#but (more importantly) its a precarious in group

[convoloutedinjoke]

competitiveness and rules brain and mortal fear of becoming a disposable outsider going hand in hand in hand < ---------- is thinking about the loneliness again

[femciolente]

Lumpen Theory : Genealogy of a Panoptilumpenism (Part 1)

“ Terrible things happen daily of which we are not aware of, hidden under the pretense of normality and coherence of the world you and I are forced to experience. Together, but yet so far away, a digital sea of modern colonization exists. All that is hidden is understood to exist as oppression, and that oppression is but the systematic death once the inevitable misery catches up to the rowdy prosperity of the cybernetical un-friendship orders.  “

.

What became projected as a refusal to expand on the different forms which the oppressed populations of the world took, the Lumpenproletariat has always been nothing more than a slur. The Lumpen  have seen their potential, actions and even existence reduced to a mere splinter of class society under the classical Marxist framework, and even more reductive under a liberal scope. 

The liberal status quo seeks to uniform these outliers, to create a non-porous, fully glossy and brand new form of governance that does not imply the existence of the faults and burdens called Lumpen. And the Marxist seeks to merely fault it for the errors of its own actions. What both of these conceptions have in common is simply their will to reduce struggle to a mere flaw, forgetting the moments and large periods in which the Lumpenproletariat took apart of, not as the subject of a movance or drive towards a narrative goal, but more-so as the undisputed net losers of the movements of the societies we trap  our thought around. The construction of a “better world” under the progressive stance implies the wiping down of the impurities the liberated subject of the  Lumpen are : there cannot be a better world for those  at the bottom of the existence of the present state of things, and the future ones if we try to be cynical. Engels retains the crown of anti-lumpen sentiment, very early on embarking in hatred towards a group he barely defined in order to assert the position of the proletariat as the unique pawn in their path of the progress of history. Nothing constructive comes from the Lumpenproletariat, and this understanding leads to conceiving them as historically “scum” and “opportunists”, friends of reaction and the status quo. The myth of the Lumpen representing the outdated populations of the early-modern urban development is something that persists nowadays. Mercenaries, crooks and “parasites” are what Engels, and then Marx, meant and explicited by the Lumpen, entities devoid of revolutionary character, outside of the glorious proletariat and most importantly, in opposition to it. In many regards, the reductionism that Marx and Engels apply to this strata of the population  is clearly tied to the events they analyzed ever since 1848 and the many abuses the working population suffered because of this undisclosed exploitative Lumpenproletariat. The vagueness of what they even imply by Lumpen at this stage makes for it to become the quick insult many cement the term as, even when Marx’s own conception evolves when Capital arrives. His true, real critique of political economy outside of the realizations he has on the conditions of the revolting bodies involving themselves in England, France and other areas of the  European theater, comes with the realization of a new concept that will be very useful following up : the  one of Lumpenization, or understood as the process that turns sectors of a viable population towards a much more precarious, fluid and non-protected existence, basically creating a larger aflux of Lumpen.

Efforts from the capitalist systems turned the varied populations of an evolving society into elements of what he saw as being the “exploitative degeneracy” that constituted the element to oppose inside his notion of the Lumpen, making it not a desirable process, but more so a subjected one with the whole entire violence of the state and capital behind it all. A scheme so simple in its perpetuation that it gets overlooked and assimilated into the “natural” processes of capital, alongside  commodity production and fetichisation. His opposition to the Lumpen is, as commonly described, political. But nonetheless, I see his opposition as coming from a severe lack of will towards a deep understanding of  outside regards, or as Ernesto Laclau would put it in this same topic, "the limits of Marxist determinism“ . In short, Marxism, as the established framework of analysis and understanding of class society guided by the proletarian socialist meta-narrative, has no room, nor want, to establish a thoughtful consideration of what the Lumpen REALLY are, outside of all value and moralistic judgement many engage with nowadays. The conditions of such a shift and change in the perspective of the Lumpen should be set, first of all, on the basis of a “non-marxist” framework, one that does not establish a subject for revolutionary progression above all other possible material analysis. 

Combating the many forms the systematic train of thought Marxism has historically represented comes in the originally Marxist realization of the end of the “labour movement”. The late Paul Mattick essentially considered the labour movement to be “dead” and non-existent in the modern times of the postwar world. No longer could the forms of organization of the working class combat capitalism the same way it once used to. No longer can the proletariat unite under the thought of Marx or Lenin in order to advance the  progression of social systems. No longer could liberation be achieved by the same old conceptions of revolution we had carried around essentially since the early Fourrieriusts. As he would put it : “The labour movement preceded Marxian theory and provided the actual basis for its development. Marxism became the dominating theory of the socialist movement because it was able convincingly to reveal the exploitative structure of capitalist society and simultaneously to uncover the historical limitations of this particular mode of production.” On this same basis, Marxism was able to grasp the concept of leading progressive revolution in terms of using a same, concrete and particular subject, one not free but alienated and exploited, with enough potential to set itself free and dissolve the forms that put it there to begin with. But no  longer can that be seen as a coherent labour movement, and the flaw comes with this essentialization of The Proletariat, the utmost important cog and at the same time, the main pawn to the creation of Marxist analysis.

With this in mind, many properly Marxist groups through the (mostly) modern history of class struggle (1960’s-80’s) have undertaken this fallacious class consideration, and taken on a Lumpen defense, one that does confront the previously mentioned un-legitimate attacks from the early socialist revolutionaries. Denning, Fanon and even Marcuse embark in the commonly found “revolutionary potential of the Lumpen”, explaining its colonial history as being the “radicals of the radicals”, a sort of unmeasured group full of revolutionary fervour, similar to what the classical proletariat can achieve if set  under the line of class consciousness. While these defenses have served as the proliferation of the term in a less commonly conceived pejorative notion of the Lumpenproletariat, they fall under the baseline that creates the issues of Marx and Engels : they create a new revolutionary subject,  this time more radical, not removed from any constructive logic in order to achieve the building up of a concise class identity. It cannot be said that this is truly the liberatory form of the Lumpen. We should in turn, consider this defense as the first kind hearted attempt to remove the monopoly of revolt from the hands of the western and white proletariat  in order to atomize  it further into greater depth. Back to the first international and the period of the mere inception of the Lumpen-Prole divide, Bakunin encountered a similar attempt, as the label he was attributed of the “Prince of the Lumpen” was a simple reaction towards what he had conceived as a preferential strategy to out-socialist the marxists. In order to defend the vague and, very un-deleuzian, nomadic peasantry of the remains of economic development in the European labour world, he provocatively took on the position of “Only the Lumpen can liberate and act towards the social revolution”. To repeat myself one last time, this is not but a change in the subject of history and a retention of the notion of the progression of history towards a being-just and not a liberatory becoming. 

The role of the diversification of the relations under the precognition of the Lumpen is one that serves a greater purpose, but once again, the Lumpen is already a liberated subject, only constrained by its own influenced volition. The repetition of the subject form instead of its abolition and liberation on a general form is nothing brand new or outstanding, and hence the proclaimed Lumpen defense of these authors remains incomplete, inconclusive and truthfully useless for a construction of the real genealogy behind the liberation of Lumpen. One group, however, embarked in the tale to liberate and act upon the Lumpen’s condition with greater notions and wider conceptions on how to approach it, this being the Japanese New Left (JNL). In reality, this wide movement of social upheaval in the Japanese islands was much more than just a grouping of pro-Lumpen students. From the Trotskyists and Maoists that confirmed the improvised parties and informal revolutionary groups at the borderlines of the control of the state, many groups seeked an avant-garde approach to acting upon the conditions of the Japanese sphere, and a revolution of Japanese culture as a whole after the fiasco of the expansion and construction of a cultural identity on the precognition of the expansion of the empire. This pre-conceptual imperialist nature to what it meant to be Japanese inherently implied a re-thinking of what groups constituted as the internal operations of the Japanese cultural machine, and those that conformed a noumena, purposely blinded and devoid of any constructive forms on which to base themselves on. The bulbous mass of deformed victims of the violence of the Imperial Japanese construction became the allies of the revolutionary groups : ethnic minorities were, for many groups of denominational variety, the main primary focus on their struggle. Doing so bought them the hatred of some more orthodox Marxist groups, claiming their “non focus on class” as being contrary to the bouillant social climate that might at the time host an actual revolutionary movement. The ethnic minorities that they sought to protect under many circumstances were grouped up vulgarly under the notion of all being Lumpen, below the Japanese worker. And under such framing, groups of students in Tokyo and Osaka claimed this aspect proudly, hailing the defense of the Lumpen into action, seeking to organise outside of the prefecture of Osaka proper the members of the Lumpen, in the case of Japan, the prostitutes, day labourers and marginalized ethnic groups that were comprised as the poster children of this movance popping up in the area. The so-called “inner colony” of the newly constructed Kamagasaki council, constituted of the Lumpenproletarian actors that constitute a majority of the activity in that area, was considered “the 3rd world inside the 1st world”. The notion here implies a heavy dose of colonial relations into the logic of the interaction with the Lumpenproletarian populations. This relation exists because of the following parameter:

Lumpenproletariat = Alienated > Proletariat ----------> sense of outside -------> colonial logic is applied for it, maintaining margin and distance with class society.

That last part remains an integral part of the actions of the JNL on the eyes of the Lumpen : the alienation due to the misery and visceral exploitation of the Lumpen from the whole of Capitalist social actors makes them a subject of the “borderlands” of class society, outside, but remaining on the grasp of the exploitation they phase. Because of this separation, they are unable to construct a destructive imperial entity, just like the Japanese proletariat, willingly or not, did. Of all the groups that appeared during this clearly intellectually fertile time in Japanese class struggle, the East-Asian Anti-Japaneist Armed Front (EAAJAF) remains as the biggest and best example of how to envision the lumpen. Many of the Marxist groups, specially those in accord with Eiji Oguma’s notion that the Anti-Japaneist movement had a clear “post-structuralist character, understanding its use of pseudo-history as realization of the “linguistic turn” ”, none of them actually continued and carried out the proposed total and radical deconstruction of a Japanese cultural identity itself, basing themselves around the “zenkyoto” form, or joint struggle committees that were used as organs that can be classically found on any other Marxist organization. On this, the Daidoji couple that founded the front did so in a non-explicitly “opposition” towards the general direction of the Zengakuren, that by then had abandoned all sense of radical deconstruction and erasure. The group held on to the stance that became the more Lumpen-friendly out of a movement that already greatly considered this sector. Their direct attacks on the Empire, whether it be via the numerous sabotages like in 1974 or simply the intellectual intention behind their collective writings and most specifically the Hara Hara Tokei, had crumbled, as Till Knaudt would say, the entirety of the still not anti-Japaneist enough New Left. Their actions are an expression of the concerns of the victims of this newly appearing virtual-colonialism that is so omnipresent in their conceptions. Basically founding an armed struggle group on the collaboration and retaliation of the Lumpen against even the workerist Prole identity seemed too far for the anachronistic Marxists of modern discourse, and even the ones at the time acting as formal opposition to the EAAJAF, but in reality is the utmost example of an action, an attitude and a thought against the anti-lumpen sentiment, and one favorizing its revolt, self-abolition and proliferation as the vector of the creative destruction they so wanted to see unfold on the Japanese archipelago. The Lumpenproletariat then follows the agitation that it is brought, not prescribed like in the case of the proletariat, and perpetually seeks the total liberation that is the lustful object of Communistic projects : a liberation from all sides of class society, an affirmation of non-exploitation.

Similarly, Deleuze, in his lectures on the State War Machine, retook this term and applied a machinic logic to the developments of capitalism he saw in the later part of his life. The “3rd world inside the 1st world” was then the 4th world, an absurd difference between the affluent perfection of the wealth created and then fetichized by the rich populations, and the misery created, not in response, but in consequence of such development. Total misery contrasted to total virtuosity of capital’s developments. As such, the 4th world is the situation in which Lumpenization occurs, one in which the machine of Capital, that we will from now on describe as “Technocapital”, perpetuates modes of production and exploitation in order to conceive a “virtual-colonial” situation. This neologism is something I have coined to describe that distance in the treatment of the Lumpenproletariat that was considered a form of colonial relationship by the JNL theorists. This relationship relies on distance and separation, all geographical, social and economical distance from class society, to the Lumpen inhabitants of its borderlands. Added to this notion, we have the central word of Panoptilumpenism, a porte-manteau word encompassing “panopticon” and “Lumpen” to define the effect that is to be understood as the self-biopolitical regulation of the Lumpenproletariat that is on itself the reason of their sense of “outsideness” and non-liberation, as a direct result from the total alienation they face and the absolute bottom of the barrel position in society that they held, and still hold, in relation to other groups. Panoptilumpenism, to be more concrete, is the genealogical perpetuating coincidence that pin-points the raison-d’etre of the Lumpenproletariat in its various forms.

Part 1 -

[elceeu2morrow]

OCTOBER 25, 2022 BY TIM INGHAM

Did you happen to find yourself in a provincial German discotheque in the early 2000s, somewhere betwixt Berlin and Dresden, watching Rednex – and we say this with a modicum of charity – ‘perform’ Cotton Eye Joe to a wide-eyed dancefloor?

While you were there, did you notice a 19-year-old woman, stood to the side of the throng, with a handbag suspiciously stuffed with tens of thousands of Euros?

If so, we do hope you were polite to her. Because she went on to become one of the most influential international executives in the global music industry.

Today, Dominique Casimir is Chief Content Officer at BMG, and sits on the board of the Bertelsmann-owned music company. Most importantly, she oversees BMG’s ‘repertoire’ (that’s publishing and records) operation in 17 separate territories, including Central Europe, Latam, and the UK. Or to put it in a more succinct way: Casimir runs BMG’s entire music operation everywhere outside North America.

Twenty years ago, such professional heights must have seemed a long way off for Casimir, who had moved to Berlin as a teenager with the initial intention of becoming a doctor. Within a few months, she’d pressed pause on these medical ambitions, and found herself studying an aimless mix of subjects at university, while waitressing in her spare time to pay the rent. One day, a realization hit her: “This leads to nothing.”

Following her innate passion for music, she signed up as an intern for a German talent agency that specialized in booking shows for Swedish pop acts. It was an eye-opening introduction to the music business.

She spent most of her time in a van, “picking up acts like Rednex and [nu-disco trio] Alcazar, and taking them to shady discotheques for playback performances – multiple venues in one night. When we got to each show, I’d been told to [accost] the venue owner: ‘No one goes on stage until the money is in my handbag!’”

This precarious lifestyle was a thrill for Casimir until one December night, still in her teens, she found herself arranging an emergency helicopter to the local hospital. The lead singer of Rednex had succumbed to a life-threatening fever… in a minibus driven by Casimir… which was stuck on the Autobahn… because of an avalanche. Casimir was out of money, out of phone battery – and very nearly out of a lead singer of Rednex.

Somehow, Casimir made it back to her parents’ house in Hamburg that Christmas. And far from being scared off the music industry, she decided to double down. 

Returning to Berlin that New Year, Casimir launched her own successful independent booking and management company – keeping her contacts from Swedish pop-land, while also branching out into management of young German rock bands. She made enough waves over the next half-decade to impress Fremantle, a Bertlesmann-owned TV content company, who hired her to handle sync licensing and music publishing agreements in 2007. 

A year later, her work caught the eye of Hartwig Masuch, who had just become CEO of the ‘new’ BMG, a startup music company backed by Bertelsmann capital. (The ‘old’ BMG was no more, after Universal Music Group acquired its publishing assets in a USD $2.19 billion deal in 2007.)

Today, outside of the major music companies, BMG is arguably the largest music publishing and recorded music entity globally. 

In the first half of 2022, BMG turned over EUR €371 million, up 25% year-on-year, with 40% of that revenue figure coming from recorded music and the remaining 60% from publishing. Its repertoire across publishing and records includes all-time classics from Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones and Tina Turner, through to modern releases by the likes of George Ezra, Kylie Minogue, Jason Aldean, Slowthai, Lewis Capaldi, Mabel and Louis Tomlinson.

Remarkably, Hartwig Masuch says that BMG had achieved its 25% YoY revenue uplift in H1 2022 “with virtually no hits” – his point being that BMG’s primary focus is not on achieving global chart-toppers, but instead on amplifying the prospects of all its repertoire, regardless of audience size. 

As head of BMG’s repertoire outside the US, Dominique Casimir oversees music that is responsible for around 50% of her employer’s worldwide turnover. 

Many of her most notable moves to date have come in her home nation of Germany. In August, for example, BMG swooped for Telamo, Germany’s largest independent record label and a specialist in Schlager music (often described as Germany’s equivalent of country music in the US). As a result of that deal, BMG now stands as one of the largest label groups in the German market.

Casimir has also personally been at the forefront of BMG’s investment in three significant areas of live music. During the pandemic, she led the majority-acquisition of German live music promoter Undercover. She also led BMG’s backing of the stage musical Ku’Damm 56, which has sold over 200,000 tickets to date, and was recently extended to the end of February 2023.

Most recently, Casimir took the wraps off BMG’s latest foray into live entertainment: The firm has booked out Berlin’s most renowned theater, the 1,600-seat Theater des Westens (TdW), every night until the end of 2024. 

BMG, in conjunction with Bertelsmann, will pack that theatre with live content each week, with a view to emulating the Vegas/Broadway-style ‘residency’ successes of artists in the US such as Bruce Springsteen, Adele, and Celine Dion.

Here, Casimir explains what her early experiences in music taught her about treating artists and why she believes BMG has cracked the right way to do deal-making with artists – as she reveals an interesting theory for why the music industry continues to obsess over weekly charts…

YOU STARTED LIFE IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY AS A TEENAGER, SITTING IN SPLITTER VANS WITH SWEDISH POP ACTS AND GERMAN ROCK BANDS. IS THERE ANYTHING YOU LEARNED DURING THAT TIME THAT STILL RESONATES WITH YOUR PROFESSIONAL LIFE TODAY?

Definitely. As a manager [in the early noughties] I saw a totally unbalanced, unfair and super-weird situation: The artist would be putting their entire life into this, and you had the industry – whether that was live or record companies – making all the money and calling all the shots. 

That triggered something in me from minute one. There was this tone from the music industry during that era: We have the power; you, artist, are small. Now shut up while we overrule you, because we know better.

I met lots of anxious artists who were so busy trying to make their A&R at the record company happy. They were delighted when one of these ‘super repertoire’ people from the label visited the show. To the artists, it felt like these label people really could open the gate of magic at a major music company. But that was actually when the trouble would really start!

WHAT DO YOU MEAN, TROUBLE?

I believe that the most important thing you can have when you’re starting a [commercial] discussion with an artist is clarity. Clarity on what it is we can achieve together, but also clarity on agreeing on a realistic picture – sometimes, a reality check! – on what the best case scenario looks like at the end of a project.

That means not promising the sky and everything in it just to get an artist to sign to you. Because what happens in that scenario is you enter into an ‘us and them’ relationship. Record companies might think [when the artist signs with them] that they have ‘won’ a deal, but if you haven’t invited clarity and honest discussion into the room, you will be left with a huge amount of pressure. And, soon, you will be left with the blame game.

The moment you create a relationship with an artist where there is ‘you’ and not ‘us’, it just won’t work.

Artists are not always super-predictable – that’s part of the reason we all love them so much. But when they know who they are, you can all agree together what the goals are and what the goals aren’t. When they’re willing to get into the ‘boat’ with their [record company partner], when you’re in it together, there is no blame game. You have a recipe for success.

ISN’T THE ‘PROMISING THE MOON’ ELEMENT OF RECORD COMPANY DEALS WITH ARTISTS VERY OFTEN BECAUSE THE ARTIST INVOLVED HAS A LIKELIHOOD OF RELEASING A CHART HIT – OR ALREADY HAS ONE ON THE WAY?

Yes. I know you noticed Hartwig’s comment about BMG not requiring a hit to grow 25% in the first half of this year. That is the new music industry. 

Of course it’s nice for every artist to have a hit, and we’ve had our fair share. But hits come and go, and for some of them [the record labels] massively overpays. Some artists have just one hit in their career, and it’s not even a super-hit. 

You can’t live off that forever, but it might cost you everything because of the way your deal is structured; if that deal, for example, is completely predicated on you having a second hit, with massive expenditure [baked in] at radio. If you don’t get that second hit, you’re toast. 

Think of it from the artist’s perspective: The industry often doesn’t talk nice about artists who don’t get that follow-up hit, especially if a lot of money has been spent trying to get it, and artists know that. A huge part of this industry still spends all its time and attention – and a lot of its money – playing that hits game, and it leads to bad incentives. 

Traditional record label A&R is like cooking spaghetti: throw 10 pieces at the wall and hope one sticks. Those pieces of spaghetti are artists! It needs to change. There are so many ways of making a living for an artist today. Even though it remains really hard to do so, focusing on just the hits and the recorded music charts – in an age when 600,000 new songs a week are going on to streaming services – isn’t a sensible strategy.

WHAT IS A SENSIBLE STRATEGY?

Our perspective is to look at artists and ask: Is there an interesting brand here, an interesting story we can use our expertise to grow around the world?

As an artist, you need as diversified an income as possible – Covid proved to all of us that just relying on live income can quickly be disrupted. It’s not about just living off your vinyl sales or D2C, or Spotify, or ticketing; you need to understand which income streams work best for you, and turn up the volume on all of them.

We don’t just promote records anymore – we promote artist brands.

WHY DO YOU THINK SO MUCH OF THE MUSIC INDUSTRY CONTINUES TO FOCUS ON CHARTS AND HITS? SURELY THAT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE UNDER YOUR ARGUMENT; THERE MUST BE A SOUND ECONOMIC REASON FOR IT?

One of the reasons I’m so thankful I started out in live is that I got to witness that ‘live moment’ – when eveything you’ve worked on together as a team is realised. You hear the audience; it’s such a direct and satisfying reaction.

That’s something you don’t get when you work in a record company. That’s one reason I think the charts remain so important to friends and colleagues in the record industry – charts are a mirror that tell a team: ‘You’ve done something successful.’

But the truth is the charts only reflect a small proportion of the music industry, and even if you do have chart success, it should only be one part of a much bigger story.

That was made clear to me from the first minute of being interviewed to join BMG. Hartwig was very strong and opinionated: we need to apply expertise and systems to what music IP is, and what an artist identity is. That’s the goal. And we need to do it while being honorable, transparent and offering the best level of service – not overruling or overpowering because ‘we know best’.

WHAT WERE YOUR FIRST IMPRESSIONS WHEN YOU MET HARTWIG?

He was busy choosing the new BMG logo at the time! I remember him turning around and saying, ‘Why do you want to join this new music company.’ And I said: ‘Actually, I’m not really sure why the world needs another major music company.’ That got him going!

He looked and me and said: ‘I will tell you why…’ And that was followed by Hartwig in full inspiration mode: What he wanted, why he thought artists and songwriters deserve it, and the type of people he wanted around him to make it happen. 

SINCE MAY, YOU’VE BEEN CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER OF BMG, OVERSEEING ALL REPERTOIRE OPERATIONS OUTSIDE NORTH AMERICA. WHICH MARKETS AROUND THE WORLD ARE YOU MOST EXCITED BY FROM A BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE?

Mexico, and Latam more generally, stand out. We announced we would launch BMG Mexico earlier this year, we’re in the process of getting it up-and-running and it is already so much fun. There’s tremendous growth, of course, in LatAm [territories] with many of them growing by more than 30% per year for three years in a row at this point.

Streaming and digitalization of the LatAm markets is generally very advanced. But on the other hand, other parts of the industry – the live business, brands, merch, the sync business – all have room to become much more relevant, and I think we as BMG will really make a difference to that.

YOU MENTION LIVE: BMG HAS MADE SIGNIFICANT STRIDES INTO LIVE IN ITS HOME MARKET IN THESE PAST FEW YEARS, ESPECIALLY WITH YOUR MAJORITY ACQUISITION OF UNDERCOVER, AND MORE RECENTLY WITH YOUR TWO-YEAR RESIDENCY OF THE BERLIN THEATRE WHERE YOU’VE SEEN SUCCESS WITH THE KU’DAMM 56 MUSICAL.

Germany is a good country for us to test things. It’s the fourth biggest music market in the world, and in some years it’s the third [overtaking the UK]. 

What we’re trying here with Bertelsmann, is to ask: Can we extend what we do in rights management in music to the live business? Because from a marketing and promotion and storytelling perspective that idea makes a lot of sense. We’re very good at that in [music rights]. And then another thing we’re very good at is financial transparency, and I think there’s a need for that in the live world. And we found a company [in Undercover] just like us. The first meeting I had with [Undercover founder Michael Schacke], he said: ‘We are about fairness and 100% transparency. Our artists can come and audit us anytime.’ 

One big annoying needle in every artist’s foot in live is the consumer data. There’s a huge amount of valuable fan data created in the process of selling tickets, but it’s often difficult for artists and managers to access that information. We are trying to crack that open with some artists, and get the fullest picture possible of their fanbase, so we can really optimise their income streams.

Our involvement in live concert promotion is the opposite of a ‘360’ deal structure: We offer live promotion and agency services on an opt-in basis to our [recorded music and publishing] artists. We hope those artists do opt-in, because we think we’re offering a lot of added value. But it’s their choice and if it doesn’t suit them that’s fine.

ONE OF THE BIGGEST STORIES IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY THIS YEAR HAS BEEN THE REVIVAL OF KATE BUSH’S RUNNING UP THAT HILL VIA A STRANGER THINGS SYNC OVER THE SUMMER. WHAT WAS YOUR TAKE ON THAT, AND HOW EVEN THOUGH IT’S A ‘CATALOG’ RECORD, IT EXPLODED LIKE A NEW STREAMING HIT AMONGST MILLIONS OF TEENAGERS WHO WERE HEARING IT FOR THE FIRST TIME?

It’s a beautiful dynamic, and it’s not about ‘catalog’ or ‘frontline’. Kate Bush is an icon and an iconic brand. The question for this new generation of consumers, and those in the music business working to maximize this moment’s potential is: What’s the core of the brand? Why why did she have such a cultural impact? What’s the essence of this artist’s appeal? 

I translate that to what we’re doing with Tina Turner [whose music interests BMG acquired last year]. What is the essence of why people feel so strongly and so connected to Tina Turner (pictured)? We’re talking about a premium brand here, and a brand that comes with very strong emotional attributes attached to it. Obviously, it’s about the music, but it’s about more than the music.

So, again, that’s the question: Why was an artist so culturally impactful in the first place? Once you can answer that, you go from there.

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Authoritarian Platforms: Far-right Radicalisation Amidst Economic Precarity in Brazil

When I started my fieldwork in an informal street market in Brazil, I was greeted with the statement ‘Welcome to the Jungle’. I met Joana Souza, a market vendor, in 1999, as she sold products like counterfeit Disney toys. During one routine police crackdown, I expected her to act in solidarity towards her neighbouring peers who were being fined, but, to my surprise, she supported the authorities. On another occasion, while Souza was trying to sell a cap for R$ 15, another neighbour broke into the negotiations, offering the same cap for R$ 10. To my research interlocutors, the law that ruled the ‘jungle’ was ‘every man for himself’. This kind of ‘neoliberalism from below’, as coined by Veronica Gago, contains the seeds of the free market ideology, with weak collective solidarity, high competition, and a strong sense of individualism. Yet, resistance, everyday politics, and mutual help were also important dimensions of the traders’ routines. They were indifferent to formal politics and their votes were diffuse, swinging from the left to the right of the political spectrum, depending on personal connections and individual interests.

Twenty-three years later, I resumed my fieldwork and discovered two things. Firstly, the network that I had studied had begun enterprising on social media platforms. Secondly, and more surprisingly, a large part of these traders were now fierce supporters of the far-right former president, Jair Bolsonaro. After many years of doing ethnography ‘on stone’— as the traders described the materiality of their businesses on the cement— the question remains: to what extent is this technological shift impacting political radicalisation? Is this political identification a reflection of predisposed political views that were already latent in the ‘jungle’? Or are the digital platforms pushing them to the far right? 

In this Insight, I argue that both answers are true. There are push and pull factors that enable the encounter between precarious workers and authoritarian populism. Certain groups are predisposed to be aligned with reactionary political values, but more importantly, technology is accelerating and therefore transforming this process. The first part of this Insight defines platform labour and its links to authoritarian populism. Afterwards, push and pull factors are detailed. The conclusion argues that platforms should be regulated along with policies towards decent employment and social justice. 

Continue reading.

[hms-tardimpala]

I love Cobra Kai, it's my Cringey Bad Show With Moments Of Brillance™.

(long-ass gushing/rant and spoilers ahead)

Cobra Kai requires constant suspension of disbelief, it doesn't have the best pacing, half the humor is horrendous, the character writing is often stupid as shit, it's such a dumb show!

It also has insanely satisfying setup-payoffs, good dramatic irony, it's at its funniest when it's self-aware and laughing of itself, which it does gladly, and it goes to the trouble of giving you gray characters who go through multi-seasons arcs to better themselves (or the opposite). It's such a fun show!

And very importantly in today's media landscape, it pulls off being the necromantic resurrection of a beloved 80s franchise. It could easily have kept the black-and-white naive, squeaky-clean tone of the Karate Kid movies, but it said "Fuck it" from the first episode. It respects its KK roots but expands on them, adds depth and layers it didn't have to. Does it always do it well? Hell no. But seriously, this show didn't need to make that effort. With its premise, it had no right to be that good.

Obviously the show leans heavily on nostalgia, but it manages not to be a total nostalgia fest and brings some interesting things to the table.

Now, having just finished S5 (a lame season, but which had moments that made me cheer and curse out loud), I want to say how much I love how dark CK can get.

Like, it starts easy. A bullied kid, some teenagers slugging it karate-style at a school dance, a tournament to tell who's the winner. Then the brawls get less and less funny. There's slut-shaming. More kids get involved, more get hurt. A teenager gets his spine broken in his high school staircase. This is more the real world than KK, so you've got kids going to juvie for their actions, others who are scarred and traumatized for life.

Then the show goes further. Adults are involved in this now. They beat each other up directly and by proxy through children. There's breaking and entering, destruction of homes, arson. An adult sexually harasses a teenage girl in a precarious living situation. Vietnam veterans' trauma and domestic violence get discussed. There's physical and psychological abuse and manipulation left and right, between adults, between teens, from adults to kids. A grown man destroys another's hard-earned mental health because he feels lonely. There's assault and attempted murder. Kids breaking each other's bones in public settings.

And season 5! The violence keeps escalating. It's the only language some of these kids know by now. And the adults who taught them are just as traumatized and wrapped up in it and they can't stop either. There's arson again, people's lives are getting ruined by what started as a petty rivalry. A teenager is forced to injure herself to prove her loyalty by a group of adults who won't let her leave. A man teaches a child a karate strike that can break a ribcage and suffocate an oponent, and the only reason it doesn't happen is the child in question isn't strong enough yet, but he tries. You've got a sword fight and a man left to bleed out in a pool. A group of four men trying to beat one to death because they've been ordered to. A guy gets his finger cut off. Constant child endangerement and serious injuries that are ignored, and the psychological toll of all that isn't even acknowledged by the characters most of the time.

And of course all ends well, wounds heal and nobody dies, and it's not even gory, but still, it gave me the chills. As someone who enjoys on-screen violence immensely, it's very rare that I wish said violence would stop. That show is unbelievable, ridiculously over-dramatic, cheesy, and also too fucking real sometimes. Like a guy who's always laughing and making jokes, and one day he has too many drinks and lets slip something that reveals how much trauma he's suppressing.

I love this show and these characters. Out of this huge ensemble cast, there's only one character I haven't changed my mind on from the beginning and gone from hating or loving them to the opposite. (and it has great ships for all tastes!!)

Anyway, season 5 was awfully bad. And I enjoyed it. I'm done talking about the karate soap opera on this tumblr for a while, I think.

[sparring-spirals]

But honestly, how could I not have had such a visceral reaction to Travis/Fjord going "Yall gotta get out of here." Of his repeated encouragements that they had to leave Fjord, everyone was grouped up and ready to dash except for him, and there was a genuine possibility of a TPK if they didnt get the fuck out. Even if it wasn't necessarily Fjord saying it- there's no way that he didn't realize.

There's no way Fjord didn't look across the field and see how they had a chance, a perfect chance to escape with their lives intact, even if it meant leaving him behind.

And- more importantly, there is no way he wouldnt have understood the value in taking the smart retreat, even if it meant he wouldn't make it out with them. I kept thinking about the arc of this half orc, of someone so terrified of being left behind and discarded that he constructed a whole new self and faced down an Eldritch Being before he was able to let those masks fall, coming to here, looking out across a snowy landscape and wishing against himself that they would be willing to leave him behind.

There are so many things tangled up in that. It's not the same, exactly, as Beau being carried away by a white dragon, because its not about chasing (The Mighty Nein have never hesitated to chase down one of their own), its about leaving. It's about stone doors closing on a brainwashed friend, about a bleeding body in a snowy landscape. The Mighty Nein only ever leave people when things are dire, and they were.

And of course I'll never be over Beau being the one to scoop him up as a Mammoth, her being the first to spring into action to get him back, escape be damned, in a mirror of Fjord whirling on Lucien and reprimanding him for "Let them have her.", of a mirror of these two yanking each other out of the mouths of a giant worm, of the Laughing Hand. I am eternally never over the Brjeaus. Thanks.

But I just keep thinking about Fjord alone on a field, knowing his crew could get away from maybe the most precarious situation they've ever been in- if they're willing to take a loss. A calculated risk, a group of people he loves enough to be left behind for, a crew that he would die for and who he doesn't want to die for him. But of course they'd be ready to risk that. They're his crew, and he's theirs.

...And, the Mighty Nein really, really, really hate leaving anyone behind.

[littlejanesilver]

The Human Experience (now with paragraph breaks!)

I know it’s not a popular ideology to have right now, because so much we see in the news appears to speak against it, but I think humans are basically an altruistic, cooperative species— with a few caveats. So many of our problems arise out of the fundamental mismatch between the world our species evolved to live in and the world we live in today. Empathy is a natural feature of the human experience. We teach our children positive prosocial behaviours like sharing their food and caring for others who are sick or hurt. We survive and build through cooperative behaviour. Kindness is instinctual and the instinct is reinforced through proper socialization. I’ve seen it in my children before they could even speak, trying to offer a pat on the back or comfort to a crying sibling. Normal, socialized humans feel physical and mental distress in ourselves when we see others in distress and are eager to alleviate it. The thing is human altruism, like that of other primates who live and hunt in groups is usually predicated on face to face personal relationships. It makes sense to share with others in your group when you have more than enough, because someday when they have more than enough they will be more likely to share with your. In humanity the ability to cooperate has been positively selected for through million of years of evolution. It makes sense that over the comparatively long human life span, where you might live in a tribe of 60 people, you would encounter the same members of your tribe over and over again and your prosocial actions would be remembered and influence their prosocial actions towards you further down the line. Our big brains are good for remembering and keeping score. Not to mention in such an environment, you would also probably be somewhat genetically related to your tribe-mates so helping your family members and tribe-mates survive also enhances the survival of your own genes. Among surviving hunter gatherer tribes it would be consider insane for one member to horde all the food while other members of the tribe starve. A person could be excluded from the group for behaviour like that and a human without other humans in nature does not survive for long. Being exiled from one’s tribe is a fate most will do anything to prevent. Also, in the hunter gatherer world, where people are nomadic, having a huge amount of one substance doesn’t make a lot of sense, because you can only own what you can carry with you. There are also no refrigerators, so if you have more food than you need, whatever you don’t eat will rot quickly. Human life in the prehistoric world could be extremely harsh. Few infants survived and giving birth was highly precarious. But when a member of your tribe was in distress, even without modern medicines you still had something you could do and that was offer comfort, through a hug, or helping with a task or offering food. In the world we live in now the instinct to share is sometimes short-circuited. Holding resources has been facilitated by inventions like fridges and silos to keep grain. People decide to keep resources to themselves and their families, because they often don’t see or can’t relate to the people their greed is harming. Executives of large companies never have to see their employees face to face, they don’t grow up with the people they employ (who nowadays may live in another country entirely), and there is no consequence to them for causing others to experience distress. Also there are so many thousands of employees that they become theoretical to the executives, rather than real flesh and blood people they have to live with on a day to day basis who will confront you if you treat themselves shitty and treat you badly right back. Also, if say a factory in another country is mistreating its workers and the factory makes clothes for your company (as well as other companies), there are so many culprits in the problem, front he managers of the factory itself, to the country it is in that allows lax labour laws, to the many companies that have this

factory make clothes for them, to the country the company is located in that makes it more worthwhile for them to hire foreign companies to make their clothes— that the individual executive sitting in an office somewhere is so far removed and their contribution is so diffuse among the many others in the process that he or she feels no shame. More importantly, that executives social group is unlikely to include members of the exploited class, so they will never be publicly shamed or held accountable in a social setting, which, let’s face it, is what keeps most of us honest, when the temptation to take more than our share is strong. The instinct to display compassion and show care for others, is also challenged in certain ways in a modern context. The instinct to display empathy and compassion is strongest for family members and extends to other tribe-mates in a healthy human being, across all cultures and settings. If you saw a loved one crying, you would naturally go up to them and put an arm around their shoulder and ask how you could help. The distress you feel at seeing another person in distress, would reduce, once you could offer them comfort. Feeling an arm around their shoulders, experiencing comforting touch also would help elevate your loved ones feelings of distress. As much as we hate feeling pain or distress, in us and seeing it in others, experiences like this help bond us to those we love. When a friend supports you through a tough time it can cause your friendship to deepen. It feels like a blessing to be able to offer them the same strength they offered you in return at a latter date. When I a can offer a listening ear to a friend’s complaint or be able to offer a pair of arms to hold a loved one who is crying, I feel the most human. Being together in this way with others, knowing that they are feeling what you are feeling and sharing in a moment, whether listening to music or experiencing a film together is so special and so inherently human. It is hard to explain, but there is a positive feeling that comes from when one is acting in accordance with one’s animal nature. The naturalness and lack of push-back your brain is giving you— like when you have really good sex or do a refreshing (not exhausting) physical workout that pushes you a bit, or stare in wonder at something in nature— this sense of doing what you were made for— what is most natural and human feels so wonderful and liberating. I feel that when I am concocting stories sometimes, this ability to be in the moment and intensely aware of what I am doing, fully experiencing it without being distracted by other worries or things going on in my mind. The problem as I see it is that we see so much distress around us that is taking place far away, across the globe and we can see the people’s faces in pain, but we have no ability to take that pain away or even offer the basic comfort our ape ancestors could, such as an arm around the shoulder or the offer of half a fruit. We can’t give them anything. Maybe we can donate money to an earthquake fund or something, but who knows if that money will even reach them and it won’t effect that specific person you see right now, on your screen. Maybe we don’t even have enough money to give a dollar to an earthquake fund and maybe the government of the country that suffering person is living in, is causing their suffering because it refuses offers from the international community to help (see North Korea). What do people do when they are constantly faced with the reality of thousands of people suffering who we can’t do anything to help? We evolved to deal with one or two people in our tribe suffering every once and a while. We evolved to feel pain ourselves at the suffering of someone and to be able to stop that pain by offering the other person comfort. But when you can’t offer meaningful, immediate comfort to another person in a personal way either through physical means or through helpful speech, what are you left with? For some people I feel like the result is a constant low-grade

(or sometimes high grade) anxiety, traumatic stress and depression. The tidal wave of suffering feels so great you are mentally drowning in it if you are the kind of person who experiences empathy for others very strongly. You might be motivated to participate in charities and social justice causes, but all the time, the satisfaction that should come from helping people is out of reach, the anxiety and sadness at other’s distress is still there because no matter what you do, with so many people in the world now, and with news from all corners of the globe constantly in our faces at every moment of the day, you just can’t help everyone. It isn’t possible. Long ago you would only be cognizant of the problems of people in your own little tribe. Dealing with their problems would be mentally manageable and might even benefit you and the other person and strengthen your relationships. Dealing with this tidal wave of billions of people’s problems is unmanageable and hugely distressing. We were not born with the mental equipment to deal with this and it is a huge problem. Avoiding it, in certain societies, to help lessen your stress is not even possible. Everywhere you look, TV screens, radios and newspapers are blaring the death tolls of the most recent atrocity. This media diet distorts your perception, because when all you hear about are huge horrific events, the regular day to day repetitive actions that occupy most of what people are doing all over the world, like today Soorya milked a goat or Bob picked his toddler up from daycare don’t make the news. Some day, I think the world will have to reckon with the mental health problems that this constant media diet of negative and fearful imagery causes humans who have no means to influence the distressing things that are mentioned. Obviously, it is important to know what is happening in the world in some sense, to hold governments accountable when they act in ways that harm people. However part of the problem is even when we see that unfairness is happening we don’t have the tools to help stop it or a deeper understanding of why problems are occurring and how we can help is left out of the reporting. This makes people feel helpless and out of control and it doesn’t help the people who are suffering in the end. Some people are able to deal with this constant exposure to suffering that we can’t help, through selectively turning their compassion and empathy faculties on and off. As someone who can’t do this on my own, I am constantly astounded to witness other people do this. Part of me is slightly jealous of this ability while part of me is highly suspicious of it. People who can do this, I’ve noticed can also be very reckless with others emotions if they believe a relationship with that other person doesn’t forward their own goals. There is something that feels lacking to me about a human that can operate in such a ruthless capacity, but these are also people who seem able to have a lot of success because their mental processes are so efficient with regards to empathy. People can often show great love and compassion for their family and friends, but have little to no compassion for people outside the group they qualify as their “tribe.” How modern people define tribe, as people who share the same religion, community, fan base, sexuality, ethnicity or even as narrowly as their own nuclear family can vary. But I would say the majority of humans display this ability to switch their empathy on and off depending on whether someone is considered part of their tribe or not. This is also, sad to say, a very human quality. In a world where your tribe was your survival, outside tribes who might steal your resources, or kill or steal members of your tribe were far more dangerous than wild beasts you might encounter. I was bullied pretty harshly as a kid and I still maintain that the whole in-group/out-group dialectic that is such a part of human experience is one of the ugliest facets of human nature there is. Most disturbing of all, it is not contrary to human

nature, as most anti-social behaviours seem to be coded as, but is often seen as positive with no social costs in-group. A person who shows altruism and fealty to their own group can show the worst sadism and cruelty to out-group members without the corresponding social penalties they would face if they were to behave the same way in their own group. There is a reason in the Torah there are numerous directives “to love the stranger as yourself” and to “be kind to the stranger” and other lessons about hospitality to people who aren’t from your town because they might be (in Abraham’s case) angelic messengers. If everybody treated strangers and out group members the same as they treated their family members there wouldn’t be so much advice about showing hospitality to those unlike ourselves. The instinct of “stranger danger” is high in human beings and starts before we can talk. Studies done with pre-verbal human infants show that when confronted with two different strangers, one who speaks their own language and one who talks a different language, the infants shunned the foreign language speaking individual more than the person who talked their own language, even if they couldn’t talk or even fully understand that language yet themselves! The corresponding instinct of curiosity in some of us and eagerness to find out and know about something outside our own experience is thankfully, a good check to the stranger-danger feeling in some of us. Sadly, the stranger-danger instinct can get stronger as people get older and lose some of their mental flexibility and the world also changes a lot from the world they grew up in. If you aren’t mindful of that tendency of the human brain, then you can get caught up in thinking that all the changes are bad and threatening and feel fearful and angry at the world as you get older. Also, the more adverse experiences you have with other people, the more they seem to trail after you as you get older, colouring your ability to trust others and harming your interpersonal relationships if you’re not careful. While it may be more mentally healthy to only extend your empathy to members of your own group, feel like society as a whole suffers tremendously when we do this. We don’t live in isolated tribes anymore. Even if the effects are not apparent to us, our actions do effect the lives of other people, sometimes far away. We need new ways and new transparency laws to let us understand what the costs to others of the goods we purchase are, where they come from and what sort of labour conditions those goods are sourced under. We also need more alternatives to buy ethically, that are within most people’s budgets. Having the choice between ethically sourced goods that cost way more than a normal family can afford and goods sold in stores that only offer part-time jobs and starvation wages to their employees that utilize slave labour in other countries for manufacturing doesn’t really offer a choice. If you don’t have a lot of money you can’t afford to be ethical, which seems wrong. How come I can get a food item at the store and every single ingredient that went into it is listed on the back of the package, but how the item was made, where and with what sort of labour is left out? As a consumer we should be afforded the ability to make ethical purchases. There should be some sort of international independent organization with actual teeth that oversees labour practices across the world and gives companies letter grades and provides this information to the consumer with every purchase. It should be a reliable independent source for the consumer that tells us whether a purchase is helping to perpetuate positive or negative work conditions around the world. Companies that have the best conditions should be rewarded and companies that have the worst should be shut down. Getting everyone on board with the philosophy that humans are all part of one tribe is crucial to improving all our lives. If all children can be taught, from the earliest days that we are all one tribe and that

we are all deserving of love and compassion and the means of survival things will probably improve. As long as people continue to believe in in-group/out-group philosophies that see their own group as some sort of master race or chosen people and everyone else as inferior or misguided and not worthy of the same kind of empathy reserved for members of one’s own tribe— humanity will not grow. Accepting the fact that we are all animals, members of the same species and the same planet, which we have to take care of together is crucial. I’ve lived on Lake Erie and Lake Ontario for most of my life. For those who don’t know both these lakes are partially in the U.S. and partially in Canada and proved most of the water and electricity for the communities around the lakes like Toronto and Hamilton in Canada and Buffalo and Rochester in the U.S and Niagara Falls in both countries. Canada and the U.S. in the past have had different laws governing heavy industry on the lakes. But this is ridiculous, because if a company pollutes on one side of the lake, it automatically causes pollution on the other side as well. Right now countries are acting like the laws they make regarding pollution, labour, immigration and countless other things only affect their own country, when the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. We don’t live in isolated tribes anymore. Every human community is touching countless other communities. We didn’t evolve to live or think this way, but if there’s one thing we humans have mastered, it’s how to adapt. We can adapt to this new world and thinking in a new way about each other and our planet— but we have to stop seeing ourselves as isolated groups and start thinking of the big picture. In this world where our edges all touch each other, we have to be especially cognizant to live peacefully and try to do everything in our power to avoid violence wherever possible. To use a metaphor, you never know how the pollution you dump one one side of the lake will effect a baby yet to be born on the other side of the lake. If there is another choice, even if that choice is just to pause and consider what this action might achieve or to really grapple seriously with the harm it might cause, regardless of whether it is “right” or “deserved.” Make the choice to think before you act. Listen to what other people are feeling who aren’t from your in-group. Even if you don’t agree with them, how can you ever convince them, if you don’t try to understand where they are coming from? More than anything right now I think we need dialogue, not knee jerk reactions. We need nuance, deeper understanding than 150 character soundbites and the ability to listen to each other and the skill of trying to slow down our minds. It is easy to act on anger, greed or fear if you don’t see the people who your actions effect. But we have many tools in our communication arsenal for communicating how we feel to other people and trying to get them to make change. Violence should be very last resort of all the last resorts, not the go-to option. We have to act in accordance with the world we want to live in, in the future, a world that has room for all people. There is no shortage of money, food or land on this planet if we all only take what we need and share with each other. The withholding of these things from others and obscene accumulation of resources for oneself and ones family is not admirable. It is a demonstration of selfish antisocial behaviour and should be seen as such by our society. How our words and actions serve ourselves, our loved ones and the human tribe as a whole and its future existence on this Earth is worth considering.

[starr-fall-knight-rise]

Humans are Space Orcs “Swimming”

Wrote this one from a couple of requests wanting to know what Sunny would think about swimming. Hope its at least something fun to read on a Tuesday :) 

Sunny had never seen so much blue before. The sky above and the water below stretching out to the horizon in all directions. The polar field in the sky above was a beautiful metallic rainbow that reflected off the water causing the entire planet to sparkle like a prism…..

It was terrifying.

Sunny had never seen so much water before. Of course their planet HAD water, it was sort of important when it came to life sustaining a planet, but most of it was in shallow rivers, and abandoned underground lava tubes and caverns. Most of her planet’s water was fed by underground springs, and the largest lake was located thousands of miles away on the other side of the planet meaning she had never actually seen it before.

Even those times she had visited earth, they had been located in the center of the landmass, and it barely occurred to her that the planet was almost 2/3s water. The humans seemed very excited about the entire thing, but as Krill had stated before, the vast majority of humans LOVED large bodies of water. She had no idea why, whether it was cultural or evolution that caused this, but it was sort of terrifying.

She found herself poised on the edge of lunging forward as her marines, and mostly Adam, leaned out precariously over the edge of the boat. She feared that the humans would fall in and drown or something and wished they would just relax, but there Adam was holding onto nothing more than a taut rope, feet braced against the side of the boat and leaning out over the water held up by a single hand. Wind whipped at his hair and shirt eyes closed and smiling.

She would generally have been glad to see that he was happy if he wasn’t hanging over a trillion gallons of liquid death.

Their boat cut a little right, and, in the distance, sunny could see a tall peak of rocks surrounded by a little beach that was no more than a football field all the way around. Clinging to  the rocks she could see some sort of strange colorful plant-life, but it was too far away to see at this point.

She spent the next few minutes trying to keep the marines from falling off the edge of the boat, which in the end only earned her some weird looks. Krill floated mildly at the front of the boat, and oddly enough it seemed as if he was more relaxed than she was.

In his case, she was worried that he was going to fly off the edge of the boat and end up sinking into the depths below, but luckily, they made it to the tiny island, and the human hopped off onto the sand. The scientists began taking their samples , the water, the sand, the strange plant life. When everything was cleared, predictably, humans began touching things, mostly picking up the sand and marveling at how soft it was.

She pointed out they had no idea what kind of dangerous things could be in there, but Adam, the commander, lying on his back in the sand looked up at her with a grin, “Nope,  not with the new protocol I made up. It's called the TISICTI for short, or for long the “Test it so I can touch it” protocol. Krill threw a fit enough times I thought it would be a good compromise.” He motioned towards the scientist, “What do you think we have them for.”

She frowned, “I sort of assumed they were here to do, you know, science and stuff. Like samples and testing and whatever else.”

The man shrugged, “I mean yes, but more importantly, they are here to make sure that we can safely touch things.” 

He leaned his head back against the sand with his eyes closed, “Honestly, this planet isn’t exactly of particular interest accept for the water and beaches. NO sentient lifeform owns it. The biggest creature are weird sort of whales, and most members of the GA don’t want anything to do with it, so here we are.” His single eye popped open, “Oh, that reminds me.” He stood from the sand and motioned to the marines, “Break out the cooler, and radio to the crew that the planet is non-toxic.” He rubbed his hands together with a grin, “Let's do this.” 

Sunny watched for the next few minutes in fascinated confusion as the humans, transformed the little beach into an island paradise. Colorful blankets and towels she wasn’t even aware the owned were laid out across the sand with large umbrellas staked into the sand against the sun. Big blue coolers of drinks and snacks were set out every few yards. And soon enough other members of the crew began to appear docking boats on the designated part of their little island.

Unlike the marines, these crew members were barely dressed, lugging more towels, and large dark glasses that helped them block out the sun.

Adam Jumped up on one of the coolers just as things were getting started whistling very loudly so that the group turned to look up at him, “Alright, a few rules before we get started. This is not our planet, and you know human history of taking care of oceans and shit. By the time we leave, I want to make sure it looks like we were never here. For every piece of trash I find on the beach or in the water after this is all over, you all are getting docked pay by a credit. Each  rock is to be thoroughly explored before you jump off. I don’t want anyone breaking their neck while out, and if anyone asks what we were doing today. You were performing reconnaissance for the suitability of human life. Got it.”

The humans let of a whoop of excitement, and Adam grinned, “Alright you crazy kids. The Mission starts now, and I expect a full report from every one of you once your done.”

Sunny had never seen an order followed so fast. Within the next few minutes humans were flrolicking in the water, and on the sand or simply lounging in the sun with their feet in the sand. The marines were relieved of their duty, and made quick time in removing all their gear exposing the fact they had expected something like this to happen. 

Maverick walked past Sunny down the beach wearing nothing more than what sunny would have considered underwear and a baseball cap. She wasn’t entirely sure if she was supposed to feel uncomfortable with that, but none of the humans seemed to mind. In fact, there was a significant number of humans who were wearing even less which hardly made sense since humans made physical privacy a very big issue.

Apparently here that didn’t count.

She turned up the beach Just in time to find Adam struggling to pull off his gear. The pants got stuck on his foot and he pitched into the sand with a laugh shaking his foot trying to squeeze out of the tactical gear. When he stood up he was wearing nothing more than shorts and was partially covered in sand.

Walking past Ramirez raised a hand, “Wow commander, put a shirt back on. I’m being blinded.”

Adam turned to look at him, “oh please Ramirez, you are just jealous of my stunning physique.” He flexed just then sending laughter up through close by members of the crew. 

Sunny looked between the two of them. Ramirez had a bigger chest and biceps, but she had to admit he may have skipped leg day a couple times. Adam clearly kept a schedule for his workouts. She would never have said it, to much a boost to his ego, but she would have given it to Adam 

Then again, maybe she was biased. 

However, Adam, and all the other marines had reason to brag if she knew anything about human physicality, so she decided to give all of them credit. 

Adam walked past her towards the water UV light reflecting in diamond colors off his skin. Invisible stripes, to humans, covered his body in an intricate and almost beautiful pattern of swirls and striations. Generally, human skin color would have never been considered beautiful to a Drev, but with the addition of the invisible patterns on their skin reflecting in rainbow colors to sunny’s vision, it was actually quite beautiful.

“Hey Sunny, you Coming?” 

She turned her head to follow him where he stood at the edge of the water, “I…. Into the water?” She stammered.

“Yeah, of course into the water.” He smiled, “That's the point of going to the beach.” 

Sunny took a step back and then shuffled her feet in the sand.

Adam tilted his head, “hey, what’s wrong.”

She rubbed the back of her head with an upper arm, a habit she had picked up from the humans. “Well…. I….”

“Do you….. Not know how to swim?” He wondered. Behind him Maverick went floating past on her back 

Sunny shook her head, “We…. don’t have large bodies of water on my planet.”

The man clapped himself on the forehead, “right, Right, I totally forgot. You know the GA classified our planet as Aquatic. Forget that that’s not normal.” He walked back up the beach feet slipping in the sand and then took her by the hands his one green eye reflecting the polar lines in the sky above.

“Come on. We’ll take it easy.” Still holding her hands, Sunny allowed him to lead her backwards down the beach towards the water, “You’ll be fine. I promise.” They had reached the edge of the water now, and with great apprehension sunny stepped into the water. 

It was warm.

“That;s it, just keep coming. The man urged, and she stepped a little deeper. The water reached to her knees now, and high on the human’s thighs. He kept leading her into the water, and in apprehension, she watched as the water line drew up her stomach and towards her chest. However, the human stopped at about his chest height, “See, not so bad is it.” She moved her lower arms around in the water marveling at the strange sensation.

The human kicked his feet up spread his arms out, and was suddenly floating on the surface of the water. He kicked a little bit with his legs swimming around her in a circle before letting his feet down again, “Time to see if you can float…. I’m almost thinking maybe not, but that’s ok because we have life jackets.”

He swam behind her taking her by the shoulders, “Ok, I just want you to lay back rise your feet and just let your arms hang out to the sides, I promise you won’t drown, and you can stand up at any time.”

Sunny nodded in apprehension but leaned her head back and kicked her feet up off the bottom. The human supported her weight from behind,and past the water she could feel his hands on her back. Water rushed against her ears muffling all noise around. He let his hands relax, and to her dismay, she began to sink, but just as she was beginning to feel panic, hands pushed her back to the surface and stood her back up. The human smiled at her then winked, which in his case was more of a blink, “Guess you're too dense, but that's ok.” he turned back towards the beach, “HEY RAMIREZ!”  

The human sat up on his beach towel and lowered his sunglasses, “What!” 

“Toss me some of those  water wing things right next to you, yeah.” Sunny watched in interest as four strange air filled rubber doughnuts were tossed to them. 

“Hold a second.” He said grabbing one of her arms and slipping It through the doughnut until it was high up on her arm. He did that three more times and then had her try the floating thing again. To her surprise, it worked, and though her feet sank, Adam’s instruction to lightly kick her feet helped to keep her lower half upwards in the water.

It was honestly kind of relaxing.

The human kept close by one hand on her arm.

Eventually she felt comfortable with letting him go. He showed her how humans swim openly admitting that he wasn’t the best at it. He knew freestyle and backstroke, which sort of just involved kicking your feet and pinwheeling your arms. Generally she was mostly just impressed on how fast the humans could swim when they clearly weren't meant for an aquatic environment.

She learned the hard way that humans could dive as well when Adam vanished under water for more than ten seconds and she began to panic. He popped up a few years to her left seconds later shaking water from his ears.

At one point she was floating on her back just relaxing when she felt something suddenly grab her leg.

She shrieked in panic and flailed about in fear. Then a body erupted from the water. Maverick peered at her through a set of dorky goggles spewing water through a tube connected to her mouth. She removed the tube and grinned at Sunny, “He he, almost pissed yourself right there.” Before Sunny could retort, the human vanished under water once again swimming away only to drag Adam underwater.

Sunny watched in worry thinking that she was trying to drown him, but apparently dunking someone was considered acceptable.

Eventually they moved closer to the beach, and they began a game with a brightly colored ball knocking it into the air and trying to keep it from touching the water Sunny was pretty good at the game, but wasn’t excited when she ended up falling and vanishing below the water. She almost freaked out before remembering she could stand coming up and spewing water from her nose. The humans laughed at her.

A few hours of that was followed by another few hours of lying in the sun on the sand. Adam requisitioned one of her arms as a pillow and ended up falling asleep in the humid warmth.

He eventually woke up when someone announces they had discovered a diving rock, and Sunny watched as Krill almost had a conniption when the humans began leaping from twenty feet up and into the water. Sunny almost followed his lead when the humans began doing tricks. Adam was the first, leaping outwards, and then pitching downwards face first hands held above his head. Sunny was sure he'd break his face doing something like that, but he came back up to a cheering crowd.

If that wasn’t bad enough they began doing flips after that rotating backwards and forwards and sideways attempting to spin as many times as possible. Yet none of them ever seemed to get hurt upon doing this. 

One of the human lab technicians managed two flips which turned into a dive, and it turned out she had been a competitive diver at university. That thought worried sunny because that meant there were humans out there who flipped themselves around off of high places just to look cool, and they did it for a living.

“Hey Ramirez, dare you to do a belly flop.” Adam said in passing to the other man.

Ramirez look up at the rock.

The rest of the group began chanting. Sunny did not like the sound of this, but the man shrugged and began climbing. The group began to scream and chant as he made it to the top of the rock. 

Krill ran up just then, “Ok that’s it. Stop right there.”

Sunny looked down at him, mostly ignored, “What are they doing.”

“I don’t know,but when humans start chanting, it’s never good.” Ramirez took a step back and then leaped forward spreading his arms out wide to either side chest downwards. 

The slap he made upon hitting the water was tremendous. Sunny winced and Krill cursed. The humans waited for a long moment staring at the water, but then Ramirez broke the surface gasping and the humans began to cheer.

He got a serious lecture fromKrill upon crawling onto land, his entire chest, legs, thighs and the side of his face one bright red welt.

Eventually she convinced Adam to stop by dragging him back out into the water. This time he appropriated a strange floating object in bright pink, and together they floated just off the beach using the pink thing as some weird sort of water cushion. 

Sunny had no idea where humans came up with these ideas. 

I was when the clouds started gathering in the distance that the humans decided now would be a good time to leave. They packed up all their things in record time and Adam had them comb the beach several times before allowing them to leave. Te shuttles reached atmosphere just as the massive hurricane passed below them. It was many miles wide, and radar detected that the surface winds were somewhere around two hundred miles an hour.

To say that Krill was not amused would have been a massive understatement.

Still though, the day had been fun.

She couldn't think of a better day in living memory. 

[southeastasianists]

When 94 Rohingya refugees were found stranded at the Andaman sea on June 24, local Acehnese fishermen once again demonstrated an exceptional form of hospitality. It was not the first time that, despite boats being pushed back by national authorities, local fishermen rescued occupants and brought them ashore. In 2015 local villagers in Aceh also saved the lives of hundreds of migrants attempting to disembark their boats, in the event that was later known as the ‘Andaman Sea Crisis’. This humanitarian response quickly gained acknowledgment in mass and social media. The public strongly condemn government’s reluctance to rescue ‘boat people’ and praised the local community for filling the humanitarian void. However, more importantly, what this humanitarian act represents is the attempt to break two kinds of silence reproduced by the prevailing regional and global refugee regime for decades. One is the refugee application process that fails to comprehend refugees’ silent bodily gestures of insecurity and consequently, further sustaining their suffering. The other silence is the politics of indifference played by the regime, resulting in the lack of refugee protection and adequate human rights provision.

‘Refugee’ is an ‘expensive’ legal status ascribed to asylum seekers wishing to secure a better live. It comes with a card allowing its holders to access a set of protection packages in host countries: accommodation, healthcare, education, employment—basically, their primary sources of security. This is a practice which gives the UNHCR, as the leading actor in the global refugee regime, a kind of power to decide which groups of people deserve protection from insecurity, and which do not—making them the global police of populations. However, in order to fulfil that security, asylum seekers must provide evidence of their experiences of persecution in countries of origin. The discursive element of the application process is substantial, whereby asylum seekers are required to articulate their distressing experience to emphasize how security is stripped off from their lives. This requisite of speaking their insecurity, however, often leaves them re-traumatised and eventually, silenced. As a consequence, many asylum seekers fail to obtain refugee status and have been forced to repatriate to their home countries or live precariously as ‘illegal’ migrants.

The silence, which the regime cannot recognise as an expression of asylum seekers’ vulnerable condition, is more than enough to serve as a valid reason for Acehnese fishermen to step up to deliver protection. Their ability to spontaneously detect emergency and offer assistance confirms that insecurities can actually be embodied through refugees’ lived bodies. It is the silenced bodies of those people in boats that speak the language of desperation and helplessness: their hunger, thirst, trauma, fear, exhaust, hopelessness, and at the same time, hope for the future. These threats are not manifested in the form of speech acts, but demonstrated by refugees’ bodily acts—and it should be enough to incite sympathy, as one of fishermen said to The Guardian about his response to finding people jumping off their boats into the sea:

“We helped them because they needed help. If we find someone in the ocean we have to help them no matter who they are.”

Apart from this, the hospitality displayed by local fishermen also represents a protest at the lack of protection by national governments. For decades, neighbouring countries where the Rohingyas are temporarily settled have remained silent and have been largely absent in the delivery of appropriate and adequate responses for the displaced.  No concrete steps have been undertaken by ASEAN member countries, for instance Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand as ‘transiting’ and destination hotspots for Rohingya refugees, to address this recurring crisis. Indonesia, particularly, opts to rely on bilateral ‘talks’ with Myanmar to cease prolonged persecution of stateless Rohingya, clearly expressing the country’s objective to accelerate the process of repatriation. Beside that this approach has not resulted in any positive progress, it also demonstrates Indonesia’s intention to refrain from its responsibility to protect displaced peoples in its territory. In 2016, after providing camps for 1 year, the government was largely reluctant to take follow-up measures. As a result, many Rohingya refugees fled to Malaysia with the help of smugglers, which they believed was a safer place where they could access the informal labour market.

[cwmoonglum]

Excession & Annihilation

The titular event/object of Iain M Banks Excession is what the author terms an 'Outside Context Problem,' something that Banks characterises as a normally once in a civilisational lifespan occurrence. His go to example via his experience playing Sid Meier's Civilization game series is that of steamships intruding into territories where the dominant civilisation relies on wind power. Both our own histories and those of the myriad doomed aristocracies that I created in Meier's games attest to the fact that such Outside Context Problems often presage societal collapse. Whether this results in colonisation or in renewal, integration of the OCP is a civilisationally generative force that renders preceding political/social structures unsustainable. The power of the Tokugawa Shogunate is invariably weakened by the intrusion of Commodore Perry; Satsuma and Chōshū samurai can assert themselves as part of a world system and appeal to Western powers for aid in reshaping Japan.

'Excession' itself means 'a going out or forth,' and it's easy to read transitional moments in this manner. Equally, we can render it a pun as an expression of ratcheting up civilisational tiers; rather than succeeding feudally the transition exceeds the containing system. Yoshinobu Tokugawa's abdication is a radical disjuncture that precedes not another Age of Warring States where daimyo fillet one another to become the next Shogun, but a moment where the exceeding power of Western technoscience results in a total shift towards new political and social forms.

Such moments are the bread and butter of science fiction. Whether this is in 'first contact' stories where the inhabitants of Earth are invaded/subjected to quasi-religious revelation or the Sense of Wonder school's obsession with confronting the vicissitudes of Deep Time. Banks' Excession is in the end a transitory event/object; a consciousness that transits between universes and cannot be perceived even by the hyperintelligent machines that run the advanced civilisation of the Culture. Definitionally, this cannot be integrated without a shift in what the Culture is for (ostensibly, self perpetuation).

The technowarriors of Alex Garland's adaptation of Annihilation face a similar problem to the Culture's Minds, but react in ways several civilisational stages below. On Earth, in the present day, an alien event/object has crashlanded. Like the Zone of the Strugatsky's/Tarkovsky or M. John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract, the Shimmer is an area completely resistant the contemporary technoscience. It exceeds our understanding despite years of research and multiple intrusions by (importantly) military forces. Garland presents the Shimmer event/object as a source of mystery, both occluding its meaning and occluded from the civilisation by the military-industrial Tokugawa analogues, 'the Southern Reach' who only see in it their own death. The protagonist, a biologist named Lena, has lost her husband to the Shimmer and resolves to enter it herself. In this, she is a typical science hero who is joined by a cadre of others (an EMT, a psychologist, a physicist, a geologist). Notably, this is the first nonmilitary group to enter the Shimmer; yet Lena is exmilitary, the psychologist is a government employee and all enter armed and armoured in the livery of patriarchal technoscience.

The film follows the logic of a horror video game; the supposed science heroes stagger from one set piece to the next picking up notes left by previous incursions into the Shimmer. They kill a mutated alligator, they watch a recording of Lena's husband slicing open his teammate to reveal a digestive tract that moves like a snake. Being inside the Shimmer is acting upon the very biology of those within it. Lena and the technowarriors accompanying her react largely with horror; the Shimmer represents a boundary violating queerness on multiple levels. The Shimmer is growing. Momentarily occluded from civilisation by explanation of a oil spill, the Southern Reach has internalised its own lie and can only view the Shimmer as an unintelligent polluting event.

Yet, the boundaries it violates are more than geographical or even biological. The Shimmer reawakens the scientists fear of an active Nature outside the control of patriarchal technoscience and modern consumption. Consider that this Outside Context Problem crashlanded in a national park, where Nature is safely contained. The growth of the Shimmer represents a civilisational danger because it will eventually encompass cities, people. Rather than the obedient Nature understood/constrained by technoscience, this mutant strain both acts with and upon the bodies and minds of those dispatched to study it. In fact, like the superconsciousness of Banks' novel it is in actuality an event/subject, violating the normative scientific dispassionate observer by looking back. This provides a neat mirroring of the central thread of Lena's psychology, where she is riven by guilt because of her violation of the boundaries of her heterosexual marriage. Her husband, she thinks, accepted an apparent suicide mission because he observed that she had cheated on him.

It transpires (or is indeed obvious from the title) that Lena's mission is not a mission of integration or understanding of the OCP, but a fascistic attempt to reseal Pandora's box. The technowarriors are dispatched to foreclose on the liberatory mutation offered by the Shimmer (for isn't all evolution driven by mutation?) and reassert the primacy of patriarchy, heterosexuality and military technoscience. Only the physicist on the team accedes to a dialogue with the Shimmer, accepting its action upon her DNA and mutating into a swirl of leaves that is carried away on the wind. For Lena, a filial warrior, the Shimmer's repurposing of human DNA to grow trees in human shapes or give a human voice to a mutant bear is grotesque because it ruptures a technological hierarchy and suggests forms of being-with Nature rather than being-over, using it. Nature, in the Shimmer, is a libidinal force that requires strict control lest it cause hurt like her own libido. Yet, it is notable that the protagonists of Garland's film can only conceive of this new generative model as essentially inferior. It is queerness understood as mimicry and grotesque pastiche.

Nowhere is this understanding clearer than in the climax of the film, where Lena finds the source of the Shimmer. Walking past the high camp decoration of a beach littered with sparkling glass trees, she enters into a lighthouse where an alien object crashed. She finds a video of her husband's suicide, concluding her suspicion that the returnee who looks like him is a Shimmer-generated clone. More importantly, she finds a genital-like hole (replete with pubic hair-like extrusions of plant matter) and descends therein to an alien womb, which generates a mirrored, non-humangendered creature. This creature mimics Lena's movements directly, and is accompanied by musical noises similar to the work of queer artist Arca (indeed the design of the creature recalls the work of her collaborator Jesse Kanda). Lena interprets the touch of this queer alien subject as aggression, even as it lies alongside her and engages in dance-like communication. Pushing her to the floor to rise again in sync, the alien feels more like a child than an invader. If this subject is acting upon Lena biologically, it can only be understood as a laudible attempt at xenocommunication. This xenogenerative biological sharing (think here of the Oankali in Octavia Butler's Lilith's Brood) is too queer, can only be understood as penetrative invasion of the patriarchal human subject. For Lena to accept it would be to reenact her infidelity on a civilisational scale. So, she kills it.

Disturbingly, once she returns she claims to the Southern Reach that the alien made no attempt to communicate. She tells a lie to reestablish the boundaries of civilisation, and is rewarded by a parallel chance to reestablish her heterosexual couple form with the clone of her husband. That the film closes with their eyes glimmering in an alien fashion doesn't trouble the patriarchal technoscience of their civilisation; they have integrated the queerness of the Shimmer into heterosexuality and human boundaries.

The OCP is defeated and subsumed by the forces of reaction in a way that is only possible in fiction, foreclosing on the new ways of being with Nature that are vital to reforming and revolutionising civilisation in the same way that queerness opens vital paths to reforming our social and cultural relations. Per Donna Haraway, we are living through 'ongoing multi-species stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen—yet.' Annihilation presupposes that the only way out is to reassert the primacy of the human, and demand that history = man + tool. Being-with is determined to be perverse, frightening and dangerous; in this the film isn't wrong. But such perversity and terror inevitably overflows any container humanity can build. Nature is on the march, and only the perverse and the queer will survive Her terror. We need to exceed current forms; the alternative is Annihilation.

[mimik-u]

Flower Child (Chapter 13): Blue (III)

Goodness, I'm nearly a year and a half late, but here we are—Chapter 13 of "Flower Child." First of all, I want to give my sincerest apologies for the delay... I mentioned this at the start of my fic "Facets," but the simplest and truest story is that my muse for writing Steven Universe and, well, writing in general petered out for a long time and has only recently returned. But, because it has recently returned, I wanted to begin to make good on a promise I made to you guys so many months ago—that one day, I would finish this story. So let's do this. <3 I'm ready now. 

(1) I read through the previous twelve chapters, lmao, and half-loved and half-hated my writing, but the point of that exercise, beyond getting acquainted with the plot of "FC" again, was to also do some quick grammar and flow revisions, so a few of the previous chapters should read just a little better than maybe they had before.

(2) Fun fact! Chapter 13 is pretty interesting because some portions of it were actually written over a year ago; it was an incredible challenge for me to work with what I had as a 2019 writer versus what I've learned as a 2020 writer.

(4) Someone asked on Tumblr a long time ago if there was a playlist I worked with in writing this story...

(5) And finally, and most importantly, this chapter is incredibly heavy, dealing with themes of suicidal ideation and extreme depression.

Please be cautious while reading if these are topics that are triggering to you!

i.

The shiny, black town car eased to a stop at the pull-through entrance of the hospital, drawing the gazes of passerby on the sidewalk. An older lady in a wheelchair, a group of what appeared to be college kids in scrubs, a scraggly-looking patient who’d obviously escaped the confines of his room to light a cigarette—they all stopped and stared as the back door of the overtly fancy car was pried open from the inside out, as a metal cane preceded a woman who quite looked like she needed it.

Blue Diamond unfolded into the light of day, trembling.

Because it was hard.

It was so hard.

To be here.

(To be.)

She wanted to collapse where she stood, dissemble and dissolve away one piece of herself at a time; she leaned heavily on the head of her cane and lit upon the sole pair of eyes that weren’t looking at her—or, really, her Lincoln. The man named Greg Universe stood next to the automatic doors with his hands shoved deep into his pockets, staring at the ground, all but boring a hole into it. When the sliding doors opened and closed at his backside, they appeared to be ripping into him, piece by miserable piece.

“I’ll call when I’m ready,” Blue murmured to her valet before shutting the door and slowly hobbling over to Greg.

Clank.

The onlookers glanced away as the town car drove off, resumed their lives and cared not for yet another broken person in their midst. The hospital was full of them as it was. Perhaps they were even broken themselves—very probably they were.

Blue Diamond did not care to know.

Clank.

I’m betraying her, she thought, she was always thinking. I’m leaving her behind. I’m betraying her. I’m—

Clank.

The clanking did the trick, catching Greg’s attention and only half-holding it. He lifted his head slowly and mustered a smile that must have been agony. It wobbled on his lips and very nearly disappeared in his bushy beard. It pulled at him—all over. He looked like a Picasso gone wrong, an abstraction of a man stretched too far.

“Hey, just in time.” He gave a shaky little laugh that rather sounded like a sob and then somehow kept talking, his entire physiognomy alive with his nerves. “Steven’s so excited to see you again. He hasn’t stopped talking about ya since this morning, which is kinda nuts because he was so tired yesterday, but this is a good thing, and so we should really go up and see him now because—”

She cut across him; it was a quiet act, a merciful one. “Greg.”

It was just his name, a singular syllable, a sound, but even that was enough.

Mr. Universe’s face fell into geometric disarray.

“No use hiding it, huh?” He half-wept, half-laughed again, scrubbing a hand over his face and bringing up his shirt to soak up what was left.

“No,” Blue Diamond whispered, her hands tightening on the head of her cane. “It’s scrawled all over you, I’m afraid.”

“Figures,” he said hoarsely. “I’m a mess.”

“No more than I am.” She pried one of her hands away from the other and gestured loosely at her entire body with a wry smile. “If you’re a mess, then I am a dereliction.”

It wasn’t a contest; it was the truth.

Four years of grieving had wasted her.

Blue Diamond was skeletal.

Broken.

Greg took this in and considered; his smile that really wasn’t a smile resolved itself into a quiet, aching sort of frown. It tugged his face downwards; it tugged at the hollows of her chest. She’d seen him only a little over a week ago, and yet today, he looked as though he’d aged a hundred years in the span of eight days. There were bags under his eyes and sunken dunes in his cheeks.

There was a little boy in a hospital bed.

There was a disease.

It was killing them both.

“How do I do this?” He asked the ground. “How did you—” But he stopped short; his breath hitched.

It was a highly personal question after all.

It was no short wonder that Blue’s cane didn’t snap beneath her grip.

“How did I do it?” She returned softly all the same. The slight breeze stirred the strands of hair poking out of her silvery braid.

Greg nodded mutely, the desperation in his face tangible. She could reach out if she wanted and touch his hurt, the very heart of it, and all of its dimensions. (She didn’t want to.)

“To be entirely truthful,” she murmured, “I’m not sure that I ever did.”

ii.

It was nearly one o’clock in the afternoon, and it was also 2:38AM, the very moment when a police officer had the audacity to come to their door and tell two mothers that their daughter was dead, gone, and never coming back. His expression was a gathering bruise, and his words were like bullets, striking right between the ribs.

Blue Diamond couldn’t breathe.

In the darkness, she sat on the edge of Pink’s bed and dragged every mouthful of air inwards like it was painful; her chest heaved with the awfulness of it, the punctured horror of leaking lungs.

Her child was dead.

Oh, God.

Her child was gone.

Why, oh, why, oh, God, my God?

And she was never coming back.

Goddammit.

In the coagulated darkness, Blue clutched her daughter’s favorite sweatshirt close to her chest; it was black and ratty, full of holes and little tears. A small alien logo perched on the chest, grinning up at her from depthless eyes.

They used to fight over this particular number.

Constantly.

“You’re a multibillion dollar heiress.” Blue would pinch the bridge of her nose and try not to raise her voice above an acerbic whisper. “Would it inconvenience you to buy some nicer clothes?”

Pink was unsparing in her retorts, wicked and witty, face upturned in a haughtiness to match her mother’s own. 

“Would it inconvenience you to get off my ass, Mother? It’s just a sweatshirt.”

“Pink!”

And on and on. 

The fabric was cold between Blue’s long fingers, still scented with Pink’s favorite perfume.

They were going to bury her today, mere hours from now.

Last week, they’d been fighting over this shirt.

On and on and never again.

The funeral… mere hours from now… less than three… but how could that also be true when it was only 1:52AM and Pink Diamond was coughing her last, strangled breath on a dirty pavement outside a bar on 9th Avenue?

Blue Diamond hadn’t been there, but she forced the words on the detective’s report to come to life in the theatre of her mind’s eye anyway. By the time the paramedics had arrived, Pink was all but gone; she gasped, and she coughed, and her brown eyes marbled in one final supernova of emotion. They tried to resuscitate her, but the damage was too extensive.

She’d fought back, the officer had said. (He thought it was a consolation to them.)

The proof was caked in her nails and scratched all over her arms, but it’d been three against one.

She was a lion, and they were men; she was a twenty-one year old girl, and they were men.

In the darkness, unraveling, Blue Diamond’s face dripped onto the sweatshirt, onto the alien smiling up at her with a black sliver of a mocking grin. She did not register—she did not care to register—the slow creaking of the door opening inwards.

Amber light strained from the hallway to find and reach and touch her but didn’t quite make it. 

Yellow Diamond was a shadowy figure in the doorway.

“You shouldn’t be in here,” she scolded, and yet, she moved into the room anyway—the hypocrite—her sharp heels muffled in the carpet. Stiff and forbidding, she came to stand in front of Blue, arms crossed over her chest, a frown crossed over her face. “It’s not healthy for you, Bl—“

But Blue cut across her. It was not a kind act; it was a precise incision—cold and surgical—three inches long and just as deep. “Our daughter is dead, Yellow.”

The shadowy figure recoiled but did not bite.

Even now, Yellow couldn’t bear to be seen as vulnerable, couldn’t bear to give one damn inch.

“I know that, dammit,” she muttered to the wall. “Dammit—do you not think I know that?”

But Blue had no pity for her, no shred of any emotion left except for the vicious tangle of grief; it tangled in her fingers, which sunk deep into Pink’s shirt, and it tangled in her cold eyes, leaking down her pale face and salting her anemic lips.

“Then act like it,” she hissed.

The exhortation bruised the air.

It demanded a reaction.

On its hands and knees, it begged for a response.

And yet, the shadowy figure said nothing. She didn't move her clenched fists.

She could not face Blue in the eyes.

Coward.

Hypocrite.

(Mourner.)

(Mourning.)

She simply left, staggering out of the room on precariously high heels, and Blue simply stayed, conflating the hours and the days and the minutes.

Later that day, they buried their daughter in a mausoleum, a gazebo—in a cemetery slathered in golden sun.

iii.

Greg explained the details as best as he could on the way up to Steven’s room. It was hard to find him a kidney because his blood type was O negative, which meant that he would only be able to receive a kidney from a Type O donor. And though he’d been on the waiting list for months now, and though he’d recently been moved to the top of the list given his worsening condition, it was still anyone’s guess as to when a kidney would become available.

(“If,” he could barely choke out, “we can even get one at all.”)

After slowly making their way across an expansive skywalk, they finally arrived at a pair of double doors labeled Truman Ward. The sun pierced through the tall glass windows and lit upon Blue’s sunken face, and Greg’s red eyes, and her metallic cane, and his wobbling lips—as though it was doing them a favor by doing so.

Greg reached behind her and pressed a button on the wall, alerting someone on the other side to their arrival.

“Listen”—he ran his hand along the back of his neck as the doors slowly parted open in welcome—“I’m going to go back to the room for a bit and see if I can get some paperwork done. Feel free to stay as long as ya’d like. Visiting hours don’t end ’til eight.”

Blue stared at him. 

Every moment—every hour, minute, and second with this child was precious nowadays, and here Greg was, lending her time out of his own.

She felt the gift of what he was offering deeply.

(She could have never found it in herself to be so generous with Pink.)

“Thank you.” She swept a stray strand of hair behind her ear. “I… I appreciate you allowing me to visit him.”

But he only shook his head and urged her through the doors with a pinched smile.

“If he’s happy that you’re here,” he shrugged, “then I am, too.”

And with that, he waved a last goodbye, and the doors folded to a close again with her on the other side of them.

Room 11037.

Walking became a monumental task as the clinically white hallway stretched out before her, lengthened by her mind, twisted and contorted into an obstacle she had to surmount.

It should have been just a hall.

Clank.

The memory of Pink burned bright behind her eyelids, stained there permanently by principle but stamped in starkly with assistance from the harsh fluorescents overhead. She was laughing, always laughing, in these flashbulb reminiscences, her freckles coalescing and then expanding across the bridge of her nose like the bellows of an accordion.

Clank.

But it wasn’t just Pink, though it always would be.

Clank.

It was Steven now.

Clank.

A ghost she chased, as opposed to the one who perpetually haunted her (who mercifully, who cruelly stayed.)

Clank.

But he wasn’t a ghost just yet, right? He was still here and still fighting—did that not count for something? Didn't his heartbeat, the very state of its continued existence, teach her to hope?

Clank.

But hope was such an awful word—so empty, brimming with meaningless sensationalism.

Clank.

(Maybe it was the vestiges of her long dead religion, but she wanted to hope anyway.)

Clank.

Hope was such an awful word.

Clank.

Room 11037. 

The door was decisively closed. 

A tall woman with bicolored eyes leaned against it, her dark lips corkscrewed into a frown.

Blue Diamond vaguely remembered her from the cemetery but couldn’t quite place a name. She could place an expression, though, and was surprised to name the one on this stranger’s face as disdain. Disdain rolled off this mysterious woman in waves, from the resolute clench of her jaw to the iron way that her arms were folded across her chest. It burned in her eyes. It seemed to languish inside of her, seething just under a facade of smooth skin.

She was a monolith of quiet loathing.

Blue squared her rounded shoulders in a manner she thought to be composed; her hands trembled on her cane nonetheless.

“You don’t like me very much, do you?” She asked it quite politely, even as the walls were harsh and white around them. She used to command rooms by the authoritative nature of her voice alone, and now she struggled to keep it together long enough to face a singular woman in front of a singular door.

“It’s not you specifically,” the woman replied, impressively put together, admirably composed. If her electric blue eye was cold, the brown one simply burned. Both were bruised underneath with tired shadows. “It’s what you stand for. It’s about the morals that Diamond Electric doesn’t have.”

“You’re an activist,” Blue surmised quickly, almost flippantly. Activists were challenging DE all of the time, and activists were always losing. Before Pink… she’d largely assumed that these sorts of protesters simply had no logical case. After Pink, she had had much more consuming thoughts on her mind than petty lawsuits against their multibillion dollar company.

“A Crystal Gem,” she corrected tersely, “but that’s not what I want to talk to you about.” Her gaze slid subtly to the doorway behind her, and Blue understood her at once.

“Steven,” she whispered.

The woman nodded.

“Steven,” she agreed, and her voice cracked as she said it, splintering into thousands of little pieces and struggling to regroup. When she swallowed to compose herself, it was almost as though she was swallowing the shards. “He likes you, and I can’t… I won’t begrudge him that.”

In the way that she said it, it was almost like she was convincing herself most of all.

“There is an implicit but there,” Blue parried softly. “You won’t begrudge him that, but.”

Again, the woman nodded, the gesture slow and measured, as though she was working something out in the tiny motion. When her squared chin came up again, her mismatched eyes were bright, intense with quiet pain.

“But don’t hurt him.”

It was a reasonable demand, but the implication behind it stung immediately and anyway.

She inhaled sharply and scrambled to defend herself, to salvage the punctured wound, but the damage was already done. Her voice came out more broken than it did cold.

“I wouldn’t dare.”

“Maybe not intentionally,” the Crystal Gem said, shaking her head. “Most people never really intend to hurt someone… but it happens. We get caught up in our emotions. We get selfish. We get distant. And then we hurt people.”

It struck Blue Diamond at that very moment that she hadn’t even deigned to ask the woman’s name.

“So, all I’m saying is don’t hurt him.” She unfolded herself from the door and stepped aside. “He likes you.”

iv.

Two days after the first anniversary of Pink Diamond’s death, a doctor shined a light in Blue Diamond’s glassy eyes and waited for a pupillary response. When he received one—an involuntary but nonetheless reactive blink—he unceremoniously clicked off his pen light and straightened up into the unfriendly darkness once more.

In the sparse incandescence bleeding in from the hallway, Yellow Diamond cut a shadowy figure by his side, her usually tidy hair rumpled from all the times her fingers had become ensnared in it that day.

Her tie was loose, and lines had already begun to etch themselves beneath those hawklike eyes of hers.

Soon, they would become permanent fixtures, marked there by time and age and grief.

For now, though, they were only suggestions.

Hints of what was to come.

(So many sleepless nights.)

(How many haunted days?)

“Well?” Though the CEO tried hard to strangle her voice into a whisper, the sharpness of the syllable was still the loudest sound in the room. Subtlety had never quite been this woman’s strong suit; she wielded her words as though they were gavels to proclaim on the heads of all who dared to cross her path.

“Catatonic depression,” the doctor replied, just as succinctly, replacing his pen in the pocket of his lab coat. “The staring, the lack of movement, the loss of appetite, the elective mutism. All textbook symptoms that point to the fact that your wife is still grieving, Mrs. Diamond. Frankly, I’m worried for her health.”

The shadow on his left scowled at this diagnosis, and she fidgeted, and it was apparent by these two idiosyncrasies alone that she was scrounging deep for some incisive rebuttal against the truth that laid like a breathing corpse directly below her. 

“Then what, pray tell, do you intend to do about it?” Her voice exceeded its former intentions of quietness. “That’s the problem. Now what’s the solution?”

“Well, I admit her to the hospital and start her on an intravenous Lorazepam treatment. It’s a sedative. It’ll assuage some of her anxiety and relax her muscles to prevent spasming.”

“Yes, and then?”

They were talking about her as though she wasn’t even there.

It was a fair enough assessment.

“And then what, Mrs. Diamond?” The doctor stared at her incredulously, shoving both of his hands in his pockets. “With all due respect, I can treat your wife’s physical symptoms from sunup to sundown, but that’s not touching the heart of what is truly debilitating her. She’s grieving, ma’am, and she needs psychiatric treatment beyond what I can provide as a private doctor and you can provide as her spouse. We discussed this the last time I was here.”

“And the time before that—yes, I know,” Yellow Diamond laughed humorlessly, the sound half-mad in her constricted throat. “Because you stand there, like an imbecile, and tell me that there’s no underlying medical cause to this?!”

She jabbed an accusing hand at Blue Diamond, whose oceanic eyes were wide open and unseeing, silent tears slipping from the corners of them and falling sideways across her face. There was an untouched tray of food on her nightstand. There was a lankness in her unwashed hair. There were pill bottles accumulating like a grotesque collection next to the alarm clock.  

And there was an air, an atmosphere, an oppression of silent decay.

The funereality of it was undeniable.

An uncomfortable wooden chair stood next to the bed where Yellow Diamond had been sitting vigil for the past two nights since they had visited the cemetery on the day of the anniversary. 

Blue Diamond’s keening sobs had sliced the autumnal air.

Her daughter was dead.

Gone.

Never coming back.

She stared at nothing, it seemed to Yellow and the doctor; she languished in the visions of Pink that seized across her mind with every dripping second of consciousness. 

“Depression is an underlying medical cause, Mrs. Diamond.” 

The doctor’s voice softened. 

Minimally.

For the first time since the house call had begun, his lanky silhouette jerked a little, as though he wanted to place a hand on the CEO’s shoulder, but thought better of it upon seeing something forbidding in the other’s expression.

“And she’s tired, ma’am. You both are.” Look at you, his rust colored eyes seemed to say. You’re both historical wrecks to a long dead ghost. “You can’t take care of her alone…  moreover, you shouldn’t have to.”

But the doctor had finally overstepped one prying comment too far, and he must have known it immediately, because he took a step back from the golden eyes glowering at him in the darkness of that dusty bedroom.

Yellow Diamond’s entire face transformed, twisting itself into facets of shattered rage.

She was feral.

(Wounded.)

Apoplectic with fury.

(Grieving, she was inconsolable.)

Dangerous.

Goddammit, she was on fire.

“Do not ever deign to tell me what I can and can’t do when it comes to my wife,” she snarled, all pretense of quietness long gone, devoured in the hurricane of emotion. “Get out! OUT!”

“Mrs. Diamond, please—“

“I SAID OUT! OUT!” She shrieked, harshly shoving his shoulder with the flats of her palms. “GET THE HELL OUT!”

The doctor did not need telling again; he fled the room as the force of Yellow Diamond’s dismissal stoned his back.

Blue blinked slowly as a shaking hand suddenly clasped her arm in the wake of the carnage, the imprint of a steel wedding band carving itself into her flesh.

That hurts, Yellow.

She blinked again, the words swelling on her tongue and dying there unrestfully.

That hurts.

v.

The warnings of Steven’s guardian standing sentinel on top of her frantically beating heart, Blue Diamond turned the knob to Room 11037 and pushed inwards until the door reluctantly gave way to a sight she had forgotten to steel herself for in-between the guilt of moving on and the agonizing action of doing so.

Steven himself.

Dwarfed in a hospital bed.

A mere wisp of the boy who had sat with her on the balcony only three days ago and stuffed his face with little chocolate cakes.

Her prodigious mind working far ahead of her paralyzed body, she frantically tried to recall his text from yesterday, what it had said about his condition, if it had indicated anything about his current state at all. But he had only told her that he had passed out and ended up in the hospital again. The boy had said nothing about the extensive tubing and the wires that ribboned and scissored his entire body in streaming colors. Lines crisscrossed each other and tumbled over and under and around his blankets. 

She saw the bottom of an empty catheter bag at the edge of the bed.

And the bruises like angry embers pulsing up his arms.

Somehow, amongst all the other things she was absorbing at precisely the same time, she noticed that next to a vase of elegantly arranged sunflowers, there was an inelegantly arranged tray of hospital food.

Untouched.

He had texted not a word about the yellow pallor of his skin.

He had used exclamation points—exclamation points!—to indicate his excitement.

Blue Diamond could not shake the notion, the very absurd idea, that he had lied to her somehow, had drawn her here under false pretenses.

(This was not the truth. She had estimated at what she was getting herself into and crossed the line into getting herself into it anyway.)

“Hi,” Steven Universe said sheepishly, his cheeks flushing darkly. He was caught, and he knew it. “It’s good to see you again, Blue.”

The seconds dripped between them.

The heart monitor on the wall counted them out.

One…

Blue’s plump lips parted slightly.

Two…

Her hand shivered on the head of her cane until the sound of it rattled the clinically quiet room.

Three…

She couldn’t do this again.

She wouldn’t grieve for another dead child.

One had been too much—one had almost killed her. 

Four…

God, and there were still days where she wondered if it still would.

Without thinking, desperate for relief, Blue turned away and braced her free hand on the door, drawing in harsh, ragged breaths that scratched at her beaten lungs, that bled them anew until they were leaking.

Who was she to believe that she wasn’t falling apart at her seams? How delusional was she to hope that a boy with a flower would be the difference between her saving grace and her inevitable dissolution? Was she so naïve to overlook the contours of his illness and think that his determination would be enough to save him from the eternal truth of this world? Was she so weak?

Death didn't discriminate between the old and the young, the sinner and the saint.

Pink Diamond was only twenty-one years old.

Steven Universe was a child.

“Blue!” Steven pleaded. “Wait, please don’t go. I—”

“I cannot look at you, Steven Universe," she cut across him, her voice low and fractured. Hot tears stood in her eyes, suddenly blurring her hand against the smooth door. “I’m sorry, but I cannot bear to see…”

“Can’t bear to see that I’m dying?”

He didn’t just refuse to mince the word; he stabbed it into her back so remorselessly that she gasped sharply. She glanced down at her chest and half-expected to see it lodged there, poking out, her beating heart speared on its tip.

“People can skirt around the word all they want,” Steven laughed bitterly, “but there’s no other word for it… without a kidney, I’m gonna die soon, Blue Diamond. I’m dying right now. I think I’ve been dying all this time. And everyone… all they wanna do… is look away from me. Pearl, Garnet, my dad…”

He sniffed.

“They keep looking away, and I’m so tired of it… I-I’m exhausted.”

The door felt cold against her palm.

Icy.

On the balcony, two days ago, she accused Yellow Diamond of shoving their daughter away in a drawer with the rest of her useless items.

In an arctic hospital room, Blue Diamond was ready to consign a boy to the same grave her daughter was buried in… 

… but dead children couldn’t talk.

Dead children couldn’t be tired.

They were simply dead.

“So, please, Blue Diamond… please don’t look away.”

The seconds dripped between them.

The heart monitor on the wall counted them out.

One…

Her eyes were wide with the horror of everything, of it all, the senselessness, the depravity, the nihilistic revolutions of this awful, uncaring world.

“I had a daughter once,” she whispered to the door. “Her name was Pink Diamond, and she was… she is… my everything. She had a smile wider than this planet could ever hope to contain… and she very much liked to laugh.”

She had never talked about Pink to anyone other than Yellow before.

Even evoking her name felt like blasphemy.

Two…

A second passed, and no lightning fell from the sky to strike her dead; she supposed her own self-flagellation was the punishment and the eternal damnation alike.

“I looked away. Yellow and I both did. She wanted more from life, and we wanted to contain her life into… into a little box that could fit on the shelf with all our other trophies. She was our accomplishment, you see, our legacy.”

Three…

Blue Diamond’s hand fell away from the door, so she could bring it up to her mouth in a futile attempt to dam the sobs that racked her shoulders.

Four…

“We looked away. The night that she… she—” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word aloud. She wasn’t brave like Steven. “We thought she was in her room, and I didn’t tell her that I loved her that night because we had argued… I thought I’d get the chance the next day or the day after that because we argued all the time. It was normal for us.”

On and on and never again.

When was the last time Blue Diamond had said those three words to her daughter?

These past four years, she had scoured her brain for the answer, but the answer was as elusive as the phrase was from her mouth.

For the simple truth of the matter was that she hadn’t said it very often.

In all her vast intellect, she had always assumed that it was assumed.

Implied.

Understood.

You’ll never let me grow up, will you?

I love you, she could have said.

You’ll never let me grow up, will you?

I didn’t want you to, she would have replied then. I wanted you to collect dust with all the rest of our awards and certificates. I wanted you safe, where I could see you. I wanted to quantify the entirety of your life and itemize the particulars. I wanted you to always be mine.

I love you.

I looked away.

An oxymoron.

A tragedy.

Five…

“So if I look at you, Steven Universe,” she murmured, screwing her eyes closed tightly against the pain, “really look at you, then I have to face that truth again—that I loved someone once… and I looked away… and now she’s… gone.”

And that was the immutable truth of the matter, the conclusion she circled around to no matter how many times the Earth continued to revolve away from the day since Pink Diamond had last existed on this world.

Four thousand revolutions later, and this would still be what it came down to in the end.

Her daughter’s blood was on her hands, staining them crimson, veining her lifelines with the guilt and the awfulness and the unbearable, crucifying shame.

And her daughter’s blood cried out, You’ll never let me grow up, will you?

And every time she so much as looked at her own palms, that was the only echo she saw written across their hollows.

Those last words.

Unanswered.

Unfinished.

Undoing and undone.

Six…

“But… I’m not gone yet,” Steven argued softly. His voice fought to be heard over all the machinery keeping him alive. “I’m here.”

He must have moved because blankets shifted somewhere behind her.

Dead children didn’t move.

Dead children weren’t here.

They were simply—

Seven…

Eight…

Nine…

Ten…

Do it, she commanded herself.

Look at him.

But Blue Diamond was frozen, and she was statuesque; she was a calcification barely anchored on the foundation of her cane. One false move and she would crumble entirely. 

The safest bet on her own survival was to limp away and dare not look behind her lest she turn to salt and dust. 

Someone else could clean up the carnage.

That woman who stood at the door—she’d do it—Greg Universe and the boy’s other guardians, too.

Don’t hurt him, that same woman had also said. He likes you.

Eleven…

Twelve…

Thirteen...

vi.

It was wash day. 

For nearly a year and half after Pink Diamond died, Yellow would force Blue out of bed every few days for a bath or a shower—usually a shower because it was becoming increasingly hard for the CEO to lift her wife in and out of the tub.

Today was a tub sort of occasion, though.

Date night with the Diamonds.

The presence of death was always with them, though, an intrusive third wheel.

With a slight groan, Yellow lowered herself into the warm water behind Blue, steam rising around their naked skin like curling smoke. Once upon a time, this used to be a favorite pastime of theirs, a chance to reacquaint themselves with each other and their bodies… but now the gesture was simply hygienic in purpose, asexual and quiet.

It was always quiet in the Diamonds’ penthouse suite these days.

Silent.

“Is it too hot?” Yellow asked, her voice as gentle as she could wrangle it. Somehow, at the same time, it was still edged with the trappings of harshness. “I can add some cold water?"

She waited briefly for a reply that would never come.

Blue stared limply at her knees, pulled up awkwardly as they were to her chest. Her sensitive skin had already reddened in a couple of places where it was touching the water. There were pink fingerprints wrapped around her armpits where she’d been handled into the tub. 

“I think it’s too hot. You’re getting a rash.” A well-manicured hand flashed out from behind her ear and knobbed the far left tap. There was a quick murmur and then the steady hiss of cold water.

“There,” she humphed satisfactorily. “This’ll feel better.”

The running stream answered its assent.

Blue Diamond did not say a word.

She hadn’t in days now, maybe even weeks; time was irrelevant to her, and the words would not come. 

There was only a dullness in her head, numb and numbing, like an icy compress coiled tightly around her thoughts.

Yellow didn’t think so, but this was better than the alternative; this was the far superior solution to the problem, the pain, and the pervasiveness of the ghost who was their daughter Pink Diamond.

Because when the analgesic of her own catatonia faded, and some of the feeling tried to seep through, her chest would unfailingly tighten, a vice squeezing hard upon her weary heart.

She couldn’t breathe.

Her child was dead.

“I…” 

The sound came from behind her, guttural and choked, as though the speaker was fighting hard against the noise and losing the war.

“I’m so tired, Blue.” 

It was an admission, and it was a copout.

Both of them knew that Blue Diamond wasn’t registering a single word.

She heard them—yes, this was true.

But they came to her—they landed softly—like distant echoes; she did not feel the pain of them, the visceral agony; at the present moment, she did not even feel her own pain, the grief and the scalding water and the grief.

Because it was always the grief she was trying to repress.

Everything else was just ancillary.

“You don’t know, goddammit, you can’t know, how exhausted I am.” Yellow Diamond’s voice shattered in the tub.

And her entire body hitched.

As though to keep that from breaking, too.

“You exhaust me, Blue Diamond. You exhaust me every single day. And you don’t even know it, goddammit. Who are you? What the hell have you become?”

The question was delivered to her backside, where it slipped down her tall, curving spine and into the water, splashing there with the delivery of the tap. With a violence that was almost cruel, Yellow reached from behind her again and flung it back into an off position.

There was quietness then.

It was so still, that it was disquiet.

It was always quiet in the Diamonds’ penthouse suite these days.

Silent.

Blue continued to stare blankly at her knees.

There were red patches on her skin.

Her child was dead.

After a moment’s hesitation, her breath heavy on the back of Blue’s long, slender neck, Yellow Diamond gathered her silvery hair gently in one hand and grabbed the comb on the side of the tub with another.

She was careful as she maneuvered its teeth through damp, lank strands.

She always was.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry, Blue.”

That was what Blue Diamond’s note would say merely a few months later.

I’m sorry and I’m sorry and I’m sorry.

Love always, Blue.

But that was the crucial thing, wasn’t it?

Sorry was not enough; love was not enough.

Because if love had been enough, Pink Diamond would still be alive. 

vii. 

In a hospital room pierced through with golden sun, Blue Diamond turned around and faced the light of day, her heavy braid swinging along with the slow, deliberate motion. 

She wasn’t looking away, Steven Universe.

She was staring straight at him—at his sunken face and his tubing and at the catheter bag and at the sunflowers.

The boy was dying, but he was not yet dead.

It wasn’t much.

At the very least, though, it was something.

He was not gone, even if he was going.

He was here.

In this moment, in this very ephemeral second.

The heart monitor on the wall attested to that; it counted his heartbeats; it pleaded with her to have hope.

(Hope was such an awful word.)

“Those are beautiful flowers,” she whispered. Her cane clinked against the tiled floor as she carefully drew closer to observe them better.

Their petals were tall and spiky, assaulting the air with attentiveness and regal magnitude.

They vaguely reminded her of Yellow.

With a light finger, she tried to prop up one that was beginning to droop beneath the weight of all its brethren, but the moment she withdrew her touch, it fell again, sighing listlessly. 

Poor thing.

“But not quite as pretty as that hibiscus you bequeathed me.”

Steven’s eyes, edged with the trace remnant of his tears, were wide and dark, full of velvet and silvery stars.

“You don’t still have it, do you?” He asked, incredulous and rather pleased.

He played a little with his hands on top of his blankets. 

He tried to tamp down his hope for an affirmative with an unconvincing casualness.

Blue Diamond’s smile bruised her lips.

“I placed it on my nightstand, sweet boy, so I could look at it everyday.”

It took a second, but the irony of that word choice was not lost on either of them.

viii. 

Yellow Diamond placed the failed suicide note on her nightstand for Blue to see and know that she saw. They didn’t talk about it afterwards.

How could they?

What was there to say?

It remained there for a few days afterwards, shriveled and guilty-looking next to the alarm clock; every time she opened her eyes, she would see it and feel its quiet condemnation. She would close her eyes against its glare and wait for sleep or numbness one to wrestle her into the dark. 

One day, she woke up, and the paper was gone again. 

The realization drew a frown across her wrinkled face.

When she thought about getting up to search for it, and mustered the appropriate will to get out of bed, apparently, many days had passed in the interim.

A month.

She only recognized this upon surveying her bathroom on her way to the toilet; she couldn't find her shaving razor anywhere.

One night—the day, the month, the year undetermined in the abscessed haze of her mind—a dull ache throbbed through Blue’s hip, growing in intensity and sharpness with each passing second that she laid on the wounded area.

There was a part of her, not entirely inconsequential, that invited the pain. For after all, suffering was the only victory the woman had left in the entire world; she wrestled with it nightly, and she embraced it. She made it her new lover and exchanged an oath that only death would do them part. She didn’t shoot herself, or cut herself, or swallow a handful of pills that would surely do the trick.

She laid on her bad hip and convinced herself that she deserved it.

But that night—whatever night that it was—the agony was unbearable, pulling at her all over.

With a groan that wasn’t voluntary, Blue wrested herself into some semblance of a sitting position and looked for her phone so that she could call Livia for an ice pack, but it wasn’t on the bedside table as it usually was… and since it wasn’t in its usual position, she had no clue where she had last left it.

If she wanted relief, she would have to brave the kitchen herself.

She wanted relief, and the guilt of it half-immobilized her.

So she sat there for a couple more minutes still and endured the stabbing ache before finally coaxing herself upwards into the dark night of the bedroom. 

Assuming her cane in one hand, Blue crept silently towards the door and out of it, where the hallway stretched out before her like a cavernous tunnel, all the lights extinguished. 

Even the telltale glow of lamp warmth that usually emitted from the study across the hall was gone out, which meant that Yellow had likely succumbed to sleep on the couch within. 

A twinge of something bothered Blue’s sternum at the thought.

She limped forward anyway and all the same, lifting her cane off the floor to keep from making noise; the wall was her guide in its stead, the pads of her long fingers moving along its smooth planes until she reached the end of the archway, where she immediately intuited that she wasn’t alone.

In the moonlight that wept into the living room through the tall windowpanes, Yellow Diamond was a stark figure sitting on the edge of the couch, leached of all her color. Her blonde hair, her silky pajamas, the leathery musculature of her corded neck—all of it was leveled by blinding whiteness.  

Illuminated.

Vulnerable.

Exposed.

When her wife swallowed, she could see every line in her powerful jaw working through the peristaltic motion. 

In the shadowed hallway, Blue Diamond stood still, even though the sharp pain in her hip demanded attention.

For this  moment, this night, this moonlit haunting did not belong to her—even though most of them usually did.

She understood, somewhere in the mire of her own head, that to disturb this scene would be sacrilege. So she watched, and she waited.

Yellow Diamond was holding something between her sharp, angular hands.

With a jolt, she realized that it was Spinel, a stuffed pink cat who had been Pink’s favorite companion once upon a time. Her left ear was still stained from the tea Yellow had once accidentally dripped on it during a princess tea party.

Washed it though they had—several times over—the spot was stubborn; Spinel had been permanently marked.

“S’okay, Momma,” Pink had only said, grinning up at them both from gapped teeth. She had hugged the toy to her chest. The affected ear brushed against the side of her freckled neck. “That just means she’s one of a kind."

Yellow’s fingers were wrapped around the cat’s plush stomach tenderly; she stared at it from depthless, ancient eyes. 

It struck Blue Diamond—then and there—that she wanted something more from this vignette; she wanted Yellow to say something. Selfishly, she desired a confirmation for what she had already so trenchantly inferred.

She wanted, she desired, she longed, she needed to know that her wife was broken, too.

It was a horrible hunger, an itch that felt terrible to scratch.

But Blue Diamond was voracious.

Sometimes, maybe even oftentimes, she could be cruel.

After a long while, though, Yellow Diamond only placed the cat down on the coffee table and stared out into the irradiated night with her hands templed below her sharp chin, lost in silent thought.

She looked older than she ever had in all of their collected years together.

She was only fifty-four.

ix.

They talked—for a long while—as the sun slipped away from the sky, sunset coming in fragments through the slats in the window blinds. 

Blue Diamond held Steven’s hand, the one that didn’t have so many IVs in it, and rubbed smooth circles against his wrist.

“Pearl does that, too,” he smiled at her softly through hooded eyes when she began. “It’s nice.”

They talked about everything, and they talked about nothing.

He told her about his favorite show, which seemed to be about morose breakfast items from what she could vaguely surmise, and he talked to her, very quietly, about his disease.

It was rapidly progressing, far more quickly than his nephrologist had anticipated.

“Those chocolate cakes we shared on your balcony,” he admitted with the air of a child waiting to be scolded, “I may have accidentally puked them up in your toilet. Sorry..."

“It’s of no consequence,” she returned with a small, sad smile.

And this was very well true.

She wasn’t the one who had to clean it after all.

They talked about everything, and they talked about nothing.

Blue told him about the sunrise yesterday, how all the colors had seeped together in a swirl of delicious color, and she talked to him, very quietly, about Pink.

“In the best of possible ways,” she mumbled, the sound caught in the column of her throat, “you remind me of her sometimes. She smiled at everything, even when there wasn’t exactly something to be smiled about.”

“That’s a very pretty way to put it.” Steven wriggled a thumb from beneath her palm to stay it against the side of her hand.

“Yes,” she nodded gently, “I suppose so.”

When it was time for her to leave—a team of nurses had come in to administer Steven’s evening medicines and check his vitals—she pressed a kiss against his forehead.

Very light and very soft.

“You didn’t look away,” he whispered against her cheek as she withdrew. His breath was sickly sweet with disease. “Thank you, Blue.”

She froze, meeting his eyes.

There was hesitancy, and there was consuming grief.

The scribble of guilt.

Scrawled all over her face.

“I wanted to, though,” she breathed. “If we're being technical... if we're being fair... I think the impulse counts against me.”

“But you didn’t.”

Steven’s chapped lips tilted into the beginnings of a smile.

“And that’s what matters, right?”

She brushed a stray curl off of his clammy forehead and thought about Pink and Yellow and all the things she did and didn’t do.

She loved them.

She looked away.

“Yes,” she told Steven Universe. 

Yes.

x.

Alone, Blue Diamond slowly crossed the skywalk, her silvery hair crowned in all the colors of the sunset, a phone pressed against her ear.

Her cane struck the tiled floor with each shuffled step forward.

Clank.

The dial tone droned rhythmically—bzzt and bzzt and bzzt.

Clank.

She felt her heart work its way up her throat, clambering up its fleshy rungs. The immensity of what she was doing transformed her nervous system into a network of beating, pulsing neuroses.

She was ready for this, and she was not.

She could do this; she half-hoped that she wouldn't receive an answer.

Clank.

And then—

“Blue?” Yellow Diamond’s low voice threw its instinctive panic across the line. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

Because this was new.

And yet, achingly familiar.

So many years of having not sought Yellow out—all those weeks, days, and months—were well-established patterns that were not easily overturned and undone.

All those collective hurts—hundreds of them, thousands.

Four years of misery sat between them like four hundred thousand miles.

Blue Diamond swallowed thickly, stopping dead in her tracks as the spillage of people continued to swarm all around her like a package freed of its contents: doctors and patients and sundry other visitors. She was the eye of their storm, and yet, she was just another broken person in the midst of so many other broken people. She was separate from them, and yet, she was their intimate kin. The contradiction seemed untenable, unworkable like all the rest.

Her fingers tightened on the head of her cane.

“I’m… I’m fine, Yellow,” she began. “Please don’t worry. I just had to… I wanted to tell you something. Are you busy?”

On the other end of the line, somewhere in a giant, yellow skyscraper at the edge of Empire City, there was the sharp intake of breath.

And the hesitant beginnings of a fearful reply.

It was a start, though.

And that was what mattered, right?

Yes, Blue Diamond thought to herself.

Yes.

[nichester]

Review: Extracurricular

Media Type: Korean Drama

Genre: Teen drama/Crime/Noir

Summary:  Ji Soo, a diligent but poor high school student is saving for college and paying rent by moonlighting as a pimp.  His precarious balance of school and work begins to fall apart when another student, Gyu-ri, discovers the truth about his job and wants in.  Things spiral quickly out of their control.

Why you might care:  If you enjoy watching teenagers do crime and get realistically in over their heads; if you are interested in dark shows with Really Good performances (in particular from the leads, who have enough chemistry for us to buy their toxic but unbreakable bond) or if you are interested in any of the themes of crime and class struggle.

Why you might not care:  Give this one a pass if you don't like your shows dark and/or are looking for a happy ending. Importantly, pay attention to potential triggers in this show! (Suicidal ideation, self harm, violence against women, sexual assault, hallucinations, and torture all occur, although not always explicitly, on this show.  Feel free to message me if you need more detailed warnings!)

Trope Bingo! Partners in crime/Bonnie and Clyde; enemies to sorta? lovers, literally I have no idea how to categorize their relationship

If you liked _______, try ______!

Can't say I've watched much in this vein! I've heard that School 2013 or Sky Castle are both excellent dramas about struggling high schoolers, but which have less grim endings.  The Get Down is a great netflix show also about marginalized teenagers struggling to pursue their dreams despite the crime and violence they're surrounded by.

~Spoilers (not anything detailed but just to be safe) and overall thoughts under the cut~

Plot:  I'll be honest, I'm not a big plot girl. Unless there's something stand-out about a story's plot, I tend to consider it more as a vehicle for character development than anything else. In this show's case, I was on the edge of my seat in horror for most episodes. The plot unfolds in a seemingly inevitable negative spiral that takes all of our characters down and leaves them far worse off than when they started. This show did rely a lot on coincidence, both positive and negative. Usually I would consider this a flaw, but I think it worked well here as a way to portray a random, unfeeling world around the characters and to emphasize the precarious nature of their situation.

Central character(s):  I was really attached to both of the leads. They had the convincing contradictions and vulnerabilities of deeply troubled teenagers, and their different traumas and personalities played off of each other well. For all of Ji Soo's smarts and skill, he has a startling naivete and a tendency to panic when things don't go according to plan. Gyu-ri is equally smart, but loud and manipulative in contrast to Ji Soo's awkwardness and isolation. Gyu-ri pushes Ji Soo to try to expand his business to make up for his unexpected losses (decisions that drive the plot), but this goes against his every cautious instinct.  Ji Soo tends to focus on maintaining what little he has, while Gyu-ri fully embraces the philosophy "the best defense is a good offense." Indeed, Gyu-ri is reckless to the point of suicidal, but the later episodes reveal a protective instinct that seems to be as unexpected to her as it is to the audience, an instinct which continually drives her to throw herself into harms way in defense of Ji Soo.  The strongest development that both characters had was in their relationship with each other, which led them to be both braver and more open than they had ever been in their lives. But their involvement with each other and their reluctance to cut ties is part of how they got to where the show leaves them--cornered and bloody.

Romance:  Technically this show has no romance, but I think it's fair to say that the leads develop an obsessive, Bonnie and Clyde-style relationship that is partially romantic in nature. Ji Soo has a distant crush on Gyu-ri at the beginning of the show, which she exploits. Honestly, some of the funniest moments in the show come from the contradiction between Ji Soo's side-hustle as a pimp and his complete and total inability to speak normally in Gyu-ri's presence. His disillusionment with her is genuinely painful, but necessary for their relationship to become one of equals. Their grudging partnership is abrasive, but their bond feels very convincing. No matter how much they resent each other, they're more strongly drawn to each other. (Watching Ji Soo pack up her discarded chip bags to bring with him on the run is just….. Its so….. Kids make me cry ok!)  It's clear for both of these lonely and deeply messed up kids that simply having a partner--someone who they can reveal their ugly sides to and depend on--is an intoxicating feeling. By the end of the show, they'd kill for each other and probably die for each other. The show smartly doesn't ever "consummate" the romance--they don't really have enough downtime when they're not actively fighting to make it convincing, and despite everything they've done both characters are still very young.  If there is a second season, this is a ship that is likely to sail (but possibly crash and burn).

Side Characters/Side plots:  In a show like this one, which depicts a marginalized and frequently abused group of women, the presence of sympathetic characters who are also members of that group is crucial, or the drama would feel exploitative. This show's most prominent side plot depicts an underage sex worker, her post-traumatic stress response to a violent client, her struggle over whether or not to speak to the police, and her desire to find genuine human connection, whether it is with her shitty boyfriend or with her pimp. (Their odd father/daughter relationship was one of the most moving parts of the show!) While I thought the writing was sympathetic to Minhee's situation, she is frequently used as a reminder of the human consequences of the other character's actions. This is both good and bad--it's important to remind the characters and the viewer of how damaging their behavior is, but it also risks treating her as a more of a tool for the lead's development than a thoroughly explored character. Up until the last episode I think the writers gave her a distinct enough arc to avoid this pitfall, but depending on her ultimate fate (in a theoretical season 2) I could change my mind.

Tone:  The tone is dark, tense, and constantly on the verge of slipping into chaos. Hallucinatory sequences play out as Ji Soo and Gyu-ri imagine themselves killing people, destroying things, or being buried alive. These sequences emphasize the character's instability, while also establishing the camera as an unreliable narrator of events in a way that pays off in the ambiguous final moments. The fantastic acting is buoyed by the directing to depict the precarious state of the leads' minds as their situation spirals further out of their control. Ji Soo's scenes feel claustrophobic and paralyzing--when he ventures out of his apartment to talk to Gyu-ri or to go to the café you get the blinking, shuffling sense of something emerging from a cave. Gyu-ri, on the other hand, is a loose cannon, and her scenes have a jittery, dangerous edge to them. As a whole, the show is excruciatingly tense and frustratingly unresolved.

Theme:  This show is a full-fledged tragedy. It is a brilliant example of a negative change arc, with all of the characters taking more and more drastic actions while still managing to retain our loyalty. I think the writer's are clear that although none of these kids have made good choices, the real tragedy lies in how they have been abandoned, used, or neglected by the adults in their lives. The few adults who show any care for them are either relatively powerless themselves (like Mr. Lee and their teacher) or too late to avert disaster (like the prosecutor). Extracurricular is a grim look at how we fail vulnerable children to the point that even a boring, average life seems like an impossible dream.

[bopinion]

2020 / 53

Aperçu of the Week:

I can resist everything except Temptation (Oscar Wilde).

Bad News of the Week:

A Brexit deal has been reached in the final meters. While British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is celebrating the agreement as the "rebirth of a nation," it is being seen in Brussels and in the capitals of the EU countries for what it is: damage limitation. I can't recall such dishonesty in a democratic country to convince the electorate of an absurd plan. But why, really?

The only reason I can think of is a symbolic one: the islanders' elite feel closer to the fading memory of their former empire when they can wallow in supposed sovereignty -"Take back control!". Yet in an ever-shrinking world, any interdependence, especially economic, is simply the de facto status quo. And it is completely irrelevant whether the British crown or the European stars are depicted on British passports.

The United Kingdom got a small foretaste of an increasingly likely no-deal Brexit in the last days before Christmas, when France closed its borders because of a supposedly even more dangerous mutation of the coronavirus. And the British public registered in amazement that within days there could be empty shelves in supermarkets and pharmacies. As a reminder, the EU is and will remain the UK's most important trading partner; the opposite is not true. For comparison: about 50% of all UK imports come from the EU, the reverse is just over 6%. That's less than trade with Switzerland - which has one-eighth the population.

So expensive watches, gold, chocolate and cheese count more for the EU of 27 nations than ... humm ... well, than what, actually? Scotch whisky for sure, souvenirs of the Royal Family maybe.... I had to do some research. Gas turbines are number 5 on the British export hit list. Pharmaceutical products on 4, crude oil on 3, refined oil on 2. And on 1 cars and car parts. A closer look is worthwhile: Mini and Rolls-Royce belong to the German BMW, Jaguar and Land Rover to the Indian Tata holding. Bentley belongs to the German Volkswagen Group, leaving only Aston Martin in British hands. The large volume however is made up of Japanese manufacturers who have settled in the UK as a stepping stone to the EU - 80% of production is exported. That will change.

Likewise, the status of London City as a financial center will change, currently number one in the world ahead of New York City. On the one hand, it is hard to imagine that the EU financial industry will remain loyal to a "foreign" location. On the other hand, the portal function to the EU market also scored points here worldwide and that will be over on 01.01.2021.

Deal or no deal: nothing will ever be the same again. Completely unnecessarily, additional costs and bureaucracy will be created on both sides of the English Channel. Since the devil is always in the details, after the negotiations is before the negotiations - many details on the more than 1,200 pages of the agreement still need to be clarified, and disputes are bound to arise. But the point of no return has been reached. With the UK, the EU is losing an important player in the team. However, with Europe, the UK loses its coach, goalkeeper and top scorer at the same time. Good luck with that. Without sarcasm. Everyone will lose. Only to different degrees.

Good News of the Week:

After seven years of negotiations, China and the EU have signaled agreement in principle on the so-called "investment protection program". This regulates mutual access to each other's markets. China and the EU, especially Germany, have never needed an agreement to trade with each other. China has always been Europe's "extended workbench" with an endless, low-cost workforce. And Europe has always been the supplier of high-quality machines and tools for China's production facilities.

Direct market access, on the other hand, has long been problematic. For example, European companies had to enter into a joint venture with a Chinese company if they wanted to produce in China themselves - whether for the Chinese market or for export. This constellation often resulted in an unintentional transfer of knowledge in order to avoid the term "theft of intellectual property". This constraint is now to be eliminated. Another important aspect is the stipulation of fair competitive conditions so that, for example, no competitor gains an advantage through subsidies.

Even more importantly, the agreement provides that China must adhere to international sustainability standards. These include environmental protection and the use of resources on the one hand, and the social sphere, i.e. the working conditions of Chinese employees, on the other. China has a lot of catching up to do in both areas. Poisoned rivers and polluted air are still the norm today, but they should now become a thing of the past. And forced labor, child labor, excessive working hours without vacation entitlement and precarious working conditions in the factories are to disappear.

In contrast to the Brexit deal described above, this one shows the right way forward: a sensible economic agreement should ensure that both partners benefit without workers or the environment falling behind. That the EU is serious about this was shown this year by the suspension of negotiations with the South American Mercosur states. If these demands are upheld, one can really speak of a win-win-win-win situation.

Personal happy Moment of the Week:

On Wednesday I got an email from Tumblr informing me of the 1 year birthday of "Bopinion". In this one year I have published 132 posts of "Bo's opinion on what matters to me". All with effort and ulterior motive, so handmade and thoughtful. And I've enjoyed sorting and formulating my thoughts in this way. And more than once, my first follower, my 17-year-old daughter, sought discussion with me. Or pointed out a mistake to me. Linguistically - her English is generation-typically better than mine -, not content-wise - because I check all facts carefully and personal opinion is subjective and difficult to evaluate anyway.

For that I would like to thank her and everyone else who took the time to read my blog. Stay faithful to me in 2021, I will certainly have something to share again - even if I wish us all that this new year will be calmer and more relaxed than the old one, which will undoubtedly fill a special chapter in the history books. All the best & Stay safe!

[haydee-gd]

[040120] BigBang and Coachella: A match made in heaven

On March 9th 2020, Coachella Festival announced that the postponement of the festival to October 9th and 16th weekend due to the rise of COVID-19, in California and particularly its rapid spread to Coachella Valley. Fans and festival goers had been waiting for news about the status of the festival for several weeks now. Among the many front line groups set to perform was South Korean Kings of Kpop, BigBang.

The news comes as a relief to many VIPs, Bigbang’s fandom, who were concerned about the groups safety and their ability to travel to California for the show during the growing health crisis. BigBang’s fandom known as the VIP (Very Important Person) had been anxious for any news.

This was set to be the band’s first concert after their military hiatus. VIPs who had been tracking the COVID-19 news updates took the news well. Citing “it was for the best” and “safety first”. Many proclaimed it was better for the BigBang members to not risk travel at this time. Fans are regrouping and starting to make plans for October. VIPs are willing to wait till October for a chance to enjoy Coachella and BigBang.

On March 11th 2020, just days after the festival postponement, YG Entertainment(YGE), BigBang’s music agency released news about BigBang’s contract renewal. According to the official communiqué BigBang’s members G-Dragon, T.O.P., Taeyang, and Daesung signed renewal contracts.

Seungri, the group’s maknae, is currently retired and serving in the military. He has a legal battle pending under the military jurisdiction (please see other articles by this author for news on the legal battle). Many fans are waiting patiently for him to complete serving his nation and for justice to prevail under the law.

YG Entertainment communicated to the public to remind them of just how strong a legacy BigBang has built. Since 2006 to 2020, this band has withstood turmoil and survived. They have risen up every time they were knocked down. They rose to the challenges and conquered adversities.

According to YGE, “Going beyond musical influence, BigBang has changed the course of Korean pop culture. YG will continue to support BigBang so that they can continue to make K-pop history as a representative of our label.”

The response from the Kpop community and the general public has been enormous. Previously, the fate of YGE had been precarious but after the press release YGE stocks displayed a fast rise. The rapid increase in numbers is an indicator that in spite of all the scandals of the previous year this agency and more importantly, this music group is one that is still in the game. BigBang is “Still Alive” very much like the lyrics and sentiments of their monster hit of the same title.

The Legacy of BigBang over the years is unbeatable. BigBang has earned the reputation of being South Korean Kings of Kpop. They became legends of 2nd Generation Kpop due to their unique music and presence. BigBang debuted in 2006 as a five member boy band consisting of members: T.O.P, Taeyang, G Dragon, Daesung, and Seungri. Since then, the members have created history by leading the way for artists to write, compose, arrange, and produce their own music. Every member of Bigbang has participated in the making of their music. The result is a sound unique and full of color.

BigBang has never been afraid to go against the norm. Their personal styles since the early days stood out. They set themselves apart from other clean cut boy bands who sang and did synchronized dances. BigBang did dance but they cared little for coordination or elaborate moves, in contrast, their stage presence was larger than life.

T.O.P could simply stand in place while rapping and all eyes would be transfixed on him. His body language, his deep timber, his style, his presence were all that was necessary to win the crowds. But T.O.P did more. During their live performances he would play with the fans. Do outrages, dances and play pranks on their youngest member Seungri.

Seungri, now retired, was the maknae (youngest in the family) and that showed. He received a majority of the elder boy’s attention during live events. His natural enthusiasm, his mischief filled eyes and his amazing humor never failed to make both the audience and his Hyungs (big brothers) laugh. But he was more than comic relief. When he sang the voice was as sweet as honey.

Speaking of voices, one must acknowledge Daesung as having one of the most versatile and powerful vocal range among Kpop singers. His voice lends beautifully to a large range of music styles and genres. In fact, fans would tell you that his live performances at Musical Stages set the stage on fire. His ability to go from cute to sexy made him BigBang’s most popular member in Japan.

When it comes to power houses, Taeyang of Bigbang definitely packs a punch. When Taeyang is on stage he makes you swoon. His soulful voice and R&B influenced music have a way to make you melt and scream all at once. His talent and his charm make him one of the fan favorites of all time. He is known to give the best fanservice and his stage is one to die for!

Last but not least, G-Dragon, the leader who has one of the largest fan following for a solo artist in the history of Kpop (1st gen through current 4th gen). His musical genius is mind blowing and his stage persona slays even the harshest of critics. G-Dragon is the artist with the most copyrighted music in South Korea. His fashion influence is so great that whatever he wears becomes a fashion style in South Korea. His music reached the hearts of many celebrities both in Korea and abroad.

BigBang as a group earned the moniker Kings of Kpop during the Rise of the Halluy wave of the 2nd gen Kpop. Groups that debuted after them were inspired and influenced by them. Other agencies planned and designed groups to follow Bigbang’s footsteps. When new deputies were asked whom they looked up to the name most often heard was BigBang. South Korea’s 3rd generation legends BTS are among the idols who name BigBang as their musical influencers.

The pairing of BigBang and Coachella is a match made in heaven. A legend in Kpop performing at a legendary music festival! The VIP fandom still has hopes to see and experience magic that this combination can bring first hand. This journalist too has plans to attend Coachella and see BigBang electrify the autumn stage at Coachella 2020.

[fallen029]

Within: Part I

Part I of a request from hey-youu-pssss for some werewolf Laxus action. I split this because I got a bit carried away with it, haha, but more soon, promise. 

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Things had been in a stead standstill for the Strauss family for the better part of a decade. The untimely deaths of both the patriarch and matriarch would come to pale to the near total inhalation of the clan faced during the great plague. It had irradiated much of the country, changing both the physical and ownership landscape involved. While the other great families dealt in their own ways, the eldest child of Elvin and Miren Strauss eventually found herself next in line of ascension all at the tender age of ten.  

It was rather unorthodox and would have been vetoed during normal means. Not only due to the age, but most importantly due to her gender. Women were very rarely considered the head of families in those times, were not thought to own land or command houses. And yet, as the plague ravished the land and the end-times felt rather imminent, it was hardly of consequence and no claim was fully realized in place of her own.

Mirajane Strauss, with very little guidance or help, found the weight of the world placed upon her shoulders at an unimaginable time in an unfathomable way. There was hardly any time to mourn her parents, her family, her friends, as she was tasked with keeping the family affairs in order.

A distant dream, it felt like now, and when she thought of those early days, she had to smile a bit wryly. Swallow a bit of air, clear her throat, blink back any wetness that might have found its way into her eyes, and continue on.

She couldn’t quite claim that she’d been all alone, during the thick of it. She had a both a younger brother and sister who, honestly, she imagined she was lucky just didn’t possess any desire for power themselves. It would have been rather easy, in those tumultuous periods, for either to have killed her off or, in her brother’s case, honestly just stake a claim. As the male heir, he probably had more of it and if he’d been interested in pursuing that, could have found himself the head rather easily.

But neither were quite interested in all of that. Elfman Strauss, while a rather broad shouldered and striking young man, was also a bit of a, well, a mama’s boy. But when she was taken from him at such a young age, he clung instead to his older sister who he’d never think of undermining. In fact, he’d get quite agitated at any sort of suggestion, even to that day.

He saw his older sister as the only reason the Strauss name held any value currently and credited her with saving not only his namesake, but even his own life.

Elfman would never allow anything to befall his beloved older sister. Not without putting up a fight.

Lisanna Strauss, however, would never have had a claim to the estate and lands, were either sibling alive, and perhaps that was why she was so insistent that they take care, in the later stages of the plague, when socializing was becoming commonplace once more. There was nothing more frighting to the youngest Strauss as the idea of ever holding power.

The small amount she had now, only in riches and the prospect of marriage, frightened her greatly.

Being from a noble family was the pits and she spent every day from childhood to the tentative adulthood she was now reaching rejecting what it meant. She hoped to never find herself in control of anything, really, and balked even at the idea of marrying into it. As the youngest sibling, a daughter of one of the head families, she was meant to be married off young and into more nobility. Perhaps even far from home.

Were her parents still alive, some of her older relatives, this probably would have happened around her sixteenth birthday. Which in itself was devastating to think about for the young woman, only just now surpassing her eighteenth. Instead, it was still her older sister that most men were interested in courting and she watched those many awkward dances from the distance, instead spending her days balancing between doing the bare minimum Mirajane required of her and goofing off out in the surrounding woods with her best friend Natsu, the orphaned servant employed at the manner.

It was a rather precarious situation that Mirajane found herself in, those days. While surely leading the family out of the plague would go down as her crowing achievement, her putting off marriage and the inevitable power transfer that would involve, was surely a feat in itself.

She was meant to marry someone of equal or lesser power than her. Or at least both she and her small group of close associates thought so. It would help her to consolidate power. When she married, she could either assist the family in absorbing more land or join them to one of the neighboring families. Either wasn’t exactly favorable for her siblings, who didn’t rightly wish to see her leave their estate and, at least in name, leave Elfman as the head of the household and Lisanna, unfortunately back in the spotlight once more for suitors.

But it didn’t seem as if their older sister seemed to keen on any of the interested men anyhow. Not truly. She spent balls and social occasions fielding interests and gaining the reputation of a bit of a prude. Not that it mattered. Many attributes had been shackled to the woman in the past and she wore them all far better than most. Mirajane knew what she wanted and, though she didn’t share it with many people, she was confident that, eventually, she would get it.

Laxus Dreyar was from the Dreyar clan, a revered and respected family who’d managed to survive the plague with very little harm. Their position in the country, surrounded by jagged cliffs and backed into the rougher side of the sea, had allowed them to quarantine far better and shield themselves from much of the damage. Makarov Dreyar, their aging (and to some decrepit, even) patriarch still resided over the family. The next in line was his cantankerous son and, finally, his brash and bold grandson Laxus. The three made up the main family and were well regarded in the land as being a bit...eccentric and surely not the best family to align yourself with.

They would be of no use to the Strauss family. Too distant and too chaotic. Mirajane was meant to marry into true stability to the house once more. It was hardly meant to be between she and Makarov’s grandson and ye, following a chance encounter, the woman found herself rather smitten with him.

It was strange, clandestine almost, or so she told herself, the way that the pair of them happened upon one another. He’d been once more, as frequently was the occurrence, had a falling out with both his grandfather and father and had been banished from both the Dreyar estate and the home his father kept on the opposite end of their hold.

Not that this was a much of a problem. From the time he was a teen, he frequently was sent away to different dignitaries and even, once, the Kingdom’s capital. Now a man in his twenties and with enough inheritance and gold to his name to inspire much work ethic, he found himself a bit of a nomad, staying around with friends of the family when they would have him and sleeping around with women when they wouldn’t.

The Justine’s were a lesser family that was a ward of his own, but Laxus had always been friends with the heir apparent. Freed was a quiet man, reserved, and functioned well as a cohort for Laxus in that he balanced the other man out. Dreyars were naturally ferocious and it had been many a fight that Freed had to lead the other man away from- And some that he wasn’t so capable.

Freed, who was sent by his father on business to meet with the Strauss family in regards to a few trade agreements, invited Laxus when to accompany him with little care. He didn’t know the Strausses, neither of the men did, and it would be nice to have company on the rather lengthy journey.

They weren’t even meant to meet with her. Mistress Mirajane. It was one of the lesser lords in her hold that Freed was to trade a few person documents with. But this sounded dreadfully boring to Laxus and, though he’d accompanied the man most of the way, he begged out of going to the stuffy environment that would be a lesser lord’s house. No. Sounded like a shitty time, honestly.

It was midday when Laxus found himself roaming around an unfamiliar city, more or less scoping out what possible night life it might offer. Not much, honestly. But it was as he was roaming about, hands shoved down in his pockets and his standard fluffy coat floating from his shoulders that he saw her.

She was seated at a patio cafe, looking over a small book of some sort as a much older man sat before her, speaking rather animatedly though the woman didn’t seem quite as interested.

He knew who she was immediately. Or at least had a good idea. It was the true Strausses, of the old blood, that possessed the snow white hair and bright blue eyes. He’d seen old photos and such of the family, anyways, growing up in the privilege of tutors and thorough education. His grandfather used to sit in on his lessons sometimes, giving him a cookie when he was able to name all of the major houses and holds; maybe something better if he could name all of their lesser houses and the neighboring.

The Strausses were remarkable, when he was growing up, for their resilence and young leader. He used to dream of one day being able to do the same as her. Once the old geezer and his father were out of the way. He imagined, when he was a boy, that he’d be awfully good at leading his hold. But now, distanced and miserable in most aspects, he looked on disdain at most everything.

But not that woman that day, as his chest ached a bit, when she lifted her eyes at just the right moment to meet his and he was hardly ever so smitten with someone. A woman. He got them quite easily with his status and money. They usually threw themselves at him and were hardly a concern. Something other than gold to burn through.

Something harsh raged through him then though and he didn’t think he could ever break her gaze, that he would ever break that gaze, even if it were only a few seconds, perhaps less, as it felt eternal. Honestly, the only thing that caused him to finally look away from the woman and she him was the loud sound of a carriage horse in distress and some yelling from the street.

It had reared up on its back legs, the creature had, fighting against two men who were trying to calm it and most everyone walking about stopped to stare in surprise.

“Oh, Uncle, go help them,” Mirajane said quickly to the man sitting beside her as both she and him stared with concern at the scene that was quickly arising. “You’re so good with them. Horses and things. I… Please, Uncle, go help.”

“O-Of course!” The stout man rose to his feet quickly and rushed right from the table he was sharing with his liege, rushing across the street to where, honestly, the horse was being subdued and comforted.

As he left though, Mirajane found herself standing as well while Laxus, after a weary glance over at the horse, found his feet bringing him over, instead, to the patio cafe. At his approach, he noted two heavy set men seated nearby tense and advert their gaze from the horse scene and instead on the new, strange man.

“Lady Strauss,” Laxus spoke loudly as he approached, keeping gaze with her while the woman, in turn, only shut her little book and looked the man over.

“I prefer Mistress,” she remarked simply and he almost bit his tongue as yes, Freed had mentioned that to him, on the off chance they happen upon her. But perhaps it would have been for the better, should he have bitten the appendage, as at least drawing a bit of blood from it would distract it from the growing ache in his chest when she smiled at him all the same. “But I am sorry, I do not believe we’ve been acquainted before. Are you a member of my uncle’s house?”

She knew this couldn’t be, how could it? The way he carried himself and his clothing gave off significant standing and birthright, but still, she knew most everyone that would qualify those standard in the immediate area.

“No.” As he came to a stop in front of the table, he said quite loudly, “I am Laxus Dreyar. Grandson of Makarov Dreyar.” And his words alone were enough to put the two burly men at ease. To her only now, he said much softer, “Here on business.”

“Business?” She scrunched her nose in such a precious way as her blue eyes seemed clouded momentarily. “Were we meant to meet, Lord Dreyar?”

“Laxus.” He took a hand from his pocket, but rather than reach out to take hers, he instead bent low, at the waist, in a way he wasn’t fully accustomed any longer. As he rose, he assured her, “I prefer Laxus.”

Rising herself, Mirajane took his hand however, once he’d righted himself, and she shook it with a heaviness no woman he knew possessed, but made the pang in his chest only grow.

“Mirajane,” she told him as a soft grin fell over her face, when she released his hand. “I want you to call me Mira.”

“Who is this then?”

And her uncle was back then, stuffy and put out as he eyed the strange man with clear disdain, but it didn’t matter. It was too late. Everything was too late, fates already sealed.

He wouldn’t be going back with Freed, no matter how much Justine insisted that he not do as he was thinking, to rethink all of his thoughts, least he wind up in a far worse situation with his grandfather than he already was, but nothing could dissuade a man in love.

“You’ve met many Ladies before,” Freed argued with a heavy frown that final time he tried to get through to his longest friend. “Your feelings always pass.”

But his words meant nothing and when Freed returned to his father, it was with a sigh and lie over the Dreyar grandson finding other business in the hold to attend to.

Given his rather high status, it was easy enough for Mirajane to write off giving him a room on the estate property, a guest cottage not far from the main house, and things moved so fast from there.

It was a cool autumn night, the first one that Laxus spent on the property. He’d spent the past few at an inn near her uncle’s house, where she was staying for a few herself, and they’d had dinner a few times. Spoken. A lot, honestly, for the short amount of time they’d been allotted. Neither was too sure who’d suggested him following her all the way back home, but when he boarded her carriage with her, it was to the disdain of her uncle and maybe some whispers of others, but Mirajane assured everyone who questioned her that it was purely business.

And yet, it was anything but.

She’d had many men in her life attempt to get fresh with her before and even reciprocated at times, but things felt much different with Dreyar. He sat beside her, in the carriage, wrapping his coat tightly around her shoulders as he spoke, at her request, of his home. Back on the cliff. Of their customs she’d forgotten or perhaps not even been taught, given how ravished their lands were during the time period this was mostly be passed on to her. She asked, also, what he knew of the Strauss hold, of their lands, and Laxus more honest than he’d ever been in his life, whenever he spoke to the woman.

“This feels,” she whispered softly in his ear after their first true embrace, when she welcomed him to the guest cottage his first evening on the estate, “so improper.”

“I’m sorry,” he replied as he ran a knuckle over the soft, pale flesh of her cheek. “We can move slower.”

But they couldn’t.

They never would have been able to.

Elfman and Lisanna were, quite quickly, suspicious of her sister and, more over, distrustful of the new man she’d brought back to their property.

“We don’t know what you’re doing here,” Elfman grumbled softly to him that first night, over dinner, when Mirajane was distracted and he was able to lean over towards the other man, “but watch yourself.”

And he, quite clearly, would be a problem.

The other one, the younger one...not so much.

“I,” she complained to him with a frown that evening as he was headed down the path back towards his temporary resting place, “use that guest house during the winter time for very important activities. So you better not plan on staying around for long, Mr. Dreyar.”

“Lord,” he corrected her simply, “Dreyar. And it’s not proper, you following me around you know. People we get the wrong idea.”

“You got the wrong idea,” was all Lisanna insisted to him as, at the tree line, where he’d have to follow the path further, to arrive at her apparently prized location, she stopped to glare at his back, “if you think you’re sticking around.”

But oh, he was.

And Lisanna wouldn’t be the Strauss most making that short trek to the guest house that autumn.

It wasn’t hard to spot the Mistress in those days, previously very tied up in her travel and work, now taking long strolls along the property with Lord Dreyar. All over the property. Even down to the cottage, citing a desire to glance over the changing of leaves and the season.

“I’m meant to marry soon,” she told Laxus, one day, when upon their walks they both nosed instead through the cracked door of the cottage and lost themselves in his disheveled sheets for what was, honestly, not nearly long enough.

It was against her neck as she clawed at his back and the man squeezed his eyes shut that he assured her soft, flushed flesh, “You will. You will, I promise you will.”

The fall gave way to winter and, though his placement on the estate was rather obvious to most, it was around that time that the news had made it back around to the Dreyar’s hold.

And there was a lot of discontentment over Laxus’ recent behavior.

He received a letter from his grandfather, urging him back home at once while the Strauss estate, instead, were not long after bombarded with letterhead from the residence of Ivan Dreyar, requesting the hand of the Mistress immediately.

“He’s doing it to fuck with me,” Laxus remarked dryly to Freed who, at Laxus’ urging over letter, arrived at the Strauss estate soon enough to discuss his next movements. “My father.”

“Forget your father, Laxus,” his friend retorted. “Your grandfather-”

“Gramps, that old geezer, he’s been trying to get me marry into another kingdom’s family. Out of Fiore.” He spit, Laxus did, on the ground, at the thought. “Fuck that. I’m not leaving Fiore. And I’m not leaving Mirajane.”

So it was decided, against the counsel of his friend and the chagrin of his family that the young Dreyar found himself officially beginning an engagement to the eldest Strauss.

“I’ll never take your land from you,” he promised her softly as they lay together one night in his cottage, which he’d stocked with champagne, roses, and the most important thing the woman was looking for; himself. “Your people. I don’t want any of that. I’ll even put it in writing. I...gave up on ruling people a long time ago. I just want you. In a way I’ve never wanted anyone in my entire life. If you will be my wife, I’ll take on whatever title you wish. But you will always be Mistress Strauss and I would never wish to remove that from you. I just want to be included in your life, not change it.”

And she smiled at him, sweetly, as she shifted to rest her forehead against his, gazing longingly into the man’s eyes as she assured him, “I just want to be in your life too, Laxus.”

There would be fallout for this, of course. A lot of scorned suitors now felt bamboozled as the woman didn’t even pick for the intended pool, but rather bypassed it entirely. The Dreyars, in particular Makarov, wrote that he would be arriving soon to meet his prospected new granddaughter-in-law, and the letter detailing this felt rather cross.

Ivan, for his part, merely sent once last request for his son’s betrothed’s hand.

Still, an engagement party date was put in place and Mirajane found that, eventually, a certain stillness began to fall over her regarding the entire thing. Being with Laxus had felt exhilarating for many reasons, but also the potential pain in him eventually being taken from her, choosing to leave her, hung over her head frequently and made him cling all the tighter to him. The resolution to this being found, the woman couldn’t help the obvious contentment that washed over her, even in the hectic days of wedding planning and house joining that would follow.

“Now that the chase is done,” Freed questioned his dear friend quite bluntly when he arrived for the engagement party, “you have not lost interest, Laxus, have you?”

“Of course not,” he replied as if this were a ridiculous question, but that was hardly the case. While it might seem as if the man was getting everything he wanted, Freed knew him well enough to know that   this was hardly what the man wanted.

Not at all.

Laxus liked for things to be hard. For them to be difficult. To anger his family and draw the ire of those around him. But as people only naturally warmed to this venture, it made sense that he’d fall out of interest with it, to fall into another ill conceived ploy for attention.

But when he looked his best friend in the eyes that evening, Laxus merely vowed to him, “I’m not a boy anymore. I’m a man. And I’m ready to move into that phase of my life. This is where I want to be.”

Forever.

The night of the engagement party was wild. It was a massive function with many neighboring Lords and Ladies. Even those from the further reaches of the Kingdom. The King himself sent word of his approval only days before and while Mirajane had smiled down at the letter, it was that night, when all her friends, family, and even those distanced to her gathered, just that once, before the eventual wedding, that her grin was at its widest.

He met so many people that day, Laxus did. Had to introduce Mirajane to so many people. Dodge a lot more people. Makarov had arrived earlier in the day, to much fanfare from the Strauss estate and though his grandfather originally wore his sternest of gazes, it only took one look into the bright eyes of his grandson (and perhaps the bosom of his bride-to-be) to understand the union.

“Will you get that short, Laxus?” Lisanna questioned him with wicked laughter that night when she passed him. “Like your grandfather.”

“Lord,” he retorted to her, “Dreyar. And Master Dreyar. Respectfully.”

But the little shit was anything but respectful.

For all the tough talk that Elfman had long given Laxus, he was a bucket of tears that night, falling all over his sister whenever he saw her and even into the arms of her affianced.

“I always wanted,” he sobbed into the shoulder of the ill-at-ease Laxus, “a brother.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t got one now,” the man grumbled, but Mirajane only giggled at the sight from where she stood nearby, with all her female friends, and for as suffocating as he always imagined be betrothed was, Laxus honestly was finally at peace as well.

He had much to drink that night, as did most people, but as the party raged on, he thought to head back to his cottage when the evening air grew colder, for his coat. It was as he stumbled down the path that he thought he knew so well, however, that it happened.

When he heard the rustling in the bushes, he thought that it might be some other guests, having snuck away with a beloved of their own, and Laxus imagined when he wouldn’t have to do such things with the Mistress. Finding a place, a proper place, in her estate. And while he’d like to give them their space, he had, unfortunately, found out what Lisanna (and her servant boy that she kept around, Natsu) had secretly been using his cottage for previously. What with how close to the cottage it was, Laxus imagined it was them, as he’d found them not long ago, together on the back property, hidden and yet now known to him, and he thought to break them up. Once more. If someone else stumbled upon them, it would be pure pandemonium and he hardly wished to deal with that.

But as he approached the bushed area in question, he sensed something else. A strong foreboding. The man hardly had time, however, to back away before it happened. A deep growl and then a vicious attack, his yells of pain being drowned out by the party not too far away, back on the estate and he was left eventually, mauled and beaten, forced to hobble and crawl the rest of his way to the cottage.

It had been a...wolf of some sort, he thought, hiding in the bushes and had sprang out at him. Powerful, sharp jaws had wrapped around his arm and ripped into the flesh, perhaps to the bone, and he thought he’d die, when he fell into his bed alone. Imagined he had that night, maybe, as he had the most vibrant and terrifying dreams.

Yet, he couldn't recall a single one, that next morning when Mirajane found him there.

Her shrill call of his name had sent most everyone running and, given all the blood in the cottage and the pathway leading up to it, the prognosis didn’t seem to bright. But most everyone was thankful (if not a bit confused) to find him blearily arise and brandish on the strangest of fang markings on his forearm and a deep scratch along his right eye.

“That wasn’t from the beast,” he muttered as he sat in one of the palours of the estate, his fiance and grandfather flanking him while the local proctor looked him over. “The arm...that was. But the eye was from some rock or something. It scrapped me on the way down.”

“Lucky you still have your eye,” the man told him bluntly. “Or your arm for that matter.”

“All that blood from those little puncture wounds?” Mirajane questioned as she rested a hand on Laxus’ shoulder. “That can’t be right.”

“Maybe the blood of that damn beast,” Makarov muttered gravely as he shook his head. “Hell hound, it sounds like. You get it good, boy?”

“I...I don’t remember,” Laxus whispered and he felt nothing like himself, nothing at all. “I don’t remember anything.”

“We’ll hunt it down,” Elfman vowed as he wiped at his eyes. “Hunt the whole damn property. Some of the men already are. If you didn’t kill it, big brother, we will!”

“Don’t call me-”

“Yes, big brother,” Lisanna agreed, noting with glee that Elfman, unknowingly, had stumbled upon something new to get under the man’s skin. “We’ll hunt it down!”

But they wouldn’t.

Not for lack of trying though.

For all the men that searched the forest and neighboring areas, no such animal could be found. Some wolves were slaughter, but none with the same, dark, piercing eyes that Laxus recalled.

“I thought,” Mirajane would remark a lot, when he’d mention the red lit, haunting eyes that he could still see, if he just closed his eyes, “that you couldn’t remember anything?”

“I can’t,” he assured her. “W-Well, I mean, I thought I couldn’t….but...”

Though the next few days were difficult, if not downright unpleasant, Laxus did eventually leave the room in the estate he was given to stay in. It wasn’t proper, after all, Mirajane had sadly remarked as she and her brother, as well as a bodyguard, walked with him that first time, back to the cottage, Dreyar trying very hard not to flinch when they passed the exact spot he’d been attacked.

But soon enough, Mirajane was able to add then and it helped anyways, when she smiled at him so sweetly.

Eventually, things fell back into their uneasy peace and Makarov returned home, with a promise to visit  before the wedding, signifying his blessing was more than bestowed. Freed too returned home unfortunately, but Laxus found that he was becoming rather accustomed to his regular day-to-day life in on the Strauss estate.

His woman seemed keen to continue on alone in most work and, considering he had little else to do, Laxus did as he’d done all fall, hanging around her siblings or other friendly workers he stumbled across. Winter now, there was snow for Lisanna to frolic through and toss at him though, oddly enough, the man specified that under no circumstance were she ever to build a snowman around him.

“I,” he told her plainly, “hate them.”

Which meant that Lisanna, who rightly didn’t care for them either way, was now determined to build as many as possible.

Still, life on the estate was nice..until about a month or so later.

Laxus grew tired early the night, retiring not soon after dinner and whispering in his beloved’s ear before he departed that no, he doubted he’d be up for a midnight stroll that night. She was disappointed, as the moon was meant to be gorgeous that evening, but relented with a nod.

When he fell into bed, it seemed almost instantaneous that Laxus found himself asleep. But, unfortunately, it was a rather fitful one. Filled with glowing red eyes and sharp pains as well as, in certain portions, an intense pleasure.

He didn’t know what to think, when he awoke the next morning to labored breathing and a few rather strange bruises along his arms.

“Even scratched myself, somehow, in my sleep,” he was grumbling to Mirajane over breakfast in the main dining hall when Elfman, who usually didn’t join them, came rushing in with one of the men from village.

“Elf,” Mira remarked as she rose to her feet immediately. “What-”

“One of the women was attacked last night,” he remarked gravely as the man beside him, the father of a young woman, looked equally distraught as he did murderous. But Elfman only looked to Laxus as he insisted, “By the same beast you were!”

[oops-prow-did-it-again]

Pokémon Black: The Novel (Prologue)

This is a novelization of Pokemon Black, meaning a complete rewrite of the story from start to finish. Follow Hil (Hilbert) as he escapes from his suffocating home life and finds himself clashing with idealistic N over deadly truths. Not everything is as it seems in Unova.

(Cross-posted from FFN & AO3)

This is part of a series I am actively working on known as Pokemon Retold. It is a project in which I intend to novelize each region’s games with a protagonist that I give a unique personality to, as listed below:

HeartGold - Lyra

Omega Ruby - Brendan

Platinum - Dawn

Black - Hilbert (goes by Hil)

Black 2- Nate

Y - Calem

Sun/Ultra Sun - Selene

Sword - Gloria

But that’s not all. These stories won’t just stay written fanfictions. I intend to fully animate this series in the future. I just have to write it all out first since the written stories will determine how the animations play out. :)

That being said, expect LOTS of fanart as I learn how to animate and so forth and I hope you enjoy! 

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

Pokemon Black

Prologue - Long Live Team Plasma

The atmosphere was cold and damp. Pristine, stark walls curved high over everyone’s heads in an arch, no true flat ceiling existing in that cavernous throne room. Broad, looming pillars kept that ornate ceiling steady and gave the room an even more elegant feel due to their extravagantly sculpted designs. Gilded blue walkways snaked across flowing water beneath the room. Thick glass connected them and allowed throngs of robed people to walk across the rivulets below. They stared at a raised, wide walkway in the center of the room carefully, each of their eyes hidden in the shadows caused by the silver hoods that swallowed their faces.

Silence gripped the room save for the distant dribbling of water as a group of seven elderly men entered the chambers. One led the pack, looking quite different from the rest, who bore thick, conic robes and tall, cylindrical hats that hid their figures. The leader still had that conic design about his clothing, but the robes did not drag the ground like his colleagues, and they were primarily a deep violet with golden streaks and designs zigzagged throughout. The most prominent of the designs on his cloak appeared to be an eye shape of sorts. He had no hat to speak of. The leader also wore a red eyepiece lined with silver, an angular monocle of sorts, blotting his right eye from view. Cupped gently in his palms as if it were made of precious glass was a gleaming golden crown with white gemstones embedded in its lustrous frame.  

The six men trailing him stopped along the walkway. Three sat precariously near the edge on one side and the other three did the same for the opposite length of the path. The leader continued his path until he reached a glittering chair made in the same shade of gold as the crown. He stood to the chair’s right and swept a red, one-eyed gaze across the gathered crowd. He cleared his throat and addressed them, “Today, Team Plasma enters its next phase of liberation.” The right side of his lips pulled down stubbornly against his words, refusing to budge, as if half of him were fighting his own words. But Marlon knew the much more sinister reason. All of Plasma knew, in fact.

“Long live Team Plasma,” whispered the six men gathered about the walkway in unison. They were the other six of the Seven Sages. World-renowned philosophers, skilled in various other subjects as well, gathered to educate Team Plasma’s members and even more importantly, their future King. It was important that they had some sort of powerful outside influence to inform their future King of the ways of the world, after all; Team Plasma’s future King was sadly forced to live his life within the labyrinthian underground castle. His purpose was one too pure and important to risk by allowing him amongst dangerous average humans and their bladed tongues, capable of twisting the hearts of men into believing untrue, outrageous ideas.

“Our prince has finally come of age,” the leader—Ghetsis, use his name, Marlon thought with a pang of discomfort—came again. His voice was gravelly but not faded or meek by any means. He had a loud, booming air of domination about him, a forceful persistence Marlon had known from no other. His seriousness was not unwarranted, however. Ghetsis went on to say, “Lord N is ready to be crowned as the King of Team Plasma and to lead us in our quest to change Unova for the better!”

Marlon watched curiously as Ghetsis’ robes fluttered at movement beneath them. He, along with most of the other members of Team Plasma present, softly gasped as he revealed his right arm fully, grasping the crown tenderly in the shuddering fingertips, and strained to raise it high above his own head. High above the gathered crowd. Marlon knew he should have been awing at the crown as it was the symbol of their future, but Ghetsis using his bad arm was entrancing in a way.

As the story went, Ghetsis had been mauled by a hydreigon he had fought to tear away from a most frightful trainer. He had described his travel through a path in the wilderness close to Victory Road as nothing short of depressing: trainer after trainer ruthlessly pushing their pokémon to fight anything they spotted. Supposedly the hydreigon had been on the verge of collapse, attacking wild pokémon desperately as if to get the training over with so it could be done. Ghetsis, unable to watch, had stepped in, he had said. The trainer had laughed him away at first and so, of course, Ghetsis battled to try to insist, to change his mind. Ghetsis battled until he no longer had pokémon at his side capable of battle. Then, the hydreigon had descended upon him in a blind fury. Even the pokémon’s own trainer had been petrified at the display and had left his pokémon there, Poké Ball and all, to whatever fate awaited it and Ghetsis. Of course, Ghetsis had survived the encounter, if only narrowly, and the scars of that fateful battle were still readily visible across his arm, his leg, and his face. Ghetsis proudly persevered despite them like they were a symbol of what they would overcome. Never did Ghetsis allow his apparent disabilities to hinder his daily life.

So, to see him holding the crown high above them in such a way, arm trembling and struggling to remain aloft, it was a moving sight to say the least. Marlon was flooded with a burning desire. Team Plasma had found him, wasting his life away in the seaside village of Humilau, five years before and had given him purpose. Reminded of this, he felt a cozy sense of belonging. Life in Humilau had been fun, that was for sure; fishing, surfing along the backs of various visiting marine pokémon, diving, swimming… it was an indulgent, carefree lifestyle, and a very pleasant one at that. He had not realized how poorly he had been spending his life until Team Plasma had arrived. Ghetsis, not yet injured at the time of that visit, had paraded across the boardwalk of the town and spoken softly of the shame in ‘owning’ Pokémon and forcing them to battle for human entertainment. Marlon had only battled sparingly up to that point, much more preferring to fish and swim than train and battle, and was haunted by the idea of whether Ghetsis’ claims were true or not. They had engrossed his then-thirteen-year-old mind with worries about what sort of world lay further in Unova’s mainland cities. He spoke to some more of the adults in his village before making his final decision to join Team Plasma’s ranks and they had all but confirmed his suspicions. The village elders lamented the introduction of the Poké Ball to the Unova region and sighed about how it had warped trainers’ minds into ones of control and manipulation rather than progress and companionship. Battles, they felt, were now about domination instead of bonding.

It was with Team Plasma, with their ideals, that Marlon found purpose. No longer was he wasting away on idle standby, ignorantly living his indulgent life, as the world progressed down a dark path.

“Long live Team Plasma,” chanted the crowd of gathered Team Plasma brethren. Marlon joined in. His voice was soft but not timid. They continued even as Ghetsis started to speak again, sounding like a distant hum.

“Fellow Sages and Servants of the King,” Ghetsis mused as he looked down at the men flanking the walkway down the center of the room. “Please bring forth our King.”

In frighteningly perfect unison, each of the six sages slowly moved to their feet and then filed together in a straight line as if they were designed to. They padded out the room and Ghetsis breathed in deeply, using his left hand to steady his slowly-failing right arm. Marlon looked up at him in hesitant admiration. Despite the story of his heroics, saving the hydreigon and saving their prince—no, King, he reminded himself—and adopting two other girls orphaned by selfish humans, Marlon still eyed Ghetsis with a hint of apprehension. Ghetsis pursued Team Plasma’s goal of liberation doggedly and sometimes, his desperation went a little far. He blinked harshly as he recalled the feeling of that broad, tight hand on his shoulder, gripping with enough force he feared his bones might splinter, and an image flashed in his mind of an imposing figure shadowing him with his height. But Marlon banished the thoughts with a minute shake of his head. Ghetsis could be forceful at times, but Marlon couldn’t blame him. He had seen the devastation wrought by humans firsthand more than many of them had and Marlon supposed he had been an annoying kid anyways. He still had a habit of slipping into the Humilau-inspired slang every now and then and he knew how much that grated everyone’s nerves, not to mention how Ghetsis had warned him that giving away identifying information—such as one’s place of origin—could compromise Team Plasma’s mission.

The crowd fell silent, finally ceasing the hushed chant, when the Sages returned to the walkway. Leading them this time was their soon-to-be King. Pale green hair fluttered and flowed down his back, framing his young, perfect face. His eyes were shut, and the Sages guided him along the straight pathway by holding the lengthy ceremonial garb that he boasted and tugging gently when he began to teeter in any one direction too far. It also kept the beautifully patterned fabric from brushing the floor. They guided him to just in front of the chair—throne, Marlon corrected himself again—and only then did they let go of his robes. They each dipped their heads and offered something in a solemn whisper before returning to their initial positions along the broad walkway.

Ghetsis, standing to attention at the King’s left, dipped his head in a similar fashion toward him. “Lord N,” Ghetsis began with an almost loving purr in his voice, “you have learned all we can teach you to guide you in your path forward. Now, we look to you as our King and as our Hero to shape Unova’s future as a place for pokémon and humans to live separate, perfect lives.” He tried to carefully lower the crown onto N’s bowed head, but his right arm gave way and it half-tumbled out of his hands. N steadied the crown himself, making no note of Ghetsis’ fumble, and then looked up at his father. Marlon felt a bolt of sadness at the display. A pokémon had been driven to madness with the desire to attack Ghetsis over the selfish lust for power from its trainer. That was all it was a reminder of. After taking a second to collect himself, Marlon looked back up at N, who had turned to face the rest of the room.

He shakily breathed in and then raised his right hand nervously. He swallowed hard. “Today, I accept my role as King of Team Plasma and as Unova’s future Hero,” N declared in that delicate tone of his. He sounded so light and gentle compared to Ghetsis but he emanated the same air of determination. “Today, long live Team Plasma!” N’s voice raised as he jutted that hand high into the air, his stormy eyes narrowing knowingly. The rest of the room erupted after him. Chants for Team Plasma reverberated throughout the walls in a way that made it feel as if even when they were gone, the room would continue to exude the words, the words of justice.

But N wasn’t done. He stamped a foot and added with stronger vigor, “Together, friends, we will make a world free of confusion and suffering! A world that is ideal! A world that is black and white!”