#but to me it seems more like an acknowledgement that terry's got a serious set of stones on him

[arttheclown]

gonna be thinking about this interaction for a while

[dramaticviolincrescendo]

Okay, what are your thoughts on Ian's relationships? With his family, his boyfriends, and Mandy (since I think that's the only friend he's had)

Oh, no. Ohhhhhhhh, no. Now you’ve done it. You’ve asked about my dear, darling favorite character on the show. My love for one Ian Gallagher runs deep, which means this answer is going to run super long. The good, the bad, and everything in between—Ian Gallagher lives rent free in my brain and always will. I derive so much satisfaction from seeing Ian interact with other people, in whatever capacity that might be. I admire and aspire to the compassion he has shown for others over the years, even and perhaps most especially those who arguably haven’t earned it. He tries so hard to be good to people, and seeing their love for him manifest when he’s reached such lows where he can’t even fathom why the love of his life would want to be with him forever? That’s powerful.

So, yeah. I said I could write essays on these characters, and that’s exactly what you’re about to get: five hours and 6k words’ worth of my thoughts. (I am so sorry. There will be text walls.)

Let’s dive into Ian’s many and multifaceted relationships—his family, his friends, and his romantic pursuits.

Ian and Family

Ian told us where he stood on this in the very first season, and it set the standard for his character for eleven years to come. Faced with a prospect that others in his position could only dream of—not being Frank’s son and having a wealthy father with a functional, prosperous lifestyle mere miles away—Ian refused to buy into it. He refused to do what might have been objectively better for his future by seeking a relationship with Clayton. In that household, he would have had access to a better public school, more financial resources, a tutor to help him where he was struggling, and less urgency for him to work so that he could enjoy being a kid. When he got sick, he would have had access to better healthcare, too. Perhaps he would have had a better shot at West Point from that background than he did at home. But that’s just it: home was with his family, and he was very clear that they didn’t live in that nice house. All he wanted—all he wanted—was to be with his brothers and sisters. He has never referred to them as only half-siblings or half-cousins; he has never even used the words, “you’re not my dad,” on Frank. That’s his family, the people he loves most in the world, and he’s always been at his best when he’s with them and at his worst when he’s not. Let’s look at each of them:

1.      Frank: It is so striking to me that Ian doesn’t appear to hold the outright contempt for Frank that Fiona, Lip, and Debbie have exhibited at different points over the years. Aside from the handful of instances where they’ve gotten into physical altercations (which Frank always initiated) and kicking him out of the house on occasion, Ian is simply indifferent to him. But there are these moments, these brief glimmers of mutual attachment and loyalty, if those are the right words. In the scene where Ian famously doesn’t count to three before using the pepper spray on him, Frank starts saying how his New Gallaghers weren’t his real kids—that Ian is his real son, and Frank is his real father. It’s a passing thought uttered while trying to manipulate his way into the house that neither of them think much of, nor does the audience…until you remember that biologically, Frank isn’t his father, and he certainly hasn’t behaved like one either. Ian has more right than anyone to comment on that, but he doesn’t because Frank is his father. He’s the father that Ian idly hoped wouldn’t come to his wedding yet sat joking about with Debbie rather than getting pissed off that he was making out with some lady in front of everyone. He’s the father who sat at the table with them eating breakfast in 11x03 and claimed Mickey was the man in their relationship without Ian saying a word to him about it, and who Ian saw no issue with taking Franny to school when no one else could. In s4, as far removed from his family as he’d been for a while, Ian still went straight to the hospital when he heard that Frank was at death’s door. We focus so much on his attitude towards Monica because of how obvious it was that we frequently miss these tiny moments and their implications. It would take an awful lot of patience, compassion, and love not to write Frank off completely after all he’s done. Not necessarily our standard definition of love between a son and his father, perhaps, but a loving soul.

2.      Monica: I have actually written a pretty lengthy post about his relationship with her because while their shared mental illness definitely plays a role in his feelings toward her, that grew complicated far earlier than his diagnosis. The first time we meet her, we see that he has a visceral reaction to news of her presence. He runs. When Ian can’t process strong emotions, that’s what he’s done in the past. I happened upon an interview Cameron did just after the end of s1 where he mentioned something I had already been thinking: Ian’s age when Monica left is extremely important. He was a kid in s1, but one who could roll with the punches, sometimes literally. She left them two years before that. Ian would have been in middle school, roughly as old as Debbie was when she still called Frank “daddy” and forgave him for everything he did. It’s an awkward age that once again set Ian in something of a danger zone—too old to accept an excuse or no explanation at all, but not old enough to process the situation in a healthy way. And then she’s back all of a sudden with no warning. Ian doesn’t cry like Debbie, and he doesn’t typically get explosively angry like Fiona. He can’t deal, so he runs. He hangs back. He only speaks when he has to and compartmentalizes: Monica wants to take Liam, and they need to stop her. It doesn’t have to be about her leaving. They have a goal—he can focus on that. And then she’s back a year later, saying she’s here to stay while Fiona seems to take her at her word and Lip isn’t there to ground everyone. Ian tries so hard to behave like Lip would with his biting sarcasm and attempts to stay emotionally distant in a way that seemed pretty exaggerated for Ian, but he’s also dealing with a fresh wave of guilt over Mickey going to juvie—and Monica gets it. She’s the only person to acknowledge that he’s in pain and actively try to make it better. She’s the only one who really knows at the time, but that hardly matters. This poor kid, whose mother left him when he still needed her, has her standing in front of him and saying she’s sorry and listening when he speaks and taking him dancing—just the two of them. Embarrassing as it was and harmful as it could have been, she tried to facilitate his dreams when no one else wanted him to go into the military. She was there for him when he went AWOL. She came for him when he was arrested and even wanted to make a place for him in her new life, unrealistic as it was. This goes so much deeper than them both being bipolar. Ian’s comment about her parachuting into their lives in s7 wasn’t about Mickey or her role in them breaking up. He trusted her. He wanted her. He needed her. And she’d convinced him that she would be there—until she left. Over and over again. She was there for him and unintentionally took advantage of how desperately he still needed his mother. She made him keep loving her, and that’s both a blessing that has him crying into a voluminous man’s arms when she passes and a curse that wrecked him more than once.

3.      Fiona: The trust these two have for each other cannot be understated. Fiona has discussed things with Ian that she never brought up around any of the other kids throughout the entire series. In the pilot episode, she tells him about feeling needed and takes his opinion on the matter to heart. At the end of the season, he’s the one she talks to about the car because she can trust him to give her an answer even without speaking. In s2, she tells Lip that the two of them are her rocks, and we see that time and time again. That’s part of what makes their falling out over the church hit that much harder: it’s Ian and Fiona. The only time they’d been on the outs in any serious manner up to that point was when Ian was adjusting to his new reality and they were trying to find a balance between sister and caretaker. Otherwise, that bond of trust had never been severed—not until Ian literally sold himself only for it to amount to nothing in the end because she had no idea the lengths to which he’d gone to get that building. That damage gets mended, thankfully, but what a powerful period of time when those two were the only ones who’d never really been at each other’s throats. There is a downside to that trust, though. As I mentioned before, Ian was so responsible and put together when he was younger that Fiona didn’t think twice about his situation with Ned or that he ran away. Not even seventeen yet, and she was telling Debbie that she didn’t like his decision to leave but trusted him. That is one of the things I love about this show—even something like trust that we always prop up as an important factor in our relationships can betray us in the most unexpected ways.

4.      Lip: I won’t go into it here, but the relationship they share is something that means a lot to me on a personal level. It’s part of how I knew that Ian would become my favorite character pretty early on. The way he simultaneously admires and envies Lip, loves and is annoyed by him, relies on him and is desperate to pave his own path in the world—what a beautiful and accurate depiction of what it means to be a younger sibling. Lip is the first person to discover that he’s gay and openly accept him for it. (I think what he tried with Karen came from a well-meaning place even if it was horribly, horribly misguided.) Lip is the one who tries to get him into West Point, hate it as he does. He helps Ian when Terry is after him, takes care of him in the aftermath of the wedding when he realizes just how deeply Ian feels for Mickey, searches the whole damn city for him when he finds out that Ian is in trouble, gets him a job, leans on him in his own time of need… He’s not perfect. He slips up, just like Ian does. Some things break my heart, like Lip insisting that he’s earned his own space when his little brother is asking him for safe harbor or Ian thanking him for being his brother outside the prison. But they love each other so much, and I just… I can’t possibly put into words how much I love their dynamic.

5.      Debbie, Carl, and Liam: I’m grouping these three together because they’re further separated from Ian in age, so we see a lot of the same trends with them as a whole. Ian loves taking care of people. We know this. We also know that Fiona and Lip don’t typically want him taking care of them—they’re the ones who take care of him when he needs it, specifically Lip. With the younger three, however, Ian can be the Big Brother. He can shake his head in utter bafflement at Debbie’s obsession with holding her breath for two minutes, walk Carl through what he needs to go camping, and promise his baby brother postcards when he leaves. The difference here is that his relationship with them is so much less fraught with conflict. We don’t see him fight with Debbie, Carl, or Liam the way he has with Fiona or Lip. While Ian tends to be the voice of reason during conflicts overall, I think it’s also because he relies on his older siblings in a way that he doesn’t with his younger siblings, and the latter don’t tend to rely on him as much as Fiona or Lip as well. There’s a lack of tension in most of their interactions growing up because that pressure isn’t there. Perhaps this is where Ian’s age and standing in the family is a bit more beneficial: young enough to have people he can rely on while too young for anyone to really rely on him for more than his share of the squirrel fund.

Ian and Friends

I’ve seen it mentioned that Ian (and Mickey) not having more friends is bad or lazy writing. I tend to believe that that fails to take something into account that, admittedly, most of us don’t really have to think about: having friends is a luxury. It requires time and effort to cultivate friendships, especially lasting ones. As a kid, Ian spent a lot of his free time working or helping to manage one family crisis after another. Going AWOL, losing his health, struggling to acclimate to his illness, trying to find a new career path, spiraling into the Gay Jesus movement, going to prison, adjusting once again to normal life, getting married, a pandemic… I’m sure he’s had plenty of acquaintances over the years, but having a family to support and constant upheavals would have made it extremely difficult to really forge strong relationships with them. I think that’s part of what makes his relationship with Mandy so special and valuable to him: she’s sort of the same way.

When we met Mandy in s1, she had other friends. We saw her meet up with them and go shopping; she told Ian a story about how one was mad at her for not sharing her make-up. As the trauma in the Milkovich household reached its zenith for her in s2 and she started thinking seriously about getting out of there, we saw those friends fall by the wayside—all except Ian. He saw her and let her see him early on. That’s a level of trust and respect that nobody else in their neighborhood would have displayed, certainly not to her. But then there’s this guy who defended her against their creepy, perverted teacher and treated her like a human being, not an object. It’s no wonder she developed an obvious, unrequited crush and sought physical comfort from him occasionally. It’s no wonder she tried to repay the favor by giving Mickey a hard time in s3 and s4, misguided and rather uninformed as we know it was at the time. (It’s also no wonder that she went for the closest Gallagher to Ian, either, but that’s for another meta.)

And Ian… Ian is loyal to a fault. We have watched Ian cut out his own heart and let the blood drip down his arm to pool on the floor at his feet if it would make a damn bit of difference for the people he loves. Like Fiona and Lip, Mandy immediately accepted him for who he is and suggested an arrangement that would protect him as well as benefit her. That is enormous where they came from. To him, that had to feel like the ultimate sign of friendship: he could trust her with a part of him that he hadn’t even entrusted to most of his family yet. From that point on, she was on the List of People Ian Gallagher Would Do Anything For. Finding out about Terry and what had happened? He held a bake sale, of all things, to fundraise for her. Seeing that his brother—his best friend—was treating her like garbage? He put him in his place. Her boyfriend was beating her? He brought her home and made it his goal to find a safe place for her to stay, even if it ultimately didn’t work. She was going to move away from all of her meager support with that boyfriend? He didn’t just rally his own arguments—he brought in outside help with Lip, who he thought might tip the scales. It’s usually just a saying that true friends will help each other hide a body, but Ian literally tried to do that. Lucky for him, he has a good head on his shoulders and used it.

No, Ian doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends. We’ve seen that he has spheres of influence, if you will, and acquaintances that he can call upon when he needs them. (For example, the guys that helped with the preacher.) However, Ian has always struck me as a “quality over quantity” type of person. Being a soldier or an EMT isn’t lucrative, but they’re meaningful for someone who sees them as vehicles for helping people. Seeing more parts of the world than just Chicago has appealed to him in the past, but he seems perfectly content to carve out a spot for himself right here at home. Having only three best friends—Lip, Mandy, and Mickey—doesn’t seem like much of a hardship for him.

Ian and Romantic Pursuits

I hate to say that there were five, but from Ian’s perspective, there were. So, let’s talk about all five. Even though…there weren’t five. There was only one. We’ll save the best for last.

1.      Kash: The first of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. I hope it goes without saying that I hate this man with the passion of a thousand burning suns. I hate him so much. However, their interactions taught me a whole lot about how kind and compassionate Ian really is—and how naïve. Of course, he would believe that Kash loved him. The man was buying him all sorts of expensive gifts, and that’s what we see on all the commercials and in so many movies, isn’t it? Grand gestures of affection through expensive gifts. Poor as they were, Ian still scraped together the money to buy him baseball tickets and CDs, convinced as he was that that was all part of what you did in a relationship. That desire to do things like a “normal” married couple in s11? Yeah, that starts here. Ian has always been a planner, and he’s always bought into certain stereotypes. We can see that here. What we can also see is Ian’s compassionate, kind, loving soul. He cares so deeply for other people, even ones that he doesn’t know very well, especially if they are living in circumstances that mean something to him. (For example, the mentally ill woman they tried to help at work and the shelter kids whose situations were so similar to Mickey’s.) Kash being a closeted gay man living in misery with a wife he didn’t love and two children he never meant to have clearly tugged at Ian’s heartstrings. Even after everything that happens, even though Ian behaves as though they’re awkward exes who just happen to work together, he still covers for Kash. He gives him that head start and takes it upon himself to break the news to Linda that he’s gone. He defends Kash to Lip when the latter finally says exactly what we all know: he was a pedophile who deserved to rot in prison for what he did. As with Fiona’s trust, Ian’s loving soul, compassionate heart, and desire for love outside his siblings are virtues that have done him harm in the past. This is one such instance.

2.      Ned: The second of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. To be honest, I don’t believe that Ian would even characterize it that way. He seemed very aware that Ned was a distraction from his problems—from Mickey being in juvie, Monica falling into a depressive episode, the money in the squirrel fund being gone, Lip moving out, losing his shot at West Point, and getting denied for service due to his age. Again, though, Ian has always wanted to feel valued, and this rich dude was letting him stay in a fancy hotel room with anything he wanted readily available. This (disgusting predator) guy was giving him attention and a distraction with no strings attached. Then the complications roll in, and he’s once again faced with being the mistress to a closeted, married man. The difference here is that he’s not comfortable with it. He tries to tell Fiona twice, which is enormous for Ian when he has never been very good at communicating if it means burdening others with or even merely facing his own problems. But he tries to tell her. He rejects the GPS unit and tells Ned that he has a boyfriend, boxing him into a strictly sexual arrangement. (This, unfortunately, makes sense. It aligns with how Fiona viewed things: where Jimmy was concerned about it, she told him that it was “just sex.”) He is also visibly embarrassed to admit to Lip and Fiona what has been going on with Ned. By that point, Ian is a year and a half older and, while still scarred and warped in his views because of Kash, perhaps a bit wiser. Emotionally, he kept Ned at arm’s length most of the time. He used Ned not just as a distraction, but as a way to galvanize Mickey into taking their relationship a step forward. But Ian is still Ian, and Ian is compassionate to a fault. Ned played that card by asking if he could have a little understanding for a man whose life was falling apart. Sure, he can. He’s Ian, the Gallagher too empathetic for his own good at times. We know how that spirals out of control. It just goes to show that even when Ian was trying to maintain some emotional distance, his heart is simply too big and his perceptions too heavily impacted by the grooming he’d experienced with two different people by then, and so he [SPOILER ALERT] still feels enough of a connection to Ned after all these years to be mildly bothered that he passed away.

3.      Caleb: The third of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. Ian’s relationship with Caleb strikes me as being similar to what he had with Ned. While more age-appropriate, Ian was very much using Caleb, just as Caleb was using him. That’s why it was so easy for both of them to walk away. Ian was in a difficult spot when they met. He was grateful to the firefighters who saved his life, but he had also just saved someone else at a moment when he was perhaps at his absolute lowest. That’s what he’s always wanted, isn’t it—to be a bit of a hero and help people? So, he’s understandably drawn there, first out of gratitude and then to be surrounded by very attractive gay firemen who helped people, saved his life, and invited him to be part of a function they were holding. But he made himself pretty clear from the start: he was interested in sex with Caleb. That was the draw. He still hasn’t come to terms with being bipolar and losing Mickey, but Ian has never not been with anyone for any extended length of time. That’s just who he is: he’s always sought some level of outward validation—from the army, Kash, Monica, Mickey, and so many others. We’re seeing him struggle with that now as he deals with the opportunities available to him as a mentally ill ex-con felon. So, he pursues Caleb as a distraction just like he did with Ned, only Caleb is a predator in his own right and can smell that his interest is coming from a place of weakness. He immediately (and initially unintentionally) preys on Ian’s desperate need for structure and order by insisting on a traditional date where Ian is very much out of his element and even goes so far as to instruct Ian on how to be intimate. It’s no wonder he mentions Mickey in these moments, as Mickey never wanted him to change, and Ian leans heavily (even slightly hyperbolically) into the fact that Mickey wasn’t a paragon of order and stability like Caleb outwardly appears. 

And I think why Ian puts up with it so long—being taught like a child, being used to upset Caleb’s parents, being paraded in front of his friends to make them jealous—is because he was getting something out of it too, just like with Ned. A stable place to live when their home ownership was in flux, a place away from his family when they weren’t providing the support he needed as he adjusted to his disorder, someone who validated his desires to help people regardless of their ulterior motives, and a physical distraction from his own problems. All of these parallel his relationship with Ned very closely. It was never going to last, of course. Ian is a strong person who temporarily forgot how strong he was because he forgot who he was, and Caleb didn’t want to be cared for—he wanted a project, like all of his sculptures. Being a project, being something that others see as needing to be fixed? That’s a hard no for Ian. It always has been. There’s a moment I love later in their relationship where Caleb tells him to turn off the lights when he goes out and lightly reprimands him for leaving one on the day prior. Ian is in a better place at that point, having regained a lot of his sense of self, and stares after him with indignation at being treated like a kid. He’s then lied to and cheated on, but I think that to mention those things to Caleb when they break up is to admit weakness on his own part—that he stuck with Caleb knowing that he was being mistreated, and Ian is not one to be called a victim. So, while we know from his discussions with Lip and Sue that the cheating and distrust bothered him most, he merely focused on Caleb lying about his sexuality, which removed a lot of the emotion from the situation—just like he did with Ned. It ultimately turned out to be a bad move since Caleb, being a skilled predator, made him question even his own sexuality in return, but we’re starting to see that Ian isn’t here to be someone’s toy anymore. Not an older, married man like Ned, but definitely not anyone his age either. I’m glad this pseudo-relationship happened because it showed Ian how strong he really was and that he could be in control of his own life. Sure, it destabilized him a little in the aftermath, but he worked through it. He leaned on his family, specifically Lip, who has always been his rock without the blurred lines that Fiona represented between sister/mother-figure/caretaker. Caleb is a garbage person, but Ian was the one who pulled the treasure from the trash, not him.

4.      Trevor: The fourth of Ian’s perceived romantic pursuits that really wasn’t. Trevor is perhaps the first relationship where we don’t see Ian dive in. Whether that’s because of his confusion over Trevor’s gender identity or the fact that he was really beginning to fully mature as an adult by that point (ostensibly finishing his education, getting a career, being fully self-sufficient, etc.), he tried to take his time and not jump right in. They hung out, talked around the neighborhood, and yes, engaged in some casual intimacy at the club. Again, Ian might not be in a full relationship, but he’s never without someone for long. At that point in the series, all he was missing was a relationship when it comes to traditional, “normal” goals for people to have. But Trevor posed a situation he’s never been in before since, while gay himself, Ian has never been very interested in activism or engaging in the LGBT community. It’s just not in his culture or environment, so to be faced with someone he’s interested in that challenges a lot of his views of gender and sexuality is something he takes his time with. Unfortunately, Trevor is younger than him and not quite as mature, not quite as experienced. He tells Ian he has plenty of friends and doesn’t need another, which is an ultimatum that has never really sat very well with me personally because I’m generally of the mind that if a person needs time and you really care for them, you’ll let them have that time. I’m not unsympathetic to Trevor: he’s been burned before and has his own trauma stemming from responses to his identity, so it makes complete sense for him not to be patient in this regard. He shouldn’t have to be—but then, Ian shouldn’t have to rush into anything he’s not 100% certain he wants either. That’s exactly what he does, though, because Ian does for others without thinking of the implications for himself a lot of the time. They make great friends, but they don’t make great partners. Trevor treats Ian similarly to Caleb in that he’s a bit of a project. Trevor educates him on the LGBT community and incorporates him into his ventures for the shelter without ever really showing much interest in Ian’s life or family, which suits Ian just fine because for as interested as he is in helping with the shelter and as attracted to Trevor as he is, he seems to know they’re not compatible. Ian, who has been having sex since he was far too young, takes a step back from it when they run into compatibility issues. (And pushes back on the pressure to bottom with some of his own—neither of them were in the right on that.) He doesn’t ask much about Trevor’s family or try to be part of his personal life. They sort of embody the “friends with benefits” stereotype: they hang out, they have sex, and that’s really all there is to their relationship. 

The reason Ian doubles down on trying to make it work isn’t because there was a future for them before Mickey broke out. It’s because he thinks he’s lost Mickey forever, he knows he’s lost Monica forever, and he’s not going to get the support he needs from his family when they couldn’t stand Monica and Fiona told him what he already knew to be true, namely that Mickey being an escaped convict would destroy everything Ian worked so hard for if he got involved. So, he does what Ian does. He needs that distraction—he needs to run from these strong emotions he can’t process, so he bottles them up and unfairly hopes that Trevor will provide some of that comfort after cheating on him with Mickey. (Had Mickey been released, I think they would have broken up. Instead, that was the first match Ian lit, but certainly not the last.) Now, the thing is, Trevor said at the start that he didn’t want to be Ian’s friend. He’s also younger and less mature in a relationship, which means he threw the concept of love out there prematurely, just like Ian thought what he had with Kash was love. The death throes of their relationship were a back and forth where Ian was spiraling and seeking comfort, and Trevor was providing some while keeping their relationship pretty amorphous. (Were they exes? Were they friends? Were they people who shared interests and danced around each other? Were they going to get back together? They never officially broke up—it fizzled and resurged, then fizzled for good.) Ultimately, whatever it was that they had couldn’t survive Mickey, Monica, or Gay Jesus. Trevor wasn’t prepared to deal with a full-blown manic episode, and based on his hands-off approach with involving himself in Ian’s life even before the Mickey-shaped bomb got dropped on them, it doesn’t seem like he really wanted to anyway. He did what he’s always done: prioritized his shelter, which I’m not deriding in the slightest. By that point, Ian was too far gone to care that he disappeared anyway. Had the situation been different and he was getting the support from his family that he needed, it doesn’t seem like he would have cared much there either.

5.      Mickey: Finally. Only took over five thousand words to get here. I’ll preface this with something that anyone who knows me from other fandoms is already well aware of, namely that I don’t do romance. Ever. Never been interested. The relationships I’ve always been most passionately interested in are platonic ones, especially “found families” and siblings, which is probably obvious from the other five thousand words here. Ian and Mickey are the first relationship I’ve actively shipped or written for in a fandom. They’re the first I’ve been invested in to this extent. As such, one of the biggest pet peeves I had when I first joined this fandom was the saying, “Ian fell first, Mickey fell harder.” These two wonderful dumbasses face planted on the concrete in front of the Kash and Grab in s1 and never recovered. I could go on forever about these two, but that particular wall of text would probably be too daunting for even the most avid Gallavich stan to traverse, so I’ll keep it fairly brief. As we can see above, Ian has a very strict sense of what he “should” want in a partner. Someone who is moderately successful in their chosen field, makes enough money to at least live comfortably, and typically does something that helps other people (a doctor, a fireman, a youth counselor). These aren’t passionate people. They’re not men who operate on instinct the way most of the people in his life have always had to by virtue of their social standing. They have life goals and opportunities that he envies, and Ian has a great deal of compassion for them when they hit a roadblock or things don’t work out. The amazing dichotomy of Ian Gallagher is that he straddles a line most people can’t between the rough neighborhood that has instilled in him all of his values/behaviors and the middle-class mentality of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and aspiring to more. Ian has always aimed for what Lip said wasn’t possible for poor people: being successful without having to scam or steal. But as I said way back at the beginning of this manifesto, the South Side is his home. His family is his family. And none of the people he’s been with personify the South Side quite like Mickey—they don’t personify home like Mickey. 

And I think that’s where the initial draw for Ian is. (I’m going to focus on Ian’s side since he’s who your question focused on.) The other guys look great on paper, and Ian’s brain says that that’s what he should aim for. We know better, though. We know that Ian has an enormous heart that belongs first and foremost to his family and their home. His heart says that this person—this dirty, rude, mean, violent person—is home. His heart says this person is everything about himself that he denies having, just like Ian was everything about Mickey that the latter declined to openly acknowledge for so long. I don’t like relationships built on “making each other better.” I really don’t. The wonderful thing about this is that it’s never been that way. Ian didn’t change Mickey. He’s exactly who he’s always been, but he’s grown past the fear of his own emotions and Terry’s response to them. He’s still a thief, a con artist, violent, and rude. Mickey didn’t change Ian either. He’s still rigidly conforming to certain stereotypes of what he thinks he should want, seeking structure (to his own detriment at times), and not a great communicator. The point for them is that they complement each other, not that they make the other a better person—not even that they bring something out of each other that wasn’t already there. That’s what Ian’s other relationships did. They made him shave off his edges so that he could fit a square peg into a round hole, and that’s not happiness. It’s simply what he thought he was supposed to do—what “normal” people did. 

With Mickey, he doesn’t have to worry so much about what is normal or acceptable. He doesn’t have to worry about whether or not his life is objectively “on track,” not until fairly recently. Mickey is the only person he’s ever been with who has accepted him for who he is, faults and strengths alike, without the underlying insinuation that he should be aiming for something else or pretending to be whatever the other person needs him to be in order to care for them. Kash needed an escape—Ian provided it. Ned needed a very specific brand of toy—Ian played that role. Caleb needed a project to feel fulfilled—Ian went along with it for a bit. Trevor needed someone who accepted him as he was but did things his way—Ian did that. To care for Mickey has only ever meant being himself because all Mickey ever really needed was him. Mickey didn’t need an escape from his home—his relationship with his family is more complicated than that. Mickey didn’t need to be saved from his upbringing—it’s what made him the person Ian fell in love with and who he is happy to be. Mickey didn’t need someone to change who he is on a fundamental level because unless it is going to get him into trouble and separate them, Ian never wanted him to. (Even then, it’s about what he does, not who he is.) And yes, I’m sure that there’s a level of excitement that Ian finds exhilarating where Mickey is concerned, but I tend to believe it goes a lot deeper than that. What he finds exciting about Mickey is what Mickey embodies about the South Side—about home. About his own upbringing, but also Ian’s. About Frank and Monica, his siblings, school, work, ROTC—existing and surviving in an environment where it’s not guaranteed that you’ll have money to keep the heat on this winter or feed your family. They spent the early seasons living in a constant state of fight or flight. They couldn’t afford not to. And there’s excitement in that. Look at how many people say that the first seasons are their favorite! There hasn’t been a huge shift in the quality or direction of the writing, just the trajectory of the characters. They’ve gotten older, and their problems have been different. It’s not about survival so much of the time anymore, but those are the storylines that excite us. For Ian, that exhilaration in the constant battle of survival in their neighborhood is sewn into the fiber of his being just like it is Mickey’s. He saw his home in Mickey before they truly fell in love, and when that followed, Mickey became home.

In Conclusion

Ian has spent his entire life looking for the “right” path only to realize that it was laid before him: his family, his small circle of friends, and Mickey. I love that that is coming full circle this season, where [SPOILER ALERT] marriage has almost made him regress a bit to that place where there must be a right way of doing things going forward, and slowly but surely, we’re seeing him loosen up.

Good morning. It’s Ian Gallagher loving hours.

[hashtagleh]

This is What Would Be Considered a Morally Grey Area

read it on AO3

by HashtagLEH

“Will you please, kidnap me?” Warlock requested in the same tone of voice he had asked to go to the zoo the day before.

“Of course not, Warlock,” Aziraphale said immediately. “You are very safe here. The security is flawless.”

“Don’t lie to him!” Crowley hissed, clutching the boy closer to him as though it would make him forget the words the angel had just spoken. “Do you want the Prince of This World to remember you as a liar at the time of the Apocalypse?”

“Mommy and Daddy wouldn’t even care!” Warlock went on insistently, paying no heed to his nanny’s nonsense words. They made no sense, anyway.

“Of course they would, Warlock,” Crowley said immediately. “After they noticed you were gone, anyway.”

Words: 6152, Chapters: 1/1

Fandoms: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Good Omens (TV)

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Crowley & Warlock Dowling, Aziraphale & Warlock Dowling, Nanny Ashtoreth & Warlock Dowling, Warlock Dowling & Brother Francis, Warlock Dowling & Adam Young, Brian & Pepper & Wensleydale & Adam Young (Good Omens), Warlock Dowling & the Them (Good Omens)

Characters: Warlock Dowling, Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale (Good Omens), Harriet Dowling, Thaddeus J. Dowling, Adam Young (Good Omens), Mr. Young (Good Omens), Arthur Young

Additional Tags: Protective Crowley, Godparents Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Softie Crowley (Good Omens), Kidnapping, Surprise Adoption Really, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, semi-seriously anyway, Attempt at Humor, it came out more serious than I intended, Child Neglect, The Dowlings Are Terrible Parents, Aziraphale and Crowley Are Wonderful Parents, and kidnappers, they take their jobs very seriously, jobs as parents and as kidnappers, look Warlock literally begged for them to kidnap him, Crowley Can't Resist Puppy Eyes, Aziraphale Can't Resist Crowley, He Can Resist Anything, Anything Except Temptation, Matchmaker Warlock, He knows they love each other, JUST KISS ALREADY Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Not Canon Compliant, Dad Crowley (Good Omens), Dad Aziraphale (Good Omens), Humor, Nanny Crowley (Good Omens), Nanny Ashtoreth (Good Omens) - Freeform, Gardener Aziraphale (Good Omens)

Crowley knew that the brunch was important.

Or, at least he assumed that it was. It was what he tried convincing to himself, so that he didn’t have to think about the fact that Harriet Dowling was not one he would count as a good mother. Neither of the Dowlings were fit to be parents, to be completely truthful about it. And when he let himself think about those things, he wondered if maybe they had only had a child because it was the Expected thing to do.

And Crowley liked Warlock. He was curious, sometimes a brat – but then all kids were. It meant he was doing his job right, to see the boy acting normal like that.

But what Warlock needed were parents who actually cared about him, and wanted to be around him and play with him. He needed to know that his parents loved him.

He told himself it was because if Warlock didn’t feel loved by his parents then he would have no real desire to destroy the earth when he was eleven and reached his destiny, and definitely not because it hurt something in Crowley’s chest when the boy was crying about missing his mom or wishing his dad could come play catch with him in the garden.

Harriet had told her son the night before that they could go to the zoo that day, if he just went to sleep right then and stopped trying to bother her. (This was particularly tempting, because the gardener had done a marvelous job at instilling a love of animals into the child, and his favorite books were generally ones with lots of different types of animals. Even Harriet had caught on to her son’s love of them and gifted him a large children’s encyclopedia at his last birthday. Well, she’d told Nanny Ashtoreth to go purchase it, but it was the thought that counted. It was one of the boy’s most treasured items.) The five-year-old had immediately lit up, not detecting the absentminded tone with which his mother spoke and believing her words in a way that only a young child could.

When Warlock had gotten up that morning, staying in his room until eight o’ clock because those were the rules Harriet had set out that she wasn’t to see him before then on any day, he had run to his mother’s room with talk of visiting lions and giraffes and monkeys on his lips.

But when Harriet had appeared in the hallway before Warlock had even gotten there, the boy had stopped in his tracks at the sight of her in a pink sundress, heels, and pearls, and it had only taken him a moment to understand. Yes, he was naïve enough to have believed her the night before, but he wasn’t stupid. She was dressed much too nicely for the zoo, and the heels were a dead giveaway that she had no intention to be walking around that day, much less among animals and food carts and suburban dads with fanny packs who reeked of sunscreen.

To her credit, she noticed Warlock as she was walking down the hall, but that was where the credit stopped building up. Without stopping or bending down to be at Warlock’s level (as Nanny did when she spoke with him), she said, “Oh, I’m sorry, sweetie – I have to go to a brunch with some of Daddy’s friends and their wives. We’ll try for the zoo another time, okay?”

And then she had been off in a flurry of pink, not even acknowledging Nanny Ashtoreth, who was standing at the end of the hallway and had watched everything that had just occurred.

Warlock had stood in the hallway a moment, and Crowley braced himself for the rage, for the earthquakes or fires or something to show how upset the Antichrist was. There was nothing he could do to stop it, so he just hoped that he had been a good enough nanny that Warlock didn’t want to set his sights on the demon, or on the angel who had probably just gotten to mangling tending to the rose bushes.

But Warlock had turned around then, tears in his eyes, and Crowley began to crouch down to accept the hug it appeared the boy was going to need, but then he just ran past the demon and back to his room, slamming the door decisively behind him.

***

Crowley allowed Warlock exactly six hundred and sixty-six seconds to cry alone in his bedroom, because he knew that that number was important to his infernal father so it was probably important to the son as well, and it just seemed a perfect number to round off of. After that eleven minutes and six seconds was over however, he rapped lightly on the door with his knuckles to let Warlock know he was coming in before opening it without waiting for a response. He was a demon, he wasn’t polite, and the only reason he knocked in the first place was because he didn’t want to startle the antichrist into discorporating him.

Warlock wasn’t crying anymore, but he still looked extraordinarily sad as he sat against the edge of his bed and brushed his fingers mournfully over the back of his stuffed lion. (Crowley had tried to get him attached to a better animal – a snake, perhaps – but the baby at the time was determined to like the lion the best. It wasn’t even a male lion – it had no mane. Harriet had mistaken it for a bear a few too many times because of it.)

“Why doesn’t Mommy like me?” Warlock asked when Crowley silently sat down beside him on the ground.

“I suspect it’s because she’s a terrible woman,” Crowley said blandly. What? He wasn’t going to lie to him – he didn’t want the antichrist remembering that his Nanny was a liar when the time for Armageddon came. That wouldn’t mean just an inconvenient discorporation – that was the path to definite destruction.

Warlock knew his nanny well enough that such a sentence was not out of the norm for her, and he didn’t say anything to try to argue with her. He thought privately that his nanny was probably right, though he didn’t want to say so out loud and make it true. Nanny always said he could control reality to his will, and he didn’t want to make his nanny’s words definitively true.

“Not to worry, Warlock,” Nanny said seriously. “One day, you will destroy every fool who’s ever wronged you and leave their corpses for the dogs.”

“You always say that, Nanny,” Warlock said glumly, and sniffed.

“Well, that just tells you it’s true!” Crowley posited. “Have you ever known me to lie to you, Warlock? No? I thought not. Trust every word I say. Now, come along. Brother Francis is probably wondering if we’ve forgotten about him, not having stopped by in so long.”

“We saw Brother Francis yesterday morning,” Warlock reminded her, but nonetheless rose to his feet.

“Yes, and he’s got just a terrible memory, so he probably won’t remember it anyway,” Crowley said in her usual no-nonsense tone. She raised an eyebrow at the way the boy raised both his arms in a clear directive that he wanted to be picked up. But this was a boy who would grow to be her master (though most days it felt like he already was, and it had nothing to do with him shaping reality but more to do with how she couldn’t deny the big brown eyes that looked up at her), and so with only a small sigh, she acquiesced, leaning down to lift him under the armpits and settle him on her hip.

“I don’t think Brother Francis has an awful memory,” Warlock told him seriously as they made the trek out of the room and down the stairs. “He ‘membered that you like the tulips more than the roses. Mommy likes roses more.”

“That’s because your mother is a basic woman, lacking in imagination,” Crowley sniffed. “And I should hope that Brother Francis remembers I like tulips. I destroyed the Dutch economy because of it.” Completely by accident, but it was still very memorable in history, even now, so he took credit for the economy drop rather than the gorgeous fields that the Netherlands boasted now.

“Daddy talks about economy,” Warlock remembered, likely picking out the only thing he’d comprehended in the last bit of that sentence.

“Your earthly father talks about anything if he thinks it’s important-sounding enough to know two bits about,” Crowley said drolly as he opened the back door to go out into the garden. One of the maids glanced at them, likely hearing the comment, before quickly looking away and finding something Very Important that she had to attend to immediately. “Now, your infernal father on the other hand only talks about Important things. Always remember, Warlock – if it sounds Unimportant or Stupid, don’t say it. And don’t agree with anyone else who says it either, because you are Above such things. Or Below, as the case may be.”

“D’you think you an’ Brother Francis could take me to the zoo sometime?” Warlock asked suddenly, perking up hopefully and lifting his head to look up at Nanny. He didn’t appear to have absorbed anything his nanny had just said.

“Er…” Crowley floundered, grasping at something to say. Take Warlock to the zoo? With Aziraphale? Not only did that sound like a disaster of epic proportions, because it was one thing to work in the same household, but going out in public was just asking for trouble from either of their respective sides – but also, what was he supposed to do if he did lose the antichrist along the way? Bless it, but he may as well descend into Satan’s lair himself and ask for destruction right then and there.

Warlock sensed his indecision, and like the manipulative little fiend that he was (Crowley may or may not have shed a tear or two of pride behind his sunglasses, but he would never say), he continued to wheedle for the answer he wanted.

“I wouldn’t run away, promise!” he exclaimed. “I’ll stay right next to you an’ Brother Francis the whole time, and I’ll be so quiet, you can just pretend you’re on a date with him!”

Crowley would never admit to gaping at the child at the last words that escaped this infernal child’s mouth, but anyone who saw it would say that that’s exactly what he did.

“Why would you think I want to go on a date with Az – with Brother Francis?”

The insufferable child actually rolled his eyes at that. “It’s obvious you like each other,” he said frankly. “He gives you tulips, and sometimes you look out the window when you know he’s working in the garden, and your face goes all—” He made a quite exaggerated impression of what could only be described as simpering, which Crowley definitely did not do. “—and when he talks about you sometimes, he gets this different little smile like he’s remembering something nice, and…”

“Alright, alright,” Crowley quickly shushed the boy as they drew near enough to be within Aziraphale’s range of hearing. Wouldn’t do to have the angel hear Warlock’s observations of why he thought they were in love – he would think the demon was filling the poor child’s ears with harmful nonsense again.

“I’ll take you to the zoo,” he promised, and when Warlock’s face lit up with excitement, he went on severely, “But only if you don’t tell Brother Francis anything you just told me. Keep it a secret, hm?”

“Now, what secrets could you possibly want to keep from me, Ms. Ashtoreth?” Aziraphale asked in his ridiculous accent as he heard the last bit of Crowley’s words.

“Warlock’s not telling,” Crowley said promptly, and Warlock nodded vigorously in agreement before wiggling to be let down. Before Aziraphale could press further, Crowley abruptly changed the subject. “When’s your next day off? Day after tomorrow, right? Excellent, we’re taking Warlock to the zoo, then.”

“We’re gonna see all the animals!” Warlock cheered, before going on his knees to be closer to a worm he found wiggling in the dirt. Crowley was disappointed that he wasn’t taking the initiative to slice it in pieces with a sharp rock as a young antichrist should, but perhaps that was because the gardener was right there. Harming the worm might make the angel cry, after all, and even Crowley didn’t want to see that.

Aziraphale’s eyebrows were currently raised very high on his face. Crowley wondered absently if the angel had intentionally made his eyebrows look like caterpillars, in some kind of homage to living creatures. It seemed like a thing the angel would do.

“Are you sure that’s allowed, Ms. Ashtoreth?” he asked carefully.

Crowley knew that Aziraphale was talking about their sides finding out and the wisdom in that, but he feigned ignorance on the matter and simply said, “The Dowlings will be out day after tomorrow, and there’s nothing wrong with Warlock’s nanny taking him out for the day. If you happen to be along, well it’s your day off and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Please, will you come, Brother Francis?” Warlock begged, looking up at the gardener beseechingly. Somehow, with the power that all children seemed to have to get filthy in just minutes, he already had dirt streaked across his cheek, lending to the whole innocent appeal. Crowley wondered if it was intentional, but he had also raised the boy long enough that he knew he got sticky and dirty with all manner of nonsense and couldn’t decide which option to chalk it up as.

Aziraphale was, of course, weaker than Nanny, and he agreed immediately to Warlock’s pleading. Crowley sniffed disdainfully, very carefully not thinking about how easy it had been for Warlock to convince him to go, either.

***

“She is quite a terrible mother,” Crowley mused that night as he sat in Aziraphale’s cottage at the back of the property. He was nursing a bottle of wine, though whether it was the second or the sixth he couldn’t remember anymore. Didn’t matter. He’d sober up before leaving so he wouldn’t be hungover for the rather taxing job of corralling a baby antichrist.

“Crowley, she is trying her best,” Aziraphale chided, but Crowley knew it was halfhearted at best, more out of a habit to argue with Crowley now than anything else.

“Except when she’s not,” Crowley countered. “She tells him things, promises him things, and then doesn’t follow through on them. What am I supposed to do here, angel? I can’t parent him.”

Aziraphale chuckled a bit. “No, certainly not. What’s a demon – or an angel, for that matter – supposed to do with a child?”

“Well, he’s only half human,” Crowley reminded him. “Other half is completely Satanic spawn. So maybe we wouldn’t screw it up completely.”

They were silent for a moment, staring at their bottle and glass respectively, and then they both looked up to meet each others’ eyes at the same time. It was a meaningful stare, one of suggestion, a what if?

A moment later, they both began laughing at the absurdity of it.

“As though we’d actually kidnap him,” Crowley chuckled, taking a swig off his bottle.

“Goodness, I’m an angel – angels don’t do these things,” Aziraphale chuckled, a trifle uneasily. “Kidnapping, honestly.”

***

“We should’ve kidnapped him years ago,” Crowley declared the next day as he patted a weeping Warlock’s back. “I don’t know what’s been keeping us, honestly. The Dowlings are clearly unfit…”

“Are you mad?” Aziraphale hissed in such a serpentine-like way that he could’ve been the one mistaken for the demon at that moment. “Don’t talk about these things in front of – of him!” he pointed his little shovel at Warlock, who was getting quite a bit of snot and tears on his nanny’s shoulder. “He’ll think we’re serious!”

“First of all, I am serious,” Crowley glared, partly because he wanted to impart the fact to Aziraphale that he was in fact serious, but also because he was resisting the urge to miracle the snot away. Honestly, this was his best blouse, and his shoulder was soaked enough that he felt it through to the skin. “Secondly, he’s crying loudly enough he probably can’t hear what we’re saying, anyway. Thirdly, he probably doesn’t even know what kidnapping means.”

“We can’t do things like this, Cr – Ashtoreth,” Aziraphale told him sternly. “And we certainly shouldn’t be talking about it, where anyone could hear us.”

“Think about it, angel,” Crowley said. “Don’t think of it as kidnapping the antichrist. Think of it as kidnapping a normal boy.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?!”

“A normal boy, who is neglected by his parents and feels unloved by both,” Crowley amended. “His father got home this evening, and Warlock wanted to show him the picture that he drew yesterday with you. You know what Thaddeus said? He said that he didn’t have time for little boys’ projects, and he was needed back at work quickly before shoving his son – his son – aside to get to the kitchen.”

“He shoved him,” Aziraphale repeated flatly, eyes sparking.

Sensing weakness, Crowley pressed, “Perhaps it was not meant to be painful physically, but now we have a crying little boy on our hands who just wants his parents to love him. We can do that ourselves!”

“Are you sure you love the boy, though?” Aziraphale asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “I thought demons weren’t capable of love.”

“And I thought angels were supposed to love and help everyone, regardless of their age or the size of their footprint in the world, and yet here we are,” Crowley said snidely, hardly noticing that he had inadvertently confirmed that he loved the little hellspawn. If it convinced the angel that kidnapping the little Antichrist was in fact the best option, he didn’t particularly care what he admitted to.

“This isn’t just a footprint though, Crowley – this is…” Aziraphale glanced at the boy, and then lowered his voice to a whisper so that Warlock couldn’t hear – “This is the antichrist. He won’t make a footprint; he’ll reduce the earth to mud.”

“If we leave him here, that’s certainly how it’s going to go,” Crowley agreed, continuing to pat the Dread Lord Junior on his back, an attempt to soothe. He never knew if he was doing this comforting thing correctly, but what he had deduced from the five years of raising the little brat, sometimes humans just needed to be held. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes – like now – they just kept crying.

Suddenly, said Lord of Darkness pulled back, and the angel and demon both silenced as the boy looked at Crowley through teary eyes that had suddenly become pleading and determined.

“Will you please, kidnap me?” he requested in the same tone of voice he had asked to go to the zoo the day before.

“Of course not, Warlock,” Aziraphale said immediately. “You are very safe here. The security is flawless.”

“Don’t lie to him!” Crowley hissed, clutching the boy closer to him as though it would make him forget the words the angel had just spoken. “Do you want the Prince of This World to remember you as a liar at the time of the Apocalypse?”

“Mommy and Daddy wouldn’t even care!” Warlock went on insistently, paying no heed to his nanny’s nonsense words. They made no sense, anyway.

“Of course they would, Warlock,” Crowley said immediately. “After they noticed you were gone, anyway.” They weren’t the most observant of parents, indeed.

“Cr – Ashtoreth, don’t say such things!” Aziraphale scolded. “Warlock, you can’t really want to never see your parents again, do you? They do love you, after all. In their own way.”

“Do not,” Warlock pouted, crossing his arms in front of him. Aziraphale appeared quite at a loss at what to say or how to try reassuring the brunette. Served him right – he was using faulty logic, anyway. Faulty because it was just wildly untrue and they all knew it.

“What did I tell you about lying, angel?” Crowley said with a raised eyebrow, first at Aziraphale and then at Warlock, still seated in his lap. “He can detect lies, anyway – he’s the Father of them.”

Warlock nodded emphatically, understanding enough from his nanny’s comments to know generally what they were talking about. “Daddy tells Mommy he loves her all the time, but he always leaves her alone. And he says he’ll play catch with me when he gets back from his trip, but then he shoves me away when I come to him with my baseball. And Mommy says she’s in love with Daddy, but she kisses Mr. Richardson when no one’s looking, and you’re only s’posed to kiss the lips of people you love. I know when people are lyin’ to me.”

“Be that as it may,” Aziraphale said in a slightly perturbed voice at the fact that the five-year-old was so caught up in the gossip of the house, though slightly altered to a child’s understanding, “We can’t just kidnap you, Warlock. It’s not right.”

“Nanny says that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ don’t matter,” Warlock said, and looked at Crowley as though to test her on whether or not she would back him up or back up Brother Francis.

“He’s got us there,” Crowley said with a smirk. At Aziraphale’s flat look, his own expression became exasperated. “Oh, come on, angel! It’d be fun! I could replace him with a toad, and no one would even notice.”

“Yeah!” Warlock cheered, sensing weakness in the gardener. “And you an’ Nanny can be my new Mommy and Daddy, ‘cause mommies and daddies are s’posed to love each other so they love their kids more too, and I already love you guys, and you guys love me, and you love each other!”

Crowley and Aziraphale were both caught by a sudden coughing fit, and Warlock was curious to see the gardener’s normally ruddy cheeks flush even darker, and even Nanny’s cheeks pinked a bit. Adults were weird, he decided.

“Well, I think it’s just about your bed time,” Crowley said abruptly, rising to his feet with Warlock still on his hip. “You’ll need lots of energy to be able to go to the zoo tomorrow.”

“But Nanny,” Warlock whined, “I want you to kidnap me!”

“We’ll talk about it after the zoo trip, and not a moment before,” Crowley said strictly, ignoring the sudden sharp look that Aziraphale sent his way. “Remember that this is our secret though, alright? Don’t tell anyone what we’ve been talking about, or it’s a definite ‘no’ to the kidnapping.”

“Okay, Nanny,” Warlock said sullenly, leaning limply into the woman’s side, resting his head on her angular shoulder.

“It’s still a definite ‘no’,” Aziraphale muttered to himself, but smiled when Warlock waved farewell to him. He didn’t like the look in Crowley’s expression, though.

***

“Warlock, come see the lions!” Crowley called to the boy standing beside the gardener a few feet away. Warlock was licking at a popsicle in his hand that was somehow miraculously (heh) not melting, despite the hot August weather and the fact that he’d been holding it for ten minutes now. Aziraphale had a sugary-looking monstrosity of an ice cream cone, which he’d tried to convince Warlock to get too, but the boy had wanted a popsicle more.

“Yes, those ‘re your favorite, aren’t they?” Aziraphale cajoled the sullen child. He’d been in a mood ever since he got up that morning, and even said that he didn’t want to go to the zoo. For some reason though that Warlock could not understand, Nanny had insisted on their going anyway, saying that he would regret it if he didn’t go. Not in a threatening way of course, because while Nanny was known to make subtle threats to just about everyone else, he never did with him. Warlock thought she was weird, because he knew that she didn’t like people – especially lots of people all gathered together in one place, crying and carrying on and generally making lots of noise. She said it sounded like Hell, making Warlock wonder how Nanny knew that. (Because she was obviously alive, so she couldn’t go to Hell, at least not yet, though Warlock thought that maybe Nanny would like it there because it was dark and gloomy and she was generally a dark and gloomy person. He’d heard one of the cooks call her a “goth” before, which he didn’t know exactly what that meant but thought that it was a word that must fit Nanny perfectly, because it sounded right.)

“I don’t care ‘bout lions,” Warlock said with a frown, even as he followed the gardener over to where Nanny was standing in front of the lion enclosure.

“You can lie all you want to everyone else, but what did I say about lying to me?” Nanny said with an arched eyebrow.

“To not to.”

“That’s right, you impossible little fiend. Now come up here – I can lift you up so you can see them better.”

Although Warlock was excited to see a Real Live Lion, he still gave a deep, heaving sigh as though obeying his nanny was a great burden placed upon him, trudging forward to stand in front of her. She immediately lifted him up into the familiar place on her hip that he always sat at in this position, pointing a gloved hand across the embankment to the other side, where a male lion was sleeping beside its mate. As they watched, the male lion rolled onto its back, legs spreading like the oversized cat it really was.

“I think I’ll call him Sir Joystick,” Crowley said thoughtfully.

“Ashtoreth!”

“Lions aren’t like cars, Nanny – they don’t have joy sticks.”

“No, Warlock, you’re right – what was I thinking?” Nanny said, a laugh in her voice that Warlock didn’t understand. “Oh, calm down, Francis – he’s five. And am I wrong?”

Warlock didn’t really understand or particularly care what they were talking about, because his mind was on the fact that he had to go back home after the day was over, and have to go back home for many days after that because Nanny and Brother Francis for some reason refused to kidnap him. He wasn’t really excited to be at the zoo because of it, because he had hoped for a little bit that Nanny and Brother Francis would say yes, and now the hope wasn’t there anymore. They were going about everything like it was normal, and even though Nanny had said they could talk about it after the zoo trip, he knew enough to know that this “maybe” was almost definitely a “no.”

They stopped for lunch at a little cart selling corn dogs, and Warlock was gratified to see that Nanny remembered that he didn’t like ketchup and asked only for a strip of mustard on the food. He didn’t show his gratitude though, still upset with the two, and ate his corn dog in silence while Nanny and Brother Francis tried to draw him into conversation about the animals they had seen so far, eventually giving up and chatting with each other.

After lunch, they went to the monkey enclosures to see lots of different apes and chimpanzees. On the other side of the enclosure was a spot out in the grass where the gorillas could wander in the sun.

When they got outside, Nanny suddenly lifted him without warning, and though Warlock was startled because usually he was the one to ask to be picked up he still instinctively wrapped his legs around her hips to accommodate the usual position.

“Look at that one!” Nanny said, pointing at a random one in the distance that didn’t seem to be doing anything particularly special or different from the others, except that it was bigger than all of them. He didn’t really understand what was so exciting about that one. Or any of them, really.

Then Nanny pressed her lips close to Warlock’s ear, breath causing his hairs to move and slightly tickling him with the motion.

“Warlock,” Nanny said quietly, voice almost unheard in the sounds around them. “You’re not going home today, alright? Everything will be just fine.”

Warlock stared at Nanny when she pulled back a bit, not sure he understood correctly but hope blooming in his chest nonetheless. A moment later, he pressed his own lips to Nanny’s ear (the one with the cool snake tattoo next to it), because that’s how secrets were supposed to be told.

“Are you an’ Brother Francis gonna kidnap me?” he whispered loudly.

“I prefer to call it surprise adoption,” Nanny said smoothly with a wink he could see through the dark glasses.

Warlock turned that over in his head, and a moment later he positively beamed as he understood that he was correct. He looked over at Brother Francis, who was humming quietly to himself and glancing around casually – but maybe not so casually. Miraculously, no one else was around the fence that showed the gorillas across the grassy embankment. Warlock wondered if Nanny or Brother Francis was magic, to be able to make sure everyone left them alone.

“I can keep a secret,” Warlock said proudly. “I won’t tell anyone, ever.”

“Good,” Nanny said briskly in her usual no-nonsense tone, though Warlock thought her eyes maybe looked a little softer than normal. “Because we’re going to need your help with this, little hellspawn.”

Warlock didn’t know what kind of help Nanny and Brother Francis would need from him – they were adults, after all, and he was just a kid – but he was more than willing to do whatever his new mommy and daddy wanted of him.

The rest of the zoo trip was a lot more fun, too.

***

True to his word, Crowley replaced Warlock Dowling with a toad. He used a few miracles to change his appearance and make him able to grow with Warlock’s DNA, so he would appear to grow up totally normal, and Aziraphale contributed with his own miracles of giving him Warlock’s surface memories. Wouldn’t do to have a boy suddenly in the house with only the memories of a toad, after all. That might be too much for someone not to notice.

Crowley and Aziraphale quit their jobs in the same week, despite Harriet’s pleas that she would give both of them raises if they stayed on. The staff of the Dowling household were their usual gossipy selves, and drew the conclusion that the two of them had eloped. They largely ignored the toad-turned-five-year-old, as they always had, and the next nanny (because Harriet still wasn’t going to raise her son – he was much too young for her to relate to yet) didn’t care enough to notice that the boy was a bit odd and croaked when stressed or annoyed, or sometimes looked like he was hopping rather than walking. Rich people were eccentric, after all – no need to be alarmed.

The boy once known as Warlock Dowling became Warlock Crowley-Fell, though he wouldn’t realize for another few months where exactly his new parents had pulled the names from. He was a quite normal boy, aside from being lullabied to sleep with strange versions of “The Grand Old Duke of York” or being instructed to love spiders rather than shriek and squish them with the nearest shoe, as most were wont to do.

He lived out in the country, in a little town called Tadfield, because his parents always said that it was the “least likely place they would go looking for him”.

He wasn’t ever sure if they were talking about his old parents or someone else.

He was an odd boy, to be certain, but none of the town members blamed him. He would turn out odd, with parents like that. Not because they were gay, of course. But there was just something about that Mr. Crowley and Mr. Fell that was strange. A certain Arthur Young thought he might have heard the seven-year-old call his father (who looked vaguely familiar every time the man saw him, but he just couldn’t quite put his finger on it) “Nanny” once, which was quite odd, but he didn’t make a habit of judging other people and dismissed it. Besides, Warlock was such a nice boy – a bit of a brat sometimes but then so was his own son. They would certainly grow out of it, as most boys did.

It wasn’t as though either of them were the antichrist, after all.

Warlock was quite happy in this new life, too. He continued to enjoy digging around in the garden with Brother Francis – whom he had to remember to call “Pops” in front of other people – and took the news that Nanny was sometimes a man with the frank understanding that came from growing up around the unusual. Some things were just explained by the fact that “it’s Nanny”, and that was that.

On his eleventh birthday, Nanny – er, Dad, that is – and Pops seemed to be expecting something from him all day. They celebrated his birthday as usual, though they couldn’t help seeming a bit…on edge. Warlock dismissed it, because that was just his parents for you, always acting odd, and asked if he could go play with Adam and Them in the woods.

“Be back before dark,” Dad had called, glancing at Pops. “And if you see a dog, don’t name it!” Warlock sighed and rolled his eyes, hopping on his bike and riding away to meet with his friends.

A couple of hours later, he came back to the house, suspicions once again aroused that his dads were psychic, but not particularly good at it, because things always happened around him when they expected it to happen to him.

“Dad, Pops!” Warlock called as he stepped inside the house. The evening sun set everything inside the house in a soft yellow glow. It was familiarly calming – it felt like home.

“Did a dog come to you?” was the first thing that Dad demanded when he came into the living room, where Pops was reading a book in his recliner and the sun made it look like his head was surrounded by a halo.

“No,” Warlock huffed. “Mr. Young got Adam a dog, though. Well, he let him keep it, anyway. It was just running around in the forest.”

“Adam got a dog,” Dad repeated. Pops closed his book and blinked at Warlock in confusion, like things just weren’t quite computing in his head.

Warlock nodded impatiently. “Uh-huh. An’ it’s small enough that it’s not going to mess up their house, but he has to wash it first before it’s allowed in because it smells like poo. He named it Dog, though. That’s a boring name.”

Dad and Pops shared a very significant look with each other. Warlock rolled his eyes. They were always doing that, as though Warlock didn’t know that they were totally in love with each other, even though he’d never seen them kiss. Still, he knew when people were lying, and he knew that his parents loved each other.

“Warlock,” Dad said, turning his serpentine gaze to him. “We need to have a little talk.”

And then it all came out, that his parents were actually and angel and a demon (he really couldn’t even pretend to be surprised at that, because it made sense) and they had come to the Dowling house to raise him to stop Armageddon, which was the end of the world, which they had thought Warlock would start, but now it looked like maybe his friend Adam was the actual antichrist, and they would probably need his help to stop Armageddon anyway, and in the end he ended up being there on the American air base and did indeed help in stopping it, and when his dads were taken by Heaven and Hell to be put on trial he was safely ensconced in the Young household in a surprise sleepover to keep him safe and a secret from both sides, and Warlock thought it was a bit weird to know that one of his best friend’s parents were also his parents, but also not really his parents because Crowley and Aziraphale had raised him for much longer and he kept everything a secret from the Youngs, anyway, and when all was said and done he continued to grow up in Tadfield with an angel and a demon as his parents, and he may have finally (with the help of Them) gotten the two of them to officially get together, and a normal fairy tale book would call it a perfectly nice “Happily Ever After”.

But that’s another story.

[taiwanpuppetryproudthunderbolt]

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interview 15

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Richard Chamberlain - How he keeps the Faith in his Private Life

"Fame isn't the answer. The answer is allowing yourself to be who you are."

"I'm not interested in being a multimillionaire; I want to do the kind of work that interests me. When I was beginning, I wanted to do everything: films, TV, modern things, period things, classics, musical theatre, I wanted to make records and I also wanted to paint. I'm a medium with occasional goods. I took dance lessons, and I have discovered that you can't do everything, but I've done a lot of it."

In a company town, Hollywood, where a favorite indoor sport is to trash everyone, its almost impossible to find anyone with a sour word to mutter about Richard Chamberlain.

The erstwhile Dr. Kildare, perhaps unintentionally, has made a secondary career of winning friends. He is Mr. Nice Guy wherever you turn.

He is therefore going against casting in his current role of Father Ralph in the ABC-TV mini-series, The Thorn Birds. For those unfamiliar with the best-selling Colleen McCullough's supernovel, Fr. Ralph does just about everything a priest isn't supposed to from having money of his own - courtesy of the character played by Barbara Stanwyck - to not being obedient or chaste.

In fact, there are those who might consider him a bit of a rotter. Not so Richard. We're sitting in his offices at The Burbank Studios just a few months after he has finished production on this massive film. He is about to don another hat: that of executive producer on a TV movie for CBS, hence the office setting complete with a round black glass conference table and comfortable chairs. Only successful executive producers rate such perks. But enough business talk. We are here to discuss The Thorn Birds, how he feels about yet another blockbuster following his so-successful Shogun and his real life.

First of all, Richard doesn't believe that Father Ralph behaved in such a reprehensive manner. "He followed his destiny," he states. "That process brought him to a kind of humility he never would have found otherwise. He needed to do that. He needed to fall from grace. I'm not saying all priests do; Ralph was too in love with the image of a perfect priest, with the glamour," he explains.

Those sentences give one a clear indication of what makes Richard Chamberlain tick. He's a perfectionist, although certainly not a bore - far from it - but he does get inside the character he plays. That's what makes him such an outstanding actor.

For this part, he researched Catholicism with Father Terry Sweeney, a Jesuit priest. He visited a Jesuit novitiate and stayed over with the young novices. "I had never before been involved with organized religion, and I got the feeling of what it's like to be part of a group of people who put the love of God and humanity before personal happiness. It is unusual and rare. The novitiates I met are in the process of doing that," he learned.

The painstaking research aside, working in TheThorn Birds was a grueling six-month assignment. A large portion of the nine hours was filmed in the Simi Valley, north of Los Angeles, where an exact copy of the Australian Drogheda landscape has been built. And it was hot. Richard's priestly garb, donned in layers, must have been well nigh unbearable.

With a boyish grin, he acknowledges that it wasn't an actor's dream come true, commenting that the plastic collar cut into his neck a lot. Just another of the ordeals that an actor goes through for the sake of a great role.

And a great plum it is. "I wanted it when I first read the book four years ago. I salivated over the part; it was such a wonderful love story. I chased after the part for years. I told my agents I wanted to do it; at that time, it was to be a feature movie and it went through the hands of numerous producers. They had Robert Redford at the top of all their lists. So I waited it out, like I did with Shogun. When they realized it couldn't be a film and Warner Bros. decided on a mini-series, then I knew I was in a good position. The producers - David Wolper and Stan Margulies - wanted me - and it became a dream come true," he says comfortably.

The dream realized, Richard was in the same position as all other actors when a role is complete: he was out of a job. "I have the actor's habit of thinking once a job is over I'll never be hired again. I can get very anxious about not working. It doesn't go into anxiety attacks, but there is a sense of fickleness about the business. If I allow myself, I can worry a lot."

He didn't allow himself to this time. Instead he took off for two and a half weeks to his little house in Hawaii. He has what he describes as, "a place on the beach in the toolies where there is nothing to do except eat." Or so he says. It doesn't show on his trim waistline two weeks after he has returned.

"I had forgotten what it was like to spend a day doing nothing. I kept saying I must be doing something wrong, this can't be right. I had a vague guilty feeling. So I just lay there on the beach and I didn't do anything," he laughs. "I find it an incredibly healing experience to go there. It's a wonderful change from the madness around here," he motions to indicate Hollywood. "I'd like to go there more often. As it is, I get there twice a year if I'm lucky."

The house has a live-in caretaker who looks after the property while its famous owner is gone. It is also rented out, through an agent, so the tenants never know that they're sleeping in Richard Chamberlain's bed. Pity.

It would appear that Richard is indeed the golden boy we all envy, whose life has been comparatively uncluttered with the "stuff" that make most of us miserable. And looking at him, handsome, trim, relaxed, just a few flecks of gray in the beard and mustache he has grown for his next part, he reflects total peace and tranquility. He's sipping a cup of herb tea from a delicate Japanese cup, NOT imported from Japan as were many of his household furnishings. Shogun did leave an impression on him.

He admits of being happier with his life as it is today than in previous years.

"As I look back, one of my big motivations for working so hard in this business in the early times was to find for myself a kind of self-worth which I imagined I would see reflected from the world when I became famous. It didn't work." He laughs shortly. "Being well-known has worked in other ways, but it didn't make me particularly happy. When I first realized that wasn't gonna work, I found other ways to work on myself, through Gestalt therapy, and working with Dr. Brugh Joy (a world-renowned metaphysician who gave up his medical practice to work with groups at his establishment in California's Lucerne Valley. Richard brought the film rights to Dr. Joy's book, Joy's Way, three years ago, and has a contract to produce and star in the story for CBS. He hopes to get it under way later this year.)

"Fame isn't the answer. The answer is allowing yourself to be who you are. I grew up at a time when certain values were deeply impressed upon children: in school and at home. There was a certain image to be maintained and a certain goal to be achieved."

One must bear in mind that Richard was born and raised in the rarefied atmosphere of Beverly Hills, where most of his friends at school were super-rich. His own father was a first salesman for a market fixture company, and then took over the firm. But he still wasn't raised in an atmosphere of wealth.

He became interested in acting while he was in college, but recalls, "My family wasn't enthused about my going into show business. They'd seen me in some college productions," he laughs. "I did want to go to college, but in my senior year I made a decision to take the gamble and get into acting. They didn't say 'don't do it'; they were supportive and they helped me, even though they didn't say 'Oh boy, this is terrific'."

His career proceeded normally: he studied with noted acting coach Jeff Corey, he got minor roles in a dozen TV shows, and in 1961 he got really lucky with Dr. Kildare. By the time that show had finished its run - there were 132 one-hour shows between 1961 and '65 and 57 half-hour episodes the following year - Richard Chamberlain was a big star. So big, he wondered if he'd live down his reputation of being the noble young doctor who did everything including make house calls.

He did what was then considered a rash step: he moved to England and worked in repertory. "I went to England because I felt it the best place to go and study. I had this real powerful hunch that I should go there and study. I was attracted to British theatre and I had amazing luck."

Indeed. He got raves for his role in a six-part adaptation of Henry James' Portrait of a Lady on the BBC. He appeared in Hamlet, The Madwoman of Chaillot, Julius Ceasar, and played composer Peter Tchaikovsky in the Music Lovers opposite Glenda Jackson. There was more Shakespeare, other classics, and when he played Aramis in two versions of The Three Musketeers followed by Cyrano de Bergerac, no one made anymore jokes about the boyish Dr. Kildare. Richard Chamberlain had arrived, as a serious actor of the theater and films. Deservedly so.

He is, of course, delighted that he listened to that powerful hunch, as he terms it. "I always try to listen to my inner voice. That seems to be one of life's most ironic essences: that very soft little voice of intuition is so easy to ignore, yet it's so often accurate. I always choose my roles intuitively. They appeal to me for reasons I couldn't say. I always have an answer as to why I choose a role, but the answer really is that it has a magnetic quality. Now, as a producer, I know that I read scripts looking for ways to make scenes work, and ideas that come up seemingly from nowhere. They just spring into my mind. It's not an intellectual process. Oh, it is to some extent, but it is largely emotional and intuitive."

As noted, here is a man who is comfortable with himself and he doesn't have to prove anything anymore. He's done that. So, when asked how he can top the role of Father Ralph, he says easily, "I don't think in terms of topping things. Everything is different and real to me. My next movie, titled By Reason of Insanity is for my own production company. I play a man named John Balt, who murdered his wife, spent years in an institution in therapy and is now back in society as a contributing member. In fact, he wrote his own life story, which this is. This story goes into areas I've never touched upon, so it's a vast challenge.”

"After Shogun and Thorn Birds, I find my interests are turning back to more ordinary parts - not that the John Balt story is ordinary, it isn't. He's an ordinary man who gets caught in an incredible vortex. Yes, I have leaned towards larger-than-life roles and that might have something to do with the fact that I have a very romantic nature. I didn't find life terribly interesting when I was a little kid. I hated school and I didn't like sports. I didn't like anything that anyone else liked. I felt out of it. It isn't that I didn't have friends. I did. And I had a pretty good time, but I was always fascinated by adventure movies. Especially Errol Flynn. But the other night when I couldn't sleep I turned on an old Errol Flynn movie and it was boring. It didn't hold up. The Three Musketeers and that kind of swashbuckling does, but not the one that I saw," he mock mourns.

Every actor has a dream role, and Richard has played such variegated parts - has he played it already or is his dream part still in the future?

"I think John Balt is as fascinating a part as I'll ever get. What are dream roles? Roles that call for words like depth and complexity, people who want things passionately and have to overcome tremendous obstacles to get them. My theory about John is that he wanted wholeness in his life that he unconsciously felt wasn't there. I think murdering his wife was unnecessary, but who am I to say that? He was living a life complying to images. He had an image of manhood, an image of the writer, of the husband and father, and he never said 'Who am I, what kind of man am I, what kind of father, do I love my children?'"

"Who am I?" Richard repeats the question. "I'm beginning to get answers at long last. What I am is an ever-changing alive being, who is not an image, who is not consistent, and I'm beginning to allow myself to BE instead of trying to be consistent and trying to comply to images. Images such an American hang-up. And so here I am in a business where images are more powerful than almost anyplace else except sports. I have found that I have warmth and lovingness and creativity. I might have doubted that before. I'm much more comfortable with people, much more willing to speak my mind. I don't have to try to manipulate people into liking me. I don't. I thought that I did." He is very thoughtful now and seems to enjoy looking within.

What are his long-range goals these days after 20-plus years of a good and rewarding career?

"I've done some satisfying work in the theatre, and I'd like to do more but I find it difficult to find the time. I want to continue along the lines I've been pursuing. I really like what I've been doing. I like my mobility in TV, I want more emphasis in films. I think I'm ready for that."

"And I like my life. I've finally created a home that I really love. I've had several houses, but I just remodeled this one - in a quiet canyon street, and it's just perfect for me. It's slightly Oriental, slightly Japanese. I brought back a lot of stuff from Shogun."

And who lives in this perfect house?

Just Richard Chamberlain and his pals. "I have two dogs," he says with all the love in the world in his voice. "Two Dalmatians: Jessie the Bandit Queen and Billy Boy."

And what does Jessie steal to merit that colorful name?

"My heart," he says in a tone that any animal-lover can recognize.

And so, then, one knows that Richard Chamberlain, a really happy man, does indeed have it all.

© 1983 Isobel Silden

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http://www.richard-chamberlain.co.uk/online.htm

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interview 32

Dick Diagnoses Dick His candid answers to 55 probing questions

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[trevorbarre]

“Make Alterations Great Again, Part 1 of 2″

This is how David Toop opened the Alterations set tonight at Cafe Oto, a sly reference to the dire event that took place in America yesterday, i.e.the grotesquerie of the inauguration of ‘President’ Donald Trump, who already appears to be gainsaying those who hoped that the dignity of the office might force him into conducting himself with some gravitas. Fat chance. He completely blew it. It is hard to imagine anyone less presidential, to be frank.

Thankfully, Alterations didn’t blow it,or turn into self-parody, and they do remain great. ‘A great little improvising band’, to paraphrase quote Paul McCartney, who was talking about a certain other four-piece. Perhaps in acknowledgement of ageing knee joints, there were no instruments occupying the floor of the stage tonight, as there would have been nearly forty (forty!!) years ago. They had to make do with the many toys and ‘little instruments’ scattered across Steve Beresford’s table and Toop’s own multiplicity of instruments. There was less rapidly-shifting instrumentation than in past days, and less ADH playing generally - tonight’s set was fairly logical and sequential (no vocals, songs or tunes either) in its unfurling, with much less musical channel-changing and jump-cuts than in their younger days. In fact, I thought of AMM at several junctures, not a comparison I would have used in 1980 or thereabouts!

Beresford played piano and toys; Terry Day played mostly a conventional drum kit, with a bit of bamboo pipe and balloon at the start of the set; Peter Cusack stuck mostly to acoustic guitar, and Toop proved to be the noise-meister of the evening, playing some ear-shredding guitar, bowed electric bass and electric zither(?), as well as some hefty looking flutes.

As they have got older, they appear to have become more ‘serious’ both in mien and in playing style. To me that is a good thing, as I was never totally convinced by, or indeed enjoyed, their early albums. To others, however, they may appear to have lost an essence that made Alterations what it was. Whatever, the audience were clearly impressed, and gave them a huge round of applause at the conclusion of the set, prompting the rather ‘rock and roll’ gesture of a short encore. Good vibes all round. 

My evening was made when Terry Day gave me a copy of the new album, recorded at Oto 7 months ago, during the Alterations Festival, and called Void Transactions (a rather odd title for such a ‘listening’ band?), and which gives a good idea of the sounds that were on offer tonight. Mostly due, it seems, to the ministrations of the enthusiastic Bianca Regina (who was one the support act duo, and who has been making a film about Day, which will hopefully be released soon), there now seem to be an awful lot of Alterations material about (live stuff, in the main), which is a good thing, as their early material,released on obscure labels like NATO, have been hard to find for many years.

It is to the subject of hard-to-find records that I will turn, for the second (related) part of this blog, records being at the heart of most of my missives.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): At long last, the wait is over — former Vice President Joe Biden announced Thursday that he is officially running for president.

Biden enters the Democratic field as the polling front-runner and with some serious establishment credentials as both a long-time senator and former VP. But this doesn’t mean he’s a favorite to win. If anything, in a field with so many candidates, it’ll be hard for any one candidate to stand out and win over a significant chunk of voters. Which means that building a coalition and a base of support will be vital. So, how does Biden’s candidacy change the dynamics of the Democratic race? Let’s tackle this by talking through the following questions:

Which candidates are hurt by Biden’s decision to run?

Who is his biggest competition?

And, more generally, what does this mean for candidates looking to cobble together a winning coalition? How does Biden’s entry ease this or complicate it?

OK, let’s get started with question No. 1: Which candidates are hurt by Biden’s decision to run?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Maybe almost everyone is negatively impacted in some way, or maybe almost everyone except Elizabeth Warren.

For the more moderate white Democrats, like Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, Biden is sort of running adjacent to their lane, if not actually in their lane.

He also has a lot of the black vote, so Biden’s candidacy complicates the ability of Kamala Harris and Cory Booker to win South Carolina.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): For all the candidates who are making electability an implicit (O’Rourke, Jay Inslee) or explicit (Klobuchar, Tim Ryan) part of their campaigns, Biden is a very big threat. Plus, black voters find him appealing, which could hurt those candidates I just mentioned, but especially Booker and Harris.

natesilver: If you’re Bernie, now you can’t really call yourself the front-runner. And if Biden is getting 30 percent, maybe your 20 percent or 25 percent factional support isn’t going to be enough.

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): But at the very least, Biden probably weeds out some of those guys like Ryan and Seth Moulton sooner rather than later, right? That is, if we’re thinking about the field winnowing at some point.

sarahf: Ryan just qualified for the debate stage though, Clare!

clare.malone: Big day in Youngstown.

natesilver: Ryan is the one guy who really seemed to be running on a Poor-Man’s-Version-of-Biden platform. Some of the other candidates who might have done that (e.g., Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, Terry McAuliffe) didn’t run.

I think others, like Moulton and Eric Swalwell, are just running because they like doing TV.

And they aren’t really affected by Biden because they didn’t really have a chance to begin with. (If Moulton or Swalwell wins the Democratic nomination, feel free to throw this back in my face, Internet.)

sarahf: Well, as our colleague Nathaniel Rakich pointed out, Nate, Moulton and Swalwell don’t have that much to lose by running — so why not run?

clare.malone: I wonder who of the top-tier candidates Biden sees as his biggest competition? I was pretty surprised to see that he hired Sanders’s 2016 press secretary.

natesilver: Biden probably sees Bernie as competition, although to some extent welcome competition because Biden probably wins a one-on-one showdown with Bernie because he has broader support among both elites and regular voters.

sarahf: What will you all be looking for as a sign that Biden’s candidacy is making a dent in the support of these other contenders?

perry: Biden already leads among moderates, voters over 50 and black people. So I will be looking to see if those leads grow.

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): I don’t know if it’s so much about a dent as about them never getting off the ground. For someone like Klobuchar, is she just going to remain stuck in the polls at 2 percent? Does O’Rourke never consistently get into double digits nationally?

sarahf: I saw some speculation on Twitter that the first 24 hours after his announcement will be crucial for Biden as a test of whether his first-day fundraising number can compete with other candidates’:

We'll know if @JoeBiden is a name recognition front runner, or a real front runner, when he posts those 24 hour fundraising numbers. He can't just match @BernieSanders, he needs to obliterate him. In a call to supporters yesterday, Biden acknowledged as much. https://t.co/cHgBljmkKk

— Rachel "The Doc" Bitecofer (@RachelBitecofer) April 25, 2019

And on Friday, the campaign said it raised $6.3 million in the first 24 hours, which puts Biden ahead of both Sanders, who raised $5.9 million in his first 24 hours, and O’Rourke, who got $6.1 million.

perry: I actually don’t think fundraising is a great metric for Biden. That’s because he is getting more support from people who are moderate and black, which I don’t think necessarily is the type of person who gives money to candidates on Day 1.

clare.malone: Going after constituencies that are likely to be a bit more moderate is something that I think Biden will focus on. Another thing I thought was telling was this Spanish language ad he put out first thing on Thursday:

Hoy estoy anunciando mi candidatura para presidente de los Estados Unidos. Somos los Estados Unidos de America – y juntos no hay nada que no podamos hacer. Únete a nuestra campaña: https://t.co/9MBT8Qkyzd#Joe2020 pic.twitter.com/GhSYDci4dr

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) April 25, 2019

That seems like a conscious play to a group of voters who might be more inclined toward a moderate candidate and might be ready to get active in a 2020 election against Trump, given the tenor of his first term — i.e., child separations that disproportionately affected Latino families and communities.

geoffrey.skelley: Latino voters seem like a wide-open voting bloc. Julian Castro seems like a potential fit. But he’s not attracting much tangible support in either the polls or fundraising so far among Democrats in general, so, as Perry wrote earlier this month, it’s not clear that he’ll be able to make significant inroads there.

natesilver: I don’t think it’s that interesting whether Biden gets a polling bounce, because those bounces usually fade anyway. But if he does get a bounce, I’d wonder how much of it comes at Bernie’s expense.

sarahf: Does it matter, Nate, that more of it come at Bernie’s expense than any of the other candidates?

natesilver: It matters in the sense that it would be quite bearish for Bernie if he fell to, say, 16 percent.

geoffrey.skelley: Well, looking way ahead — if Biden cuts into Sanders’s support, that could have real ramifications for delegates with the Democrats’ 15 percent rule (in each primary or caucus, candidates have to win at least 15 percent of the vote to win delegates statewide or by district). So sliding closer to 15 percent in the polls might signal that a candidate is going to fall short of that threshold in some states. But we’re a long way from thinking about that just yet. (Not that it will stop me from doing so!)

natesilver: If Bernie’s base is a solid 20 percent or 25 percent of the electorate, he’s reasonably interesting as a candidate. But if it’s really just like 15 percent, and the other 5 percent or 10 percent is just sort of foam-at-the-top name recognition, I don’t know that he’s a major player for the nomination.

sarahf: Well, to ask that same name recognition question of Biden, how will we know whether some of his popularity is just name recognition? I know he has higher favorable ratings than Sanders, but how should we think about his polling in the next couple of weeks?

natesilver: Given that there are more reasons to think his polling will decline rather than rise later on, I wonder if it will increase to the low 30s from the high 20s. That would give him more runway for stumbles later.

sarahf: Based on what you’re saying about which candidacies are threatened by Biden’s entry into the race, it seems as though he appeals to both the kinds of voters who’d support Klobuchar/Ryan/O’Rourke and those who’d support Booker/Harris, which is sort of a weird, in-between spot. And yet we don’t necessarily think of candidates like Klobuchar and Harris competing for the same voters.

So what is it about Biden’s candidacy that gives him appeal to different wings of the party? How could he play that to his advantage? And how could that backfire?

geoffrey.skelley: Well, Biden is going to lean hard into his connection to former President Barack Obama, who remains basically the most popular figure in the country among Democrats.

sarahf:

I asked Rihanna not to DM me https://t.co/p3TytePAjH

— Steadman (@AsteadWesley) April 25, 2019

perry: That was hilarious.

sarahf: Setting aside the 1,000 memes sure to follow, what do we make of Biden saying that?

perry: Obama is not going to endorse him, so that was a way to deal with that issue head-on.

natesilver: Nor is Obama going to endorse anybody anytime soon, although I do wonder if he’d weigh in if it came down to a contest between [Candidate X] and Bernie.

clare.malone: The way I’ve been thinking about it and the way I phrased it on Thursday’s podcast is that the Democratic Party has been having a big ideas meeting for the past two years — there are lots of new ideas, lots of people buying into them, and lots of talk about big, structural changes. But Biden is kind of offering the “if it ain’t broke” theory of things, which is that he’s here to remind people of the halcyon Obama days. A familiar face, familiar messages, that kind of thing. Which is how, I think, he could steal voters from a decently broad swath of candidates who are trying to differentiate themselves in this new environment.

natesilver: And a lot of messaging about how Trump is a historical anomaly, rather than being the inevitable culmination of the Republican Party’s drift toward populism.

geoffrey.skelley: Obama was never going to endorse this early, not with so many candidates running. But Biden has eight years of being his VP to use as evidence of his ability to lead the country, which isn’t nothing.

perry: I thought Obama’s spokeswoman’s statement praising Biden was great for him. It’s not an endorsement, but it’s somewhere between not endorsing him and endorsing him, and probably the best Biden could hope for at this stage. And Biden is already featuring pictures of himself with Obama.

Biden had a good campaign rollout in some ways. Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey endorsed him, which signals support in an important swing state. And a prominent, young black voice in the party — Symone Sanders — is joining his campaign.

natesilver: This was an interesting endorsement, too:

This is fascinating and surprising. Biden’s first NV endorsement is from progressive, young legislator, first Latina ever elected to state Senate. She also all but ran @RubenKihuen campaign that crushed @LucyFlores, who has accused Biden of invading her personal space in ‘14. https://t.co/INL3JHwnn6

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) April 25, 2019

perry: Yeah, Biden’s endorsements aren’t just from white people, or moderates in the party, or people living in the Northeast.

geoffrey.skelley: Nevada state Sen. Yvanna Cancela hits three important demographics: Latina, union ties, and from a key early state.

perry: Biden wants to build a broad campaign, and all the first indicators are positive.

But what we are seeing right now was all planned I assume for his first day as a candidate, so what happens a month from now will be more telling.

natesilver: Biden’s announcement has made me think of Harris in a slightly different light. Like, why isn’t she getting more endorsements outside of her home state? I’d think she might have more success if she used an argument along the lines of: “The polls are now dominated by three white guys, none of whom really does a great job representing the whole Democratic coalition. I’m the best alternative to them, and it’s time to start building momentum before it’s too late.”

clare.malone: On a debate stage, I think a lot of people might go after Biden’s record. I’m curious to see how cutthroat the primary will get about his past and how much that will stick with the kinds of voters that he wants to win — moderates, including minority voters.

perry: Biden vs. Warren is going to be great.

clare.malone: Warren’s memoir calls out Biden for his opposition to some of her bankruptcy work. Kind of fascinating.

perry: Yeah. Warren has long been concerned about his record and, I think, is the person with the most incentive to take him on. She is the most policy-focused candidate, and he is the exact version of the Democratic Party she is trying to fight.

geoffrey.skelley: The thing is, in a crowded field, you don’t know what the ripple effects will be of attacking someone. This was one of the things that slowed GOP contenders from attacking Trump early on during the 2016 primary. They didn’t know if their attacks might help someone else instead.

clare.malone: Right. There’s some game theory involved.

Or something. I dunno. I was an English major.

sarahf: So, who do we think Biden sees as his biggest competitor? And vice versa?

perry: Harris probably has to win South Carolina. And I think Biden has to be worried about any candidate with the potential to do well with black voters and big donors in the party.

geoffrey.skelley: Harris has to be hoping Nevada is a possible win for her, too, given its proximity to her home state of California, where she is polling well.

perry: If I were Biden, I would be worried about Buttigieg or O’Rourke or Booker taking off and being seen as very “electable” to Democratic voters.

sarahf: As Nate wrote in our theory of the case for Biden, his “ratio of favorable ratings to unfavorable ratings is 4.8, which essentially ties him for second-best in the field with Harris and puts him only slightly behind the leading candidate, Buttigieg.”

Biden’s favorability ratings are near the top of the pack

Average of favorability ratings among Democratic voters in recent national, Iowa and New Hampshire polls

Morning Consult: U.S. Monmouth: Iowa Saint Anselm: N.H. Average Candidate Fav. Unfav. Fav. Unfav. Fav. Unfav. Fav. Unfav. Ratio Buttigieg 38% 9% 45% 9% 42% 6% 42% 8% 5.2 Biden 75 14 78 14 70 18 74 15 4.8 Harris 49 12 61 13 54 10 55 12 4.7 Booker 44 12 54 16 56 11 51 13 3.9 O’Rourke 47 11 60 13 46 17 51 14 3.7 Sanders 75 16 67 26 67 25 70 22 3.1 Klobuchar 28 13 51 10 31 13 37 12 3.1 Castro 28 12 36 9 24 8 29 10 3.0 Inslee 17 7 26 5 10 6 18 6 2.9 Warren 55 19 67 20 58 30 60 23 2.6 Hickenlooper 16 9 32 8 15 10 21 9 2.3 Delaney 14 9 31 12 17 7 21 9 2.2 Gillibrand 32 14 37 17 33 18 34 16 2.1 Gabbard 16 11 29 13 16 13 20 12 1.6

Only candidates whose favorability was asked about in all three polls are included in the table.

Morning Consult poll was conducted April 15-21, Monmouth University poll conducted April 4-9 and Saint Anselm College conducted April 3-8.

Sources: Polls

geoffrey.skelley: Sanders and Harris are my first thought as his biggest competition. Plus, as Perry said, someone like O’Rourke — and I guess Buttigieg, too.

natesilver: Every candidate should probably be worried about Buttigieg right now.

perry: Biden seems like the safe choice. But if other candidates seem like a safe choice but are also exciting, that might pose a problem for Biden. Democrats want a candidate who will be Obama-like, exciting and thrilling to vote for.

clare.malone: YOUTH

Although Biden is going after the youth vote pretty hard, tbh.

Currently on sale for $27 pic.twitter.com/kLu0KBlaMV

— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) April 25, 2019

perry: Yes, Biden served with Obama, so their connection is strong. But I’m sure that many Democrats would love to elect a first-in-history candidate, whether that be a gay man, woman, South Asian woman, Latino or black woman, if they are convinced that person can beat Trump and would be a good president.

geoffrey.skelley: Buttigieg isn’t that well-known, yet he is getting around 10 percent now in some polls. That is notable given how name recognition plays into early polls.

clare.malone: People like Buttigieg because he’s young blood. That’s central to his appeal, as is the “I’m a smart moderate” thing.

sarahf: But the one big thing working against Buttigieg is that some voters don’t seem ready to say they think he can beat Trump, even though there’s a lot of enthusiasm for him:

Even non-Biden voters think Biden could win the general

Average difference between share of Democrats who said each candidate was their first choice in a primary and the share who said the candidate had the best chance of winning the general election in two recent state polls

Quinnipiac (CA) Granite State Poll (NH) Candidate First Choice Best Chance First Choice Best Chance Average Diff. Joe Biden 26% 35% 18% 25% +8.0 Beto O’Rourke 4 5 3 3 +0.5 John Delaney 0 0 0 0 +0.0 Bernie Sanders 18 17 30 30 -0.5 Kirsten Gillibrand 0 0 1 0 -0.5 Cory Booker 2 1 3 2 -1.0 Amy Klobuchar 2 1 2 0 -1.5 Andrew Yang 1 0 2 0 -1.5 Elizabeth Warren 7 4 5 2 -3.0 Kamala Harris 17 9 4 2 -5.0 Pete Buttigieg 7 2 15 4 -8.0

Includes everyone who appeared in both questions in both polls, which means some people who have not entered the race are included and some declared candidates are excluded.

Quinnipiac sampled 482 Democrats and Democratic leaners; UNH sampled 241 likely Democratic primary voters.

Sources: Quinnipiac University, University of New Hampshire Survey Center

perry: I think most of Biden’s rivals need Democratic voters to think differently about electability and who is electable. But that’s not great for Biden — a part of his campaign is based on an opinion that the others can’t beat Trump, but that perception could change.

Obama himself has publicly said that people other than white guys can win. If I were one of the candidates, I might start noting that in public.

sarahf: Yeah … What’s the scenario where Biden’s electability argument falls short? Does that happen if that’s the only thing Biden can campaign on?

clare.malone: I’m really curious about what kind of campaigner he’s going to be in 2019! I don’t think we can underrate that.

natesilver: I’m not sure if it’s that Biden’s electability argument would fall short so much as that people become more comfortable with the other candidates. If there’s someone you think would make the best president, you tend to come up with rationales for why they’re the most electable, too.

perry: About 50 percent of Democrats are liberal, and about 50 percent identify as moderate or conservative. Plus, half of Democrats are 50 or older. One advantage Biden has is that there are currently not that many strong candidates appealing to this crowd.

sarahf: So if Biden is able to woo that portion of the party … might he have enough for a winning candidacy?

geoffrey.skelley: To win the Democratic nomination in a crowded field, you might only need a plurality of the primary vote — Michael Dukakis did it in 1988, for example. However, winning a majority of delegates with just a plurality of the vote is not easy in the Democratic primaries as there aren’t winner-take-all contests like there are in the Republican primaries. Still, I’d say there’s an opening for Biden if he ends up being a factional candidate.

natesilver: You need more than just plurality delegate support, though, to win the nomination — it’s the one contest where you need majority support (more or less), or else you have to endure a contested convention.

So I think it is worth thinking about how each candidate would fare at a contested convention. If Candidate X has 35 percent of the delegates and the next-closest candidate has 30 percent, does Candidate X tend to win the nomination at the convention?

For Bernie, I think that answer is “maybe not.” For Biden, I think it’s “probably so, but not sure.”

sarahf: 2-0-2-0 C-O-N-T-E-S-T-E-D C-ON-V-E-N-T-I-O-N!!

I don’t know how you do that, Nate, because that was terrible to type.

natesilver: CoNtEsTeD CoNvEnTiOn

clare.malone: The return of delegate hunting.

geoffrey.skelley: Also, SUPER DELEGATES RAAAHHH

Anyway, yes, it could happen, but I still wouldn’t bet on a contested convention.

sarahf: OK, we’ve talked about which candidates Biden’s candidacy threatens and from which candidates he faces stiff competition. What do we think will change in the field overall now that he’s announced and we continue to move closer to the first debates?

perry: Biden now has to figure out his position on like 50 issues that have emerged in the primary.

clare.malone: I was thinking about this during the CNN forum the other night. Candidates were asked about felon voting, and now it’s turned into a little bit of a kerfuffle.

I think people might start to give more hedging answers on some of these structural change questions that have been popping up — abolishing the Electoral College and the like.

That is, I think Biden could splash a bit of cold (moderate) water on some of these hot topixx debates.

natesilver: We may be in a relative period of stasis until the debates. We’ll see how much higher the “Buttibump” grows. We’ll see if Biden gets any bounce of his own and how good his initial fundraising numbers look, but there’s not necessarily a whole hell of a lot going on right now.

perry: The stances Biden adopts will help set the stage for the debates — i.e., how big is the ideological divide in the party? But I don’t think voters really are that engaged on policy.

However, at this stage, candidates are asked tons of policy questions by activists and reporters.

And Biden will have to give some answers, which will create fodder for activists, the press and the other candidates.

sarahf: Does Biden risk not offering enough of a vision? For instance, I’m thinking of Klobuchar, who dismissed the idea of free college tuition or canceling student debt by saying that it’d be impossible to pay for and without countering with a vision of her own. I could maybe see Biden finding himself in a similar situation.

natesilver: I think Biden offers a pretty clear vision — defeat Trump and restore America back to Obama’s America.

sarahf: But is that exciting enough for voters?

natesilver: It doesn’t have to be exciting. It just has to intuitively appeal to Democrats. And I think it probably does, and I think that’s more important than the policy specifics, at least to the sorts of voters that Biden is seeking out.

geoffrey.skelley: I guess one thing to keep an eye on is whether aviator glasses-wearing Biden shows up or gaffe-prone Joe shows up? Or is it a mix?

sarahf: I’d bet on the former given the screen-printed totes his campaign is selling.

perry: I don’t think Biden can run on electability solely. I expect him to have policy ideas — just not as many or as liberal as Warren’s. He will have gaffes, but the press will cover them less intensely if he is leading in all the polls.

Also. If the gaffes are really him being insufficiently woke, he might not care about them.

This will be a fascinating part of the campaign. There will be an “Anybody-But-Joe faction” of the party. And we will see if he can steamroll them.

[ramialkarmi]

10 months ago, Univision bought Gawker in a fire sale, and it's been messy ever since

The man tasked with overseeing Gizmodo Media Group in the wake of the demise of Gawker.com says he never regularly read the site in the first place.

"I'm well past the demographic they were aiming for," CEO Raju Narisetti said in an interview. "If you ask me if it was a place I spent a lot of time on on a daily basis, the answer is no."

Narisetti is leading GMG through the media company's merger with Fusion Media Group, which is owned by the Spanish-language juggernaut Univision. According to the CEO, the transition has been a success.

But conversations with over a dozen current and former employees painted a starkly different picture.

Since the deal, the six former Gawker Media sites — Gizmodo, Jezebel, Deadspin, Kotaku, Jalopnik, and Lifehacker — have struggled with indecision, a dysfunctional bureaucracy, and an exodus of top leadership and institutional knowledge that gave Gawker Media its editorial bite.

Mergers have a tendency to be messy, and Gawker Media's entry into Univision's portfolio is far from the most troubled media acquisition in recent history.

News Corp. bungled its mid-2000s takeover of Myspace after failing to cater to the social-media platform's users and trying to monetize the site too quickly, for example, while the 2000 merger of then newspaper giants Tribune Media and Times Mirror Co. generated massive turnover at the company, public infighting among shareholders, and eventually bankruptcy. Then there's the infamous AOL-Time Warner deal, and AOL's current complicated merger with Yahoo.

Still, many GMG staffers wonder what will remain of the clever, fearless attitude that defined the sites for millions of readers and set the tone for much of the independent web.

"A lot of people who made Gawker Media what it was have either left or been so beaten down that the company it used to be doesn't exist anymore," one GMG employee said.

"Some of the Gawker ethos is sort of showing up in the publications that people have dispersed to, but it's never going to be the same. Univision claimed that they wanted to buy Gawker because they believe in 'fearless journalism,' but every decision they've made seems to be an effort to either water the Gawker spirit down as much as possible or just bolster Fusion TV in some way."

A 'pretty good,' 'challenging' year

Univision bought Gawker Media last August in a fire sale. It shuttered the iconic Gawker.com, which was viewed as toxic after a court ordered Gawker Media to pay Terry Bollea — aka Hulk Hogan — $140 million for publishing a sex tape featuring the wrestler. The lawsuit was secretly funded by Peter Thiel, the early Facebook investor and board member who was publicly outed by the publication as gay years earlier.

The company bought Gawker Media, which it renamed Gizmodo Media Group, with the hope of broadening the audience to become the voice and reflection of an increasingly diverse young America, with a slightly less intense editorial focus on the trademark skepticism and disdain for powerful interests.

Now, several months into the merger, Narisetti said that contrary to the "conventional wisdom," data shows it's been a "pretty good" few months since the six sites were bought by Univision and joined with Fusion.net and The Root.

The CEO, who joined GMG in October from News Corp., rattled off top-line statistics that showed a company growing after a tumultuous multiyear legal battle with Hogan that took the company from a $250 million valuation to bankruptcy.

Narisetti said last week that even after he had hired 53 new full-time staffers across the websites, the company remained under budget and on target to experience a 30% increase in revenue across the sites in one year.

Traffic to the sites has remained steady at about 90 million monthly unique visitors since he took over in October, certainly an accomplishment considering Fusion's notoriously poor online traffic and the loss of the 15 million to 16 million monthly uniques that Gawker's flagship website generated.

Other Fusion Media Group sites that were integrated into the GMG portfolio have thrived. Since transitioning over to GMG's Kinja operating system in January, the African-American digital magazine The Root has 35% more uniques each month than it did in the same months last year.

Narisetti's longer-term goal is to turn the network of sites into a publication catering to a diverse, young America of the future. By 2028, Narisetti said, "a majority of young Americans will be nonwhite."

"Our view is," he added, "while there are a lot of go-to brands for Americans today, there aren't a lot of go-to brands for what is going to be a much more diverse young America."

But he acknowledges it hasn't always been easy to execute that vision.

"At an all-hands I joked, 'I've never lost more sleep and gained more weight in the same period,'" Narisetti said. "It's been a great and a challenging year."

For many GMG employees, "challenging" is an understated description of the past several months.

The Gawker ethos is fading

Conversations with more than a dozen current and former staffers over the past several weeks detailed a difficult integration that has chipped away the spirit and ethos of Gawker Media, founded 14 years ago by Nick Denton as two blogs covering media and tech gossip, which eventually evolved into the fiercely independent, proudly standoffish, endlessly navel-gazing media company targeted by Thiel and Hogan.

Staffers say they felt initial relief after Univision beat out the media company Ziff Davis to buy GMG out of bankruptcy for $135 million. But now the environment is, as one employee put it, "toxic," and as downcast as it was during some of the Hogan trial.

"Every day, morale got worse because it felt like Univision was determined to stamp out all the great things about working at Gawker Media," one former GMG staffer told Business Insider. "They had no interest in maintaining our editorial philosophy, having a functioning HR department, or retaining key talent."

In the nine months since the acquisition, the company formerly known as Gawker Media has seen an exodus of top talent and leadership.

Heather Dietrick, the president of Gawker Media and then of GMG, left in May for The Daily Beast. The editorial team's second-in-command, deputy executive editor Lacey Donohue, left in late 2016 and was followed by the executive managing editor, Katie Drummond, in March. Matt Hardigree left the company in May after working as the editor of Jalopnik and partnerships. High-profile reporters like Christina Warren and Ashley Feinberg have also left the company in recent weeks.

The heads of the human resources and legal departments, both figures with outsize power and importance at the formerly independent, freewheeling company, also departed in the early months of the acquisition.

Business Insider has counted the resignations of at least 26 former Gawker Media employees since the merger, many of them in editorial-leadership positions.

GMG's women in leadership

After years of questions about its own relationship with female leaders at the company, the final iteration of Gawker Media was one with women in the most senior roles in the company, a source of pride and loyalty for many staffers.

But months later, with top leaders departing, some employees wonder whether the company is doing enough to persuade respected female leaders to remain, and if the company will suffer from the talent and leadership losses its already experienced.

"People are really worried about this," one GMG employee said. "Just since Katie left, we've lost our president, our top video journalist, and our best reporter, and that's after a big all-hands meeting where people were really clear about how alarming the pattern was.

"There are women being promoted or hired into positions of power, and I'm sure there will be more, but even if the higher-ups do all the right things from now on, it's not like you can really fix it, because you've lost so many of the people who made the place what it was at its best."

As WWD reported, after Drummond's departure in March, the editorial union wrote a strongly worded letter to management criticizing the loss of top female leaders.

"We were extremely alarmed to hear that Katie Drummond will not become executive editor and instead leave Gizmodo Media," the letter said.

"It continues a disturbing pattern of top management's failure to retain women in positions of authority, and raises serious concerns about the company's commitment to honor its contractual obligation to editorial independence. Further, it is yet another sign that Univision still has not found a way to manage the successful independent media company it acquired months ago."

Drummond's departure remains a source of tension.

According to multiple sources familiar with the situation, Drummond was paid significantly less than the company’s previous top editor, John Cook, while essentially filling in for him for several months without a title change. And when she was offered the title of executive editor, the sources say, Drummond was told it was "rude" to ask for a raise.

Narisetti told Business Insider that although he would not discuss private discussions of compensation, the characterization was inaccurate, as Drummond was assisted by the newly created role of deputy executive managing editor specifically created to support her while the company mulled who would fill the executive editor position that would oversee now eight sites, including The Root and Fusion.

At the same time, two sources said, Dietrick "was almost completely sidelined" by management after the acquisition late last year, as Narisetti and others assumed many of her previous responsibilities.

Narisetti dismissed charges that GMG's struggle to retain women in top roles was a cultural problem at the company.

Though he said he was "not minimizing" the effect many top women like Dietrick and Drummond had during the past several years, he pointed out that GMG's editorial leadership remained slightly more female than male, and he emphasized he was not "going to play defense on it."

"Our ​track record ​and actual data ​on compensation, raises, promotions, diversity​,​ as well as our ability to attract and retain employees​ who ​want to​ ​stay dedicated to the impactful journalism being done ​every day a​cross​ GMG​, more than ​speaks for itself," Narisetti said in a statement.

"I'm more concerned about my character than my reputation, because my character is who I am and my reputation is what others think I am," he said previously. "One is permanent, and one is changeable based on people's views. I have no doubt that we've lost some people and no less and no more than a lot of companies do in the first year of an acquisition and a merger and an integration."

'An unexpectedly bumpy transition'

Beyond struggling with holding together the former Gawker editorial team and mission, Univision also lost the confidence of many employees with basic operational issues that surfaced while it tried to integrate its new acquisition.

Numerous bureaucratic problems became almost immediately apparent, making the formerly nimble independent company feel like a dysfunctional cog in a massive, sluggish machine. For example, employees say Univision's teams responded slowly or were unresponsive to significant payroll and benefits problems that roiled the company for months.

The company delayed annual raises, they continued, and multiple staffers received accidental notes that stated other employees' salaries. According to two sources with direct knowledge of the incident, one GMG editorial staffer was accidentally sent a list of individual salaries for the entire editorial union, amounting to hundreds of people. In it, the person discovered that a peer in the editorial staff was being paid more than $400,000, a significantly higher number than most of the newsroom.

Employees faced similar problems with benefits.

Several employees say they had their insurance denied on visits to the doctor and were unable to pick up prescriptions. Others were charged for insurance they did not select, a source said. Two people recalled a top site editor having their newborn child go weeks without health-insurance benefits.

Narisetti acknowledged that payroll and benefit issues had been a source of anxiety for the staff, telling Business Insider that the company "didn't have a plan B in place" when Gawker's HR team left en masse.

In an all-staff email sent in February that was provided to Business Insider, the CEO apologized and said GMG was working on the issues, though benefits and HR problems persisted to the point that the editorial union in April gave the company a one-month deadline to resolve them.

"It has been an unexpectedly bumpy transition, to put it mildly," he wrote. "And I want to personally acknowledge and apologize on behalf of Univision, FMG and GMG, for all the stress and angst this is causing. Like all of you, I am also inclined to focus on our journalistic and business challenges than dissipate any of our time and energy on fighting internal issues. But we clearly need to get these internal issues in order and we will."

'Water down the Gawker spirit'

For its part, GMG has made explicit attempts to continue Gawker's history of provocative investigations.

Cook — who moved from executive editor to oversee the special-projects desk — oversees a team primarily made up of former Gawker writers.

He told Nieman Lab last month that the creation of the investigations unit "sort of offset the loss of Gawker" by continuing to pursue provocative investigations such as showing it to be quite easy to spear-phish top government officials.

When Peter Thiel killed Gawker he forgot to kill its brains: http://bit.ly/2s4W5ry

— Jack Shafer (@jackshafer) May 17, 2017

"From a distance, it seems like the acquirer values the investigative journalism from John Cook and his team," Denton, the Gawker founder, told Business Insider in an email when asked about the merger. "I'm glad to see Univision's support for investigative journalism at Gizmodo."

But GMG staffers are also having to adjust to a new environment under heightened internal legal scrutiny.

Stories have also had to clear higher legal barriers in a way that some employees feel is overly cautious and almost distrustful of the sites' aggressive, provocative journalism, but the company says is the standard operating procedure for most major media organizations.

According to employees with knowledge of the process, staff members on the special-projects desk are required to get the site's legal team to sign off on any story they write, even basic blog posts with no original reporting, and still have no official website months after launching, negotiating with other GMG sites about which site might best host an investigation.

Four current and former employees said the site's legal team was very cautious of publishing exclusives about Thiel's personal life and intentionally slowed reporting related to the tech billionaire, who financially supported the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker.

In an email to members in June obtained by Business Insider, the editorial union said it unsuccessfully tried to remove a non-disparagement clause from separation agreements. Non-disparagement clauses are commonplace in separation agreements, but some employees have taken them as a sign of hostility from management to staff.

Staffers say they were similarly infuriated by the company's decision to remove controversial posts tied up in litigation and, without an official company policy, fear that it could happen again.

"It was extremely difficult to watch Univision's lawyer decline the opportunity to defend their own colleagues' work against a malicious legal attack," one GMG employee told Business Insider. "People are absolutely concerned that Univision will try to remove posts in the future."

FMG and GMG managers have also shied away at points from easy opportunities to hat-tip Gawker's legacy.

When in February staffers tried to host a public screening of "Nobody Speak: Trails of the Free Press," a documentary about Gawker's battle with Hogan, Narisetti, upon consulting with Univision executives, initially vetoed the proposal, eventually allowing only a private, staff-only screening of the film.

In an email praising the "rich, collective past/legacy" of Gawker, Narisetti noted that the company implemented a policy of not engaging in discussions or debates on Gawker Media estate issues.

"We continue to face some ongoing business challenges around effectively communicating the premise and promise of the new GMG/FMG, and to keep moving ahead in 2017, as we continue to still be hobbled by some (diminishing) past business perceptions," he wrote. "That is somewhat relevant in this particular context — though quite secondary to the company policy of not discussing Gawker issues — as a public forum/panel around the movie, hosted by FMG/GMG, can easily and unnecessarily add to that ongoing challenge." 

'That was a rough six months'

Narisetti argued that the hardest part of the transition was behind GMG.

Several employees who lamented the mess of payroll and benefits said that since the company brought on a new HR representative last month, fewer problems had spilled out into the open.

The company, too, has prepared to begin seriously building out the GMG properties for the first time since the merger.

Fusion, which confusingly ceded its Fusion.net domain last month to the Fusion television channel, is set to relaunch with a new domain name in June.

In addition to a parenting site it launched last week, according to one source, the company plans to launch at least three new sites. (Narisetti hinted at food, music, and the environment, though Business Insider could not confirm the details.)

The Univision-owned AV Club and Onion websites are expected to migrate over to Kinja during the slower summer months, creating one universal content management system and allowing the company to increase revenue by selling the entire package of sites to advertisers as a whole.

"My view is that we look back next year and say, 'That was a rough six months,'" Narisetti said. "Our journalism has held out, we're producing great stories. I use the famous Ronald Reagan line, which is, 'If you're committing acts of journalism at GMG, are you better off today than you were seven months ago?' I think almost everybody will have to answer the question 'yes.'"

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