#can we not objectify women for five fucking seconds or is that too much for some people??

[talesfromthebandgeekmafia]

BG3 video makers stop putting Shadowheart in fucking lingerie challenge

[amateur-glass-chewer]

on "if you leave a watch unguarded"

spent some time on the internet today. this was a mistake. now i am going to rant into the void.

(this is a rant about rape culture and bs arguments that blame victims for "objectifying themselves" or "asking for it" or whatever. click away now if that's a trigger.)

people like to make the argument that women showing skin is like standing in public, unguarded, while carrying $1 mill (or wearing an expensive watch or something).

before we even get into equating WOMEN with WATCHES, this argument is fundamentally flawed. in this essay (ok so it's not a proper essay, sue me) we are going to go over why it's a shit argument, starting with reasons that have nothing to do with the fact that females aren't objects, because apparently "females aren't objects" is too hard for people to understand.

so.

let us begin.

...

point the first: stealing is still wrong.

here is the thing:

if i stand in public glassy-eyed while carrying $1 mill in cash for some damn reason (why the fuck is this the classic clapback), it is still not my fault if i get robbed. it is the robber's fault.

here is the thing about ethics:

the goodness of an action is not based upon how easy or hard it is.

it is easier to rob a disabled child than it is to rob a trained and armed adult. this does not make it ethical to rob the child. this does not make it the child's fault for being robbed.

it may be more tempting to rob $1 mill if the security doesn't look tight. maybe you won't get caught because there are no security cameras.

still the robber's fault if they decide to rob.

so there's your fundamental flaw: it's still not the victim's fault if they get robbed even if they lack security.

...

point the second: consider other crimes.

if we've decided that all crimes are equal -- that we can make conclusions about every other crime based on an analysis of stealing money -- then we're gonna have to cross reference with other crimes.

and, well.

i do not walk around wearing a bulletproof vest.

this does not give you license to shoot me.

i do not carry a gun or a knife.

this does not give you license to shoot me or stab me.

i do not have a security team.

this does not give you license to kill me.

a lack of self-defense does not negate victimhood.

...

point the third: temptation is not an invitation.

i have a functioning heart.

this is not an invitation to abduct me so you can steal my heart to transplant it in someone else or dissect it for study or eat it because you're a cannibal.

doesn't fucking matter how attractive something is or how well-suited you think it'd be to your own ends.

you don't get to be an asshole just because you wanted to.

...

point the fourth: clothing is not a defense.

so let's say those arguments weren't enough. fine. for the sake of argument, i will pretend (for like, five seconds) that stealing is fine, as long as the victim was undefended, and that stealing is the same as rape.

well, then: clothing is not a defense against rape in the first place.

i hate to break it to you, but even IF rapists were deterred by different fashion choices, well, everyone has different tastes.

even when we're talking about discourse over how much exposed skin is acceptable, people will say both "it's a woman's responsibility to be modest" and "maybe men are just staring at you bc that much skin showing is ugly". so... if that kind of bare skin is unattractive to some men, then wouldn't that be a rape deterrent against those men?

i think a lot about my own body: about the fact that i am disabled and generally fucked up. i'd argue that's rather unattractive and un-sexy of me. but the blood and scars that make me (at least conventionally) ugly might be a turn-on for some. the unattractive disabilities might make me an easier target. so no, "ugliness" is not a defense.

(also, subpoint: what if wearing clothes shows that i own clothes and that motivates someone to rob me? guess there's really no winning here.)

...

point the fifth: attention-seeking is not always sex-seeking

"but women wear those outfits to get attention"

have you considered that even if they did, creepy sexual attention is NOT the kind of attention they were seeking?

like. maybe i wear short-sleeves to the hospital to provide easier access to my arms for shots/venipuncture when i am demonstrating healthcare-seeking behavior. yes, i'm dressed in a way to help seek attention for medical purposes. no, that is not an invitation to ogle or rape me.

rape is fundamentally non-consensual. so no, they were not asking for it.

we do not "objectify ourselves" by wearing revealing clothing. you (general "you") objectify us by deciding to think of us as objects.

...

point the sixth: people are not objects.

and here is the kicker, and the argument that should have always been enough:

people are not objects.

it does not matter how big their breasts are. it does not matter whether you can see their thighs. it does not matter how heavy their makeup is.

people are not objects.

even IF stealing was ok as long as the goods were out in the open; even IF stealing was ok as long as the goods looked tempting; even IF stealing was ok as long as it was easy --

people are not objects.

...

TL;DR -- stealing objects is illegal, no matter how easy or tempting.

and even if it wasn't? PEOPLE ARE NOT OBJECTS.

[there-must-be-a-lock]

Business As Usual

Criminal Minds Rockstar AU! 

Word Count: ~3890

Warnings: Implications of offscreen shenanigans, Reid and JJ being devious little shits, but nothing too wild. 

A/N: Why does this exist? Fuck if I know! Was it a fucking blast to write? Fuck yes it was! The headcanon popped into my brain fully-formed while I was driving home from work one day, @stunudo​ and @rockhoochie​ encouraged me, and here I am. This will, at some point, be tied into the SPN rockstar au that I’ve been dicking around with, but for now it’s just the BAU doing their thing! 

Business As Usual

Talking Family and Feminism With Rock’s Hottest New Band

-

There are already fans lining up outside Terminal 5 when I arrive in the afternoon. It’s the first time Business As Usual will be playing in New York since the release of their sophomore album, Wheels Up, which has become the runaway surprise hit of the summer, largely thanks to the success of the first single, “Revelations.” They’ve gone from critically praised indie darlings to the brink of mainstream stardom, seemingly overnight. 

Band manager David Rossi, for one, isn’t surprised at the sudden attention. 

Rossi is an industry vet with almost four decades of experience under his belt. He’d been retired for a couple years when a friend dragged him out to see B.A.U. playing in a dive bar. He says that within two songs, he knew “the kids,” as he calls them, would be huge. By the end of the show, he was ready to come out of retirement if they’d let him manage them. 

With attention comes scrutiny, and for most bands, the rumors would be flying already. However, B.A.U. definitely isn’t most bands; there are no whispers of groupies, crazy parties, or other rockstar antics here. When you meet them face to face, that reputation makes perfect sense. They’re quiet and quirky, and they seem like five of the unlikeliest rock stars in modern music. 

-

“Very nice to meet you, Paul,” Rossi says, turning on the charm. This one’s gonna be a piece of cake. “Now. Before we get any further, just a couple things.” 

He gives the reporter his best fuck with my kids and I will fuck you up look and makes sure the guy looks suitably intimidated before he continues. 

“First, don’t believe half of what comes out of Penelope’s mouth, at least not until you confirm with somebody else. She likes to see what ridiculous things journalists will print.” This is, obviously, a lie, but they’ve found it’s the best way to deal with Penelope’s inability to keep anything private. “Trust me. You listen to her, you’ll end up with egg on your face.” 

“No problem,” Paul says obediently. 

“Second, you do not mention Reid’s stalker. Is that clear?” 

Paul nods, but Rossi waits for a moment, until he starts wilting slightly under the stare.

“I understand,” he says, nodding emphatically, and Rossi gives him a clap on the shoulder and a big smile. 

“Wonderful. Other than that, we’re an open book. Come in, they’re just getting ready for soundcheck. Let’s get you something to drink.” 

-

Officially, the band is made up of Emily Prentiss (vocals), Derek Morgan (guitar), Jennifer “JJ” Jareau (bass), Spencer Reid (keys), and Aaron Hotchner (drums). At first glance, they don’t look like they have anything in common; most bands tend to dress in a similar style and come from similar musical backgrounds, but these five couldn’t be more different. Reid, for example, was a classical piano prodigy who graduated from Berklee at the age of seventeen, and has a tendency to dress like an absentminded professor, while Prentiss, with her Siouxsie Sioux eyeliner, dropped out of prep school to tour with a riot-girl band. 

Producer and sound tech Penelope Garcia is the unofficial sixth member of the band, and they all credit her with melding their various eclectic songwriting styles into one distinctive, experimental sound. 

Garcia is an anomaly in a male-dominated field, possibly even more so than Prentiss and Jareau, but instead of trying to blend in or prove that she’s tough enough to fit in with the rest of the crew, she makes a point to stand out. During sound check, she’s wearing a wildly colorful dress and pink heels, which match the pink streaks in her hair and her thick pink-framed glasses. When I ask whether she deals with sexism in the music industry, she just laughs. 

 “Of course there are jerks,” she says, shrugging. “There are always going to be jerks. But I know I’m good at what I do, and my band knows I’m good at what I do, and that’s what matters.” 

“And the other women? Do they get heckled or catcalled a lot?” 

“The only person who’s allowed to objectify my band is me,” Garcia says cheerfully, and then makes a face. “Kidding! I would never.”  

-

“Nicely done on that solo, hot stuff, you play that guitar almost as well as you fill out those jeans,” Penelope says into the dead mic. It goes directly to the band’s in-ear monitors, so nobody else can hear. Derek laughs and the rest of the band roll their eyes.

When they set up the extra mics and the band-to-booth-only channel, this was not what they had in mind (as Rossi keeps reminding her) but… it’s so much fun. She hasn’t made Derek crack up mid-show yet, but she’ll get there. 

“One of these days you’re gonna use the wrong channel and the entire house is gonna hear you,” JJ says into her own second mic, but she’s grinning too. 

“Let ‘em listen, they’d just be jealous,” Penelope says breezily. “Another one?” 

“Can we run ‘Eviler Twin’ with the new bridge?” Spencer asks. 

Penelope adjusts levels on his synths and shoots him a thumbs up. “You got it, Boy Wonder. Hotch, count ‘em in.” 

-

Lead singer Emily Prentiss has a larger-than-life presence from the moment she steps onstage. She’s commanding and confident, and it’s hard to take your eyes off of her, whether she’s crowdsurfing, jumping around the stage, or delivering one of her trademark fiery speeches between songs. 

When Prentiss first expressed an interest in singing, her mother hired a private vocal coach who specialized in opera, and was disappointed when her daughter showed interest in less classical genres. 

“She was pissed,” Prentiss says, smiling to herself. “I started sneaking out when I was fourteen or so and going to this one little local dive bar that got all the punk and hardcore bands. I’m still not sure how I convinced them to let me in. But seeing the Dead Kennedys made me decide I was going to be in a band. I just looked at Jello Biafra and thought, I want to do that.”  

While their music isn’t explicitly political, the band themselves aren’t shy about expressing their opinions, Prentiss in particular. 

-

“...and that’s why I never wear a bra,” Emily finishes. “Does that answer your question?” 

“I think so?” Paul says hesitantly. He’s making a noble effort not to look down at her tits. 

Emily’s pretty sure it doesn’t answer the question, not even a little bit, but she’s also pretty sure the question was about relationships, so. Fuck that question. 

Emily’s not great at press, but she is excellent at rambling about the patriarchy until people tune her out. 

-

Drummer Aaron Hotchner, best known as “Hotch,” has become the unlikely sex symbol of the band, despite being the only one who’s happily married. The attention only seems to embarrass him. 

“It’s real fun to read him thirst tweets and watch him turn colors,” Penelope says, with a devilish grin. “But you didn’t hear it from me.” 

When Hotch goes out to greet fans after the show, the female shrieks reach a deafening pitch. He greets everyone with a charming, dimpled smile and talks to each one as if there’s no one else waiting for his attention. The crowd is sizeable and some of the fans are overfamiliar, to put it mildly, but Hotch spends over an hour there, speaking to everyone individually. He remains unfailingly polite, taking pictures and signing things even after the rest of his bandmates have excused themselves for the night. 

“He’s just the sweetest,” one girl sighs to her friend as they finally head home. 

Hotch, who is notoriously unenthusiastic about talking to the press, did not want to comment. 

-

“Love you too, Jack. Take care of your mom,” Hotch is saying, as he walks through the green room door. He hangs up, and Emily can see the moment he notices Paul; his smile vanishes and his eyebrows flatten in a scowl. 

“Was that your son?” Paul asks politely. 

“Yes.” 

“How is he?” 

“Fine.” 

Paul’s smile falters for a second. “Do you talk to them every night, when you’re on the road? Touring must be tough.” 

Hotch just gives him a curt nod this time and Emily winces. Paul clears his throat. 

“So… you used to play in a grunge band, is that right?” he asks tentatively. 

Hotch gives him another stony look. “That is correct.” 

JJ opens the door, and Emily can’t help but mutter, “Oh thank fuck.” 

JJ looks between Hotch, who is holding eye contact without blinking, and a petrified Paul. Then she quirks an eyebrow at Emily, who gives her a panicked nod. 

“Hi there, you must be Paul,” JJ says warmly. She jabs Hotch discreetly in the side as she passes him. “Rossi and Morgan are getting food, Hotch, they said you should join them.” 

He looks like he’s about to protest, but Emily shoots him a look and he heads for the door. 

JJ sits next to Paul with a dazzlingly bright smile, eyelashes fluttering. “It is so nice to meet you. Reid and Garcia are in the batcave, I’m happy to take you out there, but I’m all yours if there’s anything you’d like to ask me about first.” 

Emily shoots her a thumbs-up and escapes before Paul notices. 

-

Jennifer Jareau, better known as “JJ,” has the sort of wholesome, all-American beauty that turns heads wherever she goes; she wouldn’t look out of place on a magazine cover. In fact, modeling was what led her indirectly to the band. 

JJ started playing music in her high school marching band, but never intended to pursue it seriously. She was the valedictorian of her small town’s high school and had a full scholarship to the University of Pittsburgh. Between her sophomore and junior years, though, she was spotted by a modeling agency and offered a job; it would just be one week, in Los Angeles. She says she was most excited about the opportunity to fly in an airplane for the first time. 

While in L.A., JJ met Prentiss, and the rest is history. The two women seem to work seamlessly together and frequently complete each others’ sentences, but while Prentiss is commanding and confident, JJ is soft-spoken and feminine, almost motherly. 

-

“I always wanted a family,” JJ says, with her most heartfelt Colgate-ad smile. “It ended up looking a little different than I expected, but here we are.” 

JJ’s 95% sure that’ll be the pull quote for the article. Men like Paul eat that traditional shit up with a spoon; she should probably rein it in before he jizzes himself. 

-

The “batcave,” as they call it, is so full of gear and recording equipment that I stand in the doorway while I talk to Reid and Garcia. Her desk takes up a third of the room, and it holds two laptops in addition to several sound boards and microphones. She’s putting together a rough demo of a song they started working on a couple days earlier. 

Reid, meanwhile, is sitting on the floor, surrounded by the disassembled parts of two amps, and he’s tinkering with something tiny and delicate-looking. When I ask what he’s doing, he rattles off a rapid-fire string of technical jargon, and I have to ask him to repeat himself. He looks to Garcia, who holds up her hands as if to say ‘don’t look at me,’ and Reid turns back to me to say, simply, “I’m making it sound better.” 

Reid has a tendency to speak at three times the speed of most humans, and frequently goes off on baffling tangents about everything from obscure composers to beekeeping to the origins of Halloween. It’s hard to follow, sometimes, but his bandmates seem used to it. 

When asked if anything has changed with the band’s recent success, he says thoughtfully, “I honestly haven’t noticed. None of it makes a difference to me, as long as I get to play music.” He pauses for a moment, then adds with a smile, “My high school reunion last month was very satisfying, though.” 

-

“... William Onyeabor, of course! Lately, also, a lot of Philip Glass and Gil Scott-Heron.” 

Spencer realizes he’s been staring up at the ceiling instead of talking to the reporter. He blinks and refocuses. Paul looks slightly shell-shocked. 

“So to answer your question, yes, we do spend a lot of time writing when we’re on the road,” Garcia interjects. Spencer winces. “We’ll probably have almost an album’s worth of demos by the time the tour is over. We could stay in here all day, the trick is getting Reid to remember to eat.” 

Spencer rolls his eyes. 

“So is that how you guys spend most of your spare time? Writing and playing music?” Paul asks. 

“Well, it’s not like we’re total shut-ins,” Garcia says. “We go out and have fun too. Admittedly, JJ and Emily’s idea of fun is starting bar fights, but -”

“Really?” Paul asks, looking at Spencer curiously. 

He scoffs. “No, she’s kidding.” 

Garcia, absorbed in whatever she’s doing on her laptop, continues absent-mindedly: “Well, it’s not that they start fights, but they both do Krav Maga and also attract a lot of idiots, so… idiots start bar fights and then the girls finish them. Let me tell you, you do not want to mess with JJ.” 

Paul looks at Spencer again. He shakes his head quickly. 

“I mean, can you really picture JJ in a bar fight?” he asks, forcing a laugh. 

Garcia’s still rambling. “Honestly though you really gotta watch out for this one right here. Reid’s our resident wild child.”  

He gives Paul a disarming, wide-eyed, ‘who, me?’ smile and shakes his head again. 

“Oh, man, one time in Boston he -” 

“Garcia,” Spencer interrupts. She looks up, glances at the tape recorder in Paul’s hand, and shuts her mouth hastily. Paul is starting to look suspicious.

“Ha! Just kidding,” Garcia says shrilly. “He’s a big ol’ dork, really.” 

Spencer nods earnestly, doing his best puppy eyes. “I spend most of my time reading, honestly. She’s just trying to make me seem cooler.” 

Paul’s expression clears slightly. “That… makes sense.” 

He doesn’t press for details, which is good. The legendary Boston Incident is not something Spencer needs in print. 

-

Derek Morgan learned guitar from his father, a Chicago blues artist, but says that when he began to write his own music, he immediately gravitated to classic rock. He cites Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin as influences, and it’s easy to see that onstage; Morgan has the rakish charm and suggestive swagger to rival the moves of any of his idols. If anyone out of the group were to fit the mold of the traditional rockstar, I’d expect it to be him. 

The truth is much more innocuous. Offstage, he’s a perfect gentleman, respectful and chivalrous to a fault. He doesn’t drink, and he somehow finds time to work out almost every day, even when they’re on the road. 

“Sorry to disappoint, but I’m dead boring,” he says, with a wide grin. “Truth is, none of us really fit into any of the usual boxes. That’s why we get along so well.” 

He says Garcia is his best friend in the group, and I can tell he’s fiercely protective of the band, especially the women. When asked if he’s usually the one looking out for the girls, he laughs. 

“Honestly, they’re not the ones I worry about,” he says. “But sure. We all look out for each other, really.”   

-

The bartender shows up, finally, and slides two glasses over to JJ. She knocks back the shot first. If this dumb hipster keeps slurring at her about how much artistry there is in dubstep, she’s going to need another one very soon. 

“People just don’t get it,” he says, sidling a little closer. JJ steps back. 

“Ben - Ken?” she asks, and the guy pauses, affronted. “I’m sure that’s very interesting, but you should probably know that I’m gay.” 

He raises his eyebrows. “Like, gay gay?” 

“Gayer by the second,” JJ says coolly. 

“How do you know, though?” Ken says, which is a level of douchebag she didn’t actually expect from him. He must be even drunker than he looks. 

JJ gives him a polite smile. “I’m going to go find my friends now.”

“Hey, hang on.” 

He grabs her arm as she turns away. Behind his back she can see Derek heading in their direction. She gives him a little “stand down” wave. 

“Bad idea,” she warns Ken. 

“Oh yeah? What -” 

“Back off,” Emily snaps, appearing at her side. 

Ken looks at them mutinously, and as they turn away, he mutters something that sounds like (but probably isn’t) “Duckin’ bikes.” 

“Say it to my face,” JJ tells him sweetly. “Let’s see how that goes for you.” 

“What are you gonna do about it?” he asks belligerently. 

Emily grabs one of his wrists and twists hard, while JJ gets the other. Ken yelps. 

“Everything okay here?” Derek says from behind him. He’s doing what can only be described as looming in a distinctly menacing way. “I think it’s time for you to head home, buddy.” 

“Shoo,” Emily adds. “Go on. Skedaddle.” 

Ken skedaddles. JJ can’t help but laugh.

“We had it under control,” Emily reassures Derek. 

He frowns. “You sure?”

“Just another one who thought he could cure me with his magic dick,” JJ says with a shrug. “More shots?” 

“No way, uh-uh,” Derek interrupts sternly. “Emily. Come on. You remember what happened last time you tried to outdrink JJ?” 

“It was so much fun until then, though,” JJ chirps. He knows them too well. She exchanges a look with Emily. 

“Hey, have you seen Reid lately?” Emily asks innocently, and while Derek is scanning the crowd and scowling, JJ gestures to the bartender. 

-

Only time will tell whether Business As Usual will continue to grow in popularity, but Rossi seems confident that they’re here to stay. To hear him tell it, he’s met everyone from the Stones to the Strokes (“And I have the scars to prove it!”) and he has an eye for which bands are in it for the long haul. 

He says, “Long-term success isn’t about who’s the most talented musicians or the best performers, although these guys are both. So many bands crash and burn early.” 

“Why is that? What makes you so sure these guys will be different?”

“You hear people blame it on the lifestyle, the drugs, the parties, but truth is, those don’t matter all that much as long as the band is taking care of each other.” He smiles proudly. “These guys, they’ll always have each others’ backs. They’re a team.” 

-

“You about ready to head back to the hotel?” Hotch asks quietly, lining up his shot. “This isn’t going to last much longer.” Sure enough, he sinks the ball neatly and straightens up, giving the table a calculating look. 

“Let me round ‘em up,” Derek says. “Meet you outside in five.” 

“When has it ever taken five minutes to round up this bunch?” Hotch asks wryly. “You have fifteen and then I’m leaving. Shout if you need help.” 

He spots Penelope first. She’s in the middle of the dancefloor, dancing with a guy who might as well have cartoon hearts popping out of his eyes. She’s not drunk to the point where she’s doing her signature Shitfaced Shimmy, so she won’t be too hard to wrangle. He catches her eye and taps his wrist, then points to the door, and she shoots him a thumbs up. 

Piece of cake. 

He looks around for Reid next, hoping against hope that the kid hasn’t attracted any crazy tonight. He’s not sure why or how, but Reid has proven more prone to disaster than the rest of the crew combined. If you asked Derek who in the band was most likely to get slapped, get kidnapped, get stabbed (accidentally), lose his shoes on the way back from the bathroom, get fully lost on the way to the bathroom, get hit on by a prostitute, puncture his own foot with a dart, snort something sketchy and end up wired til dawn, or befriend a mob boss, the answer would be Spencer Reid, every damn time. 

He knows this because Reid’s already done most of those things. 

Emily pops up at his side. Her level of sobriety is surprising until Derek notices the smug smile on her face and the phone number Sharpied on her arm. He gives her a fist-bump. 

“Meet you outside,” she says cheerfully. 

This might be even easier than he thought. 

“Hey, Emily,” he calls, and she turns back to look at him. “Have you seen Reid or JJ?” 

“JJ found me a while ago to borrow my swiss army knife,” she says thoughtfully, and then her eyes widen in realization. “She never came back and I haven’t seen Reid. Shit.” 

“Alright, you check outside, look in the alley, I’ll do a sweep around here. If Garcia’s not already outside, call Hotch.” Emily nods curtly and turns toward the door. 

Derek elbows his way around the fringes of the dance floor, scanning the crowd for JJ’s blonde hair, but no luck. He checks a couple of the out-of-the-way nooks and crannies where Reid likes to curl up to pass out, even glances under a couple tables, but there’s no sign of him. He heads for the door that leads to the hallway with the bathrooms. 

He almost runs right into JJ and Reid, who are arm-in-arm as they burst through the door. 

“Oh good,” he says, mildly surprised to see them both upright. Then Reid looks up with big, innocent eyes, sniffing and twitching his nose like a goddamn rabbit, and JJ flaps her hand urgently toward the front of the bar, stepping around Derek without breaking stride.   

“We should go,” she says quickly. “Now.” 

“What did you do?” he groans, shepherding them through the crowd. He can see them exchange a glance. JJ wipes her nose with the back of her sleeve, Emily’s multi-tool still clutched in her fist. 

“We may have rearranged some things,” Spencer mutters. 

“There might be some physics magic brewing,” JJ adds. 

Just as Derek half-shoves them through the front door, he hears a shout from the direction of the bathrooms.

Amazingly, everyone is standing on the sidewalk waiting for them. 

“Double time,” Derek says hurriedly, and they all fall into step. 

“Eight minutes and thirty-seven seconds,” Hotch says, looking at his watch. He holds a hand out to Penelope. “Pay up.” 

“Thing One and Thing Two over there were just stirring up some chaos,” Morgan explains. 

“Do I want to know?” Penelope asks, fishing a twenty out of her purse. “Is this a plausible deniability situation?”  

Emily shakes her head. “I swear, Reid, one of these days I’m going to put a leash on you, and not in a fun sexy way.” 

JJ and Reid are already half a block ahead of the rest of them, arms linked, heads together like they’re plotting again. JJ lets out one of her weird little coke-giggles and Derek can hear Reid chattering about… the Wizard of Oz, for some reason? Whatever. 

Just another day for this weird-ass bunch he calls family. 

[thedirtpreferences]

PREFERENCE #18 - LINGERIE (REQUESTED)

Mick: He would say absolutely nothing, though his pupils would give him away seeing as they would dilate making his eyes black with lust. By no means was Mick a shy man, for Christ sake he got up in front of thousands of people to perform everyday of his life. What he was, however, was respectful. He never wanted to make you feel like he was objectifying you or treating you like you were a tasteless piece of meat. Furthermore, he made a very good point at always making sure you knew you were beautiful and gorgeous, not just sexy and hot. But right now, he was fighting for the right words to describe without being crude. “You’re being awfully quiet, Mickey. Do you not like the color?” Your words would be dripping with sex appeal, your face sultry and feigned with innocence as he gawked at you in horror. You looked like that and yet you were somehow afraid that he didn’t like the color? Surely you were joking. “The color, er, the color is just fine.” He would mumble trying his best to maintain eye contact with you as you pulled down your hair, shaking it so fell sensually over your shoulders. He nearly lost his bearings when you bit your lip and batted your eyes at him. “Just fine?” Pouting you walked over to his spot on the couch, pushing his chest so he was pressed firmly against it. “Mhm.” Mick mused, stifling his moan as you straddled him, your breasts now eye level with his face. “For some reason, I was under the impression that red was your favorite color on me. Perhaps, I’ve been mistaken. Oh, well.” Pretending to leave, you let out a squeak when Mick grabbed your wrists pulling you back down onto his lap forcefully. “So, you do like the red?” You would let out a breathless laugh, gasping as he flipped you over onto your back, hovering over you with a touch as light as a feather. Typical Mick; always so gentle. “I love the red. You look beautiful,” He would whisper at your ear, nipping it softly. “Beautiful? C’mon Mick, you can do better than that.” You pleaded, reaching your hand on his lower thigh, dangerously close to his progressively hardening member. “Would you like me to completely degrade you then?” Mick spoke with a perplexed look on his face, catching your hand as he brought it against his heaving chest. “Please.” You begged causing him to let out a groan as he nipped down your neck, his hands tangled tightly around your ragged locks of hair. “You have no idea what you just got yourself into,” He would laugh causing you to sigh in relief. You had finally awakened the inner freak in Mick and you couldn’t be happier.

Tommy: “C’mon, babe. You know the rules, you lost the bet.” Tommy would giggle knocking relentlessly on the bathroom door you had locked yourself in. A week ago, you had compromised with him: if he made it one week sober and well behaved, you would do anything he wanted for an entire day. In your head, you had expected making him grilled cheese sandwiches and letting him spend money on idle things while giving him frequent back rubs. Little did you know that the little devil was a secretly sex deprived animal. Furthermore, the moment he had showed up with the black lingerie set you had nearly choked on the water you were swallowing out of both fear and confusion. “I’m embarrassed.” You would groan examining yourself in the mirror with distaste. Everything about this screamed confident and lord knows you were anything but despite the endless hours of Tommy trying to plead with you. “You’ve got five seconds before I’m kicking that fucking door down,” Tommy threatened causing you to let out a sigh in defeat. You wouldn’t put it past him after all to do such a thing.

“5...4...-“

“I’m coming you idiot,”

“Not yet, you aren’t. Soon though..soon.”

Letting out a disgusted scoff, you would roll your eyes before finally unlocking the door and sauntering out with your head hung low. “Holy fuck.” Tommy would utter, instantly dropping to his knees pressing his head against your thigh. “Baby, if I stay sober for the rest of my life do you promise to wear this everyday for me? Oh, the things I’m gonna have to do to you tonight...” Pressing kisses to your inner thighs, his large hands gripping you tightly you would try to stifle the moan that bubbled to your lips, the lack of confidence slowly starting to dissipate with each gentle kiss. “Do you really like it?” You would ask genuinely curious, biting your lip sheepishly. “Oh, Y/N. Oh, baby. This is the best day of my fucking life.” Lifting you up so that you were hoisted over his shoulder, you would let out a loud squeal as he slammed you on the bed. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’m about to fuck you for this whole 24 hours. You did promise after all,” His voice would be husky, a small groan slipping past his lips when you lifted you knee to press ever so slightly against his hard member. What an affect you had on him already? If you would have known this would have got him to behave by some lingerie and sex you would’ve volunteered a long time ago. “Your wish is my command, sir.”

Vince: You would clear your throat a couple of times, recieving no reaction from him whatsoever as he wrote in his office. Letting out a frustrated sigh, you would finally say something a little less on the romantic side but bold enough to get his attention. “Hey, idiot. Do you want to bang me or not? Kinda going out on a limb here.” His head would snap up the moment he heard ‘bang’. Oggling you for a second, Vince would surprise you by dropping his pen, dipping his head back, and letting out a boisterous, hysterical bellow. “Hey, shut up. I spent a lot of money on this,” You woud pout, crossing your arms across your chest and stamping your foot. “You look so fucking sexy, I just, I wasn’t expecting it. It’s so out of character.” Wiping the forming tears from his eyes, Vince would beckon you over with an outstretched hand, pushing himself from the desk in his rolling office chair. “Get over here, you little minx.” He would chuckle, wrapping his arms around you as you awkwardly straddled his body. “Mind telling me what this is about?” He would inquire, kissing your collarbone with vehemence. “I...Okay. I see the kind of girls that throw themselves at you. I’ve seen the girls in your videos. I didn’t know if you preferred this over, well, how I usually look is all.” It was if a light switch flipped in his head as he tilted his head back and let out a small ‘oh’. How could you think that? Had he seriously let you down that much as a boyfriend? “You’re absolutely crazy. You know why we choose to feature those girls? For the aesthetic. You know why our fans look the way they do? Because they want our attention. You, however, already have my attention. I love the way you dress, the way you look, the way you are. So, please, Y/N, don’t change yourself for that. Because I love you for who you are, not what your clothes say about you.” You cheeks would turn bright red as you looked down in sheer embarrassment. To say the least you were relieved, it had taken you twenty minutes to learn how to get it on anyways plus it was so extremely uncomfortable you could cry just from that. “Plus, I’d much rather see you with nothing on.” He would purr in your ear as his hands reached around to unclasp the lacy bra. “You did that far too easily,” You would say accusingly, your eyes narrowing as he pressed kisses down your chest. “Wait till you see what comes next,”

Nikki: For once, Nikki was speechless. Out of all the women he had been with, all the horrible, naughty things he had done, he had never felt so hot and bothered in his life. For, there stood his sweet, unassuming girlfriend clad in nothing but leather and lace, her body displayed in a way he had never seen it look before. He was in awe, but more importantly he was overwhelmed with lust. Furthermore, it took everything in his willpower not to tear each article of clothing off with his teeth as he gazed at her. She was irristable, practically begging to have his hands on every inch of her body. Was he actually salivating? “Happy Birthday, baby. You can open your gift now.” Oh, yeah. He had forgotten about the small box sitting in his lap until you had reminded him that it was there. By that point, however, he could have cared less about some meager gift even if it did come from you. You were the only thing that consumed his brain in this particular moment in time. Especially looking like that. Reaching toward you instinctively, you slapped his hand hard enough to make it sting. “No touching till you open that. Trust me. You’re gonna wanna see that before we begin,” Nikki felt like a child who was being told to eat their vegtables before dessert, but still he obliged because god damn he couldn’t wait to get his hands on you even if you were being bossy. Throwing open the top of the box, he would let out a low, drawn out moan examining the best gift he had probably ever recieved: a golden pair of handcuffs. He oggled at them for a moment, his mouth slightly ajar before meeting your desperate gaze. You had thrown your arms up in the air in an ‘X’ signalling him to chain you up. Nikki couldn’t leave his seat fast enough. “You are going to regret making me want you this badly.” Nikki had snapped the handcuffs on you instantly, tugging down the thong you were wearing in one swift motion, licking your naval and working his way down. “Good.” You would state simply, grinning as he looked up at you with stars in his eyes, lust and need practically oozing from his pores. “Have I ever told you how much I love you?” He would mumble against you, your head leaning back from his hot breath being so close to the area you needed him at the most. “No, but you can prove it.” After you spoke those words, there wasn’t much talking after that; however, he definitely proved to you that he loved you in many, many ways.

(I’ve never really done anything like this before, so hopefully it doesn’t suck)

[justmenoworries]

Record Of Ragnarok - Review (Warning: Major Spoilers)

Shuumatsu no Walküre or, as it’s known in other countries, Records Of Ragnarok, is an Action Manga by Takumi Fukui, Shinya Umemura and Chika Aji that centers around the end of the world. As of now, it has 33 chapters, contained in 6 volumes.

Summary:

The story in a nutshell is that the gods have become fed up with humanity and decided to just fuck it and kill us to do whatever it is gods do in peace. The valkyrie Brunhilde objects rather strongly to this and invokes the Ragnarok clause to give humanity a chance to survive. The gods and the humans each provide 13 champions to fight for them and whichever side has the most victories after 13 rounds wins. If humanity wins, we keep living and if the gods win, we get unalived.

Pros:

The Premise. The stakes are high enough to get you pumped for each battle and it also leaves a lot of room for moral greyness on both sides. On one hand, we have the gods who strive to eradicate humanity and are almost unanimously presented as privileged jerkasses - but then you get characters like Heracles and Buddha who are technically on the divine side, but are shown to actually not support the plan to kill all humans. On the other hand we have humanity literally fighting to survive - but the manga never shies away from showing that humans are not all innocent cinnamon roles and even poses the question if humanity really deserves to survive sometimes. I mean, how much would you want to root for people who are having Jack the Ripper, a scumbag serial killer, fight as one of their champions? Speaking of which...

The champions. A few of you might have perked up at the mention of Jack the Ripper. As it turns out, whether a champion has been dead for years by the time of the story’s present doesn’t really matter: They get to participate all the same. Leading to a bunch of historical characters getting the chance to prove their badassery in the ring. Even better? This story follows the “all myths are true and all gods exist”-rule. You heard right: Every deity, no matter what religion or what part of the world they originated from, has the potential to become an anime villain! Ever wanted to see Lü Bu going at it with Thor? Well, now you can! Wanna see who’d win in a wrestling match between Raiden Tameemon and Shiva? Just read this manga!

The world-building. Record’s lore and backstories are detailed enough to have their own side-chapters and some of the characters’ pasts really make you feel for them. Wanna know how much? This manga, for a split-second at least, made me feel sorry for an unrepentant serial killer. The writing is just that good.

The art-style. It’s incredibly expressive and detailed, especially in the fight- scenes. The covers are beautiful, the character design is creative and gives every character their own, distinct style. And I know this may sound perv-y, but Aji Chika really knows how to draw naked bodies. Just... don’t pay too much attention to the anatomy.

The battles. As of the time I’m writing this, 4 out of 13 fights have been concluded and the fifth one is currently playing out. Each of the fights demonstrate so much personality and the match-ups are insanely cool. It’s never a closed case which combatant is going to win, each fight has so many twists and turns and the fighters themselves have a lot of chemistry with each other. Their motivations are, for the most part, understandable and fit the characters. If you can, check out the youtube - series by AmiasD Backup, you won’t regret it. The editing and the added background music really bring out the inherent epicness of the manga.

Cons:

The battles tend to suffer from, what i like to call, Anime Battle Syndrome. The action will screech to a halt at several points in order to let the characters monologue about their strategy, boast of their former accomplishments or just kinda... talk to each other for no good reason at all. Or have the background characters talk about something that just happened at length until you just want to shout “I know! I saw, I was there!”And the flashbacks detailing the combatants’ backstories are often just tedious. I know I praised them in my Pro-list, but no matter how cool a backstory is, if it comes smack in the middle of a hyped-up confrontation, it’s annoying! I don’t wanna see five pages of a character reminiscing how they once ate a bug when they were six, I wanna see two guys beat the shit out of each other to decide the fate of all of humankind! Just tell me the story after the battle, jfc.

The comedic aspects of the story are not handled well. I mean, I get it: In a story about the literal end of the world not having at least a few lighter moments would probably lead to the readers putting down the manga eventually because it just got too depressing. But the way Records handles it can cause some pretty big whiplash. One moment you’re on the edge of your seat, biting your fingernails in anticipation of how a certain move in the current battle has played out - only to be confronted with a joke about how Ares is dumb, or one of the background characters making an inappropriate comment. Add to that the uncomfortably high number of sexist and sometimes rape-y jokes and you got a pretty yikes collection of failed attempts to implant humor. Speaking of which...

The manga has a really weird and uncomfortable relationship with women. They’re either oversexualised to the point of being nothing more than a walking, bouncing pair of breasts and hips, or side-lined in order to give all the spotlight to the male characters. For example: The valkyries. The valkyries in norse mythology are a people of badass warrior maidens. In the manga, it’s the valkyrie Brunhilde who kickstarts the tournament for humanities’ right to keep existing. She’s also the one who selects the human champions and prepares them for their upcoming battles by introducing them to their valkyrie-partners, their “Volund”, and she acts as an overseer for each round. She’s about the most involved female character you’ll get in this story. Her sisters, the other valkyries, are literally objectified to serve as weapons to the male champions. One of them is brutally forced to submit to her partner, in a scene that is eerily  reminiscent of assault. You’d think an amazon brigade as famous as the valkyries would be treated better than that, in a manga centered around fighting. Nope. They just get to be inanimate objects for the guys to wield. Oh, and if a champion dies, so does his Volund. So not only do the valkyries not get to fight themselves, they pay the price if their partner screws up. Lovely. Another glaring point I want to bring up: There are no female champions. On either side. We get shown a list of the human champions early on and all of them are male. All the divine combatants so far have been male, too. And there’s no indication that that’ll change in the future. Which is weird, because there is certainly no shortage of badass female characters that could have been used in the plot, both historical and mythological. But nope! Pure sausage fest is what we get instead. What’s that? You wanted to see Jeanne d’Arc or Ishtar or Sekmet or Lyudmila Pavlichenko or Anne Bonnie, or literally any of the dozen of amazing female fighters history and mythology have produced? Tough luck! Saving humanity is apparently a men-only sport.

Overall, Record Of Ragnarok is a story with an interesting premise and a plot rife with potential, but it just has too many flaws for me to declare it perfect or even good, to be honest.

For what it is, it’s an okay read. If you’re willing to muscle through the blatant misogyny prevalent in some parts of it. And the rather painful attempts at humor.

4.9/10. Could’ve been done better.

[spacebeyonce]

good evening. do y’all wanna hear about the whitest shit that happened to me tonight.

of course you do. shit’s bonkers.

so today I modeled a dress my friend made for one of his classes. it was real pretty, a nice golden yellow, with a gold gele headpiece to match. I rushed to meet him after my class, got slathered in cocoa butter and dusted with glitter, and we went to the crit room.

and the first group went fine! they stayed focused and had questions and crit for the dress and the topic chosen that made it.

it was the second group where shit went sideways, and it wasn’t focused on the dress. it was focused on me.

and for a good five or ten minutes I was subjected to the most bullshit white feminist faux concern fuckshit I’ve ever heard in my life.

I can understand the concerns of cultural appropriation from literally the only fucking black girl in that group, so I’m not too critical there. it was the white women. christ, it’s always the white women that do this shit.

they really put the both of us through it, saying my friend didn’t ask for my input or consent in anything. that he just picked me to model it ‘cause ‘gold would look so nice on dom’ (which isn’t BAD like WHAT I’m STILL scratching my head on that one) and that I was just a prop to him and using me and the african culture the headdress is from as toys.

‘you’re objectifying her!’ they cried out ‘why is the dress so sheer? did she get a say in this? why are you just making her stand there and not speak?’

and I didn’t feel objectified until they said that! I didn’t feel like some prop until they treated me as such! I can speak! I have opinions on this! and it’s not all the bullshit that was pushed onto me! they didn’t even ask what I thought until the end, like some afterthought to make them look like they have the moral high ground. oh we’re actually proper enough to care about what she feels about this, unlike you.

again I won’t bag too much on the cultural appropriation concern, ‘cause I understand. but everything else just pissed me off and made me feel gross.

honestly these white girls really got me fucked up like I didn’t see through their weird fake concern mess. like it’s their right and their place to assume things of me and become a bunch of white saviors.

anyway after eating a tablespoon of glitter and spending like half an hour in the shower getting it off, here I am. still fuming.

[imaginationstimulation]

He cupped the two halves of my tush and spoke directly to them. “Run away with me, girls,” he whispered. “She doesn’t understand our love.”

I lay still, staring out the window, letting them have their time together. If I protested, I’d only make his case stronger: I’m less fun than my own butt. Which is not untrue. In my essence, I am a stone, unmoving for ten thousand years, unless picked up and moved. It’s not just sex; I find this whole experience—life—gratuitously slow and drawn out. See it crawl, second by fucking second. If I’m a workaholic, it’s only because I hate work so much that I’m trying to finish it, all of it, once and for all. So I can just ride out the rest of my life in some kind of internal trance state. Not a coma but, like, a step above that.

Our son, Sam, trotted in sleepily, and I warned him not to get in the bed: “It’s all bloody.” Alex quietly removed his hands from my body; he hadn’t noticed that I was bleeding. Sam pulled back the sheets and studied the mess, smiling giddily. “You got your period.”

“Yes.”

“You said it was coming soon and you were right!”

“Yep.”

This new generation of men has been taught (by me) to feel excited about the menstrual cycle. It’s like tadpoles turning into frogs or the moon that follows them wherever they go. I’ve been waiting a long time to have my period cheered on. More and more women my age have given up on our men and are getting together with millennials, youngsters raised by women who were born in the sixties, rather than the forties. I hear it’s great. Not a lot of hangups. But that isn’t an option for me because I need a man with a historical perspective that encompasses my whole lifetime. If anything, I regret not having met Alex sooner. If we had met at my birth and I had been able to assess how narcissistic my parents were, I could have left the hospital with Alex and got started on our relationship immediately. He would have been eight years old—young, but not too young to keep me alive. I need that in a man.

Sometimes my love for him is so intense that I want to crawl inside his body. I want him to be pregnant with me and never give birth, just hold me in. At other times, I wonder, Who is that guy? And why is he in my house? When I get that look on my face, he sticks out his hand and says, “Hi, I’m Alex. Your husband.”

Sam used his small pointing finger to tap each old bloodstain on the sheet; they dated back more than a decade, a disgusting constellation. It was one of those things you didn’t notice until suddenly you did. Like ants. Like everything.

I dressed and brushed my teeth. If I went to the mall immediately and got a new sheet, then the chore wouldn’t have time to gather weight. Once a task goes on the to-do list it settles in, grows roots—the trick is to preëmpt that. I could get a tent light while I was there. We were going camping the next weekend with another family, although unfortunately I wasn’t sure I would be able to join. Too much work to do.

“I can get new sheets,” Alex said, slowly climbing out of bed, limb by limb. Sam asked if we would be watching TV today, yes or no.

“Not sheets—just one fitted sheet. There’s only one place that sells Cariloha-brand California-king sheets individually. What is it?”

“Macy’s?”

“Nope.”

“Amazon?”

“Definitely no. I told you about my bad experience—”

“You did. I forgot.”

Bedding is an unregulated corner of Amazon, where companies charge radically different prices for the same bad sheets. You can’t even get nicer sheets by paying more—money has no meaning there. And don’t bother typing in words like “Egyptian cotton” or “thread count”—you’re just offering them more precise ways to bamboozle you. Get up, find your keys and your purse, and go outside. I hate it as much as anyone, but sometimes you just have to.

My plan was to park on the street and walk into the mall, get the sheet, and go. By not parking in the parking garage, I would outwit the psychology of the mall designers who wanted you to sever ties with the outside world. But walking in off the street was disorienting. I entered through Bloomingdale’s and had to wade through the store; it was like pushing through coats to enter Narnia. Once I made it into the mall, I had no idea where I was. It took me a long time even to find a map, then I traced my finger back and forth between You Are Here and the Low Cost Luxury Sheets Kiosk to memorize my path. The man standing next to me took a picture of the map and then trekked on, studying his phone. Pretty clever. As I walked, I glanced sideways at his tan, brawny body and floppy brown hair, just to confirm. Yes. He was a famous person. An actor. Or maybe a hotelier. Maybe this was André Balazs or whatever his name was. No, an actor. Electricity revved through my veins for no particular reason, just as a courtesy to his stature. I kept an eye on him as I walked toward the sheet kiosk, bracing myself for the moment when he would peel off in another direction. But he didn’t; we continued walking alongside each other, and I began to feel that we were together. And he kept looking at me, out of the corner of his eye. This couldn’t be true but it was. Somewhere between BabyGap and Lady Foot Locker the tables had turned. Now he recognized me.

I was twenty-two when the video was shot. I needed quick money so I could get out of a bad relationship—not a lot, just first and last and a security deposit. I couldn’t admit my plight to my parents, because I had already done this and they had written me a check, with great relief, and that was what my quasi-abusive boyfriend and I had been living off for the past six months. He had come up with the ploy.

“Make it sound bad but not too bad. Don’t say I hit you. Say I threw a chair at you or something.”

“You did throw a chair at me.”

“Obviously I wasn’t fully serious when I did that.”

I felt obligated to stay until my parents’ money ran out, since asking for it had been his idea. Then he punched not my face but the wall right next to my face and I had to move very quickly from terror to concern and rush him to the emergency room, where a young, temporary doctor said that we could either wait four hours for the real doctor to arrive and fix the bone in my boyfriend’s hand or let him “have a go.” The temporary doctor high-fived me after he’d popped the bone back in.

The next morning, I woke up early and walked down to the cluster of newspaper boxes in front of the old people’s bar, and discreetly pulled out the sex-themed paper. I’d always known that this option would be there for me if I really needed it. Just as my parents were there if I really needed them, except for this one time.

I chose the job that seemed to offer the most money for a one-time deal. I thought that they would shoot it in a hotel but it happened in an apartment, on an old couch. I wasn’t directed so much as given a series of props to make my way through, like an obstacle course. A turquoise Teddy bear, a pillow, an empty beer bottle, a metal bowl. Not everything was clear to me (the bowl), but I was too nervous to speak; I just laughed again and again to demonstrate consent. My biggest fear was that one of these men, the man with the lights or the cameraman, would misinterpret my nervousness and halt everything, shutting down the set on the ground that I was being objectified against my will. At that age, I assumed that everyone, deep down, was a feminist. So one had to be careful not to trigger feminism where one didn’t want it.

I was waiting for a costume, something black and sexy or pink and trashy that would help catapult me out of myself. Instead, a man with a baseball cap, who was maybe the director, just said, “O.K., we’re rolling.” I was in shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals. I looked down at my shirt. It was from a sushi restaurant in my home town, but if you just glanced at it you might think it was racist, because of the fake Asian lettering. I imagined thousands of viewers waiting for this racist girl to get herself off. I quickly undressed and made a scissors gesture to the camera to indicate that this first part, the part with the racist shirt, should be cut. No one acknowledged this suggestion, so I rubbed against the Teddy bear, and rode the big pillow. I held the bowl, uncertain, and then set it aside. I put the beer bottle into my vagina. With all this moving around, it was impossible to become even slightly turned on—back then I had to shut my eyes and make my body completely stiff to generate any feeling. But no one said anything until after I had heaved my last fake orgasmic sigh.

“O.K., we got that,” a woman with a clipboard said. The man in the baseball cap gave me a firm nod, like a satisfied coach. I understood then that the five-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fee was not the price of my beauty or my sex appeal; it was my naïveté that I’d sold. Every person, no matter how plain, has one great erotic performance in her—the one in which she doesn’t know what she’s doing and is desperately trying to save her life. A second performance would be a copy of the first, which would require skills I didn’t have.

My face wasn’t anywhere you could see it unless you entered a credit-card number and clicked past dozens of professionals—“college beauties,” “hot Korean girl,” and so on. But a few people made it through the gauntlet. The first time I was recognized was at a healthy-Mexican restaurant; a pale man in gym clothes stared at me for a long time before making a scissors gesture in the air. It was electrifying, as if all my clothes had fallen off at once. I looked away but there was no denying our intimacy; he’d come while watching me. The next one was a father with his family; he scissored his fingers down low, surreptitiously. The last was a butch lesbian teen-ager; she just walked right up to me and asked. Each time, I’d hurry home and enter my credit-card number, clicking quickly past the college beauties and the hot Korean girl. Though I’d felt nothing at the time, seeing myself through these people’s eyes was profound and overwhelming. I’d cry out with abandon; my body would shake and shiver as I came. Then I’d sleep, immediately, for at least two hours.

The video shoot became the central sexual experience of my life; to this day, I can’t orgasm unless I imagine that I’m the pale man, the dad, or the young lesbian watching it, sometimes all of them together, crowded around one computer screen. I’m them, I’m me, I’m them, I’m me, I come. I showed it to each boyfriend I had after that, to blow their minds but also to explain my sexual orientation; I was oriented around myself in that video and anyone who’d seen it. There was only one boyfriend I didn’t tell. He was a very classy man, emotionally speaking, and I didn’t want to give him any indication of basket-casery. After I married him, I kept meaning to bring it up, to draw him into the fold of my sexuality, such as it was. But I waited too long; we were so close now. And after the butch lesbian there was a lull, a seventeen-year lull, in which no one recognized me.

I arrived at the Luxury Sheets Kiosk and the brawny man with floppy brown hair idled a few feet away, trying to decide what to do. The scissoring gesture didn’t seem to occur to him. I ran my hand over the sheets while the cashier rang up a tall woman who kept adding one more thing. His eyes met mine, and I gave him a secret little smile. Truth is, I wanted to collapse with relief. Though a lot had happened in the past seventeen years—marriage, a child, my career—it was suddenly clear to me that I’d only been going through the motions, an exhausting simulation. I wasn’t a stone. I was one of life’s biggest fans, the best example of a living thing. The amateur sex video was like a seed I had planted in my youth; it would always sustain me. Not financially but by sending me these messengers when I was most in need. My blood moved around in my body; I felt the purpose of every muscle. I was ready to dance. And just then a beat began, so I rocked my hips and pressed my wrists together, swinging them like a girl in bondage who nonetheless wanted to party. The beat ended abruptly; it was the tall woman’s ringtone.

“Hello?” she answered impatiently; she had enough going on with all these sheets. I couldn’t believe I’d danced to her ringtone. Maybe it was O.K. Who knows? Who can really see themselves? He was approaching. He was nearly beside me, his face open with surprise. I opened myself, too.

“You’re my neighbor,” he said.

“In what sense?” I said, my eyes twinkling.

“Well, in the sense that I live in the house next door to yours.”

“The house on the corner?”

“Yeah, it’s a duplex. We live in the apartment that faces Amador Street.”

“Oh. Do you park on Amador?” I was bringing up parking just to hurt myself. I hated this conversation.

“I park on Amador and my wife parks in the garage,” he said. “Although lately we’ve been trying to ride our scooters more. I’m Joel.”

I thought about bringing up my husband, tit for tat, but I was too tired. The previous few seconds had taken everything out of me. We parted, saying that we would definitely see each other soon, ha-ha.

I drove the long way around the block to avoid Amador Street on my way home. I parked and turned off the car. It was hot but I left my seat belt on, folded my hands in my lap, and took some slow breaths. Before Joel, I had still believed I could be recognized. Now I knew I was too old. How do you mourn that kind of loss? It just pulls your whole life down. My phone rang: Alex.

“Are you home?”

“Yes. I’m in the driveway.”

“Yeah, we heard you drive up. You coming in?”

“In a sec. I need to pour my heart out to someone so I can be empty and unburdened when I come inside.”

I waited for him to say, “You can pour your heart out to me,” but he was quiet and we got off the phone. He never takes the bait. Which is good. It teaches me to be more direct in asking for what I need. Or does it? So far it hadn’t.

We’d been tunnelling toward each other for years. It was hard work, but the assumption was that eventually our two tunnels would connect. We’d break through—Hallelujah! Clay-encrusted hands finally seizing each other!—and we would be together, really together, for the remaining time that we were alive. So long as we both dug as hard and as fast as we could, everything would work out. But, of course, neither of us knew for sure how the other person’s digging was going. One of us might have been doggedly tunnelling toward the other person, while the other person was curling away in another direction. That person might not even have been aware of how off course he or she was. One of us might have tunnelled straight down for a few weeks, in anger, and then tried to get back on track, but now honestly had no idea where to go. We might break through—Hallelujah!—only to find that we were seizing the dirty hands of a stranger. What to do then? Or we might simply get tired, and stop digging, decide that here was good enough. All the while saying things like “We must be getting close!” and “I can’t wait until the day finally comes!” We might never meet up at all; we might die before it happened. Or worse: maybe there had never been any hope of our meeting up, because what was that even a metaphor for? Oneness? A child’s dream of love? I got out of the car and went inside, carrying the new fitted sheet and the tent light.

The next weekend, I was unfortunately not able to go on the camping trip. I stood in the driveway and waved goodbye to Alex and Sam, tearful for no reason. Then I went inside and walked around the house, room by room, looking at all our stuff through the judgmental eyes of a monk or a nun. I did my work, very slowly, over the course of the day. At 8 p.m. I started watching TV and at 2 a.m. I turned out the light. Then the earthquake happened.

I flew out of bed and moved down the hallway like a person on a wobbly rope bridge. I lurched out the back door and along the side of the house to the sidewalk. The shaking stopped. The street lights were off, no moon. Car alarms were beeping in syncopation. A huge branch was draped across my car. Someone was standing on the corner, waving. It was Joel. I had successfully avoided interaction all week. Now I ran to him through the dark.

“I didn’t get my shoes!” I yelled dumbly, as the pavement trembled again.

Joel thought it was safest to stay outside; I thought so, too—less stuff to be trapped under if it fell. He called his wife, who was in Sun Valley, Idaho. I didn’t call Alex, since I was safe and a middle-of-the-night call is always alarming. Joel’s earthquake-survival kit was more elaborate than ours; we spread out high-tech blankets and pillows on the lawn on his side of the duplex and lay down, waiting for dawn.

Once the car alarms had been silenced, the night was strangely quiet. The freeways were almost empty. Without the lights or the hum of cars, the sky took its place as the foremost thing. Joel and I stared up at it—an enormous gray arena we could fly around in just by lying there.

“Looking at the sky should be a ride at Disneyland,” Joel said.

This was such an accurate way to describe it. I thought about the accuracy for two or three minutes and then said, “Yeah.” We squinted at our houses in the dark and saw that they were leaning; they had shifted. I thought we’d probably move, rather than repair ours; Joel’s was a rental, so he said they’d move for sure. Maybe to Ireland. I said we’d probably move to Ireland, too. The chances seemed high that we would be neighbors again, in Ireland. We scooted toward each other, for warmth, and when I turned on my side Joel spooned me, very innocently. All bodies were good, I realized. Joel’s stocky form beside me was unfamiliar, but good. Hugging. It hit me like a ton of bricks. Hugging was so moving, so basic. Why had I ever taken pride in not being a “hugger”? Two people embracing was the very building block of life.

“Hugging is the building block of life,” I whispered. Joel was quiet and this was exactly right; more words would just take away. I pressed my hand against the lawn, palming the whole earth like a gigantic basketball. Warm tears ran into the hair at my temple, one after another after another. Hello, stranger, I thought. And by “stranger” I meant not Joel but myself. My blood moved around in my body. I felt the purpose of every muscle. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t seen the video.

When I awoke, it was light out and I was lying with the next-door neighbor on his lawn. I could tell right away that our houses were fine. It took only fifteen minutes to straighten up the books and the dishes that had fallen. The earthquake had been big, but no one was saying that it was “the big one.” When Alex and Sam got home, I told a story about hiding under the dining-room table. Our earthquake, the one that Joel and I had survived, was private. I friended him on Facebook the next day and we started e-mailing. Mostly we wrote about details from that night—the silence, the sky, how time had seemed to stretch out. I didn’t have any specific or adulterous plans; I was just wholly open. I saw us going on a road trip. Or maybe taking ayahuasca and throwing up in buckets. His penis was moving in and out of me most of the time. Sometimes I made it very small, like a finger, so that it wouldn’t distract me too much as I worked or emptied the dishwasher. Just a little thrusting tick-tock that drowned out the real sound of time: 7 a.m., 4 p.m., 6 p.m., the most brutal of time’s representatives, but hardly the whole battalion.

I was waiting for Joel’s response to my last e-mail when Alex and I stumbled on him, almost literally. We were coming home from a date night; Joel and his wife were lying on their lawn, staring up at the evening sky. They’d brought out the same pillows and blankets, and a bottle of wine. It was adorable in a way that people like us find cloying, so Alex raised his eyebrows at me before calling out to them.

“Sorry! We usually park farther up but the trash cans are out.”

“No, no,” Joel said, rising to his feet. “We’re good.” He swept his hand toward their reënactment. “It’s a lot more fun without all the shaking!” His wife raised her glass toward me and smiled; she knew the whole story. Alex nodded, cocking his head curiously in my direction. I stared at the familiar blue geometric pattern of the pillowcases. Joel had taken the exquisite energy of our experience and plowed it back into his marriage. How wise. This option had never occurred to me. I had always detonated each thing in the very place where I found it.

Even after I acknowledged that I hadn’t hidden under the dining-room table as I said I had, Alex was still confused. We’d been reading in bed for less than thirty seconds when he started up with the questions again.

“It’s just so unlike you. You hate camping.”

“I know. It was an extreme situation.”

“And you’ve never once said hi to the neighbors.”

“And I still don’t want to! Joel is a completely uninteresting person.” This was now true again.

I turned out my light. He left his light on and lay next to me, waiting. Leaving a space for my confession. I had done nothing. Nothing! My heart pounded nonetheless, the dumb beast. Just as I started to roll over, Alex turned to me and used his big hands to pull all my hair back, stretching my face into surprise. He held me like this, studying my posture of alarm, then let go abruptly and fell onto his back in frustration. We embarked on a silence. It grew and grew until it was a sort of god that we could only submit to. After fifteen or twenty minutes I almost giggled—somebody say something!—and then I realized with horror that he was probably asleep. This wasn’t our silence; it was mine alone. I lay paralyzed as it hollowed and darkened, expanding in every direction with a familiar cruelty. Hello, stranger. Once, many years ago, Alex had saved me from this black hole with the kind of understanding that makes everything else in life possible. Even ingratitude.

He shifted under the covers and I held my breath. If he was awake, I would try. If he was asleep, I would sleep, too, and probably forget to try, or forget that it mattered, or what I meant by try. Try to be brave.

“Are you awake?” I whispered.

“Wide awake.”

I sat up and told the story of the video, starting with my quasi-abusive boyfriend and ending with meeting the neighbor twice. Alex was mostly quiet, only asking a few questions (“What was the bowl for?”). I left out the hugging and the e-mailing and the tick-tocking tiny penis, but, still, when I was finished he silently walked out of the room. I took a breath and held it. I had made a terrible mistake. Why had I done this? My mind stopped, poised to shatter.

Then he came back, holding his computer. He solemnly opened it in front of me, like a violin case before a maestro. I typed in the URL. The Web site looked a little different, but the major landmarks were still there.

“You need a credit card to get to it.”

He left and came back with his wallet. He typed in his credit-card number and I clicked around. I wasn’t sure where to go because the college beauties and the hot Korean girl were gone. It was all new girls. They looked extremely young. I scrolled in a daze. Brunette. Underage. Small tits. I stopped clicking.

“When was the last time you saw it?” Alex said quietly.

“I don’t know. I have it pretty memorized so I don’t need to. . . . Not since we’ve been together.”

“Oh. I think they update . . . you know, just . . . for the viewers.”

It seemed obvious now that they wouldn’t still have a video from the nineties.

“Yeah, of course. I just thought maybe they had a section for . . . alumni or . . . I don’t know.”

I shut the computer. It was too bad. Really too bad. How bad? The consequences would be enormous, I felt.

Alex was in the kitchen now, opening cupboards.

He came back with a Teddy bear, an empty beer bottle, and a bowl. He picked up his pillow and pulled the comforter aside, arranging everything along the foot of the stripped bed.

“I can’t re-create it, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was true amateur porn, not fake.”

“I understand—the real deal.”

“The people who saw it . . . they were really overcome by it. It was their top video to watch, porn-wise.”

As we talked, Alex seemed to be riding the pillow slightly, maybe unconsciously.

“You’re talking about the pale man—”

“The pale man, the dad, and the butch girl. Yes.”

Now he was rubbing the Teddy bear against his crotch. He slid off his boxer shorts. Well. Well, now. I sat back. He was very much an amateur. He didn’t know what he was doing and he was desperately trying to save his life. I’d never seen him move his hips like that. It was funny, or no, actually not funny, just disorienting, slightly grotesque. He picked up the beer bottle, and, after a moment of honest hesitation, sucked its mouth and then—I reached under my nightgown—began slowly working it into himself. I had never wanted to see this, but I came immediately, and hard. He brought himself to the end of the show, manually. I held my breath, waiting for him to come on the new sheet. I’d have to wash it again. Who cares? I do. Just a little. Just enough to ruin each day. And then, with a swift and professional gesture, he grabbed the bowl and came into it. That was what the bowl was for. ♦

Published in the print edition of the

September 4, 2017

, issue.

Miranda July

is a filmmaker, an artist, and the author of five books. Her latest movie, “Kajillionaire,” will be released in September.

[the-hellbound-heart]

V/H/S (2012)

What better way to kick things off than with one of the first horror films I ever saw on Netflix, VHS.

I watched this for the first time a couple years ago when I was just starting to get into horror films, after finding it on a list of “alternative horror movies to watch on Halloween.” At the time, it absolutely terrified me. I distinctly remember walking my friend to her dorm and then having to run back alone down her building’s staircase, eerily similar to a staircase that acts as a set piece near the beginning of the movie.

As much as it scared me, I did really like this film, even if it has its cheesy moments. Recently I had the opportunity to revisit it, and after seeing so many horror films since I first watched VHS, I was interested to see if it still holds up. And it does, mostly.

VHS is a found footage anthology made up of five different short films inside of a frame narrative. I’ve seen plenty of bad found footage films, but I’ll also defend the genre as one that can be effective when used well. VHS is kind of a mixed bag in regard to how the found footage is used, but I’ll go into the specifics of this later on.

As for anthology films, these tend to be more hit or miss for me, usually with one or two shorts that stand out among a bunch of mediocre ones, but this has come to be expected in a genre focused on experimentation.

Since VHS is a series of shorts, I’ll review each one individually as opposed to the movie as a whole, because, again, they are very hit or miss.

“Tape 56″ (Frame Narrative)

“Tape 56″ is the main storyline that the film cuts back to in between shorts. It focuses on a group of criminals who make money filming videos of themselves sexually assaulting women and committing other various crimes. They are hired to break into a house and steal a VHS tape, where they find the owner of the house dead in front of his television. They begin to watch the VHS tapes, kicking off our other stories.

There’s not really much to say about this one. It serves its purpose by tying the narrative together, but it is pretty bland and the characters are extremely unlikable. Much of the dialogue is just needless exposition about the criminals explaining how they make their money. It’s boring, and the opening montage leaves an especially bad taste.

“Amateur Night”

Luckily, the first short we are treated to makes up for the bad opening. “Amateur Night” follows three young men who spend a night hopping from club to club, hoping to pick up girls. However, one of the girls is not what she seems, and many delightfully gruesome events ensue.

This segment is probably my favorite (apparently others felt the same as it ended up with its own spin off film, SiREN). It holds little back as far as content goes (this segment is one of the few movie scenes I have ever seen that features full on male nudity, in addition to being wonderfully violent) but manages to maintain an air of mystery. We are told what we need to know about the characters and their situation but are spared from clunky and pointless exposition dialogue like that in the “Tape 56″ segment.

I also found the characters in this segment to be some of the best in a film that is not exactly stellar with character development. The main character isn’t a total dick, unlike most of the characters in this movie, and seeing his dickish friends meet bloody ends is very satisfying. The monster, which I won’t spoil, is also an intriguing character, if more than a bit terrifying.

Overall, “Amateur Night” makes for a solid and effectively scary short.

“Second Honeymoon”

This segment follows a young married couple traveling through the southwest on their “second honeymoon.” They are stalked by a mysterious stranger, who breaks into their hotel room while they are sleeping.

There’s not much to say about this one. It’s slowly paced, the characters didn't interest me much, and I didn’t find it that scary. The ending twist was lame. The best thing I can say about it is that at least it was short.

“Tuesday the 17th”

This short is about a group of high school aged kids who accompany their new friend on a hiking trip in the woods to the spot where several of her other friends were murdered a year before. The kids are followed by a strange creature known as “The Glitch,” whose face is kept obscured by a glitch in the video.

The effect used on the glitch monster is really interesting, even if the segment itself borrows from familiar narratives (it has a lot in common with Slenderman-type stories). The characters are standard, and the story is predictable, but the effects and the mysterious nature of the creature still make it interesting enough to watch.

“The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger”

This one utilizes found footage in a creative way, taking the form of video chats between Emily and her boyfriend. Emily has been encountering what appear to be ghost children in her apartment at night. At the same time, she begins to notice a strange bump on her arm, which draws her suspicions.

Emily and her boyfriend are well-enough defined characters, and it ends up being more unique than just another ghost kid story. The big drawback for me is that it’s really fucking confusing. It wasn’t until I read the film’s imdb page that I learned what the twist at the end was supposed to be. It’s not a bad short, but I do wish there could have been more to clarify what exactly was going on.

“10/31/98″

It’s typical for anthology films to end on their strongest short, and that certainly is the case here (though personally I would consider this one on par with “Amateur Night,” this seems to be the general audience favorite).

This segment follows a group of friends on Halloween as they get lost on their way to a party and stumble upon some sort of ritual, where they rescue a young woman. As they attempt to escape with her, paranormal phenomena seem to follow them.

This is a good old fashioned ghost/demon story, and boy is it effective. This is easily the scariest segment of the film, with the tension escalating perfectly as things get more and more dire, before ending on a horrifying and gruesome note.

As a whole, I probably enjoy VHS a little more than most people do. While much of it does drift into generic jump scare territory, great shorts such as “Amateur Night” and “10/31/98″ more than make up for the lesser segments.

Though the found footage is used relatively well in many parts of the film, it also has its drawbacks. In some segments it doesn’t make sense for the characters to be filming the events (”Second Honeymoon”, for example), and one does have to question the use of a VHS format in a movie that presumably takes place in 2012.

For as many scenes that use found footage poorly, however, there are plenty that use it smartly. “Tuesday the 17th” and “The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily” give enough variety to keep it interesting, and even shorts like “Amateur Night” give an explanation for why the characters are filming, even when any sane person would drop the camera and start running.

It’s worth mentioning that there is a weird bit of sexism to this film as a whole, which delights maybe a little too much in seeing women assaulted and objectified. It walks a thin line between subverting sexist tropes (“Amateur Night”) and embracing them (”Tape 56″), but the misogynistic undertones should definitely be noted and is the major drawback of the film.

As far as effects go, this film stays pretty minimalist, but there are some really good gore scenes, which range from realistic to cheesy and fake, but never feel out of place. If that kind of thing bothers you, though, I would not recommend this film. Just about every segment has some pretty graphic gore.

Overall, I give VHS a tentative thumbs up. It’s hit or miss, but the parts that work really work and it makes for some great scares. I’d recommend VHS to anyone who likes found footage and exploring different genres.

(It’s also worth noting that this film has two sequels, VHS 2 and VHS: Viral. I have seen the second one and will post my review soon, but I have not seen the third one yet.)

[thorne93]

Knight in Shining Armor

Prompt: Seeing Sebastian Stan on the street, but not having the nerve to talk to him until he starts getting harassed.

Word Count: 1360

Pairing: Sebastian Stan x Reader

Warnings: language (I think), harassment, sexual insinuation, nervousness, threats.

Note: First whack at an “actor” fic/drabble/oneshot. Beta’d by the ever perfect @like-a-bag-of-potatoes

~~~~~~~~~~

Walking along, minding your own business, playing a little on your phone, you happened to look up in the busy streets of LA. You thought your eyes deceived you. No, you were certain your eyes deceived you. It couldn’t be….could it? The Sebastian Stan. The cutest, most adorable, most sexy, most smoldering, most talented, most extraordinary, most perfect man you’d ever been a fan girl of was walking toward you. Okay, well not toward you, per se, but he was definitely heading your direction.

Panic settled on you as your knees buckled. You had extreme shyness, probably bordering social anxiety. Your cheeks heated just looking at him and he hadn’t even made eye contact yet. Examining him in a gorgeous powder blue shirt with a small V and dark jeans, he was still walking, a slight smile on his face.

Seconds were ticking by, you knew this was a make you or break you moment. Do you speak to him? What do you say? Do you wave and keep walking? Do you ignore him? He probably wanted to be left alone, but at the same token, you were a huge fan and wanted him to know you enjoyed his work. Mentally screaming from trying to decide what to do, he was just about to pass you, looked up, gave you a slight smile and nod and walked passed as you returned the gesture.

Your heart stopped. Sebastian Stan’s eyes just met mine, you thought, your knees still like jello. Was this real life? Did that really just happen?

You heard a squeal which made you turn. Three girls were squealing, giggling, hopping up and down as they surrounded Sebastian. They had the confidence to do what you did not. You couldn’t help but stare at the scene unfold.

“Can we get your picture?” one of them asked excitedly. There was one tall light brown haired one, one shorter blonde one, and one with dark brown hair. Each of them were too skinny. The blonde was the one who asked for photos.

“Sure, I have time for a photo or two,” Sebastian replied kindly, his back to you. You moved into the sort of outdoor hallway that was the entrance to a string of stores to get a better view at him from the side, spying on the scene.

They took five pictures. One with each of them alone, then two group photos.

“We loved you in that one movie,” the tall brunette said.

“Oh? Which one?” Sebastian asked with a gentle smile on his face.

“You know, the comic book one.”

“Captain America?” he questioned. Clearly these girls were the type to watch whatever their boyfriend put in front of them, and then they would simply swoon over the hot ones, not dissecting the plot line, how closely it followed the comics, how you appreciated every little flinch and facial expression of the actors…

“Yeah!”

“There are three of them, did you enjoy one in particular?” he asked.

“Uh...The one where you were bad,” the blonde one tried.

“Winter Soldier?”

“Yes! That one! Oh my gosh, your hair was great in that.”

“Thanks,” he tried but in a way you could tell it was forced. Immediately, you knew he didn’t like being objectified like that. But who would? Sebastian and all of his costars put their all into a movie and people like this only see a sexy outfit and good hair. “Well, I’m off to an appointment. Thanks for the compliments. Nice to meet you all,” he said as he tried to get out of the group of them but they seemed to move closer, like lions hunting prey.

“Where are you off to?”

“Can we come with?”

“I’m single, you know?”

The girls continued to get closer as he swallowed and looked around uneasily, his hands coming up either in defense or to show that he wasn’t touching them.

“Yeah, come on, we're fans, we deserve the same treatment as those nerds that follow you around to conventions,” the tall brunette scoffed.

“They’re fans too,” Sebastian offered in a strained voice, trying to defend his loyal fans but not wanting to offend these girls.

You weren’t sure how much more you could take of this but you didn’t know what to do.

“Jenny! Jenny, get a pic of this!” the blonde one told the dark haired girl as she scooted close to Sebastian and tried to kiss him but he pulled away, as he did, the other brunette grabbed his shirt and pulled him toward her, effectively ripping it. Your blood boiled immediately as you saw red. Your fists clenched and you began walking out when he started to look worried. The girl named Jenny came up and slapped him on his ass as he tried to turn away from the girls.

“Where you going, hot stuff?” Jenny asked, licking her lips. This was sickening.

“Hey!” you shouted. “What the hell is your problem?” you demanded.

“And you are?” the tall brunette asked, turning to you and glaring.

“I’m your worst fucking nightmare if you don’t leave him alone,” you informed, standing your ground.

“Oh, yeah? What are you going to do?”

“I’ll kick your ass and file charges on you for assault and sexual harassment,” you confidently said.

They looked at you for a brief second and then burst into laughter.

“As if. We’re just having fun, he’s enjoying it,” the tall one said.

“You think he enjoys getting cornered, groped, attacked, and insulted. I’m really ashamed of you. As women, you know this shit happens to us all the time, simply for having boobs. Why would you put someone you’re supposedly a fan of through the same distress?”

“He’s a guy, he’ll get over it,” the blonde one scoffed as she crossed her arms.

All the while, Sebastian was staring at you.

“How about this,” you tried again, clearly they weren’t getting the message. You reached in your bag and pulled out a phone.  “I’m not fucking around. Leave him alone, or I’ll call the cops and tell them you attacked me. Got it?” If they didn’t leave, your next step was your knife, but you weren’t sure the situation called for that yet.

They glared at you but walked away before turning around to flip you off and shout to Sebastian, “Your movies are shit and so is your acting! Fucking prick!”

You shook your head and stayed your distance from him.

“I’m sorry that happened to you. Don’t pay any attention to them. Are you okay?” you questioned, your face knitting into concern.

“Yeah,” he informed running a hand through his hair. “Thank you. I doubt a lot of people would do that.”

“You’re a human being with boundaries that should be respected like anyone else,” you said simply, shrugging.

“Well thank you. That means a lot.”

“No problem…” You smiled then realized you probably looked like an idiot so you said, “Well, uh, nice to meet you - sorta. I’ll be going now.”

“Wait, I...I’d like to take you maybe for coffee or something? I mean, I was just a damsel in distress here and you’re my knight in shining armor...I owe you.” His grin made your heart stop. Suddenly, you realized Sebastian Stan was offering to take you for coffee. Before your mind could melt down from an overload you answered him.

“You don’t have to do that, really. I wasn’t looking for a reward or anything, just being a decent person.” Laughing lightly, you shrugged.

“No, I know...but...I’d like to get to know the girl behind the shining armor,” he tried again, blushing a bit.

Holy shit. Sebastian. Stan. Was. Blushing. For. You.

Stammering, not wanting to make it seem like you weren’t interested, you said, “Well, uh, yeah coffee would be great.”

“Really? Great. Do you have time now?”

“Yeah,” you said softly, smiling.

Stuffing his hands in his pockets like the adorable man he was, he blushed and smiled sideways at you, leading the way to your date. It took every ounce of energy to not scream, squeal, or die right there from delight.

[coolandreezie]

The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck Posted by Melissa McEwan at Friday, August 14, 2009   [Trigger warning.]

Despite feminists' reputation, and contra my own individual reputation cultivated over five years of public opinion-making, I am not a man-hater.

If I played by misogynists' rules, specifically the one that dictates it only takes one woman doing one Mean or Duplicitous or Disrespectful or Unlawful or otherwise Bad Thing to justify hatred of all women, I would have plenty of justification for hating men, if I were inclined to do that sort of thing.

Most of my threatening hate mail comes from men. The most unrelentingly trouble-making trolls have always been men. I've been cat-called and cow-called from moving vehicles countless times, and subjected to other forms of street harassment, and sexually harassed at work, always by men. I have been sexually assaulted—if one includes rape, attempted rape, unsolicited touching of breasts, buttocks, and/or genitals, nonconsensual frottage on public transportation, and flashing—by dozens of people during my lifetime, some known to me, some strangers, all men.

But I don't hate men, because I play by different rules. In fact, there are men in this world whom I love quite a lot.

There are also individual men in this world I would say I probably hate, or something close, men who I hold in unfathomable contempt, but it is not because they are men.

No, I don't hate men.

It would, however, be fair to say that I don't easily trust them.

My mistrust is not, as one might expect, primarily a result of the violent acts done on my body, nor the vicious humiliations done to my dignity. It is, instead, born of the multitude of mundane betrayals that mark my every relationship with a man—the casual rape joke, the use of a female slur, the careless demonization of the feminine in everyday conversation, the accusations of overreaction, the eyerolling and exasperated sighs in response to polite requests to please not use misogynist epithets in my presence or to please use non-gendered language ("humankind").

There are the insidious assumptions guiding our interactions—the supposition that I will regard being exceptionalized as a compliment ("you're not like those other women"), and the presumption that I am an ally against certain kinds of women. Surely, we're all in agreement that Britney Spears is a dirty slut who deserves nothing but a steady stream of misogynist vitriol whenever her name is mentioned, right? Always the subtle pressure to abandon my principles to trash this woman or that woman, as if I'll never twig to the reality that there's always a justification for unleashing the misogyny, for hating a woman in ways reserved only for women. I am exhorted to join in the cruel revelry, and when I refuse, suddenly the target is on my back. And so it goes.

There are the jokes about women, about wives, about mothers, about raising daughters, about female bosses. They are told in my presence by men who are meant to care about me, just to get a rise out of me, as though I am meant to find funny a reminder of my second-class status. I am meant to ignore that this is a bullying tactic, that the men telling these jokes derive their amusement specifically from knowing they upset me, piss me off, hurt me. They tell them and I can laugh, and they can thus feel superior, or I can not laugh, and they can thus feel superior. Heads they win, tails I lose. I am used as a prop in an ongoing game of patriarchal posturing, and then I am meant to believe it is true when some of the men who enjoy this sport, in which I am their pawn, tell me, "I love you." I love you, my daughter. I love you, my niece. I love you, my friend. I am meant to trust these words.

There are the occasions that men—intellectual men, clever men, engaged men—insist on playing devil's advocate, desirous of a debate on some aspect of feminist theory or reproductive rights or some other subject generally filed under the heading: Women's Issues. These intellectual, clever, engaged men want to endlessly probe my argument for weaknesses, want to wrestle over details, want to argue just for fun—and they wonder, these intellectual, clever, engaged men, why my voice keeps raising and why my face is flushed and why, after an hour of fighting my corner, hot tears burn the corners of my eyes. Why do you have to take this stuff so personally? ask the intellectual, clever, and engaged men, who have never considered that the content of the abstract exercise that's so much fun for them is the stuff of my life.

There is the perplexity at my fury that my life experience is not considered more relevant than the opinionated pronouncements of men who make a pastime of informal observation, like womanhood is an exotic locale which provides magnificent fodder for the amateur ethnographer. And there is the haughty dismissal of my assertion that being on the outside looking in doesn't make one more objective; it merely provides a different perspective.

There are the persistent, tiresome pronouncements of similitude between men's and women's experiences, the belligerent insistence that handsome men are objectified by women, too! that women pinch men's butts sometimes, too! that men are expected to look a certain way at work, too! that women rape, too! and other equivalencies that conveniently and stupidly ignore institutional inequities that mean X rarely equals Y. And there are the long-suffering groans that meet any attempt to contextualize sexism and refute the idea that such indignities, though grim they all may be, are not necessarily equally oppressive.

There are the stereotypes—oh, the abundant stereotypes!—about women, not me, of course, but other women, those women with their bad driving and their relentless shopping habits and their PMS and their disgusting vanity and their inability to stop talking and their disinterest in Important Things and their trying to trap men and their getting pregnant on purpose and their false rape accusations and their being bitches sluts whores cunts… And I am expected to nod in agreement, and I am nudged and admonished to agree. I am expected to say these things are not true of me, but are true of women (am I seceding from the union?); I am expected to put my stamp of token approval on the stereotypes. Yes, it's true. Between you and me, it's all true. That's what is wanted from me. Abdication of my principles and pride, in service to a patriarchal system that will only use my collusion to further subjugate me. This is a thing that is asked of me by men who purport to care for me.

There is the unwillingness to listen, a ferociously stubborn not getting it on so many things, so many important things. And the obdurate refusal to believe, to internalize, that my outrage is not manufactured and my injure not make-believe—an inflexible rejection of the possibility that my pain is authentic, in favor of the consolatory belief that I am angry because I'm a feminist (rather than the truth: that I'm a feminist because I'm angry).

And there is the denial about engaging in misogyny, even when it's evident, even when it's pointed out gently, softly, indulgently, carefully, with goodwill and the presumption that it was not intentional. There is the firm, fixed, unyielding denial—because it is better and easier to imply that I'm stupid or crazy, that I have imagined being insulted by someone about whom I care (just for the fun of it!), than it is to just admit a bloody mistake. Rather I am implied to be a hysteric than to say, simply, I'm sorry.

Not every man does all of these things, or even most of them, and certainly not all the time. But it only takes one, randomly and occasionally, exploding in a shower of cartoon stars like an unexpected punch in the nose, to send me staggering sideways, wondering what just happened.

Well. I certainly didn't see that coming…

These things, they are not the habits of deliberately, connivingly cruel men. They are, in fact, the habits of the men in this world I love quite a lot.

All of whom have given me reason to mistrust them, to use my distrust as a self-protection mechanism, as an essential tool to get through every day, because I never know when I might next get knocked off-kilter with something that puts me in the position, once again, of choosing between my dignity and the serenity of our relationship.

Swallow shit, or ruin the entire afternoon?

It can come out of nowhere, and usually does. Which leaves me mistrustful by both necessity and design. Not fearful; just resigned—and on my guard. More vulnerability than that allows for the possibility of wounds that do not heal. Wounds to our relationship, the sort of irreparable damage that leaves one unable to look in the eye someone that you loved once upon a time.

This, then, is the terrible bargain we have regretfully struck: Men are allowed the easy comfort of their unexamined privilege, but my regard will always be shot through with a steely, anxious bolt of caution.

A shitty bargain all around, really. But there it is.

There are men who will read this post and think, huffily, dismissively, that a person of color could write a post very much like this one about white people, about me. That's absolutely right. So could a lesbian, a gay man, a bisexual, an asexual. So could a trans or intersex person (which hardly makes a comprehensive list). I'm okay with that. I don't feel hated. I feel mistrusted—and I understand it; I respect it. It means, for me, I must be vigilant, must make myself trustworthy. Every day.

I hope those men will hear me when I say, again, I do not hate you. I mistrust you. You can tell yourselves that's a problem with me, some inherent flaw, some evidence that I am fucked up and broken and weird; you can choose to believe that the women in your lives are nothing like me.

Or you can be vigilant, can make yourselves trustworthy. Every day.

Just in case they're more like me than you think.

...As I lie awake at night wondering what happened to the light hearted, easy going, flirty girl I once was, I read this and understand. I am angry and also saddened. Trust is important in order to live a complete life. To feel that trust from people you love, and depend on, makes life a secure and happy place. No trust, no security, erodes your very being. Soon, you become someone who you barely recognize. Someone who questions everything. One who decides to do nothing. Who is scared and just plain tired of fighting so hard for respect and dignity.Who trust no one.

[tessatechaitea]

Supergirl #6

Is this the inappropriate cock drawn on the cover variant?

To be fair, my current pants situation might not be entirely the fault of the word "finale." I did just spend an awfully long time staring at that ad of Flo putting the name your price gun right up to against her lips.

• The main problem with these constant reboots is that fans that stick around from one new universe to the other are forced to reread the same fucking stories over and over again. I fucking get it already, Steve! Supergirl has worse Daddy Issues than that stripper I tipped too well and made too much eye contact with who thought that was an invitation to provide a therapeutic ear for her as she gyrated near my vinaigrette decanter. Is it too much to ask that when I walk into a building that screams in bloody neon "Objectify women sexually here!" that I not have to learn that they're real people with real problems?! • A lot of what I write is just lying for entertainment reasons (mostly my own entertainment). Like, did I really go to a strip club recently or was that just to build a metaphor I thought was funny? Am I really sitting in a squelchy load of nutsauce? Have I ever found Flo attractive? I mention this because I was reminded of my favorite stripper ever by fabricating that last stripper story and I wanted to retell it but I wanted everybody to know it was absolutely true! So here it is:

I think I met a stripper super villain in Vegas this weekend. She told me her name was Princess Unicorn Pants and for $25, she'd stab me in the face and choke me. All that for $25?! How could I refuse! I wonder if that's why I can barely speak now? It could also be the cause of my spontaneous loss of depth perception.

• Okay, so I can tell you part of that story isn't true because I still regret not finding out what would have happened if I'd spent that twenty-five dollars. I like to think Princess Unicorn Pants totally understood me and that she doesn't offer the Stabby-Chokey to just any pervert who wanders into her club. • The only reason I had an orgasm in my pants over the word "finale" is because I noticed before reading the first panel of that first page that it begins with somebody in the New York Headquarters of the DEO saying, "Chief Bones." That totally would have been the money shot. • Currently, National City is being attacked by Cyborg Supermen from outer space. This is happening so that Steve Orlando could use the pun "Rain of the Cyborg Supermen." Totally worth bringing back Cyborg Superman and going over nearly the same ground covered in The New 52 Supergirl comic book. • Cameron Chase, Dr. Veritas, Cat Grant, and Supergirl have a plan to finally defeat Cyborg Superman. Hopefully in one of those "once and for all" kind of ways. Hopefully they'll smash him into scrap iron and toss him into the sun. Then they'll run some kind of spectrographometer that will pop out a punch card reading, in English and verified by Wonder Woman's lasso, "No trace of Cyborg Superman. Utterly destroyed forever and not 'forever' in comic terms but in the actual definition of forever. Good riddance, fuckbumble." It would be odd for a machine to use the word "fuckbumble" but that could be used as a seed for some future plot where machines rise up, not to take over the world, but to just be really snarky assholes to the people trying to use them.

Oh, the Kryptoniad! Who can forget it's powerful first line: "Great Krypton lay in a dark and stormy night."

• The joke in that caption probably fully hit for only like five people. • To stop the Cyborg Superpeople, Cat Grant uses the Catco App on the phones of every citizen of National City who uses the app because they didn't read the terms of service that stated "We can hijack your phone at any time if it will help save National City (or promote Catco Enterprises in any way)." The app sends out a signal that shuts down the Cyborg Superpeople, allowing Supergirl to walk up to a now powerless Cyborg Superfather and say, "Dad. Suck my fucking dick." • Argo City crashes into the ocean a few miles out from National City and doesn't cause a tidal wave of any kind whatsoever. Also, Supergirl is more compassionate than I am. She doesn't tell her dad to suck her dick at all! Instead, she hugs him and is all, "We could have worked together, daddy. Why wouldn't you love me?" Then all of the heroes in the DC Universe feel the strengthening of another Daddy Issue and silently shed a tear. • So instead of crashing into the sun and being obliterated for all time so I never have to read another Cyborg Superman story again, Cyborg Superman and his city crash just off shore from National City. Just the perfect place for Supergirl to shrug her shoulders and think, "I guess that takes care of that! No reason to follow up at all!"

Wait a second. The Pacific Ocean? National City is on the West Coast?! With a name like National City, I assumed it was a version of Washington, D.C. But not Washington, D.C., obviously, since it isn't the seat of the United States government. But more like the way Metropolis and Gotham are both kind of New York but New York still exists as well. I guess it's pseudo Los Angeles or quasi San Francisco or quasi-pseudo San Diego.

• Great. So now Hank Henshaw has become the Randall Dowling of the DC Universe? Now that he's returned from space with some secret super power, he's gallivanting around the globe collecting alien technology to use for his own ominous purposes. • Later, one of Doctor Veritas's aides mentions why there wasn't any tidal waves and I'm all, "Oh, sure! Make me look stupid for wanting an explanation and then giving it to me later after I'd already complained about it." The tidal wave was absorbed by "Dr. Aquadus' field." I would have made that "Dr. Aquadus's field" but then I'm just a barbarian storming down the gates of language. I also will never for the life of me say "an historical something or other." But the weirder part is that a guy named Aquadus went into aquatic sciences! The weirdest part is that I first thought the tidal wave field absorber was invented by Dr. Aquadog. • Supergirl didn't let Cyborg Superman crash into the ocean because she likes boring plots, I guess. She took him back to Dr. Veritas's lair in the center of the Earth to be made Kryptonian again. That would make more sense if he were human because you'd understand that when I said "be made human again" that I meant he was being de-robotified. The Ranking! No change! It was difficult to check my excitement on reading the Chief Bones comment but I had to rate this book based on its merits. And its merits only consisted of phrases that included the words "Cyborg" and "Superman," so I couldn't help but be mostly bored by them.

[starringemiliaclarke]

Press/Gallery: Emilia Clarke Solo Flight

  VANITY FAIR – It may be another year before Daenerys Targaryen appears on HBO, but Emilia Clarke has wrapped up shooting for the final season of Game of Thrones and is prepared for the big screen.

  On a rainy April afternoon, Emilia Clarke enters the bright, airy Egyptian galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art the way so many movie-lovers before her have: quoting Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally. Adopting the unsourceable accent Crystal uses opposite Meg Ryan in a famously improvised scene filmed in this very room, Clarke starts stuttering, “Pah-pah-paprikash.” Our amused if bewildered guide, too young to get the reference, adds the 1989 rom-com to her list of movie recommendations from Clarke, who has already gushed about the 2017 religious drama Novitiate. Chuckling over this unlikely double feature, Clarke assures her, “You have two incredible movies coming your way.”

  One reference the guide does get: Game of Thrones, the HBO juggernaut which stars Clarke as its most unstoppable heroine, Daenerys Targaryen. In fact, the very tour we’re taking, put together by a company called Museum Hack, is based on the series, and offers a fan-friendly survey of the sometimes inscrutable displays of the Met. You don’t have to be an art historian (our guide is an aspiring actress) to understand what Greek fire, Damascus blades, heraldry, mutilated men, samurai kamon, the dragon-born St. Margaret of Antioch, and an early female pharaoh have to do with wildfire, Valyrian steel, house words, and Clarke’s world-famous alter ego.

And yet, despite her fame, Clarke has managed to spend a full half-hour in the museum sponging up our guide’s trivia without being spotted. For years, Clarke’s brown hair let her hide in plain sight, but she recently bleached it an icy Targaryen blond. So, why the invisibility? Maybe it’s her height. “We both have a thing about our stature not quite being what people expect,” says her co-star Kit Harington, who, at five feet eight, has six inches on Clarke. Maybe it’s her outfit—the gray overcoat, cream sweater, and jeans are a far cry from the cloaks and armor of Thrones. Or maybe it’s her bright, decidedly non-intimidating personality. “When I’m goofing around with my pals, I’m unrecognizable,” she says. Harington calls Clarke’s humor “naughty,” and it’s certainly true that her informal, expletive-laced banter is a far cry from Daenerys’s imperious tones. “Sometimes, if I’m in a really bad mood,” Clarke notes, “people are like, ‘Khaleesi!’ ”

  Finally, the spell of anonymity breaks, thanks to a display of competitiveness worthy of Game of Thrones. Our guide has challenged us to photograph as many birds and dragons as we can find in the paintings and sculptures on the tour, and Clarke is approaching the task with her usual effervescent zeal. Standing in the shadow of a stone Hatshepsut, one of patriarchal Egypt’s first female pharaohs, she triumphantly displays one of the winged targets she has captured on her phone. “This little birdie: Boom!” she shouts, her voice ricocheting off the stone walls. A pair of young men look over, then descend, and, in thick French accents, ask for a photo. Clarke’s triumphant grin tightens into a polite, distant smile.

  There it is: the face of Daenerys of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, the Unburnt, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Protector of the Seven Kingdoms, Breaker of Chains and Mother of Dragons, who, over the course of seven seasons, has climbed from powerless pawn to resolute conqueror, forcing one rival after another to “bend the knee” or burn. As Daenerys has risen, so has Clarke, morphing from a struggling actress and part-time cater waiter to an international superstar and symbol of feminine fierceness. That journey is “important and inspiring—particularly now, in our climate,” says her close friend Rose Leslie, who played the wildling warrior Ygritte in early seasons of Game of Thrones. “She’s at the forefront of representing independent women.”

  We still don’t know if, as many expect, Daenerys Targaryen will win the right to rule the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, but we can be assured that Emilia Clarke will hang up her platinum wig for good when Game of Thrones ends its eight-season run, in 2019. There’s still a lot of filming and post-production work to be done, but Clarke has already shot her character’s final on-screen moments. “It fucked me up,” she says. “Knowing that is going to be a lasting flavor in someone’s mouth of what Daenerys is . . .”

  Clarke has good reason to feel unsettled. Letting go of a culture-defining television role can be liberating, to be sure, but it can also be deflating—or worse. Jon Hamm may always be seen as Don Draper; Sarah Michelle Gellar is forever Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Jennifer Aniston will never not be Rachel. Fortunately, Clarke approaches this pivotal transition with a stubborn insistence on behaving like a normal, grounded human being. And her upcoming credits suggest that she’s greatly in demand beyond Westeros.

  This month, Clarke, a self-described “achievement junkie,” joins the rapidly expanding Star Wars universe in Solo, a highly scrutinized origin story for Harrison Ford’s Han Solo. Her well-honed gift for concealing every detail about her work—“Everything in my life is a spoiler,” she says—helped her get into character. Director Ron Howard, a Game of Thrones fan, explains that Qi’ra, Han Solo’s childhood friend turned unreliable ally, is secretive, slippery, and morally questionable—“a much different sort of a character” from Daenerys.

  If Solo becomes a major hit, it will give Clarke a rare chance to leap cleanly from one spectacularly successful genre franchise to another. But even if it doesn’t, she has no shortage of options. An active participant in Time’s Up, she has ambitious plans to write and produce her own material—and create new opportunities for other women in the industry. Discussing those issues, she begins to sound more like the fiery Daenerys. “It becomes harder to separate you from the role when you’ve been with it so long,” she admits.

  Eight years ago, Dan Weiss and David Benioff were in trouble. Their pilot for Game of Thrones, an adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s popular A Song of Ice and Fire book series, was a disaster. Along with re-shoots, the pair were looking to re-cast a few key roles, including the pivotal part of Daenerys Targaryen. Tall, willowy, and fair-haired, Tamzin Merchant, the actress originally cast as Khaleesi, was a far more conventional match for the character on the page. The second time around, Weiss and Benioff took a fresh look at the character.

  “Emilia was the only person we saw—and we saw hundreds—who could carry the full range that Daenerys required,” the pair explained in tandem via e-mail. “Young actors aren’t often asked to play a combination of Joan of Arc, Lawrence of Arabia, and Napoleon.”

  When Clarke started on the series, Daenerys was downtrodden, occasionally objectified, and stranded in a subplot that kept the character geographically distant from the main story and the actress isolated from most of her co-stars. “I was cut off from the rest of the cast,” Clarke says. Over the years, as the famously cutthroat Thrones has thinned its sprawling ensemble, Clarke has risen in the ranks, snagging the show’s flashiest, most empowering moments.

  In an era when network and streaming platforms alike are struggling to get anyone to tune in, Game of Thrones has become one of the last surviving holdovers from the must-see TV era. For a handful of weeks every year, HBO owns Sunday nights, with devotees watching live to avoid spoilers at the office Monday morning. Clearing its own very high ratings bar, Thrones commanded an average of 32.8 million viewers in its 2017 season. Its 38 wins make it the most-awarded scripted-TV series in Emmy history.

  That glaring spotlight has made Daenerys a cultural touchstone—not to mention a costume-party staple, with Madonna, Katy Perry, Khloé Kardashian, and Kristen Bell among her many famous impersonators. At a recent charity auction, Brad Pitt offered six figures to spend an evening with Clarke and Harington, only to be outbid. Last year, Daenerys finally powered into the heart of the series, earning long-awaited screen time with Harington and the rest of the surviving stars. Clarke, who has been nominated three times for best supporting actress at the Emmys, may soon be gunning for lead honors. “Everything in my life is a spoiler,” Clarke says.

  Clarke’s upbringing in the bucolic countryside an hour outside of London couldn’t be farther from the dysfunctional family dynamics that forged the orphaned Daenerys. Emilia’s mother, Jennifer, is a businesswoman who currently runs the Anima Foundation, a charity aimed at raising awareness of specialty brain-injury care, and her father, Peter, was a theatrical sound engineer who prized education above all else. “Your bookshelf should be bigger than your TV,” he liked to remind Emilia and her older brother, Bennett. “My mum, my brother, my dad, and I would sit around a table, and my happiest place was just discussing stuff,” Emilia says. “I really value intelligence. I’m one of the very fortunate few people who really likes their family. I just like hanging out with them.”

  Clarke isn’t the first woman in her family to engage in high-stakes identity juggling. Her maternal grandmother wore light makeup to disguise the fact that she was half Indian, owing to her mother’s very secret affair with a mysterious man from the colonial subcontinent. “The fact that [my grandmother] had to hide her skin color, essentially, and try desperately to fit in with everyone else must’ve been incredibly difficult,” Clarke says. “So, yeah: history of fighters.”

  Emilia’s parents saved up to send her to a pair of upper-crust boarding schools—Rye St. Antony and St. Edward’s, both in Oxford—but she never felt at home with her much wealthier classmates. “I didn’t really fit in, like everybody who ever went to school ever.” So she channeled her energy into performing. She was rejected the first time she applied to acting school, but eventually Drama Centre London claimed her from the waiting list when another student broke her leg and dropped out. There, she finally found the “artistically inclined” friends who would keep her grounded amid the circus of international fame.

  The jet-setting Clarke clings tightly to her roots even as her life and career take her ever farther from the Home Counties. For one thing, she recently got her brother a gig in the Thrones camera department. “This job can be so alienating,” she says. “You’re in a trailer by yourself. You’re in a car by yourself. You’re in a plane. You’re in a plane. You’re in a plane. That’s what success looks like if you’re an actor. Success looks like being alone.” Clarke stays sharp by devouring “nerdy” podcasts on a range of topics from politics to science. “She’s so informed,” says Rose Leslie. “She has an opinion on every topic.”

  Clarke’s father passed away in 2016 after a long battle with cancer. At the time, Emilia was in the U.S. shooting the upcoming thriller Above Suspicion and couldn’t break away to say her final good-byes. “It still sucks. Grief sucks. He doesn’t know what I’m doing now,” she says. “That’s it before I start crying.” After a couple of romances with famous men—first, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, then, reportedly, actor Jai Courtney, a brief souvenir from her Terminator Genisys shoot—Clarke swore off dating actors. In fact, she hasn’t been romantically linked in some time. When Solo premiered at Cannes, in May, she had hoped to walk the red carpet with her brother, and her goal in general is to keep her relationships out of the news. “The guys that I’ve met in my life that are dicks, I voluntarily walk the fuck away from them,” she says. “That’s just bad taste. People shouldn’t know about those choices.”

  Clarke usually appears in public with various non-famous “mates” from her drama-school days. Her “perma-plus-one” is Lola Frears, daughter of director Stephen Frears. “I ain’t got me no celebrity friends,” Clarke says. “My squad? They don’t let me get away with anything. There’s not a lot of actors I relate to.” Leslie, a rare exception to Emilia’s rule, confirms that Clarke’s longtime friends keep her in check: “There would be a ticking off or a bollocking if they felt she was no longer the lovely lady that they have always known.”

  The Star Wars tradition of featuring morally upright heroines, among them Carrie Fisher’s General Leia, Daisy Ridley’s Rey, and Felicity Jones’s Jyn Erso, was part of what drew Emilia Clarke to the role of Qi’ra in Solo, but it was the chance to break the mold that really sold her. “We’re going to hit you with a character that could very easily well be a dude, because you question her motives,” she says, sitting in a back corner of the Met’s no-frills cafeteria snacking on a pear and sipping English-breakfast tea from a paper cup. “That’s really fucking exciting in the Star Wars universe, because that has never happened.”

  Before accepting the Solo role, Clarke had to ask Game of Thrones show-runners Weiss and Benioff for permission to complicate their plans for a final season by adding a demanding Star Wars filming schedule to the mix. They didn’t hesitate. “Solo felt like a great fit that would let her show off her versatility,” Weiss and Benioff explained. “Also, we figured she’d probably get to shoot a ray gun. Ray guns are something we just can’t offer, unfortunately.”

  Swapping dragons for ray guns, Emilia Clarke was eager to prove her mettle in a whole new galaxy. But that plan hit a snag when the Solo production fell spectacularly and publicly apart. “I’m not gonna lie,” Clarke says. “I struggled with Qi’ra quite a lot. I was like: ‘Y’all need to stop telling me that she’s “film noir,” because that ain’t a note.’ ” Frustrated by the lack of direction, she turned to Solo’s father-and-son screenwriters, Lawrence and Jon Kasdan, for support. Then, four and a half months into shooting, co-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller exited the project, citing “creative differences.” Production was put on hold until they were replaced by Ron Howard, a longtime friend of franchise creator George Lucas’s. With a brand-new director and an ambitious re-shoot schedule—Clarke reluctantly agrees when I call those first months “a high-budget dress rehearsal”—Solo still had to hit its opening date, in May of the following year.

  Clarke says Howard’s arrival “saved” the movie: “All hail to [Lucasfilm president] Kathy [Kennedy] for hiring Ron.” Slipping into a mocking impression of herself, Clarke re-enacts a self-pitying therapy session with Howard over a private meal they shared before resuming production. “He even feigned enthusiasm!” she says. “I know for a fact he had that discussion with everybody. I think we all came to set feeling like his favorite. It makes for a really happy load of actors, with our egos.”

  Howard recalls that dinner a bit differently. The former child star of The Andy Griffith Show saw in Clarke “the kind of pragmatism and a can-do spirit that often comes from people who have cut their teeth doing television.”

  “I know some of how tough it was for her,” Harington says. “But she’s pretty tough as well.”

  Clarke wasn’t privy to everything that led up to the director swap, but she wasn’t entirely surprised, either. “When it comes to that amount of money, you’re almost waiting for that to happen. Money fucks us all up, doesn’t it? There’s so much pressure. Han Solo is a really beloved character. This is a really important movie for the franchise as a whole. It’s a shit ton of money. A shit ton of people. A shit ton of expectations.”

  Solo wasn’t the first troubled blockbuster to test Clarke’s resilience. If anything, the production of 2015’s Terminator Genisys was more chaotic. She watched frequent Thrones director Alan Taylor get “eaten and chewed up on Terminator. He was not the director I remembered. He didn’t have a good time. No one had a good time.” When the film underperformed at the box office, she was “relieved” to not have to return for any sequels. News of the rocky production traveled, and Clarke says the crew on the famously disastrous Fantastic Four, which was filming nearby, even had jackets made that read, AT LEAST WE’RE NOT ON TERMINATOR. “Just to give you a summary,” she says, laughing.

  Rumors spreading between film sets is one thing, but the Solo tumult was covered exhaustively in the trades and on fan sites, adding another layer of pressure to an already pressurized project. “I hope we did it good, then, because people have all this gossip,” Clarke says. “I don’t want people to go, ‘That’s the bit where it all went wrong. That’s the bit, I know it.’ I just really hope that people have a good time, that it’s good, and, you know, selfishly, that I’m not shit and that people don’t write reviews going, ‘Oh my God, that’s, like, the worst acting I’ve ever seen in my life. Wow. How did they give her the part?’ ”

  For all her anxieties about how her performance will go over, Clarke and I are both energized by the Solo footage we’ve seen. Clarke’s easy chemistry with Donald Glover, who plays fan favorite Lando Calrissian, is evident from their very first on-screen meeting. And though her shifting allegiances mean she has to play a range of emotions opposite Alden Ehrenreich’s Han Solo, she endows every twist with an undercurrent of romantic possibility. Tonally closer to the Indiana Jones movies than to, say, Rogue One, Solo marks the franchise’s return to lighthearted, fast-paced capers.

  Clarke—who spends most Thrones battles on the backs of her C.G.I. dragons—was eager to jump into the fray with some hand-to-hand combat. “She had to deal with quite a large sword and some pretty elaborate fight choreography, and she made it look easy,” Ehrenreich says. With all the re-shoots and reconfigured plotting, she also had to fight to keep some of her favorite moments in. “That is going to be badass as fuck,” she told the filmmakers of a showstopping Qi’ra moment that made the cut. “Don’t forget your audience.”

  Long before they shared a scene together, Clarke and Harington had become friends thanks to their time on the Game of Thrones promotional circuit. It was through Harington that Clarke met Rose Leslie. An adept mimic, Clarke impersonates a “smitten” Harington mooning over his on-screen lover and future real-life fiancée in the early days of the show: “There’s the best human in the world. She’s called Rose.”

  Clarke has a teasing relationship with Harington. “I’ll tell him, ‘Kit, stop being a dick—stop being so grumpy.’ Like I would with my brother.” And as the two transition in these final seasons from real-life friends to partners in TV’s biggest romance (albeit one complicated by incest), the ribbing has only increased. “If you’ve known someone for six years, and they’re best friends with your girlfriend, and you’re best friends with them,” Harington says, “there is something unnatural and strange about doing a love scene. We’ll end up kissing and then we’re just pissing ourselves with laughter because it’s so ridiculous.”

  “She’s goofy,” Weiss and Benioff confirm. “We have tried to let some of Emilia’s humor and light seep into Daenerys whenever possible. Who says conquerors can’t be funny?” A memorable Season Four conversation between Daenerys and her right-hand woman, Missandei, concerning a eunuch’s “pillar and stones,” for instance, is much more Clarke than Targaryen. Sadly, it’s unclear how much space there will be in the show’s climactic final season for bawdy, Clarke-ish humor. “I’m doing all this weird shit,” Clarke says. “You’ll know what I mean when you see it.”

  In the final episodes of a show with a body count as high as Game of Thrones’, Clarke never really knows when she might be filming her last moments with a member of the cast. She’s also shooting for the first time with several of the show’s top stars, including Sophie Turner and Maisie Williams, who play the formidable Stark sisters.

  Clarke is well aware that the strong women of the series are leaving some kind of imprint on the culture, but she’s saving up all her big-picture reflections on Daenerys for later: “This is going to be a Band-Aid that I’m going to rip off.” To help with that process, she started keeping a daily journal of her last season. With cell phones banned from the set due to security concerns, it’s her best hope of chronicling the final days of Daenerys. Selfies are off limits, but Clarke has asked set photographer Helen Sloan to snap the occasional behind-the-scenes photo. Both the journal and the photos, Clarke hints, may be available to the show’s fans someday.

  Clarke is unsurprisingly, and contractually, evasive when it comes to specifics of the concluding six episodes. Heavy hints in the most recent season indicate that, in addition to contending with the usual climactic end-of-the-world crises, Daenerys will also be grappling with more intimate parenthood and family issues. Here, Clarke and her on-screen alter ego may have something in common. Friends like Leslie and Harington are settling down to build their own families (“Their wedding is going to be siiiiick,” Clarke says), and an old schoolmate recently made Clarke godmother to a highly photogenic baby boy who makes regular appearances on her Instagram account. She lights up when talking about him.

  Talking about her own parents evokes other emotions. The wounds from the loss of her father are still fresh, but her mother remains an inspiration. If all goes according to plan, it’s Jennifer Clarke who will provide the map for Clarke’s very first post-Thrones steps. After the show ends, Clarke plans to re-create a road trip her mother took in 1972 to Yosemite and the redwoods of Northern California. With best friend and scriptwriter Lola Frears by her side, Clarke intends to spend part of the trip working on ideas for new projects. Her agents offered to take these ideas to “guys” with writing experience, but her answer to that was pure Daenerys: “No, I’m going to take it to me.”

  Citing Reese Witherspoon, Greta Gerwig, and other actresses turned creators as inspiration, Clarke says she wants to work with as many female filmmakers as she can. As for the conventional industry wisdom that women can’t work together without infighting? “It’s fucking bullshit. It’s so annoying.” An active member of Time’s Up, Clarke negotiated with Weiss and Benioff in 2014 to ensure she maintained parity with her male counterparts. She and four co-stars—Harington, Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister), Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister), and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Jaime Lannister)—reportedly each landed $300,000 per episode, a dazzling figure that skyrocketed to half a million per episode for the final two seasons. “I get fucking paid the same as my guy friends,” Clarke says. “We made sure of that.”

  And while Clarke would be thrilled to have her own Lady Bird or Big Little Lies, that’s not all she’s after. She says she’s “desperate” to make documentaries and shine a light on underserved causes. “That’s the shit that gets me going personally.” Inspired by her father’s cancer ordeal, Clarke is especially passionate about the risks Brexit poses to the U.K.’s National Health Service, and she was recently named ambassador to the Royal College of Nursing. “That’s something I have in common with Dae-nerys,” she says suddenly, after several hours of explaining all the reasons she and her character are nothing alike. “I really feel for people and I want to help them. Not to sound too much like Oprah Winfrey.” She pauses, and thinks again. “Fuck that, I’m gonna sound like Oprah and I’m going to be proud of it.”

  In the midst of the twin tornadoes of Star Wars and Game of Thrones, Clarke acknowledges that most of her choices these days are “studio choices.” And if Solo is a hit, Clarke could be working for Lucasfilm for years to come. But Harington sees something else in her future: “She’s done, far more than me or most people in the cast, these very high-budget, big-hitting blockbusters. Hopefully Star Wars continues for her and she does more of them. But I think she’s an incredibly talented actor, and I would love to see her do something which is a more focused character piece, because the ones she’s done are brilliant.” Clarke’s effervescent performance in 2016’s romantic weepy Me Before You—a surprise hit at the box office—hints at what she’s capable of.

  Clarke wants to stretch herself, and explore a new-media landscape where creators no longer have to rely on large companies in order to get their projects made. “Everyone can. Get your iPhone out. Let’s do something. You know what I mean?” And with 17 million followers on Instagram, Clarke has the power to make and launch her own projects. Her recent Thrones-themed fund-raising Instagram video for the Royal College of Nursing Foundation racked up more than seven million views in just three days.

  All that takes some of the heat off Clarke as she decides how to follow up roles in two of entertainment’s biggest franchises. She doesn’t necessarily need another monster hit. She can afford to take her time, listen to herself, and do something that feels true to who she is—whoever that may be.

  The most obvious evidence of the blur between Daenerys and Clarke is the relatively new shock of blond hair on her head. “I did this, which was frigging stupid,” she says, fingering the blunt-cut ends of her bleached hair.

  When Kit Harington trimmed his famous curls in 2015, fans were led to believe his character, presumed dead, wouldn’t be returning to the show the following season. (He did.) But Clarke swears her decision to go blonde has nothing at all to do with Daenerys’s fate. “I got to a point where I said I just want to look in the mirror and see something different. So I was just like, ‘Fuck it, it’s the last season. I’m going to dye my hair blond.’ ” Clarke jokes that she immediately felt remorse and bought nine baseball caps online. “But they don’t go with your outfit, so I don’t wear them.”

  Clarke’s brown hair had always been her shield. The blond hair makes it harder to slip back into her pre-fame life. Partying with her old friends is tricky because their friends get “weird” about it, and she misses the mundane pleasures of, say, running errands for her mother. “What I get most heartbroken about is that those opportunities are almost completely gone.” Then she catches herself, and apologizes for moaning about the “champagne problems” of fame. “If I were reading this, I’d be like, ‘Cheer the fuck up, love.’ ”

  Back underneath that statue at the Met, Emilia Clarke cranes her neck up to get a closer look at the ancient pharaoh’s smooth granite face. Hatshepsut wears a false beard that allowed her to pass more easily through the male-dominated world. Our guide points out a faint piece of carved string running up the pharaoh’s jawline holding the disguise in place. Thinking about it later, Clarke, who knows a thing or two about disguises, passing, alter egos, and powerful women, shakes her head in astonishment. “That is some fascinating shit right there.”

  A towering granite Daenerys statue may never find its way into the hallowed halls of the Met, but it’s not clear Emilia Clarke wants that anyway. As we duck out of the Met a bit behind schedule, only to find that it’s raining and our sleek hired car is nowhere in sight, Clarke gamely suggests we rush out into the downpour and dive into the back of a yellow cab. Our driver doesn’t recognize Clarke, either, which puts her at ease. Unsure how to get to where we’re going, he passes his smartphone to her so she can type the hotel’s address into his G.P.S. “Don’t worry, mate,” she announces. “Your little app will get us there!” A satisfied smile plays on her face as the taxi twists, turns, and bumps along. She looks happier than she ever has riding a dragon.

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  Press/Gallery: Emilia Clarke Solo Flight was originally published on Enchanting Emilia Clarke