#can you imagine a monster of the week type detective show with them

[rockturbot]

[metalandmagi]

Winter 2021 Anime Worth Watching!

Since 2020 basically sacrificed itself to give us the most stacked anime season of all time, I’m currently buried under the weight of almost 20 shows airing per week. So for anyone who’s looking for some anime to watch this winter, here’s some first impressions! I’m speed running my list this time by only talking about the new shows...because otherwise this would be my great American novel. 

If anyone’s interested, I have master lists for both 2020 anime and 2019 anime, because there’s no shortage of fun things to find. 

New Shows!

And before anyone asks, So I’m A Spider, So What? isn’t on here, because CG spiders freak me out.

Cells At Work Code Black: This...less comedic spin off of Cells At Work (made by a different studio) takes the wholesome concept of Osmosis Jones meets cute anime girls and turns it on its head. In this much more depressing version, we follow a rookie red blood cell who works in the body of an overly stressed, alcoholic smoker who puts every strain on the body imaginable. I love Red Blood Cell AA2153 and his co-workers, but man am I glad we get the regular Cells At Work airing this season too, because I need something fun and uplifting after seeing my sweet son go through hell every episode. 

*Heaven’s Design Team: Have you ever wondered how God came up with some of the weird ass animals that live on this planet? Like, what’s the deal with giraffes? And why can’t we have dragons and flying horses? Well this is a comedy about the engineers and designers in heaven creating the new animals that are going to inhabit the Earth. That’s it, that’s the show. It’s kind of in the same vein as Cells At Work, having comedy blend with a surprising amount of educational information. If you want something light and funny, this is the show for you (though I don’t think it needs to have full length episodes). I’m just hoping there’s an episode about how the hell the platypus was created. Also it’s the only new one available on Crunchyroll.

Horimiya: A romantic comedy about a girl named Hori who fits the image of a perfect queen bee and a quiet bespectacled boy named Miyamura who never makes an impression at school. When the two meet by chance outside of the classroom, we see that Hori is practically raising a younger brother by herself, and Miyamura is actually a sweet guy who happens to be covered in tattoos and piercings. This show is an exercise in breaking down the images people have of others in their minds, and it’s a concept that really hits home in a fun and meaningful way. Honestly, this has become one of my immediate favorites. The characters have great chemistry, and I can’t wait to see more of them!

Monster Incidents (Kemono Jihen): When big shot Tokyo detective Inugami is called to a rural town to investigate a series of strange animal deaths, he finds a mysterious boy with the nickname Dorotabo who has been shunned by the other children in town. As the detective gets closer to Dorotabo, he discovers that there may be more...inhuman secrets to the boy than he realizes...and Dorotabo discovers that Inugami has some secrets of his own. This is a hard show to sell without spoiling the first episode, but it had twists and turns that kept me engaged from start to finish. I’m really interested to see where the plot goes, because I thought this was going to be something totally different just from the PV and series summary. If it plays its cards right, this could be a great paranormal detective show!

Wonder Egg Priority: A psychological drama about a girl named Ai who starts having dreams about a mysterious egg that promises to give her what she wants most in the world...a true friend. Before long, she begins to see how the dream world and reality are tied together, and trippy antics ensue. It’s hard to say more without spoiling anything, but I had to go back and add this one in because I made the mistake of thinking it was an OVA when it’s actually a full series. And what a series it’s starting out to be. This anime has all the psychological discomfort of a Satoshi Kon product with the beauty and style of something from Kyoani (even though it’s made by Clover Works). It’s really one of those anime you just have to see to understand.

Sk8-∞ (Skate the infinity): An original skateboarding anime from Bones, featuring a typical sports anime protagonist who takes a new transfer student who has never skateboarded in his life under his wing. Together they compete in dangerous races and take the skating community by storm. The character designs rival Appare Ranman’s in outlandish creativity, and I can smell the main characters’ ship dynamic a mile away (considering they’re exactly the same as the protagonists from Robihachi). If you’re looking for some wild and crazy fun with top notch skateboarding animation, don’t skip this!

2.43: Seiin Koukou Danshi Volley-bu (Seiin High School Boys Volleyball Club): Yes, it’s another volleyball anime. And no, it’s not just a clone of Haikyu. This story follows Yuni Kuroba, a physically built but emotionally weak teenager who finds out his childhood friend Hajime is moving back to their hometown for high school. Yuni discovers Hajime has become an exceptional volleyball player and they join their school’s volleyball club hoping to turn the unknown team into a rising star. If anything, this anime is much more like Stars Align or Free, where the sport is a backdrop for letting the characters explore their personal problems. Or at least it seems that way after the first episode. I went into this show ready to throw it in the trash because how could anything compete against my beloved Haikyu, but I found myself really enjoying the dynamics of the main duo and I’m curious to see what the rest of the team is like.

And speaking of sports anime rip-offs…..I can’t believe I’m including this but…

Skate Leading Stars: The show where the animators clearly wanted to design another throw away idol anime but saw how popular Yuri On Ice was so they decided to make whatever the hell this show is instead. It revolves around a fictional team sport called skate leading, and we follow the world’s most insufferable main character, a former figure skater named Kensei who wants to return to the ice and join his school’s skate leading team after he finds out his childhood rival is going to compete in the sport. Look, this show is just trashy enough to get a certain type of audience hooked, and it mainly has to do with the best boy of the winter season, Hayato Sasugai, the aspiring team “coach” who pulled most of us into watching this show with his punk appearance, snide comments and smug personality. He’s basically the lovechild of Izaya Orihara and Shizuo Heiwajima in a high school sports anime setting. The show treats itself with the perfect amount of sincerity to get away with being absolutely ridiculous most of the time without making you feel like you’re watching it from a dumpster...like Try Knights. You will know after one episode whether this show is for you. All I can say is, Hayato is worth the watch, and I haven’t seen any 3D animation used for the skating scenes (yet) so that’s a win for me. 

Honorable mention:

Jobless Reincarnation ( Mushoku Tensei): Yet another isekai where the main character is hit by a car (big surprise) and gets reincarnated into a fantasy world...but he happens to remember his previous life and narrates himself growing up as a jaded adult. I’m only including this because it looked amazing animation wise, and I love the opening where getting hit by a car and dying is actually traumatic. And I love the protagonist’s parents (who are retired adventurers who just want to bang all the time). But honestly...the main character is the fucking worst, and I don’t know if I want to keep watching it because of how creepy and weird he is. Like...he’s the hit on your fantasy mom as a baby kind of creepy and weird. But for anyone who wants a cool looking isekai that had an amazing PV, it’s worth checking out. 

Continuing Series!

Because the real gold of the season is in all the established anime getting their next seasons, I’m just going to list some of the things that are also amazing and definitely worth checking out if you haven’t already (because I’ve already talked about most of them at some point and don’t know what else to say).

Attack On Titan season 4

The Promised Neverland season 2

Beastars season 2

Log Horizon season 3

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime season 2

Re: Zero season 2 (second cour)

Dr. Stone season 2

Cells at Work season 2

Osomatsu-san season 3 (second cour)

Higurashi New (second cour)

Jujutsu Kaisen (second cour) 

Not to mention all the shows I don’t watch that everyone else loves...like World Trigger (which I have seen quite a bit of, but long shounen shows are too much for me now) Quintessential Quintuplets, and Non Non Biyori. 

So there’s just some of all the anime airing this season. Hopefully, someone can find something they like. Here’s to a great year...well, of anime at least...

[goldenavenger02]

Susz's Halloween Recommendations Part 2: Books and Fics.

Books

Pet Sematary by Stephan King

Dr. Louis Creed and his wife, Rachel, moved to Ludlow, Maine with their two young kids, Ellie and Gage, and their cat, Church. In the woods, near their home is a pet cemetery with a sign that was spelled sematary.

Notes: this book made me scared of my own cats for about two weeks. I really enjoyed it but that scene with the cat was very excessive.

Sadie by Courtney Summers

The book chronicles teenager Sadie Hunter’s quest to find the man who killed her sister. In alternating chapters, Sadie’s subsequent disappearance becomes the topic of West McCray’s podcast The Girls.

Notes: this audio book is so fantastic, especially the podcast elements! Trigger warnings for Sexual Assault and Child Abuse.

The Project by Courtney Summers

But dealing with her ex is the least of Hannah's concerns when a terrifying blood ritual interrupts the end-of-school-year bonfire.

Lo Denham is used to being on her own. After her parents died, Lo's sister, Bea, joined The Unity Project, leaving Lo in the care of their great aunt. Thanks to its extensive charitable work and community outreach, The Unity Project has won the hearts and minds of most in the Upstate New York region, but Lo knows there's more to the group than meets the eye.

Notes: a book about a journalist trying to learn more about the cult who took her sister from her. If you have siblings, this one hurts even more than if you don't. This has a frick ton of triggers, so please look into that before picking this up.

These Witches Don't Burn by Isabel Sterling

Hannah spends most of her time avoiding her ex-girlfriend (and fellow Elemental Witch) Veronica, hanging out with her best friend, and working at the Fly By Night Cauldron selling candles and crystals to tourists, goths, and local Wiccans. 

Hannah spends most of her time avoiding her ex-girlfriend (and fellow Elemental Witch) Veronica, hanging out with her best friend, and working at the Fly By Night Cauldron selling candles and crystals to tourists, goths, and local Wiccans. 

But dealing with her ex is the least of Hannah's concerns when a terrifying blood ritual interrupts the end-of-school-year bonfire.

Notes: a queer witch book with plenty of action and magic throughout! This book is so important to me and I'm currently reading the second and final book!

The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King

Long retired, Sherlock Holmes quietly pursues his study of honeybee behavior on the Sussex Downs. He never imagines he would encounter anyone whose intellect matched his own, much less an audacious teenage girl with a penchant for detection.

Notes: one of my mom's favorites and this is one of the best mysteries I've ever read!

The Devouring Gray by Christine Lynn Herman

On the edge of town a beast haunts the woods, trapped in the Gray, its bonds loosening…

Notes: this author has been involved in some not great things involving being anti semetic (I hope I spelled that right), so if you still want to read this, please don't do it in a way that financially supports her. That being said, I read it before that stuff came out, and I liken it to a queer Teen Wolf season 3 type story.

The Cheerleaders by Kara Thomas

First there was the car accident—two girls gone after hitting a tree on a rainy night. Not long after, the murders happened. Those two girls were killed by the man next door. The police shot him, so no one will ever know why he did it. Monica’s sister was the last cheerleader to die. After her suicide, Sunnybrook High disbanded the cheer squad. No one wanted to be reminded of the girls they lost. ...

Notes: an amazing murder mystery and one that I highly recommend! A bit slow at times, but the fast scenes make up for it.

The Assassin Game by Kristy McKay

At Cate's isolated boarding school Killer is more than a game-it's an elite secret society. Members must avoid being "killed" during a series of thrilling pranks-and only the Game Master knows who the "killer" is. When Cate's finally invited to join The Guild of Assassins, she knows it's her ticket to finally feeling like she belongs.

Notes: this takes place on an small island near Wales and it's one of the most atmospheric books I've ever read! The first chapter is really nasty, but after that, it's so good!

Two Can Keep a Secret by Karen. M McMannis

Echo Ridge is small-town America. Ellery's never been there, but she's heard all about it. Her aunt went missing there at age seventeen. And only five years ago, a homecoming queen put the town on the map when she was killed. Now Ellery has to move there to live with a grandmother she barely knows.

Notes: this was like reading a CW show. That's all I can say about it.

The Spiderwick Chronicles by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi

Jared, Simon and Mallory, who finds a mysterious Field Guide hidden in the attic, written by their great-great-uncle Arthur Spiderwick, who studied Faeries — magical beings who hide themselves from Humans using a type of magic called glamour.

Notes: I can't say much about this because I barely remember it. But I remember it freaking the crap out of me.

Fics (all of these are MCU)

Pumpkins and Stitches and Monster Mash by @marvelous-writer

Notes: I told myself to pick one fic from one writer, but with Marvelous-Writer, I just couldn't do it. I'm not gonna give synopsis' for the fics, because you really just need to take my word for it and read them.

too sick for clowns by @hailing-stars

Notes: short and sweet. Hailing-Stars is an icon and everyone needs to follow her.

Vein Drain by @ciaconna on Ao3

Notes: absolutely fantastic and humorous.

Trick Or Treat (Or Traumatize) by @awesomesockes and @whumphoarder

Notes: I just freaking love this writing duo.

No doubts about it by @angels-creative

Notes: my queen, my bestie, and the fic she had to send me the link to cause I couldn't find it XD

And I think that's all for this year! Have a safe and happy Halloween everyone!

[whump-captain]

🌙🤔🍰

sorry this took so long skdhdld these are good questions 👀

🌙  What time of day do you prefer to write? Why?

Hmmm i don't think i have one, i write whenever i have a spare moment. It's usually during commute or at work while doing some less absorbing tasks. My boss had issues with it lmao but while they can tell me off for typing on my phone on company time, they certainly can't tell at all that im putting together dialogue in my head while sitting right next to them lol

🤔 What is the hardest part of writing fic?

Uhhhhhhhh starting lmao my Autistic Inertia is a beast of its own. But in actual writing i think it's making sure that i convey everything that needs to be conveyed. When i've been imagining a scene for a while, it's easy to see elements of it as obvious and forget to mention them. But the reader only has what i describe to go by, so if i don't say that the door to a room is old and damaged then it's going to sound weird when i describe a character ripping it from its hinges.

🍰 Name one of your fave comfort fics (doesn’t have to be your all time fave).

I know it has an audience of like 3 but there's a Kamen Rider fanfic that i think about on a daily basis, this one. It's got a great little one-shot structure that perfectly mimics the show's monster-of-the-week format, amazing dialogue between my favourite characters, awesome toku action, a delicious noir atmosphere, and two dudes who can turn into motorcycles getting into buddy cop detective shenanigans. Idk how much anyone who's not into kamen rider will get out of it lol but this is a good opportunity to remind everyone to go watch kamen rider.

[unicyclehippo]

Prompt~ since the crush-reveal nott has been watching more closely and can see the cracks in beau’s facade (Also sidenote love love love your work mate sending good vibes from across the ditch ☺️)

ay mate, all good vibes yeah? how’s it hangin?

//

‘that went well, i think!’

jester. nott would’ve guessed it came from her even if the words hadn’t been so distinctively painted by her accent. they’re not just optimistic, cheerful; in the face of the absolute shit show - literally - that just went down here in the sewers beneath the city, it’s borderline pathological to be so optimistic. unless, of course, the person were jester and they were lying through their teeth in an effort to cheer up their friends.

‘yeah,’ beau calls from where she’s leaned against the slimed walls. she doesn’t seem to notice the slime, or maybe it just doesn’t matter when she’s already kinda coated in shit. ‘definitely could’ve gone worse.’

‘how?’ fjord groans.

‘one of us could’ve died.’

‘okay, good point, fair point. help me up?’

it’s hard to hear over fjord’s whining, but nott thinks she hears a wheeze, a stifled little something from beau when she offers him a hand, hauls him to his feet.

‘you good?’

‘no need for the tone,’ fjord grumbles, drops her hand, wiping the slime onto slime covered pants. ‘i didn’t see you half drowned to distract the fucking thing.’

beau grins a crooked grin, red staining between her teeth. ‘it had two heads, fjord. you know that, right?’

his shoulders slump. ‘so i didn’t even distract it. great.’

‘i mean. you distracted half of it,’

‘super. super great. just what i wanted to hear. great. count on you, beau,’ he says with a mocking little wag of his finger, ‘to give it to me honestly. nothing but blunt fucking honesty from you, eh?’

if she weren’t watching as closely as she is, nott would miss the flash of guilt and confusion and, so so fast nott almost think she imagines it, hurt. and then beau is shaking her head, clapping him on the shoulder.

‘shut the fuck up,’ she laughs. ‘un-poison yourself, oh paladin. cad looks like he’s two seconds from begging to heal you, go on.’

‘huh? oh—hey caduceus, would you?’

with jester tending to caleb and yasha, and caduceus with fjord, nott sidles up beside beau.

‘he didn’t mean it,’ she finds herself saying.

‘huh?’

‘fjord. that whole honesty thing,’

‘yeah he did.’ beau doesn’t look upset that nott was trying to lie; if anything, she looks amused. ‘it’s fine, it’s whatever. he’s not wrong.’

‘hmm.’

‘what hmm?’

‘nothing, nothing.’

beau sighs. ‘i’m not in the mood for guessing games. say what you wanna say or go fawn over caleb.’

‘i’ll go make sure he’s okay, definitely,’ nott corrects her.

‘great. go on.’

‘in a moment. are you okay?’

‘i’m fine,’ beau lies. she shifts. hisses. clutches to her side and as the fabric shifts, nott can see the great claw marks in her flesh.

it’s strange, to be privy to beau’s weakness. not that being injured is a weakness, gods know every one of them has been close to or over that line before. but beau never shows it if she can help it. it almost fills nott with a weird sense of pride, knowing that beau sort of trusts her of all people; and then it makes nott’s stomach drop down down down so fast she’s sick with it and her hands come up, to defend, to fight, to fix whatever she can.

‘holy shit! beau,’

‘it’s fine,’

‘no it’s not! that’s the opposite of fine!’ nott shrieks.

beau clamps a hand over nott’s mouth, careful of the teeth. ‘shut up! do you want to attract more of those things?’

nott shakes her off. pitches her voice low again. ‘you’re fully two centimetres from being fully gutted! that’s not fine! that’s like saying a cyclone is fine weather! that’s like saying avantika was pleasant! that’s like-‘ beau waits for a third analogy, vaguely expectant and even more vaguely amused. ‘you need to get that healed.’

‘it’s fine,’ beau insists. ‘i’m still on my feet, aren’t i?’ she takes a few steps, hands spread wide as if to say, see? ‘besides, cad does his best healing when we’re unconcious.’

‘so you’re, what? just gonna wait until something knocks you down?’

‘i mean,’ beau shrugs. ‘yeah.’

‘that’s stupid.’

‘gee.’

‘no, i mean it, that’s a terrible idea.’ judging from the way beau’s eyes slide away to the side, away from nott’s prying stare, she knows it too. ‘are you punishing yourself for som-‘

‘no,’ beau snaps.

nott squints and stares and slowly nods. ‘alright. i believe that. then why?’

her cheek ticks, jaw clenching. when it happens again, nott realises that the girl is chewing on the inside of her cheek. it’s weird for that to be the thing that does it but the gesture is oddly familiar, reminds her of a young and nervous veth, and staring up at this girl literally covered in shit and blood, face pale beneath the muck, nott realises again that beau is all of twenty something and, as far as she knows, has had shit all in her life until the nein came along. nott can understand that, to a degree, but she at least had had her family and her husband until the goblins took her away.

‘they’ve got limited spells,’ beau says. ‘i keep track of this shit. tactics, y’know.’

‘so you’re playing the sacrificial knight, are you?’

‘i don’t intend to die,’ beau scoffs. ‘i’m just making sure that when we actually need a heal, there’s one for us.’

nott narrows her eyes. ‘you’re worth a heal, beau.’

‘that’d be a first.’ beau didn’t mean to say it. nott can tell by the way she flinches, then winces. she reaches toward nott. ‘don’t - you can’t - i didn’t mean that,’

‘i won’t tell a soul,’ nott promises. ‘if you ask her to heal you right now.’

‘nott,’

‘you’re of no use to us dead. go on now. shoo, shoo,’

//

she’d nearly forgotten about the shit monster and her sudden shitty understanding of the girl a few weeks later when it became increasingly clear they would have to head to kamordah.

beau had disappeared partway through the revelry of another job well done for a lovely amount of coin, and it isn’t until the wee hours that she returns, a fat lip and bloody knuckles the only sign of what she might’ve been up to.

nott sets her tankard down with a thump, watches as beau’s human eyes try to peer through the darkness to find her.

‘have fun, did you?’

‘nott.’

‘detective nott brenatto,’

‘that’s new,’

‘trying it out,’ nott tells her, words and fear of it mellowed a little by the sweet and very ineffective mead she’s been drinking. ‘get it all out of your system?’

beau slides onto the stool next to her. presses a brutal thumb to the split skin on her first knuckle. ‘most of it.’

‘wanna talk about it?’

‘nothing to talk about.’

‘wow. wow. lying to your best friend. i get it. wow.’ nott allows herself a small victory smile when the comment makes beau snort. ‘kamordah, huh.’

beau goes still as a statue. casts a sideways look nott’s way, who catches it, a raised brow her only reply.

‘i’m scared,’ she says.

nott barely contains a flinch. seeing it, knowing it, is one thing. beau saying it is quite another. ‘i’ll kill him for you, if you want. just say the word.’

beau snorts again. reaches over the bar top for a mug—not seeming to care whether it’s clean or dirty—and from a wine skin on her hip she pours herself a glass. it smells like the worst wine, a copper a barrel type casked wine, and beau drinks it down like it’s fresh water in a desert.

when she speaks, her voice is a little hoarse and nott doesn’t know whether that’s from the wine only a step above acid, or because she really doesn’t want to say what she’s saying.

‘it’s not him. it’s me.’

‘right. i’ll believe that never.’

beau treats her to one of those rare smiles, the actual nice ones. not the ones she practices with fjord but the real ones. a little awkward, a little crooked. jester smiles, nott has been thinking of them as, since she only smiles like that for jester. nott’s eyes gleam as she takes in the rarity, tucks it away mentally with the rest of her treasured items.

‘i don’t mean he’s not an asshole. he is. i’m just—‘ she swipes her fingers in a ring of whatever liquor has been left on the counter, drags the circle outwards into two horns and a little tail. ‘i’ve been trying really fuckin’ hard to be better or whatever, leave every place better than we found it, and—‘

‘you don’t think you can do that there.’

beau shrugs. ‘i don’t want to.’

nott hums in sympathy. ducks a little to take in the entirety of beau’s scowl. ‘that doesn’t make you an asshole, you realise.’

‘kinda does. if i’m picking and choosing the places i get to leave better.’

nott considers that for a minute. then sighs, reaches up to pat beau’s shoulder. ‘mollymauk was a lot of things,’ she says, ‘and he talked a lot of shit. but he was a good guy.’

‘yeah. he was.’

‘and i think if he were here, and listening to this, he’d say fuck that place.’ her vehemence startles a laugh out of beau, brings a little glint to clouded eyes. ‘fuck that place, fuck thoreau, and fuck kamordah. you’re one of the mighty fucking nein! you’re the only thing in kamordah worth a damn thing! and if you want us to burn the place to the ground, we’ll fuckin’ do it!’

‘the wine is actually really good, and pretty expensive,’

‘okay, well, steal the wine first and then burn it to the ground. i can improvise, i can adapt.’

beau shakes her head, laughs again. it’s a snotty laugh and nott doesnt bring attention to it, or her suspiciously wet eyes.

‘thanks. i’ll keep it in mind.’

‘you do that.’ nott pats her hand. jumps down off her stool. ‘see you in the morning.’

‘yeah. see you.’

[tlbodine]

Hard-Boiled Fantasy

So a conversation from @firefly124-writing about the TV show Supernatural and where it exists in relation to horror got me to wondering about the origins and trappings of what we now consider the “urban fantasy” genre, which I realized I haven’t really dug that deeply into before. 

That sounded like a fun rabbit hole to fall down, so I figured I’d do a bit of digging! 

So the initial question was: Is Supernatural a horror show? 

It kind of seems like it should be, right? There’s ghosts and demons and all manner of other things that go bump in the night. 

But structurally, it sure doesn’t seem like a horror. In horror stories, the monsters usually hunt the characters, not vice versa. And the story beats are all wrong. In fact, if you subbed out monsters for regular criminals, you’d pretty much just have a crime drama. 

And in that respect, Supernatural is hardly on its own. In fact, there’s a ton of supernatural crime fiction - from Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, to Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, to Angel (not so much Buffy, more on that in a minute) and many, many more besides. In fact, the whole genre of “urban fantasy” seems to have some hefty overlap with supernatural crime stories – but are the two interchangeable? Or is there more to it? 

First Off: What the Heck is Urban Fantasy? 

Our benevolent overlords at Barnes & Noble compiled a handy list of recommendations for Urban Fantasy series (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/12-urban-fantasy-series-to-binge-read/), and looking at them side-by-side, we can begin to see some trends:

Super-powered and/or badass main characters 

Serial format that lends itself to a “monster of the week” type storyline

Crimes and/or supernatural political intrigue 

But are they, like, the defining traits of the genre? Let’s investigate further..

According to this article from Writer’s Digest, there are a few key ingredients: setting as character, a central mystery, character-driven story (often in first person narration), and a romance subplot - https://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/5-elements-urban-fantasy-novels-must

But I take some issue with that. I think there are a fair number of stories that feel like they should qualify as “urban fantasy” without ticking off all of those boxes. Setting aside everything that could be considered “paranormal romance” - your Twilight and True Blood and whatnot (Buffy slots here better, maybe)- there’s still plenty of things that seem like they should be urban fantasy, like Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere or Lev Grossman’s The Magicians or Charles de Lint’s Newford series, or War for the Oaks by Emma Bull. 

But it’s OK - urban fantasy is large, it can contain multitudes. 

The real question is, why is so much of it just supernaturally flavored crime fiction? 

The Origins of Crime Fiction 

Crime fiction/mystery/thriller is the second-most popular book genre, coming in right behind romance for sales: https://bookstr.com/article/book-genres-that-make-the-most-money/

With that in mind, it kind of makes sense that you’d want to fold crime fiction elements into other types of stories. A genre that popular and ubiquitous is going to have lots of familiar tropes and appeal to a lot of people. 

And as it turns out, crime fiction has its roots tangled quite deeply with horror fiction – so deep, in fact, that the granddaddy of all detective stories is none other than Edgar Allan Poe. 

Poe’s character C. Auguste Dupin – from famed stories like “The Purloined Letter” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” – lays down the template for detective stories in the 1840s, from the eccentric gentleman of leisure turned detective to the impossible crimes explained by the power of deductive reasoning. That template would then be lifted almost wholesale by Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1880s with his Sherlock Holmes stories. 

And, really, it shouldn’t be a particular shock that detective stories started to really take root in this time period. In a post-Enlightenment world, we were collectively struggling with our relationship to nature, science, industry and the mysteries of the universe. Even as we continued to fear things that went bump in the night, we increasingly sought to rationalize it all. 

There was also, of course, more crime – and, thanks to developments in both city living and news reporting, people were aware of those crimes. Jack the Ripper captured public imagination and inspired terror with his murders in 1888, about the same time as H.H. Holmes was running his murder hotel in the United States. 

So with that in mind, is it any surprise that crime fiction entered its first Golden Age in the 1920s and 30s – a time when organized crime was at its peak thanks to Prohibition? 

What is especially interesting to me is that even as horror waned in popularity in the 1940s and 50s, crime fiction was entering a second Golden Age thanks to Film Noir and all of its now-familiar tropes – from world-weary detectives to beautiful dames in trouble and rain-drenched streets. 

Some reading you may find interesting on that topic, especially in regards to how the Noir genre survived the Hays Code: http://hayscodeandfilmnoir.blogspot.com/ and https://vicolablog.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/film-noir-and-the-hays-code/

Putting it All Together 

So with this historical context firmly in mind, I think we can make a few logical conclusions. 

First, I think it’s safe to say that people like crime stories because they tap into cultural fears and fascinations – crime is something that we are all aware of but which most of us have fairly little hands-on experience with, so it’s only natural that we’d be morbidly curious about it. Crime is interesting because it’s dangerous and taboo, and that makes for good storytelling. 

Second, it also seems safe to say that many people prefer crime stories to horror stories because they are more comfortable to consume: 

The hero is usually empowered rather than powerless

Justice is usually served at the end (whereas horror tends to have a bleak outlook) 

The overall feeling can be fun/adventurous/even silly and largely safe, despite the presence of a murder – see the entirety of the “cozy mystery” genre 

Mysteries tap into a puzzle-solving, intellectual aspect of the audience as opposed to a visceral/primal response

Now obviously these lines are drawn in ever-shifting sands. There are plenty of horror stories that are primarily intellectual, and crime fiction can be plenty bloody and visceral. And that’s not even touching on the cross-overs like Thomas Harris’s work or the entirety of giallo filmmaking: https://vicolablog.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/film-noir-and-the-hays-code/

But by and large, speaking in general terms, I think we can make an argument that there is probably a somewhat wider audience for crime/detective stories than for horror specifically because the intended purpose of horror is to make the reader/viewer uncomfortable, and a whole lot of people dislike feeling uncomfortable. 

So with all of that in mind, I don’t think it’s too much of a leap at all to see how our modern understanding of urban fantasy as a supernatural crime thriller got its start. 

By taking familiar horror tropes that have slipped into pop culture – monsters and demons and zombies and whatnot – and then folding them into the comforting tropes and narratives of popular crime fiction, creators can delve into everything that is cool about horror without the icky, alienating bits that make people feel bad. 

(I’d also posit that this type of storytelling is gaining an increasingly powerful foothold in modern times because it side-steps some of the more problematic aspects of realistic crime fiction – ie, the socio-economic status of most criminals, the corruption of the legal system, etc. By making fantastical creatures the perpetrators, we can skip the discomfort of due process and human rights and focus on the fun parts of solving crimes with a clear conscience)

But that’s just one opinion, from an admittedly biased horror blogger. I’ll leave you with this final essay on the topic, which follows a similar path and draws a different (but quite interesting) conclusion – https://carriev.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/the-long-and-diverse-history-of-urban-fantasy/

PS - if you like these deep dives and want to support me in doing more of them, don’t forget to drop a tip in my tip jar:  Ko-fi.com/A57355UN

[son-of-alderaan]

There’s a desert valley in southern Jordan called Wadi Rum, or sometimes “the Valley of the Moon.” There are stone inscriptions in Wadi Rum that are more than 2,000 years old. Lawrence of Arabia passed through there during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. More recently, J. J. Abrams went there to film parts of the latest Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker, because it’s largely uninhabited and starkly beautiful and looks plausibly alien, and one of the things that has always made the Star Wars movies feel so real—as if they had a real life of their own that continues on out beyond the edges of the screen—is the way they’re shot on location, with as few digital effects as possible. George Lucas shot the Tatooine scenes from A New Hope in southern Tunisia. For Skywalker, it’s Wadi Rum.

They don’t do it that way because it’s easy. Abrams and his crew had to build miles of road into the desert. They basically had to set up a small town out there, populated by the cast and extras and crew—the creature-effects department alone had 70 people. The Jordanian military got involved. The Jordanian royal family got involved. There was sand. There were sandstorms, when all you could do was take cover and huddle in your tent and—if you’re John Boyega, who plays the ex-Stormtrooper Finn—listen to reggae.

But in a way that’s the whole point: you’re out there so the world can get up in your grill and make its presence felt on film. “It’s the things that you can’t anticipate—the imperfections,” says Oscar Isaac, who plays the Resistance pilot Poe Dameron. “It’s very difficult to design imperfection, and the imperfections that you have in these environments immediately create a sense of authenticity. You just believe it more.” When Isaac arrived in Wadi Rum for his first week of shooting, Abrams had set up a massive greenscreen in the middle of the desert. “And I was like, ‘J. J., can I ask you a question? I notice we’re shooting on greenscreen.’ And he’s like, ‘So why the hell are we in the desert?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah!’ And he said, ‘Well, because look: the way that the sand interacts with the light, and the type of shots you would set up—if you were designing the shot on a computer you would never even think to do that.’ There’s something about the way that the light and the environment and everything plays together.” It’s that something, the presence and the details and the analog imperfections of a real nondigital place, that makes Star Wars so powerful.

It was powerful enough to bring 65,000 people to Chicago in April for Star Wars Celebration, a fan convention where you could see a giant Stormtrooper head made out of 36,440 tiny Lego Stormtrooper mini-figures, which is a world record of some kind, though I’m not sure exactly what, and where people were dressed up as Muppets who were themselves dressed up as Star Wars characters. But the main event was the launch of the trailer for The Rise of Skywalker, which was held in a 10,000-seat arena and was such a big deal that even though the trailer was going to be released on the Internet literally seconds after it was over, I—an at least theoretically respectable member of the media—was not only tagged, wristbanded, escorted, and metal-detected, but sniffed by a K-9 unit before I could go in.

J.J. Abrams, alongside Stunt Coordinator Eunice Huthart, directs the Knights of Ren; elite fearsome enforcers of Kylo Ren’s dark will.

I sat down with Abrams a couple of hours later. For the occasion, he was wearing a suit so black and sharp, he could have been doing Men in Black cosplay, but his most distinctive feature is his dark curly hair, which is upswept in a way that is only slightly suggestive of devil horns. Abrams talks rapidly, as if he can barely keep up with the things his racing brain is telling him to say. When I told him that not only was Star Wars the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter, but that all 10 of the Top 10 trending topics were Star Wars–related, and that he personally was No. 5, he was visibly stunned.

Then he recovered enough to say: “Well, I aspire to No. 4.” (For the record, No. 4 was the late Supreme Leader Snoke, who frankly did seem beatable. If you’re curious, No. 11 was pro golfer Zach Johnson, who had just accidentally hit his ball with a practice swing at the Masters. Life goes on.)

Disney executives talk about how important it is to “event-ize” Star Wars movies; i.e., to make them feel not just like movies but like seriously momentous occasions. They won’t have much trouble with this one: The Rise of Skywalker isn’t just the last movie in the Star Wars trilogy that began in 2015 with The Force Awakens; it’s the last movie in a literal, actual trilogy of trilogies that started with the very first Star Wars movie back in 1977, which began the saga of the Skywalker family. The Rise of Skywalker will finally, after 42 years, bring that saga to an end.

FIRST LOOK Vanity Fair reveals Keri Russell as the masked scoundrel Zorri Bliss, seen in the Thieves’ Quarter of the snow-dusted world Kijimi.

We all thought the story was over in 1983 with Return of the Jedi, and then we really thought it was over in 2005 with Revenge of the Sith. But Star Wars has always been an unruly beast, too big and powerful (and profitable) to be contained in one movie, or even in a trilogy, or even in two trilogies, let alone numberless novels, TV shows, comics, video games, Happy Meals, and so on. Now Abrams has to gather all those threads and bring closure to a story that was started by somebody else, in an America that feels a very long time ago indeed. “That’s the challenge of this movie,” Abrams says. “It wasn’t just to make one film that as a stand-alone experience would be thrilling, and scary, and emotional, and funny, but one that if you were to watch all nine of the films, you’d feel like, Well, of course—that!”

Like a lot of things that we now can’t imagine life without, Star Wars came really close to never happening in the first place. In 1971, Lucas was a serious young auteur just five years out of film school at U.S.C. He had only one full-length movie on his résumé, and that was THX 1138, which is the kind of visionary but grindingly earnest science-fiction epic that only the French could love. (They were pretty much the only ones who did.) Everybody expected Lucas to go on and make serious, gritty 1970s cinema like his peers, Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola. At the time Lucas and Coppola were actively planning a radical epic set in Vietnam with the provocative title Apocalypse Now.

FORCE MAJEURE First Order leaders General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) and Allegiant General Pryde (Richard E. Grant) on the bridge of Kylo Ren’s destroyer.

But Coppola would have to finish that one on his own, because Lucas went a different way. “I had decided there was no modern mythology,” he said in 1997. “I wanted to take old myths and put them into a new format that young people could relate to. Mythology always existed in unusual, unknown environments, so I chose space.” Lucas tried to acquire the rights to Flash Gordon (that would’ve been a dark timeline indeed), but when he couldn’t, he came up with his own original science-fictional epic instead. He called it The Star Wars. Like The Facebook, it would have to shed a direct article on its way to glory.

Even though American Graffiti had made Lucas a bankable director, Star Wars still came together slowly. In the first draft, Luke was an old man, Leia was 14, and Han Solo was “a huge green-skinned monster with no nose and large gills.” Fox executives were baffled by Star Wars, and they squeezed Lucas relentlessly for time and money. We forget now how jerry-rigged the first movie was: the cantina aliens weren’t finished, and the monumental Star Destroyer that dominates the opening shot is, in reality, about three feet long. The Death Star interior is basically one set re-arranged several different ways. To make Greedo’s mouth move, the woman in the Greedo suit had to hold a clothespin in her mouth. “What I remember about working on the first film,” says John Williams, the legendary soundtrack composer, “is the fact that I didn’t ever think there would be a second film.” (He also, like everybody else, thought Luke and Leia were going to get together, so he wrote them a love theme.)

But wherever real mythology comes from, Lucas had gone there and brought something back alive. People wanted movies that gave them something to believe in instead of relentlessly autopsying the beliefs that had failed them. We’d had enough of antiheroes. We needed some anti-antiheroes. “I realized after THX that people don’t care about how the country’s being ruined,” Lucas said. “We’ve got to regenerate optimism.” Like American Graffiti, Star Wars is a work of profound nostalgia, a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate anthem of longing for the restoration of a true and just power in the universe—the return of the king. And at the same time it’s a very personal hero’s journey, about a boy who must put right the sins of his father and master the strange power he finds within himself, and in doing so become a man.

Star Wars is also an incredibly enduring vision of what it’s like to live in a world of super-advanced technology. Science fiction often ages badly, turning into kitsch or camp—just look at Flash Gordon—but Star Wars hasn’t. More than any filmmaker before him, Lucas successfully imagined what a science-fictional world would feel like to somebody who was actually inside it—which is to say, it would look as ordinary and workaday as the present. He even shot it like it was real, working close-in and mostly eschewing wide establishing shots, more like a documentary or a newsreel than a space opera. “It feels very grounded,” says Naomi Ackie, who’s making her Star Wars debut in Skywalker playing a character named Jannah, about whom she is allowed to say literally nothing. “There’s the kind of spectacular-ness, and the supernatural move-things-with-your-mind magic stuff, but then there’s also this really grounded, rugged nature where everything is distressed and old and kind of worn out and lived-in. And I think playing with those two ideas means that you get this feeling that it could almost be real. Like, in a galaxy far away, it could almost be the case that you could have this.”

When Lucas made the first Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, he cheekily labeled it Episode V, then went back and re-labeled the first movie as Episode IV, as if the movies were an old-fashioned serial that the rest of us were all just tuning in to. Around that time, he also started talking about Star Wars as a nine-part epic—so in 2012, when Lucas retired and sold Lucasfilm to Disney, it wasn’t exactly heresy that Disney announced more movies. At the time, Kathleen Kennedy had just been named co-chairperson of Lucasfilm, and she tapped Abrams to direct the first Disney-owned post-Lucas Star Wars movie. It was a bit like saying, Make the lightning strike again, please. Exactly here, if you could. Oh, and could you also earn back that $4 billion we just spent to buy Lucasfilm? (Narrator voice: He could.)

At first blush, Abrams’s debut Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, looked like an elaborate homage to the original. Just like in A New Hope, there’s a young Force-sensitive person on a poor desert planet—that’s Rey, played by Daisy Ridley—who finds a droid with a secret message that’s vital to the Rebellion (or wait, sorry, it’s the Resistance now). There’s a villain in a black mask, just like Darth Vader, except that it’s his grandson Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), né Ben Solo, son of Han and Leia. Kylo has a planet-killing weapon, much like the Death Star but way bigger, which becomes the target of a desperate attack by Resistance X-wings. There’s even a bar full of aliens.

Abrams also insisted on keeping to the analog aesthetic of the original trilogy: those aliens had to be latex and yak hair, not bits and bytes, and everything possible was shot on location using film cameras, not digital ones. Even Lucas had abandoned that approach by the time he made the second Star Wars trilogy, but many fans consider those movies to be a cautionary tale. “Famously, the prequels were mostly greenscreen environments,” Abrams says. “And that was George himself doing that, and it ended up looking exactly how he wanted it to look—and I always preferred the look of the original movies, because I just remember when you’re in the snow on Hoth, when you’re in the desert on Tatooine, and when you’re in the forests of Endor—it’s amazing. If you put a vaporator here, there, all of a sudden almost any natural location suddenly becomes a Star Wars location.”

But the more interesting thing about The Force Awakens and its successor, The Last Jedi, written and directed by Rian Johnson, was how they subtly complicated Lucas’s vision. Thirty years have gone by since the ending of Return of the Jedi, during which time the newly reborn Republic became complacent and politically stagnant, allowing the rise of the reactionary neo-imperial First Order, whose origins we will learn more about in Skywalker. “It was almost like if the Argentine Nazis had sort of got together and actually started to bring that back in some real form,” Abrams says. Just like that, the rules of the Star Wars universe changed. It wasn’t all over when the Ewoks sang. Obi-Wan Kenobi and all those Bothans had died in vain. Even Han and Leia split up. It’s all a little less of a fairy tale now.

The feather-haired godling Luke suffered the trauma of having a Padawan go bad on his watch. It’s an echo of what happened to his old mentor, Obi-Wan, with Anakin Skywalker, who became Darth Vader. But where Obi-Wan made peace with it, waiting serenely in the desert of Tatooine for the next Chosen One to arrive, Luke’s guilt curdled into shame. He hid himself away, so that his Chosen One, Rey, had to spend most of The Force Awakens searching for him, and then another whole movie convincing him with the help of Yoda’s Force ghost to keep the Jedi Order going at all. Star Wars arrived as an antidote to the disillusionment of the 1970s—but now, in its middle age, Star Wars is grappling with disillusionment of its own.

DESERT POWER Joonas Suotamo (Chewbacca), Ridley, Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), and John Boyega (Finn) await the call to action for a chase scene.

By dint of advanced Sith interrogation techniques, I was able to obtain valuable advance information about The Rise of Skywalker. Here it is: common emblem.

Anthony Daniels, who plays C-3P0, is the only actor who has appeared in all nine movies of the Star Wars triple trilogy, so if anybody’s entitled to leak, it’s him. Daniels says he loved the script for The Rise of Skywalker, but he didn’t get it until the last minute, right before shooting started, and for some reason he just couldn’t memorize his part. “My first line would not go in my head!” he says. In person Daniels is like a C-3P0 whose preferences have been reset to charming and voluble. “The line that I couldn’t say was two words: ‘common emblem.’ Common emblem, common emblem—I would say them thousands of times. My wife would say it back. I just couldn’t say them!”

Fortunately C-3P0’s mouth doesn’t move, so he could add the line in postproduction. Anyway, there’s the big scoop: “common emblem.” I don’t know what it means either. (Also I 100 percent guarantee that they will change the line before the movie comes out so that this scoop will end up being fake news.) Daniels also told me that C-3P0 does something in this movie that surprises everybody—but he wouldn’t say what. “He keeps his clothes on. It’s not like he suddenly does this thing, but …”

The only other member of the old guard on the set this time was Billy Dee Williams, who plays the charismatic Lando Calrissian. At 82, Williams has lost none of his roguish charm, but now it comes wrapped in a kind of magisterial dignity. People tend to remember Lando for the deal he cut with Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, rather than for his redemptive comeback in Return of the Jedi, and Williams appears to have spent the last 45 years defending him. “He’s a survivor. It’s expediency for him,” Williams says. “You know, he was thrown into a situation which he didn’t look for and he had to try to figure out how to deal with an entity which is more than just a human.” And, he adds, with the weary air of somebody who has spent way too much time justifying the behavior of a fictional character, “nobody died!”

HOT TAKE Members of the crew shade and shine Daniels, the only cast member to appear in all nine of the Skywalker films, while BB-8 looks on.

Chewbacca is still here, too, but it’s not the same man in the suit. The original actor was Peter Mayhew, a seven-foot-three-inch gentle giant who was working as a hospital orderly in London when Lucas cast him in the first movie. Mayhew retired after The Force Awakens, and he died on April 30 at 74. His replacement is Joonas Suotamo, a fresh-faced former professional basketball player from Finland who always wanted to be an actor but was hard to cast because he’s six feet 11 inches tall. “When I first met [Mayhew] he told me I was a wee bit too skinny,” Suotamo says. “But we also had a Wookiee boot camp, which lasted for a week. He told me all kinds of things about the moves that Chewbacca does, how they came to be and his reasoning behind them.” Suotamo has now played Chewbacca in four movies and enjoys it about as much as I’ve ever seen anybody enjoy anything. “It’s very much like silent-era film, with Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin,” he says. “He’s a mime character and that’s what he does, and I guess in that minimalism comes the beauty of the character.”

Other things we know about Skywalker: We can safely assume that the Resistance and the First Order are headed toward a final smash, which will be a heavy lift for the good guys because, at the end of The Last Jedi, the Resistance was down, way down, to a double handful of survivors. They’ll face a First Order who suffered a stinging but largely symbolic loss at the Battle of Crait, and who, I feel confident, have learned something from the previous eight movies. The Empire built and lost two Death Stars. The First Order has already lost one super-weapon in The Force Awakens. Presumably it won’t make the same mistake twice, twice.

But the stakes go even higher than that, cosmically high. Sources close to the movie say that Skywalker will at long last bring to a climax the millennia-long conflict between the Jedi Order and its dark shadow, the Sith.

HORSING AROUND Finn and new ally Jannah (Naomi Ackie), atop hardy orbaks, lead the charge against the mechanized forces of the First Order. “It’s extremely surreal to be in it,” says Ackie, “and see how it works from the inside.”

STAR CROSSED Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and Rey battle it out with lightsabers in a stormy confrontation. Their Force-connection—what Driver calls their “maybe-bond”—will turn out to run even deeper than previously revealed.

The hottest area for speculation, however, is the identity of the titular Skywalker, because at this point there aren’t many Skywalkers left to rise. One is General Organa, the former Princess Leia, Luke’s sister—but Carrie Fisher, who plays her, passed away in 2016. That was a deeply painful loss for Abrams personally, but it also presented him with an impossible choice as a filmmaker. He needed Leia to tell the story, but Abrams didn’t feel like a digital Carrie Fisher could do the job, and there was no way Lucasfilm was going to re-cast the role.

But then a strange thing happened. Abrams remembered that there was some footage of Fisher left over from The Force Awakens, scenes that had been changed or cut entirely, and he dug them up. “It’s hard to even talk about it without sounding like I’m being some kind of cosmic spiritual goofball,” Abrams says, “but it felt like we suddenly had found the impossible answer to the impossible question.” He started to write scenes around the old footage, fitting Leia’s dialogue into new contexts. He re-created the lighting to match the way Fisher had been lit. Bit by bit, she found her place in the new movie. “It was a bizarre kind of left side/right side of the brain sort of Venn diagram thing, of figuring out how to create the puzzle based on the pieces we had.” Fisher’s daughter, Billie Lourd, appears in the movies as a Resistance officer named Lieutenant Connix, and at first Abrams deliberately wrote her out of the scenes in case it was too painful—but Lourd said no, she wanted to be in them. “And so, there are moments where they’re talking; there are moments where they’re touching,” Abrams says. “There are moments in this movie where Carrie is there, and I really do feel there is an element of the uncanny, spiritual, you know, classic Carrie, that it would have happened this way, because somehow it worked. And I never thought it would.”

The only other member of the surviving Skywalker bloodline—that we know of!—is Leia’s son and Luke’s former Padawan, the fallen Jedi Kylo Ren. Kylo probably isn’t capable of actual happiness, but things are definitely looking up for him: by the end of The Last Jedi he has taken control of the First Order and killed or at least outlived his actual father and both of his symbolic fathers-in-art, Luke and Supreme Leader Snoke. Sources at Disney also confirm that his long-rumored Knights of Ren will finally arrive in Skywalker. “And then he had been forging this maybe-bond with Rey,” Driver says, “and it kind of ends with the question in the air: is he going to pursue that relationship, or when the door of her ship goes up, does that also close that camaraderie that they were maybe forming?”

SANDBLAST Camera operator Colin Anderson readies a take for a chase sequence spotlighting the heroics of Chewbacca, BB-8, and Rey.

Darkness in the Star Wars movies tends to come from fear: for Anakin Skywalker, Kylo’s grandfather, it was his fear of losing his mother and his wife. After two movies it’s still not so easy to say exactly what Kylo Ren himself fears, even though he’s as operatically emo as Vader was stoic. He’s fixated on the past—he made a shrine to his own grandfather—but at the same time the past torments him. “Let the past die,” he tells Rey in The Last Jedi. “Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you are meant to be.”

Presumably whatever’s eating at Kylo started in his childhood: maybe being the kid of literally the two coolest people in the galaxy isn’t as fun as it sounds. Driver—who has obviously thought this through with a lot of rigor—points out that, as cool as they are, Han and Leia are both obsessively committed to lifestyles (smuggling, rebelling) that don’t leave much room for kids. He also points out that, unlike Luke and Rey, Kylo never got to go on a nifty voyage of self-discovery. Instead he grew up under the crushing pressure of massive expectations. “How do you form friendships out of that?” Driver says. “How do you understand the weight of that? And if there’s no one around you guiding you, or articulating things the right way … it can easily go awry.” By the emotional logic that governs the Star Wars universe—and also our own—Kylo Ren is going to have to confront the past, and his fears, whatever they are, or be destroyed by them.

Where Lucas’s trilogies tended to follow the roots and branches of the Skywalker family tree—their personal saga was the saga of the galaxy writ small—the new movies have a slightly wider aperture and take in a new generation of heroes. There’s Rey, of course, who sources say will have progressed in her training since the end of The Last Jedi to the point where it’s almost complete. With that taken care of, all she has to do is reconstitute the entire Jedi Order from scratch, because as far as we know she’s the Last One.

If Kylo Ren can’t be redeemed it will almost certainly fall to Rey to put him down, in spite of their maybe-bond. Their relationship is the closest thing the new trilogy has to a star-crossed love story on the order of Han and Leia: a source close to the movie says that their Force-connection will turn out to run even deeper than we thought. They’re uniquely suited to understand each other, but at the same time they are in every way each other’s inverse, down to Kylo’s perverse rejection of his family, which is the one thing Rey craves most. “I think there’s a part of Rey that’s like, dude, you fucking had it all, you had it all,” Ridley says. “That was always a big question during filming: you had it all and you let it go.”

PUNCH IT! In a historic reunion, Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) retakes the helm of the Millennium Falcon, joined by Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Chewbacca, D-O, and BB-8. “He’s a survivor,” Williams says of Lando.

Rey is also, according to totally unsubstantiated Internet theories, a leading candidate to be the Skywalker of the title, pending some kind of head-snapping reveal about her ancestry. (For the record, the other leading unsubstantiated Internet theory has the “Skywalker” of the title referring to an entirely new order of Force users who will rise up and replace the Jedi.)

Rey seems ready for it all, or as ready as anybody could be. “It’s nice having that shot at the beginning of the teaser,” Ridley says, over avocado toast at a fancy Chicago hotel, “because I think it’s quite a good visual representation of where she is now: confident, calm, less fearful.… It’s still sort of overwhelming, but in a different way. It feels more right—less like inevitable and more like there’s a focus to the journey.” Focus is a good word for Rey: on-screen Ridley’s dramatic eyebrows form a wickedly sharp arrow of concentration. I asked Ridley what she’s thinking about when Rey is using her Force powers, and it turns out Rey seems focused because Ridley is actually seriously focused. “I literally visualize it. When I was lifting rocks I was visualizing the rocks moving. And then I was like, Oh, my God, I made it happen! And obviously there’s loads of rocks on strings, so, no, I didn’t. But I visualize that it’s really going on.” (That scene, which comes at the end of The Last Jedi, is another example of classic nondigital Star Wars effects: those were real rocks. “It was actually really amazing,” Ridley says. “It was sort of like a baby mobile.”)

There’s also Finn, the apostate Stormtrooper, played by the irrepressible Boyega, who in person practically vibrates with energy and speaks with a South London accent very different from Finn’s American one. In some ways Finn has gone through a complete character arc already: he confronted his past—by beating down his old boss, Captain Phasma—and found his courage and his moral center. He has had a tendency to panic, if not actively desert, in clutch situations, but at the Battle of Crait he proved that he was past that. “I think he’s just an active member of the Resistance now,” Boyega says. “Episode Eight, he couldn’t decide what team he was fighting for. But since then he’s made a clear decision.” (Cast members tend to refer to the Star Wars movies by their episode numbers: four is the original movie, seven is The Force Awakens, and so on.)

Finn still has to make a clear decision about his romantic situation, though. As Boyega put it at Star Wars Celebration: “Finn is single and willing to mingle!” The movies have been teasing his emotional connections with both Rey and the Resistance mechanic Rose Tico, played by Kelly Marie Tran, with whom he shared a fleeting battlefield kiss in The Last Jedi. Rose seems like the more positive choice, given that she stops Finn from deserting early in the movie and saves his life at the Battle of Crait, and that the precedents for romantic involvements with Jedi are extremely bad. Tran is the first Asian-American woman to play a major role in a Star Wars movie, and she has been the target of both racist and sexist attacks online. But she has come through them as a fan favorite: when she appeared onstage in Chicago, she got a standing ovation.

Finally there’s Poe, who has mostly struggled with his own cocky impulsiveness, because he’s a loose-cannon-who-just-can’t-play-by-the-rules. Poe will have to step up and become a leader, because the Resistance is seriously short on officer material. In fact, some of that transformation will already have happened where The Rise of Skywalker picks up, which is about a year after the end of The Last Jedi. “There has been a bit of shared history that you haven’t seen,” Isaac says. “Whereas in the other films, Poe is this kind of lone wolf, now he’s really part of a group. They’re going out and going on missions and have a much more familiar dynamic now.” Star Wars has always been about friendship as much as it is about romance, and as of the end of The Last Jedi, Rey, Finn, and Poe are all finally in the same place for the first time since The Force Awakens.

The Rise of Skywalker introduces some new players, too. There’s a tiny one-wheeled droid called D-O and a large banana-slug alien named Klaud. Oh, and Naomi Ackie, Keri Russell, and Richard E. Grant have all joined the cast, though, again, we know practically nothing about who they’re playing. Going from being outside the Star Wars leviathan to being right in its belly can be a dizzying experience for a first-timer. “I actually tried to do this thing while we were filming,” Ackie says, “where I’d go one day, walking through London without seeing a Star Wars reference somewhere. And you can’t do it. You really can’t. So it’s extremely surreal to be in it and see how it works from the inside.

WELL MET Jordanian locals play the Aki-Aki, natives of the planet Pasaana.

If anything, Star Wars is only getting more omnipresent. The franchise under Lucas was a colossus, but he still ran it essentially as a private concern. He could make movies or not, as his muse dictated—he was beholden to no shareholders. But Star Wars under Disney makes the old Star Wars look positively quaint. Between 1977 and 2005, Lucasfilm released six Star Wars movies; when Skywalker premieres in December, Disney will have released five Star Wars movies in five years. “I think there is a larger expectation that Disney has,” Kennedy says. “On the other hand, though, I think that Disney is very respectful of what this is, and right from the beginning we talked about the fragility of this form of storytelling. Because it’s something that means so much to fans that you can’t turn this into some kind of factory approach. You can’t even do what Marvel does, necessarily, where you pick characters and build new franchises around those characters. This needs to evolve differently.”

A useful example of that fragility might be the relatively modest performance of Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018. Solo was a perfectly good Star Wars movie that has made almost $400 million worldwide—but it’s also, according to industry estimates, the first one to actually lose money. In response Disney has gently but firmly pumped the brakes: the first movie in the next Star Wars trilogy, which will be helmed by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, the duo behind Game of Thrones, won’t arrive till Christmas of 2022, with further installments every other year after that. There’s no official word as to what stories they’ll tell, or when a second trilogy being developed by Rian Johnson will appear.

But even as the movies pause, Star Wars continues to colonize any and all other media. In addition to video games, comics, novels, cartoons, container-loads of merch, etc., there are not one but two live-action TV series in the pipeline for Disney+, Disney’s new streaming service: The Mandalorian, created by Jon Favreau, and an as-yet-untitled show about Cassian Andor from Rogue One. I have personally tried a virtual-reality experience called Vader Immortal,written and produced by Dark Knight screenwriter David Goyer. At the end of May, Disneyland will open Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, a massive, 14-acre, $1 billion attraction where you can fly the Millennium Falcon, be captured by the First Order, and drink a blue milk cocktail (it’s actually nondairy) and Coca-Cola products out of exclusive BB-8-shaped bottles at the cantina. It’s the largest single-theme expansion in the park’s history: Take that, Toy Story Land. The Disney World version will open in August.

You realize now that, under Lucas, Star Wars always slightly had the brakes on—we were always kept a little starved for product. With Disney driving, we’ll really find out how big Star Wars can get.

ENCORE Composer John Williams conducting the Star Wars score, drawing on themes and motifs he has woven across four decades. “I didn’t think there would ever be a second film,” he says.

When people talk about the new Star Wars movies, they tend to talk about how faithful they are to the originals. What’s harder to say is how exactly the new films are different—how movies like Skywalker keep their connection to the past while at the same time finding a way to belong to the world of 2019. Because regardless of whether or not Star Wars has changed since 1977, the world around it has, profoundly. “There’s a loss of innocence, a sense of innocence that existed in the 70s that I don’t think to any extent exists today,” Kennedy says. “I think that has to permeate the storytelling and the reaction to the stories and how they’re set up. It has to feel differently because we’re different.”

We know things, as a people and as an audience, that we didn’t know back then. For example: back then it felt sort of O.K. to like Darth Vader, because even though he was evil he was also incredibly cool, and the kind of fascism he represented felt like a bogeyman from the distant past. But now fascism is rising again, which makes the whole First Order subplot look super-prescient, but it also reminds us that fascism is not even slightly cool in real life. “Evil needs to feel and look very real,” Kennedy says, “and what that means today may not be as black-and-white as it might have been in 1977, coming off a kind of World War II sensibility.” In the Star Wars–verse, Dark and Light are supposed to balance each other, but in the real world they just mix together into a hopelessly foggy, morally ambiguous gray.

But the changes are liberating too. Star Wars doesn’t have to stay frozen in time; if anything it’s the opposite, if it doesn’t change it’ll die. It will turn into Flash Gordon. For Abrams, that means he can’t go through this process so haunted by the ghost of George Lucas (who is of course still alive, but you get what I’m saying) that he winds up doing a cinematic Lucas impression. At some point Abrams has to let Abrams be Abrams.

The Rise of Skywalker might be that point. “Working on nine, I found myself approaching it slightly differently,” he says. “Which is to say that, on seven, I felt beholden to Star Wars in a way that was interesting—I was doing what to the best of my ability I felt Star Wars should be.” But this time something changed. Abrams found himself making different choices—for the camera angles, the lighting, the story. “It felt slightly more renegade; it felt slightly more like, you know, Fuck it, I’m going to do the thing that feels right because it does, not because it adheres to something.”

There are a lot of small subtle ways that Abrams’s Star Wars is different from Lucas’s, but if there’s a standout, it’s the way that the new movies look at history. Lucas’s Star Wars movies are bathed in the deep golden-sunset glow of the idyllic Old Republic, that more civilized age—but the new movies aren’t like that. They’re not nostalgic. They don’t long for the past; they’re more about the promise of the future. “This trilogy is about this young generation, this new generation, having to deal with all the debt that has come before,” Abrams says. “And it’s the sins of the father, and it’s the wisdom and the accomplishments of those who did great things, but it’s also those who committed atrocities, and the idea that this group is up against this unspeakable evil and are they prepared? Are they ready? What have they learned from before? It’s less about grandeur. It’s less about restoring an old age. It’s more about preserving a sense of freedom and not being one of the oppressed.”

FROM THE ASHES Mark Hamill, as Luke, with R2-D2. Speculation is rampant about who will “rise” as the Skywalker of the movie’s title—and how that choice will reflect the way the world has changed since Star Wars debuted in 1977.

The new generation doesn’t have that same connection to the old days that Luke and Leia did. It’s not like their parents destroyed the Old Republic. We don’t even know who their parents were! They’re too young to remember the Empire. They’re just here to clean up the mess they got left with, the disastrous consequences of bad decisions made by earlier generations, and try to survive long enough to see the future. Is any of this resonating with 2019? Might there possibly be a generation around here somewhere that’s worried about the consequences of its own decisions for the future? Star Wars has never been and probably never should be a vehicle for political arguments, but to paraphrase Ursula Le Guin, great science fiction is never really about the future. It’s about the present.

You could even—if you’re into that kind of thing—imagine the story of the new Star Wars trilogy as a metaphor for the making of the new Star Wars trilogy. In fact, I was totally prepared—because I am into that kind of thing!—to try to push this overthought metafictional hot take onto Abrams … but I didn’t have to. Abrams got there ahead of me. “The idea of the movie is kind of how I felt going into the movie as a filmmaker,” he says, “which is to say that I’ve inherited all this stuff, great stuff, and good wisdom, and the good and the bad, and it’s all coming to this end, and the question is, do we have what it takes to succeed?”

Kylo Ren has it all wrong: you can’t bring back the past and become your own grandfather, and you can’t kill the past, either. All you can do is make your peace with it and learn from it and move on. Abrams is doing that with Star Wars—and meanwhile the Resistance is going to have to do that, too, if they really are going to bring this saga to an end. Because we’ve been here before, watching a band of scrappy rebels take down a technofascist empire, and it seemed to work fine at the time—but it didn’t last. The same goes for the Jedi and their struggle with the Sith. To end this story, really end it, they’re going to have to figure out the conditions of a more permanent victory over the forces of darkness. Their past was imperfect at best, and the present is a complete disaster—but the future is all before them. This time, finally, they’re going to get it right.

[aintnouseofpretending]

There Will Not Be A Next Time

+—-—+—-—+—-—+—-—+—-—+

Summary: You and Gwilym have been together for long. Despite living together, you respect each other boundaries. What you thought was just a little bit cheesy; “Their job is pretty obvious. It’ll come off as clingy if I ask them about it,” dynamic the two of you having currently, turns out to be the reason for your split. It was revealed when you’re in the middle of your hero work, the infamous villain you have long chase was none other than your own boyfriend.

Pairing: Gwilym Lee x Reader (slight x Joe Mazzello)

Warning: ANGST. Fluff. Cursing. Violence, blood, and death. Throwing up. Superhero AU.

Word Count: 3423.

Inspired by: Led Zeppelin - Babe I’m Gonna Leave You

Perma-Tag: @ohmygoditsanthonyedwardstark

Note: This means the scene is happening right now. This means the scene happened in the past.

+—-—+—-—+—-—+—-—+—-—+

It still feels like yesterday when the two of you hugged. You make tea and breakfast whilst he put the record on the antique gramophone he found last month. The giggles you make as he silly dance towards you and slithers his hands on your waist from behind. He kisses your shoulder, you struggle cooking and dancing slowly with him. Soft smiles planted on both of your lips as they meet. Enjoying the classic blue melodies in each other embraces.

It’s warm. It smells very good. You feel very fuzzy and comfortable, and so does he. If the world is to end then, there’ll be no regret between the two of you. But you can’t take credit for such thought, because Gwilym whispers it right on your ears; his lips on your earlobe tingles down your body. He whines when you break off the hug for you have to serve the breakfast on the table. The two of you jokes, laugh, exchanging what happens at work—the silent promise you both agreed that best not to pry too far. Because there’s no need to; it’s clear that you work in the local community whilst juggling it with being a high school teacher when to you he’s obviously a freelance computer scientist.

You still remember all of that. It’s becoming even more vivid by the second as if it is happening right now. Maybe because you finally saw his face again. Suddenly all the beautiful memories rush in, replacing those that are bad. The massive urge to embrace him again is something you can’t no longer hold nor acted upon as your hands touch the cold concrete ground. Your eyes getting blurry, perhaps from the tears. And finally you can hear it; his voice calling your name. This time it wasn’t just a memory. Not a hallucination. No matter how he says it, the sound always calms you. It gives you the necessary energy to stay alive and do what you promised him and yourself.

You will get him back. You’ll redeem him, aid him back to the right path. No matter the cost.

He wishes for nothing more but to rewind time. Now he’s forced to face the consequence. Of his own action. Of your action. His deep blue eyes stare into the distance. He let the wind slowly caress his exposed head. It’s cold but pleasant. Just like your hand. How in every bad situation at work that left him sour, will easily wash away by your touch. You never fail to calm him down, to make him feel content. His most cherished moment where when you read on the sofa, you let him laid his head on your lap for a nap. It’s like in heaven, the way you gently hums and comb his hair or pets his head.

He misses it so much. God, he has no idea how to prevent this from happening, he almost says he will do anything for it. But no. That’s not why he’s there in the first place. Standing on the roof of a building, waiting for you to catch up. To finally put an end at the forking path the two of you will be forced to choose. The second hardest choice he has to make. Not even time is kind to him and let him think; you’ve arrived. The masked hero in a purple suit.

“We have to stop this once and for all, Titan.” Your voice is commanding and powerful and cold. If it were not directed at what you thought was just an evil stranger, perhaps Gwilym will notice it sooner. You’re far too different you might as well be someone else completely. But that’s just an empty hope at this point.

“Will we?” Without his mask and voice distortion, you finally hear his real voice. But it comes with an overwhelming amount of realisation. He’s indeed a human, with you superhuman ability you can detect who he is easy that if you don’t know who he is. But that’s not the case. Someone you never thought would be the villain famous for using technology against the government and the side of humanity, for the goal you now knows.

“Gwilym?”

“Hi, Galactica. My love.” He turned around, revealing his tired but familiar face. He could not bear to see how you reacted, but at the same time, he could not detach his eyes from your figure in full costume as you unmasked. The body of an extreme nuisance of a superhero, with the head of his lover. Your face clearly shows the honesty of a woman that refuses to believe what’s in front of her eyes. He could almost predict what you are gonna say if you still think he’s not your boyfriend of five years.

“I would not ask why.” You finally could talk. Your voice is breaking. “You know how it ends with me, Gwil. Revenge will never end the pain. It doubles.”

“We wouldn’t know. Our life is far too different.”

“But we share them—!”

“We don’t know! We have zero clues that the two of us are standing on the opposite side of the line! It was inevitable, y/n. When there’s still a chance this happen sooner and much less painful. We just have to be more honest.”

The pain you both felt was mutual. It was too difficult to talk, much less it would be to convince each other to change side. The two of you knows it’s impossible.

“But no more regret. I am Titan and you’re Galactica." His voice slowly turned twisted as he put his helm back on. Perhaps you will not make up your mind to beat him into a pulp if he doesn’t establish that fact

It was still hard to swallow. None of you still could believe it that right now you fight each other, the same old routine. But every hit the two of you landed, every pain you received felt agonizingly more real. Whether you should suppress or making it twice more painful. It’s like an eternity when you can’t hold back your tears but somehow manages to hold back all your kill shots, but Gwilym feels and notices it on the level you could never imagine, and let you overpower him in the end.

“Do it.” He groaned as you forcefully take off his now broken helmet. You sit on his stomach, pinning him down effectively whilst he lay vulnerable. Fist raised, ready to end him, but your hand stays stationary.

“Fool!” You screamed. “How could you think I can do that?!”

The last time you’re on top of him was when the two of you play fight, with no intention of hurting each other. There were laughs. There was music. There was happiness. But Gwilym detests the thought that this time it gave of almost the same atmosphere. He also wants you to not think such, no matter how challenging to do so.

“Don’t you say that you’ll also let me go even if we’re not a lover. You know my sins, Galactica.”

You ignored him. Instead, indulge in your sadness and the irony of the situation whilst you touch his face. The same face you expected to see every day, every night, for the rest of your life. You’re still not sure what to make of the situation, but the more you drink to his facial feature, the more you rejected the idea that this is the end. There’s still a way. You’re a superhero, and that’s your way. So when he throws you off in such strength the wall you land on start crumbling down, you have made up your mind.

“Nothing will change me!” He screamed. “Not even after many upcoming battles with you!”

Even a superhuman like you still could feel your body sore. And just like you, he has made up his mind. One of our lover quarrels, you thought, where the two of us refuse to back down like many times before. The two of you always find a way to solve the problem, doesn’t matter how it ends with unsatisfactory.

“There will not be a next time, Titan.” First I have to stop him. To prove that his way is wrong. “Mark my words.”

“It’s in the past.” You answered rather unwillingly. “We’re no longer the same person we thought we were.”

Joe Mazzello, your fellow superhero comrade, pats you on your back. Your team is preparing for the LAB-2411 raid near Birmingham, UK. Gwilym secret base all this time. It took almost three months to get the clearing from the government and the Council of Justice that manages licensed superheroes like you. Almost a hundred percent the place is empty, but whatever was left behind will lead to where he moves it. That’s also why Joe is there with his investigative-type power.

The sympathetic smile he gave you helps melting down the tension. Only make sense for him to have such effect on you; he’s the one that introduces you to Gwilym. Although you have told him to not hold himself responsible for the incident, you’re sure he still feel guilty for it. You try to rid of such burden from him, after all with he has long helped you even with just his mere presence.

“It’s exactly zero point zero zero zero zero and twenty-five percent that he will be there.” You assure. He shrugged.

“I want to say that sounded pretty accurate, but then that would be the biggest lie I ever told you.” He joked whilst he put on his gloves. “Don’t argue that my biggest lie was actually when I get you in the gig and claimed you’re just another human as your action stopping the Behemoth from obliterating Cincinnati was aired live on the TV next to me.”

“But somehow you managed to pull it off.”

“Hell fucking yeah I pull it off. Totally not because of you Falcon Punch the shit out of that absolute unit of a monster. Not at all! So you still owe me one.”

“Absolutely. A date was it? Next week? At five? Marathoning Hannah Montana until you cried?”

“Hey, okay! No one fucking diss Hannah in front of me, you hear?” He nudges your waist, as you fake flinch. “That’s a promise! If you’re not in your apartment already preparing Hannah Montana’s DVDs and a bottle of wine when I come with a bouquet and box of chocolate, I will sue you, you fraud!”

“And if you don’t come with flowers and snacks when I’m already putting the DVDs in as I pour the wine, I will report you to CoJ and get your license revoked!”

“Five dollars?”

“Done.” After you confirmed, you never thought he could smile that wide. He nodded childishly and mockingly as he slides away, he didn’t forget to finger guns you at every possible moment and mouthed five dollars even when the raid has started.

“You’re quick to move on, Galactica.” Sneered the pink-skinned villainess. “I don’t blame you. One hell of a cute guy. He’s the “No Shit Sherlock” hero, right? If I were straight, I would probably shag you already.”

“Let go of Dact.” The venom in your voice makes even Joe shivered. “And I might spare your life.”

“Now now. I need a solid deal.” The woman’s violet claws get Joe’s jaw on lock. The claw’s tip is so sharp it might easily pierce through his skin with no pain, even the thought makes you cringed.

“You, on the other hand, ‘Tica, has been far too long in my radar, I can’t wait for some tasting. So give me the kind of agreement I like, and I might spare his life. Besides, isn’t this is the man that introduces you with Titan? Don’t you feel guilty, boy? You cause them to split. If only they didn’t meet, don’t you think all these messes won’t happen in the first place?”

The blast was intense. It gives Joe the effect of a flashbang. For a brief moment, he almost clawed you to death; since he’s Pterodactyl. Only when your bare hand touch his face, the skin to skin contact helped him knows that it is you. All your memories with Gwilym, every sensation, he feels it too. As much as drag it is to wear rubber gloves all the time, this is exactly the reason why sometimes having the power of investigation more of a curse instead of a gift. But he also feels it too, the feelings keep flowing from your hand that’s not yet part from his face. Your genuine need for him to stop feeling guilty over Gwilym and your break up, to the point of anger and annoyance. As he regains his sight, the first thing he sees is you and your warm feelings towards him. If only, if only this ability allows you to also feel what he’s feeling.

“That’s why you don’t monologue as a villain.” You grinned cheekily after making sure you’ve fully healed him. “Let’s go, we’re close to Titan. We can’t lose him anymore, not after two years of chasing him.”

You grabbed his hand and pulled him up. He dusted off debris from his suit and finally answered. “Right.”

He’s not the one that just got smashed by Violet’s pink energy spark, but his life flashes before his eyes. He didn’t realize it until he sees Violet falls on her knees and dropped lifelessly. Headless. Your kill shot was so famous for killing Behemoth that every villain quickly investing in an anti-energy attack protective suit. Even Titan himself upgraded his entire armour despite the chance of receiving such attack from his ex-lover is as slim as Violet’s and Pink’s chance of survival against her. That’s also why you can track him; how every line pointed at the mad engineer that found and invent the material to endure almost any type of energy attack.

“You’re the one that kills her girlfriend, why am I the one that always almost gets killed?” Joe’s attempt to joke whilst down and hurt almost makes you forget Titan is still there, waiting for his runaway vehicle. “Look! You’re fucking spotless!”

“Three more.” Your guttural growl was not taken kindly by the rest of the three villains in your way of capturing Titan. “Come at once, cowards!”

The battle was outright sadistic. The sight of Gwilym in his new suit burn the rage in you, and his absence in the battle makes you both glad and humiliated at the same time. You don’t care how tired you are from all your previous battles, you just have to be there and keep him long enough until reinforcement come, approximately in twenty-five minutes.

“You know you don’t have to kill all of them, right?” Joe playfulness helps you calmed down after the bloodbath.

“How’s your leg?” You have long given up trying to get your voice softer.

“‘Tis but a scratch!”

“You lose your left leg!”

“So?”

You half-expected that you might, after all, have to battle Titan again, but he’s standing on his ground, almost statue-like. You whispered to Joe, urge him to leave. It might take less of brute-force and more on strategy. But your ears quickly pick up Joe’s muffled scream and you turned around.

“Fucking come on!” Joe groaned as he feels the tip of the gun on his head. “Y’all mind fucking off for a second? We need to rest too you know!”

Joe’s confidence in your ability to defeat almost anything makes you smile until your eyes widened as it caught the reflection of a shot came from above.

“No more hesitation, Titan. You don’t want to oppose us.” Crossfire stand next to Gwilym. “We have no time to waste.”

But Gwilym doesn’t move an inch. His eyes always fixated upon you and only you. And now he knows the reason why. His heart stopped the moment you stooped down and on your knees. Yet you manage to add one more to your kill count today.

“Is that supposed to hurt?” You still try your best to look tough, but your body betrays you through your gritted teeth. “I will kill all of you if that means to get Gwil back in our side.”

“He was never on your side, delusional woman.” Crossfire also has his voice distorted, and you almost mistake it from Gwil. “Don’t make me shoot you too, Titan.”

Joe kneeled down next to you. Panic was visible in his voice as he talked to you.

“Why do you take that?! You don’t wear anti-energy armour! I do!” His hand touch where you take the shot. The warm liquid slowly flowing from your wound into his hand, as you try your hardest trying to heal your own wound. He feels what you feel and trying to do through your bare hand. “No no no no no—.”

“I’m fine, Joe!” Your scream came out as a hoarse whine. “Let go of me! Run!”

“Y/n?!” Gwil screamed.

Joe's face turned pale as you dropped on the ground. He no longer feels anything from touching you. He shakes your body to no reaction. He turned your body to see your current state. The emptiness he felt as he fully grabbed onto your hand and your face makes his stomach churned. He throws himself away from you and vomits on the ground. The overwhelming turmoil inside him almost stops him to try and collect himself, but a loud bang noise that makes him jump successfully awaken him from the overflowing emotions. The shot from Crossfire, completely deflected.

“That bitch use her remaining power to protect that rat! That’s why Brandon caught my bullet.” The man growled as he takes another aim, that shot also cleanly deflected. “Motherfu—.”

The choke sounded almost inhumane followed by a loud thud. Titan eyes still haven’t left now your dead body. He walks towards you and kneeled down. He takes off his gloves and reaches your face. Cold. Your eyes no longer reflected the joy of living as the defender of justice. His long fingers wiped Joe’s blood handprints on your cheeks. Just like you when you found out about Gwilym being the villain you despise the most, this time he's not one bit believed that you are dead. Something inside of him is turning as a faint blue light came out of his hands.

“She can’t be dead! She can defeat Behemoth like he was nothing and still fucking energetic! She's still alive—!”

“Shut up!!”

The blast of blue energy exploded almost beautifully on Joe’s body, but it does nothing. The men were just as shocked to see that your energy turned to orange as it surrounds Joe and protects him from Crossfire’s shots, dances in harmony with Gwilym’s new blue energy that cleanly kills his villain comrade. That’s why you used to be able to defeat Behemoth but have to deflect Crossfire’s shot with your own body.

“She... Gave you her power... She always knew. Yet... How come I didn’t see it when I touch her... How come she hides it away from—,” Joe looked at Gwil that still holding you, putting your head on his lap. As he combs your hair softly, the blue energy power surrounds him like an Aurora. “No... You seep it away from her you fucking monster!”

“For my gift is to absorb energy on the touch.” He explained in defeat. “It’s not just you that always have to wear rubber gloves. I don’t know how else to protect her from the next generation Behemoth to know that I was her lover... I—...” 

Gwil gives him a short sad glance. The strong feeling of regret even Joe could feel without touching him. Joe dropped his stare on the ground. Hands shaking in rage before it stopped immediately. He sees all his wound is healing, his lost limb although doesn't regrow, healed completely.

“You did this and I hope you have to live with that guilt for the rest of your life, Gwil. If you don’t fucking avenge her, I will make sure she don’t waste her life and power on the both of us.”

The two energy that was at first was flowing together in harmony, not yet fully controlled by their new owner, now clashed like lightning on a giant black storm cloud. To match the hostile stare down of the two men and their rocky future to live up to your legacy.

End.

[ohprettyweeper-moved]

The Last Bandito

Part Eight: We Know What We Are

Masterlist

Chapter Summary: The woman with yellow eyes, Tyler, and Quinn all come to terms with who they are now. Warnings: Violence, death, blood drinking.  Word Count: 1765 A/N: This series was borne of this picture. The bolded phrases are prompts I have compiled to use in this fic. Also, I’ve forgotten to mention before that for the phrases in Ukrainian, I’ve been using Google Translate; forgive me if they’re not accurate!

We know what we are, but not what we may be. -- William Shakespeare

Another soul escaping from the dark science of the Bishops. The moment the sirens had gone off, she was running on foot toward the escaped. This time it was a man and a woman, deep in Trench, whose absence had gone undetected until now. 

She approached them slowly, her yellow eyes glowing in the night. They both stood tall but cautious as she approached them, ready to fight for their freedom if necessary. 

“Don’t be afraid,” she assured. “I’ve come to help you. To bring you to New Dema.”

Their defenses lowered, but only by a minimal amount. The woman was shivering, so, in an effort to show that she was indeed there to help, the yellow-eyed woman offered her coat. Her arms were exposed now, but she would be fine until she could bring the couple into New Dema and have her jacket back. 

The lights of the city came into view soon enough, illuminating her bare arms, and part of her collarbone and chest. The woman was huddled into the jacket, eyes forward toward safety, but the man had kept a careful watch on the one with yellow eyes since she had approached them. 

“How does a woman like you get scars of that intensity?” he asked. “Surely not from retrieving the lost of us from Trench.”

They were on the boundaries of New Dema now; she held her hand out to the woman, a silent request for the return of her jacket. The woman complied. While she zipped her jacket and fixed the hood over her head again, the one with yellow eyes thought about her life; how she came to be, how much she often wrestled with who she was and what she had become. 

“You can’t even begin to imagine what I had to go through to deserve these scars.”

Then, she was gone.  

After their girls’ night out, Ildri didn’t hear from Quinn for a couple of weeks. She went back to work as usual. She continued digging into Quinn’s past and, at Andre’s urging, continued to try to contact the other woman. One random afternoon, while typing notes on The Conference’s latest meeting, she received a message from Quinn. 

I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch. Could you meet me in my classroom?

Ildri immediately gathered everything, stuttered out a quick explanation to Andre, and made way for the university. 

When she arrived, Quinn was at the same podium she had stood at the first time the two women met. Her presentation on the dearg-due was up on the screen; once Ildri sat down, Quinn immediately began the same lecture she had given her students over the creature. 

“She calms her victims first with a siren song, and then steals their blood, leaving them mysteriously ill or dead.” She paused, and then continued. “That’s where I finish this lecture with my students, but there’s more.”

Ildri nodded, too afraid if she spoke, she might somehow spook Quinn out of what she had to say. 

“The descendants of that woman have been cursed with her need for blood and revenge. They appear to be as normal as anyone else, until their heart is broken. At that point, the thirst begins — not only for blood, but for murder.” Quinn came to sit next to Ildri. Tears were falling down her face. “I’ve never told anyone this before, Ildri. But what you said about everyone having demons … I don’t want to be this anymore. I kept myself away from love so that I could never be heartbroken, but that turned into keeping myself away from everyone. What I found out, is that loneliness can be heartbreaking.”

Still saying silent, Ildri reached out for her friend’s hand. This confession was not easy at all; in fact, it was the biggest risk Quinn could have taken. Perhaps bigger than she even realized. 

“I have dreams when the next one is coming,” Quinn continued. “I do my best to avoid it, but it’s like — like before I know it, I’m there. I’m in the moment and this monster that’s trapped inside of me takes over. The next one is going to be on my birthday.”

Ildri let go of Quinn’s hand to pull her into a fierce hug. “No, it’s not going to be. You and me and Faylinn, we’re going to go out and celebrate your birthday. You’ll have no reason to be heartbroken. And Quinn?”

“Yeah?”

Ildri held her at arm’s length and looked the other woman right in the eye. “Your secret is safe with me.”

Quinn hugged Ildri again. Ildri returned the embrace, and knew that her words were completely true. She wasn’t going to tell another living soul about Quinn’s secret. 

After their first trip into New Dema, the Bishops refused to allow Josh to accompany Tyler on future trips. Tyler knew the reason was related to his friend’s change in demeanor, but he didn’t dare ask the Bishops for any details. Josh refused to talk about it, leaving Tyler with no answers and on his own for the next venture into New Dema. 

This time, it was Keons who accompanied him to the gate. Tyler put up the hood on his black, zip-up jacket, and prepared for another small taste of freedom. In his heart, he was ready to run, but his mind knew that his plan was not steady enough to execute yet. 

“She’s out there,” Keons told Tyler as the gate slowly opened before them. “The one we need to further your race. Our race. Our people. We have waited until later in the day, past last call, for you to be released, so that you may have a different chance of finding her. Bring back information, before the sun rises again, and you will go to look for her again.”

Tyler turned to look at the Bishop next to him. Keons kept a steady eye on his charge, waiting for any sign of question or uncertainty. When he detected none, he nodded to the Heathens keeping the gate and it opened before them. With one more exchanged glance between them, Tyler moved forward, out of the gate, and into the forest that separated Old Dema from New Dema. 

Ahead of him, the sun was setting on the horizon. Only once did he look behind him, just before Old Dema was out of view. Being out of his room, out of the city, as this time of day approached was enough to make him long, only for a second, for the security of the wall and the rules of the Bishops. 

When he turned back toward the new city, that longing disappeared instantly, and Tyler began to run. He ran from the wall, from the rules, from this thing that he had become. He could feel the serum and the disease in his very smallest of cells, it seemed, and no amount of running would make that go away. 

Barely winded when he approached the border of the city, Tyler again pulled up the hood on his black jacket, as it had fallen while he ran. He cleared his throat and stepped onto a cement path that led from building to building, away from the cars and other vehicles that carried citizens from one place to another. 

As he approached a building busy with patrons, Tyler could smell her. The scent was sweet and strong and had a comforting undertone. He closed his eyes and breathed it in, reveling in the smell as it grew stronger. 

When he knew that she was nearby from the strength of the scent, Tyler fell back in with the crowd, and continued to follow the scent, until he had narrowed it down to the woman to which it belonged. 

They were on the west side of the city now. She was carrying two plastic bags, and a cloth one over her shoulder. A gentle hum floated from her throat, pulling Tyler in and making him wish he could follow her into the house where she finally stopped walking and unlocked the door. 

Just before she entered the house, her head lifted. Her lips parted slightly, and her brow furrowed only enough for Tyler to know she suspected something. The two of them were the only ones left walking the sidewalk now, with the exception of a few passing through the residential area. In order to keep his cover, he fell back into an alley between her house and the next. He had found her in enough time, he would do what he needed to remember the landmarks of the area, and then use the rest of his time until sunrise to explore Trench. 

Deciding he had spent enough time out in the open, Tyler backed further into the alley to find a way to stay in the dark as he navigated out of the city. He was three alleyways over when another man stepped out of a dark corner, wrapped one arm around Tyler’s throat, and held a knife to his carotid with the other. 

“Gimme what you’ve got and won’t be anymore trouble than this,” the man warned. 

Tyler closed his eyes and fought against the Heathen tendency. “Trust me. You don’t want what I have.”

The blade pressed against his skin. “Sure I do. Empty out your pockets, now.”

With the sharp edge of the knife threatening to bleed him out, Tyler could no longer stamp down the anger and fight rising within him. He grabbed both arms of the man, freed himself from the hold, and slammed the man, hard, against the nearby brick wall. Small pebbles of brick and cement peppered over the man’s face and clothes. 

Tyler held him against the wall with one hand on the man’s chest. “I told you. You don’t want what I have.”

The man’s jaw fell open and his eyes went even wider at Tyler’s red irises. Tyler opened his mouth, allowing the man a view of Tyler’s cuspid teeth, and the incisors next to them transformed to long, sharp fangs. The man drew in a breath, scratching at Tyler’s hand pressing on his throat. 

“What are you?” the man gasped out. 

“We are a new breed rising, with fire in our eyes. We don’t fear anything because we’ve already died.” 

In one last attempt at saving his life, the man plunged the knife deep into Tyler’s side. Tyler winced, but the wound deterred him only for a moment before he plunged his teeth into the man’s neck, drinking away the wretched life that flowed there. 

[possiblyimbiassed]

What happened to Sherlock? Part V – Bizarre Scenarios

I think it’s time for another monster post in my meta series. :) I might have said that I’d try to make it shorter this time, but somehow I got carried away... ;). Which is not that surprising, actually, since today’s topic is something I could go on and on about; there’s an infinity of stuff to explore in the show from this perspective. Anyway, you can find the earlier parts of my series below:

Introduction - The game is on (explains the method of analysis) Part I - Blog vs TV-show Part II - Re-living memories Part III - Drugs and weirdness Part IV – Heartbreak and coma (1) Part IV – Heartbreak and coma (2)

So, this fifth installment (out of nine in total) will explore the idea of Sherlock’s brain running a kind of simulations - basically a series of hypothetic ‘what if’ scenarios - at least from HLV and forwards. And it builds upon the conclusions from these earlier metas, namely that this show is seen entirely from Sherlock’s perspective; that we’re inside the great detective’s mind from Day 1. 

But since I believe Sherlock is in coma from HLV and onwards (see Part IV), he can’t quite distinguish these scenarios from ‘reality’. So, here goes the next hypothesis:

Hypothesis #5: Almost everything we see happen in HLV, TAB and S4 is Sherlock ‘running scenarios’ in his mind, based on a mix of his earlier memories and movies he has watched.

To test this, I think I might first need to explain some things about the concept of ‘running scenarios’, as far as I know from real life. 

Predictive modeling

At work, I’m involved in a kind of data modeling that makes me think of Sherlock’s brain. The general principle is this: You collect a set of data of a certain type (in my case it’s geographic data), you run your data set through a computer algorithm, in which some limiting values are defined, and as result you get a predicted outcome of the phenomenon you’re studying. In my case the result is a digital map that shows the most probable geographical distribution of the phenomenon. The resulting map scenario is based upon someone’s expert knowledge of the subject matter, which is integrated into the computer algorithm and used by the model. In short: you use your data sets to run the model to make predictions - scenarios.

But how can you know that your predictions are accurate? Well, you can never expect them to be entirely accurate, since the modeling is always a theoretical simplification of reality. But you can always try to validate the predictions by comparing them to real-world observations of the phenomenon in question. If a great majority of the real-world observations fall within your plotted map, then you can regard the prediction as useful; otherwise you must collect new data, re-adjust the model and try again.

Now, let’s compare this predictive modeling method to John’s and Sherlock’s conversation in TLD (all quotes from the show in this meta come from Ariane deVere’s invaluable transcripts. Bolding is always mine, though):

JOHN: Wednesday morning I booked today’s session. Now, today is Friday. So two weeks ago – two weeks before you were abducted at gunpoint and brought here against your will, over a week before I even thought of coming here - you knew exactly where you’d need to be picked up for lunch?

SHERLOCK: Really? I correctly anticipated the responses of people I know well to scenarios I devised. Can’t everyone do that?

Well, no Sherlock; we really can’t, and neither can you in this case - at least not in ‘real life’! I think John’s disbelief is totally justified; there are so many ‘feasible variables’ involved in this operation – people and things and events that uncontrollably vary in time and space – and so many assumptions based upon each other, that it would be absolutely impossible for Sherlock to predict the future with this kind of accuracy. He might get a general idea of where and when he could probably find John, yes; perhaps he could even narrow it down to a matter of days and miles, if he had enough circumstantial data. 

But he could never know the exact time and place of John’s appointment with another person two weeks in advance - when even John himself hadn’t decided it yet - merely by deductive reasoning. Neither could he possibly know that in this very instant it would occur to Mrs Hudson to abduct him and directly after it would occur to John to have Molly Hooper examine Sherlock, instead of simply doing it himself. Even a weather forecast is extremely insecure in details two weeks in advance (x, x), and the meteorologists have powerful computer programs and mathematical models at their disposal, while Sherlock in this case would have only his own brain.

But I believe here is where Sherlock leaves us one of the most important clues in the whole show about his methods and about what’s actually going on in S4; he talks about himself having ‘devised scenarios’. So maybe this is what he has been doing all along, since the last time he entered his Mind Palace!

But what kind of scenarios is he referring to? And why does he even want to set up these scenarios? I mean, if he were using predictions and scenarios, it would seem that he’s working on solving some kind of problem, right? Or at least that he’s studying some interesting phenomenon. But the only ‘problem’ we’re told about in TLD is that he wants John’s help to catch a serial killer. So why not just send a message to John and ask for his assistance with the case? Why ‘devise’ an elaborate dramatic scenario involving Mrs Hudson, Molly and John’s new therapist; none of which has anything to do with the crime case? The answer might be that Sherlock is actually working on quite another case than ‘Culverton Smith the Serial Killer’: his own personal case, trying to find out what went wrong between him and John in order to save John Watson.

In any case, Sherlock cannot make this TLD prediction with 100% accuracy; it doesn’t matter how well he knows people, that just isn’t possible. At least not in the ‘real’ world where there are too many things that can go wrong just by chance. Sherlock may like to think that he has every little detail under control, but he’s only human after all, like everybody else. Which means that these scenarios are most probably taking place inside Sherlock’s head. And his predicted outcome about John in TLD is a fine example of this. Inside his brain, Sherlock can control most of the parameters and not much is left to chance, so the model works there, broadly speaking. But IRL it wouldn’t.

Assumption upon assumption

Now, an important aspect of predictive modeling is that you need to make certain assumptions to run your scenarios; a sort of simplification of reality. But the problem is that the more assumptions you pile up, one upon the other, without reality checks in between, the more uncertain your results will be. An assumption based on another assumption will always be more insecure than the first one, right? Sherlock’s problem here might be precisely the lack of contact with reality; he needs to validate his scenarios with observations from real life. Otherwise the modeling will be more and more biased and the results more and more twisted. But I believe it’s shown clearly in S4 that there is no new input of RL data, since everything seems to have already happened before in one form or another. And the consequence of this is that Sherlock’s scenarios keep getting more and more unbelievable, derailing into their almost complete logical collapse in TFP, where so many absurd and impossible things happen that the plot loses all kinds of credibility. In short, I think TFP is the final result of Sherlock’s permanent bias.

Heteronormative bias

Let’s say that one of Sherlock’s assumptions is biased in some direction, that it’s somehow influenced by his own emotions (Sentiment; the fly in the ointment, the crack in the lens, etc, etc). With the chain of scenarios described above, the error will multiply with each new similar assumption, and the results of his mental experiments will end up not making much sense at all, just like TFP. One of the most significant biases/errors I believe Sherlock commits, is that he totally excludes ‘Johnlock’ from the equation; he doesn’t take into account even the possibility of John being in love with him or the possibility of the two of them ever becoming a couple. He consequently interprets any sign of affection from John as either directed at someone else (a woman of course) -

- or as a misguided hero-worship of an unworthy character -

- probably linked to John’s adrenaline dependence -

- which John surely will sooner or later grow out of.

This may have to do with Sherlock’s lack of self-esteem and/or fear of emotions, but it’s a heteronormative bias and it’s severe, since it stops him from seeing the problem clearly, which might make him miss the solution entirely. And as long as heteronormativity and homophobia aren’t on Sherlock’s conscious checklist of possible problems to deal with, I’m afraid he won’t discover this bias. And since Sherlock makes this assumption again and again, without ever testing its opposite and without reality checks, he ends up with narrow-minded, absurd and dystopic results from his modeling, which ultimately don’t bring happiness to anyone. Sherlock has an amazing brain capacity, but I think he gets ‘lost in the sky’, high above everyone else, as the little girl on the plane (Eurus) explains in TFP. I’ll try to explore this idea with my own little prediction testing below.

Prediction #1: When Sherlock is in coma there will be no more entirely new events that seem realistic

If Sherlock is unconscious, his brain might still keep on working on his eternal scenarios based on memories, even though it has no new input data from the external world to process. The events would now all be based on things Sherlock has heard or experienced or imagined before he entered his comatose state. Which means they will all feel a bit familiar, unless they are pure fanciful fabrications - often absurd or surrealistic - which is basically what happens in a dream state (and perhaps more so if it’s drug-induced).

And yes, I think we can see this expected pattern quite clearly, with a remarkable difference between the events up until TSoT on one hand, and in HLV and onwards on the other.

In TSoT some rather ‘ordinary’ things happen that are not uncommon events IRL, but we haven’t actually seen most of them in the show before: there’s a bank robbery, a wedding reception, a bride, a church, a (real) priest, a photographer. There’s also Sherlock writing a speech, folding serviettes and planning a party, there’s a ‘stag do’ and Sherlock gets drunk and vomits. Sherlock deduces that John’s newly wed wife is pregnant.

And we could also apply this test to all the episodes before TSoT, looking for ‘novel’, non-repetitive and still believable events (I don’t count ASiP, though, since it’s the very first episode thus cannot be repetitive):

TBB: Coherent crime case; smugglers use secret codes, run a circus and one of the acrobats can climb high buildings. John (innocently) gets an ASBO for graffiti.

TGG: A series of crime cases with hostages threatened to be blown up, including John. Poison murders and strangling.

ASiB: Weird crime case with a manipulative dominatrix. Mrs Hudson is attacked. Sherlock still solves it in a believable way. He is rude to his guests at a Christmas party.

THoB: A fairly believable crime story involving a shift of environment to Dartmoor, a client who is being ‘gas-lighted’ by the criminal of the case, and a military laboratory.

TRF: Child kidnapping case, a boarding school. A trial. Extensive media coverage of (Sherlock as) a celebrity, who becomes a murder suspect but fakes his own suicide. 

TEH: Sherlock returns from the ‘dead’ and carries on crime solving but has problems with John. John is now engaged, which is also new.

In HLV, on the other hand, most of the believable things are repetitive; John beats someone up (ASiB, TRF, TEH), someone gets shot (ASiP, TBB, ASiB, THoB), Sherlock and John visit a high and/or fancy building (TBB, ASiB, THoB, TEH), they celebrate Christmas (ASiB), Mrs Hudson’s past is discussed (ASiP, TSoT), 221B is searched for drugs (ASiP, ASiB), John seems jealous of a woman whom he thinks Sherlock is attracted to (ASiB), Sherlock and Mycroft smoke cigarettes together (ASiB), we see their parents (TEH), there’s a memory stick thrown away without anyone checking it out (TGG) and there are helicopters about (ASiB, TEH, TSoT).

The only completely new scenes in HLV either seem unbelievable or have to do with Sherlock openly using drugs; suddenly he is high in a drug den, his blood is analysed for drugs, he gets an IV drug drip and he drugs his whole family at Christmas. Among the unbelievable stuff: Sherlock is shot in the chest by John’s wife but miraculously survives. John’s wife turns out to be a ninja assassin (which is also repetitive, only with a new twist; assassins appeared in TBB, TGG and TRF and in TBB they climbed high buildings). Sherlock blows someone’s head off and becomes a murderer.  And don’t get me started again about the absurdity of John forgiving someone who tried to kill Sherlock. But none of the most unbelievable and horrifying of these events are canon consistent; ACD’s Mary Morstan never shoots anyone, Holmes is never shot, Holmes never kills anyone and Watson never ‘forgives’ anyone who has attacked Holmes. Sherlock’s drug use is canon, though, so I don’t think it’s too farfetched to believe that much of this is simply crack fantasies.

The repetitive scenes then continue in TAB and throughout the whole of S4, while the lack of realism escalates all the way up to TFP. I made a whole list of repeated scenes here  (and there are even more in the additions to that meta).

Prediction #2: If Sherlock is running scenarios, there will be indications that this is his typical method of solving puzzles

The word ‘scenario’ is very similar to the word ‘scene’, isn’t it? And we know both from canon and the show that Sherlock Holmes likes a touch of Drama and loves to disguise himself in the most peculiar ways. In one of the parts of TAB that we know for sure is taking place within Sherlock’s Mind Palace, a very obvious stage is shown as part of his method of figuring out what happened with the Abominable Bride:

I certainly don’t intend to take any credits for the scenario idea since other people presented it already long ago. Like, for example, @loudest-subtext-in-tv (LSiT), who pointed it out directly after S4 aired.  Or @raggedyblue, whose meta about The Mind Theatre, where it’s all beautifully laid-out, is brilliant in its straightforward reasoning. And, of course, the whole EMP theory developed by @gosherlocked, @the-7-percent-solution and @monikakrasnorada,  is a great foundation for the idea that what we see in S4 are indeed concoctions made up inside Sherlock’s mind. Already in 2016, before S4, @gosherlocked pointed out a series of inconsistencies as evidence that HLV is at least partly taking place inside Sherlock’s EMP. In their comment to this post, I think @tetragon4 said something interesting about how to interpret HLV and TAB as being EMP:

“Now, this is not about what I, or for that matter, what the fandom prefers. The question is: Do HLV and TAB support the theory? This is a difficult one to answer. Sure, there are inconsistencies like the camera/lighting, Mycroft’s cravat, or Mary’s pose. One swallow, though, does not make a summer. As such, what EMP theory needs is an in-depth analysis of the two episodes. Until then, it is too early to speculate based on unrelated inconsistencies. It is necessary to prove the existence of common inconsistencies running through the scenes after the supposed entrance into EMP”.

And I agree; it doesn’t really matter how we, the audience, feel about the idea of much of this show happening inside Sherlock’s head – the important thing is where the evidence takes us. So, @tetragon4’s suggestion is partly similar to what I’ll try to do with the next prediction: search HLV, piece by piece, for inconsistencies telling us that what we see might actually be Sherlock’s brain running a series of simulations or theoretical ‘what if’ scenarios.

As @raggedyblue demonstrates in their meta linked above, it’s repeatedly shown in ACD Canon that Holmes’ method of investigation is based on imagination. When Holmes explains his methods to Watson, he often mentions the importance of putting himself in the other person’s place to explore how they must have reasoned. For example in this quote from The Sign of Four:   “I then put myself in the place of Small and looked at it as a man of his capacity would. He would probably consider that to send back the launch or to keep it at a wharf would make pursuit easy if the police did happen to get on his track. How, then, could he conceal the launch and yet have her at hand when wanted? I wondered what I should do myself if I were in his shoes. I could only think of one way of doing it”. In TSoT Sherlock very clearly puts himself in James Sholto’s place, to try to convince him to not commit suicide:

Holmes also frequently uses himself as an actor while solving crime cases, usually to fool the suspects. For example, Watson tells us in A Scandal in Bohemia (SCAN), at a point in the story where Holmes disguised himself as a clergyman before appearing at Irene Adler’s home (which is also exactly what he does in ASiB):  “It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed. The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime”.

So yes; as demonstrated above, I think we can safely say that putting up scenarios in his head, as well as using ‘actors’ – including himself - are definitely important methods in Sherlock Holmes’ puzzle-solving.

Prediction #3: If Hypothesis #5 is true, we might find an initial ‘question’, some ‘inspiration’ and a ‘result’ for each scenario Sherlock is running.

As I’ve said before, I imagine that Sherlock’s extraordinary brain keeps working even when his body is unconscious, fighting for survival and trying to solve problems. I think he’s running a series of “what if” simulations, and they’re all about John Watson. I also think there are enough repetitive moments and enough movie references in this show to give ample material to Sherlock’s Mind Theatre, where he can stage very elaborate, dramatic scenarios, complete with actors, detailed premises and props.

To test Prediction #3 I’ll try to run through most of the scenes from HLV, in order to check if the statement above might be valid. For each of the scenarios, I’ll try to detect possible initial questions, which Sherlock might want to explore with the simulation in his Mind Theatre. I’ll also suggest possible elements from movies and/or Sherlock’s own memories that might have inspired the scenarios. Finally I’ll try to explain which results I think we can see in the show from each of Sherlock’s mind experiments. But I’ll also take the opportunity to discuss evidence that indicate it’s indeed just a mental scenario or - in some cases - speculate on possible alternative explanations.

HLV, Scenario 1: What will happen when John gets bored of his ordinary life with ‘Mary’? Inspiration: I think Sherlock’s memory of John beating him up after his return from the dead in TEH, his memory of John punching him in the face by Sherlock’s own request and provocation in ASiB, and John hitting the Chief Inspector when the Police arrested Sherlock in TRF; all this is making him think of John as potentially violent. Also, Sherlock deduced already in ASiP that John is attracted to danger.

[running, running the simulation, staged with ‘actors’ that either represent John or Sherlock or the challenges they are up to…]

Result: After some time of ordinary, married life, John can’t stand it anymore; he does something dangerous (because he’s an adrenaline junkie) and ends up hurting someone else doing it: he violently disarms Billy Wiggins and sprains his arm. Then he leaves Billy lying with his sprained arm and goes on to look for his neighbour’s drug addict son.

Discussion: But would John Watson really break into a drug den and single-handedly beat up the junkie who was guarding it, basically because he was bored? And how likely is it that he would then tell him “I’m a doctor, I know how to sprain people”? We’ve never seen John refer to his medical profession that horrible way, have we? (But we did hear him tell Sherlock in ASiB that he was a soldier and killed people). And would it be likely that the ‘gate-keeper’ (surrounded by hearts-and green tiles from 221B; is the eye there to make us pay attention?), who didn’t hesitate to draw knife on the intruder, would just lie there without even trying to run after him and at least warn the people in there? 

I suspect that a slightly exaggerated characterization of John starts here and later escalates, because drugs and Sentiment bias Sherlock’s mind. Sherlock’s capability of “correctly anticipating responses of people I know well” might begin to get altered already here.

HLV, Scenario 2: What will happen if John finds out that Sherlock has taken drugs? Inspiration: Already in ASiP John hears from the police that Sherlock is a drug user, and Sherlock doesn’t deny it. And in ASiB John conspires with Mycroft and Mrs Hudson to search 221B for any secret drug deposit of Sherlock’s. So both these events should be stored in Sherlock’s memory.

[Not so much running needed…]

Result: John gets furious with Sherlock and takes him to hospital; not for caretaking but simply for drug tests. He berates Sherlock for not having told him about his drug problems. Molly slaps him for ‘betraying his friends’ by throwing away his talent on drugs.

And John then joins forces with Mycroft and phones him immediately to have 221B searched for drugs. Discussion: This behaviour is not very ‘doctory’ or even humane of either John or Molly, though, is it? Sherlock is a close friend of theirs, whom both of them love, and he has just spent the night high in a drug den. But neither of them even tries to examine him, even though Molly obviously gets a positive result from the urine test. Instead, the whole scene is full of critique and punishment. And his brother Mycroft, who ‘constantly worries’ about Sherlock, now lets strangers into Sherlock’s flat to search it, and all he does is express contempt for Sherlock’s life style. I think this shows the influence of Sherlock’s self-loathing in the simulation – a pattern that will be repeated all the way through TAB and S4. Guilt. Sentiment. Drugs.

HLV, Scenario 3: What will happen if John finds out that Sherlock has a relationship with someone else (a woman, to boot)? Inspiration: Sherlock didn’t actually know Janine, but he might have noticed that John interrupted his dancing practice with her already at the wedding. And since she seemed a bit interested in Sherlock she would be the nearest candidate for this little test, where Sherlock could invent a good alibi for being with her: a crime case. But most of all, I think this experiment stems from Sherlock’s broken heart and jealous emotions; he subconsciously wants to get back at John for leaving him and marrying a woman.

[running, running the simulation…]

Result: John gets jealous and angry with Sherlock, but he tries to keep his face straight (pun intended); he won’t confess anything to Sherlock. 

Discussion: Here I believe Sherlock is indeed on to something, but he doesn’t see it clearly and consciously because of his bias. Bad characterization of Janine, also, who didn’t before seem stupid enough to wait in the bed of a supposed boyfriend who is away the whole night without telling why and doesn’t want to sleep with her anyway. Drugs. Sentiment. Underestimating women’s brain capacity (one of Sherlock’s biggest flaws I’d say; possibly originating in his contempt (=fear) of Sentiment).

Scenario 4: What will happen if Sherlock Holmes openly invites Media (CAM) to an interview? Inspiration: We already saw how the press treated Sherlock and John in TRF (for more analysis about this, see my meta about media’s role in BBC Sherlock and the additions to it) so Sherlock does have experience to fall back on here.

[running, running…]

Result: Media (CAM) own them now; they intimidate both Sherlock and John and try to find their pressure points.

They disarm John, ‘piss in Sherlock’s fireplace’ (violate his integrity), show contempt for their life-style and insinuate things about Sherlock’s traumatic past (Redbeard). And Sherlock can do basically nothing to defend himself.

Discussion: CAM’s supposed mental filing of information, and his use of a Mind Palace, seems suspiciously similar to Sherlock’s own methods of storing observations and deducing people based on it. (Look at the font, by the way; it’s written in Courier, just like a manuscript for a news article or a play or a film...). And I think Sherlock’s behaviour in this scene is weird, to say the least; why would he accept CAM’s armed thugs body searching him and John in his own house? Why would he let them intimidate Mrs Hudson (especially considering what he did to the CIA guy in ASiB)? And why would a brain like Sherlock’s immediately swallow CAM’s rather obvious bait with the letters? The depiction of John is a little strange too: how can he walk around, sit down, etc. seemingly without discomfort, when he has a big tyre lever stuck down his trousers? ;) Seeing this as a scenario in Sherlock’s head makes far more sense to me - probably influenced by drugs and (sexual) Sentiment.

Scenario 5: What will happen if John finds out Sherlock is capable of pretending a relationship with someone just for a case? Inspiration: This is Sherlock’s MO after all, even in ACD canon; he loves to play roles for a case. And he does tend to underestimate women. But maybe it’s just a bit exaggerated here? ;)

[very short model running this time…]

Result: John thinks (for the umpteenth time) that Sherlock is a psychopath, but he does not see the likeness with his own marriage based on lies; not even when Sherlock hints about it.

Discussion: Again, bad characterization of Janine, who I think wouldn’t be stupid enough to let Sherlock into CAM tower knowing fully well that CAM is present. Drugs. Underestimating women.

Scenario 6: What will happen if Sherlock ‘takes one more step’? Inspiration: There’s a plethora of action movies and games with ninja assassins and spies, and the black-clad ninjas often climb buildings and walls on their missions. So ‘Mary’s gear and behaviour at CAM tower wouldn’t be particularly hard for Sherlock to dream up; especially since there has been a lot of assassins in this show already to use as inspiration.

But I also believe there might be a particular movie inspiring Sherlock for the whole Shooting Drama scenario with ‘Mary’: “Selena” from 1997. This film, starring Jennifer Lopez, is entirely based on a real life story about the famous Tejano singer Selena, who was murdered by her (supposed) friend Yolanda Saldívar. As I explained in this addition to a post from @elldotsee, the name “Yolanda” is repeated 4 times in the scene in TEH where Sherlock meets ‘Mary’ for the first time. Yolanda shot Selena in the shoulder, and she died of blood loss on her way to the hospital. According to Wikipedia (my bolding), "The defense attorney argued the shooting was accidental, but the prosecution pointed out that Saldívar, a trained nurse, did not call 911 or try to help Selena after she was shot."

So let’s compare this movie with the events in HLV. I don’t think the actual shooting is included in the film, but this is Selena being taken to hospital:

And here is Sherlock being taken to hospital:

The stretcher is pretty similar, which could of course be a coincidence. But look at Selena (as played by J.Lo, who by the way received a Golden Globe nomination for this film):

Aren’t these images a little bit too similar for a mere coincidence? And since Sherlock is exceptionally into crime cases, I think it’s not unlikely that he might have found interest in this movie based on a famous IRL crime case…

[scenario running time is very short at first, but then the simulation goes on and on and on…]

Result: When Sherlock takes the step, ‘Mary’ (= heteronormativity) – who is now suddenly a full-feathered ninja assassin - literally tries to kill Sherlock, which might feel just the same to him in the suicidal state I believe he is in at this point (X). But then he realizes that John will ‘cry buckets and buckets’, and that John’s life will definitely be in danger. So he struggles to stay alive.

Discussion: I think this whole debacle is basically about Sherlock’s heart-break after ‘Marry Watson’, interpreted as a shot to the heart. While the real reason for his critical state might be an overdose of drugs, his mind translates this to a shooting Drama. This doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘Mary’ is a nice person, but I do believe the ninja bit is exaggerated. To ‘take one more step’ might in this case have meant a possible step towards a same-sex relationship with John. But Sherlock doesn’t consciously recognize this possibility, so in this scenario it’s depicted as if he takes one more step towards disarming ‘Mary’ (which would metaphorically be almost the same thing, if ’Mary’ stands for the hetero norm). In my sub-textual reading, this is also about heteronormativity (=’Mary’) firming its grip on Media  (=CAM). But Sherlock isn’t ready to realize this just yet, so he blames Love (=Lady Smallwood) due to his fear of emotions. In a textual reading, however, this could also mean that Sherlock has deduced that Media has some sh*t on ‘Mary’ which might indirectly threaten John. In either case, he still tries to stop ‘Mary’ from killing CAM. 

On the surface, Sherlock probably believes that ‘John is in danger’ is connected to the risk of ‘Mary’ getting desperate and trying to kill John too. But his subconscious might indeed realize that John would be suicidal too if he lost Sherlock again. And now we’re even ‘officially’ inside Sherlock’s mind palace, so we know - most of the time at least - that the characters that now show up (Jim alive and kept in a padded cell, Molly slapping Sherlock to make him focus, Mycroft giving advice etc.) aren’t actually ‘real’. 

Scenario 7: What will happen if Sherlock ‘tells John’ [the truth]?

Inspiration: Sherlock and John have a long history of not telling each other important stuff, especially Sherlock. So this threat from ‘Mary’, when Sherlock is hospitalized, might be well-founded in his own fear of talking about issues involving strong emotions. 

We’re not told exactly what Sherlock can’t tell John, but I assume she means ‘the Truth’. In this scenario Sherlock depicts it as ‘Mary’ not wanting her husband to know about her shady assassin past. 

[running, running, looong running, involving Sherlock not only telling, but showing John the truth about ‘Mary’…]

Result: As anyone might have predicted, John gets devastated; he's out of his mind with repressed anger. 

But the scenario continues in 221B, where John directs his fury not only at ‘Mary’, but - strangely - also at Sherlock, the reason for which is left unclear. Is it for not telling John this before? Is it a ‘shoot-the-messenger’ sort of rant? In any case, John’s focus seems to be that it now turns out he’s saddled with two psychopaths instead of just the one (Sherlock). In his anger, John starts yelling at Sherlock and even threatening him, while Sherlock – on the brink of another heart collapse - keeps making excuses for ‘Mary’, claiming that she actually saved his life (!) by not going for a head shot, and he claims (with a lame piece of evidence that wouldn’t hold water in any decent court room) that ‘Mary’ actually called the ambulance for him.

Discussion: But why is the focus of John’s reaction on ‘Mary’s’ lying rather than her shooting and almost killing Sherlock? Why isn’t his friend’s life the most important thing here? I think this characterization of John in Sherlock’s scenario is horribly biased and entirely absurd; Dr. Watson would NEVER treat his beloved friend this way - wasting time ranting on ‘Mary’ for lying, while Sherlock was dying from a re-opened shot wound. Especially judging by John’s reaction when he thought Sherlock was dead in TRF. 

The real explanation for this whole ‘don’t-tell-John’ business might rather be quite mundane, but highly dramatized in Sherlock’s Mind Theatre. I believe that telling John ‘the Truth’ might mean, in Sherlock’s subconscious, telling him how he really feels about him. The thought of which is still horrifying to Sherlock. But since Sherlock isn’t in touch with his own feelings yet, this is what his drug-addled brain comes up with instead. Heteronormative bias. Drugs. Sentiment.

I could also think of another possible incriminating fact appearing in Sherlock’s subconscious: What happens if Sherlock tells John about his earlier deduction that John’s wife is pregnant with someone else’s child? This seems to fit with ‘Mary’s excuse for shooting Sherlock instead of accepting his help on the ‘case’ with CAM’s blackmail: “Because John can’t ever know that I lied to him. It would break him and I would lose him forever”. 

I’ll try to explore this idea in a future meta about ‘Mary’s lies. But it could also be that ‘Mary’ is a stand-in for Sherlock in this scene; if murder is a metaphor for falling in love, Sherlock might believe that he would lose John forever if he told John the truth about his real feelings for him. 

Scenario 8: What will happen with John’s marriage, now that he knows about ‘Mary’s secret? Inspiration: This scenario is so absurd that I strongly suspect it’s not based upon Sherlock’s real memories of John (which would be irrelevant anyway, since they have never before experienced a situation like this). It could of course be based upon lots of romantic, stereotype movies where two lovers reconcile in a tearful embrace. 

But it could also be reflecting some childhood event (perhaps at Christmas) in Sherlock’s own family, where his parents agree to gloss over their problems, whatever they might have been, instead of dealing with them. One possibility is suggested in the final part of @sagestreet’s entirely brilliant Follow-the-dogs meta series: that ‘Redbeard’ is basically about Sherlock’s Dad having had a love affair with a man while at the same time being homophobic about it, which has created a trauma in Sherlock. And this also has an important bearing on ACD on a meta level. (I absolutely love this theory! @sagestreet calls it ‘speculation’, but I think he’s rather ‘connecting the sub-textual dots’ hinted at in the whole series to deduce Sherlock’s possible childhood trauma).

[running, running, loong running, involving a distorted time line interlaced with the previous scenario and Sherlock acting as an odd sort of matchmaker, trying to find excuses for ‘Mary’ and doing something very uncharacteristic: inviting John and ‘Mary’ to celebrate Christmas with his own family…]

Result: John doesn’t talk to ‘Mary’ for a long time, but after Sherlock’s persuasion he decides to grudgingly ‘forgive’ her and keeps living together with her, cowed under her dominance and not even knowing her real name. But John’s sense of ‘family duty’ kicks in here, and makes him stay with ‘Mary’ and father the kid. A ‘nice’ and ‘Christmassy’ solution based on lies and, as John says about Sherlock’s parents: “A fine example of married life”.

Discussion: I’ve always wondered what’s so ‘fine’ about Sherlock’s parents’ relationship, though; that Mummy Holmes keeps criticizing her husband in front of others and tells him he’s not even allowed to be humming to himself? That Daddy Holmes made her give up her entire mathematical career ‘for children’? Is this Sherlock’s past family Christmas trauma playing in here? In any case I think it’s a completely awful characterization, that John Watson would ever forgive someone who tried to kill Sherlock and be willing to start a family with them – especially if this person doesn’t show even a shred of remorse over the whole thing. And what does the idea that Sherlock would be willing to drug down his whole family represent? The frustration of a child exposed to his parents’ constant bickering? I don’t know, but drugs and Sentiment - devastating Sentiment – are most likely playing in here.

Scenario 9: What will happen if Media - CAM - start prying into ‘Mary’ Watson’s doings? Inspiration: On the surface, this is about ‘Mary’s secret past; a truly fantastical story about the crimes of a façade-climbing ninja assassin, which CAM threatens to reveal. A veritable ‘Bond adventure’ it would be; a dramatic action movie. But is there perhaps some ‘mundane’ and therefor more likely topic that Media usually loves to speculate about (because it makes lots of money)? Yes I think there is: ‘scandals’; particularly those involving celebrities and their love life. And Sherlock must be painfully aware of this since what happened in TRF:

Imagine what a field day the press would have, for example, speculating about ‘Mary’ cheating on earlier ‘confirmed bachelor’ but now ‘happily married’ John Watson! Imagine what they would make of him not actually being the father of her child, and what this could mean regarding his association with the famous Sherlock Holmes? It would be TRF all over again - but worse this time; the ‘beard’, the ‘façade’ would fall. For the record: I think the main reason why Sherlock stayed away from John for two years was because in TRF media had started speculating about John’s and Sherlock’s relationship and thereby John’s sexual orientation, which John seemed to take very badly. So this scenario could be far more based on Sherlock’s memories of TRF than anything else.

[running, running, looong running of the model this time…]

Result: Media - CAM in Sherlock’s scenarios - now have a leverage on them all; ‘Mary’s secret revealed publicly (whether ‘assassin’ or ‘cheater’) would harm John, which would harm Sherlock, which would harm Mycroft (by association) and might ultimately harm the whole country. Yes - Sherlock is a real drama queen! ;) So the only solution he sees is to kill CAM immediately. In fact, he’d do anything to stop this exposure of John in media.

Discussion: In TSoT, I think Sherlock’s subconscious makes three devastating deductions regarding John (subconscious because in two of these cases he emphasizes that this was one more deduction than he was expecting, and in the other one he drops his glass from the impact of the realization):

1) That a ‘recently divorced doctor’ has ‘erectile dysfunction’. But this might actually be about John, if Sherlock’s subconscious picked up that John might have a bit of a bedroom problem with his newly wed wife.

2) That John is a Mayfly Man; he has been dating a string of lovers to cover up something else. This, together with 1., could make Sherlock suspect that even John’s whole marriage is a cover-up, a façade; these two guys aren’t really into each other, but the marriage protects John from being ‘outed’.   3) That ‘Mary’ is pregnant, which seems to be complete news to John. But if he - a doctor - has no idea he’s going to father a child, one possible explanation of this might be that the baby is actually not John’s. Which would further support deduction 1) and 2) above.

So maybe CAM’s leverage was actually what Sherlock was thinking about in Leinster Gardens? What if ‘Mary’s words here are representing Sherlock’s own fear of what would happen if John’s relationship is exposed in media? 

(Also on a meta level I think this might be important: the threat of media exposure of a gay couple in Victorian times has affected the whole characterization of Sherlock Holmes for over a century). Sherlock thinks his contact with John and his career is over (as in TRF), so he can just as well start killing people (from media, preferably ;) ). And here we have some more awful characterization - this time of Sherlock himself; suddenly he has become a murderer – a bit improper for a famous detective supposed to solve crimes, not committing them, don’t you think? And, on the whole, he acts like an idiot, making blunders that cause him to lose his cases etc. It’s the Sentiment bias again - lots and lots of it, complete with – perhaps life-long - anger, self-loathing and frustration. Poor Sherlock.

Scenario 10: What will happen with Sherlock after he flips out and kills Magnussen? Inspiration: Casablanca, a truly iconic movie from WWII. End scene where Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and Rick (Humphrey Bogart) bid each other a tearful farewell at the Moroccan airport, from where Ilsa is fleeing the country with her spouse. It’s a ‘forbidden’ romance, and there are no outspoken confessions or declarations between them, no kiss; they hide their true feelings, even though they are very clearly understood. Ilsa will travel to security, Rick will stay in danger, serving his country, and Ilsa will not know if he’s dead or alive. Romantic overload.

Result: After a brief ‘solitary confinement’ in prison (a week, we learn in TAB - suspiciously close to the time I believe John and ‘Mary’ were on honeymoon after the wedding), Mycroft sends him in a private jet to a certain death in Eastern Europe, serving his country. Sherlock takes farewell of John at the tarmac and leaves him in ‘Mary’s hands. He’s about to tell John something important (like a love declaration), but changes his mind and jokes the whole thing away. They shake hands and Sherlock flies off, crying, probably thinking he’s seen John for the last time. But since the issue of Moriarty isn’t resolved yet, Sherlock Holmes is called back…

Discussion: This is so obviously a rip-off from Casablanca’s ending, and such a sentimental and overly-dramatic ending of S3 that if I didn’t believe Sherlock was in a drug-induced comatose state, I’d hold him (or Moffat) responsible for succumbing his modeling to ‘the fly in the ointment’. :)) 

Awful characterization of Mycroft though; why would Sherlock’s over-protective brother have him killed rather than imprisoned? But, most importantly: What are Sherlock’s results after HLV? 

In summary, I think Sherlock’s most important conclusions after this episode are a bit depressing: 1. That John’s relationship with ‘Mary’ isn’t a very happy one, but 2. that Sherlock can’t take any ‘steps’ towards John and he can’t ‘tell’ him anything; the façade must still be kept up at any cost because 3. Media is a serious threat against them and ‘outing’ John would break him and Sherlock would lose him forever.

These scenarios I’ve suggested for HLV to test Prediction #3 may seem a bit farfetched and speculative, and the evidence may not be particularly strong for some of them, while I think they could work for others. But at least all of them make more sense to me character-wise than the presented, face-value reading. Please consider the absurdity of the alternative we’re actually given in HLV: 

That the wife of one of the protagonists is actually a façade-climbing ninja assassin who tries to kill the main character and gets away with it, without showing a shred of remorse. 

That Doctor John Watson would yell threats at his beloved best friend when he’s collapsing from a re-opened shot wound, instead of trying to help him. 

That John Watson would forgive someone – whose name he doesn’t even know - who shot and  almost killed his best friend, and then go on to raise a child with them. 

That Sherlock would let a drug-addict drug down his whole family, including a pregnant woman, at their Christmas dinner.

That the main character – the famous detective Sherlock Holmes – would become a murderer who ‘solves’ a tricky case by blowing the un-armed blackmailer’s brains out with a gun.

That his over-protective brother Mycroft would send him to a certain death in Eastern Europe rather than put him behind bars.

I intend to go on exploring this ‘scenario-running’ for the four remaining episodes, including TAB. But this meta is already ridiculously long, so instead I’ll have to use my following two installments to do this:

Hypothesis # 6: In the show’s ‘reality’, Sherlock is slowly dying, which also has implications on a meta level, and

Hypothesis # 7: By TFP Sherlock has managed to figure out some essential things about John and the importance of staying alive, and he has managed to get in touch with his own repressed emotions.

Because if Sherlock is going to find out how to save John Watson, I believe he still has a lot of things to figure out; in HLV he isn’t ready yet. ;)

Tagging some people who might be interested:

@raggedyblue @ebaeschnbliah @sarahthecoat @gosherlocked @fellshish @sagestreet @tendergingergirl @loveismyrevolution @sherlockshadow @darlingtonsubstitution @tjlcisthenewsexy @devoursjohnlock  @kateis-cakeis @csi-baker-street-babes @sectoralheterochromiairidum @mrskolesouniverse @murphysmom67 @elldotsee

[aggimaginary]

The Grinch 2: Happy New Year Capter 2-Agatha Galido

Somewhere in the big universe, the Earth is one of the planets of the Solar system, and our home planet or home world. The world of the Whos is quite different from our world, the world where we lived in. The world of the Whos is probably from other solar system or other galaxy. It's like a dimension. And in Earth, in the country called Philippines, there was a woman named Agatha Galido, a.k.a Aggie.

This human girl is born with large insect-like fairy wings and is the only human around with such wings. Ever since she was a child, she was always loved by her family and relatives, but never have good friends in school because of being so different, making her feel miserable and friendless. When she was almost old enough, her father invented an interdimensional remote control that can open portals or gateways to many different worlds in the whole universe. Using this remote, Aggie made lots of friends that are different and unique species than her. Some are also humans like her, some are animals, and some are like cartoon and animated characters from TV. Some are also super heroes and magical creatures that weren't exist in Aggie's world. When she started making friends, like when she was 10 years old, Aggie created a team, called the Imaginary team, a.k.a. the I team, that can spread love and friendship in different worlds in the universe, and showed to everyone how friendship is important to everyone and everywhere. Since Aggie made almost more than 200 friends, she created groups according to the respective worlds where her friends lived. Since there are 36 groups, she also divided the whole team into three division; Main, Honorary, and Back-up. 22 groups in Main, 10 groups in Honorary, and 4 groups in Back-up. Aggie became the leader of the whole I team, despite that her teammates themselves are her mentors. Aggie and her team became the new owners the most power elements in the universe; The Elements of Friendship. Each group owned just one element. Some group shared the same element, according to which they represented. As the leader, Aggie represented the leading element: Imagination. Because of her position, Aggie have to look out for her team, and she loved them all like a family.

When she was 21, Aggie received a family heirloom that was originally owned by a dark god of the Land of the Forgotten in Mexico, and it's called a wand staff. Aggie's family heirloom was protected and kept by five families; Galido, Borra, Resano, Mondejar and Besares. Aggie belongs to these five families, with Galido (at her father's side) and Mondejar (at her mother's side) as her major families. Even before she received a wand staff with different magical powers, Aggie already developed super and magical powers from her powerful friends by giving her half of theirs, like sharing powers. The wand staff has been a magical heirloom of the five families, required with a spell book that contained the histories of the previous owners and magical spells they have written in it.

For many years that the I team kept organizing, the team had increased their status that each group was called by their respective element to fix a friendship problem that is related to their element either in their respective world or in other worlds that they never visited just yet. So, Aggie asked her dad to make more interdimensional remote controls for her friends, but it's quite impossible since the remote needed more energy and power for the remotes. Since the team has magical wishing members, like fairy godparents, Aggie wished for a interdimensional remote control for each group, and the leader/s are in-charge to hold the remote.

Since it was so many years, Agatha Galido is now 43, got married with one of her friends from another world and her third-in-command, which is was a red bird named Red, when she was 24, got three children and one egg. Ever since she has the power to transform into any form, she was an albino bird when she got pregnant with her 4th child, and laid an egg. The egg was five days old, so it won't be hatch so soon. Today, after Christmas, Aggie was having a great resting time with her team and family in their secret I team HQ under her and her parents' house. Aggie's parents are not as old as we thought, so they are still alive. They didn't mind of their daughter taking care of her team and family under their house. Aggie and only the Main division were sitting on the meeting table that shaped like a big letter 'I'.

"Wow, that was the best Christmas party ever we had last night," Lily said.

"I know! I can't wait for another party next year," Blueberry Pie jumped up in excitement.

"That's too soon, Blueberry," Cubby chuckled.

"I thought this is called 'Hearth's Warming day'" Gemstone thought.

"Christmas, Hearth's Warming, they're the same," Poof corrected.

"Everyone's always excited for Christmas, including us," Jet added.

"It's a good thing you two didn't ruin Christmas again this year," Saltor scoffed.

"Because Jet and I learned a lesson that we should respect our holiday; Halloween," Jack Skellington stated proudly.

"Well, at least you survived. I almost cried when I thought you two were dead!" Aggie cried out loid.

"You're 13 that time. You always cry," Sally Skellington reminded.

"Thank you for reminding me," Aggie replied sarcastically.

"It's quite shame that Mom, Dad, Phineaks and Israbellra didn't spend Christmas with us," Marie Flynn said.

"Yeah, neither do Uncle Flerk and Ferb," Maren Flynnto added.

"Yeah, well, your parents had to go to back to your world and to Switzerland for the award ceremony next week," Aggie explained. "And even Ferb and Flerk are still in Camp David. Those guys are very busy. At least Vanessa, Varessa, Thomas and Themas attended."

Marie sighed dreamingly, "Yeah, Thomas is so sweet."

Frantis almost barfed in disgust, "Uh, you do know you guys are cousins, right?"

"Umm, their fathers are stepbrothers. So, their not related," Tootie corrected.

"I just still don't get why Basil wasn't in a mood to celebrate Christmas," Jerry said. "Sure, he attended, but he doesn't seem to have fun with us."

"You already know detectives, like Sherlock Holmes, Basil was not in a mood for Christmas joy. He's always been like that for years," Pilair replied.

"So, any plans for New Year? We only have five days left," Skenda asked.

"We can have colorful fireworks," Roo suggested.

"Fireworks can be nice, but no fountain, no firecracker, no harmful firework stuff. They might blow your fingers," Leia warned.

"She's right. We don't want to have fireworks incident in the team, just like what happened to Aggie's neighbors last year," Chet agreed.

"Yeah, lots of fingers blew up last year," Smantha added.

"We can use my Pixie dust Snow ball Firework Shower spell. That's safe," Aggie lifted her wand staff.

"How about the candles? You know, the sparking ones and colorful flame ones." Fred Figglehorn inquired.

"As long as they don't explode," Azul was concerned.

"But, where can we celebrate?" Lola questioned.

"Grandpa Leo and Grandma Bernadette invited us upstairs," Amaranth Red raised her hand. "The backyard is so wide, so there's enough space for all of us to watch the fireworks in New Year's Eve."

"Close enough. We didn't celebrate New Year with Mr. and Mrs. Galido for a while," Blossom nodded.

"Okay, so we already know where we will celebrate and what stuff we will use, any more ideas?" Baby Bugs asked as he listed in the what-to-do list about New Year plans.

"How about a song for New Year?" Chyna got up from her chair, and then, pointed Aggie, "And Aggie will sing!"

"What? Why me?" Aggie asked.

"Come on, Aggie, you haven't sing a song every New Year for years. You only counted on us. It's your turn," Miley explained.

Aggie sighed, "Fine. I'll try my best. I'll just find a perfect song."

"Great! All we have to do is to invite the Honorary and Back-up divisions here for the New Year," Perry said.

Just then, Crimson Red noticed his mother's element on her I team ID began to glow.

"Mom! Your element! It's glowing!" He pointed out loud.

The whole Main I team heard the half-bird as Aggie looked down at her ID where she saw her element glowing and blinking.

"Sweet Celestia, Aggie!" Rarity gasped. "You were called. This means there is a friendship problem!"

"How come there could be friendship problem after Christmas and before New Year?!" Red growled.

"Everyone has problems all the time, Red. Including you before you became a hero," Stella recalled.

"Yeah. Thanks for telling me that, sis," The red angry bird rolled his eyes.

"Kowalski, Kelda, activate the map!" Skipper commanded.

The tall penguin and his adoptive guardian or wife saluted as they pushed two buttons together, and the table showed the hologram of the Earth.

"Alright then, where the friendship problem could be in my world?" Aggie looked up at the Earth hologram.

"Let's see here," Kowalski swiped the hologram of the Earth to rotate it and find a friendship problem, "So, there's no friendship problem in your world, Aggie."

"How about all of our worlds?" Captain Jake inquired.

When Dr. Blowhole and Dr. Blest typed something on the keyboards, the hologram showed a live footage of every world that the I team lived.

"Okay. The New York City and Central Park Zoo is okay. No friendship problem," said the reformed villain dolphin.

"Not even in Halloween town," Samuel checked on the footage of his and his family's home world or home town.

"The Hundred Acre woods is always peaceful," Rabbit said.

"Fairy world and Dimmsdale is fine," Timmy added.

"No monsters, crime or even quarreling happened in Townsville," Bubbles said about her world.

"Bird Island is still peaceful and happy community," Hal told them.

"Webster High and Z-tech is still good," Fletcher looked at the footage of his and his two friends' old and current schools.

"Our world is okay," Tom announced.

"So was ours, and Kat and Kit's home planet," Coop gritted his teeth, not wanting to mention his former enemy's home planet.

"Our world seems good too," Oggy said.

"So was Danville, O.W.C.A., and other countries," Pelry concluded.

"Including the 2nd dimension," Dofelia added.

"Pixie Hollow and the Winter Woods are still balance," Tinker Bell stated.

"Neverland is still clean," Skully scanned the footage of Neverland.

"Acme Acres in the future has no trouble," Petunia announced.

"Not even at our home," Baby Petunia added.

"Hollywood is still shining," Oliver made a thumb-up.

"My home town is also good," Fred Figglehorn nodded.

"No Devinos attacking in our town," Serio pointed.

"The Do-Jo and our world weren't affected by the master," Yin said.

Her brother, Yang, cleared his throat, "Umm, it's because there's no night master anymore, remember?"

"Shut up," the pink rabbit was annoyed by the blue one.

"Everything's fine all of the planets we visited years ago," Han mentioned.

"Starlight City has no trouble at all," Skidmark said.

"Equestria is also good," Twilight looked at the footage of Equestria.

"Did you guys check the worlds of the Honorary and the Back-up?" Aggie asked.

"Yeah, the chickens, the Kids Next Door, the herd of sheep, Pasadena, Transylvania, Zootopia, Mousedom, the garden gnomes in their world, Stork Mountain, and cars world are all okay and safe. No friendship problem at all," Clover Scarlet answered her mother.

"The Danger HQ, Smurf Village, the Lands of the Remembered and Forgotten, and the ocean where Marlin, Nemo and Dory lived are in peace too," Roy added.

"If none of our worlds have any friendship problems, then we have to search the whole universe," Aggie suggested as the whole team nodded in agreement.

When the hologram map extended, showing the hologram of the whole universe, there was blinking white light on another galaxy, just beside Aggie's home galaxy.

"There it is!" She pointed.

The hologram zoomed on the blinking white light, and showed a town with lots of houses.

"Wow, that's a pretty cool town," Bubs commented.

"And snowy!" Crimson Red exclaimed, then frowned that there's no snow in the Philippines, "Lucky!"

"Oh well, I think I have to go dimension travel again," Aggie stretched her hands and arms.

"You mean, right now?" Piglet inquired, "But what about the plans and New Year?"

"I'm sorry, Piglet, but this is very important." Aggie apologized. "But this is very important."

"Are you not going to celebrate New Year with us, Aunt Mom?" Rebecca made a sad face.

"Of course I'm going to celebrate with all of you guys. Don't worry. When I'm done with the friendship problem, I'll be home in no time."

"That's right, Rebecca," Ruby patted her daughter's head. "Your step-mom is going to spend New year with all of us. She does this every year."

"Thanks, Rubs. Now, I have to bring my wand staff and my interdimensional remote control." Before Aggie gathered her things, she was interrupted for a moment.

"Just a moment, sis," Joseline halted her, "It's snowy in that world and the town. You need to wear your winter clothes."

"Don't worry, I got this," With a smirk on her face, Aggie wore a gray jacket and warm gloves to prepare herself before going to that world where she was called.

"Is that all you have to wear?" Lumpy asked.

"It was never snow here in the Philippines, so this is all I've got. Don't worry. I'll warm myself when I get there." When Aggie opened the portal with her remote, she turned her wand staff into a sled.

"Since when Xibalba taught you how to turn your wand staff into a sled?" Periwinkle inquired suspiciously.

"He didn't. I made the spell myself. Hey, I'm the owner of the wand staff now, so it's my turn to create my own spell," Aggie explained to her wing sister, "Oh, that reminds me…" She grabbed a backpack, then her big spell book, and put it inside of her bag. "Can't use my wand staff without a little guidance from the spell book!"

"Are you sure you have to do this?" Red looked at his human wife in concern and worry.

"I have to, Red," Aggie answered with a sigh. "It's my duty."

Her bird husband exhaled in defeat. Red truly respected Aggie's duty. Then, he pecked her on the lips, "Just be careful out there."

"I will. Thanks," Aggie kissed him back and waved at her team and family, "Bye guys!"

"See you soon, Aggie." Bomb waved.

"Bye, Mom. I love you!" Amaranth Red did a flying kiss gesture.

"Be safe," Wands added.

Aggie waved one last time before she stepped into the portal until her body disappeared as the portal closed.

When the whole Main I team was left behind, they still felt sad for their leader and best friend that a friendship problem called her just before New Year.

"Man, this is a rough New Year for Aggie," Matilda said.

"I know. I feel bad for her, too," Screwball added, worried for her adoptive aunt.

[foxforfree135]

Borri Dont Use Whirlind Sprint

With DIRECTV, you can watch TV anytime and almost anywhere. Sign in to DIRECTV entertainment with your ID and password. Select Watch Online.; Browse available titles and make your selection. Heads up: If you see an Activate now or Upgrade button, you don’t subscribe to the channel airing the program you selected. Follow the on-screen prompts to subscribe and watch the program. Download directv video player for mac for free. Audio & Video tools downloads - DIRECTV by Directv, Inc and many more programs are available for instant and free download. Take it with you. Download the app to live stream—anytime, anywhere—everything from breaking news to the hottest shows and movies everyone’s talking about, on up to 5 screens at once. Available only in the U.S. (excl Puerto Rico and U.S.V.I.). Req’s compatible device. Directv video player download. DIRECTV 2.0.1 - Set home DVR on the go. Download the latest versions of the best Mac apps at safe and trusted MacUpdate Download, install, or update DIRECTV for Mac from MacUpdate. It is the directv player that i was prompted to download to my mac desktop to watch shows online.

Finish the quest 'The Horn of Jurgen Windcaller without whirlwind - posted in Skyrim Spoilers: I just started my second play through of skyrim and I'm stuck on this quest. I'm at the part with the gates that open as you walk past the stones. I know exactly what I need to do, but I don't have whirlwind sprint. I think I should have gotten it by now. Did I just miss it while doing a previous. Whirlwind Sprint - Vertical Functionality - posted in Skyrim Mod Requests: Hello and thank you, Nexus modders! Ive searched the Nexus quite thoroughly and have not come across any mods that modify Whirlwind Sprint to have the specific functionality I had hoped for when I first was introduced to it. I had hoped to be able to use Whirlwind Sprint not just to move across land or water, but also. I don't know what causes it, but every now and then when I use whirlwind sprint My character keeps running real fast after it is done and is moving at super speed. Not sure what causes it, but it has gotten me killed a few times. I am wondering if this is known and if it is known what causes it.

Borri Dont Use Whirlwind Sprint Flip Phone

Borri Dont Use Whirlwind Sprint Phone

Borri Dont Use Whirlwind Sprint Car

Borri Dont Use Whirlwind Sprint Phones

The UESPWiki – Your source for The Elder Scrolls since 1995

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2Detailed Walkthrough

2.2The 7,000 Steps

Meet the Greybeards.

Quest Giver:Jarl Balgruuf the GreaterLocation(s):Ivarstead, High HrothgarPrerequisite Quest:Dragon RisingNext Quest:The Horn of Jurgen WindcallerReward:Word for the Unrelenting Force shout, Word for the Whirlwind Sprint shoutID:MQ105

Master Borri teaching 'Wuld'

Quick Walkthrough(edit)

Go to Ivarstead.

Climb the 7,000 Steps.

Speak to the Greybeards at High Hrothgar.

Detailed Walkthrough(edit)

Ivarstead(edit)

After you're finished in Whiterun, you'll want to head to Ivarstead, as it is located at the foot of the 7,000 Steps leading up to High Hrothgar. Once you get there and get close to the bridge, you'll hear a conversation. Talk to one of the men, Klimmek, and learn about what dangers are lurking ahead. You can take an optional quest from him to deliver supplies to the Greybeards. You may also ask people there to tell you some information about High Hrothgar:

For Demon's Souls on the PlayStation 3, a GameFAQs Q&A question titled 'How do I download/install patches for demons soul?' Demons souls patch download. Demon's Souls; Patch - problem with download; User Info: paolobar2005. Paolobar2005 10 years ago #1. I have quite an interesting problem. I have never connected my PS3 to the PSN since the release of Demon's Souls, so the game is still unpatched. Today I have decided to download the whole lot of patches, and launched the game while the console. Select eboot.bin from Demon's Souls directory and click open. Rpcs3 will create an eboot.elf file next to eboot.bin, this is the decrypted file. Building From Release. Download the latest release for your release (not the source ZIP!). Place a decrypted copy of Demon's Souls eboot.bin at boot.elf. Run build.bat, if all goes well debug.elf will.

NameResponseWilhelm'The Greybeards are a solitary lot. I don't think they've ever ventured outside their monastery. We get the occasional pilgrim passing through here on their way to the summit, but almost all of them have returned disappointed.'Klimmek'I've been to the monastery many times, but I've never even laid eyes on one of the Greybeards. Not that I'd care to. Being masters of the Thu'um, they could kill you by uttering a single word. Well, not that they would. They seem peaceful, but I wouldn't want to provoke them. 'Bassianus Axius'Klimmek brings food supplies up to them once every few weeks when the weather permits it. Other than that, they seem like a quiet lot. Don't really know too much about them.'Boti'It's frightening living below their monastery. Sometimes I swear I can hear strange noises rolling down from up there. It sounds like thunder, but there's never any rain. What do you make of that?'Temba Wide-Arm'The Greybeards stay away from me, and I stay away from them. Suits me just fine.'Gwilin'Always thought it was odd that there's a layer of thick clouds covering the peak of the mountain above the monastery. Not sure what's up there, but I bet the Greybeards know.'Jofthor'They call the path to the monastery the 7,000 Steps. Can you imagine? I'm not certain if I could even make it to the top without collapsing from exhaustion.'Fastred'The Greybeards are a strange bunch. I heard they live their entire life without uttering a single word; can you even imagine?'Lynly Star-Sung'I've always fancied a journey up the 7,000 Steps to the monastery. Anything to break the boredom of living in this town. I envy you.'

The 7,000 Steps(edit)

When you start on the trail up, you'll run across various leveled wildlife and monsters, and a couple of pilgrims, Barknar and Karita. You will also find various etched stone tablets ('emblems') giving you information on the history of the dragons and the Way of the Voice.

Shortly after the fourth emblem where you meet Karita, at a point where the steps are sandwiched between two cliffs, there is a frost troll that will jump from the top of one cliff if it sees you (though sometimes it may be found further up the path). For low-level characters, this can be a difficult fight. It can be avoided altogether by sneaking past it at night or scaling the cliffs nearby.

Combat strategies(edit)

Frost trolls, like any other type of troll, have a weakness to fire. Thus, handy combat strategies include using weapons which have a fire enchantment, using fire-based destruction spells, and summoning a flame atronach. The Shout Fire Breath could also be used, as a word for it can be gained early on in the Companions questline.

Trolls can deal a substantial amount of damage, but most of it can be avoided by tactically falling back when one sees the troll raising his arms or preparing a power attack. If you need to heal, you can sprint away; the troll will not generally outrun you. Similarly, using a shield to block the Troll's attacks can also be effective, but does depend highly on timing.

It is possible to scale the rocks just before the troll, allowing you to use ranged attacks to safely eliminate it. However, the troll may regenerate its health faster than you can damage it. Using a bow with a fire enchantment or ranged destruction spells such as Firebolt would give an advantage.

If you are careful, it can be killed by long distance arrows from the entrance to the ravine it lives in. Go into stealth mode, stand at the entrance to the ravine, all to the right, and shoot at the troll when you can just see it on top of the cliff. If done properly, the troll may shift left or right a little, but will not come after you; the x2 sneak attack bonus (x3 with the perk) should allow you to kill it quickly. However, if it falls off the cliff, this will not work anymore.

If you retreat down the stairs, Karita, who is meditating at the tablet, will help defeat the troll.

Avoiding the fight(edit)

It is easily possible to simply run past the Troll, as it moves rather slowly.

Being a Nord, one can use their racial power Battle Cry to make the troll flee for 30 seconds, giving enough time to run to High Hrothgar. Similarly, being a Bosmer, one can use Command Animal to calm the troll.

You can scale the rocks to the left of the ravine, and you’ll never be detected at all.

The Greybeards(edit)

High Hrothgar

After finally arriving at High Hrothgar, you'll be greeted by Master Arngeir, who speaks to you on behalf of the other Greybeards (whose voices are too powerful for conversation). After proving you are the Dragonborn by using the Unrelenting Force shout, they welcome you to their monastery and instruct you on how to use the dragon shouts, or Thu'um.

Borri Dont Use Whirlwind Sprint Flip Phone

To further your training in the ways of the Thu'um, you will be taught the second word to the Unrelenting Force shout, Ro, and asked to practice it three times on ethereal targets that the Greybeards summon. Arngeir comments on how quickly you learn, then takes you outside for the next lesson. They teach you another word for Whirlwind Sprint. You'll be asked to practice it by using the shout to get through the gate Master Borri opens before it closes. When you're finished, Arngeir will send you on the last test: retrieving the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller.

Achievements(edit)

Borri Dont Use Whirlwind Sprint Phone

One achievement is unlocked when you complete this quest:

The Way of the Voice (20 points/Bronze)

Notes(edit)

If you activate and read all ten plaques along the 7,000 Steps, you'll receive the blessing Voice of the Sky that causes wildlife to neither flee nor attack you for 24 hours.

There appear to be only around 700 steps, but many may have been worn down or covered in snow over time.

If you consider steps as paces rather than stairs, there are around 2000 steps (when using the walking animation)

Despite the fact that, especially at higher levels, there are many dangerous wild animals along the 7,000 steps, the two pilgrims met along the way seem to be around the same level as the average bandit.

With a horse and a little cunning, you can skip both the long trip to Ivarstead and climbing the 7,000 Steps altogether. Starting at the Whiterun Stormcloak Camp, you can ride almost straight up the mountain, bypassing the dangerous creatures and the tedious long climb with only moderate difficulty.

If you bypass Ivarstead and the two pilgrims on the way up in this way, Karita will never be encountered, since she is set to disappear from the game once the player reaches High Hrothgar. Barknar will still be there at his position, on the way down, and so will Klimmek in Ivarstead, with his quest to deliver the goods. Unfortunately, the Frost Troll will also be there - although of course, fast-travelling directly from High Hrothgar avoids it (and all the above).

The shout the Greybeards use to create the attack targets for learning Ro is Fiik Lo Sah, Mirror Deceive Phantom. It is not attainable by the player except through console codes.

When you are asked to run through the gate before it closes using your new Whirlwind Sprint shout, you can make it through the gate in time using a regular sprint.

Upon completion of this quest, you will gain access to the main quest of the Dragonborn expansion.

Arngeir's dialogue about Whirlwind Sprint is slightly different if you already know a word of the shout. If you have learned part of the shout through word walls, you will receive the second or third part of the shout instead.

Bugs(edit)

If you enter High Hrothgar from the back door (where you perform the shout 'whirlwind sprint'), the Greybeards may not congregate in the hall and the quest will not progress (stuck on 'speak to Arngeir'). Exit from the front door and re-enter before speaking to Master Arngeir to progress.

This bug is fixed by version 1.2.4 of the Unofficial Skyrim Patch.

The Greybeards may attack you after you use an Unrelenting Force on them.

If you leave High Hrothgar after being presented the word Ro, but before learning (absorbing) the word on the floor, you may not be able to learn the word when you return. This can also happen in very rare cases even if you do not leave (more likely to happen later in the game if you have put off doing the main quest). This can break the main quest. There is no workaround for this other than reloading a previous save from before the word is presented to you.

If you interrupt Einarth while he's casting Ro on the floor by talking to him or shouting at him, it may not appear. ?

Save and re-load the game, and he should resume the casting.

When asked to demonstrate the Voice, the spectres may not appear.

Open your inventory and close it again and the spectre should appear.

In demonstrating Whirlwind Sprint, Master Wulfgar may inadvertently send himself flying off the mountain. ?

Quest Stages(edit)

The Way of the Voice (MQ105)StageFinishes QuestJournal Entry8

Objective 10: Speak to the Greybeards

10The Greybeards have summoned me to their monastery of High Hrothgar on the slopes of the Throat of the World. They seem to have learned of the mysterious power that I gained when I killed the dragon outside Whiterun.30The Greybeards summoned me to their monastery of High Hrothgar on the slopes of the Throat of the World. I spoke to Arngeir, one of the Greybeards, who believes that I am 'Dragonborn', which means I am especially gifted in the use of the Voice. They have offered to help me learn to use my new abilities.

Objective 20: Demonstrate your 'Unrelenting Force' Shout

5058

Objective 30: Learn the Word of Power from Einarth

80

Objective 40: Demonstrate your 'Unrelenting Force' Shout (<Global=MQ105TargetsHit>/3)

100120

Objective 60: Demonstrate your 'Whirlwind Sprint' Shout

140

Objective 70: Speak to Arngeir for further training

160The Greybeards summoned me to their monastery of High Hrothgar on the slopes of the Throat of the World. Their leader, Arngeir, recognized me as 'Dragonborn', and taught me more about my new Voice powers. After passing several tests, they sent me on one final trial, retrieving the legendary Horn of Jurgen Windcaller.

Borri Dont Use Whirlwind Sprint Car

The following empty quest stages were omitted from the table: 0, 1, 5, 12, 15, 20, 25, 55, 56, 59, 60, 70, 75, 76, 82, 85, 90, 103, 105, 110, 115, 125, 127, 130, 150, 180, 190, 200, 220, 240, 242, 245, 250, 255, 260, 265, 270, 280, 282, 284, 288, 290, 300.

Borri Dont Use Whirlwind Sprint Phones

Notes

Prev:Dragon RisingUp:Main QuestNext:The Horn of Jurgen Windcaller

Retrieved from 'https://en.uesp.net/w/index.php?title=Skyrim:The_Way_of_the_Voice&oldid=2130343'

[aion-rsa]

Top New Horror Books in March 2021

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Where horror meets speculative fiction you’ll find inventive fears and chilling uncertainty. Here are some of the horror books we’re most excited about and/or are currently consuming…

Top New Horror Books in March 2021

Later by Stephen King

Type: Novel Publisher: Hard Case Crime Release date: March 2 Den of Geek says: Stephen King, author of The Stand, The Shining, and many more, needs no introduction. The top name in horror is sure to be the one everyone is talking about.

Publisher’s summary: The son of a struggling single mother, Jamie Conklin just wants an ordinary childhood. But Jamie is no ordinary child. Born with an unnatural ability his mom urges him to keep secret, Jamie can see what no one else can see and learn what no one else can learn. But the cost of using this ability is higher than Jamie can imagine – as he discovers when an NYPD detective draws him into the pursuit of a killer who has threatened to strike from beyond the grave. 

LATER is Stephen King at his finest, a terrifying and touching story of innocence lost and the trials that test our sense of right and wrong. With echoes of King’s classic novel It, LATER is a powerful, haunting, unforgettable exploration of what it takes to stand up to evil in all the faces it wears.

Buy Later by Stephen King.

The Second Bell by Gabriela Houston

Type: Novel Publisher: Angry Robot Release date: March 9 Den of Geek says: Horror meets legend in a different take on the werewolf. Author Gabriela Houston has been praised for her character work and mixture of grounded realism and chilling fantasy.

Publisher’s summary: To the world you are an abomination; a monster with unholy abilities. You’re shunned and left to fend for yourself. Your only chance of survival is to tap into that dark potential – would you do it?

In an isolated mountain community, sometimes a child is born with two hearts. Such a child – a striga – is considered a dangerous demon, which must be abandoned on the edge of the forest to protect the community. The only choice the child’s mother can make is whether to leave her home with her infant, or stay behind and try to forget.

Miriat made her choice. She and her nineteen-year-old striga daughter, Salka, now live a life of deprivation and hardship in a remote village, where to follow the impulses of the other heart is forbidden.

But Salka is headstrong and young, and when threatened with losing everything, she is forced to explore the depths of her true nature, testing the bonds between mother and child.

The Second Bell by Gabriela Houston.

Our Last Echoes by Kate Alice Marshall

Type: Novel Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers Release date: March 16

Den of Geek says: This YA pick reminds us pleasantly of Twin Peaks or Alan Wake. A spooky setting and a protagonist with a strong hook to its location promises a tightly constructed story.

Publisher’s summary: In 1973, the thirty-one residents of Bitter Rock disappeared. In 2003, so did my mother. Now, I’ve come to Bitter Rock to find out what happened to her–and to me. Because Bitter Rock has many ghosts. And I might be one of them.

Sophia’s earliest memory is of drowning. She remembers the darkness of the water and the briny taste as it filled her throat, the sensation of going under. She remembers hands pulling her back to safety, but that memory is impossible–she’s never been to the ocean. 

But then Sophia gets a mysterious call about an island names Bitter Rock, and learns that she and her mother were there fifteen years ago–and her mother never returned. The hunt for answers lures her to Bitter Rock, but the more she uncovers, the clearer it is that her mother is just one in a chain of disappearances. 

People have been vanishing from Bitter Rock for decades, leaving only their ghostly echoes behind. Sophia is the only one who can break the cycle–or risk becoming nothing more than another echo haunting the island.

Buy Our Last Echoes by Kate Alice Marshall.

Top New Horror Books in February 2021

The Burning Girls by C.J. Tudor

Type: Novel Publisher: Ballantine Books Release date: Feb. 9 Den of Geek says: A spooky thriller set in a small village promises ghostly visitations and weird happenings that a single mother and her daughter need to investigate. Evil lurking in churches and exorcisms are a horror staple, but the historical grounding here gives it a unique texture. Publisher’s summary: A dark history lingers in Chapel Croft. Five hundred years ago, Protestant martyrs were betrayed—then burned. Thirty years ago, two teenage girls disappeared without a trace. And a few weeks ago, the vicar of the local parish hanged himself in the nave of the church.

Reverend Jack Brooks, a single parent with a fourteen-year-old daughter and a heavy conscience, arrives in the village hoping for a fresh start. Instead, Jack finds a town rife with conspiracies and secrets, and is greeted with a strange welcome package: an exorcism kit and a note that warns, “But there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed and hidden that will not be known.”

The more Jack and daughter, Flo, explore the town and get to know its strange denizens, the deeper they are drawn into the age-old rifts, mysteries, and suspicions. And when Flo begins to see specters of girls ablaze, it becomes apparent there are ghosts here that refuse to be laid to rest.

Uncovering the truth can be deadly in a village with a bloody past, where everyone has something to hide and no one trusts an outsider.

Buy The Burning Girls by C.J. Tudor.

What Big Teeth by Rose Szabo

Type: Novel Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Release date: Feb. 2 Den of Geek says: Fans of the human side of werewolves or the everyday life of the Addams Family may like this story of a student returning home to a strange place after a taste of the outside world. Written for a YA market, but the inventive concept means it has crossover appeal. Publisher’s summary: Eleanor Zarrin has been estranged from her wild family for years. When she flees boarding school after a horrifying incident, she goes to the only place she thinks is safe: the home she left behind. But when she gets there, she struggles to fit in with her monstrous relatives, who prowl the woods around the family estate and read fortunes in the guts of birds.

Eleanor finds herself desperately trying to hold the family together―in order to save them all, Eleanor must learn to embrace her family of monsters and tame the darkness inside her.

Buy What Big Teeth by Rose Szabo.

Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap

Type: Short story collection Publisher: Small Beer Press Release date: Feb. 23 Den of Geek says: At Den of Geek we’re always looking for horror that mixes with science fiction and fantasy. Isabel Yap does exactly that. A well-established writer with short stories in genre pillars like Tor.com, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, her stories are vivid and unsettling. She’s garnered praise from authors including Tamsyn Muir. Publisher’s summary: “Am I dead?” Mebuyen sighs. She was hoping the girl would not ask. Spells and stories, urban legends and immigrant tales: the magic in Isabel Yap’s debut collection jumps right off the page, from the joy in her new novella, “A Spell for Foolish Hearts” to the terrifying tension of the urban legend “Have You Heard the One About Anamaria Marquez.”

Buy Never Have I Ever by Isabel Yap.

Top New Horror Books in January 2021

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In the Garden of Spite by Camilla Bruce

Type: Novel Publisher: Berkley Release date: Jan. 19

Den of Geek says: This novel for fans of the line where true crime meets horror follows Belle Gunness, a real life serial killer. This looks like a darkly fascinating portrait of a wicked and deadly woman, showing how the “Widow of La Porte” clawed her way through history, leaving victims in her wake. Publisher’s summary: They whisper about her in Chicago. Men come to her with their hopes, their dreams–their fortunes. But no one sees them leave. No one sees them at all after they come to call on the Widow of La Porte.

The good people of Indiana may have their suspicions, but if those fools knew what she’d given up, what was taken from her, how she’d suffered, surely they’d understand. Belle Gunness learned a long time ago that a woman has to make her own way in this world. That’s all it is. A bloody means to an end. A glorious enterprise meant to raise her from the bleak, colorless drudgery of her childhood to the life she deserves. After all, vermin always survive.

Buy In the Garden of Spite by Camilla Bruce.

In Darkness, Shadows Breathe by Catherine Cavendish

Type: Novel Publisher: Flame Tree Press Release date: Jan. 19

Den of Geek says: Intentionally disorienting fiction can be hit or miss, but in this case it sounds like the non-linear storytelling adds to the intended feeling of a nightmare. Old-fashioned Gothic horror fans with a taste for dark fantasy might enjoy this one. Publisher’s summary: In a luxury apartment and in the walls of a modern hospital, the evil that was done continues to thrive. They are in the hands of an entity that knows no boundaries and crosses dimensions – bending and twisting time itself – and where danger waits in every shadow. The battle is on for their bodies and souls and the line between reality and nightmare is hard to define. Through it all, the words of Lydia Warren Carmody haunt them. But who was she? And why have Carol and Nessa been chosen?

The answer lies deep in the darkness… 

Buy In Darkness, Shadows Breathe by Catherine Cavendish.

A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson

Type: Novel Publisher: Nyx Publishing Release date: Jan. 31

Den of Geek says: Dracula retellings are common, as are takes on the famous vampire’s wives. This one sets itself apart by focusing on a relationship between the wives themselves, coloring in the classic story with what the author calls “sapphic yearning at the opera.” Publisher’s summary: Saved from the brink of death by a mysterious stranger, Constanta is transformed from a medieval peasant into a bride fit for an undying king. But when Dracula draws a cunning aristocrat and a starving artist into his web of passion and deceit, Constanta realizes that her beloved is capable of terrible things. Finding comfort in the arms of her rival consorts, she begins to unravel their husband’s dark secrets.

With the lives of everyone she loves on the line, Constanta will have to choose between her own freedom and her love for her husband. But bonds forged by blood can only be broken by death.

Buy A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson.

Subscribe to Den of Geek magazine for FREE right here!

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[defiancerpg-blog]

Congratulations ELSIE, you have been accepted as LUPUS, THE WOLF with the faceclaim of JADE TAILOR and the POWER REPLICATION ability!

Notes from the Admins: Ellie and Tasha:

Both the apps we received for Lupus were so amazing and interesting. We had a tough decision to make because they went in very different directions, but ultimately it was your vision that we felt fit best with what we originally imagined. Oh boy, I (Ellie) certainly was hooked right from the start. You did so well in fleshing out this complex beautiful character that we had envisioned. Your headcanons and ideas were so well thought out and you put so much care and research into her that I was just blown away. I (Tasha) loved the way you wrote your bio for Lupus. I know this was sent before the application format was changed, but it was beautifully done. I love how I can see how much work you put into your application.

We also would like to formally accept your request to change her name to Ashwiyaa ‘Nyx’ Lowell.

You have 48 hours to send in your blog. If you haven’t already joined the group discord then you may do so now (if that’s your wish) [x]. Once you have turned in your blog, you will be given a role that will allow you access to the private channels regarding plots/characters. Please remember to do everything on the checklist, and also we just want to thank you for joining this roleplay. We hope your time with us will be a fun and memorable one!

OOC INFORMATION

Alias & Pronouns:

Elsie, I use she/her/hers pronouns

Age:

24

Timezone, Activity Level, & RP Experience:

I’m in GMT (currently southeast England, but I’m hopefully going to be moving to Scotland in a few months). My activity is going to be around 7ish out of 10 and I’ve been roleplaying for twelveish years o.O. I don’t have any accounts to link to, but I will be writing snippets on my mockblog!

BASIC IC INFORMATION

Skeleton:

Lupus

Faceclaim:

Jade Tailor or Katie Findlay

Age:

26

Orientation:

She’s describe herself as either pansexual or sexually fluid.

Origin:

Born to parents that originated from the small town on the shores of Lake Ontario and Detroit to parents of Native descent (and Jewish on her great-grandfather’s side), Nyx’s early years were primarily spent on the run. From what she remembers her mother telling her, she was born almost a month early in a small cabin in the woods not far from Niagara Falls. Every couple of months, they would find a new place to stay or her parents would leave her with friends for weeks at a time. After their capture in New York City, Nyx was constantly shuffled between various foster homes, group homes and even juvie a couple of times.

Nova Type:

I think her abilities would fit in Mentis the most.

Ability:

Nyx’s abilities are… complicated. The official name is ‘power replication with limited power detection’ or as she calls it ‘ability radar/spidey senses and downloading’. She is drawn to people with abilities, it’s like a weird tug that Nyx isn’t really sure how to explain (aside from 'spidey senses’. She cannot tell you what abilities they have, but she can sense if someone is a Nova or not. And like when downloading something off the internet, it takes time for Nyx to 'copy’ their ability and store it in her 'mental hard drive’. Typically this is done by just standing within ten feet of them. Should the 'connection’ be interrupted, she will only have a fraction of that ability and it causes her to have headaches should the 'download’ be slow. The other option is 'instant download’ which is achieved through direct physical contact. It will cause the other Nova to feel a sudden unease and fatigue, while Nyx suffers from nosebleeds and migraines as it’s almost like getting punched. However, that is only the beginning as once Nyx 'learns’ an ability doesn’t mean she knows how to use it or control it or even know what it is. This can make her a liability and a danger especially with potentially catastrophic abilities, not to mention that she sometimes can’t get them to work when she wants them to or when she is angry they will flare up. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean that she remembers what abilities she has absorbed. It’s kind of like putting them in a box which get put in an attic where it is easily forgotten and in order to be used, it has to be searched for. To help with this she has a literal physical written list of abilities she has absorbed and is aware of. Certain abilities are triggered by specific thoughts/feelings which are written next to those abilities. Some she has remembered, but it gives her peace of mind to have it.

When using her abilities, Nyx’s eyes will turn completely black and a strange black energy (like the negative of a bright image) will appear around her fingers or objects when certain abilities are used. Biography:

Complicated. Meaning: consisting of many interconnecting parts or elements; intricate. Synonyms include: complex, intricate, tangled, knotted and thorny.

If there was ever a word to describe you and the life you’ve lived. From the day you were born, you’ve had to fight. Born too early to parents that wanted a better world and didn’t know of any other way to get it then through violence. For so long, they had been unheard. Then they found others who felt just like them. They banded together for alone we are week, but together we are strong. Now they would make the world listen; they would make the system scared of them as they had been scared for generations. For the first time, they had the advantage and they were going to use it.

You barely remember what life was like before: always on the move, staying with family friends while your parents were away for weeks on end.   You know that they loved you though and you can’t help but think that that only makes it so much worse.

It all changed in just a little more than two minutes. Those minutes will forever be engraved in your memory, haunting your dreams and thoughts like a plague. It starts with glass breaking, then smoke, the door breaking down, yelling (so much yelling), something heavy hitting the wall, gunshots. You cover your ears, it’s so loud. Tears roll down your cheeks as you press yourself into the corner, stuffed wolf clutched to your chest. You so desperately want to close your eyes but you can’t.

A gun turns towards you; familiar arms wrap around your small frame. Apples, she always smelled like apples.

Another shot rings.

And for the first time ever, you hear your father scream.

Criminals; terrorists; monsters; that’s what the world calls them but you never saw them that way. You saw your mother, who you look so much like, humming a half forgotten Ojibwe song as paper cranes floated around you heads. And your father, with his eyes so much like yours standing in the doorway with a soft smile on his face that never could reach his eyes.

Your memories fade, the happier ones that is. When you recall them now, it’s like looking through a fog. Some flashes are clear and others you aren’t even sure if that is what truly happened. The world however refuses to forget. Not only that, but it warps the memories. History is after all written by the victors.

Instead of moving from place to place with kind people at the door, instead all you know is cold. With each new placement, you pray it is different, but all it takes for someone to find out you’re Nova or just whose child you are. Still you try. You try so hard to show you are good, that you’re not like them. And yet at each and every turn, it’s like getting slapped in the face when all your effort turns to ash.

You cry when you find out you are more like your father then you thought and you hide it for as long as you can. You have his eyes, his abilities and soon his anger. Though you hate it, you can understand why they did what they did. With each disappointment, the anger builds, forming a wall inside you so that it’s harder to be hurt, harder to be cared for.

If he had put his mind to it, you have no doubt that your father could destroy the world. And if the world has taught you anything, it’s that you are your father’s daughter.

They see you as a monster and so they treat you like one. Is it so hard to understand why you began to believe it? Why you acted like one?

You always hold back, but you won’t be a victim anymore. You were raised better, you are better. And you would rather have that then be seen as weak. You don’t start the fights, but you end them. Some places have hidden demons and you run as far away as you can before you are forced to do something. They always find you though. In the end, you are always caught and dragged screaming away.

After years of grey walls and icy people, you are finally old enough to no longer be a ward of the state. But just because you are 'free’ doesn’t mean it’s better now. The day you register, the Warden just smiles at you in a way that sends a shiver up your spine. His words haunt you: 'I’ll be seeing you soon’. Two days later, it’s the anniversary of that horrible horrible day and you see people celebrate. As soon as you have the money saved, you get your biotag replaced with a clean one on the black market. But not before you cut out the old one and make it explode. It hurt and scars, but it was so worth it. The next day you are as far away as you can get.

You find yourself drifting, never staying in one place for long, hiding in plain sight. The days blur together, turning into weeks, then months and finally years. At the back of your mind, you feel the urge to join the Watchdogs. After all, your parents had been part of the inner circle and you had stayed with some of them. Eventually you push the thought away. They didn’t care, hell they didn’t even look for you. For so long you live like a shadow, content in your lonely life. For the first time, you are free from the cloud that is your parents’ name but you cannot run from your abilities. So you stay away from people, away from the cities, the asshole Wardens, the world in general. You don’t want to chance it, not that you ever had a chance in their world. Not with your name, you abilities, hell even with your bought biotag. Still, you can pretend you are someone else and maybe find some peace. Lonely peace, but at least some. That’s more than you can say for your parents. Then the bullshit Nova Protection Act came through. You were walking through some street a couple of months after it passed through out of necessity (God knows you sure as shit didn’t want to be in the city) when you saw it: a Warden dragging off a screaming kid to a truck while her mother tried to get to her child. Another Warden smacked her across the face, sending her to the ground. So many people watched and no one did anything. They just stood there like sheep as this woman still tried to fight against the armed man. Images flash before your mind: your mother screaming, you fighting against the Warden holding you as they dragged your father away.

In that second you realize that you’ve become a sheep. These four years have made you exactly what you hate. And it’s time to wake up.

The next few minutes are chaos. The sheep scatter, the Wardens lay crumpled on the ground and the child was in her mother’s arms. You told them to run and she thanked you. You can’t remember the last time that happened. It sparked something in you. For the first time you felt alive. You left the Wardens alive, but you did damage them a bit and their car was a smouldering ruin by the time you got away. Strange how you’ve followed in your parents’ footsteps: through foster homes, group homes, never staying in one place for long. It isn’t surprising that you’re labeled a fugitive.

It wasn’t long after that you found Yalena. She offered to help you to a safehouse but you refused. You had been sitting idle for far too long and you weren’t going to now. No, you were going to fight. It’s what you’re good at.

After all, maybe the world doesn’t need another hero, sometimes it needs a monster. And if you can save others from what was done to you, to your parents, what’s being done to innocents? Then you’ll be that monster.

Connections:

I imagine that Nyx’s relationship with Dinah is, like much of her life, complicated. There is so much potential between them and they could be amazing friends if only Nyx would give her the chance. She’s so envious of her because she’s so kind in spite of everything while she’s turned into what she is. She’s capable of things that she truly believes that she herself cannot give nor receive. If Nyx could, she would let her in, but she’s forced herself to be so guarded that she cannot help but think that there’s an angle behind Dinah’s kindness. After all, she must have an ulterior motive because why would she be nice to her

Even before, it was much the same. If she had met Dinah a little while before, her life might have been so different. Yet by then, she had given up any hope that someone might care about her and would’ve thought that Dinah should stop acting that way and 'grow up.’ She probably would have been a lot ruder and harsh towards her, but not cruel. A part of her would have been worried because it was only a matter of time before her spark died just like Nyx’s did.

With a little bit of time and especially if Dinah taught Nyx how to use her abilities, I see her opening up? Like going from not really enemies to like super super close? I kind of imagine that Dinah would be a calming presence and would be able to convince Nyx/hold her back from doing stupid reckless things. Plus I may have been stalking the Magicians tag and am totally going to reblog some gifsets cause they are literally perfect??? <3.<3 (kk I’m done rambling about them now I promise!)

For Leo, she’d be like 'ugh whatever’. Like she grates on Nyx’s nerves but she doesn’t really care? She pretty much just thinks of her as another asshat that thinks they know her when they know jack. Plus she would not appreciate being ordered around by her and acting like she’s better when they are all the same and want the same thing.

I’d love a partner in crime for her though? Someone that she’s kind of drawn to and they work well together? I imagine that they’re both fighters and tend to be at the front lines. Also maybe like a sibling figure? Someone who she kind of sees herself in a bit and just kind of connects to?

Changes:

I’d like to change her name to Ashwiyaa ‘Nyx’ Lowell

DETAILED IC INFORMATION

(Optional Stuff; This is all merely suggestions, none of it is required)

Headcanons + Chara Tropes + etc (up in a few): https://mockblognyx.tumblr.com/headcanons Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/elsieswriting/nyx/ Also I’m going to be posting graphics, ideas and such on the mock blog ;)

ANYTHING ELSE?

I’m going to be changing my url to 'mockblognyx’ cause having it 'misty’ is just confusing XP

Also I am so so so sorry for the rambling and the length O.o

[jam2289]

The Value of Horror Stories

Why do people like horror stories? What's the point? It may be different than you think.

The first thing you have to realize is that fiction is a highly advanced form of play. And, what's the purpose of play? Animals play to prepare themselves for the future. Lion cubs play hide and seek, chasing, wrestling, fighting, and killing. These are the skills that they will need for life.

When a lion becomes fully mature it no longer plays, it doesn't need to. There are some animals that never really grow up. Domesticated animals are usually neotenous, or child-like. Pigs are like baby boars, dogs are like baby wolves, cats are like baby panthers, etc.

Humans are neotenous our entire lives. This is why we play our entire lives, and why we can learn our entire lives. The type of play that you're involved with will depend on your environment. A child that has had a safe, happy, and protected life will probably play nice games. Most people don't have that experience of life though, and those nice games won't prepare you for the hard things in life. People naturally adapt their play to better prepare them for their expected future.

For instance, in the Nazi concentration camps the adults tried to distract children from the situation by getting them to play games. But the children invented their own games. The games that naturally emerged were ideally suited to prepare them for their reality. One such game is where a row of kids would stand across from a single child. The one child would close his eyes, and someone would punch him. Then he would open his eyes and be able to question the people in line. They would all deny it, and it was his job to be able to determine who was lying. Military psychologists couldn't design a better training program to prepare people to be able to stay calm, keep concentrated, and detect a lie while being in physical pain.

Fiction is a highly complex form of play because it's not just about a single skill, or even a set of skills, it's about all of life. A narrative is showing human behavioral patterns: how we make decisions, why, who's good, who's evil, what's valuable, consequences, and the behavior patterns of other humans throughout their lives. This is an immense amount of information. A good story can contain more useful information for life than any other form of communication. And, it contains all of this information is a safe place, a virtual reality. Fiction allows us to focus our awareness on the important parts of life and become aware of the key pieces so that we can live better lives. It's more condensed than life itself, it's beyond reality, it's a hyperreality.

That's why play and fiction exist; now, our main subject - horror. Life isn't all rainbows and unicorns. The underlying fabric of life is tragic. A happy ending is just a story that hasn't ended yet. We all die in the end. Some people live on, you may say, but they will die later. Everything that has ever been created will be destroyed. Everything that has ever been done will be forgotten. How do we confront such tragedy? Do we decide it's too overwhelming and that it's best to cut this suffering short? Do we go insane in the face of absurdity? Do you confront it with defiance? Do you redeem the suffering of life by voluntarily confronting it? Do we lock values into place for all of eternity as we move through life? There are volumes and volumes of books written in philosophy and psychology about these subjects, but the stories we tell about these things are more important because they are what provide the examples for us to imitate or to avoid. Narratives are the ideal way for us to decide how we will confront the suffering and tragedy of life.

Let me emphasize how powerful this influence is. "The Sorrows of Young Werther" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is about a young man that is in love with an older woman who is engaged to another man. He struggles with what he should do. He thinks about killing the other man, but won't do it because it violates his morals. So, he kills himself instead. This book is what launched the 24-year-old Goethe into fame. He wrote it in less than 6 weeks. So many young men committed suicide in similar clothes to the Werther character, with similar pistols, with similar letters, with the book by their side, that in the late 1700s multiple countries banned the book. That's how deeply narratives affect the human soul. We humans are made to structure our lives around narratives, because our lives are narratives.

All life is tragic, but human life goes beyond tragedy. Humans have a unique ability to experience empathy, to feel what other people feel. This allows us to be nice and good. It also allows us to be evil. Once you understand how you can be hurt, you understand how to hurt someone else. Now, you can torture. This desire to hurt people to see them hurt is malevolence. It's a unique human capacity, and it's what we consider truly evil. Most incidents of post-traumatic stress disorder are from experiencing true malevolence in either someone else, or in ourselves. But, we are going to confront it, so how can we learn to handle it? (Many people don't realize that there is such a thing as post-traumatic growth. This is where people that encounter a situation that is traumatizing become stronger and more resourceful afterward. It's more common than PTSD. How do we do that?)

The natural state of life is anxiety. If you take a cat and put it into a completely new place it will be anxious. The first thing it will do is freeze, then it will look around, then it will sniff around. Slowly it will start to explore the area, as it becomes more aware of the area, as it learns more about its new world, the less anxious it becomes. It's the same with humans. Anxiety is the initial state of life, being anything other than anxious comes from learning.

We are thrown into life, we don't choose it, it's chosen for us. The world is a confusing place, life is tragic, we are anxious, we encounter evil and malevolence, and if all of this isn't enough there are also monsters.

It's easy to find real monsters in the world, the news loves to make them famous. Can you handle an encounter with a monster? How would you know? What would you do?

There are certain patterns that are built into our minds and into the world. Think about a dragon. What is a dragon? It's a predator. The ultimate predator for medium-size mammals. Guess what humans are, medium-size mammals. Dragons are a combination of predatory reptile, plus predatory feline, plus predatory bird. Imagine a crocodile, plus a lion, plus an eagle. Now imagine that that animal breathes fire. It's the ultimate predator. That's what dragons symbolize, and that's why they're important. This same idea has taken other forms, griffins are part lion and part eagle, and chimeras are part lion and part snake, but no matter what form it takes the encounter with the predator is something that we as humans need to learn how to handle to live life.

These types of patterns dominate fiction, and especially fantasy and horror. Vampires are attractive people that suck the life out of you, aliens are strangers that you don't know how to interact with, werewolves are humans that hide a beast within, Jekyll and Hyde is a splitting of the personality, Frankenstein is the perfect thing that we try to create which goes horribly wrong and destroys us, zombies are death itself and deaths hunger to consume life.

Horror is nothing other than humans confronting the tragedy, malevolence, and monsters that are in the world in a place where you don't have to experience the horrible consequences afterward. A place where you can confront your own fears and limitations and still come out alive. A place where you can confront the evil without and the evil within and try to find a way to redeem the value of life and dig some meaning out of it in the face of such overwhelming odds. Life is what made horror, and horror is made for life.

________________________________________________

You can find more of what I'm doing at http://www.JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com

[agirlinjapan]

Red Data Girl: World Heritage Girl (Week 29)

Red Data Girl: World Heritage Girl By Noriko Ogiwara A Translation

Miss the last piece? Read it here!

Check out the RDG Translation twitter!

Whoa! It’s the second to last week of RDG 4! Part of me wants to ask where the time went but really, it’s been a while since I started posting RDG 4 and I know it. (28 weeks x 2... Wow.) End of semester work is somehow still dragging by. All the final work is done but I still have two classes that keep meeting even when everything else is over so I have work to do for them. I’ll get a week of vague respite in the middle of June but then summer semester starts right up from there. Still, I’m graduating at the end of July so it’ll all be worth it!

Red Data Girl: World Heritage Girl By Noriko Ogiwara Chapter 4: Boundary Part 3 (1 of 2)

Coming together as a group, the student government members met and discussed their findings in front of the classroom building. The result was a decision to set up the tent for the parents’ bazaar in front of the library.

The space had merit. Seeing as the haunted house would be on its other side, the area would be busy, even on the first day. Plus, the bazaar’s suggested location was big and open, located between the classroom building and the lecture hall.

Honoka had been the one to suggest the library location and while the first year students had not spoken up, it seemed like an awfully strange coincidence that the chosen space would be the center of the barrier which they had just discovered. Izumiko had wanted to object but she couldn’t say at all whether it was a good or bad thing that the parents would be filling up the space.  

When the student government headed towards the lecture hall, the Souda siblings quietly slipped away to go see the place that Miyuki had told them about. The sky had already grown dark by this time which worried Izumiko. Still, seeing as Manatsu would be with his sister and he was confident in what he was doing, she supposed they would be okay. If Manatsu was coming along then Masumi could join them if the need arose.

Manatsu, who was rarely serious about anything, did not cling to his sister on a regular basis. It was clear that he wanted to do very different things than she did. However, when there was danger involved he would never leave his sister on her own. Izumiko was envious of their bond.

Miyuki and I are totally different. And speaking of that…

Her one wish for Mayura and Manatsu was that they would call on their deceased sibling, Masumi. Izumiko was sure that the spirit in Togakushi would acquiesce to the pair’s resonating call and come to them. The triplets were of one body and mind. It was something Izumiko would never have.

When the Souda siblings returned safely, Izumiko was diligently spray painting Styrofoam on the lecture hall’s newspaper covered floor. Mayura and Manatsu beckoned Izumiko and Miyuki over to them with a hand gesture. Once they were all standing in the corner, the pair conveyed their information in whispers.

“We get what you were saying, Miyuki. And you too, Izumiko. Whatever’s buried out there is just like what Takayanagi set up on the website before. When I realized that, my scar really hurt,” Mayura said, her voice angry.

Manatsu stood by her side, looking serious.

“It makes me sick. This dangerous guy’s been up to something this whole time without anyone knowing it and he’s been acting like none of this has anything to do with him.”

“I don’t think many students go that far out into the woods but it’s still there…” Mayura added.

Miyuki nodded in agreement. “If we dig it up, I know it’ll be something pretty bad. Did you guys try to get it?”

“Masumi could get rid of it, no problem,” Manatsu answered a bit uncomfortably. “But Masumi’s an outsider once he leaves Togakushi and he only gets involved when Mayura or I get hurt. Besides, trying something like that on purpose would be insane.”

“Don’t try it,” Izumiko said without thinking. She recalled the shattered windows of the student government room, Mayura and Miyuki injured and covered with cuts, and the monster like thing that had flown around and around in the air. That was something she didn’t want happening a second time.

“I wonder why they made the barrier. Mayura, Manatsu, do you know?”

“I want to know that, too,” Manatsu responded immediately. “If there are spirits being called to the school, what’s the reason behind it?”

Mayura paused for a moment to think.

“…I’m not quite certain of this yet but it was probably a big deal for Tanayanagi to give up using shikigami. Izumiko could detect them, right? We’re guessing that shikigami and spirits are different. Even so, Manatsu and I still can’t see them that well even if they’re spirits and they must be something close to what Masumi is.”

As his hands were dirty with paint, Miyuki rubbed his face with an arm.

“Would vengeful spirits be considered the same as ghosts?” he asked. “I’m not sure if I could define them as the same thing. You could think about vengeful spirits as things that harm living beings but I’ve also heard ghost stories where people just look at ghosts and die sudden deaths.”

“When you say that, I guess divine spirits, shikigami, ghosts, and vengeful spirits are just categories that living people like us have made up.”

The four of them weren’t sure what to think.

“If the school has become a hospitable place for spirits, at least that should mean that it’s become hospitable for Masumi too,” Mayura said, sounding a little strained. “If we call for help, it should definitely be easy for him to come. But I don’t really want to show off him off to the enemy for nothing. He’s become our secret weapon after all.”

Miyuki agreed. “And what about the teachers who we think might be diviners?” he asked. “Is Takayanagi the sort of person to drag an adult into this game?”

Mayura shrugged. “He’s the hope of the diviners. In the world of magic, apprenticeship is necessary. High schoolers like us are just a group of fledglings. No matter what, there’ll be powerful adults backing us up for sure.”

“That’s probably what Takayanagi was saying, too,” Izumiko said without thinking. She instantly regretted it as soon as she realized what she had said. Miyuki shot her a particularly cold look and she made herself small.

“…He said that no one was standing on their own feet.”  

There was no judgement on Mayura’s face.

“I see… Then I get it now. That’s got to be the point of the parents’ bazaar. So we can’t complain about helpers coming in from outside during the festival either.”

“Are you saying that the bazaar was placed outside of the library so that they could help from there?”

“I don’t know but we need to be careful.”

Miyuki eyed Mayura appraisingly. “Mayura, how are you planning to counter him? Do you already know how you’re going to start?”

“We have backup too,” she said as if considering her words. “If he plans to use his support, we’ll throw in ours as well.”

“With the barrier as it is?”

“It would be difficult to drop the barrier by the day of the festival. There’s not much time left. And anyway, we still need to think up a way that’ll let us drop the barrier in the first place.”

Miyuki considered this for a moment and then nodded. “I’d say the risk is fifty-fifty. We’ll keep an eye on the chemistry club in one way or another but I don’t think we should interfere in anyway. We can’t give ourselves away.”

After Mayura and Izumiko had finished their work and returned to the girl’s dorm, Mayura seemed to remember what Miyuki had said earlier that day. She quickly turned to Izumiko who was waking up her computer and asked, “Now that I think about it, Sagara’s been taking chemistry and biology as a first year, hasn’t he? I think I might take chemistry in my second year but I don’t recommend it for you and Manatsu. Sagara is taking science now though, right?”

So far, Mayura, Manatsu, and Izumiko had only chosen to take the required earth science class. Not having a class that utilized the science laboratory, they only saw Mr. Morozumi and Mr. Kazuma in passing in the school building. Izumiko turned in her seat towards Mayura and inclined her head.

“Yeah, I guess. I know he did really well in his math class too.”

“During exams, he got perfect scores on everything. My dad knows a lot of elite people in the social sciences. I’ve met them a bunch of times and I think that Sagara’s the type that’s going to head towards a job in politics or business. He’s totally different from the academics.”

Izumiko casually recalled the book Miyuki had read over spring break. If anything could be said about it, it had sounded like a biology book.

“I think Sagara likes biology. He’s always been interested in insects.”

“Maybe he wants to go to a medical school. Like Tokyo University Medical School,” Mayura said expectantly.

Her tone made Izumiko’s eyes go wide. She had never imagined Miyuki in a white lab coat until now.

“He’s said he wants to go to Tokyo University but I haven’t asked him what he wants to major in. We’ve never talked about college classes.”  

“Maybe he’ll become a surgeon in the future and perform miraculous heart procedures,” Mayura said, describing her own plans. “I want to do that if I can but even if I get good math grades, I still have to be a science genius. I probably won’t make it. I’m starting to figure that out. But if Sagara decides to study medicine, he’ll be able to shop around.”

“Shop around?”

“I mean, schools will want to convince him to come,” Mayura answered casually with a laugh. “He’s friends with his teachers. Of course he said he won’t pry into their secrets. Unlike the people who just have to be careful about their grades, he can’t get on their bad sides just for the sake of the school festival. That’s why we have to look for someone who doesn’t have a connection to this right now. Izumiko, will you help me? All you’d have to do is use your special sight to help me look for a little bit.”

“Sure. Alright.” Izumiko nodded without having to consider it.

However, her thoughts changed course after she got into bed.

What if Miyuki really does want to be a doctor in the future?...

Izumiko did not have any idea of what she wanted to do after graduating from school. That worried her as well. After all, if she were a normal student, she would obviously have something she wanted to do in the future. It would be even stranger for an excellent student like Miyuki with expectations coming at him from all sides to not have a dream of what he wanted to do next.

…Miyuki definitely has the ability to help society. If he becomes a doctor, or a teacher, or makes a name for himself in the political or financial world, none of that would be unexpected.    

Izumiko was a completely different story.

I wonder what I should do…

Thinking about it made her chest hurt. She supposed she should choose something that allowed her to stop thinking about how she wanted to get closer to Miyuki.

Keep reading!