#eighth century human weirdness

[adventure-showdown]

What is your favourite Doctor Who story?

ROUND 1 MASTERPOST

synopses and propaganda under the cut

Vampire Science

Synopsis

In the days when the Time Lords were young, their war with the Vampires cost trillions of lives on countless worlds. Now the Vampires have been sighted again, in San Francisco. Some want to coexist with humans, using genetic engineering in a macabre experiment to find a new source of blood. But some would rather go out in a blaze of glory — and UNIT's attempts to contain them could provoke another devastating war.

The Doctor strikes a dangerous bargain, but even he might not be able to keep the city from getting caught in the crossfire. While he finds himself caught in a web of old feuds and high-tech schemes, his new companion Sam finds just how deadly travelling with the Doctor can be.

Propaganda

I could say many things about this book, but honestly the fact that there’s a vampire snail is enough (anonymous)

you know that meme with the wikipedia page that's like "instead of brain there is [insert thing here]"? that was me after reading this. it's extremely good (anonymous)

vampire crack squirrels. (@eighthdoctor )

Camp! And! Vamp! Also 8 keeps getting swarmed by kittens (anonymous)

Alien Bodies

Synopsis

On an island in the East Indies, in a lost city buried deep in the heart of the rainforest, agents of the most formidable powers in the galaxy are gathering. They have been invited there to bid for what could turn out to be the deadliest weapon ever created.

When the Doctor and Sam arrive in the city, the Time Lord soon realises they've walked into the middle of the strangest auction in history — and what's on sale to the highest bidder is something more horrifying than even the Doctor could have imagined, something that could change his life forever.

And just when it seems things can't get any worse, the Doctor finds out who else is on the guest list.

Propaganda

Doctor ends up at an auction for his own dead body (anonymous)

One of the most notable Eighth Doctor books, the first by Lawrence Miles and the beginning of Faction Paradox. Generally very good. (anonymous)

Banger of a story where 8 goes to an auction in order to purchase 3's dead body. Then the weird shit starts happening. (@eighthdoctor )

Seeing I

Synopsis

He has no idea why Samantha Jones ran away from him.

Sam is homeless on the streets of the colony world of Ha'olam, trying to face what's just happened between her and the Doctor. He's searching for her, and for answers. While she struggles to survive in a strange city centuries from home, the Doctor comes across evidence of alien involvement in the local mega-corporation, INC — and is soon confined to a prison that becomes a hell of his own making.

Where did INC's mysterious eye implants really come from? What is the company searching for in the deserts? What is hiding in the shadows, watching their progress?

Faced with these mysteries, separated by half a world, Sam and the Doctor each face a battle — Sam to rebuild her life, the Doctor to stay sane. And if they find each other again, what will be left of either of them? "

Propaganda

did you want 8 slowly breaking down under extended mental torture? of course you did. also eye gore. (@eighthdoctor )

The Scarlet Empress

Synopsis

Arriving on the almost impossibly ancient planet of Hyspero, a world where magic and danger walk hand in hand, the Doctor and Sam are caught up in a bizarre struggle for survival.

Hyspero has been ruled for thousands of years by the Scarlet Empresses, creatures of dangerous powers — powers that a member of the Doctor's own race is keen to possess herself: the eccentric time traveller and philanderer known only as Iris Wildthyme.

As the real reasons for Iris's obsession become clear, the Doctor and Sam must embark on a perilous journey across deserts, mountains, forests and oceans. Both friends and foes are found among spirits, djinns, alligator men and golden bears — but in a land where the magical is possible, is anything really as it seems?

Propaganda

features my favourite couple of all time, a giant spider and a cyborg who fall in love and fuse into one giant ice spider robot. and they were both girls (it is also a beautiful story about stories themselves and the regulars are at their best) (anonymous)

Unnatural History

Synopsis

"They called it the Millennium Effect", said the Doctor. "But the millennium was only beginning."

San Francisco has changed since the start of 2000. The laws of physics keep having acid flashbacks. There are sightings of creatures from outside our dimensions, stranded aliens and surrealist street performers. The city has become a mecca for those who revel in impossible creatures — and those who want to see them pinned down and put away.

Sam's past is catching up with her — a past she didn't know she had. The Doctor is in danger of becoming the pièce de résistance in a twisted collection of creatures. And beneath the waters of the Bay, something huge is waiting.

With time running out, the Doctor must choose which to sacrifice — a city of wonders, or the life of an old and dear friend.

Propaganda

You too want to read a full novel explanation of why Dr Who canon is Like That (hint: it's little assholes who opt to look like 10 year olds wearing skull masks). Also unicorns in San Francisco. Unsurprisingly does feature Fitz being astoundingly gay for 8. (@eighthdoctor )

The villain of the week wants the Doctor to have a consistent backstory. This is bad because it’s not Doctor Who without plotholes and inconsistencies. Plus, it was published in 1999 (?) and there’s a line about how Gallifrey is always destroyed and un-destroyed. They didn’t even know… (anonymous)

Interference

Synopsis

Five years ago, Sam Jones was just a schoolgirl from Shoreditch. Of course, that was before she met up with the Doctor and found out that her entire life had been stage-managed by a time-travelling voodoo cult. Funny how things turn out, isn't it?

Now Sam's back in her own time, fighting the good fight in a world of political treachery, international subterfuge, and good old-fashioned depravity. But she's about to learn the first great truth of the universe: that however corrupt and amoral your own race might be, there's always someone in the galaxy who can make you look like a beginner.

Ms Jones has just become a minor player in a million-year-old power struggle... and as it happens, so has the Doctor.

Both of him, actually.

Propaganda

Father Kreiner war crimes because they are so in love with the Doctor and so depressed they want to die Romeo and Juliet style. Oh and it is the superior third Doctor regeneration story. (Anastasia Cousins)

[masked-rat]

Space Marine Chapter: The Impalers

Posting this here because I would kind of like it to survive for posterity, and the odds of me coming back to 40k are pretty low.

Going to skip the Index Astartes entry because, let's face it, they're actually Night Lords.

They are *not* "lost in the Warp" or something like that. They're literal heretics who fought against the Imperium in the Heresy. And at some point, they realized that it's hard to enjoy the freedom of being Chaotic if you don't have the logistics. And while Chaos is good for freedom... it really sucks for logistics.

So, they take some old battle barges that can still pass for loyalist, come up with a cock- and- bull story about being a Raven Guard successor chapter that really had gotten lost in the warp, made a big show of dropping off a bunch of daemon weapons and warp artifacts to buy off the Inquisition, "return to their homeworld" which is now an industrial world (as in, 20th century tech, not like a forge world), the whole shebang.

Everybody buys it. And sure, they have to fight for the False Emperor every now and then, but on the other hand, the False Emperor's logistics are worth it. The Mechanicus doesn't even question when they have the industrial world's manufactories start building equipment to *their* specifications. And the gene- seed? Perfectly clean, because Night Lords geneseed is perfectly clean.

So by the time Guilliman returns, they've gone from about a hundred Marines to five and a half companies. Plus dreadnoughts, all that. Nobody cares that they're doing Night Lords shit to the planets they attack, because it's done in the name of the (False) Emperor.

Everything goes swimmingly until the Chapter Master gets summoned to meet Guilliman and receive the chapter's allotment of Primaris.

Guilliman takes one look at him, chokeslams him to the floor, and demands to know why a traitor like him should be let live.

"All hail the False Emperor."

Guilliman listens to his elevator pitch, sighs, and then tells him that he's going to be keeping a eye on that chapter, and sending him back with a different contingent of Primaris.

---

Org- wise, they still have ten standard companies. But that's where the similarity ends. The first squad of each company is terminators and veterans, and the tenth is scouts. And each company's marines are trained as more than tactical- one through four are trained in jump packs, five thru seven in bikes, eight in speeders, and nine and ten as devastators. The training emphasis is on mentorships between the veterans and regular marines, and the regular marines and scouts.

When the Primaris arrive, up to two squads are assigned to each battle company, and they get worked into the mentorships. (Edit: But, about 100 of the "old guard" are *never* up for Crossing the Rubicon. They're the ones who were the original hundred- ish Night Lords.) And those Primaris- of unspecified geneseed- are let in on the secret.

By the end of M41, the first through third, fifth and sixth, and ninth companies are combat- ready. The eighth is at half strength. It's rumored the seventh won't be combat ready until the Imperium is willing to accept jetbikes again.

They really do have a couple of Mk.14 jetbikes, but they're not used because it'd be too much of a lift for even gullible Imperials.

---

Genetic- wise, they're hard to distinguish from Raven Guard other than a mutation to the neuroglottis. Impalers have multiple pheromone- sensitive pits in their tongues, which are attuned to the stress hormones related to fear. So they can taste human fear.

They're also cannibals. They can and will eat humans, under the leadership of their chaplains and apothecaries. They try to play it off as a religious observance, but... I mean, they're really Night Lords so they probably just like doing it.

---

Armor, worth noting they use a weird pattern of armor based on reverse- engineering some Mk.2 and Mk.3 armors they had lying around. They refer to their armor as Mk.2a.

---

I think that's it. Hope someone likes this. It's probably as close as they'll ever get to seeing the tabletop. At this point, if I got back into 40k, I'd probably play Eldar.

[institute-of-planar-shitposts]

*hops up and down ecstatically* I wanna know about Sunshine!! :3

(I'm about to go to bed though, I just wanted to send this in before I forget to tomorrow lol <3 )

GAB YOU ARE AN ENABLER W H Y

Putting this under a read more because. Yeah jskdjkdcl

OKAY SO!

Sunshine is an eighth bird. Just based on her name you can guess why. Don't judge me okay I got swept up by several people doing the same on tiktok and it's just. It's a comfort media.

Her full name is Sunshine Fairfield and she's a half elf. Around the time of the mission/life in Faerun she's human equivalent of early 20s right along with Mags and Lucretia, due to being half elf she's technically like... 70-90? I think. Half elf lifetimes are weird I'll look it up later -

Anyway I. Am kinda writing an entire fic for her but whether I post it or not is an entire question of its own so. Yeah but anyway!!

She's a bard with a couple levels in sorcerer (metaphor for musician gifted kid burnout jdjdnkfkf) and most of the spells she has from the sorcerer class are either ice-based or storm-based. She's aroace and gets to be best friends with Lucretia over the century, as well as Magnus. I haven't fully decided on a bird name for her; I'm kinda split between "the heart", "the voice", "the star", or making "the lover" plural to include her. Currently going with the last one but 🤷🏼‍♀️

I kinda have this idea that over the century, she grows from being quiet and insecure to bright and confident and loud. And then she loses it again >:3 She joins the Bureau mostly as a helper to Johann but ends up accidentally becoming a Seeker and then less accidentally a Reclaimer. Learning about the century hits her particularly hard and after the Hunger is defeated she kinda shuts down, has to be talked back out by the rest of them.

Idk if anyone would actually be interested in reading the fic for her but in case someone is. There's a few more things about her I'm keeping secret :3

[hotdemonsummer]

Obey Me! and Angelology and Demonology

 alternatively titled Lets Get Into Lucifer

This is yet another long, long post about the lore of Obey Me! from the perspective of historical and theological angelology, and demonology or the study of angels and demons respectively, because I think it’s neat. I also talk way too much. I’m scared to check the word count on this.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert on anything, and certainly not on religion. I just like comparative theology. Also, spoilers for lesson 43/44.

What is an angel? And what, in turn, is a demon? It depends on who you ask. All religions that have angels have a general consensus that they are spiritual beings, intermediaries of some kind of higher power. Demons, on the other hand, are much more vague beyond general malevolence toward humanity. Any connection between the two is entirely dependent on the culture and religion in question. Some have angels but not demons, and many have vice versa.

There’s generally four kinds of spirits that are considered demons:

Dead people with extremely bad vibes (think mogwai, yuurei, and other revenants)

Neutral-to-malevolent energy, physical form optional (think djinni or yokai)

Cult subjects (including foreign gods and ancestor worship)

Corrupted angels (either fallen or Nephilim)

The word demon comes from the Greek δαίμων, or daimon, but the concept of a demon is much older than the Greeks. The original daimon had none of the malevolent, evil associations that we now think of. Instead, daimon just described a kind of powerful spiritual entity (for example, δαίμων is the term Euripides uses for the new god Dionysus in The Bacchae). What we think of as demons now didn’t exist in Greek culture, and the negative associations came when the Tanakh was translated from Hebrew to Greek, but even then shedim aren’t identical to the contemporary depiction of demons that we see in Obey Me!, which, like everything else in Western society, came about through the domination of Christianity.

Shedim, the precursor to the Christian demon, was more or less a term for false gods, a title for the various Levantine pagan gods (see: origin of Beelzebub, Belphegor, and pretty much every demon that starts with Bel- or Bal-). 

Obey Me! pretty much canonizes Type 2 and Type 4 demons, with characters like Diavolo, Barbatos, and Satan as Type 2 and the other brothers as Type 4. Historically, Beelzebub and Belphegor are Type 3 (Beelzebub and Belphegor being Levantine gods), Mammon being Type 2 (a general personification of Wealth, although Milton did write him as a Type 4 in Paradise Lost) and Asmodeus being somewhere in between Type 2 and 3 (being heavily derived from a Zoroastrian daeva of wrath). Lucifer is, historically, the only consistently Type 4 demon.

I don’t think I have to explain what a fallen angel is to any OM! fan. But I will. 

Let’s talk about these guys. We’re all familiar with Satan’s weird complex about Lucifer, and I’m sure we’re all equally familiar with how Satan and Lucifer are terms used interchangeably for whatever being is The Big Bad of Hell. However, they’re not synonymous.

Satan derives from the same Proto-Semitic root as shayatan, which... should be pretty obvious, but nonetheless has a pretty analogous role as a tempter of men in the Abrahamic religions. Beyond that “tempter of men” title, though, the actual details of what Satan is is incredibly varied, including whether or not “Satan” is a name or a title. In Christianity, the view of Satan as an extremely powerful and evil corrupter of man, wholly opposed to God, came around the Middle Ages, when witchcraft hysteria spread.

Lucifer, on the other hand, is simultaneously a figure originating in Christianity and much, much older than it. The term of course means “light-bringer”, and is heavily associated with the morning star, aka the planet Venus. To make a very long story short, many Mesopotamian, Levantine, and Mediterranean cultures saw the lowering of Venus toward the horizon at night and thought, “hey, thats a pretty neat image!” and created stories about heavenly beings falling toward the earth. Of course, they didn’t use the ‘term’ Lucifer, that’s Latin, and came from the Vulgate Bible.

The term Lucifer does not exclusively refer to The Evil Fallen Angel™ in Christian texts (some very sacred things like the Exsultet explicitly refer to Jesus as Lucifer), but it sure is the most popular interpretation. In works like Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy, the general idea is that the angel Lucifer rebelled against God in some way and was cast out of Heaven, then becoming Satan, and thus the two are one and the same.

(inb4 some Quora-type chews me out for accuracy’s sake, the “lucifer” mentioned in Isaiah 14:12 refers not to any angel, but to a Babylonian king. The whole fallen angel thing, much like the beatitudes or Bethlehem or Christmas, is a fusion of pagan influences.)

In other words, Lucifer is always and has always been a fallen angel. Satan, on the other hand, doesn’t have those connections to angelhood, and the two figures have an undeniable connection despite their clear individual differences. Sound familiar?

The next question is then what kind of angel is Lucifer anyway? to which you might be thinking, wait, there are different kinds? Yes, holy shit, there are so many kinds of angels and very little consensus on what they are. In terms of Christian angelology (because again, Lucifer is a uniquely Christian/derivative Christian figure unless you exclude Leland’s Aradia which I don’t because lbr they were Italian anyways), most hierarchies are based on the work of this guy:

This man has the incredibly succinct name of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and sometime in the 5th century he wrote a book called De Coelesti Hierarchia. It orders the *WTNV voice* hierarchy of angels into three levels called spheres, and each sphere has three sub-levels called choirs. Many, but not all, of the choirs are adopted from various Jewish angelic hierarchies. If you thought that it was just angels and then archangels were, like, the middle management version of angels then you are very wrong. I’m sorry that television lied.

You know who also lied? Tumblr dot com and any post that implies that the true form of angels is a big wheel with a bunch of eyes. That is, in fact, a descriptor for only one kind of angel: ophanim, or thrones. The depiction of angels runs the gamut from winged humanoids to multi-winged humanoids with multiple animal heads to burning snakes to vague heavenly mist.

Archangels and angels are the eighth and ninth lowest choirs of angels, respectively. Angels, or malakhim, are the default messengers of God and the choir from which guardian angels come from. Generally, if someone claims to have a message from God delivered to them, it will be an angel doing it. If it’s really important, it’ll be an archangel. Everyone else literally has more important things to do. No one’s getting visions from dominions.

Lucifer’s (the theological one) actual designation is kind of a mystery. Depending on the text, Lucifer has been described as a seraph (the highest), a cherub (the second highest), or an archangel (the eighth). According to Thomas Aquinas:

Lucifer, chief of the sinning angels, was probably the highest of all the angels. But there are some who think that Lucifer was highest only among the rebel angels.

Not very helpful, but hey. The question remains: what kind of angel is Lucifer, and this time I mean our Lucifer. 

We know that Michael, just like his namesake, is an archangel. We also know that (SPOILERS) Simeon, unlike his namesake, is an archangel as well (Simeon is a saint, not an angel.) Lucifer likely was at their level, if not higher.

However, Lucifer was also a six-winged angel, a depiction generally reserved for seraphim (and cherubim, but far less frequently).

Moreover, in terms of role, an angellic Lucifer fits well with that of the powers, the sixth choir. Powers are in charge of moving the heavenly bodies, and are depicted as powerful warriors dressed in beautiful armor. It's fitting for a being so closely tied to the morning star to be a power, after all.

So, with all that considered, what is Lucifer? 

Well, he’s a seraph (or saraph, technically). Why? Because Simeon is somehow a seraph and an archangel (I have already written too much to unpack that bullshit), and Mammon was a throne (remember those wheels with eyes?) and Beel was a cherub and therefore Lucifer had to be higher than both of them (interestingly big brother Mammon is in a lower choir than little brother Beel). This makes Michael kind of, well... weird, given the archangels’ low rank.

Some like to differentiate between archangel the eighth choir and Archangel, with a capital A, as a term for any high-ranking angel. While this is likely what Solmare is doing, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that this has zero basis in any religious text whatsoever and is solely done for the convenience of not remembering anything besides angel and archangel. Which is like, fine, but I’m a pedantic jerk who I found claims to the contrary while researching and I felt the need to correct that.

Anyways, the more you know.

[doctenwho]

Ten’s First (real) Halloween

Hello! Thank so much for the prompt! Sorry this is a day late, I meant to do it yesterday, but got distracted carving a pumpkin spiderman and sitting on the step with my mom to greet trick or treaters! I hope you all had a great Halloween though!

I should probably start off saying that I’ve never seen Pulp Fiction, and I also don’t Halloween party at all. Hopefully this turned out good anyways. I jumped ahead a bit with the prompts to do this one before I felt too awkward to complete it. Can’t really post a Halloween fic mid November, but I’m back to sticking to the order things come in!

Warnings: None

Word Count: 3,557

Summary: A Halloween fic, read the prompt above!

(Gif doesn’t belong to me, credit to the creator!)

“I’ve decided,” you told the Doctor as you made your way into the console room and plopped yourself down on the chair. You looked up the Doctor’s profile from behind, grinning to yourself.  

The Doctor froze where he was fiddling around with the console, turning to look at you with a questioning glance. He raised an eyebrow in question, eyeing you up and down before he finally replied with a confused, “decided what, exactly?”

“What we’re going to be for Halloween!” you chirped excitedly. You reclined back in the chair, grinning brightly at the Doctor as he blinked at you. “I’ve been thinking for weeks now, and I’ve finally picked out perfect costumes for us!”

“Uh?” the Doctor finally turned towards you, leaning back against the console and crossing his feet in front of him. The man cocked his head to the side, expressing a confusion you didn’t often see from him, “costumes?”

“Of course,” you gave a serious nod, crossing your arms across your chest to express the seriousness of the conversation, “costumes take a lot of thought, Doctor.”

“I believe you,” the Doctor responded, frowning thoughtfully at you, “I’m just... well, not quite sure what you’re on about, if I’m honest. Why are you so excited about this?”

“What?” you blinked in surprise, “you don’t know about Halloween? I thought you were an expert on everything earth?”

“No,” the Doctor straightened, “I know of the day, of course I do--” he gestured to himself, “Time-Lord, remember? I’ve visited the very first of each earth holiday through the years, All-Hallows Eve included—well, Samhain at least. Saw that and never bothered returning around the month of October.”

He eyed you for a second before continuing, “what I just can’t seem to understand is why you’d be excited for bonfires and the human race feeling the need to wear monster masks to ward off ghosts—which by the way, would not help at all.”

You stared at the man for a second, then another before you finally blinked at him, “so, you’re telling me you haven’t seen Halloween on earth since like the eighteenth century?”

“More like the eighth century,” the Doctor corrected, scrunching his face up in distaste, “wasn’t a fan then, not a fan now. I’m more of a Christmas guy, I suppose.”

“The holiday has completely changed,” you told him, standing from your seat and moving towards him in excitement, “it’s not like... well, that anymore. Very few fires, and the dressing up is more for fun than to hide from, uhm, ghosts? It’s parties, and trick-or-treating door to door for sweets, and getting scared!”

“Really?” the Doctor scrunched his nose up, eyeing you where you stood before him with a bright smile.  

“Yeah,” you smiled, leaning into his space, “it’s for fun now, we’ve swayed a bit from hiding away from ghosts. Just modern traditions now.”

“I see,” the Doctor hummed, turning back towards the TARDIS console. “Sounds interesting.”

“It is,” you agreed with a smile, moving to stand beside him and observe his hands moving fluently along the knobs and dials on the console, “so, what do you think about heading to earth for Halloween this year?”

The Doctor turned his head towards you, gave you a crooked smile, “nah.”

And then you were landing.

----

“Come on,” you pleaded, “I’ve got the perfect costumes picked out for us, and it’ll look dumb if I go by myself when the costume is supposed to be a couples costume!”

The Doctor gave you a sideways glance, “and what are these costumes?”  

You’d let the conversation drop earlier (or rather, had gotten dragged into another space mess you and the Doctor needed to clean up), but you weren’t about to drop the subject. Now you had a personal mission to reintroduce the Doctor to modern Halloween and all its glory.  

“Okay,” you grinned, “so, I was planning on being Mia Wallace—I can pull it off, don’t you think? Actually, it doesn’t matter, it’s Halloween. Anyways, I think you’d make a great Vincent Vega. Plus, it would look weird if I showed up as Mia but I didn’t have a Vincent, right? I don’t think people would even know who we were if we didn’t show up together.”

“And... who’re these people?”

“They’re characters from Pulp Fiction,” you explained. “It’s a popular film down on earth—I can’t believe you’ve never heard of it.”

“Right,” the Doctor gave a nod, but you were sure he didn’t really understand what you were talking about. It was nice he pretended too thought. “I never agreed to this... costume thing. Doesn’t sound much different from hiding from ghosts to me. You’ll still be changing your appearance to hide.”

“It’s completely different, and we’re not hiding, it’s for fun,” you scoffed, slightly offended, but not really since this was the Doctor, “we’re going to a party, my cousin’s Halloween party. And besides, the characters don’t even have masks, they’re regular people. Clothes, makeup, wigs.”

“Well then, this holiday really has strayed from its roots then, hasn’t it?”

“Maybe,” you shrugged, “I don’t think it’s changed much.”

The Doctor gave you a tilt of his head,smile small, “right, well, you didn’t get to experience Samhain, now did you? You’ve got nothing to compare current Halloween too.” You pouted at the man, but he didn’t seem too bothered as he continued fiddling with the TARDIS.

“It really is fun,” you attempted, “it’s probably super different from the first Halloween you didn’t like, but, like, in a good way. Halloween is the best! And all my friends will be there, and the costumes are always great—there's a costume contest.”

“I can always drop you off,” the Doctor suggested with a glance back at you. “You know I’d never keep you here against your will, just say the word and I’ll return you to earth.”

“No,” you groaned, “that ruins the fun. I can’t show up alone again,” you sighed slumping in the chair, “if you’re not going there’s barely a point in me going. I want to have fun with you, and celebrate the holiday with you. Besides, I’ve already got the costumes made up. You had everything in your collection of clothes for a Vincent costume, and I already had most of Mia’s clothes. It’s perfect, Doctor!”

“Gatherings aren’t for me,” the Doctor replied, “friends and family of my companions? Nothing ever goes right when the friends and families of companions know of me and where I take you, believe me on that one.”

“But it’s Halloween,” you pouted, “no one will be asking about any of that, not one says anything serious. And we don’t have to stay for long, we can just pop in and leave. I just... want to show you that it’s changed, Doctor. Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, and I want to share that with you.”

“(Y/N),” the Doctor turned to you, frowning. He was giving you that look he always did when he was about to disappoint you and hated doing it. He stared at you for a moment before he sighed heavily, “Maybe.”

“Maybe?” you blinked in surprise, “really?”

“Not a yes,” the man continued with a serious voice, “but I’ll think about it, alright?”

----

If you knew anything about older people, it was that a maybe wasn’t much more than a no. It was a no that left the receiver hopeful of a positive outcome. A failsafe, for the person to say maybe, so they could say no later, and not outright say it. Because a maybe left room for a yes, or, a more likely no.

So, as much as the maybe was progress, it was still basically a no. And you wouldn’t settle for an open-ended no. If the Doctor really didn’t want to go, you’d leave it after today. But you couldn’t settle for a devastating no closer to Halloween when you’d had your hopes up for so long.

“Pleaseee?” you begged. It was just about the time you’d usually head off to bed and leave the Doctor to his own devices for the night. You sat curled up on the chair in the console room, warm in pajamas as you watched the Doctor do whatever it was he usually did in the evening.  

This was the last time you’d ask for the Doctor to accompany you to the Halloween party. You weren’t going to force—not that you were sure you even could if you tried. He was superior to you, not that he pointed it out often. You’d rather a no than a maybe that got your hopes up.

You just really wanted to go this party with someone else, and who better than the Doctor? You’d always gone alone, or with friends, and your cousin always teased you about it. But what would he say when you showed up with someone? Someone as cool (and strange) as the Doctor?

And in matching costumes as well, it would be adorable, and finally break your cousin from his teasing.  

“You’re not gonna give up on this, are you?”

The Doctor hadn’t bothered looking away from his fiddling at the console, but you could hear some humor in his voice, “then again, I expect nothing less from humans who travel with me. I’d be persistent as well.”

“So you’ll come?” you perked up where you were slumped into the seat. “And don’t give me another maybe, I want a real answer, Doctor.”

“Yes, fine. Alright.” The man tipped his head in your direction, giving a small smile, “we can visit Halloween and go to your cousin’s party.”

----

“(Y/N)!” Your cousin greeted brightly, dressed as a vampire with fake blood smeared across his mouth. “You’re here,” he continued, pulling you into a hug, “haven’t heard from you in a bit, wasn’t sure you’d make it.”

“Wasn’t sure I would make it,” you explained honestly, “had trouble convincing my friend to join me.”

“Friend?” you cousin raised an eyebrow, looking around you easily, “and, where is this friend?”

“He’s... parking,” you shrugged.  

“He’s?” your cousin teased while waggling his eyebrows at you. You rolled your eyes, crossing your arms across your chest as you scoffed.  

“Yes, he’s,” you groaned, stressing the word in annoyance, “cut it out. Don’t act so surprised that I’ve brought a friend. And really don’t around him, got it?”

“I wasn’t,” he raised his hands in mock surrender, smile wide and teasing in a cousin-y way. Then, he was gesturing down to your costume, “now, what’re you supposed to be anyways?”

You almost groaned at your cousin not knowing your Mia Wallace costume, but you knew it was because your Vincent Vega wasn’t here with you. You opened your mouth to respond in a snarky reply, but before you could, the door was opening and your Vincent Vega was walking in with a hesitant expression.  

“Over here!” You called him over with a wave. You watched as the man’s expression settled on you, before he was stepping towards you and stopping at your side, eyeing your cousin.  

“This is... your friend?” your cousin tilted his head, eyeing the Doctor with a sideways glance.  

“’ello!” the Doctor grinned from your side, hesitance waning for the sake of proper introduction, which he really did love. The man gave your cousin a friendly wave, “I’m the Doctor.”

“The Doctor?” your cousin blinked at the Doctor before turning his confusion to you. You gave your relative a grin, setting your hand on the Doctor’s shoulder before nodding. “Alright, well,” your cousin clapped his hands together in an inviting gesture, “(Y/N), Doctor, enjoy the party then! Everyone’s here, and they’re all dying to see you!”

By everyone, your cousin really did mean everyone. The two of you had grown up in the same neighborhood, had gone to the same school and of course, had the same group of friends. Everyone you knew, your cousin knew as well. So, everyone really would be here.

You turned your head to watch as more people entered your cousin’s house, he threw a wave at them before grinning, “mingle,” he suggested, “I’ve gotta go play host some more. Have fun!”

You watched your cousin disappear to talk to the newcomers, a group of his sports friends you hadn’t seen in years. Some threw a wave back at you, and you returned it easily.

When you turned back to the Doctor he was looking around at everyone already mingling, eyed following around to the activities and dancing going on, “these people,” he mumbled, “they’re dressed as creatures. A mummy, a siren—is that a clown? Your cousin was a vampire...”

“Yeah,” you nodded, “and we’re dressed up as Mia and Vincent—and my friend over there is a pirate, and that guy is Mario. It’s all make believe, just for fun.”

“Right,” the Doctor gave a nod.

“Now,” you called excitedly, “let’s go see the jack-o-lanterns and carved pumpkins, ooh, and we can bob for apples. Haven’t done that in years.”

“I’m sorry, what?” the Doctor tilted his head at you, but he looked curious. And a curious Doctor was a fun Doctor.  

“I’ll show you,” you promised, “it’s fun. Trust me.” You grabbed the man’s hand, not waiting for a response as you dragged him through the party to where the music was the loudest and the activities were set up.

The Doctor loved the activities, as far as you could tell, at least. He dove right into bobbing for apples, competing good naturedly with some of the other guys surrounding the tub of water. You’d decided against dunking your head in the water, in fear that your Mia makeup would run and smear if wet.

You’d barely put any on the Doctor, but he still somehow managed to look like Vincent. You still couldn’t believe that the clothing the Doctor was wearing right now had been on the TARDIS already. You’d barely had to add anything to the look.  

Every activity you stumbled upon; the Doctor seemed to enjoy. He even carved a pumpkin (an image of a Dalek, which he’d done when you mentioned people liked to carve scary things in the spirit of the holiday). People didn’t know what it was, but they all loved his creativity and carving.

“So, who’s the handsome lad you brought with you tonight?” You looked to your side, where your longest friend was standing beside you. “And better question, where do I find one of my own?”

“His name’s the Doctor,” you informed, before grinning, “and he’s one of a kind. Sorry.”

“Figures,” your friend sighed, not even questioning the man’s name like you’d thought they would’ve, “the two of you are cute together, he seems to really like you.”

You opened your mouth to deny the fact when your friend continued on, “I mean, he’d have to like you a lot to do a couples costume. I didn’t even know you were seeing anyone.”

“I’m not,” you swallowed, “we’re just friends. And we’re just matching. Where’s the harm in that?”

“Sure,” your friend shrugged, “and I’m the Queen of England. You dressed him up in a costume matching yours and you try to tell me he’s just a friend?”

“Just friends,” you insisted, but you knew you were blushing, “and leave him alone, would you? He’s... not like us. He’s never had a Halloween like this.”

“Sure,” your friend shrugged, “I just wanted to check in before you take off like you always do and I don’t see you for months. And now, you come back with this boyfriend no one’s ever seen, hopefully you don’t make a habit of that.”

“Not my boy-”  

“Yeah, yeah,” your friend laughed, “maybe not yet. Best friend’s intuition, it’ll happen, (Y/N).” Your friend gave you a teasing grin before leaving you to watch the Doctor carve the finishing touches on his Dalek pumpkin.  

Your friend teasing you was just the beginning of it. The amount of times old friends of yours came up to you and asked if you and the Doctor were dating, or if the Doctor was your boyfriend, or, even commenting that they didn’t know you were seeing someone was absurd. And everyone commenting on how amazing the two of you looked as Mia and Vincent (or just the matching, couple-y costumes in general if they didn’t know the characters) was overwhelming.

And the Doctor would just grin brightly and wrap his arm around your shoulders or peck your cheek while you tried to tell people he was not, in fact, your boyfriend. At least he was having a good time. 

The teasing smile he gave you whenever someone would walk away after assuming the two of you were together would almost be annoying if it weren’t for the brightness of the smile.

“Maybe I was wrong,” the Doctor said when the two of you finally stepped out of the party.  

The Doctor had made his way through every activity, debunked anything that was supposed to be scary for you (even if he didn’t need too), and greeted everyone in attendance with cheerfulness. You were almost certain he’d enjoyed himself, at least a little.  

“Wrong?” you prompted, taking his hand and leading him down your cousin’s driveway and away from the party.

“A bit,” the man shrugged, “that was pretty nice. Maybe I don’t hate Halloween after all. All the dangerous creatures around us, but nothing trying to harm us, eh? What a change of pace.”

“That’s the fun of it,” you agreed with a smile, “just for tonight, you can be anything you want. No one will tell you you look weird, everyone just goes with the flow.”

“You humans are strange creatures, you know? Now, I still don’t know about the costumes though,” the man pulled on his shirt, “not sure I pull it off, y’know?”

“You look fine.”

The two of you walked slowly towards the TARDIS. The Doctor had parked the space and time machine a bit away from the party, like you’d suggested so no one would find it and the night of tricks. You could barely imagine the Doctor’s rage had the TARDIS been egged or, covered in toilet paper as a stupid Halloween prank.  

A couple costumed children ran past you, laughing and giggling as they moved up the walkway of the house you were currently walking in front of. The Doctor paused to watch, and you stopped as well.

“Trick or treat!” the youngsters cheered when the door was pulled open. You strained to hear the conversation as the woman to answer the door cooed at their costumes and dropped some sweets into their trick or treat bags.  

“What’re they doing?” the Doctor turned to look at you.

“Trick or treating,” you explained, “it’s something the kids do every year. Houses hand out sweets and the children go door to door collecting them in costume. It’s fun,” you told him, “there’s nothing better when you’re little.”

“Did you?” The Doctor asked softly, still observing the bright smiles on the children’s faces as the moved onto the next house.

“’course,” you grinned, “did the whole neighborhood every year. Loads of sweets to eat.”

The man’s expression brightened into a wide smile, “let’s do it!” he exclaimed, “c’mon, (Y/N), trick or treat with me, I know you want too! Live a little!”

“Doctor...” you paused, looking at the man’s wide eyes, bright with a childish glow. He was nothing but a child on the inside. And you should know that, if you hadn’t already, by the way that man had been mesmerized by all the activities at the party.  

You really didn’t have the heart to tell the man that adults didn’t trick or treat, and that it was actually kind of frowned upon. Trick or treating was really for the young kids, and usually stopped around teen years. But you couldn’t find it in yourself to say, especially not when he was bouncing on his feels in excitement. “Sure, Doctor. Let’s go to a couple houses.”

Surprisingly, no one made any fuss about the Gallifreyan trick or treating at their houses. It was almost like everyone could sense the man had no ill intent, and really just wanted to experience trick or treating. It was like those who answered the doors could tell he’d never been before, and was overjoyed at the thought just like any other kid to come to their home.  

The two of you returned to the TARDIS a bit later than you’d thought, pockets full of sweets and candies handed out by the lovely homeowners you’d visited.  

“I’ve changed my mind,” the man called as he emptied his pockets onto the TARDIS console. You were sure that they’d be shot around the room in the next few minutes, but didn’t really mind, “that,” he gestured to the door, “was brilliant. Halloween is brilliant. You... you humans, you’re all brillant!”

“Thanks, I think,” you snorted. “So, you had fun then?”

“Oh yeah,” the man grinned, “loads’ve it! I’ve really been missing out, haven’t I? Trick or treating, and Halloween, who’d’ve thought it could be that fun?”

You resisted rolling your eyes, since you’d tried to tell him that earlier. It wasn’t worth it, not when the Doctor was in just a good mood.

“You know, (Y/N),” the Doctor called, not looking away from what he was doing.

“Hm?”  

“Next year, we’ll dress up as Thijarians. We’ll definitely win the costume contest dressed as Thijarians.”

<><><><>

Hope you enjoyed! And sorry it’s a day late! I would say prompt me again if it’s not what you’re looking for, but I’ll feel wird posting a Halloween fic a ways after Halloween. Hope you all had a good holiday (and stayed safe!). 

Thank you to the person who prompted this, I hope you enjoyed it!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Florida has just become the first state in the Union to mandate that high school students learn about the crimes of communism.  The subject is indeed very important, and too little known. The problem is that the new legislation, like other recent Florida measures, itself recalls certain evils of communism.

As of this coming school year, high school students who wish to graduate from a Florida school must pass a class in U.S. government that includes "comparative discussion of political ideologies, such as communism and totalitarianism, that conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy essential to the founding principles of the United States."  

Any high school teacher is going to sigh at the awkward circularity of the "principles essential to the principles" formulation.  As Orwell tried to remind us in "Politics and the English Language," though, vague formulations demand our critical attention.  This weird phrasing serves a sinister purpose, one that becomes clear later in the law.  The point is that the United States is to be defined as free and democratic, regardless of what Americans or their legislators actually do.  American is free and democratic because of a miraculous investiture from the past.  Complacency is therefore patriotic, and criticism is not.

The law presents "totalitarianism" as an ideology.  Totalitarianism is not an ideology, so Florida teachers are henceforth legally required to teach nonsense.  To be sure, one can find historical figures who referred to themselves as "totalitarian" in a positive sense, but in general the term has been used as analysis and critique.  In use for about a century now, "totalitarianism" has generally been used as a category that brings together regimes with very different ideologies, drawing attention to underlying similarities.

As such, totalitarianism can also be a tool for self-critique, since it draws attention to political temptations that make different systems possible.  The most important book about totalitarianism, by Hannah Arendt, presents Nazism and Stalinism as possibilities within modern politics.  When in Origins of Totalitarianism Arendt wrote about conspiracy theories, she was writing not only about Nazi and Soviet practices, but also about a human failing.  When she wrote about narratives where we are always right and they are always wrong, where we are always innocent and they are always guilty, she was describing a universal risk.  When she wrote of people who were simultaneously gullible and cynical, for whom “everything was possible and nothing was true,” she got uncomfortably close to contemporary American reality.

By defining totalitarianism as a foreign ideology to be contrasted with American principles, Florida legislators have denied students not just the knowledge of what the term actually means, but also the possibility to appeal to a rich body of thought that might help them to avoid risks to freedom and democracy.

Unlike totalitarianism, communism is an ideology.  Its ideological character is visible in its approach to the past: communists transformed history, an open search for fact and endless discussion of interpretation, into History, an official story in which one's own country was the center of world liberation regardless of what its leaders did.  The party was always right, even if what the party said and did was unpredictable and self-contradictory.  The most important communist party still in power, the Chinese, takes this line today.  To question the revolution or the inevitability of the system is to fall prey to "historical nihilism."  In April 2018, a Chinese memory law accordingly made it a crime to question the heroism of past leaders.  What we have is good and right because we inherited it from glorious dead revolutionaries, and we must not question what the government tells us about our glorious dead revolutionaries.

We have our own official story of revolution. The Florida board of education has recently forbidden teachers from defining American history "as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence."  That narrow formulation rules out most of reality but crams in a good dose of mysticism.  Nothing is ever entirely new, and nations arise from many sources aside from principles.  The board of education’s claim is political rather than historical: Everything good comes from the past, and we must not question what the government tells us about its righteousness.  If there is only one story, and you have to tell it, that is not history but History.  The point is not that the American Revolution is the same thing as the Chinese Revolution. The point is that we are treating it the same way, describing it in dogmatic terms that we enforce in memory law. And that is deeply worrying.

The same spirit is in evidence in that Florida communist law.  Deep in the past, it instructs us, is where we find freedom and democracy.  Freedom is not something to be struggled for by individuals now, but magically "inherited from prior generations."  That phrase should give pause to anyone who cares about freedom.  If you seriously think that freedom is something that you can inherit, like a sofa or a stamp collection, you are not going to be free for long.

In the law's logic, democracy is not actually allowing people to vote, but some silent tradition that somehow exists whether or not real Americans can vote in reality.  Despite what actually happened between the eighteenth century and now (slavery, let's say, or voter suppression), we must close our minds to everything but those mythical "principles essential to the principles."  The facts give way to an underlying logic, impossible to articulate, that demonstrates that my country is better.

The Florida communism law requires that someone (it is hard, given the awkward phrasing, to say who) must "curate oral history resources."  The curation will involve the selection "first-person accounts of victims of other nations' governing philosophies who can compare those philosophies with those of the United States."  There is something humiliating about turning real people into poster children for American exceptionalism.  Refugees from other countries past and present have individual and complex stories, which cannot usually be reduced to tales of American superiority.  Edith P., a Holocaust survivor, speaks of waiting for hours every day in front of the American embassy, which denied her family a visa.  American schoolchildren read about Anne Frank, but no one tells them that her father applied for an American visa.  Leon Bass was an African American soldier who saw a German concentration camp.  He had something comparative to say about "governing philosophies," but it would not survive curation.

America today is not an especially free country.  Our own non-governmental organization Freedom House, relying on our own preferred notions of freedom (civil and political rights) ranks us in fifty-eighth place.  In other words, it would theoretically be possible (and it would certainly be valuable) for the Florida board of education to solicit testimonies from people from fifty-seven other countries where people live more freely than here, who could explain why they have not moved to the United States.  They could compare their countries' "governing philosophies" with that of the United States (favorably, unfavorably, who knows: they are free people).  But we know that this will not happen.  Such an application of the Florida communism law is unthinkable, because the Florida communism law is not about freedom.  It is about repeating that America is the best country in the world.

Self-absorption is not anti-communism.  Anti-communism would entail listening to history rather than History, and educating individuals who can make up their own minds.  You don't get freedom from the flock.

Another familiar communist trick can be found in a recent directive by the Florida board of education.  The trick has to do with leveraging victory in the Second World War.  Beginning in the late 1960s, a certain version of the Second World War became an important part of communist ideology.  In the Soviet Union, and also in today's Russia, any wrong done by the system was explained away by the fact that the Red Army had defeated the Germans.  The fact that Nazis were evil made the Soviets good.  The fact of having resisted the Nazis made one's own system unassailable.  This communist technique has now, uncannily, resurfaced in official Florida pedagogy.

In the recent school board directive, we learn that "examples of theories that distort historical events and are inconsistent with State Board approved standards include the denial or minimization of the Holocaust, and the teaching of Critical Race Theory, meaning the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons." This repeats the Soviet (and Russian) logic.  We don't deny German crimes, and therefore we are innocent of any crimes ourselves.  Indeed, anyone who suggests that we look at our own history: well, they are like Holocaust deniers!

Another sad resemblance concerns voting. Freedom involves educating people about the past as it was so that they can make up their own minds about what the future should be.  Democracy involves giving people the vote in the meantime.  The Soviet Union held elections, but they were ritualistic and fake.  When Soviet power extended across eastern Europe after the Second World War, local communist parties rigged elections.  Thus authentic anti-communists would make sure that their own elections were not rigged, and that all citizens could take part.  But the Florida communism law was passed in circumstances that suggest a lively interest in making voting more difficult.  In 2019, the Florida legislature enacted pay-to-vote legislation that effectively disenfranchised people that Floridians, in a referendum, had voted to enfranchise the year before.  The Florida communism law came into effect this 1 July, hard on the heels of a new Florida voter suppression law.

I have spent decades teaching and writing about communism, and I certainly think that young people should know about communist systems and their policies of mass killing.  But declarations of superiority do not amount to a pedagogy, nor to an anti-communism worthy of the name.  The content of the Florida communism law, and the Florida voter suppression law, and the board of education directive on race, do not suggest that Florida lawmakers and administrators have learned much about what was wrong with communism.  

These measures reveal American weaknesses that make American tyranny more likely.

* * * * *

When I went to High School in Florida [many decades ago] all Seniors had to take a class called “Americanism vs Communism.” As I recall, most students slept through the class. I thought that it was insulting propaganda - using an inadequate text that was filled with poorly written boilerplate and boring poorly made films.  If the right wing wants to inflict propaganda on teenagers it should invest in decent writers and film makers.  They are very poor in the literacy department.  I was 16 at the time and unsophisticated but I could still tell that what i was being taught was a waste of my time.

[victorluvsalice]

AU Thursday: Fallout of Darkness -- Updates To The Ug-Qualtoth Situation

Ooookay, so -- last week I may have ended my silly “me vs my brain” post about turning Alice into a weird hybrid of Sims 4 and Vampire: the Masquerade -- Bloodlines vampire with the revelation that I was planning on, ah, adjusting how things go down in Dunwich Borers when Victor and Alice discover Ug-Qualtoth. Namely with somebody getting their throat cut. Let’s actually expand on that a bit so I can prove I‘m not trying to kill one half of my OTP, shall we?

-->Okay, as I initially wrote in that first post, the new idea is that Ug-Qualtoth is not under Dunwich Borers willingly. Rather, he’s somehow trapped, like how Mantorok from Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem was trapped in his own temple. The bosses of Dunwich kept doing their “human sacrifice” thing to leech power out of the trapped god, but Ug-Qualtoth needed people who were somehow naturally attuned to cosmic forces like himself to actually free him.

-->Hey, guess what Victor and Alice are. Ug-Qualtoth sensed them in the general area close to the time the bombs fell, and tried to get them to come to him -- but then the bombs fell, and he had to use a bunch of his limited energy to keep them from dying in the chaos. Basically, this is how Victor and company managed to survive seeing a nuclear explosion, and how Alice managed to stay staked under her rubble for over two centuries without being disturbed.

-->Once they’re both out and about, they both start having dreams with Ug-Qualtoth calling out to them, asking for release. Neither of them are sure what to make of it until they actually reach Dunwich Borers (I’m thinking investigating raider activity there for a settlement, as it is a valid locale for Minutemen radiant quests) and stumble into the visions and whatnot. Ug-Qualtoth reaches out more directly when they reach the main ritual chamber, and this is when they learn that vampires were created when Ug-Qualtoth infused a tiny portion of his essence into Caine’s body. With Alice an eighth-generation Malkavian herself, she has more of the transferred essence, and Ug-Qualtoth sees her as the perfect candidate to wield Kremvh’s Tooth for the ritual he needs to be freed.

-->And Victor, unfortunately, is the perfect sacrifice -- the ritual requires quite a bit of human blood. Victor finds himself frozen in a throat-cutting-ready position over where the altar used to be, as Ug-Qualtoth instructs Alice to go get the knife. Alice, horrified, says she’s not going to kill Victor, he cannot make her kill someone she loves -- and yes, this is how they learn they love each other, because ANGST. Ug-Qualtoth promises to keep Victor alive -- as he’s freed, he’ll have enough power to do that -- and sweetens the deal by offering to adjust her vampiric state so sunlight is no longer immediately deadly, and she can bargain with him directly for new powers as she grows stronger. Alice tries to figure out another way (eventually stopped by Victor himself, who just wants all this over with), argues Ug-Qualtoth into giving the reduced sunlight weakness to all vampires, then, extremely reluctantly, retrieves the knife and -- after a very emotional kiss -- cuts Victor’s throat.

-->Fortunately for everyone, Ug-Qualtoth does not welsh. Victor is healed before he can bleed out; Alice feels the changes in her vitae; and the two bolt from the ritual chamber the moment they can -- into the sunlight, which does sizzle Alice slightly, but not nearly as much as it should. They find a dark place to rest for the day, Alice constantly apologizing to poor Victor, who reassures her he understands that there was no good choice there.

He, uh, also understands a bit of the language of the Outer Ones now too, because apparently Ug-Qualtoth, in his own version of an apology, left a tiny piece of that knowledge in Victor’s brain, and now he can cast a few simple spells using it. . . Which would be akin to the spell system from Eternal Darkness, as that feels appropriate. He doesn’t do it often, obviously, but having some extra offense against nastier enemies is useful.

-->So yeah, it all ends well, with Alice now able to at least partially stand sunlight (and with the option to bargain for better resistance), Victor with some new magic abilities, Ug-Qualtoth freed from his prison, and Victor and Alice finally entering a romantic relationship. And all it took was one human sacrifice and a lot of trauma!

. . .and now I realize a great way for Victor to impress Nisha in Nuka-World would be to show her Kremvh’s Tooth and say he survived being slaughtered in service to a god. Just don’t tell her the whole story. . .

[thesimsters-stories]

Arachna of the Dark Woods for @momoception‘s Bachelor Challenge ♥

Arachna was born as the eighth and youngest daughter of two of the most powerful mages of the Clan of the Dark Woods. Her Clan was repudiated from the Magic Society many centuries ago, because they were suspected of practicing the so-called "black magic". Since then, they can't access the Magic Realm, and to avoid a war they were, in fact, confined to the woods of Glimmerbrook with the (pretextual) office of Guardians of the Dark Woods. They have lived a rural and tribal life since then, and none of them has ever left their woods... or rather, none of them has ever made it alive (they were instantly killed by the Magic Society). But why does the Magic Society fear them that much? Because the members of the Clan of the Dark Woods are, in fact, born with a strong affinity for the dark arts... and Arachna herself is proof of it.

Arachna is a shape-shifter witch. It's a pretty rare, powerful and dark ability that is said to show up once every ten generations. Her animal form is the one of a spider. When transmuting to this form, Arachna's magical powers, especially the offensive spells, increase significantly, so much that she's quickly become one of her Clan's main weapon in battle (usually against errant vampires or other renegades mages who want to take over their territory). With all the benefits also come some risks: if she doesn't reverse to her human form in a quite short timespan, her beastly part will start to take over. She won't have control over her attacks, that will become more destructive and possibly self-harming, and she also won't be able to recognize her enemies from her allies. On top of that, the poisonous toxin that she uses for her attacks will start to spread all over her body, resulting in a paralysis that could last up to a week.

Arachna and the witches of her Clan aren't immortal, but their lifespan is longer than the one of a normal human because of the magic that runs through their veins (the most longeval usually make it to 250/300 years old). Being a "fresh" 70 years old, it's time for Arachna to find a partner. It's not unusual for the mages of her Clan to marry a human: by doing that, their descendants will have stronger genetic heritage while still passing down the ability to use magic (80% of the newborns are indeed mages).

FACTS: • Arachna's Clan is normally not allowed to leave Glimmerbrook's woods; the Magic Society has made an exception for her though, in case she gets selected for the show, on the condition that she won't use any sort of even remotely black magic (of course shape-shifting is strictly prohibited) • Every spider of the Dark Woods is basically her familiar; she also has the ability to see from a spider's perspective sacrificing one of her eyes' sight for a short amount of time • Poisonous potions are, obviously, her thing; she uses her own poison to make them • In addition to her powerful magic, she's also very intelligent and strategic; that's why everyone thinks she'll be soon appointed General of the Dark Woods' Army • Being a self-sufficient and isolated community, the members of the Dark Woods' Clan don't have the same ethical values as the "normal" society; their culture could seem cruel to others, since their most important value is the survival of the species, and they'd do anything for it • For the same reason, Arachna doesn't know what it means to be kind and considerate of other people's feelings, that's why she could be considered a little too blunt by others; the bright side? She'll always tell you what she thinks, without any filter • Loves her Clan, her people and her Woods with all her heart, and would do anything to protect them • There's a big downside about being in a relationship with Arachna: her kiss is poisonous • Sure, she can make an antidote that makes people immune to her poison for 24h... not a single minute more though, so be careful! • Before celebrating the wedding, her chosen groom (Andrew, hopefully!) will necessary have to go through a special ritual: on a clear night, at midnight, the spouses will have to share a kiss in front of the whole Clan. If the groom dies, it means he wasn't the right one. If he survives the poison, then he'll be immune to it for the rest of his life and acquires the right to become Arachna's husband. The wedding will be celebrated immediatly after the ritual, under the moonlight • She's happy with her life, but she'd like to fall in love; she also wants to have at least five children with someone who will love everything about her, even the things that most men would find creepy/disgusting... Could Andrew be the one?

Sorry this is so long! Hope you’ll like my weird bb ♥                                              ―  Moon ☾

P.S: I’ve made a “cerimonial” outfit for her (the one shown in the third picture) but it’s not meant to be used during Rose Ceremonies and stuff lol I just felt like making it! Just a side note in case she gets selected, thank you ♥

P.P.S: I swear she looks a bit less weird in-game lmao ReShade makes her look half (if not fully) dead, sorry haha

[antihero-writings]

The Empty Throne (Ch2)

Fandom: Fullmetal Alchemist (Brotherhood & Manga)

Fic Summary: It's been a long time since that word died on Ed's lips...but relationships may be the only thing that can come back from the dead. || Exploring Ed and Hohenheim's relationship using the songs "Stumbling in Your Footsteps", "The Alchemist", and "Youth" as prompts.

Character focus: Van Hohenheim

Notes: I'm so sorry for taking so long with this one!! Hohenheim proved very difficult to write for... I hope you like what I ended up coming up with though!! And do let me know if there are any inaccuracies!!

This chapter is written for the songs "The Alchemist" by Nathan Wagner, and "Youth" by Daughter (with a little of “Stumbling in Your Footsteps” sprinkled in there from the last chapter). I highly recommend listening to them before reading!! (I can put links in a reblog!)

 FYI There is reference to a scene from Ch40 from the manga in here that I don't remember being in the anime!!

If you enjoyed this, if you could leave me a comment I'd really really appreciate it!! As always, I would absolutely love to write more about this fandom, so feel free to give me FMAB prompts!! You can drop them in my ask box!!

Chapter 2: Dying Angels

Van Hohenheim walked the streets of Xerxes for two days before he gave up believing that there was someone still alive out there. That there was hope. That he was just trapped in the most feral breed of nightmare.   Now he wandered into his home, though it didn’t feel like his own, rather just some place to rest his feet. An empty shell.   They’d all died. So why did he feel like the corpse?   “How?! How could you do this?! I thought you were going to make theKing immortal, not me!”   “Oh? But what do I care for a nameless king who will be dead in but a few years? It’s you who gave me life. How could I allow you to be sacrificed for his avarice?”    “How could you allow meto be sacrificed?! What about the people?!” He threw his hand behind him, gesturing to the empty city. “What about my friends?!”   “Didn’t I teach you of equivalent exchange? Immortality isn’t bought on the cheap.”  

“They’re all dead?! That’s your price?! Everyone I ever loved?!”   “Not dead just…” He pondered the right word. “redistributed. To be perfectly frank, I thought you’d be more appreciative of my gift.”

“Gift?! Who in their right mind thinks this is a gift?!”

“Doesn’t everyone want immortality?”   “Not at the cost of an entire kingdom!”

“Interesting…But now that you have it, free of blame, is it really so bad? You have everything you could ever want. Why, you could walk into the palace right now and take all the king’s treasures. No one would stop you.” He chuckled like this was all a grand joke—(he hoped it was). “Technically you’re the only heir left. …Unless of course you’d like to battle me for it.”   Hohenhheim held his head in his hands. No, too much was happening at once. Everything and nothing at all. This wasn’t possible. His friends, the entire kingdom, it couldn’t just be gone. There were cosmic rules about this, surely. Surely this couldn’t happen. The gods wouldn’t hit reset any second now.   Hohenheim leaned back against the door. …He didn’t really want to keep going, but, then again, he wasn’t sure this body would let him die.   There was supposed to be a bazaar happening that weekend. He would have liked to go to it. 

He had that book he borrowed from Meiyo. Van himself had taught him to read, so long ago. He would have liked to give it back, to discuss it with him.    He still had to ask Rhinemile if his son was feeling better...well, he surely wasn’t now...

—(Oh, god, not the children)—   He wanted to apologize to Willard for his rather rude behavior the other day. He was in a hurry but, well, it still wasn’t excusable.    And there was that girl down the street he’d always wanted to ask if she’d like to get dinner together some time. The one with flowers in her hair.     He sank to the floor.    He’d never get to do any of that now. Couldn’t rewrite the past few days with them filled in the gaps. Tomorrow, so much of life, snuffed out like all the promises of a better future, their lives pinched out like a candle.   Though they’d all died, he was the shade, wandering the streets of a manufactured hell. A vessel for all these wandering ghosts of everyone else.   He’d believed in god once. He wasn’t sure he did anymore.    They’d all died…so why could he still hear them? If he sat still long enough he could hear his friends’ dying cries, their pleas for mercy, as if his memories, like ghouls, decided to reanimate themselves. An eternal echo of their deaths. Dead…yet not dead. Their souls ensnared before they could reach the light at the end of the tunnel, trapped forever in this pitch black passage, bracing themselves for the end, which never came. Their voices, their emotions, ocean waves in a sea of bloody despair, and if he wasn’t careful, surely his own soul would drown in that sea of faces.    The more he tried to block them out, the louder they became.    Was this real? Or was he just insane, sitting in his house, and these voices were the calls of everyone trying to save him?    He pleaded with a nonexistent god for insanity.   The flashes still lingered across his brain; all the golden light turning to a sinister, haunted violet, those black hands still waving before his eyes, clawing at his sight, that eye still tasting his soul, and the blank Truth...   He was so cold.    His body, full of souls…cold as death. A walking gilded corpse; all that was left of his illustrious kingdom. The last survivor of a grand disaster…the unwitting accomplice of said disaster.   Why hadn’t he realized it sooner?   His kingdom had become a bone yard overnight. He wondered if future historians would come across the skeletons of his friends and the standing ruins, and wonder what could have possibly killed a flourishing kingdom in one night. 

Was that all they'd be? A question to history? Not a living, breathing, bleeding people? Would their blood, their legacy, be lost to the world?

The voices clung to him, begging for a mercy he was incapable of granting any of them, like he was a cliff, one they were at risk of plummeting down. Like he was the single branch keeping them all tethered to life.

Could they not hear him snapping at the seams?

The voices were so close. He hated how close they were. Like a bug on his back, but worse, a thousand bugs crawling on his brain, and they weren’t bugs at all…they were people. They were his friends. Everyone he once knew, and plenty of people he never met, swarming his thoughts every moment.     It’s sickening to have something crawling in the corners of your mind.   It’d been two days, but it already felt like a century. He wasn’t sure how much of this he could take.    But he would have to take it.    The Philosopher’s stone. He’d read about it in his master’s books, the Homunculus told him about it. At the time it had seemed like the best of dreams; the ability to bypass equivalent exchange, to turn lead into gold… maybe even bring back the dead? 

Not them though. He knew their souls were too lost to return home.

Now he knew what nightmares were made of; the best of dreams. That the worst thing humanity can get is three omnipotent, irrevocable wishes.

He’d walked around enough to know by now, he had the whole kingdom to himself. The Homunculus was right. He could march into the palace, pick up the jewels, sit on the throne. He had it all.   If only he didn’t feel so damn lonely.   He sat, and he thought, and he thought… and he thought. For there was nothing left to do but sit and think, and be swallowed by the quagmire of his own thoughts. Turned inside out. If only he could talk to someone, anyone. A fight with a neighbor would have been relief.   Was this what war felt like?    The silence was the worst part. Just how quiet the kingdom became in a single day. The shops devoid of customers, stoves left on, potters wheels still spinning, the streets empty; no kids playing in the.   The worst part. The silence…and the noise inside his head.   He held that infected head in his hands and, knowing the very worst nightmares are real finally allowed himself to weep.

******

The first time he died was from thirst, the second from starvation. Traveling the desert isn’t a riskless business you know. The third from that weird plant he thought was safe to eat (spoiler, it wasn’t). The fourth from exhaustion, the fifth from heat stroke. Each time he died he felt the weight of their souls lessen, become a little less active.     The sixth was at his own hands.   He wished he could grant them all mercy. It wasn’t long before he tried to end the suffering of all parties involved. The seventh and eighth were too.   He’d lost track of how many times he died by the time he came across a little mining town in the dunes, full of poor people, whose leader was bleeding their pockets dry.   What was it that drove him to help them? Was it sympathy? Pity? Some sort of hero complex?    There was a little girl in rags. He pulled a golden coin from behind her ear, so she and her family would be able to eat that night.    Next thing he knew the town was after him with pitchforks, wanting to know his secrets…willing to carve him up to search for them inside.   He never wanted to cause them any pain. He still believed there was good in them, that this didn’t have to end in blood.   They tore him to pieces.   They were just a little misled, it was his mistake for dangling treasures before their hungry eyes.    There was a general goodness to people. He still believed in it.   And he was right about some of them. Some were kind, there were plenty who appreciated his alchemy, who genuinely wanted to learn, who were grateful to him.   But it was probably around the seventh—or was it the seventeenth?—time he was killed for the crime of helping that he didn’t trust people so much.   They say compassion is weakness, and when he found it was so easy to help…so easy to die for it, he started to believe them. It became more difficult to have compassion when there was such a high price.     He could have created a palace out of nothing. He could have sat on a throne of glass in a kingdom of gold and disbelief. Walled himself away in a tabernacle to ungod beneath the ground. Never dying. Never living.    But he didn’t. He was too weak. Too kind. Too restless. So he continued to walk the world, without a home, hope, or a single fiend to call his own. A golden wanderer in a world of lead.   They’re right when they say history repeats itself.    He wished someone would just reset the needle. The gods should do it any second now.   Another day, another war.    For Hohehnheim, really, though he’d lived through many wars—(best have the immortal fight, yes?)—there was only one war: himself, and the world.    Trying to help, to save, people is much more war than it is peace.   Far too many people desire immortality. Far too few know what it really signifies…what it costs. Every time he heard another foolish mortal bragging of the path to immortality he longed to wrap his hands around them, and shake them to sense. But he didn’t. He let them follow their misguided ways, for their boasts were but empty air. They didn’t know what it cost, and surely never would. They’d be granted the mercy of death in the end, and Hohenheim would stand before their corpses, a heart full of envy.   It’s cruel to desire sickness in front of a sick man. Immortality was but a disease, and he longed for a cure. 

He grew used to it. To the dull repetition, and the petty goals, and the scorn, and the screaming.   Every day he woke up to the sound screaming within his own head. Ever those flashing lights of yesterday. Every day he fell asleep to the lullaby of cries for mercy. That endless black and red sea. He tried to row through it, but each new wave sent him tumbling to nothingness. Nothing, and everything; every emotion they ever felt.   He learned to block them out so he could hear his own thoughts. He learned to listen to them, so he could know they were people, once. Hard to do in tandem.    He tried to remember that they were all people once, and were still, despite the fact that there were little more than cries for mercy left on on the stove.   He tried to treat them as people even so. He tried to get them to sit down so he could talk to them. Tried to discern individual waves from the sea. Tried to urge them to speak of more than just pain. To speak of life, and dreams, and who they once were.    They were the only good part in all this.    It wasn’t a happy life, but he got used to it all…until he met her.    Was it selfish of him to want something for himself? 

******

 It’d been ten years. Ten years since he’d seen Trisha. Ten years since he’d seen Edward and Alphonse.    It went by like days to Hohenheim. Sometimes he forgot that a few years is a very long time to people who still feel the sting of the clock.  

And children feel it most of all.   What had happened in those ten ticks? Were they happy years? How would they have changed? Would Trisha scold him for taking so long? And Edward and Alphonse, well, they’d be teenagers now.   What kind of people had they become?   Would they take after him or Trisha? He hoped it was the latter.    Excitement and nervousness together flowed through him—though would could never tell by looking at his stoic figure. 

He walked up the hill. When he looked off in the distance to where his house was...he couldn’t see it.

He couldn’t have misplaced it, could he?

As he advanced the nervousness took precedence over the excitement.

Trisha said she’d wait for him...they couldn’t have moved, right? 

As he got closer the tree came into view, the one he tied a swing to before he left...except it wasn’t a flourishing oak as he knew it; it was barren of leaves, the top half of it painted black, its branches like a claw tracing the sky, still as death.

Horror twisted in his gut, his expression pulling taut. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and continued onward at a level pace.

When he arrived he fell to his knees.    His home, the place he loved, the place the golden wanderer had finally settled down...was a pile of charcoal. 

How was this possible? 

The excitement became a twisting, writhing, questioning thing.   He would have said some horrible disaster befell the neighborhood… if the other houses weren’t standing tall.    Was it some accident? Where was Trisha? Where were Edward and Alphonse? Were they okay? Why hadn’t it been rebuilt?   He turned to the house next door, like it was a sanctuary. The Rockbells. His last hope; there was Pinako at least. Hopefully she’d still be there, and could explain.    Slowly, trembling slightly, he picked up his suitcase, the handle digging into his palm, and stood up, marching to her door. When he raised his hand to knock his breath caught in his throat.

Maybe he shouldn’t knock at all. Maybe he should just leave, spare everyone the pain.

Maybe they didn’t want him here after all.

An old lady opened the door. The sight was like time slapping him in the face. He hadn’t realized quite how long it’d been till he saw how the years lined her face, like a well read book.    “Pinako…” He spoke, time catching in his throat. “I seem to have lost my house.”

******

They built a country out of nothing. It was incredible to be there when a nation was being delivered; it wasn’t in a hospital or a house, with blood and screaming, as it is with children, but in these empty fields, these barren sands, and was much softer. From their forests and fields arose houses and farms, and from the stones arose governments and laws.    And in this nation there was born a girl. Just an ordinary girl. He’d met many like her.    …He was much too old for her.   But she looked at him, and she asked him to dance…and he felt young, and like he hadn’t been wandering for centuries.   Why? Why would she pursue him when he was too old, too cold, too empty? What did she see in him?   He couldn’t let himself get close to her. Because, after all, she was human, and therefore going to die some day…And he wasn’t going to die, and he wasn’t even quite sure he was human anymore either.    She told him she wanted to be with him, even so. Even though he was like an old god, cracked and put together out of the souls of his people, and he wasn’t quite sure if he was allowed to be human.    She told him humanity was more than he knew. Stronger than he realized. It was only because they were weak that they were strong. That they were more than just an amalgamation of mistakes. That they could change. And that the knowledge that they were going to die was what made the whole not-dying part worth it all.   Trisha Elric was unlike those he’d met before.    They didn’t get married. He didn’t want to chain her to him. But they decided to start a life together in a quaint town in the middle of nowhere. 

There he could hear the sound of birds chirping, and the wind rustling through the trees.

The wandering god, the golden corpse, rested his feet for the first time in a few centuries. 

Family. The word once meant the world. He wanted nothing more than to start one. To meet a girl, to have children with her. Long ago he told the homunculus that’s what gave life meaning. 

Now he wasn’t sure his life was allowed to have meaning.    So when she told him she was pregnant...that slave boy staring at the sunset, thinking he had a bright, short future, held her in his arms and twirled her around him. All the while the golden wanderer’s heart grew weary, and scared.

Was this really okay? Was a thing like him really allowed to sit down while? How would it work with him the way he was, with bullet holes in his heart and all these voices in his head? Could he possibly be a father, have a family, after all?   He liked kids perfectly well…he just wasn’t sure about his kids.   Would his affliction be passed on to this unsuspecting child? Would he hear voices from the moment he came into this world, unaware there were people out there without voices in their heads? Would they keep him trapped in a bottle desiring freedom from his own head?

And if the child was normal…how could Hohenheim be a father in his condition? How could he speak comforting words when his head was full of unrest? How could his child love a monster?   They named him Edward, because they wanted him to be rich in spirit, and protect the hopeless. He kicked in her tummy a lot, and Trisha told him that surely meant he’d be a fighter after all.   When Edward was born he cried. Frequently, and loudly. Hohenheim protested much himself when Trisha handed him to him, but Edward wrapped his tiny grip tight around his finger, and while his golden eyes were soft and unsure, there was fire there. And, as he calmed down in his arms, Hohenheim smiled, and cried, and was pretty sure he’d melted.

And the voices said He’s beautiful.   Edward inherited the same golden hair and eyes that belonged to a people long gone, and Hohenheim was glad their blood ran through his veins, that the legacy of a people snuffed out, who should have had generations more, existed at least in him and his son.

And they were happy. And he thought he might stay a while.    When she told him she was pregnant the second time, the slave boy jumped for joy, and the butterflies in the wanderer’s stomach turned to bats.   Trisha picked Ed up and asked if he wanted a brother. He couldn’t talk at the time, but he made a gurgling sound they thought that translated to “Only if I’m still your favorite.”    And Hohenheim tried to hold on to that. This was for Edward. Not for himself. This was for Trisha. And Ed turned out well enough.

…No, he turned out better than “well enough.”   This one was much gentler; less tummy kicking, and when he came out he didn’t cry so much.   They named him Alphonse, because they wanted him to be noble, and prepared for anything.

The four of them were joy incarnate.

And the voices said It’s okay. You can have this.

So he tried to listen to them.

He wanted to spend every moment with them, every minute he could, and some moments he didn’t have to spare.

But the more he did, the more a darkness crept in.   How could they love a silhouette? They’d surely just forget him…and in a century or two, they’d be taste on his tongue he could never spit out.   Hohenheim grew used to immortality.    But when he looked into those lost, golden eyes he wanted to bleed. He wanted to age, and feel the aches and pains of it. 

He wanted to die.    For the living, death is ever approaching. For the gilded shades death is not easy to find.

He wanted to live, for them. He wanted to die, for them.

But he couldn’t find the cure sitting still.

******

 The glass previously in Hohenheim’s hand was in pieces on the floor, but he barely heard it shatter, the echoes of Pinako’s words the only thing in his head now. 

No. No this couldn’t be. Surely the gods would hit that reset button. Come on, any day now. 

Trisha couldn’t be dead. 

The woman he loved, decided to settle down, start a family with, she couldn’t be dead. No, that wasn’t possible. 

Pinako grimaced, adjusting her glasses.

“I’m afraid there’s more.” She took a drag from her pipe. “I wish I knew what they were planning, I would have tried to stop it... Edward and Alphonse...they attempted to bring her back.”

His eyes widened, his breath catching in his throat.

“They attempted human transmutation?” he breathed. The words were coarse as sandpaper in the air. “You’re…sure?”   “Quite sure.”   He sat down; the weight of his own body, his own thoughts, too much to bear.   For far too long, the thought of seeing Trisha and his sons again had kept him going, kept him sane when he preferred to go crazy.

Coming home to find Trisha was gone, despite their promise to each other, that the last he would ever see of her was her standing at the door saying she’d wait for him. The woman he loved, the ordinary one, who told him people were more, the one he wanted to spend his life—as much of it as he could—with, the one who’d tethered the golden wanderer...he’d never, in all his millennia, get to see again.    And Edward and Alphonse had become accomplished alchemists…but they had had more of a chance to grieve, and that grief, sitting alone in the dark, became an animate beast. In their despair they had tried to bring her back…and weren’t entirely whole anymore because of it. They had seen the immaculate truth, and it tore them apart for the crime of loving their mother.    How could he possibly face them?

******

He saw the circle. The Homunculus drew a circle on the world as a line to know where to cut and make it bleed.   The images of the past redoubled, the voices coming to a crescendo, telling him together they could spare this world from their fate.    He had to stop it this time.    Last time he stood by, ignorant. He wouldn’t now. He was determined. There was no other choice.    And the price of saving this world, his family…was losing his precious years with them.

Equivalent exchange after all.    He had to destroy the middle for the sake of the finish line. 

He told Trisha he didn’t even want to say goodbye. He couldn’t bear to see their faces. If he did...he just might stay. 

When he stood at the door, and she handed him his coat, and they came of their own accord, he knew he was right.

Those golden eyes, those beautiful eyes he adored so much...seared him like a brand. In later years he would be certain they scarred him. He saw them and though the boys said nothing, blissfully ignorant of what was truly happening, everything in him—and was this really him, or the voices still?—pleaded:

Stay.   But he left anyway.

He had a world to save, after all.   He stood on the hill overlooking Resembool, staring back at his house, the shadows draping across the place where he spent his better years—where he heard the crickets, and the frogs, and the birds, and the wind, and his wife’s lullabies, and his sons’ laughter—forsaking the quaint town, his family, his life for the sake of the sea of faces, for the sake of the cure. 

“I’ll be back before you know it, Trisha. Just wait for me.”   They were the lucky ones. They got to breathe instead of heaving through corrupted lungs. He wanted to breathe too, that’s why he had to leave, after all.   The world was so empty. An emptiness that bored into his chest and made a nest there.   Long ago the Homunculus had wanted to leave his flask. He swallowed the pieces of Xerxes; the pieces of the world he once called home, now nothing more than evidence to be disposed of.    Now the Homunculus wanted to surpass god; cast a fishing line to bring god down and swallow him. To raise himself above all the spheres and look down upon them.    He wanted to create a tower high enough to reach heaven. A door that could open the stars.   He created a mark that no one could miss…except everyone standing on it.   And, with a body of his own—or something close enough, surrounded by people: by another country, by all the souls inside him, the Homunculus still sat alone in a jar.

******

He visited Trisha’s grave, if nothing else, to get proof that she actually was there. That she couldn’t be touched, kissed, hugged, spoken to, or otherwise loved.    If he had stayed…could he have saved her? Could he have kept his son’s from being torn apart in attempts to rewrite the past? 

Now she was just a name on a stone. He stood there, not entirely believing it, not entirely sure where to go from here.

Back to wandering, I suppose.   He wasn’t expecting—   When he saw that boy again, the boy from the doorway, the one with the sad, fiery golden eyes—the eyes that belonged to the sea of faces—he wasn’t a boy anymore. He was a teenager, and he wore grief like a medal, and Hohenheim knew there was real metal beneath those flashy clothes. There was fire in those eyes, still, but now it was fierce enough with a single look his gaze threated to scorch away his resolve.   That look. The same look from when he left all those years ago. That look that he couldn’t bear.    Edward was angry. He had every right to be…But the gilded sadness behind that anger was what he couldn’t bear.

Because it reminded him too much of himself.   No, I had to do this, I had to stop him, don’t look at me like that.    From the bitterness in his words, it became clear he was more than just a stranger in Edward’s eyes.   As they spoke, Hohenheim tried to look for any similarity, any connection, anything to tie them to each other, like clinging to threads on a fraying sweater.

Edward was reckless and wild, chasing visions of his future that would leave him bleeding, and that made him lucky. Hohenheim wished he could chase visions and bleed. That he would feel something anymore.

…But it wasn’t a fire that wrecked their home.   He hadn’t realized just how much he missed them until he tasted that taste again. Had his eyes been damp these ten years?   That night he drifted to Edward’s room like a lost spirit, walking up to where the boy lay sleeping.   The last he knew of them they were tiny things bumbling at his feet. Full of potential energy, waiting to fill out the molds of their bodies and names, and he didn’t dare touch them, for fear of infecting them with the sound of the sea.

Now that potential had become kinetic, and that name was more than just a word pronounced over him, it was something he was beginning to grow into. Time had begun to shape him. Though the more Hohenheim saw this, the more it seized him by the throat, asking him why he didn’t stay.

There’s nothing I could have done for them.

He wanted to talk to him. To ask him about the things he liked, the things he hated. He wanted to ask what those years were like, the good and the bad. To speak of those ten, and so much more. To watch the sunset and speak of tomorrow.

He wanted to touch him, for his touch to be gentle. He wanted to hug him, and cry on his shoulder and say I’m sorry and I wished I’d stayed and I‘d bring her back if he could. He wanted to help him on his journey, growing into that name he gave him. To be his father, even if it was just at the end.

But monsters have no right to touch children, especially not their own.

[bosooka]

Hi I just wanted to say regarding No Mercy Left For God that Mormons aren't Christian, they're their own thing? It's kinda under debate but the majority of Christians don't like them being called Christian and they have their own new stuff and all, and I don't know if the use of Christian there was about the Catholic character but I wanted to make sure? In case you didn't know? Sorry I'm just Christian and there's a Big Difference even though areas overlap.

i was expecting this ask, and i want to preface my answer with two things: 1) i am slightly but humorously offended that you’re assuming i haven’t come across this question while i was drowning in joseph smith and company, and 2) i am catholic. a queer, lapsed catholic that would get excommunicated if brought before a bishop, but a catholic all the same.

here’s the short answer: it is my policy--and it should be everyone’s--to refer to people the way they wish to be referred. mormons identify as christian and believe in jesus christ, so i call them christian.

long answer: what exactly makes a christian, in your opinion? is it belief in Christ as a savior, who is seated at the right hand of his Father, the God of Abraham? if so, i will direct you to the first [Article of Faith]: “We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.” and also the fourth Article of Faith: “We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel are: first, Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; [...].”

i dunno, dude. sounds pretty christian to me. but perhaps what makes a christian is belief in the New Testament as the word of God. some people are under the impression that mormons don’t believe in the Bible. short answer: no. long answer, from our good friend the eighth Article of Faith: “We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God.” emphasis mine. so if believing in the New Testament is what makes a christian, mormons are. still christian.

if belief in the trinity is what makes a church christian, allow me to point you to: pentecostals, unitarian universalists, jehovah’s witnesses. i know, the last one is also in a murky “are they christian” territory, but if you genuinely believe pentecostals aren’t christians because they’re weird and don’t believe in the trinity i just. am going to roll over and die.

if we can stop beating around the bush here, though: i do know why many christians believe mormons aren’t christian. it’s true that mormon beliefs differ from mainstream christianity in many big ways (i will not call it “new” stuff because latter day-saints do not believe this stuff is new, but rather that it was lost for many years).

here are a few things that are exclusive to the mormon movement: mormons believe they have both an eternal father and an eternal mother (these are the Heavenly Parents you might have heard mormons talk about); they do not believe that all humans are born responsible for the original sin; they believe the book of mormon to be the word of God (clearly).

it’s also true that historically mormons had especially unusual beliefs that were actively contrarian to the beliefs of other branches of christianity, eg. polygamy. except polygamy is disavowed by the modern LDS and has been for over a century now. the only groups who still practice polygamy are mormon cults like the FLDS, who are highly disapproved of by mainstream mormons (that’s mormon for “hated with a burning passion”).

here’s the issue: not agreeing with/believing in mormonism doesn’t make them any less christian. disapproving of the church’s past behavior doesn’t make the church any less christian. mormons being “weird” and “having new stuff” doesn’t make them less christian, because ultimately, the only reliable metric for christianity is belief in jesus christ as the savior.

i think pentecostals and evangelicals are weird and i disagree with their interpretation of scripture. that doesn’t make them not christian. as a catholic, i do not believe in adult baptism, something that is very important to many protestant sects + mormonism. that doesn’t make the sects that practice that not christian (although some hardline catholics would disagree with me, and they, like you, are wrong). disavowing mormons for ‘not being christian’ is ultimately just a way to establish your moral and religious superiority over them bc you don’t agree with them.

i want you to think long and hard about why you’re so offended by mormons being christian. perhaps you should pray on it. :)

[yesterdayjane]

Hope

In the eighth century B.C.E., the poet, Hesiod, personified the Fates as three old women whose duty was to spin the threads of human destiny. Shakespeare used these witches to fashion the weird sisters who add an ominous tone to the play which does not end well for Macbeth. Hesiod is also the guy who came up with what has become known as  Pandora’s jar, from which she released all manner of mishaps, slamming the jar shut on something that is variously translated by scholars, but commonly interpreted as hope. We’ve got that in the box, still, that glimmer of hope even as pestilence wreaks its toll. 

[writing-ro]

Fictober 19-3: “Now? Now you listen to me?”

@fictober-event​ // Set in a Multi-fandom Fantasy AU where most if not all kinds of fantasy creatures exist alongside humans, though the two cultures stay fairly separate, with many humans being afraid or prejudice against creatures.

Rating: T Fandom: Star Wars, Dragon Age Characters: Ahsoka Tano, Arista Amara (OFC), Oren Revik (OMC), Merrill (Dragon Age), Kato Shinin (OMC), Merida Mahariel (OFC), Tamlen (Dragon Age), Minaeve (Dragon Age),  Additional Tags: elf!Ahsoka, dragon!Oren, Temple exploration, Don’t Touch The Magic Mirror!, the monsters are basically the ra’zac from eragon acting like the darkspawn of Dragon Age, Three guesses who the statues are of and the first two don’t count.

She'd known something bad was going to happen. It had been gnawing at her gut since she was asked to lead the expedition. Merrill and Ashalle had been studying an old elven text and found reference to a temple. Merrill managed to use the context clues and some other old records and figured out the location and asked to go find it. The elders discussed and finally agreed to allow it, and asked Ahsoka, as one of the clan's best hunters, to lead the party. 

She told Arista of the trip, just so she wouldn't worry about her absence. Instead, she insisted on accompanying them. She had a fairly good grasp of Old Elven from her studies, and did have some talent as a mage, so she could be a help. Ahsoka had argued, that the elders would never accept her help, and that it'd be dangerous, but when Arista wanted something, she knew just how to run right over Ahsoka about it. 

So they set out, a party of seven: herself, Arista, Merrill, Merida, Tamlen, Kato, and Minaeve. Three mage scholars and four warriors. Considering the ruins were rather close to the Primian Kingdom border, that should have been more than enough to handle anything. 

The journey there took a week, and they found the ruins nestled up against a mountain, distinctly elven and covered in growth. They spent another looking through the first few chambers of the place, the ones accessible from the front door without need of another ritual like they had used to open it. Notes were taken, a few items collected, and catalogued, and each one made the scholars more and more excited to see what lay beyond. So, the eighth day in the ruins, the mages gathered together and unlocked the door. The hall behind was most impressive, gold and marble being visible even under centuries of dust. Strangely though, there was nothing inside, except a large mirror, twice as tall as any of them, standing on a dias with two statues on either side, one a elven man with a wolf sitting at his feet, the other a dragon with a elven woman kneeling at its feet. It, unlike everything else, was also completely clear of dust. 

“This place is beautiful,” Merrill said. “None of the clans have had the means to build something like this in centuries.”

“What is this mirror?” Tamlen asked.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Merida said, moving towards it with him. 

“Careful you two,” Ahsoka ordered and they flinched back just before they could take the first step up the dias. “We don’t know what it was for. Had to be important, if they locked it up so tight.”

“The room also suggests that hypothesis,” Arista said. “A vault wouldn’t have all this gold just put on the walls. Could this be a ritual chamber?”

“I don’t recall any rituals involving mirrors from the histories,” Merrill said. “Maybe there’s an inscription somewhere that can tell us what it is.”

They spread out around the chamber to look, brushes, brooms and rags knocking down dust which was then swept out the chamber with sweeps of magic. None of them realized that as more of the magic was used, the more was drawn to the mirror, and now the previously clear surface had become cloudy and mottled. 

“Did anyone find anything?” Minaeve asked, wiping her hands on a rag after polishing a plate on the east wall. 

“Nothing,” Marrill sighed as she looked in the last crevice on that wall. “Not a thing. This must have been one of those ‘everyone knows of it, so why should we write it down’ type things.”

“I think I might have found a passage,” Arista said, she and Ahsoka standing by the southwest corner of the hall. “Or at least where one used to be. The stone’s settled different than the rest.”

“Hey, the mirror’s changed!” Tamlen called, and the other turned to see him and Merida standing on the mirror’s dias, Tamlen reaching out to touch it. “I-I think I see something inside. A- It’s a city! But it’s dark, and cold and - WHAT IS THAT!”

“Tamlen!” Merida called, lunging for him.

“No!” half their group screamed as a flash of light from the mirror engulfed the two, forcing them to cover their eyes or be blinded. When they managed the blink the spots away, the two hunters were gone. 

“What just happened!?” Kato asked. 

“I don’t know,” Merrill said, moving a bit closer to the mirror. “Maybe our magic activated it somehow, but what it does, i don’t-” she cut herself off with a gasp as some things sprang out of the mirror, and Ahsoka and Kato drew their weapons while the mages grabbed their staves.

The things were humanoid, but wore black leather armor and black cloth over their faces. Wicked blades of black oily metal hung from their waists, and they made weird clicking and hissing sounds as they moved, looking over the party before drawing their blades and splitting into two groups to attack. 

“RUN!” Ahsoka ordered, but found herself and Arista cut off before they could follow those orders. Kato, Merrill and Minaeve managed to get to the door, and there they tried to hold position, Minaeve holding a barrier while the other two attacked the monsters. Arista tried doing the same for herself and Ahsoka, though it was hard to maintain it and attack.

Yet it seemed for every monster they cut down, two more would take its place. Eventually there grew to be so many, the clicking and hizzing was all that could be heard, and a sea of black separated the party. 

“Kato, go!” Ahsoka screamed over the horde. “Seal the doors and warn the clans, tell them to not send anyone else here!”

“Ahsoka-!” Kato called back, but Ahsoka screamed louder.

“GO!”

Merrill put a hand on Kato’s arm, and finally he relented he and Merrill backing up, Kato shooting the monsters while Merrill used her magic to grip the doors and pull them closed, the room growing darker as the light disappeared until all that remained was the strange, purplish glow of the mirror. 

“Think you can get that passage open?” Ahsoka asked. 

“I can try.” Arista let out another burst of magic that pushed the monsters back a few feet. “Hold them off?”

Ahsoka nodded and took a deep breath, then lunged into the fight. Her swords whirled around her in a dance of steel and gore, cutting down monsters and dodging their own return blows. As she fell more into the groove of the fight, she got faster and faster, where she could cut down several monsters before even one got a swipe at her. Those swipes she dodged, sometimes by a hair, but a miss was a miss, and the monster never got a second swing. A short wall of bodies was starting to form, but she never lost her footing. She was getting lost in the dance, and some distant part of her mind was saying it would be a story for the ages, if anyone were ever to learn of it. A elven knight sacrificing all to defend her lover and the world, taking out as many of these twisted foes as she could before her blades finally-

A grind of stone sounded behind her. “Got it! Come on!” A barrier pushed the monsters back a few paces and Arista’s hand touched the back of her shoulder. Ahsoka gave one last sweep of the monsters before turning and running after her lover down the passage way. 

However, the barrier was weaker than usual, and Ahsoka had not noticed the archers who had joined the first wave of monsters. Not until an arrow pierced her armor and into the back of her shoulder.

“AHH!” She gripped her shoulder, shoving Arista ahead when she paused. “We’ll worry about it later, for now run!”

The two ran for they didn’t know how long. The corridor was line with sconces of stone, glowing a pale blue, perhaps charged in the same manner as the mirror, or some other magic. Either way, it meant their flight was lit, and they managed to keep ahead of the horde. Every once in a while, there would be an ancient trap of some kind, always activated by the horde after their own passing, and right after a split in the corridor. A cross ways to the left and right, two sets of stairs going up or down. By unspoken decision, they always went right and up, hoping to find some doorway out. The traps slowed the horde down enough to give them some breathing room, but they would soon overwhelm it by sheer force, and Ahsoka could feel herself starting to fatigue, the exhaustion of fighting and the blood dripping from her shoulder causing her to slow. 

Finally, as they reached another junction, a giant pit trap behind them slowly filling with the bodies of the horde, she collapsed against the wall, barely keeping her feet under her. “‘Rista, go.”

“No, not without you.” Arista said, taking her hand, but Ahsoka pulled it back. 

“I’m not going to make it, I’ve lost too much blood. You at least have a chance to get out.” She raised her hand to caress Arista’s cheek, and Arista caught it.

“I’m not leaving you. Besides-” she smiled at her “-didn’t you once say you wished we would die together?”

Ahsoka couldn’t help the breathless laughter that left her at that. “Really? Now? Now you listen to me about that?” Still, Ahsoka pulled Arista close to her, burying her face in her hair as they sank to the floor. She wanted her last memory to be of her lover’s scent and the sound of her heartbeat, not the click-hiss-whoosh of the monsters and the smell of- burning bodies?

Arista screamed as a torrent of flame erupted out of the corridor they had just come down, almost drowning out the dying shrieks of the monsters as they were incinerated. The fire, heat, and smoke blocked the hall, and Ahsoka found herself growing more and more lightheaded. Black spots began dancing in her vision, and she started slumping in Arista’s hold, her lover’s calls for her to wake up becoming more and more distant. Right before the blackness overtook her, the fire finally dissipated, and she thought she saw the dragon she and Arista had met all those months ago, standing over the charred bodies and looking intensely worried about something.

[luckyspike]

Jack of All Trades - Good Omens fanfic

Crowley and Aziraphale have been around for 6000 years. Adam wants to know what they’ve been up to in that time. Anathema discovers a secret. Aziraphale is friends with the Loch Ness Monster. Maybe.

-

“So.” The assembled parties turn to look at Adam, all of fourteen years old, who is sitting on the stone wall around the garden of Jasmine Cottage, semi-melted ice cream cone dribbling down his hand. “I have a question.”

The Them, also sitting on the wall and flanking him on either side, nod encouragingly. Anathema, Newt, Madame Tracy and Mr. Shadwell, seated around the garden table and having a pleasant after-dinner chat about current events and relation to witchcraft (if any), raise their eyebrows and look politely interested. Aziraphale and Crowley, side-by-side on a bench under the jasmine, shared an apprehensive look. Dog, chewing a stick at their feet, did not pay Adam any heed. 

“S’for you two,” he said, indicating the supernatural entities with his ice cream cone. “You been around for a while, yeah?” A pair of trepidatious nods. “So you gotta know all kinds of weird stuff.” He considered his words and went on. “I mean, Crowley, I know you know a lot about science, an’ Aziraphale you’ve prob’ly read every book ever written -” Aziraphale actually blushed “- but like, there’s gotta be other stuff, right? Bet you know loads of cool stuff.”

The attention of the assembled turned to Crowley and Aziraphale, who exchanged another look which was still apprehensive but now, also, confused. “How do you mean, Adam?” Aziraphale asked politely, after Crowley shrugged. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure I follow.”

“Well, like,” Adam gestured grandly. “Say I lived for a thousand years. First of all, I wouldn’ bother with school. But I’d wanna learn about other stuff, actually properly interesting stuff, like swordfighting an’ archery an’ like … geology an’ stuff.” He beamed. “I could be like Indiana Jones, going all over the world to find stuff about lost cities and the Holy Grail an’ all that.” A thought occurred to him. “Do you know where the Holy Grail is?”

“Yes, and no, you can’t know,” Crowley answered, while Newt and Shadwell’s mouth’s dropped open. “I think I get it.” He considered it, swirling his wine in his glass. “I’m quite good at sewing.”

Adam blinked. “Sewing?”

“Yeah, you know, back before tailors and all that, you had to be able to do your own repairs and the like. And you couldn’t always miracle up a new robe or whatever. Right?” He looked to Aziraphale for confirmation, who nodded in agreement.

“I did a good deal of metalwork, as well, around the turn of the century,” Aziraphale said. “Smelting and the like. I started with just making swords and that but it’s actually very interesting, really, and I got quite good at it if I say so myself.”

“Cool,” Pepper said, eyes wide. “What else?”

Crowley considered it. “Technically I’m a medical doctor.”

Anathema cut in. “Really?”

“Well, yeah, but I got the degree on a lark in the eleventh century so I’m not ah, up-to-date as it were.”

“So should we call you Dr. Crowley?” Wensley asked, his head to one side. 

Aziraphale answered. “Best not. Unless you’re fond of leeches.” The Them and some of the assembled adults made a face. Crowley did, too. 

“Never did like that part.” He poked Aziraphale. “What else you got? Don’t you know glassblowing?”

“Oh, yes, but I haven’t done it in ages. Can’t imagine it’d be any good at it now. Pottery, too. Oh, and carpentry!” He shrugged. “That was another one of those semi-essential skills long ago.”

“Picked some of that up myself from a guy,” Crowley muttered into his wine, trailing off when Aziraphale glared at him briefly. Anathema definitely put a pin in that with plans to revisit it later if possible. “I’m pretty good at shooting. Arrows, guns, whatever you got. Part of the infernal workings or whatever.” He thought further, while Aziraphale did the same. “I was a miner, for a while, and a pilot, a couple of times.”

“I was a sailor,” Aziraphale reflected. “In the eighth century. I went to Hawai’i.”

“Easy to be a sailor when you’re not worried about drowning.” Crowley sat back. “Oh, I don’t know Adam, it’s been a long time. Anything you’re interested in?”

Brian’s eyes were bright. “Did you go to the old west? In America?”

“I’ve never been to America,” Aziraphale answered, but looked surprised when Crowley nodded to the affirmative. “You were in America in the nineteenth century?”

“Around, oh, the 1860s, yeah. It was dreadful.”

Newt cut in, hesitant but interested nonetheless. “What about the space program?”

Crowley and Aziraphale exchanged a look. “I certainly didn’t participate,” Aziraphale said. “Heaven frowns on that kind of thing.”

Crowley raised a hand. “Dah, comrade,” he sighed. “Thought it seemed interesting, so I joined up with the soviets for a bit in the 50s.” He looked pleased with himself. “I was there when they launched Sputnik, the stupid little thing.” Aziraphale raised his eyebrows at the expression of unadulterated fondness Crowley had while he talked about the satellite. “Dumb little ball with wires sticking off it and there you have it, humans in space. Amazing.”

“Can either of yeh do witchcraft?” Shadwell asked in a low voice. “I asked ye’ in the seventies if ye’ were a witch, a warlock, or someone who calls their cat funny names.”

Crowley shook his head. “And I’m not. Never was.” He spread his hands. “Just a plain old demon, no frills.”

“And a doctor,” Wensley added. 

“Sort of. And no, I don’t know any witchcraft. Never saw the need,” Aziraphale added. “Was there something in particular you were interested in, Adam? Safe to say if there’s something specific one of us might know something about it.”

Adam thought about it. “What about archaeology?” he asked, eventually. “Dinosaurs an’ the like. You must’ve seen some dinosaurs.”

They didn’t look at one another. They resolutely did not look at one another. Aziraphale answered first, clearing his throat slightly before he started. “I’m afraid not, my boy. I was, ah, occupied with the preparation for the Garden -”

“I was in Hell,” Crowley said, matter-of-fact, although Anathema and Madam Tracy did notice his arm, which had previously been draped over the back of the bench, moved to Aziraphale’s shoulder.

“Yes, and he was in Hell, unfortunately -” Crowley shrugged “- so neither of us were very much involved in dinosaurs, Adam. I am sorry.”

Adam looked a little disappointed. “S’okay. Alright, I guess. You can’t be everywhere at once.”

Crowley raised a finger. “Ah, I did do an archaeological dig in the ‘30s. 1830s, that is. Right into the early 40s, until I went to America.” The Them were rapt. “Found some footprints, a few bones, but back then nobody really knew what to make of any of it. 1842, that’s when the dinosaurs came onto the scene properly in terms of scientific research.”

“Cool,” Brian breathed. “So you did the digging and all that stuff?”

Crowley hedged. “Eh, I was there for it.”

Adam nodded. “So you know how to do it.” It was more of a statement rather than a question. 

“I suppose I do.”

The Them shared a look amongst themselves. Then, Pepper said, “We want to excavate the chalk pit. We reckon there’s probably loads of dinosaurs under there.”

“At least one T-Rex,” Adam added, confidently. Wensley looked less confident.

“Or a baryonyx.”

“I want to find a triceratops,” Brian said, plucking Adam’s unfinished ice cream cone out of his hand and making short work of the soggy cone. “I think there’s probably one of those under the T-Rex. I bet the T-Rex was eating it when they both died.”

“How’d you reckon they died then?” Pepper asked, with disdain. “Not the triceratops, obviously, but the T-Rex.”

“Maybe it choked.”

“I don’t reckon T-Rexes can choke.”

“Well, if they take big enough bites -” The conversation devolved into good-natured bickering, as was typical with the Them. The assembled adults and adult-shaped beings breathed a collective sigh of relief. 

Aziraphale prodded Crowley in the ribs. “‘Just a plain old demon,’” he taunted. “There’s nothing plain about you, dear. I had no idea you spent so much time in America.”

“Eh, I was in a phase.”

“You were really there for Sputnik?” Newt asked, still somewhat awestruck. “How’d you get the clearances?” Crowley stared at him. “Ah, right. Never mind.”

Anathema propped her chin on her hand. “What about you, Aziraphale? You can’t have just been collecting books all those years.”

He waved a hand. “No, no, I did all sorts of things. Mostly foiling this one.” He nudged Crowley, who looked skeptical. “But no, I was around for several historical moments I suppose. They didn’t seem particularly notable at the time, of course, but in hindsight they were quite significant.” He shrugged. “I helped mix the paint for Michelangelo sometimes. I sold him some pigments, as well. I just rather liked his paintings, at the time. Although the Sistine Chapel is a bit overly righteous for my tastes.”

“What? You love the Sistine Chapel, angel, don’t - oi, what’d I do?”

“Some of the illustrations are patently inaccurate,” Aziraphale muttered. “And, you know, there was the time with King Arthur.”

Madame Tracy looked rapt. “Oh, I think I remember a bit about that. Seemed very damp.” She looked apologetic. “Sorry, it’s all I remember.”

Crowley smirked into his wineglass. “That was the long and short of it. Damp and rife with damned uncomfortable suits of armor. And horses.”

Aziraphale frowned. “Yes, there were horses. Lots of riding horses.” He shook his head, as if to shake away an unpleasant memory. “Anyway, no, it wasn’t always all collecting books, although there was always that, too.”

“How did you look after them?” Madame Tracy asked. “All those years, all that moving around.”

“Oh, here and there. I … to be honest I didn’t do much moving around after about the ninth century.”

“Because your little pocket dimension got too small to hold all your books,” Crowley snickered. “Had to start using a proper building.” Aziraphale glared, but his heart wasn’t in it. 

“So was Merlin really a wizard, or was it something else, like he’d made a deal with a demon -” she glanced to Crowley “- or an angel, or was he just a hoax?”

“Interesting question, because there were elements of all of them at play,” Aziraphale replied, suddenly eager. “You see, humans are typically not capable of magic beyond basic witchcraft, which really is just science with a trick to it, except in exceedingly rare cases, but Merlin -”

“Hey, Crowley?”

Aziraphale stopped, because Adam and the Them were off of the garden wall and standing in front of the demon, expectant. “Sorry to interrupt,” Wensley apologized. “Only - we want to start excavating the chalk pit, and we were wondering what we might need to do it.”

Crowley blinked. He looked to Aziraphale, and then, with a look of determination, downed his wine and lurched upright. “Don’t,” he said to the angel, “tell them I had anything to do with bloody Merlin. I didn’t,” he insisted to the adults. “He was completely mad, and I was not involved in that at all.”

“Oh, okay, Black Knight, certainly.”

“Nothing to do with Merlin!” He thrust his glass to Aziraphale and then turned to the children, smoothing his jacket down. “Right. Alright. Let’s have a look at this chalk pit.”

“I think I have some old toothbrushes at home,” Pepper volunteered. “Mum saves them to recycle them for other stuff later.”

“We can just use my regular toothbrush,” Brian added. “I don’t.”

“Ew,” Wensley said, quietly. The chatter continued, Adam volunteering molding putty, chisels, and the like from his father’s garden shed as the five of them wandered off to Hogback Woods and the old chalk pit.

Newt looked thoughtful. “I wonder if they’ll find anything. Chalk is quite good for fossils, I’ve read.” He caught Anathema looking at him, amused and trying not to laugh. “What?”

“You want to go with them?”

“No, I mean, I don’t know the first thing about archeology, just saw films, but …” He trailed off. “I mean, a bit. I do what to go, a bit.” Madame Tracy patted his hand. 

“Well then off you go, find some dinosaurs, Newt. We have it well in-hand here.” He glanced to Anathema, who nodded, and then with some hasty muttered goodbyes, speed-walked out of the garden of the cottage and down the path to the chalk pit after the group. “Can you imagine if they did find something?”

“They might, with Adam,” Anathema reflected. Shadwell sipped his lager.

“I thought the lad doesn’t have any powers still?”

“Sort of,” Anathema and Aziraphale replied simultaneously. She looked to the angel and he shrugged. “They’re fading as he gets older, but he does have some left. I’m not sure what’s left will be strong enough to materialize an entire fossil, though.”

“I was just thinking there could be a real one there,” Madame Tracy suggested. “You never know. There’s certainly ones that haven’t been found - they can’t dig everything up to find them. Might be exciting, is all, wouldn’t it?” She laid her hand over Shadwell’s. “Quite a story to tell, hm?”

“Aye.” Shadwell thought of the kids who would come up to him outside of the pub on nice days, and ask for stories of witches and demons and eldritch horrors. Dinosaurs, he considered, might be good to add into the rota, especially if he could throw a little personal flair into it.

“Shame you never saw any,” Madam Tracy sighed to Aziraphale. “I bet they were a sight to see, hm?”

Aziraphale laughed, and tried to force confidence into it. “Yes they were … quite large, from what I understand. Astounding beasts.” He patted his knees and smoothed his waistcoat, before standing up. “Anyway, while they’re doing that I’ll get started with the cleanup, Anathema?”

She stood as well, hands in her skirt pockets. “Oh, you don’t have to -”

“No, no, I insist.”

She smiled. “Well then, let me help you. It’ll be quick with just the two of us.” She followed the angel into the cottage, weighing her words carefully. She shut the door behind them and trailed him into the kitchen. After a beat, she asked, “Were dinosaurs real?”

Aziraphale looked startled, as if he’d forgotten she was following him. “What? Oh.” He laughed, weakly, and tried to sound dismissive. “Oh, I mean, there are skeletons, aren’t there? Very real skeletons.”

“Right, but that doesn’t mean there were actual dinosaurs,” Anathema pointed out reasonably. “Just means the bones are real. And you can consider that if some omnipotent being could create the entire Earth, then how hard would it be to stick a few bones in there?” She wagged her eyebrows. “Am I on the right track?”

The angel looked perturbed. “You really are too clever by half, my dear. Do not let anybody know about this conversation, by the way.”

“I won’t,” she assured him, through her broad grin. “I knew it. I always thought they didn’t seem physiologically possible.” She crossed her arms and squared her stance. “So, cards on the table, how about sasquatch?”

“I’m sorry?” Aziraphale turned away, turning his focus to the sink full of dishes and rolling his sleeves up to his elbows. “Really, Anathema, that’s all fabricated. Humans thought those up.”

“Did they? Did they, really?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. I wasn’t involved in all of Creation,” he blustered. 

She put her head to the side. “What about the Jersey Devil? The Chupacabra? The Loch Ness Monster?” Her smile faded as she waited, and eventually turned to a frown as Aziraphale resolutely did not answer and, instead, handed her a dish to dry. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?” 

“Absolutely not,” he replied, as she began drying the dish with prejudice. “I’ve already said too much today.”

Anathema sighed. “I guess I could always ask Crowley.”

“He’ll say yes to everything.” Her forehead creased, and Aziraphale handed her another dish. “He always liked cryptid hunters. He’ll probably volunteer to go on an expedition to find the Loch Ness Monster with you.”

“So it’s not real,” she said, flatly.

“I didn’t say that.” He shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe it is and you’ll find it.” She found herself smiling as the angel grinned at her. “If anyone can find it, you could, Anathema.”

“I’m definitely going with ‘not real’,” she laughed.

“I’m sure Nessie will be disappointed to hear that when I speak with her next week.”

She rolled her eyes, but she also laughed. “Yeah, okay. So anyway, what were you saying about Merlin? And did you say Crowley was actually the black knight?”

[scifimagpie]

Game of ZZZs: How Long Stories Ruin Everything

I've been putting this one off because I was kind of busy writing an 18-part series deep-dive involving journalism and undercover work, but since Lindsay Ellis has released her video essay conclusion, I have finally put my thoughts in order.

So, today we're going to talk about something contentious. I have no issue with books being long, or shows being long, or movies being long - but at the same time, I do. And yes, I know some people adore epic scale stories for their own sake.  Not everything needs to be a thousand-page-long ten-book series with three spinoffs and prequels. Oh, sure, market forces and advertising play a role in this, but creators still participate in it.

But sometimes a story isn't long because it needs to be, it's long because the writer thinks it HAS to be. From my personal experience as a reader and writer, and especially as an editor, I've come to some conclusions about how stories are artificially extended. And in a world of global warming and climate change, shouldn't we be fighting waste everywhere, on every level?

Now, a certain show ended its eighth season not long ago; Big Bang Theory came to a whimper of a close after ten seasons, and Veep - which I only heard about towards its grand finale, alas - has also finished up a seven-season run. 

I'm not saying all of these shows participated in various errors. I'm saying pretty much every show, book, and movie series will partake in them eventually. So how do we do better than the bad ones, and how do we echo or even improve on the good ones? We can't fight what we don't know about, so let's get into it.

Spacing

Everything happens, but not right away. No, the important events are distanced from each other, to the point where there are long stretches of dead zones or deserts of nonsense in between them. I'm not talking about character interactions as nonsense here, but unfortunately, a lot of authors seem to think that they count, and that human drama isn't interesting enough to be a climax. Older fantasy works--cough, cough, Wheel of Time--can be particularly bad about this. The problem with spacing out events and using human drama between the big McGuffin/army-driven fights is that readers get frustrated by the human drama rather than finding it rewarding. Or worse, they find the army and McGuffiny-crap a distraction from the human stuff.

Padding

I know about this issue from the inside. Bad Things that Happen to Girls started off as a book called Foreverland, and then was untitled for a while before getting its current name. It went through two full rewrites before arriving at its current published form. When I wrote it at first, I thought it absolutely had to be a long novel, with lots of details about the girls' lives and a slow-burn breakdown, then an extended road trip in the middle and a bunch of scenes about their experiences in university.

I didn't realise I was padding it, but when I experimented with radically decreasing the timeline of events, I had a revelation. I didn't need years and paragraphs on paragraphs chronicling their lived experiences, full of pointless dialogue and meandering descriptions. All I had to do were give little samples and important moments, and that would get the idea across. Sometimes a flash reveals more than a long exposure shot, to put it in cinematic terms.

Cramming

EVERYTHING MUST HAPPEN AND IT MUST HAPPEN NOW AND HERE ARE TEN NEW CHARACTERS AND A NEW SUBPLOT AND HOLY CRAP WE MUST MAKE UP FOR WRAPPING UP TOO MANY THREADS AT THE END OF THE LAST SEASON OOPS.

The caps lock here was entirely necessary and appropriate, because with cramming, the story often feels like it's shouting at you. (Probably in German.)

The biggest problem with cramming, too, is that it requires glossing over things. If readers get interested by a small detail, they might end up screaming, "wait, go back!" long after the author's moved to another topic, or three other topics. Finding the balance between this and padding can be tricky, but the best solution I can offer is "external perspective." Get someone to read over your work, and when they lose attention, that's time to cut. It's a trick I often use with editing manuscripts - the minute my attention wavers, I mark it, just in case.

Crashing

this tends to happen to shows that have lived past their expiry date. Supernatural is a fine example of this. This is where "shark-jumping" tends to come into play; characters do things that go against their nature and development for the sake of jump-starting a narrative or adding some excitement.

Oh, the shark-jump. That's worth a mini-section of its own. Honestly, most shows either end or jump the shark in order to keep going. There's no such thing as a perfect writer or a perfect story; mostly because these things are subjective, but partly because keeping all the balls in the air for a story is just plain hard. 

Endless escalation 

Science fiction authors are prone to this, and so are epic fantasy authors. In an effort to keep reader interest, stakes rise and rise and rise, and then lose sight of the human scale of things. The problem is that stories are made of people, and if you forget about the people, you don't have a story anymore.

As with Cramming, this can lead to glossing over interesting bits as well. The full impact of a big change or shift isn't always felt if we rush to the next big, shiny thing. In real life, though, long-reaching consequences of events can have ripples for decades or even centuries. The Magna Carta was a big deal when it was signed; the effects of the Spanish Inquisitions, the Crusades, the unification of China (which happened more than once), the Viking cultural expansions, and the colonization of North America (by which I mean the land-theft and genocide of Indigenous peoples) are all still talked about to this day. 

Bad things that happen to characters need room to resonate. PTSD and trauma are not only interesting, they're natural, and even when people mostly recover from them, they leave a lasting impact. Let your characters get wrecked by something. Have characters reference things that have happened. Let characters get fatigued, collapse, and have to fix themselves. It'll not only demonstrate the actual impact of your events, it'll keep you from having to throw together another big, shiny thing to make the story more exciting (looking at you, Avengers series and mainstream comics). 

So, what tends to actually cause these writing techniques behind the scenes? 

Burnout or boredom

One of the most difficult and important factors - one which arguably contributed to the absolute mess that was the GoT finale - is just getting tired of your own damn story. When this happens, authors and creators will end up trying to revamp something with weird new twists partly to keep themselves interested, might engineer an awkward left turn to justify a foreshadowed plot element, or might just do a half-hearted wrap-up of the previous plot elements.

Here's the thing - audiences don't always consume stories at the same rate as authors write them. Many times, readers or viewers will stumble on a work and binge it in a relatively short time, so what took years for the writer will take months, at most, for the consumer. This can make tonal clashes very jarring. 

In other cases, an author will abandon a series due to writer's block or life events - a sin of which I, cough, am guilty - and then try to pick it up later. This will still impact the story, often negatively. Maybe one has just gotten well and thoroughly tired of the subject matter, or it's been done to death in the popular sphere. It doesn't really matter - either way, authors are subject to the world around them, and sometimes, the only way to deal with burnout or boredom is rotating to another project. That's fine - the only issue comes when the first project is completely abandoned, and languishes, unfinished. 

Societal changes and personal development 

I'm combining these two because the world around us affects us, and sometimes, we even affect the world. If you'd told me that Donald Trump and Boris Johnson were going to rise to power during my lifetime, I wouldn't've believed you. To many, it sounded like a bad dream. Well, here we are, and the long night has not yet come to an end. Using art to cope with dark times and critique them is a long-celebrated human trend, and there's no reason to stop now. Sure, we might fear our work aging poorly - but stories that try to be timeless always age anyhow, and an earnest time capsule often lasts longer, because it can tap into the problems of an era (which echo forward, as discussed in the section above).

If you'd told me that I'd be able to deal with my family issues in a more satisfactory way, I might have believed you - but realising the impact of that on my writing both as a Game Master and an author is another matter. However, the additional perspective and maturity of healing has, rather than distancing me from characters' struggles, provided additional objectivity and even empathy. Fixing ourselves and healing doesn't "take away our artistic magic" - far from it. If anything, getting over issues unlocks the ability to deal with them in fiction much more effectively. 

Disillusionment and insecurity

These are nasty brain demons, all right - perhaps one has taken a look at the broad span of one's work, compared it to one's goals, and feels they are just - well, left wanting. Every creator struggles with this at some point, whether crafting a story for a D&D party or for hundreds of readers or thousands of viewers. The only way to deal with it is with external perspective and turning to objective sources of both external critique and validation. 

After all, we tell ourselves things that may or may not be true all the time, and measuring them against the perceptions of the audience can drastically correct things. Your readers might just be happy to see the characters get married - never mind that it took you five years to write about them getting together. And even if they don't like something specific or complain about it or nitpick - hey, they're coming back. You compelled them. Even if the readers, say, abandon their fandom and proclaim it a trashfire - they're still paying for or giving your story attention and money. And ultimately, from a marketing perspective attention is always neutral or positive - even if that attention is controversial - because it increases profits. 

How do we even begin to fix all this? 

But.  All hope is not lost.

By acknowledging burnout, boredom, disillusionment, insecurity, personal development, and societal change - the factors which often lead to writing shortcuts detailed in the previous section - we can compensate for the natural creative struggles by accepting and anticipating them. 

Try to write books in a series in a continuous stretch when possible, making it harder to lose track of the tone or style or character journeys. Plot things out, and get yourself a hands-on editor and/or extremely trustworthy beta-readers. And forgive yourself for screwing up - then get back to writing. At least, that's what I'm doing! 

***

Michelle Browne is a sci fi/fantasy writer and editor. She lives in Lethbridge, AB with her partner-in-crime and Max the cat. Her days revolve around freelance editing, knitting, jewelry, and learning too much. She is currently working on other people's manuscripts, the next books in her series, and drinking as much tea as humanly possible.

Find her all over the internet: * OG Blog * Mailing list * Magpie Editing * 

* Amazon * Medium * Twitter * Instagram * Facebook * Tumblr * Paypal.me * Ko-fi

[aion-rsa]

TV’s Most Confusing Episodes From Doctor Who to Westworld

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There has to be some confusion in a TV drama, a procession of things not-yet-understood. That’s the deal: accept temporary bafflement in the expectation that at some point, all will be revealed. Or even if it won’t be, at least there’s a reason it’s been left unsolved, like a Sudoku you’ve got jam on. 

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Enough, Scrappy-Doo! The TV Dogs Who Need to Chill the F Out

By Alec Bojalad and 3 others

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TV’s Most Stressful Episodes From Battlestar Galactica to The Handmaid’s Tale

By Alec Bojalad and 2 others

What doesn’t work is when a TV show that’s supposed to be taking you along with it, leaves you behind. That could be your fault (Did you stay awake? Skip an episode? Were you checking your phone? Was your dog doing that weird thing with the curtains so you had to get up and miss a bit?). Or it could be the fault of a TV show either too ambitious or inaccessible or illogical for comfort. We’ve chosen the episodes that left us scratching our heads; you can judge who’s to blame. 

Doctor Who ‘Twice Upon a Time’ (2017)

So named because twice is the minimum number of times you have to watch the 2017 Doctor Who Christmas special before you have the weakest grasp of what’s going on. Considering that most will have only watched it once, and that, from inside a boozy, gravy-based fug, it’s staggering how esoteric this one is – impressively so. As showrunner Steven Moffat’s farewell episode, it’s a distillation of the sort of clever, complicated, ambitious, self-referential writing he’s known for.

There are two Doctors (three if you count the post-Regeneration glimpse of Thirteen), two overlapping Doctor Who stories, a Dalek, an ancestor of The Brigadier, a ship’s pilot made of glass, a moving historical WWI moment and three companions who aren’t really there. (Or are they?) It’s about regret, or reminiscence, or saying goodbye. It’s definitely about something and is doubtless very meaningful and poignant once you crack its shell, but there’s the sense that, unless you’re one of the Who hardcore, it doesn’t really care for you to try. Why be so aloof? It’s Christmas. Let the rest of us play too. LM  

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Season 4 Episode 8 ‘I’m Not the Person I Used to Be’

This was a bold move from a bold show. When Santino Fontana chose to leave Crazy Ex-Girlfriend after his one year contract ended, the character of Greg – assumed by many to be lead Rebecca’s romantic endgame – was written out in early season two. Then in the fourth and final season, Greg returned but this time played by Skylar Astin. Instead of glossing over the casting change and pretending as though nothing had happened (like when, say, Ross’ ex-wife Carol on Friends or mercenary warrior Daario Naharis on Game of Thrones changed faces), Crazy Ex-Girlfriend hit it straight on.

This smart, innovative series had always been filtered through the unreliable perspective of lead Rebecca Bunch (hence the extravagant musical numbers that take place in her head). So when Greg’s character was recast, the show used it to comment on our impressions of other people. ‘I’m Not the Person I Used to Be’ lampshaded New Greg with a psychoanalytical reflection on changing perceptions and personal growth. It was brave. It was innovative. It was admirable. It was… really confusing and distancing. However great Astin was in the role, and however clever the idea was, New Greg was the point at which some Crazy Ex-Girlfriend fans began to peel away from a show clearly unafraid to leave viewers behind. LM

Westworld Season 3 Episode 8 ‘Crisis Theory’

The Westworld season one finale was confusing in a delicious, grinning ‘Oh, you clever devil’ kind of way. The Westworld season two finale was confusing in an exhilarating ‘Blimey. All right then!’ kind of way. The Westworld season three finale was confusing in a way that made you feel like you’d watched the entire Terminator trilogy on fast-forward while downing a 12-pack of Red Bull and trying to rewire the electrics in your house. It wasn’t a good feeling.

I still don’t know which world-dominating AI was which, who was fighting who, what the evil French guy wanted, how many people were secretly Dolores, whether Maeve still only existed in the Matrix, and why Jesse from Breaking Bad was the new Jesus. If free will still exists by the time season four comes, I’m using mine to either get a valium prescription or change channels. LM

Rick and Morty Season 4 Episode 6 ‘Never Ricking Morty’

“Never Ricking Morty” is a particularly divisive episode of Rick and Morty – even at this very website! Some of us loved it, while others weren’t big fans. One thing that’s undeniable, however, is that this midseason 4 episode is the show’s most complicated narrative endeavor yet. “Never Ricking Morty” takes place on a “Story Train,” meaning that the plot initially goes through your typical three-act storytelling structure.

Once Rick and Morty realize where they are, however, Rick understands that the only way out of the Story Train is to reject the conventions of storytelling altogether. This means that any natural storytelling inclination must be resisted. It also means that the show burns through about nine series finales worth of epic nonsense right at the end as Rick and Morty’s “canon” is sucked right out of them. It’s tremendously challenging to watch, much less understand, and the episode wants it that way. – AB

Russian Doll Episode 7 ‘The Way Out’

Like many other Groundhog Day-style “time loop” stories, Netflix’s Russian Doll goes out of its way to establish the “rules” of its sci-fi premise. Every time Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne) dies (which happens with disturbing frequency), she returns to the night of her 36th birthday party, washing her face in the bathroom as Harry Nilsson’s “Gotta Get Up” plays. That much is easy to understand, and Russian Doll has fun seeing how far it can make Nadia last before perishing and returning to the night in question.

Once she meets another person stuck in a time loop, however, things start to get wacky. Russian Doll’s seventh episode, “The Way Out,” is about as off-the-wall an experience as you’ll find on television. Nadia’s loved ones start to disappear. Then she flashes back to memories of her mother. Before you know it, teeth are bloodily falling out. Russian Doll settles in for a relatively logical ending in its eighth episode, but this penultimate installment is pleasantly incomprehensible. – AB

The Nevers Episode 6 ‘True’

The Nevers’ premise is bold enough to begin with. The HBO series is set in a fictional Victorian era where a select portion of the population (most of them women) have been “Touched” or blessed with supernatural abilities. Apparently, however, bold wasn’t nearly bold enough. The Nevers’ sixth episode, which serves as a de facto season finale due to a COVID production delay, upends everything.

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This episode begins not in 19th century London like every other installment thus far, but in a far flung dystopian sci-fi future. Earth is barely habitable and humanity is on the ropes. The only possible hope that the human race has left is in the form of a powerful alien species known as the Galanthi. If this all sounds complicated, you don’t even know the half of it. “True” is notable for not holding the audience’s hand through this disorienting experience at all. The episode makes no attempt to tone down its futuristic jargon and it’s not entirely clear what’s even happening until halfway through. By episode’s end, it’s apparent how “True” connects to The Nevers’ original concept, but no one would be blamed for needing multiple rewatches to really get it. – AB

Farscape Season 4 Episode 7 ‘John Quixote’

Let it never be said that Farscape was a TV show afraid to take a big creative swing. In season 4, we get this trippy and confusing episode (written by series star Ben Browder), which sees Crichton and Chiana trapped in a virtual reality game based on the memories of Black-T Crichton (because, yes, this was after the storyline that saw the show’s main character split into two, equally valid humans) and a neural template from Stark. The game is designed to keep C & C trapped in the gameworld until they die so their consciousnesses will be trapped in the virtual reality—wait for it—forever.

This hour of TV actually holds up quite well upon rewatch, probably because it is packed to the brim with clever pop culture references, but an initial watch of this series installment is absolutely bonkers, featuring Aeryn as a southern belle, Rygel as a version of Monty Python’s Black Knight who can shoot fire out of his ass, and D’Argo as a lederhosen-wearing Hansel who, at one point, eats baked beans out of Jool’s intestines. I can only imagine what someone watching this episode out of context would imagine this show is actually about. – KB

Fringe Season 2 Episode 11 ‘Unearthed’

Some episodes of television intentionally challenge the viewer’s ability to interpret what the hell is going on, and some episodes of television are broadcast wildly out of order, seemingly bringing back a character killed off in the previous season for a humdrum monster-of-the-week installment. You may have guessed that I have a specific example in mind for that second category and, if so, you would be right. Written and filmed to be the 21st episode of Fringe’s first season, “Unearthed” was instead recycled to be a mid-season installment in the second season of Fox’s usually pretty great sci-fi drama.

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This might have worked—it’s a basic episode that sees the Fringe team exploring the mystery of a teen girl who is pronounced dead, only to wake up screaming an alphanumeric code while doctors are working to remove her organs—save for the fact that it features a Fringe team member who was killed at the end of the previous season. Honestly, I can laugh about this now, but, at the time, it was jarring and confusing, with the network (Fox, if you were wondering) offering no pre-episode or in-episode explanation offered for why the aforementioned deceased character might be up and walking. For this to happen in an episode that also features a guest character thought dead revealed to be alive is icing on the cake. – KB

The OA Episode 8 ‘Invisible Self’

The OA is one of the most aggressively bizarre shows in Netflix history. Created by and starring Brit Marling, this two-season sci-fi series is fit to bursting with strange, at times difficult-to-comprehend concepts. The storyfollows Marling as Prairie Johnson, a young woman who resurfaces after disappearing – only now she refers to herself as “The OA (or original angel)”. Prairie/The OA recruits several disciples who she promises to take to another dimension. In “Invisible Self”, the final episode of the show’s first season, it all somehow culminates into…well, into this:

Yes, what you’re seeing there is a group full of cult weirdos engaging in an interpretive dance to stop a school shooter. And mostly succeeding! The OA‘s second season gets even stranger in many respects but it’s hard to top the confusing majesty of this first season finale.

Twin Peaks: The Return ‘Part 8’

Legendary filmmaker David Lynch has absolutely no concerns about being dubbed “confusing.” In fact, when it comes to Lynch’s filmography, that’s kind of a feature, not a bug. In-between crafting mind-bending classic films like The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive, however, Lynch took some time to stamp his name into TV history with the surprisingly straight-forward Twin Peaks. Sure, Twin Peaks was frequently abstract and strange throughout its two-season run but it had a coherent plot, which is more than many Lynch movies can claim.

That sense of narrative coherence all ends during a particular episode of the 2017 revival Twin Peaks: The Return. “Part 8” is absolutely bonkers. Episode co-writer Mark Frost described it as “what you might describe as a Twin Peaks origin story, [showing] where this pervasive sense of darkness and evil had come from.” In Frost and Lynch’s world, that sense of darkness comes in forms including but not limited to: the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945, oodles of primordial ectoplasmic fluid, a frog/cockroach creature, woodsmen manifesting out of mid-air, and of course: a performance by “The” Nine Inch Nails. It’s one of the most confusing episodes of television in history…and one of the best.

Dark – Every. Single. Episode.

When trying to pinpoint one episode to highlight for this article, Dark fought back and I came to the conclusion that every single episode of German multigenerational sci-fi series Dark is borderline impenetrable. Just when you think you have finally wrapped your head around what’s happening in the small town of Winden, Dark will throw in another layer to this timey-wimey, multiversal story that assures that you, in fact, have no idea what the hell is going on.

That being said, unlike some of the shows on this list, the confusing nature of Dark’s narrative isn’t a bug; it’s an intentional feature. This is a show that asks a lot from its viewers, but gives us satisfying answers in return. And it’s OK if you only ever have half an idea of what’s going on—if that’s the case, you’re doing better than most of Dark’s characters. – KB

The post TV’s Most Confusing Episodes From Doctor Who to Westworld appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[theimagenatory]

The Doctor and Your Birthday

So, in case you didn’t notice, today is the 54th anniversary to the airing of the first ever Doctor Who episode - hence, why I posted an imagine this morning and why I will post a one-shot tonight.

In addition, I give you this small imagine series about how the different Doctors would celebrate your birthday.

EDIT: So every imagine was supposed to come with a related gif, but my computer decided to be annoying and it doesn’t work. So, apparently, no gifs it is.

First Doctor:

Honestly, he doesn’t even know it’s your birthday. It’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s just not really something that interests him, especially not since he stopped celebrating his years ago. He only finds out when Susan says something, and even then he wouldn’t have done anything to celebrate it, if it were up to him. Susan won’t have that, though, so he stays quiet and takes you to a distant planet as a birthday present. He’ll never admit it, but he smiles when he sees how happy you are.

Second Doctor:

He’s vaguely aware that birthdays are a thing for humans, though he’s not quite sure why. It’s one of his companions that get the cake (Jamie, it’s Jamie that gets the cake) but even though you all stop to have a small celebration, it isn’t anything big. He tells you ‘happy birthday’ eventually, but not until there’s nobody else who might overhear him.

Third Doctor:

He knows your birthday, having read it in your UNIT file, and is incredibly frustrated that he can’t do something amazing to celebrate it. He wants to take you to a planet half a millennia into the future, or maybe some social event a hundred years in the past, but he’s stuck on present day Earth. There’s still a rather big party, though, and he gives a speech. He hugs you when he gives you the present, and in the end that is what surprises you most.

Fourth Doctor:

He plans it weeks in advance. A trip to Disney Universe, followed by dinner in the best restaurant the 38th century has to offer only to top off with a night at one of the most perstigious dance clubs to have ever existed. Of course, all of his plans are worth nothing and you end up spending your birthday locked in a 14th century prison before running away, narrowly escaping arrows as you do. He seems upset, but you promise him that you don’t mind. It’s more authentic this way.

Fifth Doctor:

He forgets. And what’s more than that, he’s trying to pretend that he didn’t forget, even though you both know the truth. He promises he’ll make it up to you and takes you somewhere truly amazing – but it’s not your birthday anymore and you both know it’s not the same. Adric gives you a card, though, and you hold on to it for a very long time.

Sixth Doctor:

You think it’s the simplest birthday you ever had, and that’s what makes it all the more special. He takes you to dinner, just the two of you, followed by a walk in the purple moonlight of a planet you can’t remember the name of. He doesn’t look at you when he wishes ‘happy birthday’, so he doesn’t see your smile. You think it’s one of the best birthdays you had so far.

Seventh Doctor:

Much like it is with everything else he does, his celebration of your birthday is over the top and is destroyed spectacularly by something the two of you really should have seen coming. You laugh as you run back into the TARDIS, covered in green goo, and he can’t help but smile, too. He promises your next birthday will be better, but you know it will probably end much in the same way and you enjoy it all the more for this.

Eighth Doctor:

This time, you know for certain that he didn’t forget your birthday, he simply elected to ignore it. You don’t comment on it, though, and try to hide your hurt by telling yourself that it’s the effects of the War that had started on Gallifrey. You’re more than a bit surprised when he takes you home to celebrate your birthday with your family, but not as surprised as when he leaves without you. For a long time after that, you don’t celebrate your birthdays, either.

War Doctor:

It’s as though there’s an unspoken agreement between the two of you that you don’t bring the subject up as the date comes closer. When the day arrives, though, the two of you stay in. For twenty-four hours, there is no War going on outside the TARDIS doors, no Daleks or Time Lords tearing the universe apart. There are only the two of you, and it’s the best present you’ve received in a while.

Ninth Doctor:

You did not expect the seemingly emotionless nine hundred year old alien to remember your birthday. You expected even less that he’d tell your two co-companions about it. (You did expect Jack to invite a stripper, but then again anyone who knew him could see it coming.) By the end of the night, your stomach hurts from laughter and you hug all three of them tightly as you go to bed. When the Doctor tells you ‘Happy Birthday’, you smile even brighter.

Tenth Doctor:

You sneak out to see him that night. You know that if the Master catches you, the consequences would be terrible for both of you. And yet, you sneak out. The old man who looks at you from inside the tent is not the same Doctor you knew, and yet he is still the same. The visit is short and hurried, and the whispered ‘Happy Birthday’ is barely audible, but it keeps you going for the rest of the year.

Eleventh Doctor:

You have a weird feeling that he is more excited about it than you are. At the same time, you don’t care. As surprising as it may be for a man who can barely remember his age, the Doctor is very good at celebrating birthdays. After twenty-four hours of trips, concerts and the most amazing shows the universe has to offer, you all but fall into the TARDIS. It was big, and extravagant, and totally not your style, but you thank him all the same with a hug so tight it cuts off the airways leading to his overly-active brain.

Twelfth Doctor:

When you wake up in the morning, he wishes you ‘Happy Birthday’ with a smile and a hug. After that, he acts like the day is completely normal, like any other, and it’s one of the most refreshing birthdays you’ve had in a while. That night, as he asks you if you enjoyed your birthday, you smile so bright your cheeks hurt.

After all, when you’re travelling with the Doctor every day feels as special as your birthday.