#except in the actual book plot there are always twelve children (like when one gets killed a new one takes their place) so it would be like

[mercuryislove]

I ALSO want to have funny question friday so I tried to think up some interesting questions.

If Anwei and Ciaran had the opportunity to be regular humans again, would they take it? Would the people around them want them to?

I’m sure that the Sovereign has a lot of enemies since he’s like thee baddest bitch, but is there anyone that he just absolutely cannot stand?

What would happen if Robin, Wren, and Dove got stranded in a remote area together? How would they handle that situation together?

as usual you ALWAYS come through with the excellent questions :3c

If Anwei and Ciaran had the opportunity to be regular humans again, would they take it? Would the people around them want them to?

ABSOLUTELY they would. They're both really sick of it. Being undying has its perks but it really loses its luster after 900+ years. Anwei appreciates it more than Ciaran does, partly because she was sort of religious way back when and still thinks of it all as some Big Deal and a Gift and like. a Blessing or whatever and has a serious sense of Duty about the whole thing. And Ciaran is more like “so I can jump off this cliff and be fine? I guess that's cool” and also “so does this mean I can't get stis anymore?” He definitely didn't ask for this life lol (technically I guess neither did Anwei but she adjusted it to it a little better and is also the only reason that [redacted for spoilers] anyway) Either way, they're both tired of outliving every single person they ever know because even with the fun parts of never dying, it DOES get miserable watching every person you ever care about wither away in what feels like the blink of an eye.

I think the only person that would have any apprehension about them mortalizing themselves would be like. Go-Eun but only because she would be too worried that they would instantly get something like the flu and DIE. Yixing would be like “please for the love of god be normal again because I already have so many years on you and I'm so so so so afraid of getting old alone PLEASE don't leave me behind”

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I’m sure that the Sovereign has a lot of enemies since he’s like thee baddest bitch, but is there anyone that he just absolutely cannot stand?

It's true that he's the baddest bitch around and a ton of people hate his stupid sexy guts, but honestly he doesn't pay enough attention to anyone else to give a damn about what they think. He knows he'll outlive them anyway. BUT he does hold special hatred for people that try to double-cross him, question his authority, and/or fuck with his family. (technically Andhira meets all three criteria oops lol) Generally speaking, he just offs people that piss him off, but there are a few that are too important or risky to kill outright, so he has too seethe in silence for a few centuries until they end up killing each other in petty squabbles and he gets to watch from his high horse like “oh look how these low born fools destroy each other over and over while nobody ever lays a finger on me and my own” (this WILL eventually come back to bite him on the ass lol). The biggest thorns in his side are the twelve children of Ekion who are part of the third oldest family in the world (though these guys weren't technically BORN into their family the way the Sovereign's children were). He's been waiting for the opportunity to fuck their shit right up for like 600 years at this point and is getting so tired of waiting :c

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What would happen if Robin, Wren, and Dove got stranded in a remote area together? How would they handle that situation together?

UM it would depend on just how remote the area is lol If they were like. lost in the woods, it would be no big deal because Robin is notorious for disappearing for three weeks at a time to go on solo backpacking trips in the middle of nowhere, and people always assume he's been eaten by bears and he shows up stinky and hairy on instagram in the middle of Wyoming like “hi everyone I just had the greatest camping trip of my life!!” So he's good at handling the fallout of getting extremely lost. Also his family lived in a VAN until he was eleven, so he's used to shit breaking down and getting stranded places (aka campsites in the middle of nowhere). Dove would immediately have a breakdown and if Wren had a cellphone signal, she would be taking pictures and texting them to her parents through the whole ordeal like “are you sure she's really related to us? She doesn't know the difference between east and west.” And then the two of them would end up fighting like cats and dogs. Meanwhile Robin has already fixed the car and/or foraged for clean water and fucking. berries or whatever and/or built a fire and shelter. This is just a regular Wednesday afternoon for him when you're the kind of person that goes WAY off trail to find so-called mythical crags (that don't actually exist but some old stoner dude at the campsite swore they did).

HOWEVER. If they were in a plane crash on a desert island situation, they would probably just go berserk and end up killing each other in looney tune style traps. Imagine that as you will lol

[everyonewasabird]

Brickclub 4.6.2 “In Which Little Gavroche Takes Advantage of Napoleon The Great” Part 1

This chapter is full of the mythological motifs we learned from the beginning of the book.

The chapter title contrasts Gavroche’s littleness with Napoleon’s greatness--and we know by now that being a great man isn’t a good thing. It also recalls the first line of dialogue in this novel, Bienvenu’s exchange with Napoleon, where he says “You behold a good man and I a great man. Each of us may profit by it.” Of course, Napoleon is losing both these comparisons.

And then:

Petit-Gavroche, shivering gaily as always in his rags, was standing in apparent rapture in front of a wigmaker’s shop over l’Orme-Saint-Gervais way.

I’m not sure the wigs can actually be said to invoke Valjean, given that whatever his secret collection of wigs may be, we’ve never actually seen him wear one. But that “Gervais” sticks out, connecting Petit-Gavroche to Petit-Gervais, who here is being connected to sainthood.

There’s no particular Valjean figure robbing these children, there’s just absolutely every adult in Paris being vaguely annoyed at their existence and failing to give a shit.

Also I just looked up Saint Gervase (wikipedia: Gervasius and Protasius) and

They are the patron saints of Milan and of haymakers and are invoked for the discovery of thieves.

Well. THAT sure wasn’t an accident, but it sounds oddly at odds with this book’s ideas about theft. My best guess is that it's about Petit-Gervais’s role in Valjean’s realization of his own thieving.

Right now Gavroche is doing the thieving--or trying to, as he eyes a cake of barber’s soap he plans to steal and sell.

These recurrent scenes with Gavroche are starting to feel like fables, like an episode in the life of a familiar mythical figure, the way we saw a lot of with the bishop and occasionally with Madeleine. Gavroche feels like the bishop here, like this is just another a tale of our beloved little benevolent trickster god.

I think that feeling I’m getting has to do with the fact that this scene and Gavroche’s last scene  (the one where he was going to steal Mabeuf’s apples but instead gives him Jean Valjean’s wallet) have the same premise and plot: it’s been a few days since Gavroche has eaten, and he has a clever plan to rectify that, but someone even worse off is about to need him to give up his dinner for them. He feels like Coyote or Brer Rabbit--you don’t need to know what happened to him last week or last month specifically, because his narrative is not novelistic in that way. Hugo says “It’s Tuesday, and Gavroche hasn’t eaten since Friday, but he has a plan,” and we know we’ve heard a hundred stories like this before, and we settle in for a variation on a familiar theme.

And: I think it’s very, very important that the other character who gets that treatment most consistently is the bishop.

Of the two, Gavroche is the purer form of the trickster--and the more charitable. He’s loud and brash and larger than life, and his manners ape the bourgeoisie--but not for the reasons Valjean does. It’s purely to poke fun at the world he steals from to get by. He’s got a quick insult for everyone--except for the poor who need his help. He feels less like a twelve-year-old than a force of nature. It’s like meeting Tom Bombadil.

He meets the mômes and takes them in and begins to show them the ropes of surviving as gamins. And their plot is not divorced from time--Magnon was arrested today, and when they meet Gavroche, they’ve been wandering for two hours. I’m inclined to see a parallel in Valjean meeting the bishop in that: for the bishop, it was just another incident not specifically connected to other incidents in his life, but Valjean had just come from the bagne and had been traveling for days.

I suppose this has to do with dynamic vs. static characters: some characters need to change, and the story is about tracking their change, whereas other characters are larger than life already, and they can be counted on to be so no matter when or where you find them.

Just like Lesgle, Courfeyrac, and the Bishop, Gavroche asks no questions.

And he’s almost literally magic: he hasn’t eaten in several days, but when lost children are hungry, he can still dig a sou out of his pocket.

And then, in an apostrophe against Magnon but also Fantine, Valjean, the Thenardiers, Jeanne Valjean, Georges Pontmercy, Gillenormand, maybe everyone in this book who has a child, he says

“It's all the same, if I had any mômes, I would hug them tighter than this.”

Though, of course, he doesn’t manage to.

....And then we reach the elephant and there is SO MUCH SYMBOLISM to tackle that I’m going to leave the second half of the chapter for tomorrow.

[florrickandassociates]

TGF Thoughts: 5x01- Previously on...

Welcome back!! I’m so excited to be writing one of these again. I think this hiatus has been the longest I’ve gone without new Diane Lockhart content in ten years, and it sure feels like it. A lot of important stuff has happened in the time since TGF season four ended (not concluded—ended). Most notably, CBS All Access became Paramount+ and suddenly started offering a lot of content I care about! I kid. 2020 was quite an eventful year, so I was curious how television’s most topical show was going to take it on. TGF is always forward-looking, but too much happened in 2020 to be ignored. And while I didn’t think TGF would have much to say about the pandemic, it seemed impossible to imagine a season five that pretended it never happened. Going into this premiere, I was expecting that they’d either skip COVID entirely or include very few references, but after seeing this episode, I feel like the writers took the only approach that made sense. And that is why they are the writers, and I'm just some girl on the internet who writes recaps.  

Anyway, before I dive into the episode, I should also note that my pandemic boredom spurred me to actually pay $30 to watch this episode early as part of the virtual ATX Festival. Yes, I paid $30 on top of the money I spend every month on Paramount+ for this show. But I write tens of thousands of words about each TGF episode—are my priorities really that surprising? I note this not to brag or even to poke fun at myself, but because watching the episode before I knew a single thing about it (not even the title!) completely changed my viewing experience. I’ve never had an experience like this with TGW or TGF. I’m one to search for critics tweeting cryptically about screeners and refresh sites looking for background extras (haven’t done this in the TGF era, though) and read every single piece of press I can find. For any big episode, I usually know the outline of what to expect going in (I even knew about Will before the episode aired in the US!). Not this one! So, I got to be surprised, and I had to—gasp—formulate my own opinions before I knew what anyone else thought! It was really pleasant, actually. I think the structure of the episode worked extremely well for me because it caught me by surprise... and also because I’m the kind of person who somehow managed to write a college paper about Previously On sequences.

I see Tumblr has made it so that “keep reading” expands the post in your dash instead of opening a new tab. I absolutely hate this. Here is a link to the post you can click instead of the keep reading button! 

The ATX stream started mid-sentence, meaning I missed the “Previously On... 2020...” title card and skipped right to Adrian saying “I’m retiring.” It was pretty easy to pick up on the device (the directness of the scenes at the start, their cadence, and their placement in the episode made it clear this was meant to mimic a Previously) but the second title card hit way harder because... well, I had no idea if this was meant to be 2020 or some moment outside of real time until a bit later in the episode.  

Man, before I get any farther into this, two things that I don’t know where else to put. First, this episode had to cover so much ground. They had to write out both Adrian and Lucca—more on that later--, figure out how to deal with all of 2020, figure out how to either wrap up or continue all the truncated season 4 plotlines, and set the stage for a new season... in 50 minutes.  

Second, just wanna shout out the Kings’ other Paramout+ show, Evil, which you should absolutely be watching even if you hate horror. Evil is a Kings show, so it is unsurprisingly topical (sometimes evil takes the form of racism or misogyny or Scott Rudin) and at times very, very funny. I would be recapping it if Paramount+ weren’t attacking me personally by airing it at the same time as TGF. Ever hear of too much of a good thing, people?! (On that note, I am VERY upset with myself for not having made a Good vs Evil joke about the Good shows and Evil. I didn’t even think about it until Robert King made the joke on Twitter, and it was right fucking there. How did I fail so miserably?!)  

So STR Laurie, who wants a 20% downsizing, is still a thing. Noted.

This scene with Landau is the only one in this previously that is actually old footage, right?  

Unexpected Margo Martindale! Yay! (Ruth Eastman is a character who is so much more effective on Fight than she was on Wife and I’m quite glad they’ve had her appear on Fight several times. It kind of redeems season seven. Kind of.)

I don’t think the writers intentionally chose for Adrian’s book deal to be with Simon & Schuster because it is the most politically fraught publisher (the number of stories about controversial memoirs they’ve picked up in 2021 alone...) but I kind of like that Adrian’s Road Not Taken involves S&S. My guess is they chose S&S because it is owned by ViacomCBS.  

“Years ago, I wanted to create a law firm run entirely by women, but it never worked out. So, why not now?” Diane says to Liz. One of the advantages of having twelve (!!!) seasons of Diane Lockhart is that we’ve seen what she’s talking about. And we’ve seen her put this idea forward multiple times, too. I have my reservations about Diane’s brand of feminism, and I’ll say more about how fraught a Diane/Liz firm would be as the show explores the potential issues there, but on the surface I’m kind of excited about the prospect of a Diane/Liz led firm. Diane has wanted this for ages, Liz is a good partner, and this actually makes sense (unlike the nonsensical Diane/Alicia alliance of late season seven, where the only rationale was “well, Alicia needs to betray Diane in the finale, but they’re not on good terms. So maybe we make them business partners so then the betrayal stings more?”). Plus I fully love that Diane would end up running a firm with Alicia’s law school rival.

(Has TGF mentioned that Liz and Alicia were law school rivals? No. Am I still clinging on to that as a large part of Liz’s character? ABSOLUTELY.)

Julius is on trial for Memo 618 reasons; Diane is defending him. So this is still happening. (There’s more old footage here.)  

Do they put these references to one/two party consent in these episodes as a wink at the fans? It has to be intentional. (Please do not ask me what the actual law is on this, this show has thoroughly confused me.)  

I knew Cush was filming stuff for TGF, but I didn’t know it was for the premiere. She was just posting about it a few weeks ago, so either they shot a lot of it right before air or she posted a while after filming. Anyway, yay Lucca!  

Bianca’s still around. And, TGF gets to shoot New York for New York, since Bianca is there. I do wish TGF could do more location shoots; there’s something about seeing an actual skyline that feels more real.  

Bianca wants Lucca, who has never been outside of the country (except to St. Lucia, as Bianca reminds her) to go to London and buy her a resort. It’s supposed to be a three week stay and Bianca’s already arranged childcare. Speaking of children, because of COVID and filming constraints, that’s Cush’s real kid in this scene! You can’t really see him, but I recognized his curly hair from Cush’s Instagram, and the Kings confirmed in an interview.  

Adrian wants to write a book about police brutality cases he’s worked on. Ruth very much does not want him to write that book. She wants him to write a book without substance about how white people and black people can work together. He, understandably, has no interest in writing this book. (Also, you can see in the background that Ruth doesn’t think Biden’s odds of winning the Democratic primary are good—there is a big down arrow next to his picture, which definitely dates this scene.)

Oh, David Lee is in this episode. He acts like an asshole towards Marissa when she’s trying to help him.  

Marissa, not happy with the lack of respect, calls Lucca for advice “for a friend.” Lucca mentions she’s in London and Marissa does not believe her and keeps going on and on about her frustrations and her new desire to become a lawyer—quickly.  

Marissa wanting to become a lawyer because she “hates being talked down to” is not a plot I would’ve expected but it’s also one that makes a lot of sense. I think Marissa’s used to being respected and praised even when she’s doing things that aren’t glamorous, so I see how she’d get very restless when she’s no longer outperforming expectations and is instead taken for granted.  

Bells toll in the background on Lucca’s side and Marissa asks where she is. Lucca again notes she’s in London and Marissa still doesn’t believe her.

I’m going to miss Lucca so much, especially since we’ll also be losing a lot of the Millennial Friendship scenes with her. Cush is fantastic (even if she never really got enough to do here) and she plays so well off of the rest of the cast. I even sometimes liked the writing for Maia (who?) when she had scenes with Lucca, Lucca is that good.  

Jay wakes up sweating and unable to breathe, so he deliriously calls his father-figure Adrian. This whole scene is shot like something out of Evil and (I’m getting ahead of myself here) this plot is the only thing about this episode I felt was a misstep.  

“I think you’re my father,” Jay says to Adrian. Heh, I didn’t catch this line the first time around (maybe subliminally I did, since I just called Adrian his father figure lol) but I love that it is included here. Adrian and Jay’s relationship definitely deserves a goodbye.

Adrian calls an ambulance and also gets to Jay before the ambulance somehow. Adrian notes that Jay might have “this thing from China” and... we’re doing the pandemic, y’all. (Minor nitpick: on March 13th, 2020, when this scene is dated, COVID was not “this thing from China”-- we were all aware of it. March 11th was the day Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced they’d tested positive and the NBA shut down and travel was restricted and every single brand that had my email sent me a message about their plans and measures. March 12th was the last time I was in my office, and we’d been getting emails telling us to wash our hands and prepare to work remotely for weeks. I went to San Francisco in mid-late February and distinctly remember deciding to leave a burrito unattended on a table while I washed my hands because I was paranoid about COVID... and then I remember making a specific trip to Walgreens to buy hand sanitizer so that didn’t happen again. My point is, Adrian lives in the same world I do. On March 13th 2020, he would not be treating COVID like it was some new thing he’d vaguely heard of.)  

(I am going to nitpick this timeline, but please know that I’m only doing it because I can, not because I think it’s necessarily a bad choice. Lines like this do feel a little forced, but I see the reason for introducing COVID as something new rather than going for the line that’s exactly historically accurate. I also am pretty sure there are references to dates in March/April in s4 of TGF that are now going to be contradicted by this episode, but I truly do not care. The writers get a pass on this one.)  

We skip slightly back in time to the beginning of March after the MARCH 13TH title card, or maybe this is supposed to be after March 13th and my own memories are preventing me from believing these face-to-face interactions were happening. Who knows.

Michael Bloomberg is... here, again, I guess? He asks Diane to assist with a Supreme Court case about gun control. I guess it does add some weight to the plot and make the stakes feel higher.  

Oh hey, this case is the 7x17 case!!!! Love that continuity.  

Diane and Adrian are both at the office late, working, and there is an unnecessary split screen that feels even more unnecessary when you consider that the editing alone was enough to create the parallel.  

Diane and Adrian have a nice convo (which I’ll really miss, their dynamic is great and this really feels like a successful partnership) as they wait for the elevator. When the elevator dings, they nearly tumble down into nothingness because... the elevator never came. Apparently this is a reference to an law old show I’ve never seen that killed off a character this way, and it’s meant to be a wink at how they are not going to kill off Adrian.

I do not know why I remember this, but I do: after they killed off Will, a critic (Noel Murray; I just googled to confirm my memory) who didn’t want to spoil things tweeted, “Exactly 23 years and 2 days ago, Rosalind Shays fell down an elevator shaft.” Please tell me why I remember this reference that I didn’t even understand well enough to have tracked down the original tweet in under a minute. (https://twitter.com/NoelMu/status/447942456827326464)  

Back on this show, Diane and Adrian share a drink and talk about their wishes. Diane wants to argue in front of the Supreme Court, and Adrian encourages her to speak up. His own near-death experience motivates him to trash the book Ruth has him writing, and Diane trashes the (bad) legal strategy someone else prepared for the Supreme Court.

DIANE IS WEARING JEANS!!!!!! Tbh, I think my favorite part of this episode is how many slice-of-life scenes and settings we get. These are always my favorite moments. I love the satirical and political stuff too, but the character moments are what get me invested enough to write these. (Yes, Diane in jeans constitutes a character moment.)  

Diane tells Bloomberg she wants to be involved and advocates for herself. Kurt gets a call on their landline (hahaha) from Adrian.

God, I love Diane and Kurt. Not only is their banter fun, you can just see a different, more relaxed side of Diane in these scenes. Diane tells Kurt she has good news for herself, but bad news for him since she’s arguing for gun control. She asks him to help her prep for court, too.  

So this is before Jay is rushed to the hospital, because now we are back at the hospital with Julius, Diane, and Marissa. I do not believe any of these people would be setting foot in a hospital like it’s any other day on March 13th, 2020. But I'm trying not to nitpick.

I get why they chose to give Jay a rather severe case of COVID. I just don’t get literally anything else that follows from the initial shock of Jay having COVID.  

I see why the writers chose March 20th (the actual Illinois stay at home order) as the next date for this timeline. I still do not believe that people were in this particular office on that date.  

You know what else I don’t believe? That RBL just shut down for two weeks and was like, no work is being done. Did law firms really do this? I can believe it if it’s an excuse to cost-cut, and I know there were massive layoffs, but this seems... really weird???  

Why are they setting up a teleconferencing infrastructure (didn’t they have one at LG? In season five?) if they are not planning to do work?  

Lol Diane explains what Zoom is, very slowly. She asks everyone to “download a program called Zoom.com” which is one of the first Zoom jokes I’ve chuckled at in a while.  

Marissa is not happy to hear that there’s no work for her in a work-remote world (this I believe 100%), so she calls Lucca again with more questions about law school.

Love these NYC and London location shots. Wish they could do that for Chicago.

Lucca asks Bianca to help get Marissa into a law school, fast, and Bianca tells Lucca to use her name... then offers her a job.

Marissa is at the office, alone, boxing up her things, when one of the office phones rings with some dude offering her a spot in a law school class. I guess we are really all-in on this! (Why would Lucca have given a firm phone number not specific to Marissa, though?)

Adrian and his corrupt girlfriend decide to shelter in place together. I still do not understand why he is okay with her being corrupt. I also don’t really understand why they’re going from talking about sheltering-in-place to George Floyd. How did we just skip from late March to late May? Are Adrian and corrupt gf having a conversation about sheltering-in-place two months into sheltering in place?  

Okay, I am not doing so good at this no-nitpicking thing. Again, I understand why they need to merge several scenes into one to keep things moving. And I guess they could just be getting around to this conversation.

I’m going to nitpick again, I can’t help myself. How did we just go from a scene of Adrian specifically talking about sheltering in place to a scene of Adrian bursting into a bustling and maskless DNC headquarters room? How!? The only masks in this scene are on TV!! There are like ten people in this scene!  

Anyway, more importantly, Adrian tells Ruth off and screams at her that she needs to listen to him instead of acting like she knows the way forward. He is completely right.  

Why is travel from London closing down in May 2020? Is it because this scene is supposed to be at a different place in the episode? Liz is asking Lucca to come back home from her three week stay in London (which has now lasted three months but travel is just now closing down), and Lucca’s hesitant to come home.

This is all happening via Zoom, btw. Lucca’s in her hotel, Diane and Adrian are at their respective homes, and Liz is in the office. All of this feels right. There is a chat off to the side of the screen where you can see Adrian and the others discussing how to unmute on Zoom. Very real. Though probably not very real in late May 2020. Feels more like April. I am convinced this scene got spliced in later to help the episode flow because everything in this scene (except the TV footage that definitely was added later) feels like it should be happening in the March section.  

Lucca mentions that Bianca offered her a job, and at this point we as viewers know how things are going to go—Lucca's going to end up taking it. Liz types in the Zoom chat that they don’t want to lose Lucca. When Lucca tells them how much Bianca’s offering ($500k/year, go Lucca!), Diane types “Shit.” into the chat. “Shit’s right,” Liz replies. “Yes... What should our counter be?” Diane replies. Lucca is kind enough to point out the messages are not private (again, this feels like March not May) but I think knowing that their reaction to topping $500k is “shit” tells her all she needs to know.  

Diane’s background still says that RBL is a division of STR Laurie. Weird how little we are hearing about the overlords except the 20% staff cut.  

Liz and Adrian chat and decide the only way to keep Lucca is to make her a partner. Which, yeah, if you’d just made her a partner years ago when you told her she was in the running for partner and then offered it to fucking MAIA, maybe she wouldn’t be considering Bianca’s offer. Lucca is definitely one of RBL’s stars, and I don’t think she’s wrong to feel like they don’t value her enough. They treat her well enough to be upset about losing her, but not well enough to have already made her partner and not well enough to actually give her authority (even though she runs a whole department). I’d be pretty unhappy too. It kind of feels sometimes like they take her for granted, and I don’t know that Lucca is one to feel like she owes a company anything. She’s more of an “I’m out for myself” type.  

Madeline and the other partner we’ve seen a few times who isn’t Liz/Diane/Adrian, walk into the office (wearing masks! Which they take off as soon as they enter a room with Liz! Without asking her if she is okay with this! TV logic!) and ask who is replacing Adrian. They think this is a good time to reevaluate having a white name partner of an African American firm, and they are spot on. Liz tries to deflect, noting that Diane is already a name partner and was before Liz even joined, but Madeline and other partner (whose name I really wish they would say so I can stop calling him “other partner”) won’t let up. Their position is that Diane shouldn’t have been made a name partner then—all she did was bring in ChumHum, an account that quickly left the firm. Good point.  

“What is this firm if it’s not African American? It’s just another midsized all-service Midwestern law firm, one of 50,” Madeline argues. The other partner says Liz needs to remove Diane and promote two African Americans to name partner. Liz laughs and asks if they mean themselves. Madeline does not—she's concerned about the number of black associates they’re letting go. Liz heads out, but this conversation is very much ongoing.

And I think it’s a very interesting dilemma! There’s a lot of mileage the writers can get out of this, because I don’t think there’s a right answer or a wrong one. It’s all about what Liz decides she wants the future of the firm to be. If Liz chooses Diane, she might be choosing something that works for her personally or that she thinks is a safer financial bet—but she’ll be choosing to work at a firm that can no longer be thought of as a black firm, and she’ll be choosing to move away from her father’s vision for the firm. And since the plot hinges on what Liz will decide rather than what’s objectively the right path forward, there’s a lot of interesting tension there I can’t wait to see.  

(My favorite thing about Adrian leaving is that Liz will likely get more to do, especially when it comes to managing the firm. Adrian tends to speak up first, but Liz is more than capable of managing without him and I’m so excited to see what she does when her ex-husband isn’t constantly talking over her.)  

Marissa and Lucca video chat with Jay. He’s still in the hospital. One thing that bugs me about how this episode handles COVID is that I never really get the sense that any of the characters are particularly afraid of the virus. Maybe none of them were. But you’d think you’d see a little of that fear, the weird dance of trying to assess others’ comfort levels with masking, etc., in an ep specifically about living through this time. ESPECIALLY since someone they all know and are close to has been hospitalized for MONTHS with this thing! It’s just so weird to go from a scene where people wear masks until they come in contact with other people (when masks matter the most) to a scene of someone in the hospital with COVID.  

And now Jay’s weird hallucinations start as his battery dies on the video chat. I really, truly, hated these hallucinations. I was ready to be done with these from the second they started. They’re weirdly shot, they go on for too long, and they feel like the clunkiest parts of Mind’s Eye when Alicia starts having a debate in her mind about atheism mixed with the (far superior) hospital episode of Evil.  

I don’t have much to say about these hallucinations except that I hated them a lot. When there’s the reveal that Jay is hallucinating a commerical, I almost came around on the hallucinations because that’s kind of funny and inspired. And then several more hallucinations popped up and they had a round table and Jesus got added to the mix and I was like, nope, this is bad in a very uninteresting way. I reject this.  

I feel like the Kings didn’t have much to say about COVID, the actual virus. This episode is definitely more about what the characters’ lives were like during COVID and not the pandemic itself. I think they likely got a lot of their COVID commentary out of their system with their zombie COVID show The Bite (I have not seen The Bite due to it airing on Spectrum On Demand, which I have no way of accessing. Like, I would have to move and then decide to pay for cable in order to watch it.) I also suspect a lot of their commentary on COVID isn’t going to be specific to the virus and is instead going to be about things like mask-wearing and vaccinations becoming political. And, really, that’s just a new variation on talking about polarization... and they’ve been talking about polarization for years.

In fact, they even wrote a whole series about an outbreak of a (space-bug-spread) virus that caused political polarization before Trump was even elected. BrainDead is basically commentary on the pandemic before the pandemic even happened. Soooooo I get why they are more interested in recapping 2020 than in doing a Very Special Episode about themes they’ve been talking about for years. (I still think they would’ve benefitted from at least one character being afraid of getting sick or getting their family sick.)  

There is likely some interesting content in these Jay hallucinations. I hate them so much I cannot find it. You know when you’re just on a completely different wavelength than the writers? This is an example of that.  

Also I’m not a fan of the shadowy directing. I think this is meant to look cooler than it does.  

Have I mentioned yet that I absolutely love the “Previously On” device for this episode? It’s such a fun, propulsive way to get through the slog of 2020. Scenes can be short and to the point, and each scene has to do a lot of lifting to fill in the gaps. I think that leads to scenes that are better constructed and telling on lots of levels—where are people when they’re quarantined? Who’s wearing casual clothes and when? What about this scene defines this character’s life at that moment in time?  

Bizarrely, even though this episode is pretty much all plot (this happens! Then that!), I actually found this to be one of the most character-driven episodes TGF has ever done. There’s a lot of story, but most of that story is about how the characters reacted to 2020 rather than overarching plots that will weigh on the rest of the season. This episode covers a lot of ground, but it does it with character moments that resonate.  

Now it’s July and Diane’s prepping to argue in front of the Supreme Court. Kurt’s helping her witness prep and it gets a little personal... and that ends up turning Diane on. Good to see McHart hasn’t lost its spark. (Remember how Kurt cheated on Diane in season 7 of Wife? No, me neither, because that never happened.)  

Corrupt judge is back. Adrian playfully tries to distract her from work. Then he takes a video call from Liz, who updates him on the conversation she had with John (so that’s his name) and Madeline. I guess that part of May was close to July? Anyway, Adrian isn’t surprised to hear that people are upset at the prospect of Diane being one of two name partners.  

Liz is at the office in workout clothes and I love it!

They’re losing 15 black associates (and Adrian and Lucca) and 4 white ones, Liz says. This sounds like a very big problem. (I’d be curious to know what that is as a percentage of the firm and how the racial composition shifts.)

Liz knows it’s not exactly up to her if Diane stays on as name partner (the other partners get a vote, but I think Liz knows she has a lot of sway here). She’s also wondering if Biden could win, and if so, would it be to the firm’s advantage to be black-owned? Interesting.  

“Well. If you’re thinking it, then Diane’s thinking it, too,” Adrian says. He’s right. “White guilt. It runs verrrrry deep on that one, huh?” Ha. He is right about that, too. I actually can’t decide which of these interpretations is correct, because it could be either even though they seem contradictory. (1) Is Adrian saying it with a hint of mockery because he knows Diane will fight for her partnership even as she would say she’s a huge supporter of black businesses? (2) Is he saying it because he knows Diane would have enough white guilt to realize what her presence as a partner means and think through the implications? I think it is, somehow, a combination. I’m interested in this line because this whole dilemma (from Diane’s POV) is something that’s very familiar. Diane’s always been an idealist who will betray her ideals for personal gain. That sounds like an attack, but I mean that as neutrally as I possibly can. There are so many examples of this that this is kind of just a character trait of hers at this point. Usually those ideals are about feminism, but this situation seems closely related.  

Adrian overhears Corrupt GF talking about Julius, Diane, and Memo 618. You would think she would wait to have this conversation until there is no chance of Adrian overhearing, because if Adrian overhears, he might...

... do exactly what he proceeds to do and hop into a car with Diane to give her a heads up. (I think I’m just going to have to accept that the mask usage rule on this episode is “we use masks to show that the characters would wear them, but we don’t want to have scenes where characters are fully masked because that’s annoying.” If that’s not the rule, then why else would Adrian be masked outside... and then take off his mask as soon as he gets into a confined indoor space with Diane?  

Baranski looks ESPECIALLY like Taylor Swift in this scene.  

Adrian tells Diane what he knows. He dug deeper after overhearing Charlotte, so he has even more info. “If you tell me, I will use it,” Diane warns. Adrian knows that, so he takes a moment to decide. And he decides that he cares more about Diane and Julius than about his relationship with a corrupt judge.  

Diane and Julius are masked in court. Visitor and the judge are not. They use masking in a clever way in this scene: Diane uses being masked to her advantage because it means no one can possibly read her lips, so she can use the info Adrian fed her against Charlotte without any fear of spies. Charlotte, who is unmasked, guards her lips with a folder, as the Visitor watches interestedly.  

Diane convinces Charlotte to recuse herself. Charlotte says she’s making a mistake; Diane does not care.  

The new judge is, unfortunately, the idiot who doesn’t know anything about the law. Uh oh.

Charlotte decides she’s done sheltering in place with Adrian. He tries to talk through the conflict, but Charlotte says “You made your choice, Adrian. Julius Cain over me.”

“The choice was about right and wrong, Charlotte,” Adrian tries to explain. I mean, yeah, but if you’re dating a judge who has admitted she’s totally corrupt, didn’t right and wrong go out the window a while ago?

Adrian seems to think the other people involved in the events are bad and Charlotte is good. I am not convinced. I don’t think she’s the big bad, but I don’t think she’s good.  

Charlotte points out that he invaded her privacy. She is right about that. “You said the choice was between right and wrong. Turning over my emails was the choice,” she said. I get her POV. But also, she is corrupt.  

I do not like the way the part of the scene where Adrian physically restrains Charlotte to keep her from leaving is shot. I don’t think this is an abusive scene but I think it should’ve been shot from a little farther back so we could see it’s more like Adrian reaching out in desperation than trying to choke Charlotte. Because it very much looks like he is trying to choke Charlotte.  

He tells Charlotte he loves her. She says it’s too late and leaves. “Maybe you won’t be with me. But you keep down this path... you’ll be done, I’m telling you, you’ll be done.”

I think something that I’ve been missing in these interactions is that I didn’t quite realize until this scene that the Adrian/Charlotte dynamic is more interesting than Adrian liking a corrupt judge. I think he truly believes Charlotte is a good person who got caught up in some bad stuff, and that she can bounce back from it. I’ve always seen Charlotte as someone who is corrupt for herself and then ended up going along with the corruption of others, too, so I’ve dismissed her and the relationship. This is the first scene that has felt real to me, and the first scene where she’s felt like more than a caricature. Kind of sad it’s the last she’ll get with Adrian—now I’m actually starting to find her interesting. Notice how in these last few sentences I’ve used her name instead of “Corrupt GF”!  

Charlotte says she loved Adrian too, but that’s not enough. Awww.

He can’t really be surprised though, can he?  

Now it is August and we get to see Diane and Liz react to the announcement of Kamala Harris as Biden’s VP pick, and I would like to thank the writers for giving me the opportunity to see Diane and Liz react to this. It’s kind of fan-service, but it’s also a nice tie-in to the girl-power theme of the Diane/Liz alliance.

Diane and Liz realize that Adrian’s probably not a good candidate for 2024 if the DNC only wants one black candidate and Harris is the clear front-runner. Liz suggests keeping him on as partner instead, in a way that very much implies this would be her ideal solution. Diane, being Diane, says she was liking the idea of an all-female firm. Liz hesitantly says she was too, and Diane senses the hesitation.

“Let’s look again at which associates to fire. I’m worried we’re losing too many African Americans,” Diane switches the subject. How have they still not made this decision? If any employees know downsizing is coming, and they’ve had months to act on it, assuming there are jobs elsewhere, people would’ve been jumping ship by now.  

But that’s not the point of this scene. The point of this scene is that Liz corrects Diane: “Black. You can just say Black people.” Very nice moment underlining the tension. Diane means well, but she’s still acting like a white lady who doesn’t know how to act around black people... and she wants to (and, I guess, already does) run a black firm. Major yikes.  

Marissa and Lucca are talking again. Marissa does not want to be in law school—she just wants to be a lawyer. Lucca won’t accept Marissa’s refusal to memorize meaningless rules: “Marissa. I know that you know how to play the game, but you have to pass the bar to get into a position to play the game.” Why does this line make me love Lucca? This line isn’t even anything amazing. It’s just a line that cuts through the bullshit and makes a good point.  

Marissa keeps going, insulting all of her peers and teachers, and Lucca figures out how to cut through that, too: she tells Marissa that she’d hire her as a lawyer if she killed someone, but only if Marissa passes the bar. Marissa is instantly intrigued.  

“Why are you leaving here? I’ll miss you,” Marissa says.  

“Because they won’t pay me what I deserve,” Lucca says in a matter-of-fact tone. “Anyway, I thought they fired you.”  

“But they didn’t mean it. It’s like the smoothie place—they kept trying to fire me and I just kept showing up,” Marissa replies. That checks out. (Love the callback!)  

Lucca tries to get Marissa to come over to England. Marissa shuts that down as Lucca gets a news alert—and it’s not good news.  

Our next date is September 18th, 2020 and I will get my nitpicks out of the way up front! I don’t really know why it is daytime for Lucca when she reads the news, considering it was already the evening in the States when the RBG news broke. And, also, it was Rosh Hashanah, so Marissa probably would not have been sitting in her bedroom studying... she most likely would’ve been with family or friends. OK I’M DONE. FOR NOW.  

Diane is getting ready for her arguments in front of the Supreme Court. It’s almost time! She’s in casual clothes but has on a wonderful mask. She’s standing in front of Kurt’s guns to make a point (love that she’s using her video call background to her advantage) and there are several people in her bedroom getting the tech all set up. I have noted before that they only built one set for Diane’s apartment, and it’s just a massive bedroom. Diane choosing to be in front of the guns does a nice job of cutting off my question about why she’d be arguing in front of the Supreme Court from her bedroom rather than the home office she absolutely would have.  

Kurt walks in and tries to shake hands... he’s clearly not very COVID paranoid, and Diane seems to be, and... that’s something I might have wanted to see? How was Diane okay with Kurt taking risks that also affected her?

Diane confirms she intentionally chose to stand in front of the guns. That’s when Kurt gets the push notification. He pulls Diane into the bathroom to show her the news. He hands her his phone and Diane’s face falls. She starts tearing up. “2020 just won’t let go,” she says, speaking for us all.

Normally I hate things that are like, we’re going to contrive this so the news hits at the worst possible moment! This works for me, because the Supreme Court plot for Diane feels more like something that exists to be a through line for the episode. It would also be a little hard to work in RBG’s death as a main plot point—and it is definitely important enough to be a main plotpoint—if it didn’t also affect something in the world of the show.  

Also, another reason I like this contrivance is that it makes it all the more powerful when Diane says, “It’s over. He gets to nominate someone. Another Kavanaugh! We’ll have a conservative court for the next 20 years. My whole fucking life!” She’s not thinking about how this affects her case (and that case is basically a life-long dream for her). She is thinking about way bigger things, and knowing that her mind goes to the bigger things before the personal with news like this really underlines how big of a deal RBG’s death was.  

Diane tells Kurt, “I don’t deserve you. You don’t agree with me.” “I can still feel bad for you,” he responds. He holds her while she cries.

Jay’s hallucination thing is back. Now Karl Marx is here. So is Jesus. I’m so done with this. It’s nice to get a break from writing.

Malcolm X is also on the roundtable and now they’re talking over each other in that way that everyone on this show always does. (RK gave an interview about Evil where he said he likes having the children on that show talk over each other because he grew up in a household like that. I did not need to read that interview to understand that RK likes scenes where people talk over each other.)  

If anything happened in those hallucinations, I missed it, because I didn’t pause the episode. Because I do not care about the hallucinations. Because I hate them.

Now it’s November 2020... Diane’s watching election results and rocking back and forth. She tells Kurt he can go watch Fox News in the other room (so they do have more than one room!). He says he’s fine—he thinks Diane needs it more.  

“Yes, but Kurt, if you stay, I know this isn’t sensible, but... Trump seems to get more votes whenever you’re sitting on this couch,” Diane tells him. Ha, I relate to this kind of superstition so hard. “Are you serious?” Kurt says. “I am so deathly serious,” Diane responds. “Whenever you’re sitting here, Arizona goes for Trump. Humor me, please. Just go in the other room.”  

When Kurt tries to kiss her, she pulls away: “No, no, no. No kiss. If you kiss me, we’ll lose Georgia.” This scene feels so, so real and perfectly captures what it was like (at least for me, though I don’t have a Republican husband or anything) watching election results come in.  

“Uh, if you lose, we’ll be fine, right?” Kurt asks. “Kurt, let me just say this. I’m only saying that we won’t be fine so that the universe will grant me a win,” Diane responds. This scene is so fun and so good! It simultaneously captures a relatable mood, adds some levity, gives us a window into Diane’s life, and shows some of the tensions in her marriage?! I want this all the time!  

Kurt leaves the room. Diane pours more wine.

Later, with Diane still rocking back and forth with anxiety (just you wait for the several more days this will drag on!), Kurt brings in the champagne. “That was for when Hillary won. I can only drink it if Biden wins,” Diane protests. Did I also refuse to drink any celebratory alcohol until things were absolutely certain? No comment.  

“It’s odd you progressives resisted religion. You seem to have a hundred religions to take its place,” Kurt says, speaking on behalf of the writers’ room. (This joke doesn’t get written if the writers don’t believe this and probably even see it in themselves.)  

“Go away, Trump. I mean Kurt,” she shoos him away. Have I mentioned yet I love this scene?  

“Love me even if you lose?” he jokes (though I do wonder if this isn’t that joking? I think it is, but he keeps saying it!) as Diane gestures at him to get out.  

I could do without the joke about Diane’s heart on the TV for a couple reasons. One, it goes on too long. Two, I was very worried something would actually happen to Diane. You’d think that would make the scene feel more tense, but it does not, because it takes me out of the moment.

“Ok, God. You know I don’t believe in you. But I will believe in you if Joe Biden wins. I’m sorry. I know that that’s not what Jesus taught. There’s nothing in the New Testament that says, ‘Believe in me, and I’ll make sure your candidate wins,’ but I need Joe Biden to win. I’m sorry, God, but I just do. I need some faith.” This is a little much but... yeah. Also, is this the first time Diane’s flat out said she’s an atheist? I think it is, though I’ve assumed as much for quite a while.  

The next day in court, masks are no longer required if you’re a series regular and votes are still being counted. I remember those days. Marissa thought Diane was checking in on Jay... Diane was not. She was checking on vote counts.  

Apparently Jay’s finally being released from the hospital!

Bad news for Julius—the idiot judge finds him guilty of some nonsense charge and sentences him to seven years in prison.  

Diane says not to worry, and Julius asks “Why not?” Good point.

Then we have election results! We skip, specifically, to December 14th and the electoral college vote. I’m a little sad we skipped over the huge party that was November 7th, but I get why they’d rather keep things moving along. I think showing November 7th in an uncomplicated way would’ve just been too close to fanservice. But, man, what a day.  

Diane, in a red hoodie with leopard print that she somehow manages to still look classy in, is ready to pop champagne. Then she hears that on January 6th, a joint session of Congress will count the electoral votes and there might be a debate. “Nope. If I open it now, something bad will happen,” she reasons. “I’ve waited four years. I can wait another few weeks.”

It’s been almost a year and they’re still somehow negotiating with Lucca, but I understand why they’d space this out across the episode. Otherwise we’d have to say goodbye to Lucca in the first like, 15 mins of the episode and all those scenes would be in a row. I can forgive (and still nitpick) choices like this when the reasoning behind them seems sound.  

Adrian says they don’t want to lose Lucca. He, Liz, and Diane are all in the conference room, and they ask Lucca for a yes or no on their latest offer by the end of the call. Diane offers Lucca partner—she'll be the youngest partner in the firm’s history—and she’ll get a $500,000/year salary. Adrian tries to sell her on being part of American history by being part of the firm.

“We are a black firm, Lucca, and we need you,” Liz says with a lot of passion for someone who knows she might very well partner with Diane. Diane looks at Liz with a bit of suspicion at this, wondering if Liz is showing her cards.  

Lucca manages to make the wifi malfunction (or she gets very lucky) and uses the disconnection to call Bianca for a counteroffer, even though they said they needed a yes or no on the spot.  

“They used George Floyd because they want you for less. They have never appreciated you as much as I do. All those scars, all that time being taken for granted and undervalued has made you a fighter. It’s made you someone I now want,” Bianca tells Lucca. She gives Lucca a counter offer of $1.3 million and the title of CFO. Lucca takes it. Is there really another choice? (If she were concerned about loyalty to the firm and the partnership was what she wanted, she probably would've just taken it.)  

(Also, the partners can’t really act like Lucca is making history by being the youngest partner ever when they passed her over for partner two years earlier and offered it to Maia! To MAIA! Who had like three years of work experience! And yes I was fine with Alicia and Cary getting partnership offers with four years but, one, that was a scam, and two, Alicia and Cary actually worked. Oh, I see I still hate Maia with a passion. Back to THIS season...)

Lucca apologetically informs Marissa she’s leaving and the offer was just too good to turn down. I believe it. I also believe Lucca wants that job more. What has loyalty to RBL gotten her? She's someone so talented and good at her job that she just gets job offers from acquaintances all the time (starting with Alicia!). RBL appreciates her, but just enough to appease her while still undervaluing her. I don’t know that I would’ve believed a plot where Lucca actively job hunts, but I definitely believe this.

“Marissa, we don’t have to work together to be friends,” Lucca tells Marissa. I’m going to miss this so much. Why is this the best material Lucca’s gotten in ages?! I think one of the things that makes Lucca such a great character is that you can see why everyone instantly wants her on their team. She’s a fantastic friend (without giving too much of herself), she’s not a pushover, and she is incredibly sharp and able to get to the heart of any situation. I love her and I’m sad we won’t get to see more of her.  

(On that bit about friendship—I can’t write about Lucca’s departure without writing about the moment I realized just how great of a character Lucca was. It was in 7x13, when Alicia has her breakdown that’s seven seasons in the making... and Lucca supports her. But the writing, and Cush’s performance, never make it feel like Lucca exists to be a part of Alicia’s story. Lucca seems like her own fully formed person who happens to be supporting Alicia at this moment. I don’t think I can overstate how tough of a task it is to get me to care about the other person in a pivotal Alicia scene, especially when that other person was added to the cast in the final season and many suspected she’d just be a replacement for a different beloved character! Anyway, Lucca’s been great for years, and I’ll miss her.)  

Just when I thought I couldn’t hate the hallucinations more, we get a hint that they are going to continue: Jay sees one right after he learns that Marissa’s used her quarantine to start law school and he’s done nothing.  

Jay says he carries a gun now and it’s “performative.” I have no idea what that means and Marissa and Lucca don’t seem to, either.  

Another thing I like about Lucca’s final scene is that it isn’t rushed. We have time for all that, and also for Lucca to tell Marissa about the time she stole her breakfast sandwich, and for Marissa to react to it, and for Marissa to find Lucca’s Birkin bag, and for Lucca to tell Marissa to keep it, and for Marissa to react to that, and for Lucca to sappily say “think of me when you use it,” and for Marissa to nonsensically reply, “you think of me when I use it,” and there’s still a little bit more of the scene after that!  

Marissa’s silly line makes Lucca tear up. “God, I’m gonna miss you guys,” she says. “I’m gonna miss this. You make me smile. I didn’t smile much before you guys.” Awwwwwww. This is also so true to character! Her friendship with Alicia aside, Lucca’s definitely said before she’s not one to have friends (which is hilarious because she is, as I've said like 100 times, a fantastic friend and also just like, the coolest person??? Who wouldn’t want to be HER friend?!).  

She says she has to go because she’s getting too emotional and says goodbye. She’s also super sappy and when Marissa says, “you were the best,” she responds that they were the best TOGETHER! Awwwwwww.  

What a nice, fitting goodbye for Lucca. There’s no bad blood or fireworks—she just makes a change like a lot of people do. I’d like to think she’ll still be friends with Marissa and Jay after this. I don’t want too many Lucca references in future episodes, but I would really like it if we see Marissa and Jay update each other on the latest from Lucca, or if a scene begins with Marissa closing out an Instagram post from Lucca of her kid, or something. I wouldn’t want clues about what Lucca’s up to, but I’d love to see that she’s still a part of Marissa and Jay’s lives.

Now it is January 6th. Liz, Adrian, and Diane sit on the floor of the mostly empty office, watching TV coverage and drinking. It’s so relaxed it’s almost surreal, and it, like many other moments in this episode, feels like a slice of life. Everyone’s dressed casually and no one is worried about appearances or looking like the boss.  

“God, have you ever seen anything like it. It’s so fucked,” Diane says. Adrian’s more optimistic—the courts rejected most of the challenges to election results! “System worked,” he says. “Yay.” Liz says in response. She’s not as optimistic as he is.  

“Liz. Liz. Sometimes when things work out, there is no parade. There’s no congratulations, but I’ll tell you this: We live to fight another day,” he explains to her even though she makes a good point that a system just barely hanging on doesn’t bode well for the future. (She doesn’t say all this, but that’s a very loaded, “Yay.”)  

“Yeah? Then why are you leaving the law?” Liz asks. Diane seconds to the question.

Adrian announces he’s still retiring—and he’s moving to Atlanta. He wants to go to the south to help “create and consolidate political power.” He’s excited to start over and inspired by Georgia going blue. This is a very nice exit for Adrian. I fully believe that he’s interested in political organizing, that he’d be good at it, and that he’s ready for a change. I don’t think he’s always the most progressive person (of the three in this scene, Liz is absolutely the most progressive one, though Diane probably thinks she is!), but I absolutely think he thinks of himself as an activist and I believe that if he’s going to step away from the law, he’d do so to make a move like this.  

Adrian—and Lucca, but especially Adrian—probably both got better exits thanks to the events of 2020. If Adrian had just left to be groomed by the DNC, that would’ve been a predictable and boring ending for him. His candidacy would, obviously, go nowhere, and the whole thing felt weird from the minute it was introduced. But this? Adrian being energized—like so many others were—by the ways the world changed in 2020 and using his already announced departure from the firm and recent breakup as a chance to start over and make change? This is great!  

Adrian asks Liz and Diane what’s next for them. Liz says that she thinks the Biden admin will be better for black businesses. Adrian asks if they’re replacing him, and Diane says, “I think the big question is, are you replacing me?” She’s smart. I like how this scene goes from friendly to tense very fast, with everyone kind of testing the waters. Adrian tries to force the conversation, Liz opens with something vague yet pointed, and Diane speaks what’s previously been unspoken.

Liz says it’s not her intention to push Diane out. “I can’t change the color of my skin,” Diane replies. “I know,” Liz laughs. Audra’s delivery is fantastic on that line.  

“Hey, I’m gonna fight for my partnership,” Diane says. “I know,” Liz says. The tone of this scene is so different from previous partnership drama on these shows and I’m excited about it. This is just a bunch of adults talking about business decisions with each other and treating each other as equals?? It's not backstabbing?? Or drama?? No one is hiding things?? It’s refreshing and I hope this plot stays like this. We’ve done so much partnership drama that I think drama that stems from a real, pressing question that has no easy answers and isn’t anyone’s fault is going to be much more fruitful for the show.  

Adrian heads out—ah, I see now this scene is set in his empty office and this is why they are on the floor—and gets a nice last moment with Diane. And then they give him a last moment with Liz, which I knew they would but was still glad to see.  

Liz asks if he knows what he’s doing—he says he’s not sure.

Adrian asks if Liz knows where she stands regarding Diane. “It’s going to be interesting,” Liz says. I don’t think she’s decided what she’s going to do yet.

It wouldn’t be an Adrian and Liz scene if Adrian didn’t have some unsolicited advice. “Diane’s a terrific lawyer, but this firm belongs to you.  Your dad built it. He did, Liz. Despite all his faults. You got to run this place the way you want. This is a black firm. And after today, the world needs black firms. You got me?” He tells Liz. He makes it seem like Liz gets the choice and then tells her what to do. She says, “I got it,” signaling she understood him but not that she necessarily agrees.  

I cannot wait to see what Liz does next!!!!!!! About this but just in general!!!!! Without Adrian there giving her constant advice I feel like she can grow so much and the show will have to give her more to do!!! I think Adrian, for all his many wonderful qualities and all he brought to the show, can suck all the air out of a room with his charisma, and Liz usually ends up suffering as a result. She’s such a capable lawyer in her own right, but Adrian has a way of making it always seem like he’s right—even in arguments she wins. I’m excited to see Liz lead (or stumble at leadership; she is fairly new to management) without Adrian’s direct influence.  

Liz walks Adrian out and it’s cute. They run into Marissa and Jay. “Everybody fun is leaving,” Marissa notes. Liz is minorly offended, but playfully. Heh.

Adrian asks Jay how he’s doing; Jay says he’s a long-hauler but he’s doing okay. I like that they included that moment in Adrian’s goodbye sequence. It’s a very little thing, but it underlines that Adrian cares about Jay.  

Then Liz interrupts to note that Trump pardoned a lot of convicted and corrupt Republican officials....... including Julius.  

Everyone celebrates, but especially Diane and Marissa. Diane lets out her wonderful laugh and then we, finally, get to the credits. Because now that the previouslies are over, it’s time for the real show.

The credits are absolutely delightful, btw. I was a little worried some of the kittens would blow up, though! Once I relaxed and realized what they were up to—literal puppies and kittens because Biden won—I couldn’t get enough of these credits. They work so well because they accurately capture the way I (and all of these characters, except maybe Julius and Kurt) feel about the election results, but it’s so exaggerated that you know the kittens and puppies aren’t a realistic representation of our new reality. They’re just too good to be true, but you may as well enjoy them for a minute. I’m sure we’ll be back to exploding vases next week.

What a great episode! My timeline nitpicks and whatever they’re trying to do with Jay aside, I was blown away by how well the writers managed to move on from season 4, tie up loose ends, and write out two main characters. And they did it all while making me revisit the events of 2020, a year I don’t think many of us want to spend much time thinking about! This episode was enjoyable, fun, emotional, and clever. I don’t know what to expect from the rest of the season, but I’m definitely excited about the show in a way I haven’t really been in quite some time.  

This season’s naming convention seems to be titles that end with ... and only have the first word capitalized. I want to see more. 

Season FIVE? There have already been as many TGF seasons as there were TGW seasons prior to Hitting the Fan?! Time flies. 

Please writers: No topical episodes this year-- no pee tape, no Melania divorce, no Epstein. None of that business. 

Sorry if I repeated myself here. I never proofread these things, and I wrote half of this on Saturday and half of it today (Wednesday) and the days in between were an absolute blur so I cannot remember if I said the same things about this episode twice. 

[fandomsilhouette]

the fire I began (is burning me alive)

In the wake of everything he’s managed to destroy, Felix sifts through the dust and sand to see what he can salvage. Somewhere in between the heated guilt of failure and the cool stubbornness of pride, he manages to find himself in the innocence of children and the needleprick pain of an apology. 

As it happens, there’s more to happiness than a smile. There’s more to Felix, too. 

Happy @felixmonth, y’all! 

She makes it impossible to apologize. The thought crosses Felix’s mind before he shakes it away. No. He has made it impossible to apologize, with three years of back and forth bad behavior and no remorse to speak of. It had always seemed like a sign of maturity to keep every emotion lurking beneath the surface tension of his skin. Felix was a good boy, a calm boy. So why had the whole camp been against him? Felix didn’t stir up trouble. All he did was say what everyone was thinking. 

Well. Clearly not everyone. Actually, almost no one except Chloe herself, who only heard the abstract idea of it (thank goodness, or she would’ve been insufferable too). She seemed to know as soon as school started in the fall, despite finally managing to convince her father to let her skip camp. 

“I’m so glad someone finally said it. That Dupain-Cheng girl is the worst, don’t you think? She really just gets whatever she wants, which is ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous! No one can live like that, it’s absurd.” Chloe had latched onto Felix’s arm and hasn’t stopped talking since she found him. “And the way she does it!! It’s like no one else realizes she’s just being nice until they do what she wants. I knew people were dumb, but this is just--” 

“Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.” Felix drones out the words, all too familiar with her catchphrase even if she hadn’t repeated it twelve times in the span of her current rant. She doesn’t seem to notice his complete disinterest and clutches tighter at his arm, delighted. 

“Exactly!!” If she keeps this up, Felix is going to have bruises in the shape of her claws at the end of this, assuming she doesn’t just take his arm back to class. 

What did he even do wrong? All he said was what he knew. Was it too public? Was it his tone, that mysterious, ambiguous variable of intonation so hard for Felix to grasp? Was it the truth, too heavy for a slip of a girl like Marinette to bear? But she carried the weight of Chloe’s thorns and lashes with all the dignity and poise of a queen. She turned Chloe’s barbs into blossoms with all the skill and arts of a wordsmith, a master at her craft. 

Chloe turns the page on her rant and gestures wildly, nearly hitting Felix in the chest, and he has finally had enough. It’s been almost a month of school being plagued by Chloe’s agreement and a dawning feeling of unease, as though anything Chloe agrees with is necessarily wrong, and the tension finally snaps, a clean, clear break. 

Felix yanks his arm away and storms off. It’s time to do what he does best: sulk. 

Sulking is perhaps… a more generous term for what he does. Felix spends the rest of the fall semester hiding, slipping away from Marinette, watching her fend off the reluctant bullies falling quickly in line under Chloe’s regime and struggling to reconcile the way his stomach churns at the memory of what he said to the determined stubbornness of the truth in his mind. There’s something wrong in the way that he can’t look Marinette in the eyes anymore, on the days she sticks around long enough for Felix to even try. 

It takes him embarrassingly long to think about trying to live the way she does, to walk in her footsteps long enough to see exactly how broken and mercenary she is. Embarrassed and flustered and humiliated at the way a smile looks so unnatural on his features, Felix slinks away afterschool to volunteering at the library where toddlers don’t judge him for the way his lips stretch too tight across his skin and his cheeks flush a ruddy pink, blotchy and uneven. 

It’s… relaxing, to read to children. Felix falls into an easy cadence, voice rolling on the undulating waves of the story plots as they warble their approval cross-legged on rainbow colored floors. He finds himself slipping into voices, growling and snapping, cheering, squeaking, whispering, crowing, sitting up straighter to sound a little braver than he is. He finds himself leaning in, looking each child in the eyes as the tension builds. His favorites are the ones who reach for the books when he’s done and ask to read it again, the ones who cluster by his feet and watch with wide eyes as the pages turn. When his shifts end, he lets them follow him like ducks and pulls out his old favorites from the shelves for them to taste. 

Felix doesn’t realize how much he loves it here, no matter the sticky grubby palms and the tears and the wailing and whining. It seems natural by the time he lifts up one of the kids to sit in his lap, bouncing them along to the beat of the plot. He doesn’t think twice of it. 

The librarians do, and one of them pulls out a camera. 

Felix doesn’t see it until his face is splashed across promotional flyers, glossy and shining in the evening light. He’s never seen his face like that. He takes one home. 

It’s not that he’s smiling in the photo. But there’s something in his expression that has managed to completely transform his normally dour glumness into something… bright, no matter how little he smiles. It’s warm and comforting and familiar. 

It’s Marinette’s smile. 

Well, not really. There’s no smile there to compare. But his eyes are bright and wide, and his body is leaned into the camera. Tension has disappeared from his shoulders. He looks happy. 

He was happy, when the photo was taken. 

Oh.

Felix has an apology to make. 

Somehow, it has taken him most of the year to realize that not only is Marinette avoiding him, the teachers are helping her. They refuse to allow Felix to pair with her for projects, or sit next to her. Everytime he gets close to cornering her on break, she slips away with Nino or into a classroom where the teachers won’t let him enter and swear that she’s not in, no matter how much he can see her hair peeking out between the blinds. Maybe he’ll have better luck at camp. 

He doesn’t. 

Felix has never liked Luka, older-camper-turned-counselor who was way too partial to Marinette despite being three years older than her. In his opinion, Luka has no business being around Marinette at all. In anyone else’s opinion, Luka and Marinette were childhood friends through his little sister Juleka, and there was nothing wrong with it at all. Their easy laughter made Felix’s blood boil on the best of days, and the last three weeks of camp had been anything but. 

The teachers ushered Marinette into their protection under the guise of homework help and extracurriculars. Luka just whisks her away and throws his head back in laughter. Nino joins them and they huddle over notes scribbled into notebooks and Marinette’s clear voice carrying across the lake. 

...maybe Felix should just leave a note. 

He manages to go through an entire notebook’s worth of trashed apologies before he throws the book across the room and storms out. He has no idea where he’s going but it darn well better lead him to something he can give her to hold onto, to remember that she saw him once as a boy worth helping up a cliff, a boy worth keeping still for as he slept. Felix tears out the meadow grass as he walks and shreds it into angry confetti blowing back into his face on the wind. It’s picking up and Felix is starting to struggle against it enough that when the arts and crafts building comes into view, he doesn’t think twice before stepping in. 

He’s been avoiding it all summer, and for good reason. Reminders of Marinette are splashed up against every wall, every surface: her sewing kit strewn across a corner here, her lyrics spread out on a table there, projects propped up in various stages of completeness. It’s her haven, Felix can see that just by the way she lights up (the way she smiles, some part of him whispers now) when she walks in or talks about it. 

Something catches the light from across the room and Felix goes to investigate. A needle has managed to find its way out of her kit and is glimmering as the treetops sway in the wind and expose the metal to sunlight like a metronome. Three beats pass to the rhythm of his heart. 

An idea strikes, and the clouds that have been building all day finally burst. 

Felix spends the rest of the afternoon hunched over a workbench, ignorant to the announcements being made across camp to come back to the cabins, ignorant of the pain spiking up his back and the pinpricks of the needle on his fingertips. He works fast, a little messy, a little quick, and doesn’t mind the way the tears blur his vision. 

It isn’t until he’s racing to Marinette’s cabin in the pouring rain, prize clutched carefully to his chest in plastic wrap, that anyone finds him. It’s Luka, because of course it is, and Felix can already hear the lecture from across the field. Felix is a good boy. Felix follows the rules. Felix takes one look at Luka and sprints faster. 

He doesn’t get to see Marinette before he’s hauled off back to his cabin getting an earful about safety and following camp instructions, but as Luka pulls him away from her cabin, he throws the package at her steps and hopes it lands. 

After that, he collapses in a warm bath and lets the tension drain from his body, Luka’s words and warm water lapping at him in equal measure. 

She doesn’t talk to him or seek him out that summer, but he sees the pillow he’s made propped up in her window with the apology card settled neatly next to it. The two birds on the front lean into each other, curled up and happy, or whatever passes as happy with Felix’s sloppy stitching. When he stops to gape, she mouths the words he stitched so painstakingly and winks. 

Please keep smiling. 

[thefallenangelsgang]

Fic Writer Meme Tag (oh boy)

@just-another-wasteland-merc tagged me for this and let me tell you I am honored. I don’t even have a fic out yet and here she is. I’m tagging my best friend and rumored gay lover (when will that rumor ever die?) @helena-bug, all around fandom mom and lover of Macready @theartofblossoming, and newcomer to my feed and lovely person @dumbwastelander. And anyone else who wants to do this can name me as their challenger if they so wish!

Name:

Sm0lp0tat0

Fandoms: 

Lets consolidate this to things I write for, shall we? Fallout, The Hunger Games, and Minecraft Diaries (mainly for nostalgia factor I’m probably not going to post it anytime soon)

Most Popular Oneshot:

I actually don’t write oneshots? I am not sure why? I am mainly a little rat tip-tapping away at chapters.

Most popular multichapter:

Oh Jesus it was a disgustingly bad fic for Minecraft Diaries from when I was twelve. It had something like 3k reads on Wattpad and was just awful. It doesn’t exist anymore.

Actual worst part of writing:

Writing through writers block. Mine can last up to a year so I’ve gotten in the habit of writing through it until I get inspired again. What I write doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be words. Also losing all of your files. That happened to me once. My phone straight up broke (likely a software error but we still don’t know) and locked me out one night. I tried old passwords, I tried current passwords, nothing could get me in. We had to wipe the phone and I sobbed myself to sleep.

How you choose your titles:

They usually come out of nowhere. I also name my books before I even get to writing them. For my Fallout fic it took some doing. I was looking up name inspirations, the works. I finally settled on The Fallen for the first one (originally it was The Fallen Angels Gang but it didn’t feel like it fit) and One More Tomorrow for the second because that song slaps so hard. For my Diaries fic it’s I Can Do Better, I Promise, I Swear which were names that meant nothing until I developed the story further. For my Hunger Games fic Dead Giveaway was there from the beginning (once again from out of the blue) but I struggled a lot with the other names of the books. I just recently named them. Catching fire is named Rules and Roses, Mockingjay is Requiem, and the epilogue period is called The Burden of Tomorrow. They had names before that I hated, A Shadow In A Dream, Throne of Names, and Children Of Silence. They didn’t fit at all.

Do you Outline?:

Hah, no. I have a general path I follow usually (ie the plot of the work in writing about) but 9 times out of 10 I’m swinging wildly. The one exception is The Fallen. Because I have the opportunity to use dates (WHICH NEVER FUCKING HAPPENS) I am incredibly excited to plot it literally day by day.

Ideas I probably won’t get around to, but wouldn’t it be nice?:

I’ve always wanted to write an original story. I actually have an idea for one. I t has to do with gods and fantasy warfare (I actually wrote a short story for Lit class of it that I might post.) I just don’t have the inspiration or the time to work the whole thing out quite yet.

Callouts @ Me: 

Stop being down in the dumps about not writing enough! You wrote! That’s an achievement. If you didn’t write at least you stared at the screen for a while thinking! You used your brain! 

Best writing traits:

Both bad and good, I edit as I write. It’s easier for me if I have the full picture in my head. 

Spicy Tangential Opinion:

Most writing advice is bullshit so don’t let it shame you. Everyone has a different process. Some can pound out chapter after chapter. Others don’t share their work. It’s okay. If you write anything, even just dumb scenarios, you are a writer.

[imaginesmai]

Klaus-The painting

KLAUS MIKAELSON-D FOR DIE

Requested by @witch-of-letters, I hope you like it!

Plot: your anniversary is coming up, and Klaus is determinated to put into a painting your relationship. Someone might finish it before he gets the chance.

More of Klaus Angst Alphabet: B for Baby

Warnings: major angst

Klaus had been staring at the painting for at least an hour, not wrapping himself around the idea he wanted to draw. Sure, he knew he wanted it to be something special, something that summed up everything in your relationship. After all, it had been ten years of happy marriage and the occasion deserved only the best.

In your past anniversaries, he had tried every kind of gift. From buying you the most expensive necklace in France to taking you to Haleakala in Hawaii to see the sun rise. He didn’t care how much it cost or how difficult it was; as long as it put a smile on your face, it was fine. And he had succeeded in that in the past ten years; so he didn’t understand why it was so difficult that one.

You had always told him that you loved his paintings. How he would focus only on it and forget about the rest of the world. The way his brows would furrow together and his mouth would part open. You appreciated and loved each one of his works, and gladly let him hang them in your walls. In all of them, you were there, always the faint inspiration of his paintings. Still, he wanted to draw one just for you. And he was ready to pull at his hair and scream as loudly as he could.

“Klaus? I’m home!” your sweet voice rang from the lower floor, and panic set on his eyes. You were supposed to be out for at least another two hours. “Love, where are you?”

Twelve years ago he wouldn’t have had any problem; he would have picked everything with his vamp speed and ran to you. But you had been a vampire too for nine years, a very nosy one. Klaus looked around the room and decided it was not worthy, so he ran out of the door and closed it behind him just to see your cocky grin looking up at him.

“What’s in there? Are you hiding something?” you raised your brows, and Klaus felt the heat rising into his cheeks at your smirk. Even after five years of dating and ten of marriage, you could still make him feel like a silly teenager.

“I thought you were in the market, love”

“I was, but I grew tired and wanted to see my handsome husband. Why? Is it a problem, Klaus? Wouldn’t you be hiding something from me?”

“I’m not-“

“I would say a lover, but we’re past that already, hm?” you chuckled, putting your hands on his chest. “So I’m going to for a present. Am I right, Klaus? Are you hiding there a gift for me?”

Klaus rolled his eyes at your curiosity. Since last week, when he made the mistake of asking you to leave the house so that he could work on your painting, you had been trying to guess your present. He hadn’t been subtle, it wasn’t his thing, and he had to deal with the consequences then.

You had looked everywhere except for that room, and Klaus intended to keep it that way.

“Actually, I was fucking with my lover in there, Y/N” he teased. “I was thinking about leaving you for her, since she’s far more quiet than you.”

“Oh, I highly doubt any other woman can stand you like I do, Klaus.”

Being a vampire might have increased your speed and your strength, but not your height. Standing on your tip toes you captured Klaus lips in a soft kiss, enjoying the warm feeling that spread through your heart. Klaus hummed against your mouth happily, and pulled you closer to him by your hips.

His hands travelled slowly down your sides, as his lips caressed you with love. You tried to drag the kiss longer, but finally you broke away when his hands rested against your ass. You let go of his lip with a small bite, making him look at you with playful eyes.

“Elijah wants to talk to you” you said, your hands playing with the bottoms of his shirt. “I’ve found him in the market, he told me that you should go to their house as soon as possible.”

“Not even a week of peace” he sighed. “I thought I told them I was not coming back to the Mikaelson’s house.”

After your marriage, Klaus and you had bought a little house outside the city. It was quiet enough and you didn’t have to worry about anyone finding you. The idea of having children was not welcome for any of you; it would be too dangerous and you enjoyed too much your calm environment. So a little house with a small garden was all you needed.

Klaus remembered the day he told his siblings he was leaving. Rebekha had been furious, throwing things at him, and Elijah had tried to convince him otherwise. Kol screamed at him that family was everything; funny coming from him, since he was never home. A few months passed until the accepted he wanted to be away from that world, and that he had found his little space of happiness with you.

“If it’s another shitty problem about-“

“What if it’s something important, Klaus?” you frowned. “I know you said you didn’t want to do anything with them, but if they are in big trouble they will need your help.”

“I have things to do love. Much better and important things to do.”

“Unless you want me to assume you’re talking about my present, you should go help him.”

He locked his eyes with you, pouting like a child. He just wanted time to finish your present, or he wouldn’t have it ready for the next day. Probably, his brother just wanted some help with werewolves witches or some matter that he didn’t care about. But if you were good at something beside being nosy, it was at staring contests.

For a few minutes, you just stared at each other without blinking. You mimicked your husband’s pout, tilting your head to the side and putting your best puppy face. Little by little, Klaus’ face started to fall; first, his eyebrows twitched and he blinked. Then, his lip trembled and finally he looked to his right with a roll of his eyes.

You jumped excitedly, and laughed at his childish attitude.

“Come on, Klaus, you know you can’t beat me in a staring contest! It was bold of you to assume I would give up” you pecked his pursed lips, playing with the hairs at the back of his neck.

“If I go, I want you to promise me you won’t enter this room.”

“Why don’t you trust me?”

“Because I know you, love” he laughed. “And I know that, as soon as I walk out this door, you will peak inside.”

“Well, as long as I know, love, this is also my house. So in terms of walking around it, I can step in whatever room I want to.”

“Then I guess I will have to leave you tied down in our bed and deal with you later” he smirked, sneaking a hand in your trousers and giving your ass a hard pinch. “Just to be sure, I will need to turn on the vibrator. And, you know how Elijah is, Y/N. Might be there for a while.”

At the beginning of your relationship, you would have died in embarrassment at his words or ran away to hide under your blanket and deal with your horny self. But you were familiar enough with Klaus to know he loved when you teased back.

The hand that wasn’t caressing his neck gripped his crotch and gave it a squeeze. Klaus gasped as you pushed him back against the door.

“Then I expect you to come home before midnight, just like Cinderella. Because if you don’t Klaus, I might have to take care of myself” Klaus’ eyes were clouded with doubts; half of him wanted to run towards his old house and slam his brother’s head against the table for making him leave you in that moment. The other half wanted to forget about his brother and about the painting and bend you over the nearest table.

“You’re being such a brat, love” he massaged your ass with his hand inside your jeans. “I hope you know what you’re getting yourself into.”

“I’ve known for the past fifteen years, Klaus” you smiled. “And I don’t regret it one bit. Now go before Elijah finds us in an awkward position.”

With the image of your naked form on your bed and your open legs waiting for him, he nearly knocked a few things in his way out. As soon as he came back, he was going to paint your body with a different type of paint.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“C-Care to repeat that?” Klaus chuckled awkwardly, his mind not wanting to understand what his sister was telling him.

She rolled her eyes, turning another page of her book without paying much attention to her brother.

“Elijah is gone, Klaus. Had been for a few weeks, and I’m under house arrest until things are solved” she said, sarcasm and hate for his brother dripping down her voice.

When he came into her house asking for Elijah with anxious eyes, she thought something must had happened. Recently, New Orleans had been a nightmare. Their father, Mikael, had been seen roaming around the country, followed by the most powerful witches in the world. They thought it was fake until Rebekah was almost killed on her way back home; since then Elijah had been looking for him while she was locked in the house. Making her more grumpy than usual.

“Y/N told me she saw him in the market, asked her for me to meet him here. Maybe he’s coming” Klaus sat in one of the couches, trying to mask his confusion. “Sure you don’t mind me here, sister.”

Rebekah rolled her eyes at the mention of your name. She didn’t like you, and she didn’t mind showing it to everyone she met. Even if her brother had hidden her into a coffin for years and threatened to kill her, he was still her brother; and in her eyes, you took him away.

“He’s not coming, Klaus. I talked to him this morning, and he is two states away. He can’t come here that quickly even if he wants to.”

Klaus frowned, trying to find something logical about the situation. He always knew when you were lying; you tended to raise your left brow. Besides, he was the one who turned you, so you had a special connection.

As he sat in the seat waiting for his brother, he found that he didn’t miss a thing about his old house. Each corner was filled with laughs and fights with his brothers, with good times and mostly bad ones. They had been his family, yet he hadn’t felt like one of them for years. Then, he got you and he really felt like home.

Rebekah’s book was long forgotten, and she focused instead on her brother’s absent smile. She was used to his sarcastic talking, not to his daydreaming.

“Are you thinking about your next victim, Niklaus?”

“That’s not on me and you know it, Bekah” he smiled at her. “I was actually thinking that if he isn’t going to come, I’ll be going”

“You could help us. It’s your father too, brother. If we go down, you’ll be next, and your toy too.”

“Last time I saw him, he was dead. He had a white oak stake in his heart, and I’m sure we burn his body until there was nothing left” he raised his finger when his sister opened his mouth. “I told you, Rebekah, I’m not coming back. I have a life with Y/N and I’m happy. No matter how many problems you get yourself into, I’m out. It’s pretty sad that you have to say that our father has come back to bring me here, you know? You can always visit.”

Klaus enjoyed as his sister’s neck became red with fury, and her eyes twitched with anger. Throwing the book across the room, she got up from her seat and looked down at Klaus.

“You’re an idiot, Nik. She’s going to leave you or hurt you, and then you’re going to realise what you have lost. Don’t expect me to collect your broken pieces.”

“Tell Elijah I say hi, and to stop joking with us!”

With a final wink, Klaus ran towards the door and slammed it shut; in time to see how a sharp pencil stuck into it. Followed by Rebekah’s angry scream and the sound of things breaking. Oh, he didn’t regret leaving one bit.

He took his time walking home, feeling comfortable between the shadows of the night. It was eleven thirty, and his body was physically shaking with excitement. Klaus could almost see you in your bed, waiting for him to adore and ravish you. The paining could wait, he decided. He had already the main idea, and he was going to expand it that night with your body.

Too caught up on his own thoughts and imagination, he didn’t register the smell of blood from outside your house. He should have, but being around you and your kinky sex life had made him used to your blood’s smell. So he walked right through the door without a second thought.

As always, your house was dark. He placed his keys on the horrendous bowl you had made in your crafts workshop some years ago. He didn’t like it, yet he didn’t have the heart to tell you so, seeing how proud you were of your work. Klaus walked up the stairs and saw the light of your room on. A well-known feeling made itself known in his body, and he was almost tempted to take out all his clothes. Almost.

Yet something else caught his attention; to his right, the room where your painting was kept was half open. It didn’t come out any light from inside, but he didn’t leave it open. Sure as hell he remembered closing it and seeing your mischievous eyes looking at it as he ran away a few hours ago.

Logical connections appeared in his mind, and he smiled when he imagined you lying to him just to get him out of the house to see your gift. The things that he was going to do to you that night. But before, he wanted to make sure everything was on its place. That you hadn’t knocked up anything. So with a last look towards your suspiciously quiet room, he opened the door of the studio.

“What the fuck have you done?” the question left his mouth to the air as he saw what was inside. In the dark, he could see some paints on the ground, and a lot of stains on it. There was a huge mess, and he was ready to shout your name until he turned on the lights.

It was not paint what was on the floor, it was blood. It was full of blood, the painting that he had been working so hard on was covered with it too, an unnatural amount of it. Klaus felt his throat closing up, the urge of puking too big to stop it; so he bended down on his right side and emptied the contents of his stomach. Without getting up, just dragging himself out of the room, he called your name desperately.

“Y/N! For fuck sake, Y/N?! Come here, love! This is not funny!” Klaus tried to get up, but he fell down again as tears fell down his cheeks. “Y-Y/N?! I’m-I’m not mad, okay? I don’t care if you have-if you have seen it.”

By the time he was finished calling your name, he head arrived to your room. The soft light of your night light let him see that your room was a mess too. Your drawers had been turned around, your closet open and one of the bed legs was broken. In a twisted way, it was the one that was closest to him, so it seemed that your body was facing him.

Klaus didn’t get to your bed before falling down again, he had to crawl towards it as sobs shake his body. In the bed, you had your arms crossed in front of your chest. Some fingers were missing, and those who were there had bruises or were angled in a strange way. Your legs, that had been always his favourite part of your body, were covered in blood and bruises, and he could almost guess that there were bites on them.

The only part of your body that was untouched was your face. You looked like you were sleeping, with your eyes closed and your lips parted. Had it not been for the gore sight and the dried tears in your cheeks. Klaus got into the bed and gripped your body close to him, crying into your neck as his hands tried to fix an unrepairable damage.

That night, he howled, cried, sobbed. He screamed at nothing and everything, and he shouted for someone to take you back to him. When morning’s light, Klaus tears dried out. His eyes were red and his lips were dry; his clothes, drenched with your blood and your body cold between his arms.

Slowly, he got out of bed and walked towards the room with the painting. In the middle of your gift, stood the only thing that managed to get another tear out of him. He wiped it furiously as he took your shattered heart in his hands and looked at him.

Klaus knew who had done it. Rebekah had told him and he thought that she was lying; and then, you were dead. The last coherent thought that left Klaus mind before he ran out of the house was the beautiful idea he had for you gift.

[septembersung]

I said I wouldn’t do it, but here I am, posting another chapter of Generations!

Please understand that this draft is, while scanned for typos and basic coherency, a genuine “rough” draft - what a block sketch is to the final painting.

If you’re enjoying these and want more, please also know that I am putty in the hands of praise and feedback.

(Chapter One here.)

Chapter Two

Meadowlark Farm stretched across four sections in central Kansas, more than two thousand acres of plains, rolling hills, riverbanks, stubborn cottonwoods, irregular ponds, and the occasional dense stands of timber. The old family farmhouse stood close to the middle of the property, near what had once been a river but was now a seasonal creek, in a particularly fine grove of cottonwoods. In high summer, the waxy leaves shimmered wildly in the slightest breeze, like a flock of dragonflies or a shoal of fleeing fish.

The house itself rested against a little rise in the land, looking out sedately over the fields, with one basement corner, the original cellar, built into the hill. Two ancient limestone fenceposts still marked the end of the patchy gravel driveway, half taken over by dandelions. Huge clumps of pampas grass marked the rutted drive. The house rested easily in the shade of tall elms and cottonwoods. Part of the original limestone foundation remained, ringing three corners of the original square ground floor. Seen from the side, where the driveway ended in a field of stubby buffalo grass, it looked regular enough, a typical nineteenth and twentieth century farmhouse in peeling white paint. Walking around the curving front porch revealed an extra wing, built on at a diagonal angle, which stuck out like an injured bird testing the wind with its good wing. The attic, a huge airy room above the original second floor, winked back at the sun with many small square windows.

Back of the house, in the triangle between the west-facing end of the house the northward-thrusting angle of thew the new wing - over a hundred years old and still it remained, in family parlance, "the new wing" - a little kitchen garden grew half-wild. Wide, smooth stepping stones marked the short path from screen door to the little plot.

Beyond the new wing, in the true backyard, children's playground equipment dotted the slope. Mismatched swings hanging from chains and ropes attached to rusting A-frames and weathered wooden beams swung gently in the perpetual Kansas breezes. Slides and monkey bars glinted in the hot sun. Chickenwire separated the play area from an enormous rectangular garden, already overflowing with produce, heavily over-planted, and exuding fragrant herb smells with every gusty breeze. The land ran down a gentle hill towards a dense growth of timber and a long, enormous pond.

Not too near the pond, several mismatched outbuildings hunched in what could not quite be called a cluster. Like a crowd trying to pretend it is not a crowd, each person too embarrassed to stand too close to anyone else, they held a swath of ground to themselves. A huge, two story barn with its paint long gone, worn to a brownish grey. A nearly shiny Morton building, not quite new but startlingly contemporary. A hay shelter, with rusted slanted roof. A skeleton barn, with just a few peeling boards left here and there, it's empty roof frame stretching over antique machinery. And a solid, unremarkable little shed, red boards dulled to maroon, covered in a patched roof of mismatched shingles topped with an enormous handmade antenna. The double front doors stood ajar and a solid-looking padlock hung from the wide-open latch, hanging casually open.

Beyond the swings, the big garden, the outbuildings, and the pond, the land fell sharply away to a creek bed. It was low in this high, dry summer, and nearly still. The banks, crumbled where the grass gave way to clay, ran with little wavering along the crease where hill met plain, until they met the little woods to the east. Cropland stretched out beyond the creek to the north. Near the trees, but enough to be shaded by them except in earliest morning, just on the north side of the river, lay the old family burial ground.

It had not always been meticulously tended, but in Leah's lifetime the oldest headstones had been somewhat restored, the most egregious weeds removed, and this summer, even the grass had been recently mowed.

Anna-Lucia knelt at her mother's headstone. Martha Addison, beloved wife, mother, sister. May 8 2005 - August 15, 2070. RIP Et Lux perpetua luceat eia.

The thick granite headstone with its neatly cut, clear letters stood in line with several others, some so weathered and faded as to be hardly legible. After a moment, hand resting on the sun-hot granite, Anna-Lucia sat down and crossed her legs, shoulders slumped, hands folded in her lap. A few brown rosary beads hung between her fingers, but her mind had drifted into wind and dappled light and the hum of insects and the sound the tall grass made bowing again and again to itself in the gentle, incessant breeze. Time passed but she did not know it. Then -

"Here you are!"

Anna-Lucia started badly as a sun-blind silhouette loomed over and dropped down suddenly, throwing two strong arms around her shoulders.

Dazed from the bright light and her unintentional reverie, it took Anna-Lucia several stunned seconds to process the small hands with many rings, the flyaway, unevenly cut dark blonde curls, the lavender perfume.

"Liza!" she gasped out at last, returning the hug.

In the sixteen months since she had seen her sister, Liza's choppy curls had grown irregularly long. Her wiry arms were sun browned and stronger than ever.

"Oh, I have missed you, little sister," Liza sighed affectionately, giving her one last squeeze and sitting back, stretching out like a cat on the warm prickly grass. It was an old joke between them; Liza, the eldest, was as petite and youthful as their mother had been; Anna-Lucia had her father's bigger bones and had nearly always been mistaken as the oldest.

Trying to shake off the sun-daze and afternoon grogginess, Anna-Lucia found she had no words - just a huge, cheek-splitting grin, and a few irrepresible tears in the corner of her eyes. She gripped Liza's shoulder and squeezed. Liza smiled back, but her eyes were tired and new care lines were etched there.

"You didn't tell me you were coming," Anna-Lucia said at last, when the silence had stretched so long it began almost to feel like another dream.

"No one knew. Not even me, until forty-eight hours ago. I fully expected to miss this year's reunion and be stuck on the beat 'til Christmas."

"Lots to report in Rome?"

"I've hardly been there - they send me all over the EU. That's the great thing about this job. Catholicity is a small operation with big dreams. I'm really the only full-time culture reporter they've got, so I have my pick of assignments. There's enough for three of me and three Giovannis besides."

"I still can't believe they get away that name."

Liza grinned wickedly. "Oh it's caused a few misunderstandings, but the reporter credentials, and the kinds of bylines I'm racking up, set them straight pretty fast."

"I hardly know anything about your job - you've sent three letters, Liza. Three, in a year and a half."

"Sixteen months, thank you very much." Liza hesitated. "It's - changing, over there. Letters aren't as... in vogue as they used to be."

Anna-Lucia looked at her sharply. "You're joking." She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, pushing away the lingering brain fog and reminding herself she was still not certain what privacy remained at home. Take nothing for granted. "I mean, nothing's more fashionable than retro, right? Where would the elite be if not at the height of fashion?"

Liza shrugged, an airy show of unconcern belied by the downturned corners of her mouth, as she reached into her bag, tossed carelessly on the ground next to her. "Whatever fires their rockets, I guess. It's pages, now. Personal pages to orally deliver messages."

Anna-Lucia felt inside, somewhere, that this was more important than she grasped, than her sister let on, but the sun had been slowly cooking her for more than an hour and Liza was pulling out of her carelessly dropped bag a thick wad of cream-colored envelopes addressed in a trailing scrawl she knew very well.

Her heart leapt. "You saw him!"

Liza shook her head, and she was pale under her tan. "These came through the postal service."

Not, Anna-Lucia registered distantly, the post office.

"That's how I found you out here, actually. I got in not twenty minutes ago and went in looking for Dad, and Grandma immediately sent me out here." Her eyes conveyed that Leah had warned her, too, they could not speak completely freely in the house. "These are all addressed to him."

Anna-Lucia stared at her. "Just to Dad? Not even one for me? Or you?"

"I tried to tell you." Liza held out the letters. "Check the dates."  Swiftly, Anna-Lucia tugged the rubber bands off the thick stack and they uncompressed in her hands, spilling over her lap. Each was labeled, F1sh, followed by a string of numbers she recognized as an encoding of month, year, and - something she couldn't decipher. Location, probably.

"A year ago? The most recent one is twelve months old?"

"One's only seven."

"You've read them?"

Liza frowned at her. "I take my job seriously, Anna-Lucia."

"I'm sorry. Stupid question." Mechanically, Anna-Lucia gathered the letters back up and rebound them. "So you've had no news."

Liza just looked at her.

Understanding began to dawn, and Anna-Lucia did not like it. "That's why you came home."

"We need Uncle Kevin's address book."

"No news at all? Seven months and nothing? Not a single person knows where he is or what happened to him?"

"Will you help me find Dad?" Liza pleaded, glancing down at her watch, a slim, chic, old fashioned ladies' analog. "He needed these... yesterday."

Anna-Lucia felt as unmovable as the headstones beside her.

"Please, Anna-Lucia. I don't... I can't tell him alone."

Liza stood and held out a hand. Anna-Lucia grasped it and was hauled to her feet, stiff, half-asleep limbs complaining and uncooperative. She heaved a deep breath, involuntarily, as if she'd been swimming underwater. Their little brother had been missing for at least seven months, and no one had heard a thing.

"Dad's in the new shed."

[jullienfm]

jacob elordi. cis male. he/him.  ／  jc "jules" jullien just pulled up blasting ain't it fun by paramore  — that song is so them ! you know, for a twenty - two year old nhl player, i’ve heard they’re really naive, but that they make up for it by being so magnanimous. if i had to choose three things to describe them, i’d probably say well - worn skates sporting freshly sharpened blades, drops of blood collecting in a white porcelain sink, and small town roots kept intact against all odds. here’s to hoping they don’t cause too much trouble ! ( sam, 23, est, she/her )

it is i, sam, and i also write jack ( @devinfm​ ) buuuut here’s another character that’s almost exactly the same as the last one but with one or two small changes. feel free to message me if you’d like to plot!

i. stats

𝙛𝙪𝙡𝙡 𝙣𝙖𝙢𝙚: jean-claude valère jullien

𝙥𝙧𝙚𝙛𝙚𝙧𝙧𝙚𝙙 𝙣𝙖𝙢𝙚𝙨: jc, jules

𝙝𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙩𝙤𝙬𝙣: dawson city, yt

𝙙𝙖𝙩𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙗𝙞𝙧𝙩𝙝: january 1st, 1998

𝙯𝙤𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙘: capricorn

𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣: idk heterosexual for now

𝙥𝙤𝙨. 𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙩𝙨: magnanimous, solicitous, responsible.

𝙣𝙚𝙜. 𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙩𝙨: naive, jittery, gauche.

ii. history

jean-claude valère "jules" jullien was born and raised in dawson city, a town in the yukon. his father is a miner while his mother stayed home with their eleven children. yes, you read that correctly, eleven kids, all boys. their ages range from the eldest being in his late thirties to jules, who is the youngest by a margin of about twelve years.

he was a high - risk pregnancy. his mother was in her forties and thought she was through with having children, so when he was born a bit small and premature but otherwise perfectly healthy, jules was immediately considered a miracle child and doted on accordingly.

he was sheltered from the start, homeschooled by his mother ( while his brothers attended the local public school ) and given a band aid and a kiss for every little bump and bruise. the fact that none of his brothers grew to resent him is a whole other miracle in itself, but to be honest most of them took after their parents and participated in coddling him, and those who didn't were at least old enough to not care that much.

jules learned how to skate before he even learned how to walk, and he's been playing hockey for just as long. he started out on the frozen lake in the backyard of his childhood home with a few of his brothers, and it quickly became apparent that he not only possessed a natural talent for the sport, but that he also genuinely loves it.

he was so good at hockey that he was allowed to play at the junior level in canada a year early ( he was the third player to ever be granted the privilege ) and from then on it became his entire life. at just fifteen years old he was breaking records, collecting awards, and garnering attention from nhl scouts in his first season alone. from then on, the improvement and accolades just kept coming.

he played his first international tournament in sochi with the canadian under - 18 team when he was 16, leading the tournament in goals and points and helping to win gold for team canada. he was awarded the chl's player of the year award following his final season playing junior hockey and is one of the most decorated players in the league's history.

jules was the first round, first overall draft pick by the los angeles kings when he entered the nhl. at the start of his second year, he was named captain of the team, making him the youngest captain in nhl history at 19 years and 254 days old. he's a three - time world championship gold medalist, a four - time nhl all star and last year, he signed an eight year / 12.5 mil per year contract with the kings, which is one of the highest in the nhl. he gets picked on for his age, and there are people who think he's overrated, but the fact of the matter is : he brings results.

iii. extras

it's jc or jules. no one ever calls him jean-claude because it’s just too much of a mouthful for no good reason.

jules is the team captain and plays center for the la kings hockey team, #98 as a nod to his birth year. he's a four time all star, well known for his speed, and a fun fact is that he's ambidexterous so he can shoot with both hands.

six foot five, 190 lbs...so, kinda lanky.

his mom is from quebec so he's semi - fluent in french and kiiiinda has a little accent. 

he's nice. so nice, that he's actually nice to a fault. a downside to his sheltered upbringing is that he's very naive, so he's an easy target for people especially pretty girls to use for clout and free stuff, then drop once he's served his purpose. it's happened many times and jules is none the wiser. he just thinks he has really bad luck.

he can be quite anxious. he’s had a lot of pressure on him for a while now and hockey is obviously something that he takes very seriously, so he’s kinda...tense. he can also be a little nervous in social situations and tbh he literally doesn’t know how to talk about anything except for hockey and taking pictures. 

he's gotten into basketball since he moved to los angeles, so he's a HUUUUGE lakers fan. catch him courtside at every single game he can make it to.

he’s also gotten into music! he really likes bands like blink and all time low and probably wants to learn how to play an instrument like the drums so potential wc

he's always had an interest in photography he got a camera from his parents as a teenager and it’s become a beloved hobby of his. it's nothing that he would ever consider pursuing seriously, but he's often seen with his camera and likes to take pictures of his friends, architecture, basketball games, concerts, or anything else he finds interesting.

might occasionally be seen with a book instead of his camera.

don't ask to take a picture of him, though — he hates being on the other side of the lens.

he's quiet and modest, but every once in a while he likes to flex a liiiittle bit.

iv. wanted connections

Dudebro™ best friend

non - Dudebro™ best friend

friends ( close friends, friends, friendly acquaintances )

someone he’s protective over

cousins ( most likely from canada or the midwest, but otherwise anything goes for this. )

fwb and one night stands

his celebrity crush / someone who’s crushing on him

exes ( some who have used him for clout / free stuff, some who didn’t, some who did and then regretted it, all of the above! )

( these are just ideas and i’m trash at coming up with stuff, so please don’t feel limited by what’s listed here. )

[tessatechaitea]

Wonder Twins #8

The British version of Polly Math isn't as clever because her name is Polly Maths.

I thought aging was waking up every morning because you didn't take enough pills the night before.

The worst part about aging is being too dead to see the youth who made fun of you for being old grow old and die themselves. The sad old 48 year old guy typing this wants you to know that the sad old 48 year old guy in the panel is the principal of Zan and Jayna's high school. The librarian is also a sad 48 year old guy except not a guy and maybe not sad. She probably fucked the principal in high school though. This is probably a love story. Not one of those love stories that ends happily. More like one of those love stories where some lonely jerk goes to their 30th high school reunion and tells the person they had a crush on in high school that they never stopped loving them and the person they confess to says, "Did we know each other?"

I'm beginning to think I shouldn't be as proud as I am to guess where comic book plots are going. I'm fucking pathetic.

Don't worry. Principal Adultman doesn't admit to being a chronic sleep-creeper in the panel following the previously scanned bunch. He just says, "I'm a principal!" Although I totally would have been intrigued if he had said, "I was a sleep-creeper!" I would have thought, "Gross! What a jerk," and not, "Oh! I hope we get a flashback!" Because I'm a decent person who now knows sleep-creeping is wrong. Principal Adultman wants to cancel his 30th high school reunion so he doesn't have to interact with Librarian Lost Love. I guess he's afraid they might play The Cure's "Last Dance" during the reunion which was playing the first time he finger-banged the librarian. The principal confesses his love for the librarian and his subsequent failure over the years to get over it on the open school announcement microphone. So now the librarian knows things are even more awkward than she realized! Now she has to start preparing her speech about how there's no way he can love her because he doesn't know her and even if he thought he loved her in high school, she didn't love him. She couldn't love him because she didn't even know who she was or what she wanted and should she have to live with the unintended consequences of one moment where she really wanted to fucking cum on some guy's warm hand for the rest of her lives simply because that warm hand belonged to some schlub?! Maybe she's the type of person who doesn't prepare speeches and she'll just tell him to fuck off and get a life. Although she's a librarian so I think speeches probably excite her as much as the album Disintegration does. Somewhere in the high school reunion drama is a story about Polly Math and her inability to forgive Jayna for putting her in prison and failing to save her dad from eternity in The Phantom Zone. But I don't think that's as important as that old guy still pining for a woman who forgot about him decades ago. Polly escapes prison or something. I don't know. I just skimmed those pages to get to the final embarrassing confrontation between Principal Adultman and Librarian Lost Love that Jayna is unwittingly setting up. She thinks she can prove people will always forgive each other. Ha ha! What a child!

Bah. Stupid Jayna being right.

Wonder Twins #8 Final Thoughts: I guess Mark Russell doesn't trade in cynicism. He's all about earnestness and optimism and hope and shit. Hey, I get that! It's totally the stuff I would aspire to if I wasn't such a lowly, scum-sucking piece of crap. But I'd still prefer for Librarian Lost Love to have been a bit mean. He treats her like a failed conquest for thirty years, making as if she's the reason his world has fallen apart and his time at work has uncomfortable moments, while she was just going on with her life as he grew smaller and smaller in her rear view and he expects her to do the heavy lifting of forgiveness?! Fuck that dude! Although, I suppose, if he didn't matter to her as much as I suspect he didn't matter to her, it's easy enough to just say, "Sure! You're forgiven. Now can you stop making things so awkward, you immature turd?" Anyway, I guess Polly is going to forgive Jayna soon because they're going to team up to save Polly's dad.

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

by Wardog

Monday, 23 July 2007Wardog opens the inevitable slew of Harry Potter by bitching and moaning.~Reviewing Harry Potter has got to be something of a pointless endeavour; I mean, if you like Harry Potter you'll read it anyway and if you don't, well, you probably have more self respect than I do just about now. The truth of the matter is, I don't like Harry Potter any more. Once, upon a time, when they were tautly-plotted, slim-line, above-average children's books I was very fond of them. But now that they're a sprawling, insufficiently edited Phenomenon I can't read them without frustration, and yet seem to be incapable of, you know, stopping. It's depressing, I think I need a twelve step programme. Given that the book has evolved beyond conventional reviewing (and that's not a good thing) here are some assorted observations.

Needless to say: spoilerific, including death spoilers

Plot & Pacing

As in the preceding two books, this is completely wrecked. Although it has a beginning and a reasonably climatic ending sequence (the Battle of Hogwarts, because that's all we ever really cared about anyway, wasn't it?) everything in between seems jerky and uneven. Essentially, it consists of long stretches of exposition interspersed with pockets of reasonably exciting action sequences, as Team Potter infiltrate the Ministry, Gringotts, Malfoy Manner and finally Hogwarts with varying degrees of success and pointfulness. If I was feeling generous, I would comment on the thematic nature of these incursions, and how resonant it is that everything that Harry was introduced to in the earlier books as a source of protection and authority is now corrupted. But I'm not feeling generous; Harry, Ron and Hermione spend an enormous quantity of the book sitting in a magically protected tent in the middle of nowhere, dithering between hallows and horcruxes and reading Rita Skeeter's biography of Albus Dumbledore.

Aside from one or two chapters at the beginning of the book, the Harry Potter books have always been told entirely from Harry Potter's point of view. The reader sees what Harry Potter sees, and hears what Harry Potter hears. This comes with attendant advantages and disadvantages. It brings the reader close to Harry and makes you root for him, it also rigidly controls the flow of information between author and reader. But it also means that for anything to happen, Harry has to be there. That's why he spends such a lot of time crawling around beneath his invisibility cloak listening in on plot dumps. Needless to say, the same holds true of the seventh book; the whole wizarding world is at war but we hear of it as Harry does, through daily prophet articles and occasional communications. There's no sense of scale or grandeur. It's unpleasant, yes, and oppressive but it packs only a limited emotional punch because the reader, like Harry, it stuck in a freaking tent.

Furthermore, a large portion of the book is told through letters, extracts from books, articles, memories, long autobiographical interludes from minor characters who suddenly turn out to be important. It's not precisely tedious but the preoccupation with the backplot, as ever, hinders the build to a dramatic climax. There's even an intermission, I kid you not, an intermission in the final showdown so Harry can peg it off to Dumbledore's office to re-live the last seven books from Snape's perspective. Perhaps I'm old fashioned but I don't think three chapters from the end is a good place for a massive exposition.

I'm not saying there aren't good bits, because there are. Neville kicks Dark Lord ass, for example, Dudley, of all people, has a moment of touching redemption and Luna remains just fabulous throughout. But the book seems to have no sense of itself as, well, a book. Books need to build to something, books need pace and structure, books need to be edited! But as Dan said, it's not a book, it's source material.

Style

Perhaps a demonstration is in order...

A quote from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets:

"Hang on..." Harry muttered to Ron. "There's an empty chair at the staff table.... Where's Snape? "Maybe he's ill!" said Ron hopefully. "Maybe he's left," said Harry, 'because he missed out on the Defence Against the Dark Arts job again!" "Or he might have been sacked!" said Ron enthusiastically. "I mean, everyone hates him --" "Or maybe," said a very cold voice right behind them, "he's waiting to hear why you two didn't arrive on the school train." Harry spun around. There, his black robes rippling in a cold breeze, stood Severus Snape. He was a thin man with sallow skin, a hooked nose and greasy, shoulder-length black hair, and at this moment, he was smiling in a way that told Harry he and Ron were in very deep trouble.

Aww. Just typing that out made me nostalgic for happier times when I actually used to enjoy reading Harry Potter. A quote from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows...

And then with a little shudder the elf became quite still, and his eyes were nothing more than great, glassy orbs sprinkled with light from the stars they could not see.

I know they are very different books and the seventh book is infinitely "darker" (I'll come on to this later) in tone, setting and intent from the second, and I also know that there's something like seven real world years between them. But if this is evidence that JK has developed as a writer, I would like to point out that she appears to have developed a rambling, overwritten and overwrought style in place of the clean, sharp and witty one of the earlier books. You're meant to get better, the more you practice, right?

I could, perhaps, forgive the above but it's not an isolated incident. The stars are cold and unfeeling throughout; it's worse than being in a Hardy novel. And people don't just die, they die with Tragic Gravitas, their "eyes [staring] without seeing, the ghost of [their] last laugh still etched upon [their] face." A little less verbiage and a little less hysteria could have benefited this book immensely.

Character Death: the Massacre of the Minors

Characters die in Harry Potter, we have always known this. JK Rowling makes a big deal of it. It's how we know she is writing Serious Literature for children instead of a bunch of silly books about a teenage wizard. Reading the books, it's obvious that JK prides herself on her portrayal of death and its after-affects on the loved ones of the deceased.

The suddenness and completeness of death was with them like a presence - The Deathly Hallows.

This is at its best when it's understated, for example the lingering psychological consequences of the death of his parents on Harry which seeps through the pages of all the books. When it is all about Making A Point about JK's conception of herself as a writer, it is unsurprisingly less effective. I don't mind that Sirius died, I mind very much that he died to Show Us Something About The Nature of Death.

The Deathly Hallows has a higher death count that Hamlet, except that they're all relatively minor characters including, of all people, Colin Creevy, the poor pointless bastard. This says nothing to me about the harsh and futile nature of warfare, but it does scream "cheap shot." I hate it when authors kill off their emotionally engaging wallpaper characters just because they can and then expect the reader to applaud them for being dark and courageous. I felt exactly the same way when Joss Whedon gratuitously killed off Wash in Serenity. It was easy to kill Wash, he was a great character who everybody loved but he was also completely irrelevant in terms of the plot. His death was a quick way to wring an emotional reaction from the audience without causing the writer any inconvenience to do it.

People die by the bucketload in Deathly Hallows (including Harry's owl, for crying out loud), but none of the deaths are meaningful, with the possible exceptions of Fred, Remus and Snape. Most of them, including Lupin's, occur off camera and are thus stripped of any emotional resonance whatsoever. I can't help but suspect that JK must have loathed Remus, one of her most popular characters, by the end. He spends the whole book dashing in and out of focus being stripped of any plot and then, oh look, by the way he's dead. And Fred was essentially a

spare

Weasley, having, you know, an identical twin. It's the most cowardly half-hearted selection of deaths I think I've ever encountered.

Against this arbitrary massacre, the survival of all the main characters seems both ludicrous and damnably unfair. I'm not saying that I wanted Harry, Ron, Hermione and/or Ginny to die but if you're going to make a hoo-hah about how being a children's author is like being a cold, callous killer you probably ought to stick by your machete.

Which brings us nicely onto...

Dark, man, dark

I have one answer for this and it's oh pulease.

Having waited around politely for Harry to finish school, Lord Voldemort has finally got round to taking over the wizarding world. Quite a lot of nasty things happen in Deathly Hallows and there's a 1984ish air of secretive corruption and control but Harry Potter's darkness is about as sophisticated as a teenage goth's, and remains about as cosmetic. The nastiness is always a hazy, unconvincing background to the well nigh miraculous survival of all the main characters. Hermione, for example, gets captured by Bellatrix at Malfoy Manner and, although she horribly tortured in a scene that is genuinely chilling for about half a second, she shrugs off the experience with the ease de Sade's Justine. And Hogwarts may degenerate into a horrendous nightmare of cruciatus-enforced discipline but the students respond to this with a Blytonesque "down with those rotters" jolly hockey sticks glee that completely undermines any sense of oppression or abuse.

Similarly, although Lord Voldemort swoops around being threatening and imprisoning wandmakers, the Death Eaters themselves continue to be the most appallingly incompetent bunch of nazi-wanabees ever to grace a page. Not only do they routinely fail to capture or kill (and, occasionally, even recognise) the three teenage wizards who keep infiltrating their strongholds but they spend so much of the book being punished for ineptitude by their own master, it can almost be considered a form of self-harm. Regardless, it's hard to take them seriously as opposition.

It is mildly interesting to see Harry himself stooping to some of the unforgivable curses with barely a qualm. But this seems to be less a case of dark, man, dark than convenient, man, convenient.

Paging Lord Voldemort

This is an aside connected to the general incompetence of the Death Eaters. In the seventh book, the Dark Mark seems to function primarily as a communicator, which means the greatest dark wizard, like, ever spends the book being yanked about the country by his incompetent minions. There isn't a scene like this in the book, but there should be:

Random Wizard: ARGHRGHGH!!

Lord V: CRUCIO!

Random Wizard: ARGH! Mercy! Mercy! I'll tell you everything. Please ... stop the pain.

Dark Mark: [ring ring]

Lord V: I'm sorry, I have to take this... [talking into his elbow] Hello, yes, Lord Voldemort here ... I see ... are you absolutely certain of that? You thought you'd captured Potter fifty pages back. Oh. You've definitely got him this time. On my way.

Remus, Tonks and Sirius

Let's move on to character for a bit. I have always thought the Remus/Tonks relationship felt bolted on, and suspected it was a "ya boo sucks" to fanfic writers which made me even less sympathetic to its inadequate presentation. As Harry and Cho and Harry and Ginny have comprehensively revealed, human relationships, especially romantic ones, are not JK's strong point. But Remus/Tonks, partially because we only ever see it second and third hand, has always seemed particularly lacklustre. Harry, as a protagonist, does not preoccupy himself with the moods and inner workings of his companions; therefore in Half Blood Prince we were occasionally told Remus and/or Tonks looks sad or angry or otherwise distracted but then left to either draw our own conclusions or hear about the reasons long after the events that inspired it.

This unsatisfactory portrayal continues, unabated in Deathly Hallows. Off-camera, they get married, have angst, and Tonks becomes pregnant. Remus comes on-camera long enough to angst further and then retreats back into married bliss. Their child is born (Team Potter are sitting in their tent as usual at this point), Remus evinces delight and then he and Tonks are both killed at the Battle of Hogwarts. To say it's massively dissatisfying and frustrating is to do massively dissatisfying and frustrating things a great disservice.

Oh and as a footnote to this, it turns out that Sirius has girly pics on his bedroom walls. Just to make it absolutely clear that he's straight, completely straight, you got that slashers?

Dumbledore

You would have thought the one concrete advantage to Dumbledore being definitely dead would be avoiding the long Dumbledore Explains The Plot chapter at the end of the book. But, no. Death just isn't the handicap it used to be in the olden days and it happens anyway. Stab me. Stab me now.

Just as Order of the Phoenix tore away the veil of unquestioning admiration and idolisation Harry (and, presumably, the reader) felt for the Marauders in a conceptually interesting but badly executed way, Deathly Hallows does the same for Dumbledore. Harry is forced to confront the truth that his beloved mentor was a real person, a man with faults and weaknesses just like any other. I always found Dumbledore a little difficult to take but it's hard to tell how much that was deliberate on the part of the author (he's the worst headmaster in the world, for example - imagine you were in Slytherin house at the end of Philosopher's Stone, how would it feel to have the house trophy goiked out of your hands by some random world saving after the whole hall had already been decorated in your house colours, saving the world is all very noble and everything but it's hardly a legitimate extra curricular activity) and how far it was me reacting against his role as a plot device, explaining or withholding information on the most spurious personal pretexts to make life easier for his author.

But the fact of the matter is that Dumbledore is too imperfectly drawn in books one to six to be effectively interpreted as anything other than a two dimensional mentor figure. Therefore Harry's Dumbledore-related angst in the seventh book interferes with the smooth running of the plot and feels completely hollow because ultimately it doesn't matter. He's dead, for God's sake, dead. It's just too late in the day to care about Dumbledore's family skeletons and, since he was always presented to the reader as a kindly jelly-bean eating mentor figure, the additional "complexity" feels like an unconvincing and irrelevant ret-con.

That Bloody Epilogue

Of all the stuff that was leaked onto the internet before the book was officially released, the epilogue was the only one I investigated. I dismissed it as a clever parody. It was just too sickening. Draco's receding hairline had to be a joke. The legion of incestuously named rugrats, ha ha, very funny.

Oh wait.

No.

That was real.

It was really real.

Dear God.

Worst. Epilogue. Ever.

Conclusion

Sadly, everyone else I've spoken to (with the exception of Dan, obviously, but we share a brain) has been deeply enthusiastic about Potter. So perhaps I'm just a grumpy old git and didn't deserve to enjoy it.

It still sucks though.

Themes:

J.K. Rowling

,

Books

,

Young Adult / Children

~

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Arthur B

at 19:21 on 2007-07-23Don't worry, I am also grumpy about Potter. I briefly considered actually bothering to read

...and the Half-Blood Prince

in order to prepare for

Deathly Hallows

, since I'd stopped after

Order of the Phoenix

, but in the end I couldn't be bothered - especially after I got around to reading summaries of it, and reading patches of it in Borders.

Thoughts:

- Speaking of cheap shots, doesn't Voldemort randomly kill the Sorting Hat for no good reason?

- And doesn't Voldemort essentially die because of a totally newbie mistake? Which Harry carefully explains to him before Voldemort goes ahead and screws up anyway? Doesn't Harry basically loophole his way to the win?

- Aren't

these people

overreacting a little?

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Wardog

at 20:42 on 2007-07-23Oh I totally forgot about the random death of the Sorting Hat! And, yes, Harry Potter wins by being a PC - he is the Joe Williams of children's fantasy.

That is a slightly over-reaction, yes...but people are not sane when it comes to HP.

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Mystiquefire

at 18:36 on 2007-08-11Trust me you are not the only one who thought this book sucked.

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Wardog

at 21:38 on 2007-08-11I think I'm so bitter because I was once very into Harry Potter. And I think I've become incapable of recognising its strengths any more. I mean what I've come to think of the puzzle-box aspect of the books (plots within plots) is probably better done than I give it credit for being. For example, according to the friends I have who still like Harry Potter, if you go back, you can genuinely trace a hint of the "true" Dumbledore throughout all the books. Sadly I genuinely can't be bothered.

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empink

at 12:12 on 2007-08-24

Sadly, everyone else I've spoken to (with the exception of Dan, obviously, but we share a brain) has been deeply enthusiastic about Potter. So perhaps I'm just a grumpy old git and didn't deserve to enjoy it.

No, you are not. My hate for DH grows with time's passing, actually, and though I'm well out of my tween years, I'm not yet a grumpy old git or anything approaching it ;).

Well, I might just be plain grumpy, but that book was enough to make me so, even when I just expected more possibly crappy source material for fanfic, fanart and so on. While it hasn't seemed to have as great an effect on fannish output in my little corner of fandom (mostly because of extenuating wankumstances), what little effect it *has* had has produced fic and art I'm still avoiding. Not because the fans I keep track of are not talented in their own way, but because I still can't bear to read things that are compliant with Deathly Hallows, cracktastic though they may be. Instead of making me chortle at the weirdness of fandom, the cracky ships that have sprung up just make me see more red. More...more epilogue. *shudders*

The whole book was just so *bad*, in places where it wouldn't have taken more than a little judicious effort to be the opposite. The few good bits it had just weren't enough to hold back the tide of useless jokes, stupidities, non-characterizations and daft deaths. It therefore feels hugely ironic that DH is the only HP book I have a copy of to this date (well, a paper copy).

Then again, I doubt I could reread the earlier books now without rolling my eyes and sighing knowing what is ahead for Harry. Incapable of recognising the series' strengths looks about where I'm standing now.

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Wardog

at 10:54 on 2007-08-27Many thanks for the comment - one of the problems with DH in terms of fandom, perhaps, is that it closes off more avenues than it opens, if that makes sense. Especially in terms of the Epilogue of Death because everyone is permanently dating the person they were doing at school. I wouldn't say no to a bit of twisted Dumbledore/Grindelward m'self but I can't see it eclipsing the amusing if pointless popularity of Scorpius/Albus-Severus (just *shudder*). Sadly, I have copies of all the books and although I tried to re-read them a few months ago to prepare for DH I couldn't actually get beyond 3. Sigh.

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M Harris

at 11:19 on 2007-10-04One of the most irrating things in book seven was Voldemort's lack of a plot or any sort of meaningful action. I spent the duration of the book waiting for him to kidnap people Harry was emotionally attached to and torturing/killing them until Harry came to him. We are continuously told of how unusually smart and clever and intelligent (and handsome)Tom Riddle was. So it is completely out of character to have him become inept. But of course Lord Voldemort being strategic and cunning would mean that Harry would have to form some sort of plan, and as he is clearly incapible of that I guess JKR had to stick with him sitting in a tent for a very long amount of time while Voldemort killed time by killing minor characters.

Another thing that really angered me was JKR writing that Snape based his entire life on the fact that he was in love with some girl when he was fifteen. It made his character lose any sort of depth he had gained through the other books. The dialogue between AD and SS of "After all this time?" "Always." made me want to kill people.

The halfnaked!pictures in Sirius' room could have ONLY been put there as a "fuck you, I'm writing the book" from JKR to the slashers. I have no idea why she felt so threatened that she needed to close that particular opportunity for straying from 'everyone is straight and get married to people they met when they were eleven and have large amounts of children named after dead relatives' Deathly Hallows.

(Hahahaha, Dumbledore/Grindelwald is canon, because she can't write another book to insert girl!porn in to say otherwise.)

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Wardog

at 12:40 on 2007-10-04Indeed, Voldemort's ineptitude is particularly annoying in book full of things that are particularly annoying. I remember those halycon days when Voldemort was actually rather scary... the drinking unicorn blood business really traumatised me. To be fair, the whole seven book arc is so unwieldy I'm not sure I could easily come up with a way for Voldemort to have been effective by book 7 without completely hindering Harry's ability to take him out. I think it actually comes to the contradiction that lies at the heart of most children's books (and for that matter a lot of detective stories): why is that the group of feisty kids able to take out fully grown villain when conventional law authorities have failed, or why is this cocaine-saturated amateur able to catch the criminals who have been defying the finest minds at Scotland Yard. Most texts go some way towards smoothing over these inconsistencies (i.e. the Secret Seven always end up alerting the police when it comes to the crunch, Sherlock Holmes is a specialist in a proto-forensic techinque that - although nonesense in the modern day - is unknown to the authorities) but JKR manages to have the worst of all possible worlds: hugely powerful wizard we should all be scared of who has taken over *the entire ministry of magic* versus one short-sighted kid with an expelliarmus.

And, yes, you're right - the whole Lily business makes Snape much less complex and interesting than he used to be.... although I almost hovered on the verge of finding it just a little bit sweet. I was desperate for emotional connection by that time in the seven hundred page monster.

Dumbledore/Grindelward? Ouch.

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Melissa G.

at 15:07 on 2009-12-08So, I've been in a "reading sporks of Harry Potter" mood which led me back to many of the articles here, and I just wanted to point something out about Colin Creevey's death, and maybe someone else has said it already, but...it is not actually possible for him to have been there to die.

It's said that he snuck back from the Hog's Head into Hogwarts to join the battle. The only problem is: he can't have been at the Hog's Head in the first place. He wouldn't have been at Hogwarts that year - being Muggleborn, he would been arrested and sent to concentration camp(?) - so he couldn't have been evacuated from Hogwarts to the Hog's Head to sneak back. And he couldn't have gotten into the Hog's Head from the outside because Hogsmeade has a curfew curse thing that would go off if anyone was walking around the streets late at night. Perhaps he Apparated into the Hog's Head? But why? How would he have even known the battle was going on then?

I know it seems obsessive, but it's just that it was such a cheap shot, and it isn't even possible given the rules she set up. Arg.

[the-rawl]

my imaginary friend saves my life on the regular

I lived in an unpleasantly run-down house in a third-world country with my younger brother, and my parents, who were missionaries. My entire peer group had moved away in the space of six months, leaving me the only fifteen-year-old in our community.

Since only seven children between the ages of thirteen and seventeen remained, the co-op school neglected to hire a teacher to cover our grades, leaving our parents to negotiate their own means. Mine enrolled me in an online school, conducted via online chat and screensharing -- I never saw my classmates' or my teachers' faces. My parents were quite preoccupied with their mutual work, so that the family rarely ate together or spoke except for purely practical reasons. I was terrifically lonely.

No one noticed how late I stayed up, or how late I slept in, or whether I did my homework or attended class or ate regularly. I ate a lot of chocolate -- a bar of dark chocolate a day, sometimes -- and read every book in my collection over and over again, trying to become the characters, and have their problems, which were always solved by the end of the series. I ate toast when I was hungry, because when the power was on it was easy to make. I cried a lot. Some nights, about two in the morning, I'd walk around the silent house and the courtyard in the dark, too miserable to sit still or to sleep or to read. I remember looking up at the sky through the grapevines on the arbor and wondering if this was rock bottom, if I could possibly feel worse.

Well, I could.

long text post under the cut

My mom and I went to the shop down the street for groceries. It was probably a fifteen minute walk, both ways. Early on the way back, some young local man made an inappropriate gesture at me, and after we passed him, followed us for a short way. My mom told me I needed to walk with more confidence, that I looked like a target. I was afraid.

After that, getting home seemed to take forever. It was like I existed in dark fog with the consistency of cotton candy, thick, and cloying. Sound seemed muffled, like being underwater. I was cold.

I got to my room on autopilot. I laid down. I was at the bottom of a well, knee-deep in cold water. I couldn't see day at the top, just some specs of light, stars maybe. I couldn't get out. I had something living in my chest, thick and black, stinking like tar, or like rotten vegetation. If you cut me open it would seep out without depleting, like an infection. I had a hood over my head that smelled like dust from a closet that hasn't been opened in years. There was a pain in the back of my throat, like I needed to cough, or scream, but I couldn't make a sound. My bedroom light, a bare bulb, had a fuzzy halo around it when I looked up, so I knew it was on. But the corners of the room were dark.

That was the first time I thought about killing myself. Eventually I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was morning, and I was hungry. Emotionally, there was nothing. I'd been pressed flat between two slabs of concrete. I was a single grain of sand on a tile floor. I got up and made toast. Then I cleaned the rabbit hutches, and pulled down hay for them.

When I'd finished my chores I went to my laptop and plugged in the usb stick for accessing the satellite internet. I was only supposed to use it for school, but last night had told me that I wasn't just sad all the time -- there was something wrong with me, and if I didn't do something, I was probably going to die. That didn't sound all that bad, except that me dying would be a terrible burden on my family.

That's how I learned I was depressed, that it was a legitimate medical condition, and that I had no access to any of the resources the websites recommended -- not therapy, not medication, not social support (I didn’t feel like I could approach my parents at the time, although I eventually did, which lead to some major life changes later on).

I also learned that the way I was feeling and the things I told myself weren't normally-calibrated responses to my environment. That I couldn't trust my own brain to interpret what was happening to me without applying a false negative patina. This would have been quite alarming if I had been able to muster any emotional response at all. What do you do, when you can't trust your own brain?

I needed someone or something that could be with me. That could tell me the truth, serve as a reality check, remind me of my options and the reasons I had chosen not to pursue some of them, and that could be available at any time of the day or night.

So I made myself an imaginary friend. Her name was Ka, and she was shaped like a little dragon, small enough to sit on my shoulder. She was green, and the edges of her scales were soft, and the tips of her talons were blunted -- she wasn't there to protect me from things around me. She was there to protect me from myself.

I knew that making a construct of this kind was dangerous, that I was relying on my own faulty brain to regulate what amounted to a second personality. But I was at the point where having an alternate personality or a voice in my head could hardly make anything worse. I put in some safeguards, choosing to trust in my ability to create and maintain them.

Ka could only ever tell the entire, unbiased truth, and she couldn't force me to do anything. I wasn't allowed to give her the driver's seat. She couldn't interact with the physical world in any way, not as herself, and not through me. When I was very lonely, I would pretend she was sitting or walking next to me, but she only ever existed in my head.

I would wake up, and it would be two in the afternoon, and I would feel bad about wasting most of the day. But Ka would say, you are up now, and you didn't sleep for twelve hours this time, which is an improvement over yesterday. You have enough time to eat and to log in for your English class. Oatmeal would be a healthy alternative to toast. You could put honey in it.

I would forget to do my chores, and someone else would feed and sweep up after the rabbits. And I felt terrible about neglecting my animals, and I felt like I had been neglected, too, because whichever of my parents had done the work never brought it up, and I was desperate for some accountability. Then Ka would tell me that feeling bad about forgetting the rabbits was a good, reasonable thing, because it meant I recognised I had failed to maintain my responsibility to them. That before I look to my parents for accountability I needed to look to myself. That my parents had made sure my animals wouldn't suffer. That I had another chance not to make the same mistake. That possibly my parents hadn't failed to discipline me, but rather decided I had too much on my plate, and tried to be kind by not mentioning my lapse. That symptoms of depression include sleeping too much, tiredness, trouble thinking, concentrating, deciding, remembering, and so forgetting the animals was not entirely my fault. That I could forgive myself.

I would skip my most hated class, Biblical Worldview, and feel both guilty about doing it, and pleased with getting away with it, and confused and sad because while I was skiving I wasn't doing anything I enjoyed more, because I couldn't think of anything I would actually enjoy doing. Ka said, you're old and mature enough to decide for yourself whether attending lecture is necessary for you to understand the material in this unit. That if you made the wrong decision by not attending, the consequences will occur when you struggle with the homework. That some consequences will occur regardless in the form of your participation grade. That loss of interest in normal activities is a symptom. That choosing to do nothing rather than participating in an unpleasant activity is still an improved experience, and therefore a reasonable, if mildly hedonistic, decision.

When I thought about hurting myself, about hurting myself more than just digging fingernails into my arm without breaking the skin, Ka said that doing so was risky. I might experience a brief emotional relief by doing so, but the risk of infection or accident was considerable. That self-harm was noticeable, and as she reminded me, above all I didn't want to be noticed. That in all the stories or accounts I ever read about self harm, not one person failed to regret it later. That however much I might hate another person, I wouldn't take a knife to them. Why should my own body be an exception?

When I wanted to die... Ka said that by killing myself, I would abandon everything that would happen to me, and everything that I would do, and everything that I was responsible for. Yes, the pain would stop. Wanting to escape pain is normal. But the depression could ease, and that would also stop this particular suffering. If I died, who would finish the stories I wrote? If I died, our wandering outdoor cat might decide never to come home again -- I was her favorite. If I died, my parents would be very upset, and surprised (I don't think they understood the depth of my affliction until many years afterward). She said, even if you hate yourself, hate being yourself, there are creatures left who rely on your existence for their physical and emotional wellbeing. She said, cutting your ties to this place in that way means cutting all of them, even the good ones, even if there aren't many good ones left.

Ka wasn't all about dispensing sensible thoughts into my unbalanced brain. I would tell her stories, on my good days, and she would contribute to the plot. When I had a positive emotion (positive emotions were usually muted, when I felt them at all), she would echo that feeling back at me, so it was like hanging out with a friend who enjoys the same things you do. It was incredibly reassuring to be able to fall back onto her sensible, even-tempered presence when I felt anything but.

About a year later, motivated by my persistent mental health issues and my brother’s own health problems, my family moved back to the States, and I got some real psychiatric care, including counseling and a prescription. As my depression eased, I needed Ka less often, and eventually she retreated. She said I didn't need her anymore, and after a while, I didn't miss her. I made a few new friends. The sky seemed so much clearer for my last three years of high school. I rediscovered what it was like to enjoy life.

For many people, depression is a chronic condition. When I went to college, mine came back. Not quite as strong as before, because I recognised the symptoms early and started deploying coping mechanisms sooner. But it was there, that blackness welling from deep in my chest, creeping up my throat till eating made me feel sick. My dorm room was a poor refuge, because my roommate loved people, but not cleanliness. I had no support system, because I attended college out of state, and no one came with me.

I missed a lot of meals. I lost about fifteen pounds, and I was never heavy. I slept fourteen hours a day on weekends, and four hours on weekdays. I got all As, my first two years, with a full class load, in the engineering track.

At the end of one bad day, first semester of freshman year, I came back to a blessedly-empty dorm room, locked the door behind me, and had a panic attack on the floor. When that finished, I wanted something to make me feel better. Getting chocolate would mean leaving the room -- not an option. I had no comfort foods, my bedding was stale, the bathroom was grimy. No one I trusted lived within eight hundred miles. My betta fish swam to the surface when I lifted the tank cover, but it was not in their nature to be cuddly.

I remembered Ka. I wished she were there. I pulled at the spot where she used to be, wondering if I could recreate her, or something like her.

She uncurled, lifted her head, and said, "I'd hoped you'd look for me soon. I couldn't come back to help until you asked for me."

This depressive episode has lasted for four years, prolonged, I think, by my pigheaded stubbornness in pursuing a degree far past when the cost to my health exceeded the benefit higher education could bring me. And also by my parents' divorce precipitated by my dad's gender transition. I'm only recently starting to emerge from it, an improvement brought on mostly by my decision to drop out of college.

I haven't called on Ka as often as I did as a teenager. I have more access to external resources, these days, including finances, medication and trusted friends. But even now, if I tap at the part of my mind where she is, she'll uncurl and sleepily ask, "What is it?"

I think, "Just checking you're still there. Go back to sleep. I'm okay right now."

I'm not writing this down as advice; I'm not saying, if you're depressed, make yourself an imaginary friend. Don't do that, or if you must, make sure you know what you're doing, and the risks. What I wrote up there about constructs like Ka having the potential to be dangerous is real. I was careful, but I was also lucky.

I wrote this on the off chance that someone already has their own Ka, in the unlikely event that that person reads this, to let them know that they aren't the only one. And I'm hoping, a little, to learn I'm not the only one.

[jupitermelichios]

Smallville Recaps: S1 E1 “Pilot”

I realised I never actually reviewed the first 2 episodes of Season 1, so I’m going back to rewatch them and share my (mostly confused and angry) thoughts.

Hey Smallville, Goldeneye 007 called and it wants its CGI back. (Actually that's not fair. The PS1 had way better graphics than this. I think this may have been done on a ZX Spectrum.)

Huh, weird that our first non-CGI shot of the show is a teaser for Green Arrow that won't pay off for several seasons. Also Lionel trying to bully his son into not being afraid, because he really is the worst parent.

I love that Lana's aunt Nell clearly hates Martha and Jonathan exactly as much as they deserve.

“Where are her parents?!” Jesus Jonathan, take it down a notch. She's with her aunt, it's not like the kid's just been abandoned!

So apparently Lana has magic powers in the pilot?! She pretends to grant Martha's wish for a baby like 3 minutes before they find Clark.

Jesus fuck is this a horror show?! Why is there a naked teenager crucified in that Cornfield begging passing children to help him?! What the actual fuck Smallville?

Oh good, and now the kid is dead and probably so is Lex. What a way to start your show!

Remember kids, if you look up and see a large meteor flying towards you out of the sky, it's important to stay exactly where you are so that your 4 year old daughter can watch you die and be traumatised by it, and not, for example, take two steps to the left and survive.

They kid they chose to play baby Clark is a) about 7 and b) possibly Latino?! I mean, it's not the weirdest casting choice in this show, but it's still fucking weird.

I love that Martha's first thought upon finding Clark is 'yoink, this is my baby now!' and not 'oh shit, we'd better try and trace this kid's family.

To give the writers their due, having Lex loose his hair because he was present as a kid when Clark's spaceship crashed is actually a pretty genius idea.

Flashfoward to Clark being... 26? 15? I have no idea how old he's supposed to be. Wait he's in highschool. 18? Seriously, I have no idea.

Why do Teen shows all think “really wants to play sport but can't because of his special powers” is a super relatable plot, especially to the kind of teenagers who watch Superhero shows. Speaking as someone who has been in a  teenager in their life, it's really not!

Okay so a) Smallville's population has gone up by 20,000 in ten years, which seems a lot, and b) Smallville's population is 45,0001. How?! There's 1 high school, apparently only 1 junior school since they've all known one another since they were 5, no theatre, no cinema, and a single factory employs like half the adult population of the town, and the population is 45,000?! The nearest town to me growing up had 1 high school, 2 primary schools and a cinema, and that had a population of 3,000!

“You can't play football, that's suicide.” The actor playing Clark is ten years older and two foot taller than everyone else at the school, but sure. Suicide.

Apparently the naked dude crucified in the cornfield thing is a Smallville tradition that Chloe has  never heard of before this exact moment. Also what he fuck kind of high school tradition is that?! That's some fucking Cabin in the Woods ritual bullshit right there. The football team are probably all going to turn out to be demons in disguise or something.

Lana having a kryptonite necklace is actually a pretty good idea for the whole love triangle thing. If Lana's parents hadn't been killed by a kryptonite meteor hitting them. As it is, she's just coming off as really weird and super morbid.

“Which are you Clark, man or superman?” “I'm still figuring that out.” Good line if you know he's got powers. If you don't know, and you're just making a weird Neitzche joke (you know, like teenagers do) then it just makes Clark sound like an absolute nob. Which he is, of course.

You know I said Whitney is the best human being in the Dramatis Personae? The major exception is in this episode. But even here, his first line isn't asking Lana to do his homework, it's asking Lana to read over his homework because he was up super late finishing it. Because even in the pilot, Whitney is secretly a super-nice dude. (Apart from that whole naked crucifixion thing.)

Lex's character introduction: driving a very nice porsche while dramatic rock plays. Okay, so we're supposed to think Lex is the coolest character, right? That's definitely what I'm getting from this.

Holy shit, Clark is actually being selfless and saving Lex from a car crash. That may be the only nice thing he does all season.

Ah, the introduction of Clark's habit of watching Lana change through his telescope. Because Clark's a totally relatable guy, and a hero.

“Hey your lucky charm, isn't that the thing that killed your parents and a bunch of other people and gave Lex alopecia?” “Yeah I figure just because it's always been super unlucky up till now, maybe it'll be lucky this time.” That's some fucking weird figuring you're doing there Lana.

“Hey you look like that Scarecrow kid” is a weird way to greet someone who you had a direct hand in putting into a coma twelve years ago.

Oh good, naked crucified kid from the opening now has superpowers and he's back for revenge. Question – why has he waited 12 years?!

Lex brought Clark a truck. And so begins the tradition of Lex buying Clark inappropriately expensive gifts because he doesn't understand how friendship works.

Making Jonathan Kent irrationally hate the Luthors was a really weird writing choice. Really weird.

Wait, Clark doesn't know he's an alien?! How the fuck did he think he could do any of this shit?! What have Jonathan and Martha been telling him all this time????

Oh man, I'd forgotten Lana's habit of riding horses through graveyards. Like normal teenagers do. If I was Nell I'd be seriously worried about Lana.

Lana thinks visiting her parent's grave with flowers is weird, but Clark hanging out in a graveyard where no one he knows is buried is totally normal.

Clark is pretending to hear dead people. Nothing like a séance with a girl's dead parents to really set the mood.

Clark just walked Lana home. She arrived by horse. And walked home. What happened to the horse?!

“Hey you want to go to the dance with me?” asks Clark to a girl in a long-term relationship who he's only ever had one conversation with. You know, like normal non-stalkers do.

Until proven otherwise, I'm going to assume that the writers decided the Luthor family would all be into fencing because they thought Lex would look hot with a sword. And they weren't wrong.

“Do you believe a man can fly,” is one of the strangest pick-up lines I've ever heard, but oddly it seems to be working for Lex.

Chloe sees a guy she's never seen before in a town of 45,001 people, and just assumes he must be some kind of immortal and starts checking 12 year old school year-books. You know, like a normal person does.

Chloe tells Clark that she's been investigating strange goings on in the town, Clark responds with “You should have told me about this.” Fucking why Clark?

And now we see literally the only bad thing Whitney ever does, and it's weirdly jarring. He's such a nice dude in all the later episodes, but now he's beating Clark up, stripping him to his boxers and trying him up in a crucifixion pose in a field for the sake of some cheap jesus imagery. Also giving away the necklace that he knows is super important to Lana. What the fuck writers?

Man, school dances in 2001 were wack. I mean, we all remember slow-dancing to Linkin Park kock-offs right? That was a totally normal highschool experience.

Fun fact – if you electrocute a car, it will start. And none of the electrics will be fried. Because that's how cars work.

Wow, villain gets convenient amnesia may be the laziest fucking 'we've run out of time to resolve the plot' get-out I've ever heard.

Okay, so Whitney is captain of the football team. And Lana and Whitney are Homecoming king and queen. But they definitely aren't seniors, because it's going to be seasons yet before they graduate. How the fuck old are these people meant to be?!

You know, fantasizing about slow dancing with Lana may actually be only relatable thing Clark ever does. Good for you pilot episode.

[la-knight]

Books I Read in 2018: Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi

“Maybe that's why superheroes wore capes. Maybe they weren't capes at all, but safety blankets, like the one Aru kept at the bottom of her bed and pulled up under her chin before she went to sleep. Maybe superheroes just tied their blankies around their necks so they'd have a little bit of comfort wherever they went. Because honestly? Saving the world was scary. No harm admitting that.”

“It is not failure to fail.”

“This is what we get for thinking that scaley orange skin and fake hair could keep that former demon out of elected office.

“You are the Daughter of Death," hissed Aru. "You don't walk into a telephone pole because of a boy.”

“Aru was twelve years old. Even she knew that half the time she didn't know what she was doing.”

Twelve-year-old Aru Shah has a tendency to stretch the truth in order to fit in at school. While her classmates are jetting off to family vacations in exotic locales, she'll be spending her autumn break at home, in the Museum of Ancient Indian Art and Culture, waiting for her mom to return from her latest archeological trip. Is it any wonder that Aru makes up stories about being royalty, traveling to Paris, and having a chauffeur? One day, three schoolmates show up at Aru's doorstep to catch her in a lie. They don't believe her claim that the museum's Lamp of Bharata is cursed, and they dare Aru to prove it. Just a quick light, Aru thinks. Then she can get herself out of this mess and never ever fib again. But lighting the lamp has dire consequences. She unwittingly frees the Sleeper, an ancient demon whose duty it is to awaken the God of Destruction. Her classmates and beloved mother are frozen in time, and it's up to Aru to save them. The only way to stop the demon is to find the reincarnations of the five legendary Pandava brothers, protagonists of the Hindu epic poem, the Mahabharata, and journey through the Kingdom of Death. But how is one girl in Spider-Man pajamas supposed to do all that

------------

I first heard about Roshani Chokshi when her novel The Star-Touched Queen debuted back in like 2016. The elevator pitch I’d heard for it was “Hades and Persephone but with Indian mythology.” I’m a HUGE sucker for Hades & Persephone, always have been. So of course I snatched that up, and fell in love with Maya, with the beautifully lyrical and poetic prose, and with Roshani Chokshi’s way of painting her different worlds. Out of the four books she has out right now, I only have one left to read (A Crown of Wishes). She’s brilliant, and when I found out she was expanding to Middle-Grade, I knew I had to see what was up with her newest book

So what can I say about Aru-Shah and the End of Time? Well, some people might compare it to Percy Jackson - it’s a somewhat similar concept, the children of gods fighting monsters to save the world. Probably why Aru Shah is the first book from Rick Riordan’s new imprint from Disney Hyperion (the man is doing the Lord’s work, not gonna lie). But if I were to compare Aru Shah and the End of Time to Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief...it’s better. It’s SO MUCH better (no offense, Rick).

See, I like Percy. I like the series and I like him. But the first book was a bit shallow. To be fair, it came out at a time when middle-grade was still fighting to be allowed to hold the same depths as some of the “more risque” YA of the time, like having queer characters, or characters with mental health issues, or what have you. At the time PJ:LT came out, most middle-grade fantasies weren’t allowed to have that kind of stuff. Thankfully Rick Riordan helped pave the way for publishers to realize, oh, shoot, middle-grade can have a lot of the same depth as YA, holy gosh (other helpers in the cause are Tahereh Mafi and JK Rowling, although more points go to Ms. Mafi). So why is Aru Shah better than Percy Jackson?

It’s deeper. It’s richer. It’s more diverse. Some of you might think, well of course it’s more diverse, it’s Indian mythology. No, no, no. You don’t understand. It’s amazing. We have two Indian girls teaming up to save the world, one with extreme anxiety and OCD who wants to be a doctor, who casually mentions her gay hero brother without it being a big deal. We have a series set up to put together a team of five young Indian women who fight monsters and save the world. 

There’s a former villain who learns to love, who does honor to the two female leads. The tasks and challenges are clever and fun, with a touch of whimsy but still as action-packed and engaging as any adventure in Artemis Fowl or Harry Potter. We have a girl from a single-parent home who’s always wanted more of a family, and she gets one - as soon as Aru meets Mini, one of the other reborn Pandavas, they start calling each other “sister” and vow never to turn their backs on each other. There’s a brief moment where this is put to the test, but the girls get over it and reconcile easily.

One of the best things about Aru, the character, is how accepting she is of Mini after they meet. Mini can be a little high-maintenance, and at first Aru’s a little exasperated, but it doesn’t take long for her to realize Mini has severe OCD (instead of high-fives, they bump elbows) and anxiety. In fact, Mini’s a lot like me. And while sometimes Mini will say something and Aru will be like, “Wait, really?” after a minute she’s just like, “Okay, sure. If that’s what you need.” 

When they pull off some daring-dos near the end of the book, Aru offers her elbow for a bump without having to be reminded of the no-hands rule. Even better, Mini doesn’t just decide to high-five Aru at the end. She’s still OCD, still freaks out over germs, and Aru doesn’t mind. And while Mini does sometimes panic, Aru is mostly very understanding and helps her get through her panic attacks. When Mini expresses fear that Aru will abandon her because of her anxiety and “other flaws,” Aru not only promises she won’t, but puts a spin on it that helps sooth Mini’s fears (Aru gets hung up about this and wonders if she’s lying; I’ll touch on that near the end).

The villains were interesting, the mythology is fairly new which means explanations can be provided in a fun way and it’s not stuff we readers have been told ten million times. I was honestly surprised by the identity of Aru and Mini’s fathers (who aren’t their biological fathers; these Indian gods imbued the girls’ souls with...soul DNA? That’s not what they call it, I just don’t know if I can explain it any other way). Also, as a fan of The Star-Touched Queen, I had to wonder - did Maya have anything to do with Mini’s powers?

You know how in Percy Jackson the kids get neat doo-dads that turn into magical stuff? Like a pen into a sword, Thalia’s bracelet into that one shield, Luke’s winged sneakers, blah blah? Aru gets a golden tennis ball and Mini gets a purple compact. Not a big deal? Ah ha, au contraire. Those items are the glamoured belongings of the god of thunder and the god of death, and they’re actually pretty cool - but also pretty!

This book is just...fun. It’s SO FUN. The monsters are new, the tasks are original, the characters are cute, and I loved it.

Let’s talk about the thing I love most: Aru Shah. Roshani Chokshi has the interesting ability to create characters that are basically me. Not physically, not according to age or race, but with Night, with Maya, and now with Aru, she creates female leads who speak to me on a fundamental level. 

This time, it’s Aru, who’s basically Loki from Loki: Agent of Asgard except female instead of genderfluid, 12 years old, and Indian. In L:AoA, there’s a scene in the final bindup where Loki indentifies themself (first in femme-presenting form, then in masc-presenting form) as the moon goddess, the god of stories. Aru is the personification of that. 

Something that gets said a lot in the book is, “You’re a liar, Aru Shah.” But she’s not. She’s a storyteller, a world-changer, someone who refuses to view the world as bleak and terrible and uses the gift of words to make it better for herself and the people she’s loves. She’s an optimist who fights with words and thinks fast on her feet. She’s a daughter of Lord Indra the Thunderer and a reincarnation of the greatest of the Pandava Brothers. She’s the moon goddess, the god of stories, someone I would’ve idolized (or possibly gotten a crush on) if I’d read this as a kid, and I love her. I will follow her to the end.

Also she better get as many books as Percy did (so like...15 books).

There were only two complaints, really. One, Aru was rather preoccupied with boogers (it came up like 5 times). I mean, I know she’s a tween, but still. Two, I saw the plot twist with her dad coming from a mile away.

Plot: ¾ star Characterization: 1 star World Building: 1 star Word Choice: ¾ star Realism: 1 star 

- ¼ star for copious snot (ew)

+ ¼ star for positive portrayal of a character with anxiety and OCD

+ ¼ star for having a 12-year-old girl in Spider-Man pajamas saving the world, okay? 

In total: 4.75/5 stars

Would I Buy It: I did! Now I need the next one!

Would I Recommend It: READ THIS BOOK, PEOPLE!!! It’s so cute, seriously.

I was asked to tag @magic-in-every-book so here’s my Aru review! :)

All pics were stock photos manipulated by me in Photoshop or in the public domain. Except the painting of the Pandavas. That’s from Wikipedia.

[loki-of-war]

On the future of TWD

(EDIT: Reposting due to a formatting error)

So I’ve seen a lot of people commenting and sharing their opinions lately on how Chandler’s departure will affect the show, if it will survive this hit or not, for how many seasons more will TWD run, etc, etc. And I decided, now that I’m thinking more rationally (I hope) and I’m able to form understandable sentences, to share my honest thoughts with you lovely people on this entire mess.

Which is as follows: I give the show a minimum lifespan of ten seasons (meaning, the show will end in two more seasons) and a maximum of twelve seasons in total. This is my verdict, feel free to disagree with me.

Now onto explaining why I think this is so:

I can sort of see why old fans who left and people who have never liked Carl or feel lukewarm about him are happy this death is going to happen. But on the other side I'm thinking this kind of mentality is the reason why the show gets away with terrible decisions and why they keep making them over and over, declining in quality. I don't think it's right to condone mediocrity; this is from someone like me who has stayed on the TWD's side so far hoping they'd find the right footing at some point this season  (then, obviously, because why wouldn’t they, my patience and tolerance was rewarded with this haha). And as I mentioned in a previous comment I made on YT, no matter what the public's feelings for Carl are, they won't change the importance of his role in the plot and his fundamental connection to Rick (this latter element has an effect on the whole cast, for better or for worse).

But anyway, Carl's death is going to change the entire mood of the series from now on so it definitely will never be as it once was and I think because of that the story will slowly bleed out. I mean, Carl has been the greatest determinator for every single one of Rick's decisions the entire show, and not only that but what he symbolised as a character, the hope for a better future, is gone now. What do children, sons, daughters, symbolise in every universal story? The next generation, what comes after, that not everything is going to be screwed up forever; especially after seeing how unmerciful TWD's world has proven to be for children and having Carl be the only exception to this 'kids cannot survive this world' rule has sort of become a moot point thanks to the...current circumstances.

Rick's and Lori's speeches to Carl in seasons 2 and 3 respectively justify this way of thinking: that after everyone from their generation (the adults) dies, Carl will have to take the reins and move on. I refuse to believe any writer with common sense would write such important pieces of dialogue just because they felt like it, just because they're emotional words without any other kind of meaning behind them. That is just lazy and awful writing in my opinion. Why write these poignant moments only to have the kid killed long before the end of the series? Why write/do anything if those things are going to be ignored later down the line, nevermind that every piece in a story must connect with the others? Why bother teaching him this morality lessons if they're all going to go to waste anyway; if he will never have a character arc/storyline that is plot relevant where his morals are challenged? (Good on you, whoever made the call, for missing out on possible great storylines for Carl that would have improved viewing and the quality of the show). That doesn't make a bit of sense, unless that what they were looking for was to give the events leading up to his sudden death some twist of irony, and that'd be perfect and all, except that Carl dying was so not part of the plan (the improvisation is so obvious it hurts me in the balls I don't have) and even the way his death was set up was graceless-the bite- and not something one would expect from the same people who made/directed/wrote/produced Season 4. In other words, killing him was basically flipping off the idea of a future in the face, whether they meant to do that or not, and this is bound to turn the overall mood the series to a much grim and darker tone to an already heavy themed and toned series. Many people won't find themselves too content with that heavier tonal change, I think, if the ratings for season 7 are to be trusted.

Ignoring that the conclusion to this was having him die though,  I do have to say the actual set up in the mid season finale itself was beautiful and emotional (Chandler's acting was on point, he was the star of this episode), but the chain of actions leading up to it was lackluster. With lackluster I mean that he is a very important character that has literally been wasted for far too long; if you look at his progression throughout the seasons you'll realize he has not done much from a plot perspective despite being a main character. Therefore, his death feels unsatisfactory and empty because one can't help but feel that he hasn't nearly done as much as he should have. What he did to save his people in the mid season finale was amazing but it wasn't enough to make up for a notorious lack of screen time over full eight seasons, moreover if the motivations that drove him to that point, to that mentality, to that philosophy, don't make sense because his personality has made a one eighty from how he was the previous season with no type of prior explanation as to why that happened.

It may not seem like it but I'm actually a huge fan of angst and favorite-character-slaughter. I love when books, music, movies, videogames, series make me suffer (great examples of this are my undying love for Hannibal the tv show and that my favorite videogames are the ones directed by this one man, life destroyer actually, called Yoko Taro). Perhaps that is another reason why I'm being so critical with the choice to kill Carl (asides from the horrible decision-making and poor writing), because I love being hit in the feels in the best way possible, without holding back any punches, just go straight for the kill and make me cry like a newborn. However, I don't like tragedy when it's done for shock value, or when it's done simple-mindedly. If a favorite character of mine is going down, it has to make sense and they must have had filled out their purpose in the story, reached a state of character development we're all satisfied with so that when they die one can accept it and be happy despite the possible trauma that could ensue after (well, one can't exactly pin point when that happens, when enough is enough, but to have had the character embark on a lot of adventures even without them accomplishing their purpose, is enough to embrace their death). I guess what I'm trying to say with all this is that, while on one hand I would have preferred him outliving everybody else, if they were still so adamant on having him die at some point of the story (as if killing Carl had actually been part of a long term plan and not some last minute decision) they should have developed him first and foremost, and then assign him a proper death in later seasons, most preferably before the last season ends given that him dying before Rick is several different levels of wrong; if he wasn't such a huge part of Rick's character then fine, do it, but putting and end to him is equal to neutralizing Rick for literally years, which is time that both a comic and a tv show cannot afford, so to do it near the end of everything would be a better fit.

And, I don't know, even having Judith fill the void won't be of much help either, because we haven’t and we won't see her grow the same way we did Carl, her relationship with Rick will be vastly different, and so on. Probably this is just me but I'm not really attached to her; Judith so far is to me only a concept and not actually a person (yet). The fact that they keep changing the little baby girls who portray her doesn't really help, that gets me out of the story everytime. She just can't replace Carl, she might take his future storylines but it won't be the same. Besides, by the time she grows up, she’ll already be deep into this world, this is her normal life and probably by that time things will have changed.

So basically, not only in killing Carl they destroyed the image of a future, they have killed a foundational part of the essence that made The Walking Dead be The Walking Dead we all knew and loved, and that will never return. Also, allow me to point out that for those who think that The Walking Dead is about people dying whenever and wherever, and the cruel injustice that is life, I am not going to say that your interpretation is wrong but it is an incomplete one. The audience doesn’t watch TWD only to see tons of MC’s get murdered on a daily basis. Otherwise, why bother with investing time on a plot and just have them all killed at once. The soul of TWD is not about senseless killing and murder and tragedy and sadness. Simplifying it all to ‘this show is about the possibility of anybody dying/gore/zombies/etc’ is a great disservice to the show and the fans. Obviously, I am not neither the writer of the show or Robert Kirkman to claim to know to a T what the central theme of The Walking Dead is, and for full disclosure I have not read the comics. Nonetheless, basing my personal opinion on the tv show alone, I would like to think one of the core themes the show has explored and returns to time and time again is the topic in regards to the essence of human nature, and how in spite of apparent doom and the horrible circumstances we are forced to face, humans will always find the way to move forwards and stay strong, ergo, the message is a positive one, not a negative one, depressing, nihilistic one. And what better character to portray this versatility of human nature, this capacity for change, other than Carl Grimes, a child of transition, a child who was pulled out of his normal childhood and thrown right into the chaos of the apocalypse? A boy who has witnessed inhumane things, horrible things, has killed his mother, his second father figure, has done awful things himself, has always been toeing the line between right and wrong, cruel and kind, because of all the experiences he has had to process in a very short period of time? He was obligated to grow in a decaying world, watching his father and the ones surroundind him make mistakes, learning from them, evolving, seeing close ones die, starving, surviving insane experiences... If someone like that manages to grow in such a hostile environment and still remains true to himself and still has not lost faith in the world and humanity, and keeps close all the meaningful, important things his family and friends told him in the course of his entire life and not only that, but also applies them... What does that mean for you, to you? What does it mean for us? What does it say about human nature that hasn’t been told before or not quite in this manner?

Well, that is the point. I guess we will never get to find out in the Tv Show the answer to those questions. Regrettably.

If, and just if, the show manages to recover from this point onwards, I still have no idea how I'd feel about having the show thrive on the tails of throwing under the bus such a key character with no legitimate reasons behind the choice (don't even get me started on what they've done to poor Chandler). I'll still watch the show but I would be incredibly uncomfortable if that is how it turns out to be.

Finally, I apologize for any grammar mistakes or awkward phrasing you may find, it’s way too late to be doing such a long post and English is not my main language. Please don’t be afraid or feel awkward about replying to this post, even if it’s to hate on it. I really don’t mind having a long conversation about this topic with you all since I’ve literally been dying since Sunday night to discuss it.

Thank you so much for reading!

[septembersung]

It appears that tumblr mysteriously deleted Generations chapter 2, as far as I can tell, so here it is, freshly posted.

Chapter Two

Meadowlark Farm stretched across four sections in central Kansas, more than two thousand acres of plains, rolling hills, riverbanks, stubborn cottonwoods, irregular ponds, and the occasional dense stands of timber. The old family farmhouse stood close to the middle of the property, near what had once been a river but was now a seasonal creek, in a particularly fine grove of cottonwoods. In high summer, the waxy leaves shimmered wildly in the slightest breeze, like a flock of dragonflies or a shoal of fleeing fish.

The house itself rested against a little rise in the land, looking out sedately over the fields, with one basement corner, the original cellar, built into the hill. Two ancient limestone fenceposts still marked the end of the patchy gravel driveway, half taken over by dandelions. Huge clumps of pampas grass marked the rutted drive. The house rested easily in the shade of tall elms and cottonwoods. Part of the original limestone foundation remained, ringing three corners of the original square ground floor. Seen from the side, where the driveway ended in a field of stubby buffalo grass, it looked regular enough, a typical nineteenth and twentieth century farmhouse in peeling white paint. Walking around the curving front porch revealed an extra wing, built on at a diagonal angle, which stuck out like an injured bird testing the wind with its good wing. The attic, a huge airy room above the original second floor, winked back at the sun with many small square windows.

Back of the house, in the triangle between the west-facing end of the house the northward-thrusting angle of thew the new wing - over a hundred years old and still it remained, in family parlance, "the new wing" - a little kitchen garden grew half-wild. Wide, smooth stepping stones marked the short path from screen door to the little plot.

Beyond the new wing, in the true backyard, children's playground equipment dotted the slope. Mismatched swings hanging from chains and ropes attached to rusting A-frames and weathered wooden beams swung gently in the perpetual Kansas breezes. Slides and monkey bars glinted in the hot sun. Chickenwire separated the play area from an enormous rectangular garden, already overflowing with produce, heavily over-planted, and exuding fragrant herb smells with every gusty breeze. The land ran down a gentle hill towards a dense growth of timber and a long, enormous pond.

Not too near the pond, several mismatched outbuildings hunched in what could not quite be called a cluster. Like a crowd trying to pretend it is not a crowd, each person too embarrassed to stand too close to anyone else, they held a swath of ground to themselves. A huge, two story barn with its paint long gone, worn to a brownish grey. A nearly shiny Morton building, not quite new but startlingly contemporary. A hay shelter, with rusted slanted roof. A skeleton barn, with just a few peeling boards left here and there, it's empty roof frame stretching over antique machinery. And a solid, unremarkable little shed, red boards dulled to maroon, covered in a patched roof of mismatched shingles topped with an enormous handmade antenna. The double front doors stood ajar and a solid-looking padlock hung from the wide-open latch, hanging casually open.

Beyond the swings, the big garden, the outbuildings, and the pond, the land fell sharply away to a creek bed. It was low in this high, dry summer, and nearly still. The banks, crumbled where the grass gave way to clay, ran with little wavering along the crease where hill met plain, until they met the little woods to the east. Cropland stretched out beyond the creek to the north. Near the trees, but not enough to be shaded by them except in earliest morning, just on the north side of the river, lay the old family burial ground.

It had not always been meticulously tended, but in Leah's lifetime the oldest headstones had been somewhat restored, the most egregious weeds removed, and this summer, even the grass had been recently mowed.

Anna-Lucia knelt at her mother's headstone. Martha Addison, beloved wife, mother, sister. May 8 2005 - August 15, 2070. RIP Et Lux perpetua luceat eia.

The thick granite headstone with its neatly cut, clear letters stood in line with several others, some so weathered and faded as to be hardly legible. After a moment, hand resting on the sun-hot granite, Anna-Lucia sat down and crossed her legs, shoulders slumped, hands folded in her lap. A few brown rosary beads hung between her fingers, but her mind had drifted into wind and dappled light and the hum of insects and the sound the tall grass made bowing again and again to itself in the gentle, incessant breeze. Time passed but she did not know it. Then -

"Here you are!"

Anna-Lucia started badly as a sun-blind silhouette loomed over and dropped down suddenly, throwing two strong arms around her shoulders.

Dazed from the bright light and her unintentional reverie, it took Anna-Lucia several stunned seconds to process the small hands with many rings, the flyaway, unevenly cut dark blonde curls, the lavender perfume.

"Liza!" she gasped out at last, returning the hug.

In the sixteen months since she had seen her sister, Liza's choppy curls had grown irregularly long. Her wiry arms were sun browned and stronger than ever.

"Oh, I have missed you, little sister," Liza sighed affectionately, giving her one last squeeze and sitting back, stretching out like a cat on the warm prickly grass. It was an old joke between them; Liza, the eldest, was as petite and youthful as their mother had been; Anna-Lucia had her father's bigger bones and had nearly always been mistaken as the oldest.

Trying to shake off the sun-daze and afternoon grogginess, Anna-Lucia found she had no words - just a huge, cheek-splitting grin, and a few irrepressible tears in the corner of her eyes. She gripped Liza's shoulder and squeezed. Liza smiled back, but her eyes were tired and new care lines were etched there.

"You didn't tell me you were coming," Anna-Lucia said at last, when the silence had stretched so long it began almost to feel like another dream.

"No one knew. Not even me, until forty-eight hours ago. I fully expected to miss this year's reunion and be stuck on the beat 'til Christmas."

"Lots to report in Rome?"

"I've hardly been there - they send me all over the EU. That's the great thing about this job. Catholicity is a small operation with big dreams. I'm really the only full-time culture reporter they've got, so I have my pick of assignments. There's enough for three of me and three Giovannis besides."

"I still can't believe they get away with that name."

Liza grinned wickedly. "Oh it's caused a few misunderstandings, but the reporter credentials, and the kinds of bylines I'm racking up, set them straight pretty fast."

"I hardly know anything about your job - you've sent three letters, Liza. Three, in a year and a half."

"Sixteen months, thank you very much." Liza hesitated. "It's - changing, over there. Letters aren't as... in vogue as they used to be."

Anna-Lucia looked at her sharply. "You're joking." She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, pushing away the lingering brain fog and reminding herself she was still not certain what privacy remained at home. Take nothing for granted. "I mean, nothing's more fashionable than retro, right? Where would the elite be if not at the height of fashion?"

Liza shrugged, an airy show of unconcern belied by the downturned corners of her mouth, as she reached into her bag, tossed carelessly on the ground next to her. "Whatever fires their rockets, I guess. It's pages, now. Personal pages to orally deliver messages."

Anna-Lucia felt inside, somewhere, that this was more important than she grasped, than her sister let on, but the sun had been slowly cooking her for more than an hour and Liza was pulling out of her carelessly dropped bag a thick wad of cream-colored envelopes addressed in a trailing scrawl she knew very well.

Her heart leapt. "You saw him!"

Liza shook her head, and she was pale under her tan. "These came through the postal service."

Not, Anna-Lucia registered distantly, the post office.

"That's how I found you out here, actually. I got in not twenty minutes ago and went in looking for Dad, and Grandma immediately sent me out here." Her eyes conveyed that Leah had warned her, too, they could not speak completely freely in the house. "These are all addressed to him."

Anna-Lucia stared at her. "Just to Dad? Not even one for me? Or you?"

"I tried to tell you." Liza held out the letters. "Check the dates."  Swiftly, Anna-Lucia tugged the rubber bands off the thick stack and they uncompressed in her hands, spilling over her lap. Each was labeled, F1sh, followed by a string of numbers she recognized as an encoding of month, year, and - something she couldn't decipher. Location, probably.

"A year ago? The most recent one is twelve months old?"

"One's only seven."

"You've read them?"

Liza frowned at her. "I take my job seriously, Anna-Lucia."

"I'm sorry. Stupid question." Mechanically, Anna-Lucia gathered the letters back up and rebound them. "So you've had no news."

Liza just looked at her.

Understanding began to dawn, and Anna-Lucia did not like it. "That's why you came home."

"We need Uncle Kevin's address book."

"No news at all? Seven months and nothing? Not a single person knows where he is or what happened to him?"

"Will you help me find Dad?" Liza pleaded, glancing down at her watch, a slim, chic, old fashioned ladies' analog. "He needed these... yesterday."

Anna-Lucia felt as unmovable as the headstones beside her.

"Please, Anna-Lucia. I don't... I can't tell him alone."

Liza stood and held out a hand. Anna-Lucia grasped it and was hauled to her feet, stiff, half-asleep limbs complaining and uncooperative. She heaved a deep breath, involuntarily, as if she'd been swimming underwater. Their little brother had been missing for at least seven months, and no one had heard a thing.

"Dad's in the new shed."

[aion-rsa]

How Nancy Drew Succeeds as an Adaptation Where The Hardy Boys Fails

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

It is a truth universally acknowledged that every few years, a new on-screen adaptation of The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew will arrive. Since the franchises’ first appearances on the page (1927 and 1930, respectively), we’ve all been collectively fascinated by the stories of spirited teens solving crimes that range from neighborhood theft to international espionage. But this year is perhaps the first time we’ve seen two appear so close to one another.

Hulu’s 2020 The Hardy Boys adaptation is the fifth time the famous sleuthing siblings have appeared onscreen. The CW’s Nancy Drew, which is set to return for its second season in January, is the girl detective’s ninth, and that’s only if you don’t count several failed pilots that never moved forward. (Quietly judging you, CBS.) We’re clearly obsessed with these kids, likely because many of us grew up reading stories of their adventures, and wishing we ourselves could take part in them.

But for a variety of reasons, these stories have proven perilously difficult to adapt for the screen. Perhaps it’s because movies and TV shows naturally dull some of the self-insert joy that young readers get from these books. Or maybe it’s because there are always going to be growing pains when trying to adapt children’s classics for the adults that networks hope will tune in to watch these series. Either way, neither The CW’s Nancy Drew nor Hulu’s The Hardy Boys is particularly faithful to its source material, though each makes different choices about how to strike out on its own, narratively speaking. And one method clearly works better than the other.

Nancy Drew jumps at the chance to create a completely new take on a classic heroine for modern audiences, acknowledging that their girl detective does and should look different than her textual counterpart. Tonally, The Hardy Boys has a lot more in common with the original Stratemeyer Syndicate catalog than its CW cousin does, with its wholesome feel, younger characters, and colorful, vaguely timeless aesthetic. But, of the two, it’s Nancy Drew that ultimately gets the spirit of its source material right.

The Hardy Boys seems content to let the characters languish in a sort of nebulous vacuum, crafting a fairly bland family mystery that’s populated by characters who not only bear little resemblance to the classic novel versions we know but who aren’t interesting enough in their own right to make up for it. True, the show features a pair of appealing young lead actors in newcomers Rohan Campbell and Alexander Elliot, but it makes the brothers much younger than in any previous adaptation to date and needlessly widens the age gap between them in an attempt to appeal to a broader audience. While this move is understandable on paper, in actuality it robs the series of its most important element: The relationship between the Hardy Boys themselves.

With Frank now sixteen and Joe just twelve, their characters no longer feel like equals, or even really like friends. In fact, young Joe has more to do with his BFF Biff – intriguingly now reimagined as a tomboyish girl – than he does with his brother. (What high schooler is naturally this eager to hang out with a twelve-year-old, after all?) Frank’s whole uber-protective vibe is sweet enough, but this isn’t the relationship that any of us remember.

To be fair, this Nancy Drew isn’t necessarily any truer to its literary roots than The Hardy Boys is. After all, Nancy has sex in the CW series, and the show fully embraces the supernatural in a way the original books never did. (In the novels that creepy noise in the attic was probably a neighbor’s cat. Here’s it’s 100% guaranteed a murderous ghost.) 

This version of her story bears little resemblance to Carolyn Keene’s novels beyond its eponymous mystery-loving heroine and a slew of self-referential Easter eggs that will make fans of the books sigh with delight. (Truly, there’s an episode whose plot turns on a literal hidden staircase.) The show acknowledges its roots by making its aged-up Nancy a former child detective prodigy in the town of Horseshoe Bay, even as it admits allowing that little girl to grow up into a young woman who regularly breaks into buildings isn’t really that cute anymore. And could have unfortunate legal ramifications.

However, despite the much-changed setting around her, it still feels as though you can draw a line from the Nancy of the novels to star Kennedy McMann’s version of the character. Her Nancy is whip-smart and plucky, but most importantly dedicated to finding the truth, no matter what, even and maybe especially when it personally costs her to do so. From its opening frames, The CW’s Nancy Drew knows exactly what kind of show it wants to be, and embraces that identity with gusto.

Fans of the original novels may or may not find that identity enjoyable, and that’s certainly more than fair, but rightly or wrongly, the show has a point of view. Hulu’s The Hardy Boys, unfortunately, seems stuck serving multiple masters and, in doing so, satisfies none.

Its classic, old school mystery feel seems meant to appeal to families and younger viewers, but its legitimately scary moments and dark themes like death and political corruption are hardly things that parents are going to want to explain to their kids. After all, the boys aren’t just trying to solve a variety of generally low stakes cases in their small town, as they are in the novels. They’re trying to figure out who killed their own mother, and the show is vastly unprepared to really deal with how disturbing that both is and should be.

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The show’s 1980s vibes and likable central squad of teens feel like a slightly less alien-filled Stranger Things, but none of our core characters are particularly compelling protagonists. (Callie Shaw is maybe the exception to this, but the show also puts her in a weird catfight with a new girl at her school, because, of course, it does.) In the end, The Hardy Boys is extremely tonally uneven, trying to balance innocence and adulthood in a way that just doesn’t work.

Is Nancy Drew perfect? Of course not. And if what you’re looking for is a faithful retelling of Keene’s original stories, you’re definitely going to be disappointed by it. But, unlike The Hardy Boys, at least this adaptation is a show that feels like it has something to say. And that makes all the difference.

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