#everybody is entitled to their own interpretation obviously

[slashersgostabbystabstab]

People who only view the Singularity as some robot animal pet

Read the tags before you come at me

[cowboylikesel]

i’m sorry but the narrative this fandom has created around buck and eddie in the last few years that there’s no way they could ever truly be happy if they don’t end up in a romantic relationship with each other and that they’re otherwise doomed to a life of misery is so…sad to me?

like obviously everybody is entitled to their own interpretation of the show but it’s just such a limited view of what love and family can look like. buck and eddie (& chris) will always be family and they’ll always be in each other’s lives, no matter who they are with. maybe they will end up together but if they don’t that doesn’t mean that what they have with each other is somehow less meaningful. seeing their current relationship simply as a stepping stone for a possible romance feels to me like a betrayal to both of them and what they’ve build with each other.

i get that everybody enjoys things in their own way but condemning my favourite characters to an eternity of misery instead of opening myself up to different possibilities is just not something i’m willing to do again and i honestly think this way of thinking is a big reason why a large part of the fandom just seems miserable engaging with the canon material of the show post s4 but especially s7 — at least when it comes to buck and eddie and every storyline related to them that can’t be interpreted as some kind of build up to buddie.

[blockgamepirate]

Dumb Minecraft Wild Update discourse under the cut:

I think the thing about Minecraft 1.19 is that I get how frustrating it is that people completely turned on it over a couple of features not ending up included. And yeah some people are definitely being assholes about it. And as much as it's funny to meme about "Caves and Cliffs part 3" (because let's be honest, it kinda is) it's not like it isn't a perfectly decent update on its own and the reason Caves and Cliffs ended up getting separated into three updates was because it turned out to be such an ambitious update.

(Which is good ftr. I'm glad they decided to do a full terrain overhaul instead of just adding some mountains to the existing terrain and within the existing build limit. That would have been a letdown. And making the deep dark more than just a new biome with a new monster but with the ancient cities and everything was a good move too. And I'm glad they didn't do crunch to force it all to get finished in one go.)

I can't even blame them for over-estimating the time it would take to accomplish all that. We've all been there. It's fine. And I do think people complaining about Caves and Cliffs and the deep dark getting split into different updates are being too entitled.

That said, I don't like the fact that Mojang refuses to acknowledge that their messaging about the Wild Update was misleading. Because yeah sure maybe they didn't promise to update the birch forest or other biomes except swamps, but the whole spiel about wanting to update overworld biomes and showing off the birch forest concept art and talking about how they wanted to improve the atmosphere, all that was included in the Wild Update section of the event. If it was just a vague concept that wasn't necessarily intended for this update then they could have easily talked about it in another part of the event, possibly even after the Wild Update reveal and made it clear that it was not something they were working on for this update. At the very least I think it's worth owning up to it and recognising why people interpreted it as an indication of what would be included in the Wild Update.

And could people in the community please stop blaming others for getting hyped up? Just because you knew all along that it was just concept art, doesn't mean other fans were wrong to interpret it differently. It was pretty damn ambiguous.

I don't know if it was something Mojang thought they might do and included to build up hype or if it really was always intended as a vague future direction kind of thing, but whatever it was, the messaging ended up making people disappointed and unnecessarily deflating the hype for the update at the very point when it needed it the most. And that's not all on the community, some of the blame goes to the PR team. I mean miscalculations happen and that's understandable, nobody's perfect, but it was a miscalculation. It's not just the fans being stupid for not reading their minds.

Mojang's response to the backlash could have used more work but tbh I'm even more annoyed at the people who are suddenly very loud about how they knew all along that it was just concept art and everybody's getting mad over nothing, despite the fact that I don't remember them ever saying they knew the birch forests weren't gonna get updated before Mojang confirmed it...

Also I think part of the reason people are making noise about it is to show that there IS interest in this biome update and we don't want it to go into the unused concepts pile. It's not just "you promised us a birch forest update!" but "you showed us a birch forest update and now we want it!" You know?

Obviously I'm biased because I really wanted the birch forest update too, but look: you gotta understand that people were genuinely excited and are genuinely disappointed. I get that Mojang can't do everything or please everybody but I just want some respect for people's feelings here, okay?

I'm just so frustrated with the smug comments.

Also the frogs didn't need to eat the fireflies, the fireflies could have been purely atmospheric.

I mean I do still like the update, even if it didn't live up to the hype. It's just a shame, thinking about what could have been. And I feel like if it had been presented as a bit of a smaller update (or like a medium-sized update I guess) it would have been fine in fact. I mean I think most people were fine with 1.15 which was tiny in terms of new features, because it was made very clear from the start that it was gonna be a small one.

I mean of course it also suffered from coming after 1.18 which was, despite the delays and not having the deep dark, much cooler than anyone had dared to expect from the cave update. It set the expectations high. And so did 1.16 for that matter, another update that absolutely exceeded expectations. But still, I think actively lowering expectations for this one would have helped. Like just say clearly and simply that it's the deep dark and the swamps and that's it. Just two moderately big things that had been long expected that people had been waiting for, it would have been fine. People would have been happy enough.

Okay rant over. Sorry about that, just needed to get it out of my system.

[theangryjikooker]

Hello!

I just wanted to let you know, you're not alone... I'm fairly new too, in the world of BTS and BTS shipping. Like, I think I started "really" listening to BTS since last November!!

And obviously I got totally hooked! I searched for them (investigated almost every nook and cranny of the internet) since then, and I was like, sooo drawn to Jimin and Jungkook's bond.

However, I would like to pride myself, that I am more rational about them (than JKK hardcore shippers), and that even though, I do actually ship them, I don't find every hyped moment between them as momentous as everybody else claims!!

To me rather the underated, subtle things stand out... And really Jungkook and Jimins dynamic is littered with hidden gems, even though the louder moments seem the "Best" or the most "canon"...

That being said, I kind of also love reading what shippers interpret and write about them. However, I don't really feel very comfortable interacting with them, because I don't know, sometimes they seem so obsessed, for lack of a better word; and even entitled at times.

But really, I think that's just any famous fandom, they always have people like these...

So please don't feel bad! Much love and hugs!

You are the sweetest, and this was so lovely, thank you. 💜

I see we have some things in common regarding Jikook.

Welcome to the fandom! I hope you enjoy your experience (apart from the occasional run-ins with bad eggs), and you're obviously most welcome here on my blog to share your own theories, etc. if you feel comfortable.

I know you didn't ask for this, but if I had any ~sage wisdom~ to offer you, it would be to start curating your space now. Do not be afraid to get rid of people who bring negativity into your primary accounts. Allow fandom to be fun for you, and everything will be smooth sailing.

[shroomcult]

@soulxmakaweek

Day 4: Apologize

I fell way behind with Soma week because I got slammed with work and this monster of a fic took me too long to write.

Summary: 

Maka comes to realize that Soul had never felt fully comfortable around Crona, and in ignoring this entirely - she unknowingly hurt her closest friend.

Special thanks to Tori @chichirichick (she betas all of my dumpster fires, bless her) for proofreading this mess of emotions and also to Zi @azroazizah for coming up with the concept for this fic. 

**Disclaimer** This story is not about putting blame on Crona, but instead about acknowledging the fact that Soul went through trauma due to their actions and it was never taken into consideration by Maka before inviting them into their friend group. I'm not saying Crona didn't deserve support, but it's also completely valid for Soul - a victim of Crona - to not feel entirely safe around them regardless of their tragic background and circumstances. If Crona is a big comfort character for you and you feel you would likely be upset by this concept, then I recommend not reading it altogether. We all interpret things different and we're all entitled to our own opinions, and I'm not going to get in arguments with people over this.

It’d been a while since the Spartoi team was all together again.

After the fall of Asura, they really had no purpose to join forces as a team. No big baddie to unite them in ass-kickery. 

The skies were blue again. There were still Kishin eggs to take down, and a shaky new diplomatic relationship with the witches to maintain as well. 

Things were more or less … normal. Boring, even.

The only big difference Blackstar could discern was that nobody seemed to have time to just hang out and be friends anymore.

Kid was over his head with his new responsibilities, and while he was doing an admirable job filling his father’s shoes; there was a steep learning curve and his perfectionist tendencies only made it more challenging to overcome. He upheld a calm and collected demeanor in the public’s eyes, but Liz and Patty spent most of their time holding him together behind the scenes. 

Soul and Maka were a different situation entirely.

It was odd enough to adjust to the recent change in the nature of their relationship. They claimed to be the same as they’ve always been - just Soul & Maka. Only, they grew much closer after the hardships they had endured both in the book of Eibon and on the moon.

They had been close to begin with, but this was a different kind of close. Stolen glances, hands reaching for each other when they thought nobody was looking. Blushing for almost no damn reason. 

Something was going on between them - he could be sure of that.

More recently, however, Maka had been particularly obsessive about solving the dilemma of Crona’s entrapment on the moon. She was driving herself to a slow-burning insanity, considering every moment that she hadn’t rescued them yet to be a personal failure.

She’d been spending much of her time in the restricted section of the library, consuming every piece of relevant research for hours on end. Soul often stayed up there with her doing the same, or at the very least keeping her silent company when he was too burnt out to read anymore.

He’d also spent much of his extra time with Stein, training to perfect his sound-wave abilities into his own form of wavelength attack.

He’d been giving his all ever since making deathscythe status to hone his strength and better serve Maka. He’d even been able to hold his own for a surprising amount of time in the sparring ring against Blackstar, and that was a feat in and of itself.

All of the focus on Crona’s rescue had appeared to be wearing on him, though. 

Soul may have accepted Crona into his friend group for Maka’s sake, even empathized with them - but he had never fully trusted the demon sword meister. Although Soul was outwardly friendly towards them, Blackstar noticed the way his friend had watched them like a hawk before they turned back to Medusa. He was always ready for a scenario like that because he had never felt entirely safe around them to begin with.

Not that Maka had bothered to even take Soul’s feelings into consideration before forgiving Crona on his behalf.

She couldn’t have possibly been that dense. She had to have been actively ignoring the signs of Soul’s discomfort because she couldn’t handle acknowledging them.

And now she was doing the same thing all over again even with Crona as far away as the moon. It was obvious that Soul was doing what he always did - shoving his own feelings aside in favor of Maka’s. The loyal mutt of a boy valued her wellbeing far above his own, that was for certain.

He just seemed so exhausted of it all now. Searching tirelessly with Maka for a solution that may not even exist took up much of his time and energy.  

He never had the time to shoot hoops or play video games like he used to, and Blackstar was far above begging for his attention. He stopped even bothering to ask him.

Just for one night though, by some divine luck - everybody was willing to clear their schedule to have a late night dinner at the most beloved and heart-attack inducing burger joint in town. 

Every member of Spartoi was crammed into the largest booth in the restaurant and their chatter was loud enough to fill the whole section. 

There were multiple conversations happening at a time, but Blackstar was zeroing in on Soul who had his chin resting on his palm and that stupid, dopey look he got on his face when he was proud of Maka. Yuck. Keep it in your pants, loverboy.

Maka was next to Soul, his arm stretched out behind her on the booth, while Ox engaged her in a fiery debate over god knows what across the table from her. Judging by the redness in baldy’s face - Maka was on the winning side. He really couldn’t understand Soul’s hard-on for a bossy know-it-all personality, but whatever floats his boat he supposed.  

He decided he’d seen enough of that look on his best friend’s face and crumpled up a straw wrapper, dipping it in his soda and sticking it at the end of his straw.

He blew on the other end, sending the sticky wad of paper flying across the table. The projectile hit its target directly on the cheek.

“Fuck’s sake dude, how old are you?” he grumbled, reaching over the table to grab a handful of napkins to clean his face off with.

Maka snatched some of his napkins for herself, rubbing it vigorously into the flecks of cola that stained her uniform. “You got my shirt all wet, idiot.”

Blackstar simply threw his head back to cackle obnoxiously. “I just thought I should break up your lame little debate team fight before Ox over here pops a blood vessel. You know he can’t handle losing well.”

“I wasn’t losing!” Ox hissed under his breath.

Maka only met her opponent’s glare with a shit-eating grin.

“Hey, Maka! What had you stopped to talk with Professor Stein about earlier today?” Tsubaki cut in, obviously attempting to diffuse another argument between the two competitive brainiacs.

Maka’s expression relaxed into something a little more neutral, seemingly caught off guard by the question. Debate-mode successfully disarmed.

“Oh. Well… I just had some questions about my black blood research for him.” 

Blackstar didn’t miss the way Soul tensed up beside her at the mention of black blood. His face was void of any distinct emotion, but something was off in his body language. The way his shoulders squared as if he were instinctively bristling.

Anyone with a shred of social awareness could have deduced that black blood, Medusa, and Crona were not Soul’s favorite topics. It wasn’t unusual for him to shut down and discontinue any contributions to a conversation when any of these things were brought up. 

Unfortunately for Soul, all of those subjects were constantly on Maka’s mind since she began her obsessive pursuit for a solution to Crona’s ordeal.

“Oh? And what did he have to say?” Tsubaki pressed, completely oblivious to the tense situation she was potentially triggering.

“As you’re already aware, there’s not really any official research on the black blood that exists. We’ve been digging through countless books - gathering as much information about madness and Kishins as we can, but it can only get us so far. It would be so much more useful if we could get our hands on a physical sample of the substance itself.”

Soul’s eyes widened in concern, but only for a second before he slipped his usual poker face back on. His Adam’s apple bobbed nervously despite the veneer of calm he displayed.

“Anyways,” she continued, turning to look at Soul, “I was going to talk to you about this later, but maybe some of the black blood still remains in your system? I know we believed it was all gone, but surely there’s some residual amount of it lingering behind? Something we could maybe isolate, extract and create a concentrate of? Stein said it was unlikely, but technically possible. We have to try for Crona, right, Soul?”

He was no longer wearing his mask of apathy. Unmistakeable, visible discomfort was etched into his facial features and he was clenching his hands, knuckles whitening from the pressure. Everyone at the table was hushed and the tension was palpable.

“He doesn’t have to try anything,” Kid’s voice cut sharply through the silence, golden eyes flashing sternly at her.

A soft gasp escaped her and her eyebrows shot up, clearly taken-aback by the sudden burst of hostility from her boss and close friend. Her eyes darkened seconds later, determination setting in.

 “I think that’s his decision to make, and I’d like to hear what he has to say,” she turned her attention back to Soul, hope still shining in her eyes.

He fidgeted with his necktie, loosening it and clearing his throat. “Yeah, s’fine. Whatever you need, I guess.”

Maka’s face lit up into a bright smile that turned Blackstar’s stomach and she pulled Soul into a brief hug. “I knew we could count on you, Soul! You’re the best partner ever.”

“Whatever, it’s no problem. Just try not to drain me of all my blood, alright?” he chuckled weakly, avoiding her eyes in favor of staring a hole in the middle of the table.

She gave an easygoing laugh in response, and went back to conversing with Tsubaki as if she hadn’t just pressured her partner into volunteering himself as a guinea pig for the sake of someone who had literally sliced him open from shoulder to hip and infected him with black blood to begin with.

Is she fucking serious?

Blackstar was practically vibrating with fury from the interaction he’d just watched, and Tsubaki’s normally soothing hand on his shoulder did little to calm him down. When he glanced at Kid, he instantly knew the death god had shared his frustration with Maka’s obliviousness. 

It wasn’t long before Soul abruptly stood from his place at the end of the booth, pulling a twenty out of his wallet and placing it on the table in front of him.

“Soul? What are you doing? The food hasn’t even gotten here yet,” Maka blinked at him in confusion.

“I’m not feelin’ too great - gonna head out, sorry guys. Could you just bring my food back in a to-go box?” he said with an apologetic quirk of his lips. He squeezed her shoulder gently before turning on his heels and making his way out of the diner in long strides.

Why does she look so shocked? Does she really not understand that she’s been hurting him?

After that, the night passed by in a haze for Blackstar. He hardly spoke for the rest of the meal due to the fact that he was using all of his mental capacity to keep his impulse to stand up and loudly call his friend out in front of everybody in check. 

The only thing truly stopping him was the knowledge that Soul would likely be embarrassed and more than a little pissed off if he’d made a big scene over something that he wasn’t even willing to talk about.  

So he waited - held his tongue until he could lash out in private.

As everyone was saying their goodbyes, Blackstar watched her rise from her seat gathering her to-go boxes carefully and giving him a nod of acknowledgement before she headed out.

His eyes bore into the back of her head as she left, and Tsubaki’s hand clamped gently on him for the second time that night. Her eyes were crinkled with a gentle concern.

“I think you should leave this between them. If Soul wanted all of this out in the open, he would have had that conversation with her himself.”

A heavy sigh settled in his chest, “You know how he is. He’s the suffer in silence type and he always does her bidding. If nobody says anything, then nothing’ll change. I just want to talk to her - not like I’m gonna beat her ass or anything … unless she gives me a reason to.” 

“Blackstar,” she chided, fully aware that he would make good on that threat.

“I know, I know. I won’t be long, see ya at home,” he said, throwing up placating hands before stuffing them in his pockets and striding in the direction Maka had gone. 

            _______________________________________________

Maka set her walk home at a leisurely pace, dragging her feet slightly as she watched the sunset bleed into the sky above.

It wasn’t that she was trying to prolong seeing Soul, or that she wasn’t worried about the way he’d acted back in the diner - like something was eating at him. 

She was pretty positive that he wasn’t physically ill, which only left the option of it being an emotional issue. 

And getting Soul to talk about emotional issues was like trying to pull teeth from a temperamental bear. 

She had to figure out a way to go about this delicately, and she had to figure it out soon because their apartment block was fast approaching.

She stopped in her tracks when she felt the presence of a familiar soul behind her. His steps had been so quiet, she wouldn’t have even been aware he was stalking her from behind if it weren’t for her exceptional soul perception abilities.

“I know you’re following me, Blackstar.”

In moments, he was stepping out in front of her. “Wasn’t trying to hide. I need to talk to you,” his voice was uncharacteristically stern.

She wasn’t stupid. She knew Blackstar had some kind of problem with her since dinner. He was deathly quiet and glowering at her for most of the night; very unusual behavior from someone who never shuts up or hesitates to start a fight. 

“Okay, I’m listening,” she said, already preparing to defend herself against whatever absurd argument he wanted to pull her into.

“The whole situation with Crona - have you ever once thought about how Soul feels about it?”

Whatever she had been expecting to come out of his mouth - that wasn’t it.

“What? I mean, I know how Soul feels. He wants Crona to be safe, just like I do. What are you trying to get at?”

“I’m not talking about what he thinks about Crona being stuck in the deathdamned moon, Maka! I mean have you ever thought about how he felt when you forced Crona into his life to begin with? After being sliced open?” 

Maka’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline and her mouth opened and closed a few times, baffled by the question. 

“Soul understands why I welcomed Crona as a friend. He trusts me,” she answered, hoping her voice conveyed the confidence that she couldn’t find in this moment.

This entire conversation was throwing her off.

“Yeah, okay. He accepted your decision because he trusts you, or loves you or whatever the fuck. We all know that - but that doesn’t mean he was comfortable with it. It doesn’t mean he felt safe. He just stuffed his own feelings down, because he knew it made it easier for you.”

Her throat tightened as her own conflicting emotions overcame her. He had no idea what he was talking about. Soul was fine. He’s always been fine. 

“Did he say that to you? That he didn’t feel safe?” she choked out. 

“Soul? You think he tells people things? About his feelings?” he snorted. “No, he doesn’t have to tell me shit. It’s clear on his face every time you mention Crona, or Medusa, or that fucking blood.”

“Maybe you’re just making assumptions about how he feels!” she shouted back, gripping handfuls of the front of his shirt.

He leaned in, completely unfazed by the rage burning in her eyes. “You ever noticed how when Crona was around, he was always watching them out of the corner of his eye - twitching every time they made some sudden move. You ever noticed how quiet and withdrawn he’d get around them? Or any time they were brought up? You didn’t - because you didn’t want to.” 

“Shut up! Y-you’re making something out of nothing. Are you trying to tell me that I should just give up and forget about Crona? That they don’t deserve to have a friend?” 

Some of his aggression was fizzling out as he released a heavy sigh, placing his hands calmly over hers, still clenching in his shirt. “I’m not trying to say that you shouldn’t have helped Crona, or that you shouldn’t keep trying to help them now. I’m only telling you that even if Soul has forgiven and moved on - he’s still a victim of Crona’s actions. He suffered trauma from that, even if he’s too fucking stubborn to admit it. Just acknowledge that maybe he needs a break from thinking about them - all of that shit that happened - every now and then. Get your head out of Crona’s ass long enough to check if he’s okay too.”

She stumbled over wordless sounds as her hands went limp and released their vice-grip on his clothing. She was trying desperately to think of a way to refute the awful things he was saying, but Blackstar wouldn’t give her the chance. 

“If you gave him even half the thought you gave to Crona - maybe you would have noticed it like everybody else has. I just want you to think about it for a bit, that’s all,” his voice softened towards the end, shoulders sagging slightly as he turned away, leaving her to deal with the aftermath of his confrontation.

The heat of tears prickled behind her eyelids and she clenched her fists tightly to her sides. 

She wanted so badly to swing around and scream at Blackstar’s retreating figure that he was wrong, that he had no idea what he was talking about and of course she thinks about her weapon.

But the longer she allowed his harsh words to sink in; the more she could feel the sting of truth settling into her heart.

Had she really been so blind? 

             _______________________________________________

Soul had been laying on his back in bed, hands resting on his stomach and eyes pointed at the ceiling, unmoving for some time. He wasn’t entirely sure how many hours, but he knew his playlist had ended long ago - no music played from the earbuds that were still jammed in his ears.

He couldn’t explain the heaviness in his heart. The anxiety that often set in whenever Maka mentioned Crona or the black blood. It was all water under the bridge, wasn’t it? There was no point in allowing himself to wallow in all the negative emotions that punched him in the gut at the mention of their name. It was selfish to feel those things - it was his job to give Maka his full support. His own feelings were irrelevant.

It was just harder on this particular night. Sure, she droned on about those sore subjects often. Their research revolved around it anyways. He’d just hoped that it could have been different just for one night.

He’d secretly been ecstatic when Maka begrudgingly agreed to shelve her research just long enough to get a late dinner with all of their friends. A break had been long overdue. 

Things had been different between them, after all. They’d been sharing a bed, and they’d even shared a few kisses in the small, rare moments that they’d spent alone together - focused only on each other. They were chaste kisses, but he’d greedily take whatever he could get. 

As she became more frantic about her lack of results in helping Crona, he may as well have not even existed to her. 

He’d just needed that one dinner to pretend things were normal, to pretend as though he was on a date with her and she was willing to spend time with him and think about literally anything aside from her latest fixations. Instead, she’d asked him to play part in some unsound experiment - to prod for things that he hadn’t wanted to find again. It had only been made more uncomfortable by the scrutinizing presence of all of their friends. 

He’d felt used.

Soul perked up at the familiar sound of the front door creaking open and slamming shut. He was immediately ashamed of the pavlovian response he had to the sound of his meister returning - the little flip in his heart that made him feel like a stupid dog wagging its tail at the sound of its master.

Just keep to yourself. She doesn’t need to interact with you in this useless state of self pity. You don’t deserve her comfort.

Self-loathing curled in his gut and he kept his eyes stubbornly trained on a water stain in the ceiling.

Suddenly, light flooded into his dark room as his door was hesitantly opened. He reflexively brought himself to sit up on his elbows only to meet a teary-eyed Maka.

All self-indulgent angsty thoughts instantly evaporated from his head, and he was ripping his earbuds out and swinging his legs over the side of the bed to get up.

She made purposeful steps across his room, throwing her arms around his neck and forcing him back onto the bed with the motion.

“I’m so sorry, Soul,” she warbled mournfully into his sweater. 

“Huh? Sorry ‘bout what? What’s going on, Maka?” he tried to nudge her into looking up at him, but she adamantly refused.

She took a few shallow breaths before rubbing her wet cheek against the quickly-dampening fabric and looking up at him with dewy eyes.

“I haven’t been a good friend to you - have I? 

Was that a trick question?

“I-I don’t get what we’re talkin’ about here,” he stuttered uselessly, attempting to compensate for his lack of eloquence by brushing his fingers comfortingly through her soft hair.

“I never asked if you felt okay with Crona being around you. I never asked you if you forgave them at all - I just brought them into your space, your home. I just wanted them to have a chance at a normal life so badly - I ignored your pain, and I’m so sorry,” she rushed her confession out like it had been a breath she was holding in.

He had to fight the urge to bark out a laugh. It wasn’t that he found anything that she said humorous - it was just so strange that she was addressing this out of the blue. She’d seemed completely unaware as usual back at the diner, where had this even come from?

He was so lost in thought, he’d almost forgotten to respond and instantly regretted the prolonged silence he’d left her in. “Maka, it’s fine,” he insisted, “I get why you forgave Crona. I admire you for it.”

“But that doesn’t mean you were okay. I should have at least checked on you, or asked you about how you felt - or literally anything,’ she mumbled numbly from his chest.

“Hey. Look at me,” he said, lifting her cheek from its resting place against his sweater, “Sure, I didn’t feel the most comfortable around Crona. I think it was pretty awkward for both of us to be near each other. That doesn’t mean I dislike them, or didn’t want you to be their friend. You can’t beat yourself up over something I hadn’t bothered to tell you.”

His words hadn’t brought the comfort that he’d hoped they would, and her brows remained stubbornly crinkled. “If it had been me - if I was the one who’d been cut by that sword, would you still say that you don’t dislike them? That you’re okay with us being friends?”

It was a question that he instantly knew the answer to, but he was reluctant to say it out loud. He finally caved, bringing his eyes back to hers, “No. I wouldn’t have been able to forgive them if it was you.”

She closed her eyes tightly, nodding her head in grim acceptance of that truth. She had likely known that would be his answer already, but hearing it must have been difficult.

“But I love that about you. You have so much compassion. I only care for the few people that I’ve decided I love - I don’t have room in my heart for others like you do. I’d like to be more like you,” he whispered reverently, taking her cheeks in both of his hands and briskly wiping away all of the moisture he could reach with his thumbs.

“I should’ve had more compassion for you,” she lamented softly under her breath, eyes downcast.

“You’re not a fuckin’ mind reader, Maks. It was my choice not to bring anything up.”

She nodded slowly, but the way her grip tightened on him only confirmed his suspicion that she wasn’t going to forgive herself for it.

Minutes passed before a word was spoken, but Soul eventually cleared his throat. “You know, I don’t expect you to ever stop being friends with Crona, or to give up on rescuing them. I don’t want that. I don’t mind helping you like you’d asked earlier tonight, too. If that’s what you need from me, then I’m here.”

She brought herself to her elbows on top of him to get a better view of his face.

“I know. I’m not going to give up on them. But It matters to me that you’re happy too, and if that means you need a break from all that, then I want you to know that it’s okay to ask for that.”

“Right, I’ll keep that in mind,” he said in a hushed tone, distracting himself with a piece of her hair twirled between his fingers.

“And I don’t want to use your blood for research. It was wrong of me to even think of asking you that. We’ll find another way,” she assured him, voice tightening with emotion, “I definitely got carried away with all of this. It wasn’t healthy, and I really am sorry I’ve pushed you away in the process. We can’t solve this thing if we don’t have time to properly take care of ourselves. You’ve been working so hard with me, and I think we need more actual quality time together.”

“Yeah, I could get on board with that. I kinda walked out on dinner tonight, so how about we do something - just you and me tomorrow? Movies sound good?”

“Movies sounds great,” she hummed in agreement, hands idly playing with his hair.

As much as he would have preferred for her to continue her ministrations, he stopped her movements to grasp her hand, bringing it to his chest to rest above where she knew his scar was. He pressed down on her hand lightly.

“I’m glad it happened. I’m glad they gutted me, ‘cause I hadn’t understood what you meant to me till that moment,” he muttered, pressing a quick kiss to the top of her head.

She only exhaled shakily, hand tightening against the evidence of his devotion.

“I just hate that it took a lecture from Blackstar of all people for me to realize that I’d been hurting you.”

His eyes widened a little at that new piece of information. Blackstar was the one that brought all of this on her mind? He could’ve sworn it would have been Kid if anyone. He couldn’t help but feel a little touched that Blackstar had been so concerned about him, but he was also somewhat irritated that his friend had distressed Maka as much as he had.

“Blackstar, huh? Remind me to have a conversation with him about mindin’ his own business,” he laughed half-heartedly.

“No, don’t. I’m glad that he said what he did - I needed to hear it,” she urged him.

“Doesn’t matter. He didn’t have to make my girlfriend cry from guilt over bein’ friends with someone,” he muttered, but his face immediately burned a bright red as soon as he’d caught what he’d called her.

She was a similar shade, holding her breath as well as his gaze with a tortuously difficult to decipher expression on her face.

“That is, uh- I mean… fuck.”  

Very articulate. Great job, Soul.

He hadn’t needed to agonize over whether or not he’d just fucked everything between them for long because her face soon melted into a warm, genuine smile.

“Girlfriend, huh?” she said with a glimmer of mischief in her eye.

“I’d like that. If that’s w-what you want,” he wanted to kick himself for the voice crack he just experienced. Not cool in the slightest. 

At least she got a good giggle out of it. The melodic sound squeezed something in his chest and he swallowed nervously as a response.

She brushed back his bangs, leaning in to place a soft kiss to his forehead. She peppered a trail of kisses down his cheek until she reached his lips. 

This kiss was far from chaste. She cradled his cheek and jaw as she slanted her mouth sweetly over his, pressing fervently, constantly moving against him and eliciting a breathy moan from him that he would never admit to making. 

When she tried to separate, he followed her, bumping noses for a moment and giving the corner of her mouth a few more enthusiastic pecks before backing up and allowing her room to look at his face. 

“Girlfriend sounds nice, actually,” she smiled broadly, letting her fingers brush against the back of his neck.

“Glad that’s settled, then,” he laughed easily, not even bothering to feel any embarrassment over the flush of his skin or the lightness of his breath.

He crushed her to his chest, and they stayed like that for a while, just listening to the other’s loudly beating hearts until they were lulled to sleep. 

He’d have to thank Blackstar with a game of basketball later.

[neutral-emerald]

SILVER THE COSMIC TIME-JANITOR (or: dude, what's with all the alternate futures)

silver the hedgehog has a very simple backstory. he's a kindhearted, sorta-naive but altogether very driven psychic hedgehog here to save the world by time-traveling to the past (also known as present-day) to prevent the apocalyptic future he was born into from coming to pass!

[ID: A screenshot of Silver from Sonic 06. He’s glowing with cyan energy as he flies over a dark, post-apocalyptic city.]

...wait, if he's time traveling 200 years into the past to completely change the shape of the timeline, how do the stars manage to align such that he manages to be born at the exact same point in the new timeline with the exact same genetics? how are his parents born? does silver have parents?? and how does he do this no less than THREE SEPARATE TIMES??!

hey everyone, i'm tumblr user neutral-emerald here to make good on the idea i vaguely gestured at yesterday and point out silver's wildly inconsistent backstory(s) and then explain to you how this isn't just sega playing hopscotch with the concept of time travel, but actually TOTALLY EXPLAINABLE if you don't mind a whole lot of conjecture and "fuck dude i just think it'd be cool."

LET'S GO.

before i get started, a few things to establish.

first, this is about… half serious, tops. it’s less of a theory and more of an observation of something that’s weird and then throwing some possible explanations at it because i am a massive sucker for time-based nonsense. if you wanna take my observations and build your own conclusions, go for it. i’m not your boss.

second, i'm basing my conclusions off of both the games and the idw comics. the conclusions i draw are applicable to either continuity, but the logic does rest a decent amount on the comics, so just a heads-up in case you were expecting pure game canon from this.

and third, i'm working off like half a brain and very intermittent checks of the wiki and cutscene compilations, so there's probably many things i'm missing! if you notice something i said was wildly off-base, go ahead and correct me in the replies and i'll either edit the post or explain to you just how that detail doesn't actually matter, depending on whether it. y'know. matters.

with that out of the way, let's get into the first topic of discussion!

part 1: the future is inconsistent, y'all

now, i'm not sure if you've heard, but in the year 2006 sonic team released this little indie game creatively entitled Sonic the Hedgehog. it was a smash hit, won countless awards, and for some reason went down in history as a messy, incomplete bugfest. but that's not what matters. what matters is that it introduced Silver the Hedgehog.

silver hails from 200 years in the future. the world is a bleak, fiery place, and has been since the monster iblis was unleashed after princess elise's death. silver was born into this world, which we know since it's literally the first thing he says in his story.

[ID: A cropped line from Silver's story in Sonic 06. "This world was devastated before I was born."]

i'm not going to drag you through a beat-by-beat summary of the entire plot of sonic 06, you should know it already. silver meets mephiles, gets lied to about who caused the apocalypse, mephiles yeets him and blaze into the past, he tries to murder Sonic the Hedgehog™, and so on. eventually he helps kill god, and then sonic and elise travel further back in time to kill god even deader so that none of the game ever happened, and the bad future into which silver was born never happened, thus thoroughly scrubbing silver's existence from the timeline!

...until.

sonic rivals.

i'm not going to speak much on sonic rivals, mostly because i'm not super familiar with it. but what matters is that silver is back! he's still from the future, he's still here to change the past, and most importantly he wasn't deleted from existence by the destruction of solaris, unlike everything else from sonic 06 including everyone's memories of it. and obviously, whatever state his future is in, it's not the same as it was in sonic 06.

now, i don't have a single clue what is going on in rivals 2, so do inform me if there's some big information i'm missing from that one. all i know is he's fixing yet another possible apocalyptic future, like always. correct me if i’m wrong, i don’t have the patience to trawl through it myself.

then we've got sonic colors, in which silver is again from the future. notably, he’s definitely not from an apocalypse!

[ID: Some screenshots from the DS version of Sonic Colors, again cropped to just the text. Tails and Silver are talking to each other.

Tails: What's the future you came from like, Silver? Silver: A lot brighter than this. Silver: The sky is blue, and everybody's got a smile.]

sonic generations doesn't add much. again, correct me if i'm wrong, but i don't think we learn anything about what kind of future silver is from, and he's definitely not here to fix it this time. that's sonic's job! he's just hanging out like everyone else.

now, up until this point the future has been reasonably consistent, setting aside my somewhat abstract understanding of the rivals games. there's nothing to say that silver's not coming back in time from the same point in a single timeline, which is the one and only version of the future ever since the destruction of sonic 06.

UNTIL.

[ID: Two panels from the comic Sonic Forces: Stress Test. In the first panel, Silver looks worried as he lands in front of Knuckles, who looks skeptical.

Silver: We've got big trouble! Eggman— Knuckles: How can you be here? I thought you returned to the future?

In the second panel, Knuckles looks away with a self-assured grin, while Silver looks more panicked.

Knuckles: Oh wait— I must be dreaming! Silver: What? No! I've come back with a dire warning from the future!]

i have a lot of issues with sonic forces, especially with how its story is written. something i do NOT take issue with is the supplemental comics, mainly because they are WONDERFUL evidence for my crackpot time travel theory.

like i said, up until this point we don't really know whether silver has been experiencing separate instances of the future, or simply traveling back in time to prevent an also-time-traveling eggman nega from messing things up in the past. but here, we get some very juicy information:

[ID: Knuckles and Silver again. Knuckles has his arms crossed and is looking at Silver, who has a nervous look on his face as he slams a fist on the palm of his other hand.

Knuckles: Come again? Silver: Something happens that brings the world to ruin! But the historical records are sparse or make no sense. I came back to hopefully head off whatever's about to happen and save the future.]

silver travels back in time to prevent a terrible apocalypse. this is not the beautiful future silver came from in sonic colors— but this is the same silver. everyone recognizes him. he recognizes everyone. and yet, the future he came from is different.

part 2: silver is a walking paradox

allow me to remind you of what i pointed out when i was talking about sonic 06. silver was born into the iblis-apocalypse. considering no elaborate timeline nonsense happened to him before the events of the game (by his reckoning) i think we can safely assume he was born like a regular person with parents.

in the first post-06 timeline, silver was probably also born. let's be charitable, acknowledge that sonic team doesn't overthink the butterfly effect like i do, and say that silver was born to the same parents, because the universe likes to keep things nice and simple and contrive itself to make this particular character exist in this time period.

so, it's entirely fair that silver comes to exist in a post-06 timeline at the equivalent point in time, aka 200 years in the future. it's also fair that he travels back in time to prevent some kind of apocalypse, because that's his narrative role! it's what he does. when it's time for him to exist in the story, that's what he's there to do.

what isn't fair is the fact that it keeps happening.

[ID: A panel from the IDW comics. Sonic is stretching his legs while looking faintly exasperated at Silver, who is nervously holding his arm.

Silver: Er… No. I came back because defeating Eggman didn't save the future. Sonic: Couldn't even play along. Had to bring the mood down. Sonic: *sigh* Okay, what happened this time?]

[ID: The following panel, cropped to just Silver's text bubbles narrating over a starry sky.

Silver: When I left, my time had been conquered by the Eggman Empire. Everyone lived in fear, choking on polluted air. Silver: When I went back, the Eggman Empire was gone— but so was everyone else. Silver: There was nothing left. No people, no animals, no machinery. Only water and sparse, metallic plant life.]

allow me to summarize my understanding of all this: silver is from the future. normally, the future is good. sometimes it isn't. when it isn't good, he goes back in time and fixes things, then returns to the future to check if that fixed things.

the least conjecture-y interpretation i can come up with is that sometimes silver will go into the past, then go back to the future but end up in a Bad Timeline and thus go into the past again to fix things. there's no weird warping directly between bad timelines, he only gets there by way of the past.

but that's boring, so here's my PREFERRED interpretation.

silver hails from a good future, but sometimes it just changes. he's unstuck from time— if something weird happens in the past, he's the only one to know that the passage of fate was changed, because he went to bed in one timeline and woke up somewhere categorically worse, and the only way he can fix it is by figuring out just what caused this and going back in time to fix it.

or, to say it in a meme:

[ID: A picture of someone lying in a hospital bed with a nurse standing next to them, edited so that Silver is in the bed.

nurse: sir… you've been asleep for 2 hours silver: oh boy i can't wait to wake up in the same timeline i went to sleep in]

part 3: how did this happen?

it's one thing to point out that silver doesn't experience time like a normal hedgehog, and another thing to explain how and why this happens.

fyi, this is the part where i go wildly off the rails and start saying whatever i want. there's a ton of explanations one could come up with, most probably stemming back to sonic 06. i'm just going to go with my own, and probably not come up with a whole lot of concrete evidence because i'm just spitballing. this is me having a fun time. going "heeheehoohoo time traveling hedgehog go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr"

so. something i haven't touched upon is that in all games after sonic 06, silver can time travel. we never see him do it, it's never explained how he does it. all we know is that he's doing it under his own power.

which is kinda odd, don't you think? should he be able to do that?

in sonic 06, we see three mechanisms for time travel. first is the chaos emeralds. if two people perform Chaos Control with a chaos emerald apiece, they open up a swirling rift in the air which can send them to different points in time and space. silver can't be doing that, for obvious reasons— he's only one hedgehog, and he's not exactly running around with a chaos emerald at all times. that can't be how he does it.

second is a time machine eggman built. that obviously can't be it; the machine doesn't exist at all after the timeline gets wiped, and again, silver is doing this on his own. he's actively antagonistic towards eggman, even. absolutely not this one.

third and finally is mephiles, who can make big purple orbs to take himself and passengers to different points in time. this obviously can't be it either, for similar reasons to number 2, right? after all, mephiles is one half of solaris, who was destroyed before he could be split off. he doesn't exist to be silver's time-traveling uber driver.

...right?

well, obviously. i'm not going to try and tell you that mephiles is secretly alive and shepherding silver back and forth between timelines for no reason. that's ridiculous. no, i'm going to try and tell you that silver is mephiles.

or rather, he's solaris. or RATHER, he's the new solaris, sorta-ascended to the role of Time God after the old one got blown out like a birthday candle.

like i said, i'm going wildly off the rails and as such don't have any concrete evidence to explain why it's this instead of something else, but hear me out. after elise blew out the flame of hope, the universe was left in an interesting situation. someone needs to be in charge of the flow of time, but the previous time-god was just unceremoniously destroyed. but all the power and energy of a time-god has to go somewhere, in some form, in some time.

with nothing else to go off of, the role of time-god starts flipping through every notable being it had interacted with. they're all solidly accounted for in the timeline, except for one. silver the hedgehog was born into a timeline that cannot exist. silver the hedgehog does not, and cannot exist. silver the hedgehog interacted quite a bit with both sides of solaris— he spent a substantial amount of time fighting back iblis, and associated with mephiles, even being one of the few people to directly experience his time travel abilities. silver the hedgehog tried and failed to absorb iblis into himself.

here's my theory: after sonic 06, the universe reasserted itself such that silver was the new Solaris. silver is not consciously aware that this is what he is, but he knows that he can time travel. sometimes the timeline will rearrange itself around silver. he is unaffected by this because he is a higher being unaffected by such petty trifles as "an origin" or "paradoxes".

silver the hedgehog probably doesn't have parents. he sprang into existence one day and everyone just kind of went with it, himself included.

oh also something i thought was neat but couldn't think of where to put:

[ID: More cropped dialogue, this time from Team Sonic Racing.

Silver: I'm fine. It's just, something bad is gonna happen. I can't explain it. I just feel it. Blaze: Have your travels through time given you precognition? Silver: I don't know. Maybe they have. Or maybe I'm just thinking too much.]

silver might be becoming psychic in a future-vision kinda way. that, or he’s riddled with anxiety. possibly both.

TL;DR

silver hails from no less than three separate timelines, his existence is a tangled web of who-knows-how-many grandfather paradoxes, and i choose to believe that he's god.

if anyone who cares more about evidence wants to gather up like, little one-off clues that support or conflict with my conclusions, go right ahead. or just throw your own arbitrary headcanons for what's going on with this at me. or incorporate these ideas into an au or something! i just want more people thinking about what the Fuck is up with silver post-06, because by god there is a WHOLE lot of potential packed in there

anyway thanks for reading make sure to like comment and subscribe—

[asgardianthot]

Hunting Season (sambucky) – Part 3

Series Masterlist

A/N: I know I promised this update over a week ago, and I’m sorry it took so long:/ I’ve felt really down for the past few days, I’m having a hard time with online classes and with my lack of serotonin lol. This was not my greatest week and I suspect it’s got to do with the quarantine. I know a lot of us are having a hard time coping with everything and it can be very stressful and draining. We’re all struggling to find the energy to do what we love, and *not* seizing our free time to create or be productive can make us feel very frustrated or disappointed – I just want you to know it’s okay to seize your free time to just rest, even if you haven’t done anything exhausting per se. Emotional draining is part of the global situation, and you have every right to simply exist. People are dying or losing loved ones – I think existing is more than enough right now.

Words: 3106

Summary: A shitty guy has entered the chat. You know who.

Bedtime had come, and Sam followed Bucky to their assigned room. It was, apparently, the one he had been using ever since he and Rebecca were old enough to stop sharing bunk beds. When Rumlow came into the picture, the family allowed the jolly couple to share the queen-sized bed. Hence, that was the set-up for Sam and Bucky.

"Yeah, I forgot to mention." Bucky apologized as they shut the door behind them.

The entire house seemed to have gone silent at that time of the night, making them feel like they should speak in a lower tone than usual.

"It's fine." Sam brushed it off while he kicked off his shoes near the door.

"Nah, man, I can sleep on the divan." Bucky shook his head, "I'll go get some blankets."

The last thing he wanted was to put Sam in any more uncomfortable situations. He was already in the most uncomfortable position anyone could ask of their friend, and Bucky felt guilty every single second of their stay, which had only lasted for less than a day so far.

"Dude, it's fine." Sam insisted, "Not like we've never shared a bed before."

Although they effectively had spent a number of after-parties in the same bed or the same couch, this setup felt a lot more intimate, somehow. Maybe it was the silk sheets, or the elegant shade of white which adorned the room, or the dim nightstand lights that made it all feel so cozy. Maybe it had to do with the fact that that's how boyfriends sleep, and them having to pretend to have that dynamic. Still, Sam wouldn't agree to Bucky's solution.

"Yeah, but it's seven nights." Bucky reminded him with a wince.

"If I get tired of you I'll send your ass to the divan." Sam ended the topic with that, stretching his arms to communicate his deep need of going to bed already, "I just wanna get some sleep, it's been a long* day."

Bucky snorted, "I told you." He smirked as he opened his bag to find his pajamas.

Sam sat on the edge of the bed. He had, in fact, agreed to this insanity. Clues and riddles and family drama and money*. He was there to help his best friend through a tough time, and that was his primary concern, but if he ever got too tired of the Barnes' crap, he could always remember the gold at the end of the rainbow. He let a loud sigh, almost like he was finally dropping off the weight of the 'boyfriend' act, and allowing himself to look exhausted. He dramatically dropped to the bed on his back.

"Two millions, right?" he raised an eyebrow at Bucky.

The appellee nodded, "Two millions."

-

Day 2

One of the many responsibilities the Barnes family had was continuously being good guests, which meant inviting relatives and neighbors and co-workers to spend a day or two in the lake house. Most of them had their own vacation residence nearby, or were vacation-buddies who could hop on their boats and grab lunch with the Barnes. Only a few guests would actually join the house accommodations and spend time with them. It was the case of a friend of Nana, one of Colin's co-workers, Aunt Ida's new boyfriend and distant cousin who would be spending the night, according to what Winnifred said during breakfast.

Sam had a hard time processing the fact that they had all that extra room for futile acquaintances; in fact, he very subtly lashed out at Bucky for allowing his family to set their staff in small bedrooms behind the kitchen when he had such luxuries. Bucky, head hanging low at the empty breakfast table, explained that even if he had Sam's revolutionary momentum and eloquence, his parents would never listen. 'I'm actually the last person who could change their entitled, outdated mentality', was the exact finishing sentence.

Sam once again got that sour reminder that he had to portray something for Bucky's parents. He had to pretend to be okay with the way Winnifred spoke to the maid through hand gestures instead of polite words. He had to pretend to act like he knew what the hell those big New York impresarios were talking about during the first tray of appetizers. Hell, he didn't even know that appetizers came in successions and that those successions were called 'trays', until now.

Most importantly, and at the moment Sam was standing in that big yard with freshly cut grass and a lake view, he had to pretend to belong. He had to walk among senior citizens with more money than they could spend in the few years they had left, young folk who looked like they had too much access to their daddy's bank accounts, and women who spoke exactly like Winnifred, as if different tones or voice inflexions belonged to a lesser class. Sam had to meet them all, and he had to act like he didn't feel as foreign as he'd ever felt.

"You're a saint, Sam." Bucky sneaked up on him and spoke in his ear, standing behind the lost man, "You can stop greeting wealthy dinosaurs now."

Sam realized he had done more than what was asked of him, and so, he dropped his shoulders in retreat. He turned around and gifted Bucky one tired smile.

"You okay?" the latter grabbed his shoulder tenderly, with concern, "This was too much, wasn't it? You should've called in sick like I-"

"I'm not traumatized by rich people, Bucky." Sam rolled his eyes, "I'm dating you, 'member?"

The verb caught Barnes by surprise, until he immediately remembered he meant the farce they were putting up for the family. However, during that millisecond of doubt, it felt like Sam was implying something with a double meaning that Bucky wasn't entirely sure disturbed him. In other words, he felt like Sam was flirting, but obviously, he was quickly reminded of the situation.

"I was just thinking what my mama would have said in a place like this." Sam confessed with a soft laughing tone.

The image was pretty funny. In the few times Bucky had spent time with Darlene, he was overly captivated by her strong personality. She was so caring, just like her son, but patience and subtlety weren't her strong suit.

"She would have been so... justifiably rude to all of them." Bucky dared to guess.

Sam chuckled, "Yeah."

"Would've ruined the mood for everybody." Bucky joined in the loud laughter.

The two were still smiling to themselves when Bucky's mom and Rebecca approached them, both holding cocktails in their hand.

"Whatcha talking about, lovebirds?" Rebecca teased them.

As much as she knew she couldn't raise the curtain to their farce, out of love for her brother, but also because engaging in a hassle like that one would take her out. That didn’t mean she couldn’t make this the most annoying family holiday Bucky had ever had.

"Mind your business." He replied dryly.

"James." The sibling’s mother reprimanded Bucky’s rudeness.”

"I was just messing around, ma’am." Sam jumped in his defense, effectively stopping the potential fight. "I'm not used to so much... elegance."

"You mean all these old and dull people in fancy clothes?" the woman suggested her own disappointment regarding her guests, and nodding happily when she noticed Sam’s surprised grin. "Trust me, lots of us have a hard time adjusting to them."

"Some of us think we shouldn't adjust, but the other way around." Rebecca reproached, which earned her a single head tilt from her less confrontational mother.

Wilson took the opportunity to be the lovable, polite boyfriend, "Are you having trouble with these men too, Ms. Barnes?" he asked with a gracious smile that accentuated his cheekbones.

"I wouldn't call it trouble." She, expectedly, diminished her statement to avoid being interpreted as discontent.

Rebecca gave up on the eye-rolling to start using an annoyed, distant glare. As much as she had always been closest to her mother than Bucky ever had been, their ways of dealing with their life and other people were very different, along with their worldviews.

"They're bigots, big surprise." The young woman used a rude sarcastic tone, yet got no reaction from her Winnifred, who was now decided in de-aggravating the topic of conversation.

"Our friends tend to be on the conservative side.” She said before waving her hand in her own defense, “Don't get me wrong, I'm no liberal."

Bucky snorted, "No one was thinking that, mom."

Sam merely pressed his lips together in order to stop a smirk from becoming too visible.

"But lots of them are very behind time.” Winnifred continued nonetheless, “Treating their wives like housemaids, interrupting me..."

The irony was so palpable, all three younger characters could barely conceal their own personalized expressions, which varied from shock to laughter, because Winnifred Barnes treated her housemaids like lesser humans and interrupted everyone. Sam gave Rebecca a look, which she replied with a nod that implied ‘I know’. She then drew a zip line across her mouth for him to drop it.

It had also been Winnifred herself who stood by George when Rebecca went to a Women's March with her friends and the married couple believed it to be 'too dangerous' because who knows what kind of people can be in a march! Giving credit where credit was due, however, Winnifred had her daughter's back when a family friend grabbed her butt in her sixteenth birthday, and Rebecca, being the strongly voiced person that she’s always been, let everyone know ‘what kind of perverts his father hung out with’.

"Yes, they’re keen on the rich male supremacy around here.” Rebecca sighed, unable to keep listening to her mom pretend to know what she was talking about, and willing to change the subject to go back to bullying her brother, “It's a bummer. So, guys..."

"Oh." Winnifred suddenly said, fixating her eyes on something in particular, past her company.

"What?"

The three followed Winnifred’s view and found a man most of them recognized perfectly. The dark hair gelled back, the expensive but tasteless clothes, and the way he stood his ground like he owned it. It was a look that had once enamored Bucky, but it seemed more like a horrible nightmare right now.

As soon as Sam noticed James’ breath hitch and his face freeze, Sam knew that it was Brock Rumlow. He had only seen the devil through social media pictures, and he wasn’t very recognizable from afar, but the reaction it brought Bucky was hard to miss.

Apparently, Rebecca was even more upset than Sam about the man’s presence.

"What the fuck is he doing here?" she let out with deep rage.

"Rebecca!" her mother prioritized the lady’s manners over the downright astonishing situation.

Rebecca ignored it, "Who invited him?" she whisper-shouted.

"I believe it was your uncle Teddy.” As soon as the woman realized everyone’s stare in reaction to her nonchalant way of speaking, she placed a hand on her son’s arm, “He didn't know, James. What was he supposed to do? Un-invite him?"

"I'm lost. Why is he here?" Sam cut in.

"Oh, don’t worry about him, Samuel!” She gave him a very inappropriate smile for the occasion, “He's a family friend. His father and George are business buddies."

Sam realized he had missed a big part of the information. He knew Bucky had met Rumlow through family contacts, and that they have known of each other’s existence for a couple of years before they actually got to know each other. What he had no idea of, was the close relationship between the Barnes and Rumlow fathers. Had he known, he would have expected the ex-boyfriend to show up, but judging by his fake boyfriend’s state, Bucky wasn’t expecting it either. Probably because he was underestimating Brock’s maliciousness and hoping he wouldn’t invade his space.

Sam spoke directly to Bucky, using a calming tone, "You wanna go somewhere else?" he offered an out.

Unfortunately, before Bucky could reply, Rumlow saw him and began walking directly to him.

Bucky took a sharp breath, "Too late now."

Nobody said a word until Brock joined them.

"Ma'am.” He politely nodded in Winnifred’s direction, then turned to his former partner with a false smile, “James. Care for a walk?"

Bucky knew he was speaking a lot more formally than usual, because Winnifred was there. Care for a walk was just a fancy way of spitting out ‘let’s talk’, and Bucky despised that offer with every fiber of his being, but he wasn’t able to respond. His tongue was tied. He clenched his jaw, feeling powerless, and was rescued by Sam, who extended his hand.

"Samuel Wilson.” He gave Brock a big, play-pretend grin, “And you are...?"

It wasn’t a surprise that Rumlow was being rude, as he had been ignoring Sam and Rebecca’s presence like they weren’t even there.

"Brock Rumlow." He shook the man’s hand.

When Sam dropped his hand away from Rumlow’s, he took Bucky’s in his, as a painfully obvious demonstration of their romantic involvement. Brock lowered his eyes towards the intertwined fingers and bit the inside of his cheek, before nodding with a partially amused expression on his face.

"I take it you're..." Brock tempted, earning an affirmative look from Sam, "And I take it you know who I am."

Wilson tilted his head, "You just told me, you're Brock."

"This doesn't have to be awkward.” The unwelcome man smiled, glancing at Winnifred to make sure she approved of his manners, but even she kept looking away, “We both know James and I-"

"Look, Brock.” Wilson cut him off, “Nobody here really cares. Do you care, love?" He asked Bucky.

Bucky couldn’t help but smirk at Sam’s successful act, "Irrelevant." He agreed.

"Unless... it matters to you, Brock.” Sam frowned sadly, putting up the most condescending act he had ever pulled, “In that case, I'm sorry if this is painful."

If looks could talk, Rumlow’s would have stated a very easy ‘fuck you’.

"We'll see ourselves out, actually. Nice to meet you." He said, then turned away.

Bucky gifted his ex a fake host smile, "Have a good one."

As soon as the couple went back inside the house, Bucky let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. He murmured grateful words as the noise of the gathering outside became muffled, and Sam squeezed his hand, which he was still holding. As a matter of fact, they didn’t let go of each other for a while.

-

"I brought us some food." Sam announced when he reached the top of the stairs.

Bucky had hid himself in the small living room which welcomed guests to the second floor. He was sitting on the couch, watching crappy TV, avoiding the large amount of people talking downstairs.

"You sneaked lunch up here?" He asked with surprise.

"Yes, Bucky, I stole two plates of crab risotto and an apple sorbet.” Sam mocked his naivety with sarcasm, “I made sandwiches in the kitchen, you doofus."

Bucky usually felt less than Sam at many things. Sam was smarter, he was resilient, he was hardworking and he was happier than him, most of the times. Seeing Sam in his messed up world only fomented that, because Sam was a fish out the water among the Barnes and their guests, and still, he glowed brighter. He was better than anyone Bucky had grown up with, and certainly better than himself. That’s why Sam had probably asked the kitchen staff if he could bother them for a second while he made two sandwiches, and he probably talked to them the entire time, and he probably let them speak longer than he did because he didn’t want to seem rude.

Bucky just knew that’s what he had done, while, if he were by himself, he probably would have skipped lunch and snacked on leftovers later, when no one was looking.

"What did I do to deserve you?" he sighed, receiving the plate Sam had prepared him.

The appreciation made Sam feel fuzzy. As much as he loved helping Bucky because he was his best friend, he never wanted Bucky to depend on his help. And yet, this time, he liked the idea of being needed by him.

He shook off the idea and sat on the couch, "That's a good question."

"I think God sent you when he saw how shitty everyone else in my life is."

Wilson laughed, shifting closer to Bucky’s and taking a big bite of his sandwich.

"Becca ain't so bad.” He remarked with his mouth full, “She comes around eventually."

"Yeah, she does." James agreed, thinking of how protective the young woman had become as soon as she saw the man who hurt her brother.

"You ever get tired of getting all your parents' shit when you watch her get away with stuff?"

Bucky shrugged. "I'd do anything for her. And they already see me a certain way, might as well protect her from that."

Wilson smiled to him, a warm sensation taking over his chest, "You're really good to her."

As much as Barnes wanted to take the compliment, the exchange had become too intimate, and if there was one thing Bucky had been rejecting during the whole boyfriend act, was intimacy between them. He feared he might get confused.

"You trying to pamper me, Wilson?" he bumped Sam’s shoulder playfully.

The latter rolled his eyes, and they went back to the TV show on screen while they ate. A few minutes later, something was twirling around Sam’s head so heavily, that he had to speak out.

"Hey, uh... A bit of- a really foggy bit of what I said when I was blacked out might have come back to me." He told Bucky, avoiding eye-contact.

James knew exactly what that was. Sam had just seen Rumlow for the first time, which brought back a very specific part of the conversation they both had, but only Bucky remembered.

"You remembered shitting on Brock?" he raised an eyebrow, amused.

"I mean, I'm not sure, but I bet I didn't have anything nice to say about him."

"Nothing you hadn't said before." Bucky lied.

Sam most certainly had said some things about the ex-boyfriend that he had been keeping to himself, and only had the guts to let out while blackout drunk.

They sat back and switched the channels, finding a better movie to watch, ignoring the lunch party completely. Eventually, Bucky found himself laying on Sam's chest, sort of sided, but he was too comfortable to move away.

[incarnation-of-victory]

I wasn’t initially planning on saying anything about this scene, but since it’s generated a decent amount of discourse, I’d like to add my two cents, because it is about Bakugou after all.

So, do I think Bakugou shouldn’t have been used for comic relief here? No, I think it's fitting because Bakugou is often used for comic relief, and I feel like this scene is supposed to come off mixed to us. We're supposed to find it funny, but since we also are the only ones privy to the full extent of Bakugou's feelings right now, we're also supposed to feel a little bad for him, because we know he's frustrated and worried about Deku and wants to check up on him, but he’s been stopped short from seeing him right now (though nobody else is allowed to come in either, so everybody loses). I also think it makes perfect sense for them to physically restrain Bakugou to stop him from moving. It's partly for his own good so he won’t reopen his wounds, and it's evident that by how desperate Bakugou is, he won’t listen to any kind of reasoning, so they have no choice but to resort to this. The students also don’t want Bakugou to disturb the rest of the patients in the hospital, hence that one lady going “At last, some relief!” I also think it's clear that his classmates are relieved to see that Bakugou is not so gravely injured that he still can't move around and yell. They're glad to see that he's awake at the very least. On the other hand, Bakugou does claim to Best Jeanist that he's not actually as okay as they think he is: whether he means emotionally or physically is uncertain. How seriously we’re supposed to take Bakugou’s confession of not being alright is also unclear. Whatever's truly the case, let's just assume that Bakugou is indeed, physically well enough right now to be out of the woods.

This leaves my only real gripe(?) with this scene: nobody acknowledges why Bakugou’s acting so emotional and out of control to begin with. Granted, I don't think anything anyone can say will stop Bakugou anyway, but an attempt at acknowledging his feelings would be nice. I mean, in 298, we already had Sato & Mineta warning Bakugou that if he kept moving around like that, he might die. So yeah, they did acknowledge Bakugou's physical state, but what about his emotional state? Why couldn't anyone say something like, "Bakugou, I know you're worried about Deku right now, but you need to slow down?" or "Man, Bakugou's really that determined to see Deku, huh?" or idk, just any kind of recognition of why he's acting that way?

Which leads me to the 2 ways I interpret their reactions in this scene: a) the class 1-A students & others there aren’t supposed to really understand Bakugou's behavior here because they don't know the full extent of what happened between Bakugou & Deku, or how Bakugou truly feels about him. One hint of this gap in understanding could be from the flashback sequence in 284, when Uraraka mistakenly thought that it was Bakugou's decision to use explosions against Deku for Black Whip training. The inclusion of that detail is very deliberate in showing a disparity between how people used to view Bakugou vs. how he actually is right now, particularly in regards to Deku. Hell, even I thought it was Bakugou's idea until Bakugou claimed otherwise. 

And/or maybe it’s like b) when Bakugou got tied up at the Sports Festival: people rarely try to understand why Bakugou acts the way he does in the first place. It's easier & more convenient to just to scold him or put a muzzle on him. And the thing is, everyone did get that Bakugou was mad there because he felt like he won an unfair fight, but nobody tried to sympathize with why he'd feel that way (except Aizawa later, when he stood up for Bakugou at the press conference). It's not that I expect anyone to be particularly successful in talking down Bakugou, but an attempt at acknowledging why he's acting that way is enough to feel like the other characters have some respect for his personal feelings & desires.

And it's not like I'm asking them to psychoanalyze every single time Bakugou blows up: obviously it's not going to be that deep every time. But this is an extreme case here, and even then, Uraraka only made a surface observation of Bakugou being louder than ever (which is odd: Uraraka’s ability to understand Bakugou/his relationship with Deku has always been somewhat inconsistent).

Anyway, I don’t like how the opposition to any critique of this scene has devolved into "those stupid Bakugou stans overreacting and woobifying their uwu poor bby Bakugou" or even claiming that this is just “bkdk shippers being mad.” While I do think some people are blowing this scene a little out of proportion, I don't think it's unreasonable at all to interpret this scene as another instance of people not truly understanding Bakugou, particularly because there's been multiple precedents for this kind of situation before. Also, there's no need to bash or condescend people who have strong negative reactions to this scene: they're entitled to expressing their feelings. Saying that people are reading this wrong and need to shut up is just an attempt at shutting down any kind of conversation that you disagree with. You don’t get to dictate what’s reasonable to analyze or criticize and what’s not.

Everybody wants their favs’ struggles to be taken seriously, trust me: this isn’t just a Bakugou stan thing. Earlier in the series, nobody really cared about Bakugou being used as the butt of the joke because a lot of people didn’t like him, so it was framed as “heartless bully gets his just desserts.” But now that we know Bakugou a lot better as a person, and that we know that yes, he is indeed a human being with feelings like anyone else, it makes sense why a lot of us would feel more sympathetic toward him. 

Personally, I’d just like it if other characters pointed out Bakugou’s true feelings more often, because I feel like Bakugou’s a lot more reasonable than they give him credit for, so the things he does often fly over their heads. Even some fans reading the series still have trouble grasping Bakugou’s true intentions, which is why it can be helpful to have other characters spell them out for us (i.e., All Might recognizing that Bakugou is worried for Deku). I mean, I’m genuinely surprised that they are people who are completely caught up with the manga and still don’t realize that “there being a dissonance between Bakugou’s true intentions and how he appears on the surface” is a big part of his character. But when the characters in-universe even act like this, I guess I can see why (but it would also be helpful to note that it is… indeed possible for characters to have more than one feeling or motivation for something…). Though I will admit that people can take this to the other extreme too and make him seem softer or more persecuted than he actually is.

In conclusion, this scene didn't bother me too much, but I also couldn't help but feel somewhat off-put by how all the reactions to Bakugou were missing the whole picture, but I feel like that’s kind of the point.

[aboveallarescuer]

Dany considering, threatening to take and/or taking violent measures

As I was rereading ASOIAF, I made it my goal to compile all* the book passages demonstrating either certain key attributes of Daenerys Targaryen (e.g. that she's compassionate and smart) or aspects of hers that are usually overstated (e.g. that she's ambitious and prophecy-driven).  Doing such a task may seem exaggerated, but I'd argue it's not, for many, many misconceptions about Dany have become widespread in light of the show's final season's events (and even before).

It must be acknowledged that it can be tricky to reference, say, ADWD passages to counter-argument how she was depicted in season eight (which allegedly follows ADOS events). Dany will have had plenty of character development in the span of two books. However, whatever happens to Dany in the next two books, I would argue that there is more than enough material to conclude that her show counterpart was made to fall for flaws that she (for the most part) never had and actions that she (for the most part) would never take. (and that's not even considering the double standards and the contradictions with what had been shown from show!Dany up until then, but that's obviously out of the scope of these lists)

Another objection to the purpose of these lists is that Game of Thrones is different from A Song of Ice and Fire and should be analyzed on its own, which is a fair point. However, the show is also an adaptation of these books, which begs the questions: why did they change Dany's character? Why did they overfocus on negative traits of hers or depicted them as negative when they weren't supposed to be or gave her negative traits that were never hers to begin with? Another fact that undermines the show=/=books argument is that most people think that the show's ending will be the books', albeit only in broad strokes and in different circumstances. As a result, people's perception of Dany is inevitably influenced by the show, which is a shame.

I hope these lists can be useful for whoever wants to find book passages to defend (or even simply explore different facets of) Dany's character in metas or conversations.

*Well, at least all the passages that I could find in her chapters, which is no guarantee that the effort was perfectly executed, but I did my best.

Also, people could interpret certain passages differently and then come up with a different collection of passages if they ever attempted to make one, so I'm not saying that this list is completely objective (nor that there could ever be one).

Also, some passages have been cut short according to whether they were, IMO, relevant to the specific topic of the list they're in, so the context surrounding them may not always be clear (always read the books and use asearchoficeandfire). Many of them appear in different lists, sometimes fully referenced, sometimes not.

I listed the passages back to front because I felt doing so highlighted Dany's evolution better.

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

To justify the existence of this list, let's see examples of widespread opinions that I feel misrepresent Daenerys Targaryen:

It's just time that we acknowledge that Daenerys' behavior over the past few seasons has been more of someone with an overinflated ego and an limitless sense of entitlement than that of a ruler with the well-being of their subjects and land in mind. If I can really spill the tea, she's acting a lot like the Mad King as well as Cersei, who's currently acting all type of the fool on the Iron Throne. Violence may be a necessary evil, but like...do we really have to burn everybody alive? Is that really what we want for Westeros? (x)

~

[S]he’d rather slaughter her enemies than use them to her advantage. Sure, sometimes you need a good slaughter, but you have to be willing to try diplomacy, too. (x)

~

The issue isn’t whether it’s better if the slave cities remained slave cities — it goes without saying, that’s reprehensible. But her most striking moments ruling Meereen are quite sadistic in nature. In season four, when the Meereenese crucify slave children as a threat to Dany, she responds by crucifying an equal number of noblemen once she takes over the city, despite Ser Barristan’s pleas for mercy; “I will answer injustice with justice,” she coolly responds. Revisiting that scene, it’s pretty disturbing. What starts out as a moment of joyous liberation — and the slaves chanting “Mhysa!” her way — ends with the anguished screams of the newly crucified Meereenese across the city.

Fast forward to season five, when Ser Barristan is unceremoniously murdered in an alley by the Sons of the Harpy, Dany rounds up Meereen’s elected leaders to interrogate them and find out who among them could be a secret Harpy. To establish she’s not fucking around, she picks one of them at random to be burned alive and subsequently eaten by two of her dragons. She’s not just content with her decision; despite not getting any answers, Dany’s entranced by the sight of her dragons and the burning fire.

Dany’s fascination with fire — not to mention her nonchalant attitude toward violence — bears an uncomfortable resemblance to her father, the “Mad King” Aerys Targaryen. (x)

Are Dany's acts of violence supposed to make you wonder if she's going to "burn everybody alive"? Are her acts of violence "quite sadistic in nature"? Does she feel "entranced by the sight of her dragons and the burning fire" and has a "fascination with fire"?

I would argue GRRM has written a character who only chooses violence either for humanitarian reasons or for political goals (which are often intertwined), and even in the latter case, she seeks to avoid collateral damage (ASOS Dany III, ASOS Dany IV). She's not immune to acting on vengeance, but so far it's always been motivated by the injustices perpetrated upon others (ASOS Dany VI, ADWD Dany II); you can argue that "harsh justice", as she puts it, is not justice, but you can't argue that she's doing it for them. The one exception to this is her burning of Mirri Maz Duur, but even then, it is not because she is "sadistic", she explicitly recognizes the futility of vengeance. She kills her because she needs her life for the ritual that culminates with the birth of the dragons. You could argue Mirri didn't deserve it, but Mirri also killed her child and left Drogo in a comatose state. And she lives in a society that largely normalizes violence. Dany's entire characterization must be taken into consideration.

With that in mind, there is no textual evidence to suggest she will decide to burn every noncombatant she can find because she was unhappy about their reception. None. She fights to be queen because she wants to protect the ones who can't protect themselves and it is her duty towards her lost family. She carries unbearable guilt over her mistakes (or ramifications that had nothing to do with her). She treats her achievements and inheritances as a duty rather than as something that elevates her beyond others. She wants a home for herself and peace for everyone.

I should also add that the list about the moments showcasing her empathy and compassion is more than four times bigger than this one. One can argue I'm being biased, but it says something that passages showing instances when she does take violent measures would not fill a whole list. I also had to look for moments when she considers or threatens to in order to fill this one. And even then, her positive aspects greatly surpass her "negative" ones. Why would GRRM focus so much more on her sympathy towards others rather than on her ruthlessness? Must be because Daenerys Targaryen is ultimately meant to be a sympathetic character who is not supposed to turn into a mass murderer of her own volition, ever.

A Dance with Dragons

ADWD Daenerys VIII

The hall rang to Yunkish laughter, Yunkish songs, Yunkish prayers. Dancers danced; musicians played queer tunes with bells and squeaks and bladders; singers sang ancient love songs in the incomprehensible tongue of Old Ghis. Wine flowed—not the thin pale stuff of Slaver’s Bay but rich sweet vintages from the Arbor and dreamwine from Qarth, flavored with strange spices. The Yunkai’i had come at King Hizdahr’s invitation, to sign the peace and witness the rebirth of Meereen’s far-famed fighting pits. Her noble husband had opened the Great Pyramid to fete them.

I hate this, thought Daenerys Targaryen. How did this happen, that I am drinking and smiling with men I’d sooner flay?

~

“You don’t never want to trust a sellsword, m’lady.”

“I have learned that much. One day I must be sure to thank you for the lesson.”

~

“Is there some man in the Second Sons who might be persuaded to … remove … Brown Ben?”

“As Daario Naharis once removed the other captains of the Stormcrows?” The old knight looked uncomfortable. “Perhaps. I would not know, Your Grace.”

No, she thought, you are too honest and too honorable. “If not, the Yunkai’i employ three other companies.”

“Rogues and cutthroats, scum of a hundred battlefields,” Ser Barristan warned, “with captains full as treacherous as Plumm.”

“I am only a young girl and know little of such things, but it seems to me that we want them to be treacherous. Once, you’ll recall, I convinced the Second Sons and Stormcrows to join us.”

“If Your Grace wishes a privy word with Gylo Rhegan or the Tattered Prince, I could bring them up to your apartments.”

“This is not the time. Too many eyes, too many ears. Their absence would be noted even if you could separate them discreetly from the Yunkai’i. We must find some quieter way of reaching out to them … not tonight, but soon.”

“As you command. Though I fear this is not a task for which I am well suited. In King’s Landing work of this sort was left to Lord Littlefinger or the Spider. We old knights are simple men, only good for fighting.” He patted his sword hilt.

“Our prisoners,” suggested Dany. “The Westerosi who came over from the Windblown with the three Dornishmen. We still have them in cells, do we not? Use them.”

“Free them, you mean? Is that wise? They were sent here to worm their way into your trust, so they might betray Your Grace at the first chance.”

“Then they failed. I do not trust them. I will never trust them.” If truth be told, Dany was forgetting how to trust. “We can still use them. One was a woman. Meris. Send her back, as a … a gesture of my regard. If their captain is a clever man, he will understand.”

“The woman is the worst of all.”

“All the better.” Dany considered a moment. “We should sound out the Long Lances too. And the Company of the Cat.”

“Bloodbeard.” Ser Barristan’s frown deepened. “If it please Your Grace, we want no part of him. Your Grace is too young to remember the Ninepenny Kings, but this Bloodbeard is cut from the same savage cloth. There is no honor in him, only hunger … for gold, for glory, for blood.”

“You know more of such men than me, ser.” If Bloodbeard might be truly the most dishonorable and greedy of the sellswords, he might be the easiest to sway, but she was loath to go against Ser Barristan’s counsel in such matters. “Do as you think best. But do it soon. If Hizdahr’s peace should break, I want to be ready. I do not trust the slavers.” I do not trust my husband. “They will turn on us at the first sign of weakness.”

“The Yunkai’i grow weaker as well. The bloody flux has taken hold amongst the Tolosi, it is said, and spread across the river to the third Ghiscari legion.”

The pale mare. Daenerys sighed. Quaithe warned me of the pale mare’s coming. She told me of the Dornish prince as well, the sun’s son. She told me much and more, but all in riddles. “I cannot rely on plague to save me from my enemies. Set Pretty Meris free. At once.”

ADWD Daenerys VI

“If we should wed by Westerosi rites …”

“The gods of Ghis would deem it no true union.” Galazza Galare’s face was hidden behind a veil of green silk. Only her eyes showed, green and wise and sad. “In the eyes of the city you would be the noble Hizdahr’s concubine, not his lawful wedded wife. Your children would be bastards. Your Worship must marry Hizdahr in the Temple of the Graces, with all the nobility of Meereen on hand to bear witness to your union.”

Get the heads of all the noble houses out of their pyramids on some pretext, Daario had said. The dragon’s words are fire and blood. Dany pushed the thought aside. It was not worthy of her. “As you wish,” she sighed.

~

Dany filled his wine cup again, wanting nothing so much as to pour the flagon over his head and drown his complacent smile.

~

She wanted to scream, to gnash her teeth and tear her clothes and beat upon the floor. Instead she said, “Close the gates. Will you make me say it thrice?” They were her children, but she could not help them now.

ADWD Daenerys IV

“The Shavepate has ways of finding the truth.”

“I do not doubt that Skahaz would soon have me confessing. A day with him, and I will be one of the Harpy’s Sons. Two days, and I will be the Harpy. Three, and it will turn out I slew your father too, back in the Sunset Kingdoms when I was yet a boy. Then he will impale me on a stake and you can watch me die … but afterward the killings will go on.”

ADWD Daenerys III

“The Wise Masters should follow their example. I spared Yunkai before, but I will not make that mistake again. If they should dare attack me, this time I shall raze their Yellow City to the ground.”

~

“Have you forgotten? I have dragons.” [...]

“My dragons have grown, my shoulders have not. They range far afield, hunting.” Hazzea, forgive me. She wondered how much Xaro knew, what whispers he had heard. “Ask the Good Masters of Astapor about my dragons if you doubt them.” I saw a slaver’s eyes melt and go running down his cheeks.

~

Westeros. Home. But if she left, what would happen to her city? Meereen was never your city, her brother’s voice seemed to whisper. Your cities are across the sea. Your Seven Kingdoms, where your enemies await you. You were born to serve them blood and fire.

~

“Xaro Xhoan Daxos does not threaten. He promises.”

Her sadness turned to fury. “And I promise you that if you are not gone before the sun comes up, we will learn how well a liar’s tears can quench dragonfire. Leave me, Xaro. Quickly.”

ADWD Daenerys II

Mercy, thought Dany. They will have the dragon’s mercy. “Skahaz, I have changed my mind. Question the man sharply.”

“I could. Or I could question the daughters sharply whilst the father looks on. That will wring some names from him.”

“Do as you think best, but bring me names.” Her fury was a fire in her belly.

~

She was the blood of the dragon. She could kill the Sons of the Harpy, and the sons of the sons, and the sons of the sons of the sons. But a dragon could not feed a hungry child nor help a dying woman’s pain. And who would ever dare to love a dragon?

~

She sniffed suspiciously at Reznak mo Reznak. I could command the Shavepate to arrest him and put him to the question. Would that forestall the prophecy? Or would some other betrayer take his place?

ADWD Daenerys I

Dany said a silent prayer that somewhere one of the Harpy’s Sons was dying even now, clutching at his belly and writhing in pain.

~

Daenerys pushed her hair back. “Find these cowards for me. Find them, so that I might teach the Harpy’s Sons what it means to wake the dragon.”

~

She had not forgotten the slave children the Great Masters had nailed up along the road from Yunkai. They had numbered one hundred sixty-three, a child every mile, nailed to mileposts with one arm outstretched to point her way. After Meereen had fallen, Dany had nailed up a like number of Great Masters. Swarms of flies had attended their slow dying, and the stench had lingered long in the plaza. Yet some days she feared that she had not gone far enough. These Meereenese were a sly and stubborn people who resisted her at every turn.

~

“...Women do not forget. Women do not forgive.”

No, Dany thought, and the Usurper’s dogs will learn that, when I return to Westeros.

~

There were times when Dany wondered if that razor might not be better saved for Reznak’s throat. He was a useful man, but she liked him little and trusted him less. The Undying of Qarth had told her she would be thrice betrayed. Mirri Maz Duur had been the first, Ser Jorah the second. Would Reznak be the third? The Shavepate? Daario? Or will it be someone I would never suspect, Ser Barristan or Grey Worm or Missandei?

A Storm of Swords

ASOS Daenerys VI

“I want your leaders,” Dany told them. “Give them up, and the rest of you shall be spared.”

“How many?” one old woman had asked, sobbing. “How many must you have to spare us?”

“One hundred and sixty-three,” she answered.

She had them nailed to wooden posts around the plaza, each man pointing at the next. The anger was fierce and hot inside her when she gave the command; it made her feel like an avenging dragon. But later, when she passed the men dying on the posts, when she heard their moans and smelled their bowels and blood ...

Dany put the glass aside, frowning. It was just. It was. I did it for the children.

~

Dany remembered the horror she had felt when she had seen the Plaza of Punishment in Astapor. I made a horror just as great, but surely they deserved it. Harsh justice is still justice.

~

“Do not ever presume to touch me again, or to speak my name. You have until dawn to collect your things and leave this city. If you’re found in Meereen past break of day, I will have Strong Belwas twist your head off. I will. Believe that.”

ASOS Daenerys V

Worst of all, they had nailed a slave child up on every milepost along the coast road from Yunkai, nailed them up still living with their entrails hanging out and one arm always outstretched to point the way to Meereen. [...] “I will see them,” she said. “I will see every one, and count them, and look upon their faces. And I will remember.”

ASOS Daenerys IV

“I say, you are mad.”

“Am I?” Dany shrugged, and said, “Dracarys.”

The dragons answered. Rhaegal hissed and smoked, Viserion snapped, and Drogon spat swirling red-black flame. It touched the drape of Grazdan’s tokar, and the silk caught in half a heartbeat. Golden marks spilled across the carpets as the envoy stumbled over the chest, shouting curses and beating at his arm until Whitebeard flung a flagon of water over him to douse the flames. “You swore I should have safe conduct! “ the Yunkish envoy wailed.

“Do all the Yunkai’i whine so over a singed tokar? I shall buy you a new one ... if you deliver up your slaves within three days. Elsewise, Drogon shall give you a warmer kiss.”

ASOS Daenerys III

“He will not come,” Kraznys said.

“There is a reason. A dragon is no slave.” And Dany swept the lash down as hard as she could across the slaver’s face. Kraznys screamed and staggered back, the blood running red down his cheeks into his perfumed beard. The harpy’s fingers had torn his features half to pieces with one slash, but she did not pause to contemplate the ruin. “Drogon,” she sang out loudly, sweetly, all her fear forgotten. “Dracarys.”

The black dragon spread his wings and roared.

[...] “Unsullied!” Dany galloped before them, her silver-gold braid flying behind her, her bell chiming with every stride. “Slay the Good Masters, slay the soldiers, slay every man who wears a tokar or holds a whip, but harm no child under twelve, and strike the chains off every slave you see.” She raised the harpy’s fingers in the air ... and then she flung the scourge aside. “Freedom!” she sang out. “Dracarys! Dracarys!”

“Dracarys!” they shouted back, the sweetest word she’d ever heard. “Dracarys! Dracarys!” And all around them slavers ran and sobbed and begged and died, and the dusty air was filled with spears and fire.

ASOS Daenerys I

[“]The warlocks said the second treason would be for gold. What does Illyrio Mopatis love more than gold?”

“His skin.” Across the cabin Drogon stirred restlessly, steam rising from his snout. “Mirri Maz Duur betrayed me. I burned her for it.”

A Clash of Kings

ACOK Daenerys III

“I mean to sail to Westeros, and drink the wine of vengeance from the skull of the Usurper.”

[...] “Will nothing turn you from this madness?”

“Nothing,” she said, wishing she was as certain as she sounded.

A Game of Thrones

AGOT Daenerys X

“I am tired of the maegi’s braying,” Dany told Jhogo. He took his whip to her, and after that the godswife kept silent.

~

As she climbed down off the pyre, she noticed Mirri Maz Duur watching her. “You are mad,” the godswife said hoarsely.

“Is it so far from madness to wisdom?” Dany asked. “Ser Jorah, take this maegi and bind her to the pyre.”

“To the ... my queen, no, hear me ...”

“Do as I say.” Still he hesitated, until her anger flared. “You swore to obey me, whatever might come. Rakharo, help him.”

[...] “I thank you, Mirri Maz Duur,” she said, “for the lessons you have taught me.”

“You will not hear me scream,” Mirri responded as the oil dripped from her hair and soaked her clothing.

“I will,” Dany said, “but it is not your screams I want, only your life. I remember what you told me. Only death can pay for life.”

AGOT Daenerys IX

“Eroeh?” asked Dany, remembering the frightened child she had saved outside the city of the Lamb Men.

“Mago seized her, who is Khal Jhaqo’s bloodrider now,” said Jhogo. “He mounted her high and low and gave her to his khal, and Jhaqo gave her to his other bloodriders. They were six. When they were done with her, they cut her throat.”

“It was her fate, Khaleesi,” said Aggo.


If I look back I am lost. “It was a cruel fate,” Dany said, “yet not so cruel as Mago’s will be. I promise you that, by the old gods and the new, by the lamb god and the horse god and every god that lives. I swear it by the Mother of Mountains and the Womb of the World. Before I am done with them, Mago and Ko Jhaqo will plead for the mercy they showed Eroeh.”

The Dothraki exchanged uncertain glances. “Khaleesi,” the handmaid Irri explained, as if to a child, “Jhaqo is a khal now, with twenty thousand riders at his back.”

She lifted her head. “And I am Daenerys Stormhorn, Daenerys of House Targaryen, of the blood of Aegon the Conqueror and Maegor the Cruel and old Valyria before them. I am the dragon’s daughter, and I swear to you, these men will die screaming. Now bring me to Khal Drogo.”

~

Dany called out for the men of her khas and bid them take Mirri Maz Duur and bind her hand and foot, but the maegi smiled at her as they carried her off, as if they shared a secret. A word, and Dany could have her head off ... yet then what would she have? A head? If life was worthless, what was death?

AGOT Daenerys VIII

“You do not command me, Khaleesi,” Qotho said.

“Find Mirri Maz Duur,” she told him. The godswife would be walking among the other Lamb Men, in the long column of slaves. “Bring her to me, with her chest.”

Qotho glared down at her, his eyes hard as flint. “The maegi.” He spat. “This I will not do.”

“You will,” Dany said, “or when Drogo wakes, he will hear why you defied me.”

~

Eroeh stared fearfully at Drogo where he lay. “He dies,” she whispered.

Dany slapped her. “The khal cannot die. He is the father of the stallion who mounts the world. His hair has never been cut. He still wears the bells his father gave him.”

“Khaleesi,” Jhiqui said, “he fell from his horse.”

Trembling, her eyes full of sudden tears, Dany turned away from them.

~

Only a horse, Dany thought. If she could buy Drogo’s life with the death of a horse, she would pay a thousand times over.

~

She caught him by the shoulder, but Qotho shoved her aside. Dany fell to her knees, crossing her arms over her belly to protect the child within. “Stop him,” she commanded her khas, “kill him.”

AGOT Daenerys VII

“I will not have her harmed,” Dany said. “I claim her. Do as I command you, or Khal Drogo will know the reason why.”

AGOT Daenerys VI

“You will drink,” Dany said, cold as ice. “Empty the cup, or I will tell them to hold you down while Ser Jorah pours the whole cask down your throat.”

~

His khalasar left Vaes Dothrak two days later, striking south and west across the plains. Khal Drogo led them on his great red stallion, with Daenerys beside him on her silver. The wineseller hurried behind them, naked, on foot, chained at throat and wrists. His chains were fastened to the halter of Dany’s silver. As she rode, he ran after her, barefoot and stumbling. No harm would come to him ... so long as he kept up.

AGOT Daenerys IV

“I am the Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, not some grass-stained savage with bells in his hair,” Viserys spat back at her. He grabbed her arm. “You forget yourself, slut. Do you think that big belly will protect you if you wake the dragon?”

His fingers dug into her arm painfully and for an instant Dany felt like a child again, quailing in the face of his rage. She reached out with her other hand and grabbed the first thing she touched, the belt she’d hoped to give him, a heavy chain of ornate bronze medallions. She swung it with all her strength.

It caught him full in the face. Viserys let go of her. Blood ran down his cheek where the edge of one of the medallions had sliced it open. “You are the one who forgets himself,” Dany said to him. “Didn’t you learn anything that day in the grass? Leave me now, before I summon my khas to drag you out. And pray that Khal Drogo does not hear of this, or he will cut open your belly and feed you your own entrails.”

[allbeendonebefore]

I was kind of under the impression that this is just a widespread thing in Alberta, especially because of the Angus Reid fractured federation survey (I cant include the link here, but you can Google it, its from January 24th 2019). When got back into Hetalia, I imagined the dynamics kinda changed to this, which would be pretty bad tbh. I hope its not that aggressive in Alberta, I will never be able to go check tho, too expensive :( I loved the bad french btw

i see you guys sending these asks super late at night and i wonder whether any of you sleep - idk where you’re writing from and i may be on the west coast but are you guys ok wherever you are? I just woke up but I have my tea and if I’m not caffeinated now I surely will be as I answer this.

I’m sure I’ve seen the survey you’re speaking of before and before I address it in any specific detail I just want to back up and re frame Why I’m Being Like This in regards to recent events and my orientation towards answering these questions in terms of Hetalia the way I do, because I think it’s the heart of how I answer.

the tldr of it is:

1. I have an opportunity to make interpretations of reality in unexpected and challenging ways, therefore widespread opinions don’t govern anything but my stupid gag comics in the simple sense that if everyone was represented by widespread opinion alone all the time, nothing would change and

2. if i can answer dozens of asks about ralph and oliver hanging out there’s absolutely no reason I can’t answer asks about ralph and jean hanging out, lol.

3. If you’d like a shorter, more concise “vision statement”, I have one on @battle-of-alberta here. (although now I notice the links don’t work on mobile so you’ll have to be on desktop for that one)

I’m assuming this will be long so cut time

(and yes, alas, the bad french is my legacy and I’m afraid it has not improved much although i swear i was an A student when i was actually taking it) (and no please don’t visit now, purely for pandemic reasons, it would be really expensive And you’d have a bad time) (and talking to me is free lmao) (I do not mean to say that you need to have feet on the ground to understand a place at all, i mean, at the moment I don’t lol)

headings because I say a lot

what even is hetalia

At the most basic level, Hetalia is a tool that can be used in a variety of ways. It can be for memorization, current politics at a glance or historical relationships in different settings. I use it for all of these things, of course, I certainly use it a lot in comics that take place in the much more distant past in @athensandspartaadventures. When I was writing that, I was in undergrad and AaSA was a tool to help me pass my exams, I didn’t think of how it might be read or interpreted by people who have lived in or experienced those places these days, or what kind of political and cultural tensions it might reveal. (Not to say that it has gotten me into sticky situations, exactly, but I am more aware of where things like that would arise now).

These days I look back on a lot of my experiences - both in IAMP/Hetalia and just as a person, and I think that if Hetalia is a tool it should be used with some awareness of intention and responsibility. Things in the fandom have changed as it became more mainstream and more well known and I think there’s a definite worry about screwing up or not representing Everything or not pleasing Everybody or not doing it Right. I have a simple, insufferably academic principle.

(That said, yes, you can still do it very wrong if you write a methodology.)

Still, it’s a comfort to me that I’m just doing the things the way I say I’m going to do them, and that is the underpinning of Inspired But Not Constrained By Hetalia. I don’t do things Himaruya’s way, I can’t do things the way IAMP would do them if it were running today because it’s not and things have changed, all I can do is do them how I would do them.

I have hurt people in the past because they sometimes couldn’t tell whether I was writing From an Albertan Perspective or not, and I’ve evoked some preeetty spicy comments over the last decade, and I realized that tone and perspective are something that really shapes how people understand and interact with my work and I’m trying to use that understanding in a conscientious way)

what even is alberta

So when you’re me and you’ve grown up in a province that is the Angriest in the country and the most Misunderstood in the country and the most Entitled in the country and nobody outside of maybe Saskatchewan has a good thing to say about you half the time and maybe you’re tired of that... you get kind of depressed thinking about how every year some kiddo comes on the internet ready to be excited about making or celebrating characters that represent themselves and No Matter Where They Go running into everyone else’s negative impressions first and foremost.

We joke about how everyone hates Toronto, though I’ve always understood it in a teasing way because I’ve never ACTUALLY met someone (outside of our current legislative assembly) who REALLY hates Toronto, but it does feel like I’ve encountered (directly or indirectly) people who do Genuinely hate Alberta and hoo boy is That a strange feeling. I mean, there’s an understanding that BC also ‘hates’ Alberta but half the people in BC are originally from Alberta so it’s a, uh, different feeling.

The story of Alberta from everywhere else is always the story of that Angus Reid article and the memes and comments and listicles that spin out around mainstream media. Alberta is giving too much. Alberta is getting too little. Alberta is too stupid to understand that equalization payments are a good thing actually, and Alberta is too dumb to understand you don’t really need EI if you make enough money in six months to own a house and multiple vehicles Just Because you own a house and multiple vehicles. Alberta is destroying the environment for everybody. Alberta has a huge concentration of white supremacists. Alberta is the Texas of Canada* and has the conservative streak and bible belt to match. Alberta should get annexed by the US. Oh, but Banff! We like Banff, though.

And like I said, politicians use these widespread feelings to stir up the sentiments of people who can’t afford to travel, people who are naturally suspicious of mainstream news, people who have barely even left their hometowns let alone the province and have no other means of validating what they hear, but people who’s emotions are genuinely tied to real feelings of alienation that really exist and HAVE existed for generations. And when the so-called “laurentian elites” in ontario and quebec make fun of them for being uneducated red necks, well, you hit a wasps nest and expected what, exactly?

what even am i doing

And like I’m faced with this question every day I decide to pick up my stylus and badger you all with unsolicited comics: do I want this to continue? Do I want to wear the mask that fits? Do I want to stand aside and say #notallalbertans #notlikeotheralbertans and stand over here on the island** patting myself on the back for not? being? there? Do I say yes, you’re right, and stand aside and watch loud mouth white supremacists co-opt wexiters and let them lead the perception of the province I grew up in just because that is what’s currently happening? Do I acknowledge the widespread sentiment and then pick apart every other province to say Well Actually You’re Equally Problematic Hypocrites, So There?

Obviously I’ve been saying no for a while. I’m perfectly happy to acknowledge the reality and when I draw stupid gag comics like this or this you can tell (hopefully) from my style that it’s tongue and cheek. When I draw less stupid not-gag comics like this or this I am trying to explore the Real Sentiments in a way that doesn’t completely polarize the issue and spin it out of control. I’m more of the opinion that even though Current Sentiments do get in the way that as personifications they 1. have some perspective and as people they 2. have some interest in not throwing out a friendship that was a struggle to build up every time the polls change or some new radical party seizes power. I do a lot of research and I want that to be reflected in my understanding of each characters deep seated beliefs and motivations, but I don’t want to let either the history or the current realities dictate the future if I am going to try to do that myself. 

why even am i doing it for

So like really the heart of the matter is: I am writing what I write for my thirteen year old self. She was the me who moved back to Canada from the United States, who’s first introduction to living there was a hellish surge of nationalism after September 11th. Who’s defense against that was to hide behind a shield of Canada is Better, Actually and who returned to Alberta during the boom years to realize that, oh wait, the rest of the country thinks we’re assholes just like they think the United States is. Who spent her teenage years learning that, boom or bust, the widespread sentiment in and out of the province is just as narrow, shortsighted, self interested, and stubborn as her own fiction of What Canada Was Supposed to be Like. Who learned that propping up that image at the expense of her friendships was not worth it, that propping up that image at the expense of people who are suffering and dying under that image is not worth it. Who found herself rehashing the same sort of gut reaction defensiveness online because the Guilt and Apologizing on behalf of her province compared to others felt Really Heavy for a kid who didn’t have any clue what to do about it and was just there to have fun and learn some stuff.

So I’m writing for anyone else who finds themselves exhausted and saddened by coming online and seeing that the only way that people can imagine Alberta is as an antagonist. I’d like to challenge everyone to start to imagine it better. It’s my little “escape” from reality, and for me it’s much easier to talk to people here where the stakes aren’t as high and the grievances a little less personal.

I’m also writing (in a more secondary way) for everyone who’s ever looked at alberta from afar and wondered What is going On inside your Head and is it always This

(no comment at this time)

as always, I’m here to explain At The Very Least what goes on in My head because at the end of the day, that’s all I can do. And though there are some things that make me angry and emotional, I’m happy to explain why. Happy to answer asks or chat on discord or whatever, any time I have the time. :)

footnotes

*This is just a footnote to say something I didn’t want to interrupt the flow of my comments, but this is an annoyance that me and my Texas Tomodachi share lol

**You’ll notice angry Albertans online have a favourite tactic, and that’s pointing out hypocrisy. They can justify A N y T h I n G by calling another province a hypocrite “so there” (i.e. BC can’t claim to be environmentally conscious because of Victoria’s sewage problem or Site C) - and while I am interested in shattering the image of Alberta vs. the Perfect Rest of Canada a little bit, I feel like it’s a very lazy argument that is used to deflect and not to help. I think it is more useful to unpack the sentiment of Why Alberta Still Feels Taken Advantage of rather than mudslinging, and when the mud starts flying no one seems interested in addressing problems anymore.

[protectwoc]

thots on little women (2019)

or, y’all are giving greta gerwig too much credit, part one

(Before y’all say anything, I know)

I have a lot of thoughts about the new Little Women movie.

I should probably start by saying that I loved the new movie. I thought most of the acting performances were good (Emma Watson’s accent notwithstanding), and it was a pretty faithful adaptation of the book; a lot of the quotes were lifted verbatim from the novel, and I often found myself mouthing along with the actors. I don’t usually like book-to-screen adaptation changes, but I actually didn’t mind most of the changes here. The two biggest things that were changed were the decision to start the story in the middle and jump back and forth, and the positioning Jo as the writer of Little Women who was forced to write in the “Jo marries Bhaer and gets a happy (married) ending” bit. I actually really liked both of those choices and thought they were good additions to the story, making this probably the only time I’ve ever liked any book-to-screen adaptation changes. Also, I am and have been since childhood an Amy March stan, and I liked that her character was more fleshed out and relatable to other viewers. I also think Florence Pugh did a superb acting job. Overall I liked it a lot, and I fully intend on rewatching it again.

I should also say that I read Little Women when I was very young, probably nine or ten, and I loved it, and it has been one of my favorite books since. Regardless of these facts, I never saw any of the live action versions, so the only version I have to compare the 2019 one with is the movie inside my head. With that said, as previously mentioned, I have a lot of thoughts.

Look, the movie was really good. I thought so, my family thought so, and clearly critics thought so too. But when I started reading the reviews after I had seen the movie, something about them kept rubbing me the wrong way. Something kept nagging at me, but it wasn’t until I read this particular review that I realized what it was: “here’s the thing about greta gerwig’s little women. it’s really not just about jo anymore...she showed the struggle and sacrifice and love that meg has. she gives beth one of the most beautiful story arcs ever. she lets beth exist in the movie and grow on us before her death.” But… she didn’t, I remember thinking. And that is the crux of my issue with the movie, or at least, the conversation around the movie. It feels like a lot of people are giving Gerwig credit for things she didn’t actually do, like fully fleshing out the non-Jo characters, or exploring Jo’s sexuality. And that is what I am going to discuss in this essay.

I imagine the Venn Diagram of people who read my first Descendants meta and people who will be interested in this is virtually nonexistent (probably just me, honestly) but just in case, this essay will be set up similarly to my last one. It will probably come in at least two parts, since I can already feel this getting away from me, and I will start with an unnecessarily long list of prefaces:

This meta is not, for the most part, about race. I do believe Greta Gerwig is a White Feminist™, which shows up in a lot of her work, up to and including this one. Obviously the racial diversity of Little Women is virtually nonexistent, but coming from a Greta Gerwig adaptation of Little Women, I’m not sure what y’all were expecting. Since I didn’t go into the movie anticipating any sort of racial diversity, I wasn’t disappointed, and for that reason I will be leaving racial dynamics and Gerwig’s fraught history with racial diversity out of this meta almost entirely.

As previously mentioned, I read Little Women when I was pretty young and loved it. I read it way before I knew anything about the internet or media discussion, so I formed my opinions on the story writ large independently of basically everyone else. With that said, it wasn’t until way later, like about 14 or 15, that I actually started reading online discourse about Little Women and discovered that my opinions ran contrary to just about everyone else’s.

For example, I have always loved Amy March. She was always my favorite character, her chapters of the book were always my favorite to reread, and I was ecstatic when she married Laurie and thought it made perfect sense.

Conversely, I have never been a huge fan of Jo. I know, in the book community that’s basically blasphemy, but whatever. This sense of apathy is probably due to the fact that Jo and I have virtually the same personality, and I get on my own nerves quite often, and also that even as a child I was never a huge fan of Jo’s “not like other girls” personality.

I am what some people would call hyper-romantic. Consequently, my favorite section of the book has always been the last half, with all of the romances and drama. I also didn’t have a huge problem with Jo’s marriage to Bhaer; I didn’t love it or anything, but given that I was never super attached to Jo’s character, I wasn’t super broken up when she married him, also partly because…

I never read Jo as queer. I know, I know, but as a bi woman, I never picked up on whatever subtext everybody else seemed to. I grew up around a lot of white women in the country, and they all acted exactly like Jo did, so maybe that’s why. Of course, it’s a perfectly valid interpretation/headcanon, I’m just telling y’all that I personally never saw it. With that said, I was excited to watch an interpretation where she was more explicitly queer, as all the reviews seemed to say she was, and boy, was I… disappointed.

To clarify, I’m not saying all of my opinions because I want to change anyone’s mind, or convince them that they’ve been reading the book wrong all these years. But I think it’s important to let y’all know where I’m coming from, since I’m sure it’s going to color the way that I view the movie, and the problems within it. In the same way, if my personal opinions about the book change the way you are going to read this essay, I suggest stopping now.

With all that said, I present: Thoughts on Little Women (2019). Also, spoilers, obviously.

Part One: The Sisters

A lot of the praise given to Gerwig’s Little Women centers around one thing: Jo’s sisters. Specifically, how the three sisters are given a much more prominent role in the storyline than in previous adaptations, almost to the level of Jo herself. Now, as previously mentioned, I have never seen another adaptation of Little Women, but I can speak for this adaptation and say that I feel supremely let down.

Let’s start with the obvious: Beth. The review that I cited claimed that Gerwig “gave Beth one of the most beautiful story arcs ever” and “let viewers get to know her so that you really feel her loss.” While of course this reviewer is entitled to their opinion on this movie; all media is up for interpretation, I can’t say that I agree with these statements, or even know where this interpretation came from.

Beth basically only has five major scenes in the film. Obviously she’s a part of many of the other girls’ scenes, but when I’m discussing her “major” scenes, I’m referring to ones where the main focus of the directing is on Beth and her feelings/behaviors. Anyone who read Little Women can tell you that the most memorable thing about Beth is her death. Unfortunately, in the movie, the scenes that deal with her sickness/death are more focused on Jo’s feelings than Beth’s. In the past, Jo mourns her hair with more concern than she shows for Beth, and in the present, the focus continues to be more on Jo’s emotions. Beth’s only actual major scenes are:

Beth is too nervous to talk to Mr. Laurence and hides behind Marmee

Beth is the only one of the March sisters to go visit and take care of the Hummels; she contracts scarlet fever

Beth overcomes her fear of Mr. Laurence and goes to play the piano in his house.

Mr. Laurence gifts Beth a beautiful grand piano; she goes to thank him.

Jo takes Beth to the beach where Beth confesses she is ready to die.

The problem with these scenes is that they tell us basically nothing about Beth’s characteristics. From those five scenes, we can glean that she is selfless, shy, until she isn’t anymore, and that she is a musician, which, contrary to what many musicians believe, is not a personality trait. In actuality, we cannot even concretely say that she is shy, since we only see this behavior through her interactions with Mr. Laurence. She seems to have no problem engaging with the Hummels, and it could just as well be that she is more nervous interacting with a rich older unmarried man, which would not be uncommon for a woman of her situation in her time period.

The only personality trait that differentiates Beth from her sisters is her selflessness, since all three of the other sisters have moments of selfishness that define their characters. But the only time this is ever contrasted with them is when she goes to visit the Hummels, (and then she contracts scarlet fever as a punishment?) One occurrence does not a personality trait make. We know virtually nothing about who Beth is. When viewers see Beth’s sickness and eventual death, they feel sympathy for Jo instead of mourning Beth’s character.

In fairness to Gerwig, much of this is the result of the source material instead of a directing choice. Beth was never given as much focus on Alcott’s Little Women as her sisters. For context, each of the sisters were given “chapters” that focused on their adventures and exploits. Meg has eight, Jo has fourteen,  and Amy has ten. Beth has a grand total of five chapters actually centered around her point of view. So it seems obvious that in an adaptation of the source material, Beth would not have been given nearly as much precedence in the narrative.

BUT, and this is a huge but, we knew that Gerwig has no problem changing huge parts of the story she’s telling. This is not a bad thing; as I’ve already mentioned, I think it works to her advantage in many parts of this movie, namely the ending change. So it would not have been out of her scope of abilities or desires to change parts of the source material to flesh out Beth’s character in the same way she fleshed out Jo’s. The fact that she elected not to do that shows that she simply didn’t want to.

Again, this is not a bad thing. Even though it is always presented as a story of four sisters, it is no secret that Jo is the main character of both the book and basically every adaptation. It is no surprise that she is the most developed character because she is essentially the protagonist.

HOWEVER, with all of that knowledge, the thing that irks me about this movie is how the conversations around it has been giving Gerwig so much credit for how developed all of the sisters are when this just isn't true. As it turns out, it is untrue across the cases of all of the sisters.

The next most obvious is Meg. Meg’s case is arguably more egregious than Beth’s, because arc-wise, she is the one who lost the most in the book to screen adaptation. As before, let’s take a look at Meg’s major scenes:

Meg is invited to spend several weeks with her rich friends and she allows them to parade her around and turn her into someone she’s not (even if she wants to be.)

After Laurie sees her in at the party with her friends he judges her, then apologizes, and then they dance and he treats her like a lady.

When the sisters go with Laurie and company to the beach, John Brooke flirts with her, which she reciprocates.

Later on, John volunteers to go with Marmee to take care of Mr. March, and Meg kisses him on the cheek.

Before her wedding to John, Jo asks Meg to run away with her, and Meg responds that “Just because my dreams aren’t as big as yours doesn’t mean they aren’t important.”

Meg’s rich friend Sally convinces her to buy a length of expensive silk to have a dress made.

After purchasing the silk, we see Meg regretful outside her home, and she hugs her twin children.

Meg and John have a conversation about the silk, in which she tells him that she “is so tired of being poor.” When John looks hurt, she apologizes.

John comes to the March household to tell Meg that she should have her dress made. She tells him that she’s already sold it to Sally, and they make up. 

Meg definitely has more focused scenes in this movie than Beth does, which makes sense, as she is clearly a more prominent character than Beth is. In the book, Meg has a total of eight focused chapters, to Beth’s five. However, proportionately, the ratio of Meg’s focused scenes to Beth’s is considerably less than the ratio of Meg’s focused chapter’s to Beth’s. This is because for whatever reason, many of the scenes that dealt heavily with Meg’s character, particularly in the second half of the book, were done away with in the movie. Meg’s lifelong dream in both the novel and the movie was to be a wife and mother, and she has an entire arc in the book that centers around that. In the movie, however, it was entirely cut out.

Look. I’m not here to pass judgements on the merits of Meg’s lifelong goal from a feminist perspective. Meg is allowed to have her dream just as Jo is. In the movie, Meg has a wonderful line right before her wedding, when Jo suggests that they run away together. “Just because my dreams are different than yours doesn’t mean they’re less important.” This is a lovely, sentimental, and even feminist take on Meg’s hopes. Desiring to be mother to a man and mother to children is not necessarily a feminist dream, but she is entitled to it just the same. Following that same logic, if you are going to go out of your way to include a line about how Meg and Jo’s dreams are equally important, they should be treated so in the narrative. At the bare minimum, Meg’s arc should be on par with the source material, but it simply isn’t.

In the second half of Little Women, Meg has several focused chapters where she learns to manage a household, comes to terms with being the wife of a poor man, and how to balance having children with having a husband. She has several important discussions with Marmee and with John that are entirely cut from the movie, and we only see her children, Daisy and Demi, twice.

To reiterate, none of this is bad filmmaking, per se. If Greta Gerwig set out to make an adaptation of Little Women that is more focused on centering Jo as the protagonist than the novel, that is perfectly fine. The problem is that Gerwig seems to think she made a more balanced adaptation than the source material, and so does everybody else.

[warmbeebosoftbeebo]

Okay, I read your post about the nudes (Thank you for responding btw!!!) but now I’m fixated on another issue. Zack fetishizes lesbians a lot. Do you think this relates back to his ex-wife, a lesbian? Eg. he feels entitled to talk about lesbians that way after being married to (and presumably sleeping with) a lesbian? Or maybe he was attracted to his ex-wife because he’s attracted to lesbians? Or maybe he’s attracted to lesbians because of his ex-wife?

so some of it i think is fine, namely that he finds “soft butch” women attractive. there’s nothing wrong with a man being attracted to gender nonconforming, androgynous, soft butch, etc. women. it’s actually something i liked about him (eg heavier and/or soft butch women being types of women he was attracted to.) the “everybody loves lesbians” and “Two girls having sex is literally the best thing in the world.” and “I always love lesbians. I get them. Dicks are weird and boobs are great.” stuff. it comes from hearing lesbian and interpreting it as bisexual. (which stems from not seeing women as more sexual, but from seeing women as having no sexuality, no desire & wants, no boundaries. to them, she/women generally/bi and lesbian women in particular, reflects back what men want to see.) 

and if he thinks what drives lesbian women is boobs, like what drives him, he doesn’t get lesbians lol. lesbians aren’t lesbians because women are uwu soft booby creatures, but because they are attracted to femaleness, vulvas, scents, tastes... it’s like reducing attraction to men to their buttocks, or their breasts. we mammals have sex primarily with our genitals, and what drives mammalian attraction to females is actually attraction to vulvas, scents, tastes, skin, the experience of being with, feeling with, even in thought... the sexualization & objectification of the female breast is particular to human culture, and certain patriarchal ones at that. (indeed, some theorize that because human vulvas are much less conspicuous/big/swollen/visible than chimp and bonobo vulvas, we evolved larger breasts and buttocks to compensate for our less visible vulvas. men evolved larger buttocks as well, obviously, and mammals, including humans, of both sexes have buttocks in some form, breasts and nipples.) breasts can be part of it for humans, for sure, but it’s not what drives it in mammals, or even between women. indeed, i think the focus on breasts is the result of cultural/malestream objectification of them, and if a woman was say, attracted to breasts but grossed out by vulvas, i’d say that reflected internalized objectification of herself and other women, not of attraction to women. it would be her seeing other women with a patriarchal male gaze, not being attracted to women. also note his “nobody likes man boobs but everyone loves lesbians.”

i’m sure his ex plays into it. he even made said on periscope about not being able to be mad at her for leaving him for a woman, because the thought of her with a woman was so hot. ugh. it’s interesting how in mainstream and leftist/liberal circles, women eroticizing two men together is so taboo and often erased when men pornifying women together is ubiquitous to the point people think women are naturally bisexual, whereas men are gay or straight end of (eg male bisexuality is forbidden in het, couples, even “porn for women” whereas female bisexuality is universal, liberals/leftists assume women are uwu soft bisexuals, most people think all bi men are gay, teen girls and women into male-male eroticism get derided for “fetishizing mlm,” both sexes are supposed to find female-female eroticism sexy but most consider male-male eroticism gross, most females in pop culture who aren’t heterosexual are bi, but most non-heterosexual men are gay, most men who have repeated, mutually desired and enjoyed sex with men identify as straight, etc). 

they did have a sexual relationship, but the extent i’ve heard him talk about it is saying he gave a lot of oral and never got any back (in another periscope), because even with him, she wasn’t into dick (it was the “eat pussy no matter what” one with b where b also says lesbians ain’t into dick and shouldn’t try to be. jeremy was in the backseat. in the van. on the way to the hallelujah video shoot, i believe. zack actually got serious for a moment with his “you know, i really believe that” about eating pussy no matter what lol). considering male culture/porn, being into women with women probably came before he met his wife.

the general fetishization/pornifying i think comes from male culture, but i think the specifically being drawn to soft butch women comes from his experiences. his ex-wife isn’t butch, androgynous or feminine to me but i’ve only seen her 2-3 times. (but she is a red head, with larger breasts & not thin haha, which are other attributes he’s into.) i don’t know where specifically the later comes from, especially considering men’s porn is full of two feminine women together; butch and gender nonconforming, even androgynous women are no where to be seen in it. 

him finding soft butch women attractive means him going against the grain of what men are supposed to find attractive, especially considering that most of men’s attraction to women, especially in the 21st century/online culture/porn culture, is actually attraction to femininity, not femaleness (eg “needing” a woman to be shaved of all body hair to find her desirable has nothing to do with femaleness but femininity, ritualized submission. it is actually a flight from adult femaleness. same with finding a woman attractive based on plastic surgery, heels, make up, lingerie, etc.). indeed, it’s reached a point where men will question their own sexuality it they are attracted to gender nonconforming/butch/androgynous women (eg women in trades, farmers, women who wear men’s clothes, women who don’t perform femininity, etc)!

[emilyblame]

Let’s start with fandom

ok. this is gonna take forever.

Cherry Red.

i think this song is pretty straightforward. and since the main theme across the album is grief (surprise, surprise, it ain’t fandom), i think it pretty much represents the beginning of grief: the defeat after being beaten one too many times. first by his break-up with Ciara, and then their old label (Equal Vision) keeping all the rights to their music and original art. also, i think the name comes from Awsten’s synesthesia, and then he stuck with calling Ciara “Cherry Red” because it either sounded cool, or it was something that he actually called her, we’ll never know.

Watch What Happens Next.

this one is extremely straightforward too, there’s really not much room for interpretation. just read the lyrics. this song is a fucking kick in the nuts not just to the fandom in general, but to the music industry too. it’s a big FUCK YOU to everybody who wants something from them without giving anything in return. and also to everybody who thinks they’re entitled to tell them how to create their art.

Dream Boy.

i mean, we’ve been here, we’ve talked about this. Awsten’s talked about this. this song is about being put on a pedestal so fucking high, he’s gonna crack his skull when y’all inevitably feel like he’s not worth it anymore. it’s about confining Awsten in this little fucked up box where you like to believe he’s perfect and flawless, but the second he does something ‘wrong’ (aka: something you believe it’s out of character for him, or something that doesn’t fit with the image you have created of him) you wanna toss him out and ‘cancel’ him. i’ve said this so many times before but: kids, don’t let Awsten let you down. he’s just a guy.

Easy To Hate.

this is obviously a break-up song. but it’s not your regular mopey-break-up song. it’s about the exact moment when he realized, “you know what? i loved you, but what we had was toxic as fuck and i’m glad it’s over.” like that moment when something stops hurting, and you don’t have the strength to be mad about it. don’t worry, he’ll be mad about it later in the album… because grief is a loop, apparently.

High Definition.

long story short, the first half of this song is about Awsten realizing how non-functional his relationship with Ciara was, you know? in hindsight. about staying away, knowing that’s what’s best for him, but still missing her. and the second half is about how much it sucks to be a touring musician, in every aspect of his life. sad patch in the grief path. low, low point.

Telephone.

this one is about having a crush on someone but doing nothing about it because you’re not in the right mental state to be in any sort of relationship. it is like a little cloudless patch in an otherwise stormy sky. a ray of sunshine. a spike of joy when you thought all was lost. continuing on in the path of grief. it’s the Waterpark’s version of Paramore’s Crushcrushcrush, someone had to say it.

Group Chat.

Aawsten worded it better (obviously), but the idea of Awsten’s voice being all fucked up is that you’ll never know how the other person is feeling just by reading them on social media. and also, about the fact that grief and pain is not something that happens once and when you’re 'fine’ or you’ve 'moved on’, you’re happy again and back to normal. it’s meant to represent how the pain, and depression, and anxiety, and every shitty thing that happens to you stays with you forever. and just because you can’t see it, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there (yeah, i just totally stole Chester’s words for this– god, i loved that man. and i miss him everyday.)

Turbulent.

i feel like this song is Easy To Hate’s angrier sister. like, it’s still about his break-up and it’s still about him realizing how much better off he is now, but… angrier. he’s not just, “what we had was toxic as fuck and i’m glad it’s over,” it’s more like, “what we had was toxic as fuck, and i’m tight as fuck, and you should be so lucky, lose my number.” angry patch of grief.

Never Bloom Again.

and we’re back to sad. but it’s not please-take-me-back-i’m-nothing-without-you sad. it’s an i-know-i’m-better-off-but-i-can’t-help-but-still-miss-you sad. and also a kind of i’m-broken-beyond-repair sad (which makes me incredibly sad.) but i mean, the lyrics pretty much speak for themselves. one thing that i really love about this song is something that Travis also pointed out, and it’s that the line “all the girls in Los Angeles look like you from a distance,” has that dual interpretation of meaning that he either sees her everywhere or that she’s not special at all, that she’s just like every other girl in L.A.

I Miss Having Sex But At Least I Don’t Wanna Die Anymore

again, pretty straightforward lyrics. again with the anger. this is more like, sad angry. frustrated angry. i’m-sick-of-this angry. again touching the main theme of Dream Boy and maybe mixing a little bit of High Definition, i feel like this song is about everything he hates about the way his life was the moment he wrote it. like, all the cons of every aspect of his life. the cons of being popular on twitter, the cons about getting bigger as a band, the cons about living with the fact that he put his heart in someone’s trust and she shattered it like it meant nothing. i love the ending, when he starts repeating, “But I guess its fine, it’s cool,” and it gets progressively more frustrated and agressive, like he’s trying to convince himself that what he’s saying is true. like, if he keeps repeating himself that he’s fine and that things are cool, he might end up actually believing it.

War Crimes.

so, much like Watch What Happens Next, this song is really straightforward. actually, i like to think of it as WWHN’s b-side. like, they’re different sides of the same coin. because where WWHN criticizes the fandom and the music industry, War Crimes is a critic on how fucked up his own peers are too. like, the other bands, instead of becoming allies in the 'fight’ against the industry, they stab each other in the back to get to the finish line first. it’s about knowing who your real friends are; and how far he’s willing to go to ‘make it’.

[Reboot].

this one is a little on the sad angry side. but lyrics are also pretty straightforward; they’re about his break-up with Ciara, there’s not really much to read into.

Worst.

this one is angry angry, kinda like Turbulent. like, [Reboot] sorta states the way he feels about the relationship now (aka: when he wrote the song), and Worst is like, “And this is exactly how you broke me.”

Zone Out.

the reason i think this bit is here is to say, “am i still the boy you dreamed of?” like, after hearing all of this, after hearing how broken i am, do you still think i’m perfect? do you still think you want me?

I Felt Younger When We Met.

lyrics speak for themselves here. and we’re back to defeat… because grief is a loop. and so is the album. literally. i fucking love that so much. stupid sexy Awsten with his talented brain, i wanna kick him and hug him…

[ahsporn]

Cody Fern Interview for Out Nagazine

Out: What is it like to play the Antichrist?

Cody: It’s been the greatest privilege of my acting career so far. Between this and Versace, if for some reason the apocalypse came tonight, I’d be pretty happy with what I’ve done.

Out: How much did you know going into the season?

Cody: I didn’t know anything, I didn’t even know the theme, we found out when everybody else found out. We did know obviously that there had been an apocalypse, but I found out that I was playing Michael Langdon two days before we started filming. My first scene was the interrogation with Venable. All that Ryan had told me was that I’d be wearing a long, blonde wig and that I would have an affinity for capes. I went into the piece thinking I was the protagonist.

Out: Do you think that in a way, Michael is the protagonist of Apocalypse?

Cody: I think he is, but that’s from my perspective. I understand that the witches are the protagonists, particularly Cordelia. It’s in many ways a continuation of the Coven story, but running parallel is the story of how I see Michael, which is this very betrayed, broken, lost young man who finds his way into the apocalypse because of circumstance, not because of destiny.

Out: There’s a conversation of nature vs. nurture: we know from Murder House that there was evil in Michael from birth, he wouldn’t have been murdering his babysitters if there wasn't, but it’s become clear in the latter half of the season that he’s lost and is being manipulated by people with their own agendas.

Cody: We see him at 15 when he’s grown 10 years overnight, and the way that I always played Michael was that the murders are an impulse that he can’t control and he doesn’t understand. His consciousness is that of a 6-year-old boy when he’s a teenager, but he’s struggling to come to terms with his body and his desires, but he’s not fully formed. When you follow that, to me Michael’s story is a parable. There’s two ways of looking at the story of the devil: the way that people have interpreted the bible, and this polar opposite that Lucifer so loved god that he refused to bow down before men. Here we have god’s favorite angel in this kingdom of heaven, who was then made to bow down before god’s next making, and ultimately that leads to him being cast out of Heaven, and it wasn’t like Lucifer was wrong. Man then goes about destroying the earth. That’s what we’re doing right now, we’re destroying planet Earth, and it seems that there’s no remorse for it. I really leaned into that with Michael, this young boy who was cast from the kingdom of Heaven, who was cast out of the normal rigors of society, out of what people find acceptable, and then is used and abused and abandoned and broken, and what happens when you have no love in your life, where does that energy go?

Out: One of the ways I’ve been reading this season is a commentary about the state of gender politics. The warlocks essentially bring about Armageddon by attempting to topple the matriarchal power the witches have over the coven. Michael in a way is this avatar for misogyny and male entitlement. Was that intentional?

Cody: I absolutely believe that was intentional. The thing about Ryan Murphy is he’s able to weave these incredible social commentaries into this fascinating world he’s created. Certainly in this season we are looking at bringing down the patriarchy, about what happens when a matriarchal society is enforced and the hubris of men begins to take flight. It’s not dissimilar to what’s happening in society today or what has been happening for hundreds of years. Ryan certainly weaves that into his writing. The gender battle is being fought and Michael is the avatar for it but is certainly not a part of of it. He is manipulated into this gender battle but he himself is not misogynistic, but there’s certainly something to be said for the fact that he needs a very strong mother figure in his life and has mommy issues. His mother tries to kill him in the Murder House, Constance commits suicide, Cordelia takes away Mead and he has this robot who he has to program into loving him. I think he has an enormous respect for Cordelia. He needs strong women in his life, and if he just took Cordelia’s hand when she offered it, if he just overcame his insatiable thirst for revenge, he could’ve gone another way.

Out: One of the standout episodes of the season was “Return to Murder House,” what was it like to find out that not only was Jessica Lange returning but that you’d get to act opposite her?

Cody: My ovaries exploded. I can’t begin to describe to you how overwhelmed I was. The first scene I shot with Jessica was the scene where Michael finds her dead body after she’s committed suicide, and I was so excited and nervous and afraid of that scene that I spent the whole day shaking like a life. When we got to it I was so excited and overwhelmed, it was very hard for me to drop into the chaos around what I needed to go into. Sarah, who is just the most exceptional human being in the world not to mention the hardest working and the most talented, took my hand and said, “Don’t be afraid of this, you’ve got to really go there,” and then jokingly, “Imagine that at the end of this if you didn’t get it that Jessica would think you’re a bad actor.” It was terrifying! I was certainly able to move past a wall, that’s what was blocking me, I was so afraid of judgement, that wasn’t coming from Jessica of course, it was coming from myself and my own process. Working with Jessica will go down as one of my life’s greatest achievements.

Out: What was it like to not only act alongside Sarah Paulson but to be directed by her in “Return to Murder House?”

Cody: One of the greatest joys. As an actor, to step into the director’s chair, you have a certain upper hand because you understand how actors work and how to communicate with actors. Sarah very much comes from a place of absolute respect for the emotional process of the artist. First and foremost she’s looking out for you as an artist, which elicits such extraordinary performances because you have so much trust in her, so you’re willing to give her anything and everything. She’s got such a deft hand as a director, watching it was gobsmacking, and was working under the most extreme pressures imaginable. Not only was she playing Billie Dean and Cordelia in another episode in the same time as this was filming, she had to film 72 scenes. In contrast, the episode before had 32, so she was filming almost double what any other director on the series was filming, while playing two other characters in two other episodes with under one week of preparation, it was truly a feat.

Out: She certainly wears a lot of hats...speaking of which, you had a very special hat yourself. Let’s talk about that wig.

Cody: I loved that wig. If I could wear that wig on a daily basis I would. Wearing that wig was everything.

Out: How long does it take to get into the Rubber Man suit?

Cody: It takes about 20 minutes and a lot of lube, and once you’re in it you’re in it, you can’t take it off. So I was in that suit for 16 hours. I think I held the record for being in the suit the longest.

Out: Can you settle this debate: was Michael the Rubber Man suit who has sex with Gallant?

Cody: No, not physically anyway. The Rubber Man is also a demon, so when someone is wearing the suit, they become the Rubber Man, but when nobody is wearing the suit, Rubber Man — through the power of Murder House — becomes a demon, and that demon is in many aspects controlled by Langdon. Langdon uses every means at his disposal to warp and manipulate and draw out the innermost desires in a human being, he draws out their shadow self and he’s able to play with that shadow and create scenarios that tempt a person into giving into the evil inside of them. Because the Rubber Man is there and then Gallant realizes he’s killed Evie. There’s some mind games going on there in how Michael reveals Gallant’s innermost desire, which is deeply Oedipal, because we [we wonder], is he fucking his grandmother? Because the realization is that the Rubber Man is Evie and he’s just slaughtered her in his bed. There’s so many layers of darkness there. That’s certainly how I thought about it.

Out: I’m sure you can’t reveal anything about the finale tonight, but can you tease a bit about how Michael’s journey ends?

Cody: There’s something deeply beautiful and tragic about the way that the story ends for Michael. It was genuinely one of the hardest scenes that I shot in the series. The end of the series, knowing that this was going to be the last time I — I’m getting sad about it now — I loved Michael so much, the past nine days since we finished filming it have been very hard. I loved Michael so much and I wanted so much for him, I just wanted love for him. The way the series ends for Michael is very moving.

Out: Are you open to returning for another season of AHS?

Cody: Oh my god, in a heartbeat. The experience is beyond comparison. Moving forward there will hopefully be great triumphs in my career, hopefully I’ll get to play characters that are as complex and layered as Michael, but this will forever have been the most formative experience of my acting career and of my development as an artist. To work with these extraordinary women at such an early point in my career, to work with Sarah Paulson and Frances Conroy — fuck me, Frances Conroy is one of the most talented, hard working, fierce actresses. To work with Kathy Bates and Joan Collins, the list goes on and on. To be in the same room as Billy Porter, who is an American treasure. The entire experience was so exceptional and magic. I know I’ll never have that back, that moment, it’s gone. I would come back in a heartbeat.

[atlasvale-blog]

So I'm pretty shit at social media in general, and I'm not at all qualified to speak on behalf of anyone but myself (obviously), but more and more so recently, following conversations with my deeply intelligent, brilliantly ambitious and successful, and intensely compassionate wife, along with several other women in my life, I've felt compelled to share some of my own thoughts. It's a fairly long post, but I think it's worth having a read.

This is, in essence, a kind of list I'd like to think would be a good - but certainly not exhaustive - collection of helpful little points and reminders for both myself and every other member of the male population on how not to be dick. These things might not apply in every single situation, but they strike me as pretty solid rules of thumb. Turns out, it's really not that hard to not be a dick when it comes down to it!

So, in no particular order:

1) If you piss on the toilet seat, or anywhere else that isn't in the toilet bowl, wipe it up. It's not difficult and if you're a grown fucking man; it's just basic decency. Same goes for number 2s. Don't be a dick.

2) Boobs are great, of course they are. The whole human form is a wondrous, beautiful and majestic thing. It doesn't matter if it's male, female, big, small, light, dark, rough, smooth, tall, short, or anything in between of any race or colour, the human body is a stunning thing to be hold. Definitely admire it; 100% appreciate its beauty; but don't ever think you have any fucking right to go and touch it, or interfere with any other body unless you have complete and explicit permission to do. You aren't owed shit when it comes to other humans, and you have zero rights to make other people feel uncomfortable, insecure and straight-up endangered because of your misguided expectations of entitlement. Admire individual beauty, but don't assert yourself on it. Adopt a simple 'look but don't touch' policy in your head if that helps (but don't be a leery fucking creep about it). Don't be a dick.

3) Same thing goes for making unsolicited (which, for anyone struggling with that concept, essentially means 'without being asked') comments about the way anybody else looks. You find person X appealing to your personal aesthetic tatses? Good for you. Don't shout it at them from across the road or as you drive past them or send weird messages to them about it. You don't find person Y appealing to your personal aesthetic tastes? No worries. Don't shout it at them from across the road or as you drive past them or send weird messages to them about it. You don't need to make any comments one way or another about how you think other people look because it's not your concern. Don't be a dick.

4) Treat everyone with respect. Simple as that. Don't undermine people's efforts to succeed; don't degrade people with words or actions; don't shit on people's attempts to better themselves; don't lash out at others because you might feel I adequate. Simply, don't be a dick.

5) Don't EVER do ANYTHING sexual with another person if you don't have EXPLICIT PERMISSION to do so. That doesn't mean 'she didn't say no,' it means 'she said yes.' Think about how you'd feel if it happened to your mum, sister, daughter, grandma, aunt, cousin, friend. I shouldn't have to even have to put this on the list. Don't be a fucking rapist. Don't.

6) Be mindful of how you speak to people - you might not mean anything negative by what you say, but be aware that things could be interpreted in ways that make people uncomfortable. Also be mindful that in a lot a situations, it's none of your business. Don't tell a stranger to smile, it's none of your business; don't tell someone they should parent their children differently, if the child isn't in danger, it's none of your business; don't tell someone they should wear more/less make-up, it's none of your business. You get the idea. Don't be a dick.

7) If you don't have the capacity to have a period, don't make assumptions or negative comments about people who do suffer from them. Instead, make sure you understand what they are and how they work (as a Science teacher, I'm only too aware of the complete lack of understanding that there is from men with regards to how the female reproductive system works, and to each and every woman reading, I'm deeply sorry that we're such morons; I'm trying to help remedy that a bit!). Once you know the mechanics of a period, then have empathy - you don't know what it's like if you don't have them, so just be supportive; it's not as though women can just turn a period off. Adopt the simple Friends adage: "No uterus, no opinion." Don't be a dick.

8) Scientifically speaking, childbirth is definitely worse. Accept it, move on. Don't be a dick.

9) Breastfeeding is totally normal. It isn't offensive, it isn't a problem. Don't be fucking weird about it. Grow up, realise that mother is doing something entirely and utterly natural (it's literally what the biological function of the boob is) and just go about your day without interfering with other people. Likewise, some mothers can't, or choose not to breastfeed. Don't shit on them either, it doesn't concern you. Don't be a dick.

10) Stop being so obsessed with your dick. Nobody wants unsolicited pictures; nobody wants to hear about it without invitation; nobody believes you when you exaggurate about it, or, if they do, everybody is then disappointed when they find out the truth. It also definitely doesn't 'stretch out' vaginas - those things are designed to handle WHOLE FUCKING BABIES. You don't have a dick the size of another human, her vagina is not going to be stretched out by you or anyone else. Grow up. Don't be a dick.

I'll finish there but, as I mentioned, this is by no means exhaustive and I'm not at all qualified to talk about what it's like to experience the daily struggles women face; it's merely a collection of my own thoughts.

I'd apologise for it being a long post, but it's important stuff and reading more is good, so I'm not going to. If you feel this was helpful or useful, feel free to share it to people that might benefit from it.

Comment if you feel the need to, but as I mentioned, I'm shit at social media so don't be offended if I don't respond.

Have a wonderful day!

[nebris]

We’re Not Done Here

How the MeToo movement became a feminist sexual revolution.

Laurie Penny | Longreads | January 2018 | 19 minutes (4,764 words)

The problem of sexual violation can not be treated as distinct from the problematic of sexuality itself. The ubiquity of sexual violations is obviously related to what is taken to be routine, everyday sex, the ‘facts’ of pleasure and desire. — Linda MartAn Alcoff, Rape and Resistance

This kind of mania will always at some point exhaust itself. — Andrew Sullivan, New York Magazine

***

Oh, girls, look what we’ve done now. We’ve gone too far. The growing backlash against the MeToo movement has finally settled on a form that can face itself in the mirror. The charge is hysteria, moral panic, hatred of sex, hatred of men. More specifically, as Andrew Sullivan complained in New York magazine this week, “the righteous exposure of hideous abuse of power had morphed into a more generalized revolution against the patriarchy.” Well, yes. That’s rather the point.

Sullivan is far from the only one to accuse the MeToo movement of becoming a moral panic about sexuality itself, and he joins a chorus of hand-wringers warning that if this continues — well, men will lose their jobs unjustly, and what could be worse than that, really? The story being put about is that women, girls, and a few presumably hoodwinked men are now so carried away by their “anger” and “temporary power” that, according to one piece in the Atlantic, they have become “dangerous.” Of course — what could be more terrifying than an angry, powerful woman, especially if you secretly care a little bit more about being comfortable than you do about justice? This was always how the counter-narrative was going to unfold: It was always going to become a meltdown about castrating feminist hellcats whipping up their followers into a Cybelian frenzy, interpreting any clumsy come-on as an attempted rape and murder. We know what happens when women get out of control, don’t we?

Charges like this are serious. Too serious to dismiss out of hand. I don’t mean to do so, not least because I am a queer person, and I do not take the notion of sex panic lightly. Why, then, are so many people so anxious to believe that this is one? There is at least one simple answer. It is easier — much, much easier — to manufacture an attack on sexuality than it is to imagine an attack on patriarchy.

Sex is not the problem. Sexism is the problem, along with the upsetting multitudes of men and women who seem unable or unwilling to make the distinction. An attack on sexuality, however, will always find recruits from across the political spectrum as well as from armies of amoral keyboard droppers who just want to read about what celebrities get up to in hotel rooms. An attack on patriarchy, male supremacy, and sexual oppression — that is far harder to accept. It is far harder to allow. Easier to transpose it into a key of prurience and wait for the whole thing to stroke itself into exhaustion. But — forgive me — if you think this movement has blown its load already, you’ve no idea how women work, and you’ve no clue what’s coming.

***

Alright, ladies, you’ve had your fun, and you’ve given us all a fright — but that’s enough now. If we relegate this all-out revolt against male sexual entitlement to the kitchen shelf where it belongs, everyone would be a lot more comfortable — at least, the men in the room would be, and we all know that’s what really matters.

Just look at what happened to poor old Aziz Ansari. They warned us that this sort of thing was coming, and we didn’t listen. A famous and successful man in his 30s goes on a date with an unfamous woman in her 20s, they go home together, he pesters her for a shag, she isn’t strong enough to say no or slap him away like a real woman ought to, like women used to do back in the day, so like the snowflake she is, she gets upset and goes home — and we all know how this one goes. He wins an award, and she decides to take revenge. She goes to the press, the press report the encounter in cringeworthy suck-by-blow detail, the feminazi #MeToo hive-vagina takes over, the hysteria mill rattles into overdrive, and boom — just like that, his career is over. Now everyone’s calling the poor guy a monster and a rapist. He’s blacklisted from every network. He’ll never work again. Another fallen soldier in the sex wars. Predictable. Tragic. Just goes to show how weak modern women really are, how much they hate men and sex, how they always take things too far, how they never miss a chance to play the victim.

At least, that’s what it might’ve gone to show if any of that had actually happened. What actually happened was quite different.

What actually happened was this: A man was rude and sexually entitled, fucked up and hurt somebody, and she told him so. He apologized and took it to heart. An unscrupulous trash publication chased this woman down and got her to tell her story, which it reported in the lurid language of celebrity sex scandal. Babe magazine framed it in a way designed to garner maximum attention, derail important activist work, and humiliate everybody involved. The original piece at Babe magazine is an object lesson in how scummy gutter journalism can be when literally all it cares about is keeping readers salivating. The piece pruriently portrays both parties in the worst possible light: Ansari comes out of it looking like an entitled dick on training-wheels, and “Grace” comes out of it looking not like an honest young person who had an upsetting experience, but like a spiteful child who wanted to hurt a man who hurt her, who wanted to ruin him just like the papers warned us all women do. The reporter makes her look hysterical, which is something she definitely isn’t, because nobody is, because hysteria is a fake disease made up by a sexist medical establishment a hundred and fifty years ago to pathologize women who were traumatized and frustrated and wanted their lives to be different.

Unfortunately for those who were hoping for a crowbar to shove in the wheels of this barrelling machine of social and sexual change, what this moment illustrates is a remorseless and prurient witch hunt failing to happen. Ansari still has his career. He’ll be fine — not because the hand-wringers called time on a movement that went too far, but because this movement is honest. This movement is more than just a ballroom full of fainting maidens who collapse at the sight of their own ankles. It turns out that most women can, in fact, distinguish between sexual assault and a bad date. It turns out that sex is just one more thing we really do not need mansplained to us.

***

You want to talk about sexual repression? About wanting women to act like fainting Victorian ladies? The idea that it’s women who are the enemies of freedom in a world where, for centuries, the very worst thing you can call a woman has been “loose” or a “slut,” where for a female or queer person to be openly sexual is to incite violence or excuse it after the fact — that would be laughable anywhere, but in America? In a nation where legal abortion is all but impossible to access in all but the most liberal states, where conservative lawmakers in every district are going after not just safe pregnancy termination, but contraception? We have not even begun to have a real conversation about creating the conditions for meaningful sexual liberty that works for most human beings. If you want sexual liberation, make contraception, reproductive health care, and pregnancy termination easy to access and free at the point of use. Then, Mr. Sullivan, we can talk about “defending sex.”

If anyone is confused about the difference between sex and violence, if anyone is operating under the assumption that men are always and only animals who cannot be expected to control their erotic compulsions, it’s not women. It’s men, because they’ve been socialized to understand sex and violence as synonymous, and it’s the mainstream press, because stars, sex, and violence have always sold copy.

Part of the confusion has arisen from the obvious glee with which the press has sunk its indiscriminate fangs into individual offenders, luridly repeating details of alleged transgressions and sidelining the experiences of victims and survivors, as if sexual activity itself were the so-called scandal rather than whether or not the sucking and fucking and flowerpot-wanking was consensual. There’s always been a ripe news economy of sexual hypocrisy. The same tabloids that sell millions of issues printing pictures of topless teenage girls will gladly jump on any slut-shaming bandwagon that trundles by on its way to the frigid past.

It turns out that women, largely, are not the ones who are confused between sex and violence — not when the stakes are this high. Which is incredible, really, because most of our lives have been spent, especially if we are straight, being gaslit and bullied into believing that sexual violence is normal and fine. We have been socialized to think we need to be reticent and shy about our own desires — that our bodies are for men to desire and own — and yet we are also the ones responsible for setting the boundaries. We have been told that the absolute maximum we can expect, if we are good and quiet and not too provocative or angry, is not to be violently raped.

We are also supposed to put other people’s comfort before our own in every remotely sexual situation. We must not be rude. We must not upset or threaten the man. We must say no when we mean it, but we must take care not to offend him or threaten his masculinity, because heaven knows what will happen then. That’s where this backlash has backfired. Instead of exposing a movement that has overreached itself, instead of proving that MeToo is simply, as a well-reported letter in the French press put it, an attack on men, the Aziz-and-Grace story has opened up a whole new conversation about what we expect from sex, even when it is technically consensual. It turns out that we’re not done here.

We are far from done.

***

There will always be cowardly and conservative elements in society just desperate to take even one irresponsibly reported story and use it to damn an entire movement, and we must not let them, because this matters too damn much. There’s a reeking double standard in the room. Right now, if a man makes a mistake and hurts someone, it might, just for once, ruin his career — but it seems that if a woman makes a mistake and hurts someone right back, or allows her pain to be twisted to serve someone else’s agenda, she damns not just herself, but all other women by association.

This is what happens when patriarchy is on the run. It gets nasty. The mind games ramp up. Women are always the first to lose. But I have a word of advice for those who tried and failed to use this flashpoint to condemn the entire movement:
 Gentlemen, do not test us. Women who love their own freedom are all too used to hearing that we have gone too far — in fact, we’ve been hearing that for centuries, whenever we’ve tried to take a single step. The truth is that we have not gone nearly far enough, and we have very little to lose. Attacking our reputations, calling us liars, trying to humiliate us and drive us apart — we’ve seen all that before. Try it and see. This is not going to go the way you want it to go.

No, really. I have crept across the lines of this messy culture war to give you this advice, so please take it seriously, because it is for everyone’s good.

The terms of this war of sex and power have changed, and so have the weapons. Physical violence and threat won’t work for you here. You are trying to fight against whispers and rumors and inference, against righteous rage, against charges of hypocrisy, exploitation, and crass dehumanization that hit home with career-ending accuracy. And you’re trying to fight this war with an arsenal you don’t know how to use, against an army that has been training with these weapons for generations, because these tools of emotional warfare are the only ones they have ever been allowed, because they are women.

You are going to lose.

I don’t care that you’re fighting on your home terrain, that you’ve always been told that sex and power belonged to you and you could set the terms. You want to fight women over who has been more wronged in the field of sex and power. A lot of people also tried to invade Russia in the winter.

I’m sorry to break it to you, but women are not out of control here. They are very, very angry. There’s a difference. Turns out that this is not a runaway train, that women are still driving this sexual revolution — for that is what it is — and the pain and rage fueling the engines are far more profound than we wanted to imagine. It turns out that women want more. More than the right simply to go about our working lives without being constantly sexually harassed. More from men than just being able to keep their fool hands to themselves in the office. It turns out that this is also about the bedroom. It always has been. It’s terrifying, I know, but yes — women want more, women expect better, and it’s time we got it.

***

Back, if you can bear it, to the Aziz Ansari case. If we believe what Ansari himself has confirmed about that night, three things are true about this story:

Ansari acted in a shitty, entitled way towards a young woman. The way that he behaved was not okay or fine.

He does not deserve to go to jail or be blacklisted for it, but that doesn’t make it okay and fine.

Almost every woman I know has had a similar sexual experience — and no, that still doesn’t make it okay and fine.

That last point inflects the first two. The fact that this sort of experience is so goddamn common is precisely why it deserves attention, and should not simply be filed away in a closet marked “women who make too much of a fuss.” Women don’t make enough fuss about how much sex can suck for us even when it is, technically, consensual, even when no crime has been committed. We’re socialized out of making a fuss, just as men are socialized into thinking about sex as something they have to bully and pester out of women. Shitty, dehumanizing sex is not normal, and it is not okay — it’s just very, very common. And because it is so common, because it is a chapter in so many of our stories, it is easier to write this sort of thing off as a “bad date.” The story of the bad date, the bad fuck, and the bad marriage is easy and comforting to tell — almost as easy and comfortable as the story of the young woman who goes hysterical and ruins a man’s life over a bad date. What a pity it isn’t quite so simple.

Sex is many things, but it is rarely simple. Contrary to the popular narrative that opponents of the MeToo movement have propagated, most women don’t like to think of themselves as victims. Most of us would prefer the version of the story where we were in control the whole time, where the hurt and disappointment were our fault, because that way it’s easier to own the horrible things that have happened to us and make sense of the way they make us feel about our own bodies, and about sex in general. It’s easier to smile and repeat the lines that are required of us every time we stand up and demand that women be treated with a bare minimum of human decency: We don’t hate men. No, we don’t hate sex. We’re not like those angry, prudish feminists of the frightening fictional past with their burning bras and man-skull necklaces, ready to castrate any passing politician who accidentally brushes the wrong knee. We are not fainting Victorian maidens. We don’t hate sex. We love sex, and we love men, ok? All of us love sex and all of us love men, all men, no matter how badly they behave, because that’s what it means to be a good woman — it means loving what you’re told to love no matter how much it hurts you.

Love is such a huge, strange word, a word that stretches to contain all the silence, pain, and longing that crowd around the corners of your bed. To speak personally, yes, I love sex, but sometimes I also get angry at it — and sometimes wish it did not have to hurt so much. That’s something I’ve heard from a lot of women and girls I am close to, in this rare time where we have been able to talk about this with a little less censure. Maybe you love sex, but you wish it did not come at the cost of your dignity, your livelihood, your self-esteem. You wish you were able to have it on terms that you could bear. You wish you could ask for what you wanted and be heard. You wish you could talk about all those times you didn’t really want it but went along with it anyway to keep him happy, or to keep yourself from harm. Maybe you wish you could remember how to be hungry. Maybe you wish you could still feel the pleasure you used to anticipate before abuse and trauma left their fingerprints all over your body. And maybe people have simply used sex as a weapon against you so many times that you don’t love it anymore, not right now, and you know what, that’s fine too. Asking women if they love sex (implied: with men) is like asking the front-of-house staff how they feel about their work when the boss is listening.

Repurposing an attack on sexual injustice into an attack on sex itself is convenient and easy and wildly, wildly wrong. It also works like a dream. Nobody wants to be called frigid, which is the word for women who aren’t sluts. The actress Catherine Deneuve, along with a hundred other co-signatories to an open letter in Le Monde, condemned the women speaking out about assault as enemies of “sexual freedom.” The problem is that sexual freedom is not something that can be enjoyed in isolation when more than half the human race still fights for the basic freedom to choose when and how and who we fuck.

I resent being ordered to declare my love for sex by milquetoast liberal commentators who think that women routinely lie about rape and by slimeball anti-feminist shock jocks who spend the other half of their time trying to ban contraception because Jesus said so. The entire world hates sex. Yes, we do. If we didn’t hate sex, we wouldn’t talk about it the way we do behind its back.

Those fragile Victorian ladies, with their corsets and their smelling salts, they seem to come up in every banal and predictable condemnation of the MeToo movement — it’s worth asking who they were and what part they play in the long, weird story of human sensuality. Why were those women so apparently frightened of sex? They were frightened because not so long ago, sex was legitimately terrifying if you were a woman — as it still is for many women and girls around the world. Sex was dangerous. It could kill you, or ruin you, and the fact that you probably wanted it made it that much worse — when you crave something that could mean disaster, that doesn’t make the desire go away, it just makes it that much more horrifying.

A lot of men don’t quite understand why women policed sexual morality in the first place: not because they did not have desires, but because they were made to pay such a heavy cost for men’s desires before they even thought about having their own. Because sex was dangerous. Within living memory sex was extremely goddamn treacherous for women — and in many places it still is.

In fact, we do not have to choose between fighting against sexual violence and being sexual. Today still, as it has been for centuries, we are told: one or the other. We could not demand the right to have our bodily autonomy respected and still expect to get to be sexual, to dress like that, to walk like that, to suggest that we might want something good girls don’t. Men could be asked nicely not to attack when provoked, but if we actually showed any scrap of sexual desire ourselves, all bets were off.

The fight against sexual violence and the fight against sexual repression are two sides of the same struggle: to divide one from the other is to collapse the whole enterprise. So-called sexual liberationists of our parents’ and grandparents’ generation failed, and failed badly, by thinking they could have sexual freedom without tackling male supremacy and sexist violence, by clinging blindly to the cozy delusion that women aren’t actually sensual beings in the way that men are, that women’s sexual freedom can remain an afterthought, and any woman who acts as if it isn’t can and should be punished.

This is why in so many places where abortion and contraception are strictly controlled, exceptions are made in cases where the person seeking to end a pregnancy has been raped: because the real issue is and always has been sexual control, and the problem is not unborn babies but adult women with the temerity to think they can fuck who they want and get away with it. Only men are allowed to get away with that.

In the real world, nobody has so far been sent into career exile for asking someone out. There’s a difference between a polite invitation and repeated, aggressive pestering or a boss who refuses to keep his hands to himself because he thinks that power and seniority gives him a right to your body. Flirting is still allowed, but judging by the panicked responses to any MeToo narrative that isn’t clear-cut rape, it is not women who are confused about the difference between flirting and aggression, but men. This is, sadly, a predictable consequence of an erotic consensus that constantly associates male sexuality with violence, that tells straight men and boys that their sexuality is dangerous and uncontrollable and that if they fail to persuade women to “take” it, they are not men at all.

Understand that until women’s sexuality is not closed on all sides by a big, ugly wall of violence and intimidation, until we are allowed to actually access our erotic impulses honestly and think about what we want, until our bodies are no longer bargaining chips for the crumbs of power men sweep off the table for us to fight over, women will not be sexually free — which means that nobody will be sexually free. Understand that rape is a tool of sexual repression as well as of sexual oppression, and that a fight against rape culture is a fight for sexual liberation — the foundation without which true sexual liberation is going to fall flat on its face in a pool of its own juices.

***

The MeToo movement has not gone “too far.” We have not gone far enough. We won’t have gone anywhere near far enough, not until we achieve something like actual sexual liberation — for everyone. I believe that the next stage is going to involve a process of truth and reconciliation. Rape culture and misogynist entitlement are the key in which our current chorus of dissatisfaction is sung. What that means is that a lot of sex that is technically consensual is nonetheless dire and disappointing, especially for the women involved. This is why the demand for better sex — for fewer Cat People and coercive hookups and woke boys taking too long to understand when you’re just not into it — is also revolutionary.

As Ellen Willis notes in her seminal essay, “Towards a sexual revolution,” sexual coercion is “a tool of sexual repression.” We aren’t calling out men and condemning them to career assassination for being shitty, inconsiderate lovers, and a couple dozen humans in the Northern Hemisphere will be glad to hear me say that — but it’s worth asking why they so often are. Turns out that unless you pay attention to the needs and desires of the person opposite you — or however you happen to be angled — you’re going to be a bad lay. She might not say so, because she’s worried that if she upsets you or hurts your pride you’ll hurt her in far more measurable ways, and she might not be wrong. But trust me: Treating women as people, people who have wants and desires and messy, meaty insides, people who have to live in patriarchy just like you, people who can change their minds and get shy and sometimes take all their past traumas to bed with them just like you do — that’s the one position that’s guaranteed to win with almost everyone. The trick is that there’s no trick to it.

It’s possible that the best sex of our lives, as my friend Meredith Yayanos told me the other day, does not exist yet. When it does, it will be in a world beyond rape culture. In 10 years of trying to fuck like I lived in the early days of a better nation, I’ve found spaces where it seemed that, for a time, something like real sexual liberation was possible. Usually they were queer spaces, or at least spaces with their own reasons to mistrust received ideas about gender and pleasure. But they were mere cracks in the carapace of violence, little chunks in the brittle social exoskeleton of bitter sexism and shame sealing us off in units of terrified longing, even when the clothes came off. I found myself running up against rape culture over and over again. The retinue of bad and selfish and shitty behavior of grown men in bed. The violent fragility of masculinity that could have been so much more. I wanted more. I still want more. And women who want more are a problem.

I’m not promising that the great consensual anti-sexist revolution to come will mean an end to broken hearts and hurt feelings. I would never lie to you about a thing like that. I would anticipate that it might make the breakage cleaner and the scarring easier, but I have only my own experience to go on there. I have been let down and messed around in my time by a few rare and special snowflakes who managed to find entirely new ways to hurt me — ways that did not involve being sexually violent or at any point treating me as less than human, even though I was female and they were not. You can be anti-sexist in theory and in practice and still be a goddamned brat and a soul-sucking mindfucker, it just takes a lot more work and creative chops. I take my hat off to these rare young men, and I will probably end up taking off other things in the future, because people are fascinating and the flesh is weak.

Only when we consider the possibility that male sexuality might not be inherently violent and exploitative can we ask why so much of it is. Why does the joyless, coercive sex that we so often have to settle for under patriarchy have to be the norm? Can’t we do better?

We can, and we must, for reasons that go way beyond the bedroom. If the main problem with rape culture and sexual repression were the fact that they make sex less satisfying, well, there are simple ways around that, and they plug in at the wall. But the rolling crisis of toxic masculinity does not just kill the mood, it kills human beings. It ruins lives. It is a species-level disaster that causes trauma on a scale most of our tiny minds cannot stretch to comprehend. And it can’t go on like this. There is a bigger and scarier social and sexual revolution on its way, and the fact that it will make fucking a lot more fun in the future is just a bonus.

Buckle up.

Note: The original version of this essay has been slightly amended to provide additional context on the Babe magazine story about “Grace” and Aziz Ansari.

* * *

Laurie Penny is an award-winning journalist, essayist, public speaker, writer, activist, internet nanocelebrity and author of six books. Her most recent book, Bitch Doctrine, was published by Bloomsbury in 2017.