#but i think this is the most succinct i can get it without losing people's attention

[burn-with-the-house]

Mahanon Tabris Meta Post

This is going to be a long one, boys. Read more under the cut. tw: brief discussion of SA

Gender and Gendered Violence

For Mahanon Tabris, the journey he undertakes in Dragon Age: Origins is one that is centered around his gender, and gendered violence. Despite the Andrastian faith being the prevailing religion across Ferelden (and Thedas as a whole), we’re still treated to the typical misogyny in-world as we can come to expect from any pseudo-medieval fantasy game released in 2009. Ranging from snide comments made about the capabilities of a fem Warden or what can be extrapolated as parallels from real-world allegory as headcanons (click here to read my headcanons about Ghilan’nain), the world of Thedas is not so different from our own in regards to subtle if enforced ideas about gender roles and norms.

Enter the City Elf origin. Regardless of whether you first played it with a masc or fem Tabris, it leaves a sick feeling in your stomach about the underbelly of nobility of Thedas and their treatment of their lessers–elves, servants, and, well, women. 

Mahanon Tabris lived most of his life in Denerim performing as a gender-conforming woman because that is what was asked of him. Although his mother Adaia indulged him in many things; the art of weaponry, whispers of a life beyond the Alienage walls, and the gift of a new name for her son once he asked for it, the narrative demands that Adaia dies. The wife dies, the mother dies, the woman dies to further the story. That is the very first thing that Mahanon Tabris learns; the woman will die. 

His father, Cyrion, asks him to put aside the notions of masculinity that his mother had humored. Not for a lack of love; in fact, it is an outpouring of Cyrion’s love, concern, and fear that drives him to make that request. Mahanon, who has learned that deviation from the norm equals death, acquiesced to the request. From there he continued to stifle everything that made him “Mahanon”--that which is now intrinsically tied to his mother, and by virtue, her death. (These themes relate to how Mahanon interacts with his Andrastian faith. I’ll discuss that in another post).

I decided not to start Mahanon’s story (Born Again in Blood) with the wedding day, and the horror that it was. Instead I started his story in the immediate wake of it; being led out of Denerim by Duncan, after he had silently witnessed his life trade hands three times. From his own, to Valendrian, to the Arl’s men, and then finally to Duncan and the Grey Wardens. Truthfully, it was hearing that Duncan had once wanted to recruit Adaia that fostered trust once they were far enough away from Denerim that he was willing to speak.

Duncan gave him that chance; let him announce his new name. On the way to Ostagar, Mahanon cut his hair. There is also an instance in which he speaks with the armorer and it appears this stranger recognizes his plight.

His lips twitched downward at the thought, but his chest bloomed with new breath. He could give any name that he wanted. He could weave any lie, any tale, any story to make it palatable on the tongue. If he was a Grey Warden now–at the least, a recruit–his life would never be the same. He remembered the name his mother gave him when his father wasn’t listening, her hands soft and warm on his cheeks. The name they shared in whispers together as she taught him how to wield a sword to defend himself. The same name Shianni muttered as he lifted her up off of the floor. “Mahanon,” he said. “My name is Mahanon Tabris.”

Fingers closed around the cold hilt and he brought it up to his neck without much of a second thought. He cut through the wet tresses just where they brushed against his collar; it would have been easier, he realized, were his hair dry, but he had already begun to cut it away now. He braced his feet in the mud and stood there, cutting, until he felt a weight fall free from his head and he could breathe freely. Left in his hands were the twenty years of his life. He would let the river take them, too.

 “I think I have something that will fit you,” he said. “Put this on underneath. Those bandages don’t do shit beneath the plate.” Mahanon looked down to see something reminiscent of a corset in his hands, though the leather strands could be more tightly bound, and it did not go as far down the torso. Confused, he looked back up at Gareth.

The smith didn’t bluster as he collected pieces of a plate set. “My daughter went off to become one of them Templars. I still see her at the Chantry sometimes. But she has a similar issue. Things can’t get in the way; I get it.” (paraphrased).

These are three experiences on the way to Ostagar alone that Mahanon is allowed to express himself the way he would prefer. There is an acknowledgment from Duncan that everything in Denerim is dead and left behind, and so he gives Mahanon that space to let it go and embrace a new life, which he eagerly grabs onto. That being said, Mahanon has just walked away from the most horrifying instance of gendered violence that one can articulate within the Dragon Age series. Reeling from that trauma, it changes how he interacts with the world.

Behind his gleaming amber eyes, Mahanon’s mind went blank. He wasn’t sure where Kallian ended and he began anymore, but all he knew is that he was a liar again; a liar wearing a beaded wedding gown. It was green once, he remembered that. Then it was red. Red, red red, and dripping with the lifesblood of men who had tried to take his own. Her own. Took Shianni’s. Took Nelaros’s. So he took theirs. Everyone whose hands had touched and stolen and dirtied. All of them. Like dogs. “I killed an arl’s son for raping my friend,” Mahanon snapped, and he took a step forward.

Finding the first of the recruits, Daveth, was a simple but stupid affair. Mahanon had stumbled upon the man harassing one of the women in King Cailan’s army. It took Mahanon planting himself firmly between them and introducing himself to give the woman a chance to run off. Not that he blamed her. Daveth introduced himself as a thief from Denerim. Not that Mahanon couldn’t tell. The accent gave away where he was from. His attitude gave away the fact that he thought he was entitled to take what he wanted even if it didn’t belong to him.

Mahanon did not sleep soundly that night. In his tent, which he erected far from the others, he remained tense. Rest did not come for him, and he did not close his eyes. Instead he curled his body around his sheathed sword, his bleary gaze locked upon the flap of his tent. A camp full of strangers. Stronger than him, faster than him, deadlier with a blade. He would be a fool to think that he could rest soundly and safely when surrounded by them.

“Come on,” the man said, forcing a smile to his face. He clapped a hand on Mahanon’s shoulder. Alistair withdrew his touch when Mahanon flinched away from the wall and his hand, scowling. Alistair’s smile turned apologetic as the pale light of the sun began to rise.

 “I am sorry,” he said to Mahanon. “I was told what occurred in Denerim. It should not have happened to your friend.” There was pity in Loghain’s gaze. Mahanon loathed pity. With that, he swept away into the tent, and Mahanon was left breathless. Reeling, he felt like the only eyes left to pull him apart were his own, as if he could step out of his own body and watched as he forgot how to breathe. He watched himself stand there as the world drowned out with the roar of blood in his ears. He didn’t need pity. Apologies. He needed them to understand. He had been the one to cradle Nelaros’s bloody corpse to his chest. He had been the one to carry Shianni out of the arl’s home as she sobbed silently into his torn sleeve. 

 Duncan found him later in the kennel with the ailing Mabari. It took him a while. The sun was up. He could only assume that he was tough to find, or maybe Duncan wanted to give him space enough to collect his composure. The dog had begun to perk up, the kennel master had told him when he had come by. Food and water had been partaken of, and so Mahanon had plopped down inside and let the dog rest her slobbery head on his lap. He wasn’t sure what brought him here of all places. Maybe it was the fact that the Mabari brought a rare feminine touch to a place where he had only been pitted against men who, unfortunately, were surpassed by dogs where tact was concerned. 

“Do you know who removed them?” Mahanon asked. He put a hand out towards Alistair’s chest to deter him from saying anything else. Jory was quaking at the sight of the woman, but Daveth’s face had smoothed into a steely regard, and there was a dark glint in his eyes that sat ill with Mahanon. Like a knife that caught moonlight through a dirty window.

That’s a lot of examples, but I wanted to lend significant insight into how Mahanon views the world around him  in the wake of his trauma. He may be a man, but he does not trust other men. He has spent too long and too wary to make the mistake of doing so, even if they do not treat him with the same regard as they would if he were still presenting as a woman. At the core of Mahanon’s masculinity, he carries with him his own violence that comes with existing as a woman–and the inherited gendered violence that he carries from his mother, and his grandmother, and so on and so forth all the way back. (Andraste ties into this as well. We will readdress this in the religious meta post).

Mahanon’s masculinity is centered around his femininity, and his outward masculine expression is another way to protect that part of him. Yes, he is trans, and has been a man from the very first breath, but he will not abandon that girlhood of his, he will not sell it out and lie abed with the men who tug and tear at women like his mother until there is nothing of them left. 

Mahanon saw the Grey Wardens as such: 

Death to his old life.

A chance to live his new life.

But the Joining was a baptism of blood, and inherently feminine. You must consume tainted blood, let it pass through you, to become Greater? It is baptism, it is birth, and it is life. It is everything that a mother does,and  it is his mother who remains the straight arrow in his mind that guides him. Mahanon’s themes and the way he grapples with his own gender is the idea of death, life, and rebirth, and everything that he has to live with. He cannot any longer deny any part of himself.

He looked down at the chalice in his hands; blood, tainted. He looked up at the statue of Andraste that peered down upon them all. He thought of her when she died a martyr. He thought of his mother, lifesblood, the breath she gave for him at birth. He thought of himself, a child, blood-red and slick from between his thighs. He parted his lips and drank deeply.

[therealvinelle]

Why do you think fanfic writers lie in their fic tags? Like, a fic itself contains several semi-graphic depictions of het sex, and yet the tag is Gen. What is the thought process behind doing shit like this?

They're sick fucks, that's why.

To be more serious: I think few people set out to intentionally deceive their readers, and the ones that do usually want readers so badly they forget themselves. Genuine bad actors are rare, or so I choose to believe.

As it is, I suspect I'm a misleading tagger myself, at least to some.

The way I treat tags is as warnings, so I will tag ships featured in my works even if they're one-sided, background, or in the past because that way people who don't want to see that ship know to avoid my story. Edward/Carlisle and Jacob/Renesmee getting tagged in my fic Bleach on the Brain is an example of this: sucks if you clicked on the fic because you're a shipper but the way I see it, sucks worse if you don't want to see those and now you're reading a fic with father/son incest and a guy in his mid-twenties grooming a child in it. If I hadn't done this, if I'd only kept the pairings which were depicted positively, then the negative tags in that fic (grooming, sexual assault, etc) would have been assumed to be related to those and someone else would have been upset with me.

I tag this way because @theoriginalcarnivorousmuffin learned the hard way (i.e.: got hate) that tagging only for endgame will get a lot of people very mad at you, but now A/B shippers have fics depicting their ship negatively. It's a losing game.

So that's bringing me to a major reason why I think misleading tags happen (which gets a headline so I can tell myself this post is structured):

People have different ideas of how works should be tagged

Some people want to tag for everything that happens in the fic. Literally everything, if it's a smut you know exactly what goes where just from reading the tags.

This also means they might tag characters who appear only briefly in a scene in chapter 35 (the fic having 56 chapters so far and being 500k+ long), because hey, the character appears. Or maybe they're brought up a lot and are very important to the fic even if there's not much actual screentime, so a character like Voldemort gets tagged in a Harry Potter fic focused on the war without him actually appearing all that much.

On the opposing side you have the minimalists. They tag the main two characters and put three more in the additional tags so it won't go in the character tag, and add a ship tag some 30 chapters in. There are two additional tags, both are very vague. If that - I've seen people who don't tag at all, or who just tag with a single character, or just the ship - it really is up to the individual.

I've noticed the type of author (whether Ao3 was their first platform, how much time they spent elsewhere, whether it's an imported fic, and how old the author is) and the type of fic (how old it is, the author's background, and genre (oneshot, drabble, multi-chapter, 5+1, etc.)) influences tagging.

Common to all authors, though, is they try to tag as they feel is appropriate for their fic.

Which brings me to the next issue:

How do I tag?

A lot of people are confused about this.

They're confused about what tags mean - what's freeform (I honestly keep forgetting what this one is supposed to be too), when something should be tagged, what belongs in relationship or character tags vs. additional tags, what additional tags are supposed to be.

Do you, for that matter, try to explain your story in the tag ("this is a roommate AU with feelings") or do you tag succinctly ("roommate AU", "feelings", "fluff") or a combination? A lot of authors seem to prefer the first and last options, from what I can tell it's become the norm. Most authors seem to use the additional tags to connect with the reader in this way, and so you get people placing more emphasis on the additional tags than the succinct tags.

How do I tag? Sensibilities section

Then there's the question of sensibilities: what's triggering to reader A may be great stuff to reader B, with the author not realising it could be triggering to anybody and should have been in the tags, or the author thought knees brushing against each other warranted big red warnings that "they literally had sex, oh god this is so dirty. so dirty!! can't believe i wrote this. ENTER AT OWN RISK" which of course is very disappointing to the sick fucks who wanted porn.

Or the opposite happens: the author knows the subject is triggering, which means people might not click on the fic, and they want attention so badly they ah weasel out. Or option three: the author can't tag without spoiling the story, and so they either put "creator chose not to use warnings", don't rate it, and let the readers enter at their own risk or they use tags uh strategically (have a look at how I tagged Nebuchadnezzar's Dream to avoid spoiling the bloody coup d'état that happens at the end. Today I simply would have gone for no warnings and no rating, but those tags are also a solution which I think is... alright, I suppose "massacre" could have been added but it was entirely off screen so to me would have been an abuse of the tag).

In other words, everyone will be tagging differently and sometimes it's because they've no clue which tag is warranted, sometimes they're trying not to spoil their story, sometimes they didn't realise they should or shouldn't have tagged for something.

Anthologies (when someone posts their oneshots as chapters of a story)

These used to frustrate me endlessly, until I saw a "how to help readers find your fic!" post explaining that with anthologies, your readers get a notification every time you post a new oneshot and it's easy to find them all!

Which, in retrospect, is the most fanfiction.net statement I've ever seen (indeed, OP was an old ffnet dog).

Ao3 allows collections, and is unique in this: to older fandom people, putting your thematically connected oneshots together as chapters of a story used to be how it was done, having 54 connected drabbles on your fanfiction.net profile where readers couldn't filter them out nor select to view only the drabbles put together made perfect sense. And then they never adapted to Ao3's features, and other users seeing these anthologies copied the action because hey, stats.

I'm still frustrated with these people and wish they would just post their oneshots individually, but I think a lot of them are just... really really keen on the numbers on their fics going up, and not thinking about the purpose of the archive, utilising its features, nor that they're making their oneshots harder to find and annoying a lot of people.

The tag difficulty with anthologies, of course, being that if you have two oneshots in it, one with characters A and B and you tag it for X and Y happening, the other oneshot is with characters C and D and you tag it for Z and W happening, and continue like this for 30 chapters, then you have a wall of tags so everyone will see your story, good on you, but your readers have no way of knowing what's happening in your story or to which characters, and they're either patient enough to click their way through every goddamn chapter or they just scroll past your thing. Either way you're cloying a looot of tags and the readers who wanted Z and W happening to A and B are pissed because they clicked their way through god knows how many chapters only to not get what they wanted (and now they don't like anthologies either).

(Disclaimer: sometimes drabbles or oneshots are so interconnected that it doesn't make sense to separate even on Ao3, so to every rule there's an exception.)

In conclusion

Most authors are making tough choices when tagging, or they don't know how to tag, or they want readers very badly (and what you as a reader can do to ameliorate this is to comment and kudos frequently! Even give positive notes in the bookmarks when you make a new one because believe me we check!).

Or they're writing an anthology, in which case you should be very skeptical about those tags.

[starlightandetherealshadows]

Hello! Feel free to ignore this, but I wanted to give my two cents about the MC's initial personality while playing. Now, this may be blunt, but at first, I was incredibly disappointed. Usually, I tend to play stoic/quiet MCs who don't lash or speak out, and it seemed to be quite the opposite to the distrusting and stoic mc in the game. However, I was thinking extremely hard about this, and I actually get why the MC was so outspoken, especially when V literally pointed a gun at them. Stoic and stubborn MC, from what I saw in the prologue, could easily be more nonchalant *before* the alien invasion, but that, obviously, changed. When C found them and brought them to the hideout, I didn't take into account that MC was in a vulnerable position, and I only focused on the part that MC hadn't interacted with another person in years. So, yeah, of course, MC may be overwhelmed, but their not gonna let people (V *cough*) walk all over them. I guess the thing was that I was so used to stoic MCs in IFs just standing on the sidelines and observing, but that is obviously not that kind of IF. The thing that had gotten to me the most, however, was the second-hand embarrassment of MC actually talking back to V after he blatantly insults them because I could never😭 I guess what I am trying to say is that even though I was seriously taken aback, none of the characters (including MC) are not gonna be 2-dimensional (as you have stated multiple times), and it has definitely grown on me, even if the MC was a little more of a fire-cracker than I expected. I am really looking forward to seeing where you take this story, and I will absolutely be eating it up because even if I might have to be tossing my phone across the room occasionally (bc my second-hand embarrassment is so easily triggered😭😭), I cannot get enough of your writing and characters!! I hope this made sense because I was just rambling about my take on if you are willing to make the MC a little more stoic or have some mute choices, which I am not against, but at the end of the day, I will still be reading the fuck out of Memento Mori! Have a good day/night!!! MWAH💋

Hi sunshine!

I appreciate your super-thorough analysis of both MC's personality and also your initial/developing reaction to it!

Just wanna offer some perspective on why I'm writing MC the way I am (you've already nailed a lot of the points but this is gonna be a succinct explanation from my head hehe)

MC is ultimately a fully fledged character in Memento Mori. While writing, I have about six different MC's in my head, each with distinct personalities, motives, and reactions to events. As I'm writing Ch. 2 in particular, I'm using these characters to influence the choices available and the stat checks necessary for certain actions. MC was never going to be a self insert. I love a good self insert sometimes, but it doesn't work with this if!

What makes characters feel realistic and multi-dimensional to me is their ability to break out of their different archetypes. We all know the ones like The Mean Girl or the Shy Kid or the Comic Relief. We can use your Stoic!MC example. Do we as humans act the same exact way every single day with every single event and interaction? No, we don't. Because we are complex, muli-faceted individuals that can have conflicting thought and actions, or opinions. What makes a character feel flat is when they are only given like 3 personality traits and stick to those regardless of what happens around them in the story.

So in Memento Mori, your Stoic!MC will have moments where they're outspoken and opinionated. The Charming!MC will lose their cool and lash out rather than smooth talk. The Friendly!MC will snap at someone without thinking. We aren't perfect, neither is MC, and I think that adds dimension to what can easily be a very blank slate kind of character. This isn't exclusive to MC, either! Veronica/Vincent will be nice to you sometimes for seemingly no reason. Zero will have moments where he is not okay and rejects your comfort when he reads it as pity. Cecelia/Chase will not always be the bouncy comic relief that uses humor to make everyone smile.

To add insult to MC's injury, like you mentioned in your ask, they are suffering from extreme amounts of PTSD and trauma. They have lost everyone and everything, they're a young adult living in complete isolation for two years. They're starving, they're injured, they hate themselves and being alive. It's going to take them a while to feel like themselves. In the span of one day, they've been nearly killed by a monster, then they're covered in blood guts and sweat when they meet C, then C brings them to meet 6 other people (including two aliens) and now they're going on this extensive journey with complete strangers, while that very morning they were contemplating ending it all. it's a lot.

By the time MC meets V, they are already at their limit of dealing with bullshit so V pointing a gun at them was never going to fly. V insulting them was a no-go either. Now, in the future, MC can ignore V more often because they'll be less on edge than when they were all first introduced. Once they have time to process, then they can react what is most familiar and comfortable for them. It will take time.

I laughed when you called MC a firecracker! I'd say they're more...unpredictable as a character when they're under high stress. As time goes on, they'll adjust and mellow out in some ways, but right now? MC has had ENOUGH with feeling like shit all the time.

I'm really glad you were a bit embarrassed by MC talking back to V because that was my goal AHDSEWLKMFRLK it's supposed to feel a bit uncomfortable. It's MC trying to clap back on someone when they have lost most of their social skills. It made ME cringe while writing it. Like oof MC, just ignore them???!!!

I'll definitely be adding some more options to be a bit more stoic or selectively mute in chapter 2, and as for chapter 1, I think more options to stay silent while talking to Cecelia/Chase or when they're speaking with Delphine/V could be good too. I'll see how it flows!

You'll see at the beginning of Ch.2 that MC already feels a tiny bit better. Nothing much but at least they aren't alone anymore, and they have a hot shower and some real food. So small wins for MC!

I think that's all I wanted to say for now!!! Thank you again for your message, my friend!!! I'm glad you're liking my writing and my characters, it does mean a lot to have your support!! <3

[comradekatara]

like star trek, or lord of the rings, or shakespeare, or homer, it’s evident that avatar’s success (both in terms of quality and the consequent popularity of it due to its quality) is inspiring a new generation of media inspired and influenced by it.

I watch a lot of contemporary cartoons that clearly have taken cues from atla due to my baby brother’s love for that kind of vibrant fantasy quest narrative. and while shows like the owl house and amphibia are most obviously direct descendants of gravity falls, and she-ra clearly takes a lot of inspiration from sailor-moon-type “magical girl” anime, they also implement a lot of tropes that atla may not have invented, but certainly perfected. it’s clear that atla changed the game.

and since my brother really likes these tropes, i’m glad that there exists a wealth of media dedicated to depicting them targeted towards his generation, especially now that there are more diverse voices behind the scenes dedicated to giving kids better representation than what we had growing up. I like these shows! especially amphibia, which surprised me in its emotional subtlety, depth, and nuanced characterization (seriously, watch the frog show it’s so good).

so I don’t want it to seem like I think that trying to replicate the tropes of a successful staple of the genre is necessarily a bad thing. this kind of derivation is the natural process of all art, playing with what works, expanding on and subverting previously established conventions in the form. but I think that a lot of the time, what happens is that people will see the success of a groundbreaking work, and try to replicate that without understanding what actually made that original work, work so well.

take lord of the rings, for a prime example. tolkien’s approach to middle earth was a project he spent his entire life on, developing conlangs and histories for a fictional world that took great inspiration from his own extremely thorough knowledge of medieval europe. as a medievalist and linguist, he used his academic career to create a work of art in which he explored various themes that concerned him personally, such as the cost of war, which he understood firsthand having fought in WWI, losing many close friends along the way. middle earth was his personal passion project that reflected his own life and interests, and cannot be separated from the man himself, as it is his personal mythology, and a reflection of his very soul.

and yet, since lord of the rings (in particular) all but established the genre of high fantasy as we know it today, pretty much everyone believes that they must take cues from tolkien if they wish to make their own mark in the genre. but people didn’t take the right lessons away from what made tolkien so successful, so instead we get stupid shit like dungeons & dragons and game of thrones that thinks that orcs and battles and half-assed conlangs is how you build a fantasy world.

or that because star trek had scapeships and humanoid aliens, that’s what makes sci fi, sci fi. the hunger games certainly isn’t a perfect novel, but it had thematic depth. every ripoff of the hunger games that came after in the post-apocalyptic teens-in-a-dystopia boom was completely fucking hollow, replicating the aesthetics and surface-level narrative conventions without actually understanding the very blatant critique of US capitalist wealth inequality the book was actually about.

a “trope” can be more than a mere aesthetic implementation or plot point in a story, and yet for some reason, when people attempt to replicate tropes in genre fiction specifically, they get stuck on the most surface-level ones. but good genre fiction goes beyond the surface.

writers do have a lot to learn from atla. it is an extremely well-told story. it’s teleologically succinct without feeling rushed or constricted by its linearity. the characters are all constructed and developed with so much depth, not only as individuals, but in the ways in which they all mirror and inform each other. the themes are complex and well-established. the worldbuilding is thoughtful and immersive. the jokes are funny! the aesthetics are impressive! it flows well, all the narrative beats work well, it’s just an all-around very good show. a masterpiece, even.

there’s no shame in being inspired by atla. I know I am. it was the first piece of high fantasy storytelling I saw that didn’t feel like a direct ripoff of tolkien. I have cared deeply about all of the characters my entire life. it is very important to me. but what makes atla good isn’t its aesthetics (although yes I do enjoy its aesthetics). what makes atla such an unforgettable staple of american cartoon history is its writing.

and that is what we must take cues from. we must ask ourselves—why do these characters work so well? how are they constructed that makes their journeys and relationships so impactful? why does the worldbuilding feel so real and immersive? what aspects of this world and these nations feel so real and familiar and complex to us? why are the themes so effective? what resonates so beautifully in this story? what nuances in this narrative structure allow for it to be such an unforgettable piece of art?

because, when you ignore the deeper themes of a text for its surface-level aesthetics, taking inspiration in name only, skimming of the top and hoping the facade will be enough to get by, that’s how you get, well, the legend of korra. interrogate the true meaning of what it is that inspires you, and why it is so impactful. let the avatar franchise and its legacy be a cautionary tale. and watch amphibia ✌🏼

[genshin-impacted]

lost & found // Diluc x Reader (1/3)

Word Count: ~3.3k 

Notes: GN!Reader, Seelie!Reader, Diluc/Reader, what more can I say? You’re a cute seelie following Diluc around

Summary: Vaguely remembering the time when you were once human, you are a mini seelie roaming the outskirts of Mondstadt when you find Diluc and decide to follow him-- though he does his share of following you too, through the best and worst of your adventures together. 

“You’re more of a radar for trouble than treasure, aren’t you,” Diluc says rather than asks you, though his fondness is clear to see. You can only do a bashful swirl in response. 

-

Alternatively: As a seelie, you’re terrible at leading Diluc towards treasure without running into hoards of hilichurls or enemies alike, but he follows you anyways. 

[Part 2]

.

.

You are a seelie. 

You aren’t quite sure what that is, but you know for a fact that the wispy reflection that you see in the lake is you. No hands, no legs, no head, no heart-- though you remember when you had all that before. You can feel yourself breathe, but you also know you would be fine without it. You touch the water and vaguely feel its coolness and register that it is wet, but you aren't sure what is touching the water or how you know what it feels like. 

You are able to fly. You rise, and you fall, and you twirl in midair, and you know you have never been able to do this until now. "This is nice," you find yourself saying, but your voice comes out garbled and high, so you stop. You suppose losing your speech is the price to pay for the power of flight.

You don't know how long you wandered until you find something familiar to you. In a land of slimes, aggressive flowers, and crystalized butterflies, it's hard for you to take everything in at once. But you can recognize a human when you see one. (It would be difficult not to. You were once human, too, if you can remember.)

The human is strikingly distinct as far as humans go. With bright red hair, the man in black leans against the tree by the lakeside and watches the water lap up against the short cliff. You don't make snap judgments, not usually, but when you see the man in black, you can't help that your first thoughts are that he looks lonely.

You float to him steadily from what you hope is outside of his sight, curious enough to approach and observe what you can of him without being seen. 

Except, the moment you fly near him, he looks directly at you. (Apparently, you glow, if the light that you shine on his face is not enough of an indicator of your bioluminescence.)

You freeze in mid-air, or as much as you can as a globby orb of light. You wait with bated breath as he watches you as intently as you watched him, and you take a glimpse at what your light has allowed you to see: bright red eyes to match his hair. (You've never seen so much red on a person. And red-red too, not just the orange-y red you've seen people with.) 

Not knowing what else to do, you decide to do a somersault. (You think if you were still a human, you’d attempt to crack a joke or start a conversation to break the ice, but alas.)

You expect him to start doing something-- anything. But the man continues to look at you, though with less of a guarded expression and more of a curious one instead. 

You almost feel offended by the strange look he gives you, but then you see his lips uplift into a small smile and you forgive him. For good measure, you twirl in the air and, when he simply follows you with his eyes, you circle around his head like a halo.

"You're a different type of seelie, aren't you?" He says, his arms still crossed when you fly down to smush your face against the red gem at his collar and the Vision at his waist. You loop around his legs and try to lift his fur-lined coattails, only for him to lift it up himself and shoot you a raised brow. "Did you want me to follow you?"

Follow you? You wonder, why would he want to follow you? You don't think you have anywhere to be, let alone anywhere to lead him to. 

Now how to convey that to him…

The red-head watches you as you shake yourself side-to-side in what you hope looked like the shake of a head. "Ah… That's a no, then. I see," he says. He chuckles when you chirp in joy, looping up again. 

He pushes himself off the tree and walks on the path, toward the mansion in the distance. You follow closely behind him. A few steps in, he turns to you-- and you almost feel bashful enough to droop in height.

"Are you following me on purpose?" He asks.

You swirl up and eagerly bob your head. You wish you could ask, but the only thing you can do is trill-- which seems to do the trick when you hear the man huff in amusement before beginning to walk again. "Well, hurry up then," he says, and you chirp once before speeding up to catch to him in record-speed flying. 

(If you accidentally crash into his back at your eagerness, you think the shake of his shoulders in his laughter is only good signs of the beginning of a friendship.)

.

.

.

You hope the man you’ve decided to follow doesn't mind that all you can do is trill and twirl in the air. You make for a poor partner in conversation, considering you cannot supply the words to respond, but you think he at least finds you amusing at least if the small smile on his face is anything of note. You think he looks rather charming like that, as opposed to his straight-faced somberness when he was alone. Very mysterious, you think to yourself, must be popular.

When you follow him and see groves of grapevines and a mansion of formidable size, you think perhaps his rugged handsomeness and broodingly mysterious nature aren’t his only charm points. 

(You wonder if you can eat. You press where you think your mouth should be onto a bunch of grapes only to be disappointed by a lack of action. 

"What are you doing?" The man's voice calls out to you, amusement laced into his words. You turn around and speed back to him, feigning innocence.) 

The two of you enter the confines of Dawn Winery-- or so you read from a sign. You watch curiously as your mysterious man waves his hand in greeting when a few maids bow respectfully and follow him into the back where a man waits by a wheelbarrow.

"Master Diluc," the man says, and you are elated to finally put a name to a face you've followed for a while now. The winery employee looks past him at you, and you instinctively hedge closer to Diluc, almost hiding behind his hair. "Is that… a seelie?"

"So it seems," Diluc replies, crossing his arms. He takes a look at you. "Though it has yet to guide me anywhere."

You let out an extended squeak of indignance that makes him laugh, uncrossing his arms before he turns back to the worker at hand to discuss business. 

You'll show him, you think huffily. You can guide him somewhere-- it's in your bones (metaphorically). You found him, didn't you? You reason, surely there is something innately Seelie about you that will lead him somewhere.

Most seelies, as you have learned from watching Diluc follow the larger blue seelies, guide people to a treasure chest or some kind of monetary reward for leading them back to their seelie courts. You wonder if they are programmed to know where they are supposed to go and if there is a natural pull to a certain place. You wonder if it's anything like your wandering curiosity similar to that of a child, hoping to see what lies ahead and barreling forth. 

Either way, you take the lead and Diluc follows you out into Teyvat.

And he follows you right into enemy territory.

The first time feels like an accident, and after Diluc destroys the encampment, he finds a box of artifacts as a reward for his battle prowess. (You've never seen so much burnt grass.) The second time you guide him into enemy territory feels like a coincidence. They were next to each other, and hey, Diluc is able to find an exquisite chest this time filled to the brim with mora.

The third time around, it is hard to argue otherwise.

"You're more of a radar for trouble than treasure, aren't you," Diluc comments, settling down onto a log as you (metaphorically) bury your head into your hands. To convey such emotion as a seelie, you droop to the ground as flat as you could possibly be at his feet.

"I'm kidding," he says, watching with quipped lips as you rise from the ground moodily. "We did get some treasure out of it, so it wasn't a total loss." He reaches out with his hand to gently brush over your front as he would a cat-- and you react as a cat would, preening into his hand. He lets out a huff of laughter. "Affectionate, aren't you?"

You do a bashful swirl.

.

.

.

You realize soon enough that most people would not call Diluc private or stoic. Charming, a man with a way with his words, succinct, and pleasant are only a few things you've heard people say about him. And you were right-- he is a popular man if the eyes that follow him and the dreamy sighs that come after he leaves is of any indication.

The mysteriously cool Diluc you meet on the first day is vastly different from the man that everyone else interacts with on a day to day basis. He's not charming all the time, but he has a way about him that exudes confidence and almost an elitist composure. In some ways, you are glad-- you don't have to hide away behind his collar or in his hair (you still do this, if you're honest, just because his hair is so fluffy), afraid to mar his pristine reputation as a local bad boy. And in other ways, you are a bit smug, to know a side of Diluc that he shows to very few people.

Kaeya is one of those few people you have seen Diluc act anything less than amicable towards. 

"I was hoping one day you would have someone at your side but I have to admit, Master Diluc," Kaeya says, propping his face on his hand in amusement, "this is not quite what I imagined."

You let out a titter of laughter at the difference between the two men's expressions as Kaeya pokes at your little translucent ears. Kaeya looks at you with mesmerizing amusement as Diluc glares at Kaeya over his wiped-clean glass like he would like to do nothing else but break it over the other's head. ("It wouldn't hurt that much," Kaeya tells you flippantly. "Not as much as the hangovers his drinks give me.")

"Don't you have somewhere better to be?"

"Not really, no." Kaeya replies, feigning hurt, "Why, don't want me here?"

"Never."

Kaeya gives you a pointed look akin to a puppy. "His words are colder than my Vision, mini seelie," he says to you. "Careful not to get frostbite now."

"You have the privilege of having earned my ire," Diluc says shortly. "Also," he slaps Kaeya on the back of his hand when he goes to pull at your ears, "stop that."

"Protective, aren't you?" Kaeya chuckles, watching as you gaze up at Diluc adoringly. "I think you're one phrase away from telling me to get my own mini seelie."

At this, you let out a long coo, flying up to bop Kaeya gently on his nose before going over to Diliuc and rubbing your face onto his cheeks. You hear Diluc let out another breath of laughter, and you feel his hand press you closer to him. “Are you comforting me?” He asks in amusement, and for once, he does not berate Kaeya for joining in with his laughter. 

“The pair the two of you make,” Kaeya drawls, picking up his glass of Death After Noon. “You’d fight wars for each other, wouldn’t you?”

Of course you would, you think, though there was very little you could do as a seelie-- and you forget that at times. 

To be fair, most of the time, Diluc didn’t seem to treat you any less than his traveling companion. You’re only reminded when you float on your own when he’s cleaning up the tavern and get chased by cats and birds alike, only to come flying home to Diluc blubbering about your near-death experiences (though was it even possible for you to die?). And when you try to, in attempts to help Diluc out, scold a rowdy customer into behaving by slamming your body into their face rapidly without doing any damage whatsoever.   

The two of you-- Seelie and Uncrowned King of Mondstadt-- were a pair of renown. (“Two peas in a pod,” Venti would say the first time you led Diluc to him at Starsnatch Cliff, and “always together like bread and butter,” he said to you two the second time you find him near Starfell Lake. And “are you two following me?” when Venti walks into the tavern for the third consecutive meeting.) And if you ever doubted that Diluc cared for you, you had to look no further than when you were stolen from Diluc’s side by treasure hoarders who didn’t know any better.

It is in these moments where you are viscerally reminded that you are a seelie-- a being meant to guide people to treasures-- and not what you have been for the past few-- weeks? months? by Diluc’s side. You realize that you’ve never been hurt in this form before when you are kidnapped. It didn’t occur to you that you could feel any pain, and you wonder why not when you can feel the softness of Diluc’s hair and the warmth of his hand-- all gentle, loving gestures. Being squeezed by the treasurer hoarder’s hand feels suffocating, like your lungs being crushed under a massive, unrelenting weight.

It is not pleasant, to say the least, especially when they threaten you to take them to treasure that you know you cannot locate. 

Or can you? 

With convincing pulses of light, as though you’re approaching actual riches, you lead them where you lead people (or rather, just Diluc) best. 

The enemies of your enemies are your friends; you watch as an axed mitachurl spins around, chasing after the treasurer hunters who with varying degrees of fear, run away. They would have gotten away scot-free if they had not run into Diluc who had somehow found you before you could come back to him.

His phoenix burns bright especially in the moonless night, and Diluc takes care of two enemy camps that night. 

“Clever,” he says, making you preen, “leading them here. They really didn’t know what they signed up for when they started following you, did they?”

How did you find me? You trill, twirling around. And there should be no reasonable way for Diluc to understand what you’re trying to say, but he does anyways. 

“I just did what you usually do for me,” Diluc says, putting his hand up so you can gently land on it. Your glow illuminates his face in the softest shade of color. You watch as his lips turn up into a small smile. “I led myself to wherever the trouble was and knew I’d find you.” 

(Diluc will never tell you this for as long as you are a seelie, but the moment you do not come back to him when he finishes up his shift at Angel’s Share, his stomach drops. It shouldn’t have been hard to spot you, a glowing light, amongst the quiet, softly lit streets of Mondstadt, but he gives the city a quick lookover and cannot find you. 

He learns about the treasure hoarders from his connections and does not hesitate to take his broadsword with him and go looking for you. 

He runs into two other treasure hoarder camps and fights three groups of slimes before he finds the hilichurl camp you’ve led the hunters into, beyond relieved to see your familiar light in the distance.)

From that night, Diluc finds a mini seelie (you), sixteen anemo sigils, an old broadsword, mora, and a few treasure hunter insignias left behind. He gives you a sunsettia even though the both of you know you cannot eat, and you sit together at the edge of a cliff, watching the moon come out from its hiding place within the clouds. 

You have never felt safer.

.

.

.

You don’t really sleep, but every night you take your place by Diluc’s pillow and let time pass you by. Time feels different as a seelie, especially when you do not have Diluc to ground you to the schedule of a normal person. 

Though, if you were honest, it isn’t as though Diluc keeps regular hours himself. How many times have you bullied (read: squeaked at) him into turning in before dawn? How many times have you pressed your entire translucent body onto his face so he can take the hint to finally take a break? You vaguely remember being a human, and you think you should be abhorred by the amount of sleep Diluc isn’t taking, considering how good sleep can feel. 

On the bright side, Diluc has gotten more used to your antics that it only takes a little nagging from your end for him to turn the desk lamp off.

“You’re quite persistent,” he comments, following you with his eyes as you press your body into various spots in the ceiling above him. “I can’t tell if I’ve been blessed or cursed with you as some sort of guardian.”

Guardian seelie, you titter, spinning around with your ears outstretched as though you were an angel. Special isekai seelie, you laugh to yourself, and Diluc only watches you fondly as you float down. 

"’Stripped of all that the body once held close and the soul once held dear, song and memories are all that now remain of yesteryear,’” Diluc recites quietly as you look up to him. “‘The last singers-- the first Seelie-- they played their final tune in the halls of angels.’" 

What is that?

“It’s a song I remember hearing when I was a child,” he says, “about seelies and their origins. I don’t remember if there was anything else, but it came to me today when I was thinking of you.” You wait for him to continue as he dims the light, your glow the only thing illuminating the room other than the moon. “Most seelies want to go back to their seelie courts… but it doesn’t seem as though you want to.” He pauses. “Or is it that you don’t have a court to go back to?”

You stay silent. 

“Sorry, forget what I said. It doesn’t matter in the end anyways.” Diluc scoops you up from his lap to place you at your usual place on the other pillow by his head. You softly trill when he gently pets you, and whether you mean to or not, you glow just a bit brighter for a moment.

“Even if one day you decide to leave, the winery will always be open to you,” he says. “Adeleine and the rest of the maids will recognize you and let you in-- though I suppose the entirety of Mondstadt knows who you are by now so I guess I don’t have to worry about that, do I?” He smiles when you coo softly.

“Good night,” Diluc says to you, as he does every night, and sleeps knowing you cannot say it back in words, though he understands you regardless every time.

If you weren’t a seelie, would you have been able to be as close to Diluc as you are now? Would he still have cared about you to the extent he does now?

Even if these questions did not have the answers you wanted to hear, you think to yourself, as your heart warms (though you have no heart) from the sight of seeing Diluc’s even rise and fall of his chest, that you wish that you’d one day be able to say ‘good night’ back to him.

.

You can only watch the moon rise and dream.

[bamfdaddio]

X-Men Abridged: 1981

The X-Men, those back-to-the-future mutants that have sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them, are a cultural juggernaut with a long, tangled history. Want to unravel this tapestry? Then read the Abridged X-Men!

(Uncanny X-Men 141 - 152) - by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, Brent Anderson, Dave Cockrum, Jim Sherman, Bob McLeod and Josef Rubinstein

While I also committed various fashion atrocities at the age of 14 (tye-die and fauxhawks, oh my), even Liberace would find Kitty’s outfits too much. (Uncanny X-Men 149; Uncanny X-Men Annual ‘81)

We dial back from the v. epic scope of the last few arcs. Instead, 1981 is just a lot of fun! We get:

Storm and Emma doing a Freaky Friday!

the X-Men vs. Magneto (again!)

A surprisingly effective Alien rip-off

An dystopian future! (OoOoOoOo)

Last year was the year of the Dark Phoenix, this is the year of Kitty Pryde. That’s not to say Jean’s death is swept under the rug: all throughout, we see her friends mourning her loss or remembering her fondly. (Scott even gets to have a demonic adventure about it.) But in general, Claremont puts Kitty in the forefront, fleshing out his YA-addition to the team. And what would a YA heroine be without a grim dystopia? Roll out the iconic Days of Future Past!

To be fair, 2013 was a dark time for all of us: What Does the Fox Say somehow got to the top of the charts and I was still watching Glee. (Uncanny X-Men 141)

How cool would it have been to see a name like Jonothon Starsmore or Eva Bell on those tombstones?

Anyway, that’s Kate. Kate’s had it rough. Mutants are at the bottom of the foodchain, most X-Men are dead and only a small cadre of resistance fighters remain, Sentinels dominate, and while she is married to Piotr, her children have been murdered. Bleak. Luckily, the rebellion has concocted the plan to shunt Kate’s spirit back in time to prevent this awful future from happening. (You’ve seen Days of Future Past, the last passably good X-Men film, you know what’s up.)

Let’s do the time warp again! 1981!Kitty’s mind gets taken over by 2013!Kitty, who promptly tries to convince the X-Men that a new Brotherhood of v. Evil Mutants will try to kill Senator Kelly, a presidential candidate who tries to put the mutant menace on the agenda. (Mutants tend to blow stuff up when he’s around.) Since the X-Men recently took a literal trip to Dante’s Infero and also befriended a cosmic world-ending entity, they basically shrug and go: “Yeah, this checks out.”

Off to Washington they go (zoommm) and there, they happen upon the Baddest Bitches in Herstory:

“How dare you hate mutants, senator Kelly! We’ll fix that by killing you!” (Uncanny X-Men 141)

This All-New, All-Different Brotherhood consists out of:

Destiny, a blind woman who can see the future. Definitely the eeriest member of this group. Badass lesbian, though that won´t be canon for years.

Avalanche. Greek who makes things shake. Is a long-standing member of the X-Men Rogue’s gallery, but rarely features in the spotlight. I think he got more characterization in four years of X-Men Evolution than he ever did in the comics.

Mystique. Shapeshifter. Ruthless and unhinged, the Cersei Lannister of the X-Men universe. Absolute legend, secretly the wife of Destiny, currently not as unhinged as she’ll be later. Immediately implied to be related to Nightcrawler: it’s the yellow-eyes-blue-skin-combo.

Pyro. Can manipulate fire, not create it. Absolute pillock, in all the best ways of the word. Originally intended as gay, but they decided to make him Australian instead. (?!)

Blob. Big, strong, immovable. We’ve seen him before.

One of the details in this fight I enjoy is that Storm is still struggling with her leadership, although she has a better grip on things than Cyclops:

Wolverine then proceeds to use those iconic but deadly claws about twice per issue for the next, oh, forty years. (Uncanny X-Men 142)

While the X-Men fight the Brotherhood in the present, we cut back and forth to the future. There, the X-Men consist out of some familiar faces - Storm, Colossus, Wolverine - and some surprises: Magneto (in a wheelchair), Franklin Richards (son of) and an unfamiliar ginger girl called Rachel. (She’ll be important later.) We even learn (one of) Magneto’s names: this is the first time he’s canonically called Magnus.

One of the strengths of Days of Future Past lies in its brevity, the way it tantalizingly taunts us with a brutal but familiar future without giving away too much. It’s single-handedly responsible for all those dark future timelines the X-lines are so fond of which will eventually culminate in time-displaced grandsons from alternative dimensions and the impossibility of a succinct answer to the question: “Who’s Cable?” Too much of a good thing and all that.

Still, what Days of Future Past does so successfully is:

Put the idea of the mutant menace back at the forefront, hammering home the metaphor of mutants being a minority. Mutants being put in camps and being forbidden to breed should - regretfully - make us think of all too many real life equivalents. (Specifically, all of the imagery harkens back to the Holocaust.)

It starkly shows what happens should the X-Men lose, reminding everyone of the stakes. The X-Men are here for a reason: bridging the gap between mutants and humankind. If they fuck up, we end up with mutant concentration camps.

It helps that the X-Men in the future almost all die horribly: Franklin is incinerated, Storm is impaled… It's brutal stuff. The only one to survive is Rachel, who wonders if their plan actually changed the future or if they created an alternative timeline. (It did the latter, sorry ‘bout it, Rachel.)

In the present, Kate chases after Destiny, who trains a gun on senator Kelly. I always wondered how this works: if Destiny saw the future, she knew that killing Kelly would trigger a terrifying future. What in the current Marvel timeline made her decide that the Days of Future Past was better? Did she see her own death? Did she see the Onslaught-crossover coming? The Chuck Austen run? What was it?

In any case, time-anomalous Kate stops Destiny from killing Kelly and the future is safe! For now. Kate disappears, Kitty returns to her body and some of the Brotherhood are apprehended. All is well, for now.

After being a key figure in DoFP, Kitty is also the main character in the Christmas special, which is basically a straight up horror and a pastiche of the Alien-movie.

Seriously, John Byrne still isn’t sure why he wasn’t sued by Ridley Scott for this. (Uncanny X-Men 143)

If you love Kitty Pryde? Read this issue. If you’re not convinced you like 80’s Kitty? Read this issue. It’s not continuity relevant and it’s basically Kitty playing the part of a Final Girl in a horror where she’s being chased by a demon, but it’s so good. It showcases all her strengths and her foibles. Kitty’s intelligent, cute (sometimes preciously so) and brave, but she’s also young, self-conscious and hot-headed. And it's not as if the other X-Men automatically adore her: Storm berates her all the time, she’s afraid of Kurt because of the way he looks (though she grows out of that) and she fights with Professor Xavier a lot. Moreover, she has a clever power-set for a young superhero who faces menaces on a daily basis: a thirteen year old who can go intangible is far less likely to have reality ensue on her and be dramatically offed because she's better at protecting herself.

I’m sure there are people who thought Sprite was hogging the spotlight, but I, for one, say she brings more to the table than, say, Angel. She’s not the Dawn Summers of this franchise.

Scott also gets a side quest. Poor guy can’t catch a break: first the love of his life dies, so he quits the X-Men, then he realizes he can’t do much else than be a superhero. He becomes a sailor on the ship of spunky captain Lee Forrester, is drawn into the sadistic plans of a demon unironically named D’Spayre and then shipwrecks in Bermuda with Lee.

The X-Men, meanwhile, are tormented by a team-up of Doom (who’s currently Latverialess and working on a comeback) and Arcade, that annoying crony. Locke, Arcade’s dom, has kidnapped the loved ones of the X-Men (Moira MacTaggart, Jean Grey’s parents, Illyana Rasputin and Amanda Sefton) in order to blackmail them into getting Doom to free Arcade. Apparently, Arcade accidentally insulted Doom and DOOM DOES NOT FORGIVE THAT FOLLY.

While the B-Squad (Polaris, Havok, Banshee and Iceman) goes to save Arcade’s hostages, the X-Men sneak into Doom’s castle. Well, except for Storm, who doesn’t give a single fuck and simply flies up to Doom, demanding an audience. Doom likes the cut of her jib and invites her to have dinner. (This is pre-Tinder, so this is a legit way of scoring a date.)

If Storm has a flaw (I said if!), it’s got to be her atrocious taste in men. (Uncanny X-Men 145)

The X-Men find Arcade’s cell empty, while Arcade casually saunters up to Storm and says hi. Storm realizes too late that this is a trap: while the X-Men are all trapped in Saw-like traps, Storm is encased in ‘living chrome’.

If you remember she’s claustrophobic, you know why this is a bad move.

While the X-Men free themselves from their traps - Polaris hilariously has to deal with a murderous merry-go-round - Storm is slowly driven mad in her prison, triggering a worldwide tempest. (She causes Lee and Scott to shipwreck.) Under the threat of Wolverine’s claws, Doom releases Storm - or rather, unleashes her.

“Instead of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen, not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me and despair!” (Uncanny X-Men 147)

The memory of Jean brings Ororo back to herself and she starts undoing the superstorm she created. (If only climate change were reversed that easily.) Their confrontation ends by Storm easily forgiving Doom, because she apparently trespassed on his grounds without adequate cause.

Mkay.

All of Arcade’s hostages return to their homesteads, except for Illyana Rasputin, Piotr’s sister: she’s staying at the mansion for a while. Angel, who’s sort of been a part of the team since the Phoenix thing, has had it with Wolverine and his ‘tude, and decides to quit the X-Men : he doesn’t want to be a part of an outfit that has a killer like Wolverine on it. (Or maybe he’s just mad Claremont didn’t give him any storylines: his presence has been mostly pointless.) It’s too bad he left before Kitty started experimenting with her outfits: I bet he would have loved her ugly-ass costumes.

Equally inconsequential is the introduction of a brand new character, who then proceeds to disappear from the narrative for the rest of the year:

Black Tom has tried to kill you at least twice, but him sending you a long-lost daughter doesn’t give you pause? Ugh, Sean, you deserve Moira. (Uncanny X-Men 148)

Intrigued by Theresa? TOO BAD, WON’T SEE HER AGAIN ANYTIME SOON.

Another new character is the lonely, decidedly mutant looking Caliban, who can sense “people like him” and is on the lookout for companions. Like many lonely people who try and grasp at friendship, he decides to overshoot his shot and ruin the night of Storm, Kitty and Jessica Drew at a Dazzler concert. Because he tries to kidnap Kitty, the girls react a trifle aggressively. When they realize their mistake - the eerily pale Caliban is a simpleton rather than a menace - he’s already fled. No mention is made of the Morlocks yet!

There’s also another dull annual where the X-Men team up with the Fantastic Four to save Arkon’s dimension from the Badoon and yaaaaawn. Far more interesting is the landmark issue #150. Slowly, through the adventures of Scott and Lee Forrester, Claremont has been setting things up for the return of a favorite villain. While the X-Men investigate Magneto’s old base in Antarctica on a hunch of Professor X and tangle with Garruk, Scott and Lee survive Storm’s tempest, only to wake up next to a strange island that seems to have been raised from the ocean.

It’s apparently some ancient citadel from a long forgotten civilization with a fondness for squid statues. (I don’t know man, I’ve never been to the Bermuda Triangle, maybe this is just super-accurate.)The tentacles make Lee Forrester feel very amorous, but before Scott can tell her he is way too repressed to just have sex with an attractive someone he’s known intimately for a month or two, Magneto saves his ass by revealing he, in fact, raised this island from the seafloor.

Oh, Magneto. So extra.

My ambitious little mutant demagogue then proceeds to take the entire world hostage, showing how much he’s grown from the pompous, raving madman from the sixties. (Sure, Magneto is still a bit of a madman, but increasingly, he starts being on the right side of history.)

“I’m trying to make Magneto more sympathetic.”

“Just put him on a page with some bigger villains who are less noble, like the Vanisher, Count Nefaria, or…”

“Reagan, Thatcher and Brezhnov?”

“Er.” (Uncanny X-Men 150)

It’s obvious Magneto is being pivoted as a more noble villain, codified into the well-intentioned extremist we know and love today. Not only do we get the first hints at his past, fleshing out his motivations, he’s also not wrong. Humans are historically not great at taking care of the planet or each other.

When the Russians call his bluff and launch nukes at Magneto’s new island, he quickly disarms them. His retribution is swift and ferocious: the entire citadel is a machine that massively amplifies his powers. He sinks the submarine that launched the missiles, condemning the entire crew to death, and he casually erects a vulcano in a Russian city in Siberia.

Damn. Not messing around this time.

Despite his good intentions, Magneto is still definitely in the wrong: not only because of his methods, but as Scott points out: if Magneto unifies the world under his kind of benevolent dictatorship, all of that will simply fall apart as soon as Magnus dies.

In a way, Magneto is just as big a dreamer as Charles is: Charles believes in peace and integration, whereas Magneto believes his iron fist will be enough to make a perfect world happen. Both of them ignore the reality that acceptance is difficult and messy, because you’re trying to change essential human nature: the fear of the other. Magneto believes in big, sweeping gestures that will fix the world in move, while changing the world is also boring, hard work. One step forward, two steps back. Magneto just wants to leapfrog to his ultimate goal.

The X-Men fly over the citadel, returning from Antarctica, and their plane crashes into the ocean. (Magneto does not brook planes over his territory, humans!) The Professor is also nearby, looking for Scott with Moira, Peter Corbeau and Carol Danvers. The X-Men sneak onto the island, but to their horror, their powers are nullified by some machine of Magneto. They reunite with Scott, who formulates a plan to thwart the would-be ruler of the world.

While the rest of the X-Men go to trash the machine, Storm, Kitty and Lee infiltrate the control chamber where Storm finds a sleeping, shirtless Magneto. Once again showing her terrible taste in men, she is not weak in the knees at the sight of a sleeping Magnus: instead, she contemplates killing him.

Storm knows how dangerous he is, but she also knows that he’s a great man who’s fighting for ideals, no matter how misguided. She hesitates too long: Magneto stirs, suspects an attack and tosses her out of the window, to her death.

Magneto quickly undoes the sabotage the other X-Men have wrought to his machine. A fight erupts. Storm, meanwhile, has managed to grab hold of a ledge. She crawls back up and smashes an important-looking computer, restoring everyone’s powers.

The battle turns grim, but Scott sends Kitty away to wreck Magneto’s machinery. She sneaks off, following Scott’s orders and destroying both Magneto's power-up device and all of his plans by phasing though the computer circuitry. Magneto senses this and furiously gives chase. Overcome by rage, he attacks Kitty and disrupts her phasing power with a magnetic bolt, seemingly killing her?

Everything about this story beat is great: mama bear!Ororo, mournful Magnus and even the fact that Kitty’s godawful outfit serves a narrative function: highlighting to us (and Magneto) just how young she is. The fact that Kitty’s Jewish is just icing on the cake. (Uncanny X-Men 150)

And thus, the softening of Magneto commences. 1981 might be a year with wildly varying narratives, but it has given us at least three enduring legacies to the X-Mythos: a new kind of Magneto, a fondness for dystopian futures and the character of Kitty Pryde, who's really come into her own this year.

Ugliest Costume: Kitty! Purposefully, but still. Best costume, by the way, goes to Destiny, with her creepy, creepy golden mask. Just imagine this lady casually strolling across a battlefield, eerily calm and collected, dodging everything you throw at her. Awesome design.

Best new character: I usually pick one character - what good is having a shared award when declaring the best of anything? - but this year, it’s going to one of my favorite couples: Mystique and Destiny. Can’t wait to see more of them.

Most audacious retcon: Blob somehow retroactively becomes a member of the original Brotherhood, which is not what happened. Ever weirder is Xavier pondering that he never met Magneto before his attack in X-Men #1, while their cordially adversarial relationship rooted in a youthful friendship would soon become a cornerstone of the X-Men.

What to read: Uncanny X-Men 141 - 143 and 150 - 152

[crashdevlin]

Opposites Don’t Attract (A Witcher Fic)

Author’s Note: This was written while I was fighting Covid19...so I’m pretty proud of that. I'm aware that not everyone likes the Witcher but this was the only thing that would could out of my head that week so...

I took bits of lore from the show, the books, and the games and mixed them all up into a cohesive awesomeness...also, the smut is pretty good, but the banter is where it's at with this one. If you guys like this, I might make it a series...so, let me know how you're feeling on it.

Summary:  Y/n is a witcher from the Cat School (a nomadic school that is one of the few that actually makes female witchers) who keeps running into Geralt of Rivia...to her great pleasure.

Pairing: Geralt x Female Witcher!Reader, mentions of Geralt x Yennefer and Geralt x Triss Merigold

Word count: 3869

Story Warnings: 18+! HERE BE SEX!! DON’T READ IF YOU’RE A YOUNG’UN!!!, unprotected sex, creampie, mentions of infertility, little bit of angst (it's a Cassie story...what do you expect?)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

It wasn’t often you crossed paths with the White Wolf. The Continent was vast and you both had work to do. But it was always a treat when you walked into a tavern and smelled the man.

"Geralt. What brings you to Kagen?" you asked, taking the stool next to him at the bar.

"A contract."

"Always so succinct, Wolf...and just a bit disrespectful. Isn't my school the one that's supposed to birth disreputable thugs?"

Amber eyes turned on you as you fiddled with your medallion, a silver coin with a cat's head on a silver chain. It hung right between your breasts and never came off.

"Here to kill a monster...or be a monster?" he asked, his voice a deep rumble.

A zing of indignant fury went through you but you stifled it instinctively. "I haven't taken a contract against a human in nearly twenty years. I've learned the error of my ways. I told you as such when we met last. Remember? The bard's impromptu celebration in Lyria." He grunted softly at you and looked away. "You do remember, don't you, Geralt?"

"My memory is fine, Feline."

"Then you remember folding me in on myself and making my body quake?" You set your hand on his thigh and watched his face for a reaction.

He gave no indication he even noticed your fingers over the conditioned leather. "Since when do you call them 'humans'? When last we met, you were still calling them by the slur."

You rolled your eyes. "That was a single slip. Another thing I've seen the error on. I've developed, I've grown. You have to admit that some things are hard to shake, like a word you shouldn't say or a prejudice you were taught as a small child. I wasn't really given a choice on who to sympathize with in the conflict. Cats and Elves, we go together. Call it a commiseration of outcasts."

He let out a long sigh before dropping his hand to yours. "You talk too much, Cat."

"Well, someone has to fill the silence around you. Jaskier doesn't seem to be around right now, so I'll take that mantle." You licked your lips and hummed as his fingertips slowly caressed the back of your hand. "I could help you fulfill your contract. Two witchers are better than one. What are you after?"

He turned his head just enough to catch your eyes. "You want to help me?"

"I want to fuck you, but I feel you're going to be distracted until you've got your coin so I might as well hasten that instance."

"Can I trust you to have my back in battle?"

You pulled your hand away and shook your head. "If I can alter my preconceived notions of humans, you can alter your notions of Felines. Or, in the very least, of me." You caught his eyes and held them without blinking. "I have known you for decades, Geralt. Can you trust me to have your back?"

He held your eyes for a few moments before he picked up his ale. "It's a graveir. Strength is more important than speed."

"Well, then I'll just have to pull its attention and hope it is hungry for witcher." You smiled. "And you can kill it before it eats me."

He smiled just a bit as he set his mug down. "Perhaps I'll let it eat you, kill it while it is sated and happy."

"Aww, but then the great White Wolf would never get to eat his fill of this Feline ever again."

He smirked as you set a coin on the bar and requested an ale of your own. "And what brought you to Kagen, Y/n?"

You smiled at the use of your name. "Tracking a man." His eyebrow went up so you clarified. "Just tracking. He's a historian. There's some question of the authenticity of some of the Aen Seidhe artifacts he's 'found'. He's at the whore house two down so I thought I'd have a drink while he was busy. A lucky stroke to find you."

"If you help me with the graveir, you might lose him."

You took a drink of your ale and turned on the stool. "You think we can't take down a graveir and have a fun night before a middle-aged human historian wakes from his well-deserved nap after a night of lust away from his wife?" You leaned next to his ear and whispered, "Are you underestimating me or yourself?"

"I could never underestimate you." He tipped his head back and finished off his ale and you chugged down your own. It was time to work.

As you moved to follow Geralt out of the tavern, a tall man with a sunburned face stepped in front of you.

"I didn't know they made witchers with tits," the foul-smelling farmer said with a guffaw at the end for good measure.

"Well, you've never seen the Butcher of Blaviken with his shirt off, have you?" you snapped, stepping away from him.

"You're a real one, then? You got the eyes, I see. They do all those mutations on you? Hear witchers are like a bitch in heat but cain't procreate. Now there's a perfect woman, right? Always ready to be filled, but never able to give me any more little brats."

Geralt sneered at the man's words but you just shook your head. "I guarantee no woman wants to be filled by you or your brats. Especially not this woman."

The drunk looked offended for a moment before he scoffed. "You're not a woman. You're a fuckin' mutant. Wouldn't want your-"

A blade was in your hand and held against his throat in a flash. "I'm a fucking mutant and a fucking woman and I want nothing to do with you."

"Apologize," Geralt demanded, quiet and intent.

The drunk looked down at the knife and blinked a few times, then nodded. "Sorry."

Your blade was back in its sheath on your hip before he could take another breath. "Let's go, Geralt."

"Hmm." He pulled open the large wooden door and walked out, you followed.

~~~~~~~~~~~

"When's the last time you saw the Caravan?" Geralt asked as you headed for the woods.

"You really don't think I've changed, do you?" He gave a noncommittal grunt so you rolled your eyes. "Even after that slime back at the tavern? I didn’t kill him. I didn't even hurt him. I didn't even spout off and call him a...well, if anyone deserves to be slurred, it's a man like that and I held my tongue." You reached out and slapped your hand across his chain mail. "Haven’t seen hide nor hair of Dyn Marv in…"

You rubbed your fingers across your eyes and shook your head. "I abandoned the Caravan the day I met you. The ideals were harder to shirk but I left my school the moment I realized that Gezras wasn't quite the savior they claimed. You had it right. You and the others up at Kaer Morhen, you know how...how a witcher's supposed to act. You were trained in the codes and morals, I wasn't."

"No, you were trained blindfolded on a tightrope across the rooftops of Oxenfurt."

"Let it never be said that Cat School is without our flair." You smiled over at him. "And it was Oxenfurt, the Cintran Capital, and Vengerberg. Nomads and all that."

Geralt looked over at you and smiled. "I can imagine the Cintran guard were very happy to have a bunch of witchers crawling across their roofline."

"Oh none of them ever cared for having a bunch of witchers in their city let alone running training exercises across their roofs. But not a one tried to stop us. You'll recall, there was a time when most feared and respected us more than they hated us."

"I don't recall people ever fearing Cat School," he teased.

"Ah-ha, you're so hilarious, Geralt. My sides are in stitches from all this laughter," you responded dryly.

You walked in relative silence for a few moments, your boots making no sound on the tall grass. "I didn't know meeting Vesemir affected you so much," he said eventually.

"Oh, yes. It was wise old Vesemir that showed me the error of my ways, not the dashing white-haired man who rode into Novigrad after him."

"Dashing. That's a new one."

"I'm absolutely certain it is not a new one, Geralt. Not for any woman who's had the pleasure to make your acquaintance." Your cheeks heated up in a way you imagined his never did. Wolves dulled emotion. So did Bears, and Vipers, and most schools. Most pushed down emotions to make a witcher less susceptible to fear and anger and sadness. Cat School was different. You were reminded of that every time you were around Geralt. "I bet 'dashing' would be one of the first words they'd use to describe you: the Triss Merigolds and Yennefer of Vengerbergs of the world."

He looked over at you as you approached a cemetery filled with recent dead from a bandit attack on the outskirts of Kagen. "Hmm. Is that jealousy I hear?"

"No!" you responded just a little too loud. "What do I have to be jealous of? They're two supernaturally beautiful sorceresses who've been part of your life much longer than I have. Besides, none of us really gets you for more than a night or two, right?"

He grunted softly in agreement, then offered a potion from his belt. You took it and swallowed it down, feeling your already-fast reflexes get a boost. "You're supernaturally beautiful too. It will make you better graveir bait."

You couldn’t focus on the compliment he'd given you as he pointed to a bloated ghoul digging into a fresh grave with short, strong claws. He was gone by the time you looked back but you could sense him moving around the outside of the cemetery.

Normally, this was the point when you'd draw your silver; approaching a ghoul as it ripped a limb from a corpse to make its meal for the night. The sword stayed on your back with your steel, however. You were to take its attention so Geralt could kill it from behind.

It was fairly easy, actually. You and Geralt, working in tandem, had the graveir as dead as his dinner before there was a chance for real trouble. It noticed you, it rushed you, you dodged and dodged and threw a punch or three to its ugly face and then Geralt appeared in your vision and the graveir met the sharp blade of a witcher's silver sword. No muss, very little fuss, and very little blood.

"You did good as bait," Geralt commented as you walked back toward the city. "Maybe I should have you play the snack on hunts more often."

"Oh? A snack for the monsters or a snack for yourself?"

"I'm serious. We work well together."

"It's not the first time we've worked together."

There had been, in fact, two other monsters that you helped Geralt with. A wraith terrorizing a man in Novigrad that you helped him with when you first met each other and a wyvern you encountered on the road. Geralt happened to have the contract on the wyvern and showed up to take it down as you were in the midst of killing it.

He graciously shared a portion of the coin garnered from his contract.

He hummed in acknowledgement. “You should come with me.”

You stopped and turned to look at him. “What?”

“Once you’ve fulfilled your contract on the historian, you should saddle up and travel with me. You said it yourself, ‘two witchers are better than one’.”

You looked up into his eyes and blinked a few times. “You miss Vesemir so much that you would travel with me just to have another witcher at your side?”

“Why don’t we leave it at ‘I enjoy your company’?” he suggested.

You started walking again, heading toward your mare, a Konik named Daisy, and Geralt’s mare, Roach. “Will you be staying in Kagen for a while?”

“I have a room at the inn. I can stay in Kagen until you return.”

“You’re serious about me coming with you? I thought sweet nothings were whispered in the throes of passion, not in the aftermath of battle.”

“You don’t have to come with me, Y/n.”

You shook your head. “I’ll have to think about it, Geralt.” You didn’t want to anger any sorceresses. You climbed up into Daisy’s saddle and grabbed her reins. “For now, let’s go to the inn. A bath and a bed sound amazing,” you said, before riding toward the city.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The tub was small but you weren’t large. “How do you fit in this thing?” you asked, dunking yourself under the warm water.

“I’m very good at fitting into tight spaces.” Geralt stepped up behind you and kneeled down, setting his chin on your bare shoulder. “Do you need help getting clean?”

“No. But I’d love a bit of help getting dirty again after I’m done.” He hummed and nodded, turning his head to press his lips to your neck. You hummed happily and turned your head to give a bit more access and he took the invitation, running his hand down your body and under the water. You gasped as his fingers brushed your curls. “I’m not clean yet, Geralt.”

“Clean enough.”

You pressed closer to him, arching your hips and reaching back to grab the back of his head, pulling him further down. “More,” you whispered. He chuckled, slipping a finger down to tease your entrance. “Fuck, don’t tease.”

“Why not?” He nipped at your jawline and gave a low hum. “You know...the first time I heard your voice, I knew I’d have to hear you moan.” You gasped as his finger slipped into you down to the knuckle, your fingers digging into his scalp as the heel of his palm pressed into your clit. “I knew I’d have to feel you cum on my cock when I smelled you in the heat of battle.”

You moaned at the thought of Geralt, barely knowing your name, deciding that he’d have to have you just based on scent. It was something so animalistic, so inhuman...so uniquely witcher.

You twisted in the water and wrapped your arms around his neck, pulling him in for a fierce kiss. You didn’t wait for an invitation into the cavern of his mouth, tugging on his bottom lip with your teeth as he gathered your body in his arms and carried you to the lumpy bed across the room. You pushed at his clothes without breaking the kiss, desperate to taste and feel him. Your fingers skimmed across the lines of his back muscles as you pulled his shirt off. His fingertips dug into your hips and moved to put bruising pressure on your ass as you started untying his trousers.

The man was a specimen. The mages at Kaer Morhen made the best of him. You didn’t have time to examine the body and the cock that were so prominent in your wettest dreams because he was obviously just as desperate for you. He got his trousers down and reached between your bodies, taking his length in hand and smearing the head of it in the wetness seeping out of you. You were just about to start begging when he slipped his cock into your cunt.

You lifted your hips to get more of him inside of you. You needed him stretching you and stuffing you. You needed him pushing you to the absolute limits. He fit you better than any ever had.

He rocked his hips against yours, his pelvis putting pressure against your clit as his cock barely moved against your walls. You wrapped your legs around him, ankles crossed at the small of his back, urging him deeper. He growled and grabbed your wrists, pulling your hands from his shoulders to pin them to the bed above your head.

No other man could put you in such a position. No other man controlled you like Geralt. You would never think to let it happen. No man, not even another witcher, could play you like such a fine instrument. A beautiful lute.

Part of you wished you didn't heal so efficiently, so quickly. Part of you wanted to wear his marks upon you for days, but his marks, just like the scent of your coupling, faded far too quickly for your liking. It left you with nothing but the memory and that just wasn't enough. Not when the man you were remembering was so...amazing.

You whimpered out a faint request and he heeded it, slamming his hips into yours harder. You struggled against his grip, desperate to get your hands in his hair, wanting to tug on the white locks, but he refused to relinquish control of your wrists. He gave you everything you needed, but not necessarily what you wanted.

Like you wanted to hear his voice, but the only time you really needed to hear it was when he leaned down next to your ear and demanded, “Cum, Cat.” Your toes curled and your head pressed back into the pillow, your hips arching closer to his as that finally cracking pleasure fell over you. Geralt lasted a while longer before he filled you, his cock pulsing against your walls as his breath caught in his chest, fingers tightening around your wrists as he came.

He pressed sweet kisses along your jawline as he pulled his half-hard member from your dripping pussy and his hands released your wrists to slide his fingers up to entwine with yours. You ended up with your legs tangled with his, neither of you seeming to care about the wetness of sweat and cum sticky between both of your thighs. You kept one of your hands clutched in his, but pulled the other away so that you could run your fingers through his hair as you stared at the ceiling.

“Do you give it much thought?” you asked, quietly. He made a questioning noise and popped open one eyelid to look up at you from where his head was on your breast. Your cheeks heated up and you licked your lips. “What they did to us. What the mages made of us. What they took from us.”

“Took?”

“Options. The options they took from us. We were children, Geralt. We were babies. They stole…” You cut your words off with a shake of your head. “I guess I’m the only one who thinks about it...and I can’t really imagine being some normal peasant wife with a litter of children and a world of misery, but I...I guess there’s some sweetness in the simplicity of their lives, you know? And I hate that I was never given that option. I was deprived of simplicity before I was even aware there was a difference between the folk in the Caravan and the rest of the world.”

Geralt was silent, but the way his fingers tightened their grip upon your hand filled you with a sense of calm. “People hate us, Geralt. They think us heartless, emotionless, cold. I learned to fake it, because that’s what people expect from someone with two blades on their back and these lovely eyes, but-”

“Cat School doesn’t dull emotions.”

“No. Not even with training. That’s a learned reaction to the outside world. I miss Dyn Marv fiercely sometimes because it’s...lonely away from people who understand. It’s hard to walk the Continent alone.”

He closed his eye and shifted a bit against you. “Why aren’t you with them, then?”

“Differences of morality.”

He was silent for a few minutes, just the sound of your breathing filling the room. “Opposites attract.”

“What?”

“It’s something the bard says. The idiot heard it from an alchemist once and he likes to believe it applies to relationships too. It’s why he goes after beautiful, cultured, married women. ‘Opposites attract’.” He sat up and looked down into your eyes. “But it’s horseshit. We look for companions that remind us of us. It’s why all of his women are as enamored with him as he is. Opposites don’t attract, Y/n...and that’s why you are someone I can’t say ‘no’ to.”

“Because we’re so alike?” you guessed.

“Yes.”

“Just because I’ve changed though, right?”

“No. You changed because you weren’t truly that woman. You were what the mages made you. What your teachers made you. You changed when you decided to.”

You licked your lips again and sat up a bit on your elbows. “What about your sorceresses?”

He smirked a little. “I don’t have sorceresses, Y/n.”

“Lovers. Ex or current?” you simplified the question.

“Current. Obviously,” he said, sarcastic humor in his voice as he ran his hand down your body.

You rolled your eyes and tried to ignore the way his touch lit your skin aflame with sparks of desire. “Geralt, I’m serious. If Yennefer were to ride into Kagen right now...if she knocked on that door…”

“Yen would just walk in. She’s never been one for other peoples’ privacy.” He leaned his head down when you didn’t express amusement at his jest, pressing his forehead to yours. “I could lie.”

“Not really. You’ve not proven yourself a good liar, Wolf.”

“True. I prefer honesty.” He sighed and looked away, sitting up to lean his back against the wall.

“Would you turn her away? Would you turn away Triss?” You sighed heavily. “I’m not trying to sound...like such a sodding woman, but...Geralt, you asked me to come with you. That seems like-” His pensive face made you question what you were even trying to get at. “You know what? I think it’d be better if I just head back to my job following Professor Lery and-”

“Don’t.” He grabbed your arm as you moved to get off the bed. “I care for Triss and I think I...loved Yennefer. But I...don’t think we’ll be an option again. She’s been upset at me since Triss.”

“Won’t this-”

“Stop questioning everything.” You closed your eyes as he leaned over and kissed you again. “Stay.”

“I have to finish the contract, Geralt. I’ve already been paid a hundred-fifty gold for it.”

“Then come back,” he demanded softly.

You smiled at him and nodded, but your heart was far less resolute than you were pretending. “Of course. Don’t go anywhere.” You rolled off the bed and grabbed your trousers and shirt, dressing hastily before grabbing your swords and potion belt. You kissed him one more time before leaving the room, swiping a loaf of bread off of a table in the tavern on your way out.

You weren’t sure if you were coming back to him. You wanted nothing more, but you weren’t looking forward to the moment one of his sorceresses came to call. “I’ll decide while I finish this job,” you told your horse, patting her lovingly. “Maybe it should just stay you and me, huh, Daisy. Maybe two witchers aren’t better than one.”

[mittensmorgul]

So for the most part, I outright reject the finale. But I do think, in light of the whole "Jimmy was supposed to be in the bar, and Dean was disappointed by that because his perfect heaven would have Cas in it" just makes me all the more convinced that the final episode was some kind of djinn dream. Like.... There's no other explanation in my opinion. If Dean's perfect heaven was supposed to have Cas, and he tragically gets faked out by Jimmy (????? Why tf would jimmy be there anyway), it just proves that it's not ACTUALLY heaven. That, along with he El Sol beer he's drinking is all the evidence I need. I think after 15x19, Dean and Sam got whammied by some monster, and are stuck in a hallucination, and that's what we're seeing. (My headcanon is that it's actually The Empty doing it, because it knows if it doesn't keep Dean and Sam occupied and spinning in circles, they'll invade the Empty to save Cas. So its trying to prevent that) :)

Hello, anon friendo! I am gonna start by offering the socially distanced version of a high five, because yeah... There is just so much to unpack here, and you provided such a succinct and all-encompassing series of statements to start from. Thank you!

*flings open array of questionable suitcases*

First off, Congrats on having rejected the finale. I know a lot of folks are still struggling with that one, for many reasons. But you have hit upon so many of the points I’ve been trying to make about the finale since it aired. I’d just like to start with some of the assumptions I’ve heard from folks about the finale that make it impossible for me to consider it fully honestly canon. Because so much about it just makes no goshdang sense... like... not at all...

One of the biggest issues I have surrounding the reception of the finale in parts of fandom is that it portrayed a “happy ending.” The show itself spent the entire final season telling us that a gravestone marked Winchester was not and never would be a happy ending (thank you Becky Rosen-- words I never thought I’d say, but honestly and most sincerely meant). Let’s break this down a bit.

Starting from the assumption that “heaven was fixed” so that characters could have true free will there, making it satisfying in any way that Dean died so young and never got to truly experience happiness during life, I would like anyone who has adopted this attitude to then explain Kansas the band. I mean... explain that in any satisfactory canon-compliant way. (hint: you can’t. it makes zero sense in canon, if heaven is truly reformed and “happy” with everyone in possession of free will.)

Which brings me to Misha’s comments about Jimmy being in the Roadhouse. Why, if heaven were truly fixed, would Jimmy ever in a bazillion years attend a party for Dean Winchester? If Heaven were truly a “happy” ending for Dean, why introduce this element of eternal tragedy and heartbreak to his heaven experience? Why taunt him with the eternal loss of Cas-- even if you don’t think he reciprocated Cas’s romantic feelings, he was canonically the best friend Dean ever had, and being forced to exist forever in a place where he had everyone else he ever cared for except for Cas? Is frankly horrific.

How the actual fuck is that a happy ending, in any sense of the word?

How is this the sort of heaven that Dean would’ve made for himself before it was “fixed?” At least in the memorex heaven, he could’ve lived in oblivious peace with Cas, even if it was always just his own memories and not ~actually Cas~. I honestly think that would’ve been happier than the abject tragedy of what we did get, and what we would’ve gotten had the original script played out.

All of this kind of makes me wonder if they ever even actually defeated Chuck. Like... it feels more like Dean got pulled into the Empty at that moment with Cas and Billie, and everything else after that point was the Empty’s endless experience of sorrow and despair we knew it subject its charges to. So that’s one potential for what could’ve actually happened. I mean, everything about the finale was sorrow and despair, you know? Dean didn’t even get to enjoy his pie at a pie festival because Sam smashed in in his face. How is any of it happy, in any way?

Because if that was actually heaven, there wasn’t actually any free will (because why tf would Kansas the band have chosen to put on that concert? why tf would Jimmy have been there, just to torment Dean with the taunt of Cas returning to him only to have that hope snatched away again? It’s cruel. It’s, in fact, a source of intense despair).

The djinn theory could also work, and I’ve read some excellent fix-it fic using that as a premise. But that doesn’t really explain what happened to Jack (and Amara, since she was in there with them) after hoovering up Chuck’s power, you know? I think the simplest explanations in canon are that Chuck actually won via the unified power of Light and Dark being transferred into Jack and effectively using him as a vessel. With Sam and Dean convinced they’d won, they effectively stopped resisting Chuck’s story for them, and using Jack’s understanding of humanity and the Winchesters specifically, Chuck finally was able to implement a version of his story that the Winchesters would just waltz into without thinking it was supernaturally influenced at all. Going bigger and bigger with monsters and cosmic troubles hadn’t worked, but going so small Sam and Dean would barely even notice the influence-- even with the incongruous reappearance of a vampire that appeared in their lives once, for like two whole minutes 15 years ago, and an unsolved case from the journal from more than 30 years ago that John had never even linked to vampires at all.

At this point, I need to mention that I’m watching 10.23 as I type this up. An episode in which we confront the Mark, along with Death, and Dean’s despair, where he learns a version of the truth (but by no means the full truth, or even accurate truth in some respects) about Chuck’s Story, Amara/The Darkness, etc. That would unfold more fully over the next five seasons. And what was the case Dean took in this episode? Vampires. LOLOL omg this show is nothing if not horrifically consistent, yes?

So because of this, I went haring off through my own blog looking for a post I made a long time ago about the symbolism of how various monsters are used on this show (because again, consistency). I got sidetracked by other posts in my monsters tag, including this from after 15.09 aired, which feels particularly awfully relevant. This was my reaction to Chuck’s Story he showed Sam in that episode, about what the future would look like should he successfully trap Chuck with a Mark, and which... yeah is basically exactly thematically consistent with what we saw in the finale, right down to a cheesy twist on vampires. Read the whole post right here, but this is the part that reached up and punched me in the face:

this is how Dean personally reacts when he loses Cas. We know how he reacts when he loses anyone else– think about what he did when Charlie died. He went on a murder rampage against the Stynes for killing her. When Mary died he broke some furniture and went full bore toward both resurrecting her and stopping Jack. But without Cas, Dean loses the will to fight. Sam has… always been different. He referenced Jess in 15.04 to remind us of how he was after she died in the pilot episode. Just like John, he picked up the revenge mission and ran with it. But for Dean, Cas is different. Without Cas… Dean gives up.

Because... Dean gave up. Sure, he and Sam weren’t overrun by vampires in the end. Chuck knew they’d never stop fighting the monsters, one way or another. The only way to get Dean to give up is something Chuck hadn’t quite figured out yet... maybe not until after 15.17, after confronting Cas in the hallway of the bunker, after absorbing Amara’s power, knowledge, and perspective on Dean.

Chuck needed Dean to give up, and honestly? Pushing Billie to clear him off the table and send him (and Cas, that pesky angel who never did what he was told) to the Empty would’ve been a direct way to deal with that... pretty much akin to having one sibling locked in a cage forever, yes?

Also, still looking through my monsters tag, I’m reminded of 14.15, and still cannot differentiate the version of Heaven in 15.20 from what was done to the people of that town. This... is not... paradise. This is actively what Dean has been insisting is the OPPOSITE of paradise since like… 4.22… No ending where Dean was a “Stepford bitch in paradise” ever had the possibility of being “happy,” at the core of things, and this “fixed” version of Heaven just doesn’t hold up to any degree of inspection. Something is seriously wrong here. https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/183465650390/so-can-we-talk-about-this-monster-of-the-week-for

And since I was unable to find the post I wrote who knows how long ago about Monsters and how they’re symbolically used on Supernatural to represent larger themes in the episode, I’ll just attempt to sum up what Vampires have been used for. Revenge. Vampires are always, in some way connected to themes of revenge.

(and hooray, I found at least a post adjacent to the one I’ve spent the last four hours trying to find... https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/187207052080/i-obviously-did-not-think-this-through, where I mention that shapeshifters are about revealing hidden truths (mostly about Dean since most shapeshifters are connected to Dean), zombies are about grief and the inability to move past it.)

So why... why at the end of their road is the monster that comes after them-- literally FOR REVENGE for something that had never been blamed on Sam or Dean to begin with, from season 1, directly connected to John’s revenge mission and the first time they learned about the Colt AND the first time they learned in canon that Vampires were even real... like... this feels very specifically like some kind of layers-of-meta levels of shade on them, you know? Vampires are for revenge, so what vengeance exactly is being visited upon Sam and Dean in this episode? If not Chuck’s entire story for them itself?

So yeah, 100% agree, something is incredibly rotten in the finale. And I am sick to effing death of people trying to convince us that anything about this was “good” or “happy” or “satisfying” in any way. Or even “how it was always supposed to end” with Dean dead bloody, as if the entire back half of the series hadn’t been suggesting that a true win was the subversion of all of Chuck’s story for them, and Dean finally being able to have his chosen family all alive, happy, and chilling on a beach somewhere watching the sunset. Nothing will ever convince me that the ending portrayed in 15.20 wasn’t exactly how Chuck thought he “won,” rendering it entirely irrelevant to the rest of canon, unless all of canon was ultimately the tragedy we’d been encouraged to believe would be firmly defeated in the end.

Folks, you can’t have it both ways. 

[shitelock]

I'm not native, so it's kinda hard for me to understand what a song means in a subtextual way lmao. So, help me please. The song "if you don't love me now" it's confusing to me because I feel like that's ed trying to say "if you don't love my Edward persona, you will never love me in any other form", but what does it mean the part of the song that says "and I still hear you saying you will never break the chain"?

thank you so much for this ask.. thinking about song lyrics in relation to stede and ed is what I live for.. with that said this is my messy interpretation of these lines

the “if you don’t love me now” bit works in a lot of ways. at the end of episode 8, for ed, it means “if you leave with calico jack, if you don’t act on your love for stede now, you’re never going to get that chance again.” and “breaking the chain” in this sense could be about breaking out of the shackles of his ‘Blackbeard’ identity. “I can still hear you saying you will never break the chain”—ed can still hear his old promises to himself that he’s a monster, he’ll always be a monster, and he might as well give in to it because he doesn't deserve any better. but he doesn’t give in. he breaks the chain and returns to stede, and even though they get “chained” in another way (captured), it’s okay, because they’re in it together now.

but when we watch the finale this song feels different. sadder. it feels more like the breakup song that it really is. now it’s switched perspectives to stede, and it’s saying “if you ditch ed on that dock, if you let him leave without you, if you don’t love him now, you’re going to lose him.” but stede still has so much guilt in this moment! and “breaking the chain” here can be the same as it was for ed, the expectations for himself, but where ed succeeded stede succumbs. he lets the chain tighten and he returns to his old life.

alternatively “breaking the chain” could be stede breaking the relationship between them. ed saying “i can still hear you promising to run away with me,” but when stede leaves him without a word, he’s making himself out to be a liar and breaks the chain that ties them together in the process.

(also—ed being left on the dock, showing stede the most authentic and vulnerable version of himself, “if he doesn’t love me like this he’ll never love me”)

i'm sure other people have described this in a much more succinct way but this is what's going on in my rotten brain when i listen to this song. love u anon happy sailing <33

[tcm]

Interview with Richard Benjamin on Making Comedy Look Easy in MY FAVORITE YEAR (’82) By Donald Leibenson

To hear Richard Benjamin tell it, MY FAVORITE YEAR was a charmed production. For his first film as a director, he had been looking for a comedy (“I’m just kind of bent that way,” he jokes) and the stars aligned to bring him a script that, he says, was everything he knew. He had Mel Brooks as the film’s guardian angel. He had a bona-fide movie star that his wife, Paula Prentiss, recommended after another actor regretfully declined the film’s plum role. And he heeded Carl Reiner, who gave him succinct advice about making a comedy: “Get funny people.”

Which he did. The film is character actor heaven, with Joseph Bologna, Anne de Salvo, Selma Diamond, Adolph Green, Basil Hoffman, Lainie Kazan and Bill Macy.

MY FAVORITE YEAR is set in the mid-1950s when television was live and comedy was king. Mark Linn-Baker stars as Benjy Stone, a young comedy writer on a variety show reminiscent of Your Show of Shows, where he ardently pursues the show’s not-amused production assistant (Jessica Harper). During one life-changing week, he is assigned to chaperone the show’s guest star, his idol, former swashbuckling screen hero, Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole in an Oscar-nominated performance), who has a penchant for drink, womanizing and otherwise behaving badly. 

Benjamin spoke with TCM about casting O’Toole, trying to pin down Mel Brooks and why you should never end a comedy in a graveyard.

To quote Alan Swann’s great line, dying is easy, comedy is hard. With MY FAVORITE YEAR, you make it look so easy. How did the project come to you?

Paula and I were in New York. My agent, David Gersh, sent the script by Norman [Steinberg] and Dennis [Palumbo, credited as co-writer due to the Screen Writers Guild arbitration]. I remember reading it in the hotel room and as I finished, I said, ‘This is everything I know.’ I was in high school when Your Show of Shows was on. I would get on the phone with my friend Shelley Berger, who I am still close to, and we would do all these routines they had done on the show on Saturday night. I grew up loving Errol Flynn and those swashbuckling movies. I had also worked at 30 Rockefeller Plaza [the film’s setting] as an NBC page and guide, and I knew every inch of that place. [The script] was right up my alley, as they say.

Brooksfilms produced the film, and Mel Brooks was a writer on Your Show of Shows. Did he serve as the film’s guardian angel or offer any input?

Guardian angel’s good. He kept saying he would give Norman and I two full days to sit down and go over the script to see if we could make it even funnier. The truth of the matter is that the script didn’t need much of anything, but he promised that. Trying to get Mel to stop moving is a feat. We went to his house, and he invited us in and then said he was going out. He said he had to walk the dog. Then he comes back, and he said he had to go, that there was a crisis at Fox. I said, ‘No there’s not,’ and he said, ‘Well, there could be.’ So, what he ended up giving us was two hours, but it was a great two hours. And the next thing you know, he was gone.

But Norman and I came up with one of the best jokes in the movie while we were standing in his driveway watching him drive away. It’s the one where Swann falls off the roof and plummets past the two elitist guys. And one says, ‘I think Alan Swann’s beneath us,’ and the other guy says, ‘Of course he’s beneath us, he’s an actor.’

I cannot imagine anyone but Peter O’Toole as Alan Swann. Was he the first choice?

Albert Finney had been offered the role, but he had not committed. He was up in Sausalito making SHOOT THE MOON [’82]. They told me I had to go up there and convince him to do the film; otherwise they couldn’t make the movie. The list of people M-G-M would go with was very short, because who are you going to believe with a sword in their hands? So, I’m on this mission, because if he says yes, I’m going to get to make a movie. We arranged to have lunch together. He’s completely charming. I get ready to ask the question – which could change my life, by the way: ‘Will you do it?’ He said, ‘Well…,’ and I could tell it was going to be a no. He thought the script was really good, but he had done two or three movies in a row and he said he wanted to get back to the theater. Then he said to me, ‘Why don’t you get O’Toole?’ He said, ‘We do this all the time. I turn something down, he does it, he turns something down, I do it.’ When I got back home, Paula who had made WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT? [’65] with Peter, said, ‘Get Peter. He is perfect for this.’ Finney said it, Paula said it. And I asked [co-producer] Michael Gruskoff if M-G-M would make the film with O’Toole, and Michael said yes.  

What was the meeting with Peter like?

(Laughs) That meeting! That meeting was quite something. First of all, we couldn’t find him. We could tell we had the right person because the behavior was just like the character. He had a farm in Ireland with no phone. You had to call this pub to get a message to him. I called the pub and they said Peter wasn’t there. His agent didn’t know where he was. I called his manager and said, ‘We’re trying to find your client.’ He said, ‘He’s at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. He’s been here for a week.’ 

So, I’m actually talking to Peter O’Toole, and he said he had heard about the project and to send him a script and we would get together the next day. I go over and there he is in a beautiful suite wearing a smoking jacket; he is the character. He said, ‘Here’s the thing…’ and I thought, ‘Here we go again.’ He said he liked it very much, but he hadn’t read the last ten pages and to please indulge him and he would call tomorrow. The next day, on the dot, he called and he said to turn to the last page of the script.

Now, in the original script, there’s a scene which I shot that would have played after what’s in the movie. It took place in a Hollywood cemetery, and Benjy is walking past the gravestones. He says in voiceover that Alan Swann made him promise he would do something on his birthday every year. Alan has passed away, and Benjy comes to his grave, kneels down and pours a bottle of Courvoisier over the tombstone. That’s what’s on the last page. Peter asked me to read the date that was on the tombstone. It was Aug. 2. He said, ‘Aug. 2 is my birthday; did you know that?’ I asked Norman if he knew that, and Norman said no, he had made it up. And Peter says, ‘Therefore, I must do the film.’

What happened to that scene?

I was terribly reluctant to take that out because Peter did the movie because of it. But people at M-G-M said I couldn’t end a comedy in a cemetery. We had two audience screenings, one with that ending and one without it. In the screening with it, the audience enjoyed the picture, but the scene put a pall over things. Then we had the screening without it and the audience was very enthusiastic and very up as they came out.

How did you find Mark Linn-Baker?

Our casting director Ellen Chenoweth said the first person to get was Mark Linn-Baker. Mark came in and read and was terrific. I said, ‘This is my first movie, I can’t cast the first person who walks in here.’ I saw maybe 25 to 35 more—some really good people—but she was right, so after all of that, I said to get him.

Peter and Mark had great chemistry.

They seemed to hit it off right away, but later, back in L.A. after we shot the long scene on the roof, which played like a mini-farce, Peter came up to me and said, ‘I like the lad, you cast him well.’

Was Peter game for the physical stunts?

I couldn’t stop him from doing them! The bathroom scene required him to fall headfirst into the wall. I came to him before we shot and I said, ‘The camera is so close, I can’t pad this wall.’ He said, ‘I was brought up in music hall. I can do this all day. Don’t concern yourself.’

Director Howard Hawks once said that a good movie was three or four good scenes and no bad scenes. I lose count watching MY FAVORITE YEAR of how many great scenes there are in it. Between those driven by comic banter, the TV sketches, the physical comedy scenes, the quieter romantic scenes and even the dramatic confrontations, did you have a favorite type to direct?

I can’t say there was a favorite. It’s all of a piece. I will tell you that one of the scenes I like is in the Stork Club and getting to do something that reminded me of all these kinds of wonderful comic movies I loved growing up. I do remember that one of the first things we shot was the scene in Central Park where Alan Swann mounts the horse. It just seemed to lack energy. And I was thinking, ‘I have to go tell Peter O’Toole that he has to pick up the pace and it has to be lighter.’ I went up to him and said, ‘It’s good, but…’ and before I could finish, he said, ‘You want it faster and funnier.’ I said, ‘You’ve got it,’ and he said, ‘And you shall have it.’ And I thought, ‘This directing thing is not so hard.’ (laughs)

Were there directors you worked with as an actor who particularly inspired you when you became a director? For example, you worked with one of the best, Mike Nichols.

Mike, yes. He directed me in the national company of Barefoot in the Park and [the film] CATCH-22 [’70]. Mike’s thing was he’d come up to you very quietly and say, ‘Just like in real life.’ That was his main thing. It meant that there should be no ‘acting’ here; your character responds to situations as they would in life. It’s like what [critic] Walter Kerr once said about Neil Simon’s jokes: They have the truth in them. This is what funny people know: You can’t try to get a laugh, because you won’t get it.  

At one point, Alan Swann says that doing the TV show was the most fun and the hardest work since the world was young. Was that what making MY FAVORITE YEAR was like for you?

It was the most fun, there’s no question of that. It was a magical experience because of the screenplay and everyone involved. Everyone’s game came up because of Peter. You don’t need many takes with him, that’s for sure. But how all of this came about and got to the point where I would be offered this, and what has to happen in your life to come to that moment – you can’t make it up. And when that moment comes, you’re hopefully ready. I was really fortunate.

[arcadianambivalence]

My (Exhaustive) Thoughts on the 2021 West Side Story Adaptation - 2/3

Sorry for the wait.  I had the most succinct thoughts about the beginning and ending, but the middle needed some cleaning up before I felt ready to post it.

So if you saw the film or haven’t seen it, here is part two of my thoughts (part review, part analysis) on the new West Side Story adaptation of the classic 1957 stage musical.  If you haven’t yet, please read part one.

[Spoilers ahead]

The Balcony Scene

Still unaware of Bernardo’s level of importance in the Sharks (the dude literally waltzed up to him and was like “Nice to finally meet you, Maria’s brother”), Tony loses sight of Maria and almost gives up hope of seeing her again.  But he’s still optimistic about life, so he sings a song about her name, the famous equivalent to Juliet’s balcony monologue.

The movie is aware of how skeptical the audience may be of love at first sight, so it makes sure to infuse the scene with humor as people react to Tony’s song without bordering on parody.  

Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski deserves an award for this scene alone: what feels like spotlights to Tony are just the lights to a basketball court, and even a puddle can resemble the stained glass of a church when the mood is right.

In a burst of optimism, Tony sneaks into a neighborhood populated by Puerto Rican families and begins singing out Maria’s name, seemingly to no avail until Maria emerges on that sweet and final note of the song.

At first, Maria tries to get him to go away before Bernardo finds out, but when she realizes he’s busy with Anita, she relaxes.  They talk some more.  Tony decides to seize the day and asks her to run away with him.  She laughs and teases “maybe tomorrow.”  But the cutesy banter turns serious as the two begin to sing.  

While in their first meeting, it looked like the two of them were set apart from the world, “Tonight” takes a different approach.  There is almost always some sort of physical barrier between Tony and Maria from the moment she spots him from her balcony, and so the verses of the song are performed as Tony tries to find a way to vault past the locked fire escape and balcony rails, to literally overcome the obstacles between them.

It’s pretty clear Tony’s already smitten with Maria, but I think this is the scene where Maria falls in love with him.  (She has stars in her eyes like this is Lady and the Tramp!)  While Tony climbs the literal barriers between them, Maria lets go of her fears, so when they’re finally on the same level, nothing is physically or mentally keeping them apart. 

...Except for Bernardo, who calls for Maria from inside the apartment.  Far from letting that deter them, they agree to meet again the next day so they can spend some time alone together.  She has work the following night (which rules out sleeping together tomorrow evening), but they genuinely want to spend time together, so he tells her to meet him at the metro, where he’ll take her someplace meaningful to him.

Why Fight?

The following morning, Maria tries to act like she hasn’t spent the night dreaming about meeting Tony again.  During breakfast, we get an idea of the dynamic between the three: they generally have a happy banter, but it’s not without its tensions.  Bernardo is used to having control, which Anita and Maria resist; Anita and Bernardo have a loving established relationship, and now Maria is something of an interloper in their routine; Anita also has some doubts about being treated as a member of the family, even if not lawfully married to Bernardo; Bernardo expects his little sister to be different from the person she really is, etc.

There’s also an element of Bernardo, the Shark bleeding into Bernardo, the brother in this scene.  For instance, he pejoratively refers to Tony as a “Pollack,” which Anita mocks (“Spic, Pollack, now you’re sounding like a real American!”).  He also clenches his fists and pulls the “my house, my rules” card.  Maria’s frustration from the previous day bubbles over, and she tells Bernardo in no uncertain terms that he might be able to intimidate other people, but he can’t scare her or tell her what to do.  

(This is the last on-screen interaction between the siblings, by the way…)

Anita and Bernardo have a small argument about their future together.  They’ve been together five years, but she has refused each of his proposals unless he swears to give up the Sharks, which he hasn’t.  He tells her he dreamed of marrying her and having six kids together and moving back to Puerto Rico, to which she responds, “marry a cat.”  

Then the argument broadens to life in America and spreads to the entire street.  Like in the 1961 film, the pro-America side largely consists of women while the pro-Puerto Rico side is generally male, but the film takes pains to make this show-stopper as different from the other adaptation as possible.  The song is taken from the rooftops at night to the street in daylight, allowing for the scene to span multiple locations as the characters make their way from the apartment to the gym to the middle of an intersection.  It is a scene bursting with light and color that showcases the love between Anita and Bernardo, despite their opposing opinions.

Things aren’t quite so bright for the Jets.  A few members, including Anybodys, and a woman (presumably picked up for prostitution) are in the station for questioning.  (Rebel Without a Cause reference?  Anyone?  Anyone?)  Now without the interference of Riff and other authority figures, some of the boys insult Anybodys with transphobic remarks, and Anybodys responds with insults to the Jet’s heritage (something along the lines of “daygo pansy”).  A brawl ensues, and Anybodys ends up being chased through the station by Krupke and other officers.  This leaves the woman and the rest of the boys locked in a room together.  The boys break out into an imaginative “Dear Officer Krupke.”

And while I’ll try not to make a million But the 1961 movie comments, I’ll admit that I prefer the other adaptation’s ribald take on the song that is, ultimately, a response to the “Why are kids like this?” comments the original stage and 1961 movie audiences would have implicitly understood.  As shown in the song, adults attributed juvenile delinquency to sociological reasons like changes in American families or the disintegration of traditional values or psychological reasons like mental illness (anti-social behavior).  

Und the funny personas the boys adopt range from a Freudian “head-shrinker” to a shrill and resentful social worker.  The humor is carried over here with the occasional choice of pitch for some of the boys, but the context is somewhat lost in the fun.  It’s framed as a spontaneous number to put Baby John at ease, which is why the camera lingers on his reactions until he finally joins in for the final verses.  Though explicitly making the impetus for this song be Officer Krupke’s comments instead of Shrank’s is definitely one point this movie has over the other.

This scene does touch on the film’s wider themes, though.  Throughout the movie, the authority figures question why the Jets bother to fight the Sharks.  The obvious answer is racism, but the film takes pains to not simply leave it at that.  Characters repeatedly say that “this is about territory,” even though their descriptions of their opponents are couched in ethnic slurs.  From a bird’s eye view, we the audience know the two gangs are fighting over a neighborhood that is in the midst of gentrification.  It’s a neighborhood that will ultimately belong to neither of them.  To Lieutenant Shrank, this is just one more reason the gang warfare is a nuisance and a menace.  Later, Quique contributes the limitation of the feud to a single neighborhood to Bernardo accepting the limits placed on him by the (white) locals.  After all, America is a massive country.  Surely there must be a place for everyone.  Then, there’s Valentina, who ultimately argues that personal choice is more important than allegiance to any group.  As she says, “Life is more important than love.”  It’s something the other characters never really learn, or if they do, they learn it too late.

Another scene created for the movie follows Tony and Maria on a date.  (It’s like Kushner got the chance to write the screenplay and decided to answer every criticism thrown at the stage play by cynical members of the audience who don’t get suspension of disbelief).  But this scene isn’t extraneous fluff; it’s thematically significant.  

While on the subway to the Church of the Intercession or The Met Cloisters (I’ve seen articles list both of these places), Tony and Maria have a disagreement over the Sharks and Jets.  She takes offense that he implies life is easier for the Sharks than the Jets, which he says is because of the sense of family and community shown by the Puerto Rican immigrants (which suggests that Riff and Tony don’t have families, so there’s an element of envy here).  For a moment, it seems that the lovers, too, will join their opposing peers, but they find common ground.  It’s not a case of Either/Or, but And.  

Also, can I take a moment to appreciate the symbolism of them visiting the Church of the Intercession, as what did the sight of this church do to Tony when he was on a bus to prison?  It interceded for him.  And as for the Cloisters, this is the closest the movie gets to dropping the characters in a Shakespearean setting.  Not only is this a beloved site for medieval art in America (and I know the Middle Ages preceded the Renaissance, thank you), the place is also, in a sense, an immigrant.  Pieces of the architecture were originally brought to America from an excavation site in France, but while the original intent of the cloisters in France was (obviously) religious, the Met Cloisters in America are intended for contemplation and an appreciation of aesthetic beauty.  Tony’s line that the place is now a museum is also a nice touch.  The historic significance of the place has been replaced with something more modern—kind of like the West Side.

Tony reveals to Maria that he first saw this place while on a prison bus.  He then explains his history with the Jets and why he left them.  “All my life, it’s like I was falling from the world’s tallest building.  I stopped falling the moment I met you.”  Instead of pushing him away after learning about his record, Maria treats him with understanding.  “I don’t want you anywhere near the fighting,” she says, recognizing the pressure he would be under if he went to intervene in the rumble.  

I know I sound like a broken record by this point, but I really like how this adaptation uses dialogue to develop the characters.  Conversations like this one show that Tony and Maria are laying the foundation for what could be a long and intimate relationship like Bernardo and Anita’s.  Every relationship has to start somewhere, after all.

Inside the cloister, Tony tries to woo Maria with some romantic phrases he learned from Valentina, then the scene turns into one of earnestness when the couple vows (in both English and Spanish) their love in “One Hand, One Heart.”  

There’s an ebb and flow to their interactions throughout the entire movie, and this continues here.  Maria is the first to speak the vows, but Tony completes them when she nervously steps back.  While she initially urged Tony to intercede in the fight, she has since changed her mind, but Tony agrees with her original idea.  Believing he still has credibility with the Jets, he swears to stop the fight before it happens.

Mutually Assured Destruction

...Then Chekhov’s gun descends when Riff buys a Smith and Wesson (“mutually assured destruction”) from an implied friend of his father.  While he plays it tough (dare I say...cool) in front of the dealers, Riff immediately turns to childishly brandishing the gun in front of the other Jets until Tony shows up to try to de-escalate things.  

First, he appeals to Riff’s self-preservation (“do you know what’ll happen if they catch you with one of these?”), then to his previous place of authority in the gang.  All that goes out the window when Riff ignores Tony’s urging to leave the gun and they fight in a number that really shows off the choreography and set design.  

The dancing also tells us about the dynamic between the characters.  Riff is lithe and scrappy while Tony is the muscle (and the heart) of the two.  It fits.  No wonder they jokingly call each other Batman and Superman.  If the comic book heroes could dance, I’d imagine it would be something like this.

It also shows how much Tony missed during the past year: the arrival of the Sharks, Riff’s ascendency to sole leader of the group, and the loss of his street cred.  So Tony’s appeals to the other Jets are completely ignored, and the gang leaves with the gun, as certain of their invincibility as he may have once been.

I love that “Cool” was moved before the rumble as Tony’s first attempt to stop the fight.  It plays up the conflict between Riff and Tony that comes to a head in the rumble, but while in “Cool” it’s dance as combat, the knife fight in the rumble is combat as dance.  And man, the Foley artists make you feel the punches when Tony’s desperate and final attempt to stop the fight goes spectacularly wrong.

But first, “Tonight (Quintet).”  

The only way to do this on screen is through montage.  Robert Wise knew it, and so does Spielberg.  And again, it’s a wonderful moment of mutually opposing certainty before the storm.  The mirroring of the Jets’ and Sharks’ movements is great.   Bernardo wraps his hands like he’s preparing for a boxing match.  Riff is still processing his spat with Tony.  Meanwhile, Maria and Anita are both painfully optimistic as they go about their evening routines.  Even Tony is positive that he can talk to Bernardo and smooth everything over.

The editing gives a nice fake-out where it looks like Tony and Maria are going to meet in the middle of the street when really they’re actually going in opposite directions on different streets.  Light also heightens the emotions of the scene.  There’s a nice bit of foreshadowing when Tony’s face dips into the shadows as he walks over the spot where he’ll eventually be shot as he sings “make this endless day endless night,” but Maria remains in the light.  The red sunset behind the characters gradually dims as they physically descend through the city: the Jets go under the highway, Maria gets on the subway, and finally Anita is in a darkened apartment safe for the candles she’s lit for her date.  The scene ends on Anita’s painfully bright smile as she waits for Bernardo who won’t return.

The gangs meet in a warehouse used to store salt for when the roads ice up in winter.  (Salt...because conflict, and tears.  Get it?).  There’s that iconic moment when the gangs’ shadows overlap.  

You can cut the tension with a knife.  

Tony arrives to stop the fight but only makes things worse.  Bernardo recognizes him from the gym and doesn’t hold back how personal this fight is.  He accuses Tony of using Maria to feel better about himself, punctuating his speech with light jabs until one punch makes contact. Tony stumbles back, bleeding, then succumbs to his worse instincts and lunges.  

One of the things the screenplay does to fit this story to a modern audience is give each of its characters backstory and desires, and Tony is no exception.  Before the movie starts, he was deep in gang life with Riff and nearly beat a boy from the Egyptian Kings to death, and now he’s about to do it again.  Realizing this, he stops.  But the fight is just beginning.  In the chaos, Riff and Bernardo draw knives.  

(Side note: I saw this in theaters, and when the knives came out, one woman in the audience was so surprised, I could hear her gasp Jesus! each time the movie cut back to the knives.)

These aren’t butter knives, but long and pointed switchblades.  These things can definitely kill you.  So when Riff runs into Bernardo’s knife while trying to push Tony out of the fight, you know it’s lethal.  And when Tony’s grief turns to rage and he stabs Bernardo, it is believable how quickly he goes down.

(Now, I have mixed feelings about Tony’s role in the fight.  On one hand, he has to be the one to kill Bernardo, because that’s how the plot goes.  On the other hand, having Tony progress from trying to keep the peace to fighting Bernardo to trying to stop Riff’s involvement in particular to stabbing Bernardo does seem a little repetitive in such a short period of time.  Part of me wishes Tony had started to throw a punch at Bernardo before stopping himself, so it’s more surprising when he stabs Bernardo.  But then the other part of me thinks that it makes sense for Tony to repeatedly change his mind, given his history and all the other impulsive choices he makes throughout the movie.  I don’t have a conclusion here, just thought I’d share it.)

The sirens of the oncoming police cars break through the yells, and like in the 1961 film, all heads turn to the oncoming sound in beat with the music, and Anybodys drags Tony away from Riff’s body.  Unlike in the stage version and the 1961 film, Chino remains behind a moment longer to cradle Bernardo...and grab Riff’s abandoned gun.

Notes

Stay posted for part three.  It shouldn’t be so long a wait!

[thewyrdwritere]

Human Kind

Human kind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman My rating: 4 of 5 stars Rutger Bregman's Human kind: A Hopeful History is a 'book about a radical idea, that deep down, most people are really pretty decent. It's a crazy idea, just go on twitter, or watch the news. People are the worst, right? If that's what you're thinking, then you really need to read this book. Human kind is history from a fresh perspective, that of positivity, something many of use probably need right now. And Bregman's energetic, anecdotalesq prose does just that, without losing scholarly rigour. Bregman provides some shrewd criticism of how myths and narratives about humanity's 'savage nature' have developed, influencing psychology experiments and mainstream culture alike. Lord of the Flies has a lot to answer for. Context, details matter. It's through thorough investigation that Bregman is able to overcome the dubious interpretations, the media lies and the bad science to get to something altogether more positive. Turns out humans are really giant friendly puppies. Radical idea right? You must be barking? Have you seen the news? What about the Nazis?! Valid questions that have been anticipated by Bregman. Human kind addresses how prehistoric man turned from a hippie commune, to civilization, to empires, kingdoms and global CEOs. It's not great reading, it's kinda dark, distressing even, to think that our great civilizations, cultures and institutions are a wrong turn, that our inherent puppiness can be lead horribly astray. 'Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely'. Pertinent stuff, particularly now. But what if the defining nature of humankind was a mistake, from the enlightenment to now, what if modern societies were built around a mistaken belief in humanity's inherent selfishness and what if institutions could be built towards presuming the best in humans rather than presuming the worst? Is there a way back to our lost inner puppy? Well yes, actually there is, Play! What!? Play!? Are you mad?! Humanity needs structure, discipline, good grades, sales targets, boring repetitive jobs.... No, apparently not. Bregman explores ways in which better societies can be built and one of the more fun methods explored is play. Again modern myths of human nature are exposed to shrewd criticism, fascinating modern case studies are aligned with evidence from our prehistoric ancestors to make a compelling case for the freedom and creativity that play brings to humanity. The strictures of school and work environments are laid bare as traps, 'shut kids in cages and they behave like rats' being a particularly succinct quote. Democracy is another method explored, real democratic communities as opposed to voting for whichever political aristocracy you fancy. Real world case studies are again used to great effect to argue that political engagement can thrive when communities have an actual stake in decision making, or something to fall back on rather than the punitive system we call ' welfare benefits'. And there are plenty more real world examples that Bregman gives, where reversing our perspective of humanity from punitive to positive leads to interesting conclusions. Naive and saccharine!? Maybe? But Bregman builds a compelling long narrative of human psychology, simply by reversing perspective, and I found the logic of Bregman's history quite persuasive. Wishful thinking, perhaps? But Human kind sets out a clear compelling argument for a more positive society, culture and civilization. A way back to our inner puppy. View all my reviews

[starry-sky-stuff]

Sorting the Grisha Trilogy

For this sorting I’ll be using the superb sorting system created by @sortinghatchats. A brief breakdown, there are Primaries, the why, and Secondaries, the how. For a more in depth explanation check out @sortinghatchats or @wisteria-lodge. Here’s a link to a great and succinct explanation. 

Disclaimer: Spoiler warnings apply both for the Grisha Trilogy, the Six of Crows Duology and the Nikolai Duology. 

This turned into a very long post so I cut for length.

Alina Starkov has a very loud Lion Secondary that she increasingly grows into as the series progresses. Alina has literally no chill ever, about anything. She’s always ready to throw down. In Siege & Storm, she’s quite ready to tear the Crown Prince a new one for his suggestion that they lower the draft age. All the while Nikolai watches in exasperation because they very much need to keep the generals and royals on side. But Alina can never be anything other than what she is. he is genuinely disturbed by Nikolai’s ability to switch personas because it is so antithetical to her entire personality. Alina is the same kind of Lion Secondary that Katniss Everdeen from the Hunger Games is — someone who inspires an army and is ultimately used as a symbol and martyr by others for their own gains.

For her Primary I would also say Lion. Alina has very firm beliefs and they all come from within. She’s also got that lone wolf outlook that Lion Primary’s often struggle with. Repeatedly, she pushes people away and is intent on doing things alone. There’s also elements of the unhealthy Glory Hound Lion Primary, in that, as much as Alina is motivated by doing good, she’s also motivated by gaining power. Greed and power are such integral parts of her storyline. A Snake would claim they were gaining power to protect their loved ones, a Badger just people in general or maybe Ravka as a whole. But Alina gains power so she can defeat the Darkling and save the world. When she kills Mal, as much as it is to save the world, a part of it is also to gain power, for which she pays a price by losing said power. The very core issue in her relationship with Mal is the conflict between a Loyalist and an Idealist. For Mal, his main priority is Alina. For Alina, her priority is defeating the Darkling. 

Loyal and dutiful Mal Oretsev is an incredibly obvious Snake Primary. His entire motivation is centred on Alina. Everything he does is for her. He volunteers to hunt the stag for her, he deserts the army for her, he stays in the capital to protect her even though he hates it. “You’re my flag, you’re my nation” is a very Snake flavoured declaration of love. Mal is not in this fight because he wants to save Ravka or defeat the Darkling. He was completely okay with him and Alina escaping to Novyi Zem at the end of the first book and leaving Ravka to its fate. He commits to the fight when Alina does, and her cause becomes his cause. 

For his secondary, charming, likeable, Mal is a Badger. One of the first things we learn about Mal is that he can fit in anywhere and has no trouble making friends. Although he has a bit of a Lion Secondary Performance, at his core his a team player. He enjoyed the army because it was a community, and he’s at his lowest in the second book because he has no friends and no community. Part of why he’s much healthier in the last book is that he has a community again and a position within that community. In the White Chapel he can train and teach, and once they leave he has his own little team again. He falls into the leader role in the last book, not because he inspires loyalty the way Lion Secondary Alina does, but because he caretakes and looks after people. When they’re underground, and he constantly goes back to check on everybody and talk to them to make sure they keep up, that’s a Badger Secondary looking after his community. It’s probably not at all surprising that Mal has what @the-phoenix-heart has dubbed the love interest sorting. His priority is Alina, and he shows his love by following her and joining her quest, and in the end, sacrificing himself for her. Mal wasn’t going to die to save Ravka. He was sacrificing himself to save Alina. 

Nikolai Lantsov, whose entire motivation in the original trilogy is to gain the throne of Ravka to save Ravka, strikes me as more of a Loyalist than an Idealist. Either he’s a Badger whose community is Ravka, or a Snake who just has a very wide circle. Considering there’s no evidence of him dehumanising people, I would lean towards Snake. We later learn that part of why he wants to fix Ravka is a promise he made to a childhood friend who died in his arms, which strikes me as a very Snake motivation. An Idealist would be more motivated by the cause of helping Ravka, and a Badger would focus on Ravkans being in need of good leadership. I think much of his character arc in Nikolai Duology makes sense through the lens of a Snake Primary moving his priorities, as Ravka as a whole becomes less important and Zoya becomes more important. His primary was very difficult for me to accurately gauge because I think he actively hides it behind his secondary performance. Once we’re in his head, his motivations are very focused on the individuals he cares about. I think he and Zoya also bond over this Snake Primary that was let down by their parents and so transferred their loyalty onto Ravka as a whole. 

Initially, I thought he had a Snake Secondary. After all, Alina’s description of him being similar to a Matryoshka doll, always putting on different personas, is quintessential Snake Secondary. But when you actually look at how Nikolai solves problems, it isn’t with his charm or guile. Yes, he saves Alina by pretending to be Sturmhond, but they get into Ravka because he came up with a flying ship. In the last book, he saves the group because he just happened to have a secret military base he’d developed for a rainy day. In the Nikolai Duology, he literally came up with a plan for someone else to masquerade as him just in case he ever went missing. He solves his problems by pulling out some old tool or plan he’d previously developed on the off chance he’d need it. Total Bird Secondary. Now, Nikolai has a very good Snake Secondary model. It was something he developed in children to deal with his emotionally neglectful parents, by becoming whatever he had to be to get attention. But at his core, he’s an inventor, it’s what he enjoys doing, it’s what he does for fun, and it’s how he solves his problems. 

The Darkling, who views ozatskaya and even other Grisha as beneath him is a Dark Badger Primary. To the Darkling, only the Grisha are human, and even then he still thinks of him and Alina as above other Grisha. When parts of the Second Army turn on him he dehumanises them in turn. There’s an argument for an unhealthy Lion Primary, who believes wholeheartedly that all the terrible things he does are justified and he’s the only one who can save Ravka. But building the Second Army and Little Palace as a place the Grisha could belong seems to me like a Badger Primary looking to build his community. It’s also explains why he can kill all these people and feel no guilt whatsoever because to him they’re not really people. In the Rule of Wolves he even explicitly says that he whilst he values human life in general he does not value human lives specifically. 

The building of the Second Army is proof of his Badger Secondary. A skilled manipulator, he nevertheless uses genuine emotion and pieces of himself in the manipulation that I don’t think a Snake Secondary would find necessary. If you believe he did develop genuine feelings for Alina, then that would probably be a Badger Secondary who fell for his own performance. A Snake Secondary would probably have pretended to want a relationship with Alina without developing any feelings. His primary and secondary work together to explain why he was so affected by the Grisha turning against him. That’s his community, the community he built up from the ground, and when they turn on him he punishes them for their perceived disloyalty. 

Zoya Nazyalensky is a Snake Primary whose circle includes the Second Army and eventually the whole of Ravka. There’s an argument that she’s a Badger Primary who might’ve been a little burned, and she does treat ozatskaya as lesser than Grisha, but I don’t see the evidence of dehumanisation. Her reason for turning against the Darkling is that he killed her aunt, her only family and to her mind the only person who loved her. A Badger Primary might’ve been more motivated by him massacring Novokribirsk as opposed to a particular loss. Also, her feelings of failure are specific to her feeling that she failed her people — failing to stop the Darkling from killing her aunt, failing to protect the Second Army, failing to stop Nina from being captured. Throughout the original trilogy she’s burned. She’s lost her only person and so latches on to what is hers — the Second Army, Ravka, the Little Palace. She protects these things because they’re hers not because of any ideal. In the Nikolai Duology she unburns and opens herself up to admitting more people to her circle (or admitting that they’re actually in her circle and she does care about them). 

Zoya’s secondary was harder for me to pick. She’s definitely an improvisational secondary. We never see her making plans or being worried about being prepared, she just goes into dangerous situations and things work out for her. Snake Secondary in neutral state is possible. For the most part, she’s not particularly chargey for most of the original trilogy and could be a Snake that just doesn’t care. But she treats Nikolai’s Snake Secondary Model with awe and is, I think, too genuinely impressed by it to be a Snake Secondary herself. Lion Secondary makes more sense given that she’s a natural leader who inspires others more than makes herself likeable. The ending of Rule of Wolves also makes me lean towards Lion, since it’s her running headfirst to save Nina without any plan of attack and she doesn’t try to work her away around the situation like a Snake. She just runs straight into danger. 

Genya Safin, who wants nothing more than to belong, is a Badger Primary searching for a community. It’s why she stays loyal to the Darkling even after he destroys Novokribirsk, because he gave her a community and sense of belonging, and she believes these things are reliant on her loyalty and service to him. For her secondary, probably Badger too. Like the Darkling, she falls into the trap of believing her own manipulations and actually becomes friends with Alina. Also, the fact she spent years working on her tailoring skills seems like a Badger to me. 

David Kostyck, the quintessential inventor, has a glaring Bird Secondary. He’s the one who comes up with inventions, like the discs and the portable light, and is more comfortable in his lab than in the field. As for his primary, I think he might also be a Bird. He’s not a loyalist. If he was a Snake Primary then he probably wouldn’t have turned on the Darkling after Novokribirsk because Genya was still with him. He could be a Badger Primary who turned because of the massacre. But I think he’s a Bird Primary. He desires knowledge, not for the sake of power but purely because he wants to understand things. He strikes me as having a very decided morality. Merzost is bad because that’s a core Grisha teaching that he has adopted in his own system. 

Tolya and Tamar are harder to sort because they get less screen time. Tolya’s probably  double Lion, considering his concern with being honourable and his qualms with morally dubious actions. Also, his faith seems to me to be very felt and that is more Lion Primary. Considering his main role is as the muscle, definitely Lion Secondary. Tamar, who is totally okay with the morally dubious actions her brother abhors and, as of the Nikolai Duology, is in charge of spying is probably a Snake Secondary. Her motivations are less clear. Could be that she’s a Snake Primary who based her loyalties first of Alina then on Nikolai. She seems to be more attached to individuals than to any cause or country. 

In summary: 

Alina: Lion Primary/Lion Secondary

Mal: Snake Primary/Badger Secondary, Lion Secondary Performance

Nikolai: Snake Primary/Bird Secondary, Snake Secondary Model

The Darkling: Badger Primary/Badger Secondary, Snake Secondary Model

Zoya: Snake Primary/Lion Secondary

Genya: Badger Primary/Badger Secondary

David: Bird Primary/Bird Secondary

Tolya: Lion Secondary/Lion Secondary

Tamar: Snake Primary/Snake Secondary

[strangevoyages]

Your advice was super encouraging, because I'm terrified of rejection and each time submitting a story has been nerve-wracking. Do you have any tips for people to "beat the slush pile"?

Hi there, sorry for answering this so late! I do indeed have some tips for beating the slush pile!

Keep in mind, though, that I was an editor at a literary publication that published short stories and poetry, so my advice might differ slightly if you’re thinking of submitting a novel. Here are some of the things I learned during my time reading through the literal slush pile:

1) Follow the publication’s guidelines to the letter. If they say they want 12 point, Times New Roman font, double-spaced, do that. If they say they want no more than 5,000 words or 20 pages, definitely do not risk sending in 21. Do not try to make your manuscript stand out by choosing a different font than what is asked for; do not trust that the strength of your writing will break through the rules in place and they’ll just have to publish your manuscript once it’s caught their eye! We read hundreds of manuscripts in a day, and the ones that didn’t bother to follow our guidelines, we threw away. If you can’t be bothered to follow what’s asked of you, the publisher can’t be bothered to read your manuscript.

2) Write a very short, appealing, and interesting cover letter. For novels, cover letters are the “intro” or blurb to every submitted manuscript that tells the person reading it what they should expect--the back of the book blurb for the project, essentially. It’s a way to grab a prospective editor’s attention and make them sit up in their seat. Cover letters are a staple of the industry and should accompany every submission, unless the publication specifically asks otherwise. 

For short stories, cover letters should be incredibly short (to match the medium), and should give the editor an insight into who you are and how that influenced the story you’re submitting, if applicable. Cover letters are a way to put “a face to the name” and create a more personable connection between you and the editor. You should put any and all credentials you have (awards you’ve won, previous published works, etc.) without being braggy, and it’s best if you somehow tie your description of yourself into your introduction of the story. The best cover letters I’ve read have gone something like:

“I am a roboticist who teaches engineering at Tulane University. To The Moon was inspired by my experiences building an AI companion last year, and the humor and wistfulness involved in becoming a parent to a robot. My works (mostly science fiction) have been published in places such as Glimmer Train and the Boston Review. I have been a long-time reader of [Publication Name] and I hope To The Moon can find a home in its pages. Thank you for taking the time to review my submission, and I very much hope to hear back from you.”

Sometimes it can help if you make a very brief connection in showing that you do read the publication you’re submitting to (no more than a sentence). Naming specific editors, stories or authors from previous editions, and et cetera can all help your case: it shows that you’re not just blindly spamming your work out to any and all publications and it usually makes editors pay attention more. But being sycophantic can also be obvious; no “It would be the greatest honor in entire my life to have my story published by such a prestigious, world-renowned journal!” Once we got a letter saying they’d name their firstborn child after our magazine if we published their work, which was funny, but not that effective in getting it published. 

In all cases, your cover letter should be interesting, snappy, succinct, and memorable. For novels, it should describe your story in an intriguing way, without hyperbole and exaggeration (do not write “To the Moon has been called the greatest story of all time and is said to rival War and Peace in its brilliance” or anything like that). You can look up examples of good cover letters online or even look at the backs of your favorite books for more help with that!

3) Don’t try to be cute. Be professional when submitting your work. Do not write anything like “I love ice cream and gerbils!” in your cover letter. Do not put a picture of a gorilla as your cover photo (in fact, don’t include a cover photo at all). Do not be cheeky or self-effacing and say “Most people think I’m on cocaine when they read my work. I look forward to hearing what you think!” Yes, I did receive every single one of these cover letters in real life. They are really funny and brightened my day, but boy did I get sick of seeing that gorilla. 

4) Write the strongest first page possible. I made it a policy to read through every submission I got my hands on, but many of my coworkers (and much of the industry) has a “one-page” policy. If you do not grab their attention within the first page (or first three pages, or first five for some people), it goes in the reject pile or back into the slush pile. It might sound harsh (we got into a lot of arguments over this), but that’s how it works: you have a lot of competition, and many stories have incredible openers. If you want to make it out of the slush pile, you have to start out strong and capture an editor’s interest right away. So have the most polished and engaging opening you can! Of course, we’ll notice if quality steeply drops after the first page, but this is my most important advice to writers seeking publication. No cliche first lines: “It was a dark and stormy night...” “It was that smile. That damned smile...” “But it was all a dream...” Punch the editor in the face with your opening!

5) Check for typos. This one is obvious, but if your manuscript has more than one typo, the editor’s going to lose faith in you, fast. (If your typo is within the first lines of your story, good luck.) Your manuscript should be impeccable when you send it in, and editors don’t tend to be all that forgiving when there are many other relentlessly-combed-through manuscripts waiting to take your place. If you have typos in your story, it implies that you didn’t care all that much about its submission, so the editors take that as a sign that they shouldn’t care all that much, either.

If any of this sounds scary or intimidating, I assure you it’s not: I actually think sending in stories for submission is a fun process if you don’t take rejection personally (I have been rejected from places more times than I can count! It’s just part of the business!). But following these simple tips will give you a big boost over the majority of submissions most editing teams see. Good luck and I hope this helps!

[ohgodmyeyes]

hi! I was curious as to what are both your fav and least fav versions of anakin? (like aotc, rots, old force ghost, clone wars, etc)

This is such an exciting question, but I'll try to be succinct instead of long-winded and boring. (My stories are already there for that.) Here's a quick rundown of a few different Anakins, from my most treasured to the one (and only one) I tend to side-eye: 

ROTJ Anakin / Force Ghost Anakin - I'm grouping these guys together, because I love them all for the same reason, and that reason is that they DID it. ROTJ Anakin is the Anakin who finds himself again; who takes responsibility for his family, and a huge step toward atoning for the things he's done. He spends ROTJ slowly changing; we see it in how he regards the Emperor, and the way he regards Luke. The closest thing he’s ever going to do to getting his wife back, realistically, is saving his son and finally openly defying Palpatine. It doesn’t matter that anyone else knows Vader has been rescued from himself, or that he was really a good man all along. Luke knows, and that’s enough; it’s part of why their relationship is so special to me. Luke is the only living person who says a proper goodbye to Anakin: He knew all along that it was worth it to try to know him. That’s beautiful.

His journey isn't finished at this stage, exactly, but his he's in a better place than he's ever been, and I love him for it. He's hope personified, even for the very worst of us.

As an aside— physicality isn't a barrier to any of this; I love him all busted up and dying, I love him as a fully-healed Sebastian Shaw, and as a pretty, young Hayden Christensen.

Padawan Anakin / AOTC Anakin / Jedi Quest Anakin - In second place is a much younger iteration of him— a sad, lonely kid who's easily excitable, and dangerous, somehow, without being at all frightening. He's a mixed-up kid who's had a less-than-ideal upbringing, bound to an ancient prophecy no one knows enough about. He cries out constantly to be held and loved; he's got his heart in his hand, and he's always ready to give it away to the next person who shows him kindness— or who even just needs him. 

He's still so compassionate and well-intentioned at this point in his life, even when it doesn't benefit him. He can be petty and sensitive, although anyone would be, if they had to bear the kind of weight Anakin carries on his own shoulders at that age. His emotions sometimes run amok, but his heart is still so good... and more importantly than that, he knows it. He still has hope, for himself and for others, despite the overwhelming sense of 'otherness' he tends to feel. That's what sets him apart from Vader for me, even though I think AOTC Ani resembles the ultimate, 'suited' Darth Vader a lot more than the Anakin we meet at the beginning of ROTS. 

Plus— although this is fairly irrelevant— AOTC Anakin happens to be Anakin at peak hotness. No damn wig is going to change that, nor is the sad fact of my own rapidly-advancing age. :) 

Little Kid Anakin / TPM Anakin - The sweet baby version of Anakin comes in next for me. The altruism he struggles to hang onto until he finally falls is front-and-centre at this stage. He's tough by necessity (obviously, he's a fucking slave), but he isn't jaded yet— largely owing to his mother. Even when he loses Qui-Gon and gets to the Temple and struggles to integrate, his heart just stays enormous. God knows what he's already been through, but he never stops trying, and there's nothing fake about his confidence at this stage in his life. I love that; I think we could all stand to be a bit more like nine-year-old Anakin Skywalker.

There's an Anakin & Reader story on ao3 by @itohan called 'Kuebiko', and it's a beautiful depiction of what it might be like to be a caregiver for a very young Anakin. It's headed for some pretty sad places, to be sure, but there's a lot of sweetness and lovely (sometimes chilling) little insights into his character that I don't otherwise get to see very often. Anyone else with a soft spot for child Ani should go and read it.

'Classic' Vader, between the end of ROTS and the end of ANH - This is an enormous chunk of time, but again, I think it's more helpful than not if I just group these iterations of him together, at least for the purpose of compiling this list. It's horrific and tragic and a devastating waste of potential, but Anakin really does spend a huge amount of time mired in a thick, dark cloud of grief and anger. He convinces himself of a lot of stupid shit during this period in his life: 'Anakin is dead, I'm fulfilling my destiny, I can get Padmé back, she'd love all this ORDER I'm bringing, blah blah blah'. Every ounce of his extraordinary control is purely surface-level; he's a raging wildfire inside for a longer period of time than I think nearly anyone else could realistically sustain (as in, Kylo Ren was always going to die at 30, and I'm surprised I didn't, too lol).

He's empowered by his shitstain of a 'Master' to hurt and kill people against everything that once made him who he was, and no one can know he suffers for it (or for the loss of his wife, or the family he wishes he could have raised with her). No one can know anything about him; he's a man playing a part who can't ever take off his costume. Everything hurts him, and the only places he can turn to for comfort are the battlefield, and the inside of his own head. He has profound disabilities of every imaginable nature, and receives no more than the most cursory physical maintenance to remedy them. He escapes into his missions, but every one of those is a slight against his own better nature. His personal pursuits don't benefit him either; for basically twenty years of his life, he's living in an emotional storm— it ebbs and flows, but it never lets up, and his entire existence is set up specifically to reward the most despicable of his behaviour.

He doesn't make very many genuine emotional breakthroughs, because he's not allowed— just tricked and lied to and manipulated and taken advantage of, even when he's the one ostensibly in 'control'. His life only starts again when Luke comes into it; again, one more reason their connection is so special to me.

I'm going to go ahead and recommend another Anakin/Reader story by a different author; it's called 'mrfiveohone' by DarthDoritos, and it's on ao3. It's a brilliant exploration of what a strange, budding relationship with a youngish Vader might look like, and just an overall beautiful portrait of escalating intimacy on top of that. Another one I would highly recommend (completion status notwithstanding) is called 'Afterimage', and it is by garnettrees, also on ao3. It's a very dark Vaderdala story that gets right inside Anakin's head in the most wonderful ways. He never stops loving Padmé, and in that, he never truly stops being who he is. 

This is the Vader I (admittedly somewhat dramatically) see the most of myself in. It puts us at-odds sometimes, but my urge to get up underneath that mask and make him feel worthy of his own name is insurmountable. I love him because if I didn't, I'd be in trouble. 

Which brings us to TCW Anakin… who is, perhaps, the only version of Anakin I can honestly say I don't care for. Which is fine, because the show itself really isn't my kind of thing. Suffice to say, that particular depiction of him departs so dramatically from any of the other ones I've known (or listed here) that I just can't get into it, no matter how hard I try. 

I'm going to end this with a shout-out to Lego Anakin! I've never seen a shitty version of Lego Anakin, whether in a cartoon or on my desk at home. :)

Thank you for asking, anon. That was fun to write out!

[xcrystalzero]

Hello! I’d love to request a romantic matchup, as I’m an absolute sucker for those. Pls take your with this, and drink some water!

So first of, I’m 18 and het female. Appearance wise I’m a tiny (on a good day) 5’1 with, as of rn, pastel purple hair—I change my hair colour frequently. I have quite the defined hourglass shape, which I lowkey hate because finding clothes is a nightmare... the only feature I really like apart from that are my freckles. Besides that, I love fashion, and i spend quite some time on trying out new hairstyles and clothing combinations. So yeah that’s it appearance-wise.

Personality:

To be succinct, I’m an ENTP-T (HI KIN). I’m usually quite determined, stubborn, blunt, rational, and quick witted, but I try to be softer and more careful with my words around the people I love. My main quality is really just my galaxy brain (yay me, intelligence saves me from being a complete arsehole), although I always try my best to help the people around me (which can sometimes become overbearing, I’m sure). I have random periods where I just... succumb to being a crackhead. I’m not the biggest fan of always being serious, so I want to let loose sometimes. Tho one big issue I have, is that social cues and emotions are just really not my area of expertise. I have absolutely no idea how to act in most situations, and while it’s gotten better (i was unbearable to be around when I was younger) I’m vvv awkward and can easily be rude (accidentally... sometimes at least) djdjdjieks. Also, I’m such an annoying smartass, I’m sorry to everyone.

Hobbies and Interests/Dislikes:

For hobbies, I have too many in true ENTP fashion. Although, I mainly focus on dancing, writing, and... is hanging out with friends a hobby??? Idk, but I love spending time with my loved ones. I also quite like baking and I’m a huge simp for Shakespeare—well, his works that is, and for general English literature. I also love gaming, history, and debate. Another important thing for me is topics like feminism, gender equality and all that good stuff. I’m not really an activist (too much stuff on my hands I guess?) but I’m very passionate about these topics—and easily get into arguments about it. Dislikes—well, the usual ones like unnecessary hate and stuff like that, but specifically, I absolutely abhor when someone judges and condemns someone else—who hasn’t done anything against them—without even knowing their story. Also, ignorance is annoying af.

Some other stuff uwu:

For preferred traits in a partner: First of, my love language is Quality Time (we don’t need a big adventure or anything) and Acts of Service. I’m vvv averse to physical touch in a romantic sense and I need my s/o to respect the fact that it’d take me a long long time to get used to him initiating smth. Trauma tingz... I know it unfair tho, as some people just need that, so I try to compromise as much as possible. Communication is super important to me. Keeping your secrets are alright, and if you’re shy or anything that’s also cool, but if I seriously ask you about smth, I’d rather you wouldn’t lie just to spare my feelings. Also, I need someone who isn’t afraid to voice their opinion if it differs my own. I’m quite into debating—over any topic, really. Thus, I might come off as rudely argumentative (which I guess I am), but it’s mostly just a matter of enjoying the mental thrill and wanting someone to consider my perspective/explain their perspective to me. Patience is another trait I really need in someone. I have ADHD, so even if I try my best to listen, I might have to ask if you could repeat whatever you just said. Also the bouts of random forgetting, my occasional impatience... yeah, adhd things. Beyond that, I believe that if you truly love someone, you can grow with them and work around any negativity.

Can’t really think of anything else rn. Thank you for doing this 💜💜💜 take care and drink some water

Hiiii! Omg I'm ENTP/INTP -T too! We chaotic as fuck. Anywayyy, here we go!

I match you with ... Zhongli!

- Ah yes, Geo Daddy himself.

- I think that Zhongli is one of those people who highly value intelligence. He's been around for a while now and seen a lot of things. Obviously, he knows that most people can't begin to approach the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over time. That's why meeting you is a pleasant surprise.

- He's an incredibly patient and supportive person so he'll have no problem entertaining your crazy ENTP ideas or any of the things that come out of crackhead hours.

- He'd like the interest you have in fashion. There's something charming about the way humans like to accessorize and change up their appearance and you do a good job of it.

- It's a good thing you like history because this guy will 100% go on long tangents about the history of the land. If you try to correct him on something, he might try to fight you. The best part is that he doesn't even realize he's doing it, he just doesn't see how he could be wrong about something like that when he's been around to see it all. Have fun with those debates... Thankfully, he doesn't mind your argumentative nature and tends to deal with it pretty calmly which just calms your down too.

- Imagine though, dates where you guys burst into old libraries or bookstores. You had just disagreed on a certain technicality of Liyue's history at sea and you are determined to be right this time. The two of you spend hours scanning over books and asking the various historians always conversing around the restaurants and at the wharf. You guys actually end up kind of attracting a bit of attention, since people find it cute that you're trying to outsmart THE Zhongli. Plot twist...

"See! I told you it was 254 years ago! You were thinking of something else!" You raise the parchment you have been pouring over for the past few minutes triumphantly over your head before presenting it to Zhongli.

The man in question takes the paper, scanning it quickly before looking back to you. "Hm, I suppose you are correct."

"I win!" Your smug little smile is full of pride as you place your hands on your hips. Perhaps to others, losing such an argument would be disagreeable but Zhongli finds it adorable more than anything else.

"Yes you do my love. Yes you do..."

- His love language is quality time too! You guys spend a lot of time just wandering around Liyue Harbor together, literally just chilling or sipping tea on the veranda, enjoying each other's company.

- Basically you have one of those relationships where you can be both very active and very chill together.

Alright there we go! I swapped out my coffee for water just for you :). Hope you enjoyed!