain, because the problem with Voldemort is that unlike the good villains in this story, who feel real because we’ve all met people like them, Voldemort is and will always be larger than life.

A genocidal maniac is a villain few of us have faced societally, and one none of us have faced directly.

Also, rather than being a worse version of Umbridge or Fudge, Voldemort is more akin to a worse version of Snape. He’s a tortured soul who does bad things because bad things were done to him, rather than being cruel through his choices, his own agency.

That’s the first reason why “the horrors of war” wasn’t the best choice of a narrative for this world.

The second is that I don’t think JK sees anything wrong with her muggle hating characters.

She clearly thinks killing muggles is wrong, of course. She’s not that bad.

But, well, the muggle characters in Harry Potter are consistently kind of awful.

First there’s the Dursleys, selfish, entitled, egotistical, and cruel to anyone different from them. Then there’s Snape’s muggle father, who was horribly abusive, as well as cruel to anything different from him.

Then there’s the muggle prime minister, who despite being an important figure, is left completely out of the loop for anything concerning wizards, pretty much only used when the ministry needs the muggle news to say or do a certain thing, like when Sirius Black was declared a criminal.

There’s also the family at the quidditch world cup, of whom who only meet the patriarch, a somewhat stupid man who remarks uncomprehendingly on the oddness of wizards trying to assimilate into muggle society, a man who is canonically obliviated ten times a day.

And that’s it, that’s all the muggle characters I can remember. Aside from the Dursleys, none of them are given more than a page or so of screentime, and none of them do anything significant.

No, wait, I did actually forget two.

Hermione’s parents, who are obliviated and sent to Australia when the war starts, because the only thing they could ever do in a war is be victims.

Muggles in Harry Potter are consistently stupid, ineffectual, and cruel to anyone different from them.

Out of the entire massive cast of Harry Potter, there are few enough muggles that I can list them all off the top of my head without googling and the only muggle in the story ever given the all important chance to be kind is Dudley Dursley, who is taken out of the story the moment he stops being an awful person.

I’m sure you see the problem.

The issue with Harry Potter is that JK acts like the problem is solved when muggles are no longer being actively persecuted, when in reality that’s only the beginning of solving the prejudice that plagues her world.

Voldemort is frequently called “wizard Hitler” and I think that’s more accurate than people realize, because as with Hitler, people easily see the problem with Voldemort committing genocide, and they’re fine with working to stop that, but the moment they’re asked to examine their own biases, their own small cruelties and exclusions, the ten thousand cuts they’ve inflicted with their own hands…

The moment people are asked to examine themselves, to look close at the mirror and point to what allowed someone like Voldemort to gain a following in the first place, they turn away and go back to turning a blind eye to the fact that if you don’t address the societal issues that made him gain a following in the first place, there’ll just be another when it’s been a few years and people have forgotten.

In the end, Grindlewald is wizard Hitler. Voldemort and the death eaters are wizard neo nazis.

I’m not Jewish, though, so I’ll let them be the ones to expand further upon this, as many have.

My point here is that JK’s story would have been more powerful if it had been about addressing the issues that underpin the death eaters, rather than killing their leader and acting as if that’ll solve anything.

JK Rowling is antisemetic, racist, and a TERF, among other things, and while I’m glad it shows in her work as little as it does, it does show, and I’m not going to cover that in this because a thousand other people have covered it better than I ever could.

Suffice to say, I’m nonbinary, and I’m glad I was disillusioned with her before I knew she was prejudiced directly against me, because loving her before she said the things she said and did the things she did would have hurt.

The fact that her world shows so clearly the consequences of her beliefs, even in the context of a prejudice that doesn’t exist in our own world…

I guess she’s always been too good a writer for her own good, in the end.

#harry potter #jk rowling #harry potter meta #harry potter criticism #tl;dr i hate harry potter because it came SO CLOSE to greatness and then JK just SQUANDERED it and i'll die angry

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anotheronechicagobog · 4 years

Text

Crockett Marcel x reader D’accord (Oneshot)

Written by: @anotheronechicagobog

Warnings: Mature themes, America has HORRENDOUS gun laws, seriously as a Canadian I get second hand anxiety about your gun laws/judicial system (even though Canada’s is far from perfect)/healthcare system, April is not written well here but I’m gonna do a nice fic for her soon, pardon my French (literally, quite a bit of this fic is in French with translations)

You’d been surprised to find another Francophone in Chicago. After you’d moved there from Quebec, you weren’t expecting much. Only a couple of “Oui, oui,” and “hon, hon, hon”’s from some unintentionally insulting Americans. So when, during your fifth shift, you swore in your native tongue “merde!” you’d been pleasantly surprised when Crockett had responded without missing a beat.

You’d shown him French-Canadian food, he’d shown you Cajun food, and you had each gained a confidant at med. And you’d both needed it. You were in a new country with very different social customs and laws, and April had kissed him while Choi was deployed leaving him a magnet for gossip. You’d both just needed someone to talk to, and speaking French with each other was just an added comfort.

“What did Doris say this time?”

“I don’t care that people are talking about me, I really don’t. Gossip is just part of hospital life and that’s fine, but I am so tired of being glared at and avoided. People aren’t even bothering to get to know me. I am just so tired about having to fight for a basic level of confidence in my colleagues for something that I didn’t even do! She kissed me, she just walked up and kissed me, how is this my fault?”

“I’m sorry Cherie.”

“I know. How was your day?”

“Anderson pretended to shoot at me again.”

“Seriously? You should report him to HR.”

“I don’t know, I don’t want to be overreacting.”

“He is pretending to have a gun and waving it at you on a daily basis because he knows that you are from a country with decent gun laws. What about the day he comes in with a real gun? And loaded? What if he actually shoots you? You need to report him, Cher.”

“Okay, I will. At the end of the day.”

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

You sat at Molly’s away from the main group, shunned by your colleagues. “It was just a joke, Y/N, can’t you take a joke?” But it didn’t feel like a joke. Not to you. You already felt like you should be wearing a kevlar vest on a regular basis; you didn’t need to be made fun of for your very real fear. You were busy moping when someone plopped down in the stool beside you. “Mon journée a sucé. Dites-moi que le vôtre était meilleur.” (My day sucked. Tell me yours was better)

“Voyez-vous la foule de gens qui me regardent et qui parlent de moi là-bas?” (Do you see the crowd of people looking at me and talking about me there)

“Zut. J'espérais vraiment que ça irait mieux.” (Damn. I was really hoping it would get better)

“Moi aussi.” (Me too)

“The hell are you two speaking? Swedish?”

“... It’s French, Hermann.”

“If you say so Y/N... You guys want another round?”

“Yes, please, kind sir.” Trying to make a joke with the man everyone said had a heart of gold and a belly full of laughs at all times.

“Well, okay then. French people are weird.” Both you and Crockett sucked in a breath. Explaining was always the hardest part. “We are not French people. Crockett is Cajun, and I am French-Canadian.”

“Okay, I don’t know what Cajun is, but isn’t French-Canadian just a Canadian who speaks French?”

“Mon Dieu.” (My God)

“Sacre bleu (Damn it), Hermann. No, a French-Canadian is not just a Canadian who speaks French, and unless you want to start a war in a country you don’t even live in, I advise you to refrain from speaking in that manner again. And just for the record, a Cajun person is someone descended from Acadia settlers in Nova Scotia who left for Louisianna to flee the British.”

“... Okay. I’m sorry I asked.” You just held your breath as Crockett swore under his breath. You opened your eyes, grabbed your glass over bourbon and downed it. “Je sais que je viens juste d'arriver, mais je veux déjà partir.” (I know I just arrived, but I already want to leave)

“Allons-y alors.” (Let’s go then) Marcel threw cash down on the bar before you could argue and helped you put your coat on. “Avez-vous déjà mangé des tapas? J'ai entendu dire qu'il y avait un super endroit à quelques pâtés de maisons d'ici.” (Have you ever eaten tapas? Heard there is a great place a few blocks from here)

“Montrez le chemin.” (Lead the way)

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There was a new hot button topic of gossip the next day at MED. You and Marcel. Of course, no one was that cordial. ‘He couldn’t have a nurse so he went for an intern?’, ‘What, she thought being an intern is too difficult so she’s hooking up with a doc so she doesn’t fail?’. None of anything they were saying was true. First of all, April kissed and then rejected him all while she was dating someone else, second, he wasn’t even your attending. You did your ED rotation before he got here. You were on your pediatrics rotation, and kicking ass at it. Third, he didn’t know anyone here besides you thanks to April, so who exactly was he gonna say ‘give her a pass for me’ to? You just rolled your eyes and continued working. At the end of the day, that was what would speak for you.

You hadn’t been very close to April, or anyone in the ED really, they’d all had their own drama going on the entire time you were there, so you just faded into the background. But now, April was making an effort to talk to you. You would have found it odd, had it not been at the time the rumours were really flying, and if you hadn’t seen the burning question behind her eyes. She was jealous. She damn well wouldn’t admit it, but she was. And you were angry at her, and at least you were grown up enough to admit that. She had hurt Crockett. Damaged his work relationships and reputation before he’d even started. So you acted like you enjoyed her company. You talked about literally anything that wasn’t Crockett Marcel. You watched as her questioning eyes grew more and more desperate. If she was going to come to you acting like a jealous girlfriend she should have had the decency to be honest. But she wasn’t. And Crockett was paying the price. So you tortured her a bit. It wasn’t that bad, honestly. Plus, what made her think she had any right to know about relationships you may or may not be in? But her feelings did become noticeable. To the other nurses, doctors, interns. Suddenly everyone was aware that she had kissed Crockett, and that Ethan wasn’t the only doctor she had feelings for. You felt bad for Crockett, he’d gotten sucked into a wormhole before he even knew his feet were leaving the ground. The same thing could be said for Dr. Choi’s fist.

You pushed back the curtain and marched over to Crockett who was too busy arguing with Maggie to notice you at first. “Have you gotten a CT done yet?”

“Oh- Dr. Y/L/N. Uh, let me check. Uh... Here.” Maggie handed you and a skeptical Will the tablet with Crockett’s head CT already loaded. The black and white image should have comforted you. It looked good, no injuries or anomalies. But you kept looking, you kept gripping the tablet no matter how much your knuckles, and fingers, and wrists were starting to hurt. “Cher?” You slowly looked up, Maggie and Halstead had left the room at some point. “You seein’ something Halstead didn’t?”

You didn’t answer. You didn’t have the voice to. Instead, you regarded his face intently. Choi had only gotten in a single punch, thankfully, so there was only bruising around his right eye. You moved to stand in front of him, standing in between his legs which were dangling off the side of the bed. “Cher?” The bruise was already purple, the section around the forehead turning black. Your lips pressed into a firm line. After setting the tablet on the end table you gently took Crockett’s face in your hands. Ignoring the rest of him, you gently drifted your fingers around the bruising. Your stomach sunk the more you looked at it. It wasn’t inflamed, there wasn’t any bleeding, his CT was clear. But you just couldn’t shake the weight in your gut. You didn’t even know what you were looking for. But you kept looking. “Cher.” No inflammation. “Cher.” No bleeding. “Cher.” Clear CT. “Cher.” Keep looking. “Cher.” Crockett delicately grabbed your wrist, finally grabbing your attention, bringing more than the bruise on his eye into your focus. “I’m okay, Cher.” His eyes were boring into yours, pleading for you to listen to him. He moved his hand from your wrist up overtop of your hand before intertwining your fingers together and leaning his face into your clasped hands at the side of his face.

“D’accord?” (Okay?)

“D’accord.” (Okay) He smiled gingerly. Still looking at you with soft eyes that made you melt he opened his mouth, you could tell that words in his native language were on the tip of his tongue, when the curtains in the room were pushed back suddenly. April stood, tall, strong, and with a look of utter betrayal on her face. No one in the room said anything, no one in the room breathed. Slowly, as if she were avoided a cornered coyote, April backed out of the room, her chest starting to shake, her eyes watering. Soon you were left alone in the room, your hand still wrapped in Crockett’s. Now in full view of the entire ED staff and gossip mill.

#One Chicago #chicago med #crockett marcel #crockett marcel x reader #april sexton x Crockett Marcel #april sexton #maggie lockwood

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valaks · 3 years

Note

Hey Valaks! I love your blog and your writing!

Please could you do 1, 10 and 18 for the writing asks?? 🌺

Thank you for the ask! I have added a cut to hopefully not be that person clogging up the feed XD

1. Tell us about your current project(s) – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

I have a few collabs outstanding like Gemini and a Kabir/Alex sequel to Reunion (It’s rated T at the most so still kid friendly) with Lupin and Devil Went Down to Georgia with Galimau. My utter love for both of my collab partners for pulling me through at a time when I’ve been really struggling. I have a WIPs List but I’ll confess to not having touched most of them in quite sometime (partly from life, partly because I’m not sure how interesting they’d be to anyone else other than me which influences my writing more than I would like to admit):

Good Intentions: Smithers never thought he’d be anyone’s moral compass, he was no angel to sit in anyone’s shoulder but trying to keep Alex Rider from following in the ruthless footsteps of his father or worse his former handler, Alan Blunt is as close to hell as he can imagine. (Wherein Alex becomes head of MI6 we watch his morality slip away form the eyes of an increasingly frustrated and heartbroken Smithers - it all culminates when Alex uses a child “just as an informant, simple information gathering” but hidden behind the charming smile of John Rider and the brutal coldness of Alan Blunt’s words is Alex Rider dying as he says them (Smithers just hopes there’s still a part of the boy he once knew in there to mourn)

Walk the Line: Alex thought he was done with SCORPIA. But they kept creeping back into his life in the most unexpected of ways. He thought he could at least count on it being on the other side until he gets teamed up with Walker, his former classmate and current CIA spy. Unfortunately he still hasn’t been able to figure out whose side Walker is really on - attempted deep cover op like his dad, repatriated rogue spy back on the “good” side, or SCORPIA double agent? He doesn’t know but at least he’s nice....in that obnoxious American way.

Temperamental: (Sequel to Sentimental which isn’t all that popular and you would need to read it for the sequel but basically amnesiac Yassen whose memories stop pre John’s betrayal set during the Stormbreaker mission and features him trying to come to grips with the use of chemical weapons against children and how to handle Alex once he snaps back to reality which is where this starts) Yassen had promised Alex Rider that he would be safe from the world of spying but fate had other ideas. In the days after Sarov’s failed plan, Yassen scrambles to find where MI6 have hidden his wayward charge without drawing Rothman’s attention. A request from one of their existing clients to look into suspicious activity at his son’s former school prompts Yassen to investigate under the guise of offering security. He should have known where there was trouble there would be Alex.

10. How would you describe your writing process?

Lordy do I ever not have a good answer for this. Typically it involves an idea hitting me and then the determination: would this idea work better as a short to post on tumblr (because the set up would take away the tension or would require a multi chapter which is not really my strength), as a prompt to lob out into the ether for someone better and brighter to touch on, or a fic. Once fic is decided I determine whose perspective the fic would be the most interesting from either because it would create the most tension or their internal monologue/background knowledge would add the most to it. Then the summary is written and a title is chosen. If it’s something I’m really passionate about and I already have it in my head I tend to write it all in one go, if there’s more I need to chew on then it’s a series of dates with the Evil Writing App. The final determination is whether it’s good enough for Valaks or if it gets sent to an alt account.

18. Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

Allegedly. I’ll try to go in order of posting -

Ruthless has a sequel where Alex just goes *quiet* once the initial dust as settled it’s unnerving to everyone because they’re not used to having to wonder just what Alex is thinking, at least not behind closed doors but what happened isn’t exactly something that can be recovered from easily, not when Alex isn’t sure who all’s in on it no matter what they’ve told him. Failure is the AU where I considered what would happen to Alex to make him want to torture.

Alibi was originally going to have Yassen show up in the end but I found it far more fascinating if MI6 was just testing Alex so out went Yassen and in went Ben. The sequel to it was torn apart and turned into Warm Reception because I wanted to trope flip SCORPIA comes to Brooklands and decided that it was more logical to have a small fight in Mrs. Bedfordshire’s lobby than anywhere else and I wanted to explore some side characters instead of Ben.

Providence’s sequel thoughts ended up inspiring Gentleman’s Agreement but I did write a small short for it “Yassen and Alex encounter each other on mission. Surprisingly they are working to mostly the same goal - Yassen needs to kill the millionaire who Alex needs to get information from. “I suppose I could answer some questions for you, Sasha. /In Russian/“ “Is now really the time for a language lesson?” he ground out in frustration but the man pointedly ignored him “/Fine but I don’t know some of the words/“ “/Then there is no better way to learn/“

I mentioned the Sentimental sequel but changing Sarov to come first and probable for almost a month before Yassen figures out he’s missing made the most sense. It was also a bit of fun at the Yassen would absolutely take Alex away from MI6....just to throw him in a school and throw away the key. Almost had him send him to Point Blanc but decided that wouldn’t quite fit all that well and wouldn’t be as interesting as if Alex had already gotten his feet back under him with MI6 and now sees that Yassen was right that MI6 would just use him until he’s dead but that doesn’t mean Alex wants to be anywhere near Yassen. Julia Rothman might have other ideas when she finds out what her newest second in command is hiding.

Gentleman’s Agreement.....there’s a lot of thoughts on Sequels and AUs, a lot of them have been written by better people, but that fic was written in 45 minutes so there wasn’t much time to recharacterize or change scenes. It did get Turncoat aka the Alex saves Yassen fic I wanted so badly.

Blood Brothers is a fic I really worked hard on considering how John would feel about his son being thrown into SCORPIA assuming Alex was of age. A rocky marriage was characterization that didn’t quite fit what I imagined would have happened but did fit the story so it stayed in. It was a fic that was supposed to get expanded on - the competition between Hunter and Yassen and Nile and Alex who is desperate to beat his Dad and his “apprentice”. I think two teenagers thrown against each other with a bit of a bone to pick, especially Yassen and Alex who can both hold a grudge even if one runs hot and the other runs cold, would have been compelling and a little fun but the premise and specifically John’s characterization doesn’t quite work out to me.

Found and Legends both have their plotting done but it’ll never see the light of day

Little Moments and Sweetest Thing were my guilty pleasure writing pieces for a while and I have about 1000 DMs of scenes for both of them that are lost to the sands of time and an embarrassing amount of self indulgence

Mates has a follow up ending for those who needed resolution in the comments of it. I’m not sure I did a good job of showing that Tom was in a semi abusive relationship since a lot of people seemed to blame him for him and Alex’s breakup. Most of my headcanons for how their relationship goes have them splitting much sooner just because of Tom’s own home life and either being unable to relate/talk to Alex and drifting away because his Mom throwing a plate at his head isn’t being hung over crocodiles but that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt or because Alex is just too dangerous/jumpy to be thrown back into a school environment and lashes out even unintentionally especially not under the pressure of being seen as a failure. School is also a barometer of just how much he’s lost of himself and his childhood, bonus points for Alex being completely upfront with Tom about everything he’s done

In My Sights has an AU where this is all post Christmas at Gunpoint and Yassen is there because he knows Ian is already at Sayle’s factory and will have to be...handled. So two weeks of just getting Alex trained for the protection he might need, connecting him to resources, etc. Ian finding out that Yassen had been there was part of a draft at one point which was included Alex wondering about an all too sincere goodbye from Ian “who never hugged him” but I can’t find the snippet anymore ;__;

A Warm Reception was an alternate version. Originally I wanted it to be Alex watching his last chance at normality slip from his fingers and then the crushing realization that it was something that was his own doing, not even MI6 but Skoda who he had picked a fight with and the accompanying breakdown but then decided that Mrs. Bedfordshire was the right way to go upon writing the summary. Because everyone loves some Outsider POV

Adopted was supposed to be a one chapter throw away trope flip of K Unit adopts Alex. I kept it pretty consistent with Amitai and Lil Lupin’s K Units, tried to add in some more characterization just in how they treated some of the details. It has an alt ending/chapter where they find out Alex is Cub when they pull him from Three’s tender mercies almost by accident. I was persuaded into light humored fluff via guilt trip.

The Truth and Other Deadly Weapons has Ben acting exactly like he think he would in front of everyone but my AU was that this interaction happened in the field and absolutely shattered Ben’s trust in him partly because he had worked for the other side and partly because even if it ‘wasn’t as bad as it looks’ it showed a severe lack of judgment. It also featured several chapters of Alex running into the glass ceiling that is having “Member Malogosto Class of 2004” on your resume. Was going to feature Alex running into Walker as well and into problems within MI6 and the CIA but that was eventually cut and it was kept to one chapter.

Guardian....Guardian holds a very special place in my heart. I was given the prompt of a Monster Fic and I wrote what I knew but the interesting parts were all the ones that come after the story but might come across to a general audience as Hogwarts School of Prayers and Miracles. The plotting done post this was going to feature baby Angel Alex reuniting with his parents but...they were strangers to him and so he stayed with Yassen more and more, followed him, learned from him....it encompassed everything from the dynamics of broken families to reflections on theology and references from the Good Book....which is why it’ll never see the fandom but has a very special place in my heart.

In another, more perfect world Glocking Around the Christmas Tree is the Die hard fic this fandom deserves but as Lupin and I untangled the plot of the movie more and more we just couldn’t make it into anything that would be coherent on paper so it was changed and changed and is now a half finished sad abomination that sits on my works list only because Lupin would kill me if I took it down.

Hot Shot was supposed to feature my current favorite character that is not Nile Abara, John Crawley but I wimped out and changed it at the end because I swore I would write the Crawley fic that we all need. Hear me out: John Crawley knew and worked with John and Ian Rider, was respected by both of them, was recruited by SCORPIA within one year in the field, is the Chief of Staff of MI6, the man who “no one gets a knife in the back without him signing off” and is also the man who walks his dog to check on Alex. There’s a mentorship waiting to happen there, preferably in a nice work study program during college where Alex finally gets to see the repercussions of his missions and Crawley helps try and pull him back from the black mark that SCORPIA would have put on him.

My personal fluffy favorite is the spinoff of Devil Went Down to Georgia where Joe Byrne did pull Alex out post Skeleton Key and brought him home. There’s a pretty extended one about where Tom ends up after Mates. There’s also an actual sequel but ask me no questions and all.

Skipping a few collabs and Febuwhump fics but Burning Questions was just supposed to be Branded - a fic where upon being captured by Razim he is brought in and forcibly branded to differentiate the appearances of Alex and Julius (since Razim has decided to have him killed after shooting the Secretary of State). As a result of the pain levels spiking when Alex actually sees that the SCORPIA logo is branded onto his cheek Razim considers that emotional pain might be something to investigate. There’s a couple thousand words on it, one day I might polish it up.

First Impressions is supposed to be a mirror verse of Alex working for MI6 which includes Three as Blunt, Rothman as Jones and of course Sagitta as K Unit while he’s up against his father as Yassen and Yassen as Crawley. But it was cut down significantly even if the ideas are pretty fun to consider.

Sorry this was probably more than you bargained for but it was fun to get everything out there so thank you for asking

#alex rider #alex rider fanfiction #Im so sorry #I just have a lot

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musical-chick-13 · 3 years

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And Theon bc I love him

WHAT A COINCIDENCE I LOVE HIM TOO (this answer is gonna be a combination of books and show)

Send me a character and I’ll tell you the following:

• Did they live up to their potential? / In what ways was their potential unachieved?

-I would say yes. The only negative I have about his general arc is his death (which, see below). But Theon from the very beginning was, though not a particularly nice person, still relatable. Feeling othered, wanting to be accepted by an immediate environment that doesn’t accept you, isolated from and ostracized by your family, and the tension that comes between serving the different types of familial relationships in your life. Theon has no idea who he is, tossed aside by his blood family for not growing up with them and being “soft,” aka sort-of moral and having emotions that aren’t selfish rage or smugness (which, yep, that second part is a mood, see: my entire childhood and how no one wanted to be around an “emotional” “soft” child). And from there, he spirals out of control in a way that, while certainly not admirable by any stretch of the imagination, is still understandable in the context of the narrative and his characterization. And from there, after going through hell and quite literally losing himself (even to the point of straight-up denying rescue), he builds himself back up gradually, to the point where he expressed extreme regret for what he’s done, helps an innocent woman escape a truly horrifying situation, acknowledges that his family is generally garbage, and (in-show b/c again books aren’t finished), helping to restore his sister to power, rescuing her after his PTSD relapses while confronting Euron, and ultimately opting to protect the Starks come hell or high water in order to genuinely atone for what he’s done. He is no longer conflicted because he wants to do the right thing, and that right thing is defending the kingdom from the White Walkers and making sure Sansa and Bran are safe. And it’s no longer about fulfilling a duty or finding a family to fill the void. Because now he has found himself. I will contend that Theon has one of the best, most nuanced, most organic redemption arcs of all time. I will forever be grateful that I got to see that piece of storytelling unfold.

Although, I would love to know what he thought of Dany. A missed opportunity, that.

• How they negatively and positively affected the story.

-Positive: His arc of identity and finding where your loyalties lie ties into the overall theme of “How do you find yourself in a world where goodness, authenticity, and honesty are often punished and increasingly rare?” And it proves that governmental politics aren’t the only defining factors in decisions: familial politics can be just as difficult and dangerous, which adds yet another rich, complicated layer to the overall story. He has a genuine, honest-to-Drowned-God redemption arc, which is...not really present anywhere else in the story (no, Jaime is not on a Redemption Quest, I will die on this hill). But I think the biggest draw of Theon’s presence is that it deconstructs the whole “Character Revenge Fantasy” idea. He does bad things. We want him to be punished. But not like that. No one deserves that. How far is too far? What does retribution really look like? Given how easily that idea can be abused and go off the rails, is retribution even something to strive for? What is the point of using extreme violence/torture/mutilation/breaking someone’s psyche when it doesn’t really accomplish anything? Isn’t atonement and genuine justice a better option? It certainly was for Theon. He could only piece himself back together and do anything meaningful once he was out of his abusive environment. All of these are imporant questions that are posed by his existence in the narrative.

-Negative: Idk if I have much to say here. My biggest problem is his death (see below), but that’s not really a negative story effect so much as...being disappointing and narratively irrelevant. I gotta say, his introduction via his sister was...really weird. I genuinely have no idea why GRRM wrote that. It never came up again or had any kind of narrative ramifications and kind of cast a strange, uncomfortable light on his relationship with Asha/Yara for the remainder of the story. I can ignore and enjoy their later relationship it if I don’t think about it too hard, though, so I guess I’ll chalk it up to GRRM having a Bad Idea.

• What my favorite arc for them is.

-All of it?? Theon’s journey is kind of...one big arc, which is why I think it works so well. He has this overarching redemption plot which spans the entire series and informs every decision he makes (for good or for bad, depending on where in the aforementioned journey he is). The redemption arc isn’t bogged down with side plots or other pieces of narrative clutter, meaning it has time to grow and, thus, be gradual and realistic. If I had to choose a specific point, it’s probably when he tries to reintegrate back into society via supporting Yara. Gaining the Iron Islands’ support for her ruling, spiriting away with Euron’s fleet, and ultimately rescuing his sister after her capture. He can’t just go back into society. He’s scared. He has really bad PTSD. But he recognizes that putting his home in good hands is something bigger than just him because it’s Yara’s home, too. I just...I really love family relationships, y’all.

• What I think of their ending.

-I’m not really sure how I feel about this one. I get that the series is GrimDark™ and that people who make the right choice and fight for good die all the time, but Theon dying just felt...wrong. To me.

And, like...I get it. It makes sense to parallel his original descent into villainy (cemented by executing those two boys and pretending they were Bran and Rickon) with him dying to protect Bran himself. It ties into the whole very common trope of completing a full redemption arc by committing a completely selfless act at great personal cost. It’s kind of like the whole Missy thing in Doctor Who (which...hoo boy, that post is coming, make no mistake), where selfishness is directly opposed by making the ultimate sacrifice with no motivation for personal gain. And the fact that the last words he ever heard were “You’re a good man?” I cannot even begin to describe how much that makes me sob. But...honestly, I’m really tired of this idea that redemption has to end in death in order to be achieved or “complete.” I think it’s much more poignant to have a redeemed character live to help build a better world. Because what’s the point of telling people to be better if the “reward” is death? No one’s going to want to reform themselves if they think that’ll be the result.

I think the thing that Bugs Me™ the most is that Theon never really got to have a moment of peace when he was alive. Sansa gained the North’s love and at least had a secure childhood. Ned and Cat were happily married for years. Arya had parents who loved her and a good relationship with Jon. Jon fell in love with Ygritte and found his Night Watch Bros, and Robb (in show verse) had some very happy moments with Talisa. Davos put great stock in what he considered fulfilling friendships with Stannis and Shireen; Brienne was treated respectfully by Renly, Catelyn, and Sansa; Missandei and Grey Worm had each other and their friendship with Dany, who herself had many personal successes in her quest for the Iron Throne and saw the death of her abusive brother. Cersei even had moments with Jaime (who himself had several notable military victories and at least some time with Myrcella, as well as being gladly and deeply in love, however dysfunctional that love was), times when she successfully fought off enemies (including her dad), and some sweet moments with Tommen, as well as a huge victory via blown-up sept at the end of season 6. Theon was treated as a second-class family member by the Starks his whole life by being “traded” to them as a condition of war resolution AS A BABY, is immediately disparaged and mistreated by his immediate family when he tries to return to them, makes terrible decisions that almost cost him his conscience completely, is brutally tortured by Ramsay, is on the run with his sister from Euron almost immediately after, and has a PTSD attack that ultimatly results in him having to launch a rescue mission. And then he fights ice zombies. And then he dies. He never really...got to be happy at all? There was never any kind of “win” for him. Not even survival. The narrative couldn’t even give him that.

TLDR: Theon’s death seemed less shock-value-y than others (like, for example, Shireen or Missandei or, heck, Melisandre even), and it isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever seen. It’s narratively-informed and it makes sense as an emotional through-line, but, ultimately, Redemption Cemented By Selfless Death is a tired trope, and I honestly thought this story (which...you know...serves as a deconstruction of common fantasy tropes/book tropes in general) was better than that.

• When I wish they had died. / If I think they should’ve died.

-So here’s where we get personal™ kids.

So, it’s no secret that I am...severely mentally ill. I’ve talked about expression/presentation of mental illness in regard to Cersei a lot on this blog, and how that (as paradoxical as it may seem) helped bring a sense of comfort and emotional resonance to me. Theon, post-Ramsay, has, I think, a very clear case of PTSD. Theon is one of the few characters I’ve seen where his mental illness isn’t the cause of the bad, violent, dangerous choices he makes. It only takes root after he has made the decision and conscious effort to better himself, and it, rather than demonizing him, serve to humanize him. His trauma didn’t define him. And although a PTSD attack led to him unintentionally losing Yara to Euron’s capture, he makes every effort to rescue her, a goal he does end up achieving. It is so rare I get to see a character who goes through these things, successfully fight them and come out with positive qualities at the end. Like...switching topics a bit here, Jaime going back to King’s Landing to (try to) escape and ultimately die with Cersei made sense to me because, as Jaime says, he is a hateful man. He never made much of an honest effort to be anything else. And he never truly wanted to be good; he just wanted to be liked. He wanted to adopt some personality that would make him feel less disconnected from the rest of the world. But Theon...genuinely feels remorse for everything he’s done. He makes a concerted effort to do everything in his power to improve the lives of people he believes are good and deserve to be safe. So, just...killing him off in a Completely Selfless Sacrifice (like...you know how a lot of mentally ill people put themselves through suffering-like OCD rituals, bottling feelings, self-harm, even suicide-in a misplaced attempt to “help” or “protect other people”) seemed antithetical to everything we saw of his arc.

Ultimately, with such a humanizing, empathetic portrayal of trauma and mental health struggles, seeing Theon be killed off just...pissed me off. I am so tired of seeing mentally ill characters die. I really want to believe that I can live through and thrive in spite of the things that afflict me, and I get example after example of characters not being allowed to do that. It feels awful, quite frankly. And it makes hope that much harder.

I also just feel like...there was nothing the story gained from his death? I get the thematic parallels as mentioned earlier, but it didn’t really move the story forward in any significant way. It didn’t motivate other characters to do anything, it had no political ramifications, it didn’t serve to contribute to any kind of happy ending or commentary on society, it just...was sad. Again, I thought this story was better than that.

#theon greyjoy #got #my son #mental illness in media #meta #redemption arcs #tw: self harm mention #tw: suicide mention

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pseudospectre · 4 years

Text

Had a conversation recently with some friends about how stories with a heaven/hell dynamic love the idea of fallen angels, but I’ve never seen anything that goes the opposite direction. So I wrote one. It’s been a long long time since I’ve written anything so please forgive the quality, it was just a quick bit of fun. :)

Rise

I fell for a reason. I burned for a reason. I remember so little of my previous life, so many years, even centuries ago, but I remember that much. I have no tragic story of innocence betrayed or manipulated, no heart-wrenching tale of self-sacrifice or loss. I was just, as they say, a bastard. That’s all I can tell you, all that survived the fire, so to speak.

They’ll tell you, gleefully, about the hopelessness, when your soul arrives after judgment and they offer you a position. This is all there is left, they say. You are lost, you are evil, this is all you deserve for eternity. Most damned souls don’t truly understand, in my experience. Everyone believes, to some degree, that they were at least all right, in the end. And they fight the idea of damnation and punishment, think somehow that resisting the new temptation and heading to their torment is somehow going to prove that, or help. As if they can weasel out, eventually, if they aren’t contracted. It always seemed remarkably shortsighted; of course you can’t. I already enjoyed the cruelty, I knew what it meant, so the opportunity to spare myself the pain in return for causing it? Well, what is a demon if not selfish? I was fine with the requirements, already there and unsaveable, it’s not like it can be worse? You can either suffer or be a part of the system, and I made a damn good demon. A little hell humor. And that’s supposed to be all there was, the end, fin.

Turns out, they don’t quite give you all of the information

What you need to understand is that there’s a lot of misinformation out there about how all this is set up. Most beliefs have some concept of punishment or reward, but strictly speaking, we’re not really associated with any one in particular. Funnily enough, it has more to do with your social beliefs than whether or not there’s a god. Nobody gives a fuck who’s name you take in vain, for example; it’s all about balance. And there are absolutely folks that fill the roles of what you’d call god or the devil, make no mistake. The cultures that talk about weighing souls have that part the closest, although it’s a hell of a lot more complicated than that, ha. Not that I cared at the time, but actions, with very few exceptions, cannot be good or bad in and of themselves. Something you do nice for someone could in fact have a negative result for someone else down the line, unintentionally or unknowingly. All of that has to be carefully picked apart and scrutinized to truly reach a conclusion, and I’ve even seen a net “loss” overall be rewarded and net gains get descended, based on factors even I don’t understand. Wasn’t my job; I didn’t judge, I just turned the screws on the ones they sent me. But as with any large-scale operation, it’s not infallible. I know it seems like it ought to be, but here we are. Hell, here I am. The thing is, it’s a lot easier to correct an accidental reward than an accidental punishment, because everyone down there wails their innocence. No one believes them, of course, they all think that. There’s no point in following up, usually. Mostly, souls I worked on were one of two things: screamers (self explanatory) or talkers. Talkers are the ones who still think they can wheedle their way out, or want to share their life story again, hoping they can find a loophole or something to get them out. Some of those souls had been there longer than I had, sometimes; pitiful. Didn’t matter to me, I was having a gre- well, it was a time. And then I was passed a recent acquisition for punishment; not that uncommon, although by then I usually mostly had the old-timers who needed the skills of someone who really knew their stuff. But this soul?

Completely silent.

Really. Didn’t make a sound. Threw me for a huge loop, centuries as a literal nightmare and suddenly, no begging, no crying, nothing. Not even if I taunted, not even when I got started. And in that moment, it became the worst day of my afterlife-me, a piece of shit human voluntarily gone horrifying demon. Because I felt something. First mistake. If I’d stopped there things might have gone on without changing, but I was never what you might have called smart. Average is probably being generous. But I was so bowled over by that little spark of whatever it was-I couldn’t even recognize that it was an emotion, isn’t that sad?- that I made my next mistake: I asked why. Turned out I’d been handed my first actual misjudgment, this poor thing never protested a single action since they got here, never once defended themselves. They’d convinced themselves in life so completely that this is what they would deserve, that they just didn’t have any desire to try to fight it. I asked what they’d been judged for, and they just looked at me, and said they were ready. But when I pushed (at that point I was panicking over whatever was happening in my brain and figured I could count more questions as emotional manipulation or baiting or something) they didn’t list a single thing I had ever heard of stacking up to damnation. Someone at the gates really fucked up, in other words. Someone came in shortly after that and whisked them off, everyone had a good laugh over it for weeks after, jeering and asking me how much I got to put them through before they got picked back up. It should have been easy to join in- before this I would have been in the center of the mockery, but something was wrong, that flare was still inside me and I was having trouble handling it. You ever have a secret and you’re just sure everyone knows what it is just by looking at you? It was like that. And eventually I figured out that’s all it was, just a little bitty emotion, but that almost made it worse because it wasn’t supposed to be there; from what I even knew how all this demon shit worked in the first place, I was pretty sure it wasn’t even possible! But all I had to do to go back to my routine was ignore it, suppress it, reject it. Easy peasy, I’m a goddamn senior demon.

Except, to my shame, I couldn’t let it go. Does that even make sense, a demon feeling shame? Pretty sure that’s what it was at that point. But it was like having a little secret treasure that no one else could see. I would hide it, and then in little moments alone or whatever, bring it out and feel. I didn’t have the context anymore at the time, but now I can compare it to having lived in the dark and suddenly feeling a moment of sun. I had felt sorry for the soul, for just a moment! And the thing about emotions, they can grow the more you think about them. And I started thinking about it a lot. And then I started feeling happy (the horror!) that the mistake was caught and they got to leave. In case it’s unclear, feeling stuff like that for non hell-related reasons makes it pretty hard to do demony things. And if you remember, I’d never felt a whole lot of that kind of thing even before I got here. I literally tortured the souls of the damned, how do you do that when you start feeling sorry for them? But that little crack of light inside me, the shard of humanity, started bring back memories, or at least concepts, from when that’s all I was, and I suddenly started recognizing them as lost. And it hurt? And for the first time, I was mourning. After all, damned is forever. A demon is forever. So I was some weird fluke who caught some feels somehow, it couldn’t change that. But, you know, when your work starts to suffer, people start to notice. They started to talk. And they were right, my game was slipping hard. I felt bad! After a while I couldn’t just not say anything to the ones who just barely tipped the scales! As secretly as I could, I was giving them comfort. And I had to defend myself from my superiors over stuff I couldn’t stomach anymore but had to keep up with, or risk getting kicked back down. The wildest part was, my first thought about losing status wasn’t to save my own skin, of course not….now I was thinking about what the folks I got to talk to would do without those brief moments of respite I’d been passing out.

Point is, I was a demon who didn’t want to be a demon anymore, after centuries of not giving a fuck, and knowing full well that I was solidly fucked and that this was only going to get worse. I was miserable, but I still couldn’t put away the way the tiniest good feelings and I hoarded my experiences like someone who’s drowning clings to a raft. Except this raft was ruining my afterlife, and I didn’t really care for some reason. But I wanted to do my best, and not in the way I was used to. I had no idea what was going to happen but it probably was never going to get better.

But then, the crossroads.

Not the regular demony kind of crossroads. Oh no, I got stuck with the moral kind, although I didn’t realize what it was going to mean at the time. It had gotten bad enough for me that I was back to working under supervision, just like old times, the bad ones from when demons are just getting started. It was hard to do much that way but I’d figured out that even just smiling helps some people apparently? Or at least, once I first figured out how to smile so that they knew it wasn’t a threat. You ever seen a demon? I was not precisely what most people would prefer to look at with any expression. But it was already a hell of a day (more jokes!) and I was apparently near a limit I wasn’t aware of, and we got assigned a new soul. A new soul who didn’t say a word, just like where all of this began. And my supervison grinned at me, and snarled, and raised an arm, and I didn’t even have time to register that I had stepped between them to take the blow. Cheesy, I know. But there was a sound like one of those big industrial light switches snapping off, and it felt like time stopped or something. Maybe it did, I’m still not sure. But the literal, actual judges showed up. I was relieved someone got there so fast before anything else happened, I hadn’t even thought about what was going to happen to me yet. Proof positive I was completely broken by then, hadn’t even thought about my own skin yet. A couple of the judges took the soul away, and I waited for my bosses to show, but the judge still standing there was just watching me. After a moment, they said “Are you coming, or not?”

What.

I don’t think I was processing yet, but I think that’s probably all I actually said. So they gave me a look like you give to the dumbest guy in the room (I’m familiar with it) and said “Are. You coming? You have work to do. Unless you really think you’d prefer to stay?”

“Coming to what? You already picked up the error, it’s not me. Why would they let me leave, anyway? Not that I’m in a hurry to get my asskicking for this.”

There’s that look again. “Then don’t stay for it, they have no claim at the moment. Your balance tipped. Your call, stay, or take your out and rise.”

First time I’d ever heard that word. “……Rise?”

“Yes, rise. I suppose they wouldn’t want it to be common knowledge around here; then again, it means the few cases we get tend to be pretty solidly legitimate. Angels can fall, after all….why couldn’t a demon rise?”

“Sorry, got brimstone in my ears or something, are you telling me, of all creatures, that I’m heading upwards?” I definitely laughed. Demon laughter is very unpleasant. Recognizing this when you’re the one laughing is not fun.

“Something like that. As I said, your call. If you still prefer all of this for eternity, by all means, stick around.”

And that’s how I found out risen demons are a thing.

It’s not easy, no longer being of hell but not being of heaven, but it’s probably easier than you might expect. People think about heaven and hell in terms of punishment and reward, and while this is mostly true, like I said before, it’s really more about balance. The slate’s not wiped clean, but it’s not like I have some impossible restrictive rules that set me up to fail, it’s not like one tiny slip will shoot me back to the inferno, but I have bosses who check in now and then, keep tabs. And they’re here to help me, I’m not just stranded to make my own way. I’m not human, but I’m probably closer to that than I am to angel or demon anymore. And I gotta say, I look a whole lot better. I still put most people off at first, at least a little, but I’m way less spiky and you know. Fewer teeth, fewer arms, that kind of thing. But I guess you could say I’m doing pretty well now, dragging my way back to something I’m not sure I ever was, to be honest. I’m grateful for the chance.

And I’m looking forward to seeing who I can drag along with me, and that part feels pretty good.

#demons #heaven vs hell #short stories #written bits #mine #angels #redemption #original fiction

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lillotte17 · 4 years

Text

Words to Fill Space

Whelp, I’m not going to finish this since the literal creator of the show sort of pulled the rug out from under me. (bless) But I liked what I got down, so I figured I might as well toss it out into the void.

Catra knew who was on the other side of the door before it even finished opening. After all, she had hardly given her a moment to herself since rescuing her. Not that Catra minded the abundance of attention, exactly.

She didn't know how she felt about it, if she was being honest.

Any of it.

When she had been trapped on Prime's ship, some tiny quaking voice inside her had hoped against hope that Adora would come for her. That her inherent need to play the hero would override all the anger and resentment she must hold for her now. That a single shining thread of the promise they had made to take care of each other was still binding them to one another across the vast reaches of space and time, bitter words and bloodied hands.

Catra had hoped, but she hadn't really thought it would happen.

And yet, Adora was here, standing her the doorway with what seemed to be an armful of blankets and pillows, grinning from ear to ear like an idiot.

She wasn't sure what feeling the image instilled in her, but it was more than a little overwhelming. Everything that involved Adora seemed to be like that. Too big. Too bright. Heart hammering behind her ribs.

"What do you want this time?" Catra grumbled, curling into herself on the thin mattress at the center of the room, hiding her face in the crook of her arm, "I apologized to Entrapta, and I played nice with your friends at dinner, what else do I have to do before you let me get some sleep?"

"I remembered that you get cold easily," Adora explained, not at all put off by the less than cordial greeting, "The ship only has a few bedrooms, but we found a bunch of extra blankets and things in storage, and I figured you might want some of it."

So saying, she tossed a blanket at Catra's head, burying her face in soft stifling fabric. Catra hissed, flailing at the unexpected darkness for a moment before managing to tug herself free. Adora snorted.

"Gee thanks," Catra snarled, "Now can I go to sleep?"

"Well, sure, but…um," Adora began, suddenly looking a bit sheepish.

"Yes, what else do you want?" Catra heaved a sigh, rolling onto her back and flinging an arm over her face.

"There aren't enough bedrooms to go around," Adora admitted, "The rest of us all agreed to double up, but we knew that you were still having a hard time adjusting to being around everyone so… It seemed like I was probably the best choice to send in here with you? After all, it's not like we've never shared a room before…"

Catra moved her arm just enough to take a long look at Adora's face. There was something unbearably soft about it. Uncertainty dancing along the fringes of hope. The dim lighting painting her pale blue eyes the color of storm clouds. Her mouth teetering on the edge of a smile.

"That was a long time ago," Catra reminded her, shifting her gaze away.

"It wasn't that long ago…" Adora insisted quietly, "We don't… You don't have to talk to me or anything. I'm just going to bed down on the floor."

"Do whatever you want," Catra replied with a huff, "It's your ship anyway. It's not like I could kick you out even if I wanted to."

"…do you want to?" Adora wondered.

"…no."

The mumbled admission was apparently enough consent for Adora to move fully into the room and start arranging her makeshift bedding in one corner, tucked up against the wall.

After a minute or two of shuffling around, Adora seemed to settle. The only sound in the room afterwards was the faint sound of even breaths. She smelled a little different than Catra remembered -probably some kind of fancy princess soap as opposed to the regulation bars the Horde passed out- but beneath all that, she was the same. A light honest scent, with the faintest tang of sweat. The smell of safety and trust, and home.

For the first time in ages, Catra felt something inside her unclench, just slightly.

"Do you ever wonder what would have happened…if you had let me come with you when you went back for the sword?" Carta asked, her voice low, and her eyes fix firmly on the ceiling.

The was a long stretch of silence, and for a moment she thought Adora might have already fallen asleep.

"Not anymore," Adora replied, soft and remorseful, "I used to, back at the beginning of all this. I drove myself crazy trying to think of what I could have done differently that would have made you change your mind and leave with me. How I could fix things between us so we could be friends again. But then…"

"Then I opened the portal," Catra guessed, sounding bitter, although mostly at herself, "And you gave up on me."

"I never gave up on you!" Adora insisted, sitting up from her pile of blankets to fix her with an intense look, "You just… You wouldn't let me help you! You wouldn't listen to anything I had to say! You kept hurting me, and my friends, and everyone around you, and then trying to push the blame somewhere else when things went wrong. We grew up together, I know you better than anyone else in the whole world. I always knew you could be better than that. I've seen you be better than that! But it's not like I could just punch you into being a good person, you know? I tried! A lot! You had to want it for yourself first. What else was I supposed to do for you, Catra?"

"I…I don't know," Catra whispered the admission into the dark. She felt her heart sinking in her chest. The same bleak helplessness that had been dogging her for months stealing back into her thoughts. Despair and shame and regret. Knowing that, once again, no matter how hard she worked for it, no matter how far she stretched out her hand, the things she wanted were still beyond her grasp.

"It…It's never going to be the same, is it?" she asked thickly, choking down all the other things she wanted to say. Not even having the words for half of them. "Between you and me?"

"…Probably not," Adora sighed.

Catra made a quiet strangled sound, biting back tears. She was so sick of crying. Sick of losing and being lost. Being left. But she didn't have it in her to lash out anymore.

Her ears twitched at the sound of shifting blankets and bare feet padding across the room.

Adora sat at the foot of her bed, her expression uncharacteristically hard to make out. Catra sat up and stared back at her, trying to mask her own upset. After a few moments of contemplation, Adora finally reached out and touched her hand. Brief and gentle. Comforting.

"We can't go back to the way things were before," she said, "But maybe that's for the best. I don't think either of us were as good at being friends as we thought we were. The Horde wasn't really a great place to learn anything that didn't involve hitting things and yelling. We both made mistakes. We both hurt each other. Unintentionally, and…less than unintentionally, too. I don't want us to be like that again."

"I…understand," Carta replied. Her shoulders were shaking. Adora covered them with her hands, warm and steadying.

"But maybe, we can make something better?" Adora suggested, the corners of her mouth twitching upwards.

"Better?" Catra repeated dumbly, momentarily at a loss.

"Yeah. Better." Adora confirmed, a full-blown smile blooming across her face this time, crinkling the corners of her eyes. The low-lit crystals in the room seemed to all agree to pool their light withing her gaze at once, making her eyes shine like starlight.

Catra almost wanted to cover them with her hands. She felt like Adora could melt her from the inside out with those eyes. Even without She-Ra's powers.

"I'm…not sure I know how to do that," she admitted instead, trying not to let out a very telling sniffle.

"Me neither," Adora huffed in wry amusement, "But I'm willing to try if you are."

"And you really think all your princess friends in the Rebellion are just going to accept that?" Catra wondered, disbelieving, "Accept me? Like nothing happened?"

"Well…probably not at first," Adora conceded, "You did send an awful lot of bots and soldiers to shoot us. But they accepted Scorpia, and they forgave Entrapta, why should you be any different?"

"I've done a lot worse things than either of them," Catra pointed out.

"Alright, that's fair," Adora sighed, "But there's no way you've done worse things than Shadow Weaver, and she's part of the Rebellion now. I mean, nobody likes her or trusts her at all, but she's still there. Nobody tortured her, or suggested sending her off to Beast Island or something. The Rebellion isn't like the Horde; people who make mistakes can have a chance to fix them. It'll be hard, and I can't promise that all of them will like you, or decide to forgive you for what you did, but I know they'll at least give you a chance to try and make things right."

"Shadow Weaver never flipped a switch that nearly ripped the entire planet apart," Catra scoffed.

"No, you're right," Adora agreed, rolling her eyes, "She just spent twenty years or so helping Hordak manipulate orphans into destroying their own planet just to get back at the Sorcerer's Guild for throwing her out. She also poisoned Plumeria, tortured Glimmer, tried to wipe my mind, and almost destroyed Mystacor. And I mean…that's not even getting into everything she did to both of us while we were growing up."

"You don't have to try and make excuses," Catra said, looking away, "Shadow Weaver wasn't half as good at running the Horde as I was. I'm not sure if that says something impressive about me, or pathetic about her, but I don't think any kind of comparison between us is flattering. I'm not exactly proud that I was better at being awful than she was."

"You aren't?" Adora blinked.

"I know, right?" Catra chuckled dryly, "It surprised me, too."

Adora snorted. She caught her gaze again, and the air settled in silence between them for a few heartbeats. Not in anger or frustration or resentment, but something almost comfortable. Almost like friends.

Almost.

Adora smiled at her again, soft this time.

"You know, there is one huge thing you did that Shadow Weaver didn't," she said.

"Oh yeah?" Catra drawled, trying to act nonchalant, but feeling a touch apprehensive despite herself.

"Yeah," Adora continued, her smile curling up into more of a grin, "You said you were sorry."

#She-Ra #Catradora #Catra #Adora #catra x adora #fic #not sure i feel like i got their voices 100% right #but eh #it is what it's gonna be #this was also going to end with sleep snuggling #so Noelle legit just straight up came for my life #lmao #XD

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thewanderer-000 · 3 years

Text

Letting Go...

Tagged by @mrspaigeomega

I'm not tagging anyone because I'm taking too long to get these out and I feel like I'm bothering y'all. But mostly, I feel like I'm bothering everyone.

(Note: recently edited, 18+. Language, comfort, physical(may cause triggers), angsty. Normally, I don't write like this but the story got away with me. And new FC5 OC Penelope Thompson)

______________________

The evening set in, Jacob felt it, he didn't have to see a sunset to know evening was there. Jacob sat at his desk, blank stare at the paper work on his desk, it was another episode where he felt overtly anxious with his crowded mind. And some people of his past sat in the shadows, too bad they didn't stay in the past. Jacob especially didn't want to see remnants of Miller, and his parents as he stayed up too late. Or have them popping up like his chosen in the halls, or like her.

Deputy Penelope "Nelly" Thompson, who Jacob unfortunately was practically pried off of in a isolated incident, she struggled to breathe and failed to break his hold around her neck. After, Jacob couldn't really look at Nelly, he remembered why he did what he did. Matters were worse since he left a highly visible bruise on Penelopes neck, resistance members kept her away from Jacob. And he thought it best, Jacob wanted to block out everything as he walked away. He left quickly so as Nelly wasn't trying to follow him, or anyone else as he looked upon his hands.

It's not like Jacob would go back to choking the light from her, the incident was a giant sign no matter what, the things from his past would haunt and torture him. That he would finally let himself sink low, constantly the villain. Maybe the sinners were right, and he was just like what they painted him as, no matter what he affiliated. Regardless of what Joseph said, Jacob knew that this may be how he does himself in. Then wondering if he would snap again but who would be the unfortunate soul in his grasp next. The tormentors of his past won't stop popping up around him, and how he hated them. He was sorry, and regretted everything wrong he'd done, but it wasn't ever enough suffering, ever. These walls now felt smaller.

He didn't mean to do that, not to her, especially after the truce of peace in his bunker with the resistance members and civilians. On top of that Jacob appointed Nelly as their leader, she's supposed to be a Lieutenant. Here he almost snuffed her out unintentionally, somehow the peace was still here. More than likely everyone was afraid of him, really afraid.

Jacob obsessed, the Miller in his mind just wouldn't leave him alone, then when Miller touched him, Jacob lunged at the his former brother in arms who taunted him. If Miller wouldn't understand that Jacob wanted nothing to do with him, Jacob was going to have to deal with him. The Miller that haunted him did this a lot when it seemed like Jacob was doing good. He'd push and push til Jacob finally pushed back. This time Jacob had Miller tight in his hands as he tried to get away, soon Jacob's parents were trying to free Miller from Jacob's hold. It almost always played out the same way, Jacob attacks but Miller, then Miller is gone, long gone. And Jacob was left with the mess and try to explain himself, how was he to know.

The voices yelling didn't match his parents, Jacob didn't care as he threw a fist at them, but more of his father tried restraining him. Before Jacob knew it, a hand grabbed a fist full of his shirt then his father hit him. Bringing him back to reality. In the silence Jacob's chosen created space between him and Nelly, Jacob looked over at her as some of the resistance came rushing to her aid. Jacob was about to go to her as well, but one of his men prevented him. The feeling in his hands had Jacob realize it wasn't Miller but Penelope, he couldn't stay there, so he left to exercise himself to exhaustion. The hallway felt small before, but now it was almost claustrophobic, he was going to need space.

No one bothered him too much in the following weeks, though they still checked on both Jacob and Penelope. Jacob being monitored for any hallucinations, orders from the only doctor they had, wasn't much but the doctor did his best. Though, enough of the mental health stuff came from the Veterans Center, and tips from Veterans that joined Eden's Gate came in handy. The resistance kept Nelly away from Jacob, he wasn't ready to face her yet. Jacob made that a direct order. One of the women of his Gate informed Jacob that Nelly was fine, but that she still wanted to see him. Jacob said "out of the question", but that he was sorry for what happened, he didn't mean for it to happen. That was the only reply, even though Nelly asked every time she was around the Peggies that came to check on her.

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

'Nelly asked for me many times, I knew it was a matter of time till she would come. But the pictures in her medical report, I couldn't make it possible, I can't help what's wrong with me. All the scarred are left with is coping, and sometimes I'm not sure what is going on there. I can only push on, lead as best I can, and hope that at the end of this I'll see my brothers.

Penelope Thompson, Penelope was the only one I wasn't prepared for'.

Before her was Deputy Lyric Cain Haig, a problematic figure in my recent past and now, and now I have Deputy Penelope Thompson, I martyred me. I was gone, and explaining it to Penelope, would she see this mess I hide within myself. I'm constantly fighting me, that is something she didn't need to see, nobody needed to see it. But, would I start to see her here in my hallucinations as well, after a long while maybe I would. I had a few random people come to me in my head, I anticipated this, the most I could ever do is to ride it out. Some brought out the worst in me, my one regret is Penelope suffered one with me, and she's so damn insistent about seeing me.

"Does she just go for shit that is not good for her? Considering she came here, I suppose so", 'Penelope is like that disruptive, incessant Deputy Haig deep down. Though, I think back on those nights when Penelope was in here with me, holding me in her arms, or me holding her in my arms'.

"I can't fucking focus tonight", I get up from my desk to go sit on my bed, 'maybe I'll go to bed or something'. I look at my bed envisioning Penelope and myself, I sigh, because that's not making things better. 'Forget going to bed, I'll head to the gymnasium and work out, but who am I kidding, that wouldn't help. I'm feeling something I don't want to feel, I think I'll get to the gym, fuck waiting for these apparitions to fuck off. I swear this bunker has intensified something's, or maybe it was the bliss. Whatever it's bullshit, that's what it is'.

I change into my sweats, and grab some trainers before heading out. Walking the bunkers halls I hear everyone enjoying the close quarters and each other's company. The single men's and women's quarters are full of laughter. Then some of the married couples are kinda the same, an argument here and there, nothing serious. I started to wonder how Nelly was, from everyone in the bunker, I could only imagine she is well.

'Her soft smile with a bit of a dreamy look as she giggles, her dark brown eyes smiling. That stern look her eyes make when she's confused, concentrating or training. Her full lips, and that face she makes, the one that pokes her lips out even more-'. I quickly approached the gym so as not to keep thinking about Nelly.

Once I enter the gymnasium I go run laps, do a bit weightlifting after laps, push ups, sit ups, and a little circuit training to finish. I'd stay longer but I feel an audience peering at me, and I just didn't want to be someone's form of entertainment or judgment. Being under a human's gaze is different than an apparition, I know mostly what the apparitions are thinking. Human gazes made me uncomfortable now.

I never understood how Lyric could just go with the flow with that sort of thing, but maybe she was used to it. She was one of the top soliders in Marine Corps., I made it back to my room thinking of sister Lyric. I don't know why, 'the little sister I never wanted', much like Faith but I think she's deadlier. Then I wonder if I'd need all of these files after it all, I imagine not if we're all to build on a new world. I walk around my room reading all the files, but the sweat on my clothes was starting to bother me. I undress, tossing my soiled clothing into the laundry basket, leaving my sweat pants on.

At some point of reading files, I fell asleep. I woke hours later, I didn't dream which is great, my dreams only seemed to turn into nightmares. Or take me back to an old reality, but before I could left myself sink, I get off my bed to shower. Refreshing as ever, I welcome the hot water and scrub myself clean, afterwards I looked myself in the mirror thinking about getting rid of the beard. 'Nah, I still like it'. Towel around my waist comes off as I dress, I look at the time and I'm up super early, again. 'And it's fucking Sunday, so nothing is happening, or- fuck'. My door opened and quickly closed as I looked at the calendar, I turn to see Penelope, still by the door.

"Jacob, we need to talk" she stood there looking anywhere that wasn't my face, something was on her mind and she wasn't going to let it go. I wanted to go to her and touch her, have her wrapped in my arms once more but I don't dare. The look on my face fades, knowing that I really fucked up what could have been. Shes afraid and I'm the reason why, and I can't help her.

"Yeah, we should, Penelope. You want to sit down?" I ask, unsure if I should have asked that, but she sits on my bed. I register where she sat but wondered if she's ok with me next to her. I take a shot at sitting next to her and she's stayed, so I assume it's fine enough. She doesn't flinch or move away, but then she looks at me and we just look at each other.

"Jacob, are you ok?" I'm surprised, I couldn't respond to that, 'I suppose, I shouldn't be surprised, she's always been that was since we've been in the bunker'.

"Me? I know I'm not, but you-" I reach out to point at "it", my marks on her neck. She makes a face like what the hell then she sits up unzipping her hoodie to let me see. Not what I wanted but she seems ok, I'm not trusting that facade though. I gently touch, feeling the bruises, my eyes tracing as my hands are.

"Fuck, Penelope. How are you here? I'm surprised that you decided to come near me at all, babe.. Maybe this isn't good, may-" she pulled away before I could finish that sentence, she's gonna be a horses ass now. I exasperated this, or I'm yet to do so.

"Jacob! You've been through the wringer and each time we've been sleeping together you-" Penelope stopped and sat better and took a breath, she had point. 'Though, I didn't know I talked about others in my sleep'.

"You mentioned Miller, and during the incident you mentioned him, again. I just-" I couldn't help but stop her, I didn't want this to consume her.

"I know we talked about your boys, your family and I've been enamored with you, and especially that new years kiss. But Miller is my problem and I don't want that part of me consuming you, because it's only going to end badly. I care about you too much to let it get you like it's got me" I felt like I broke my heart, I'd rather not kid myself and cut her loose before things get worse. I felt like I did when I was homeless but worse because I wanted her, and a future with her and her family.

"Jacob" she said pulling me to her, I was weak and went to her, just once more I wanted to feel her kiss, once more feel her in my hands. And feel her holding me before I severed our bond.

#Jacob Seed #Far Cry 5 #Fanfic #Fan Fiction #writing #short story #Letting Go...#Lyric Cain Haig #Penelope Thompson #Far Cry 5 OC #Far Cry 5 OCs #Far Cry 5 Deputy #18+#triggers #physical #comfort

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