#i also just have a problem with the whole 'feral woman' trope as if it is perceived and glamorized by a lot of people

[kylejsugarman]

i dont know if its my dislike of the creatives behind them (diablo cody and darren aronofsky) or their ties to the whole "coquette fem" aesthetic, but i do not like "black swan" or "jennifer's body" lol

[qqueenofhades]

Hi. I’m curious. What did you mean by “women who read fiction might get Bad Ideas!!!” has just reached its latest and stupidest form via tumblr purity culture.? I haven’t seen any of this but I’m new to tumblr.

Oh man. You really want to get me into trouble on, like, my first day back, don’t you?

Pretty much all of this has been explained elsewhere by people much smarter than me, so this isn’t necessarily going to say anything new, but I’ll do my best to synthesize and summarize it. As ever, it comes with the caveat that it is my personal interpretation, and is not intended as the be-all, end-all. You’ll definitely run across it if you spend any time on Tumblr (or social media in general, including Twitter, and any other fandom-related spaces). This will get long.

In short: in the nineteenth century, when Gothic/romantic literature became popular and women were increasingly able to read these kinds of novels for fun, there was an attendant moral panic over whether they, with their weak female brains, would be able to distinguish fiction from reality, and that they might start making immoral or inappropriate choices in their real life as a result. Obviously, there was a huge sexist and misogynistic component to this, and it would be nice to write it off entirely as just hysterical Victorian pearl-clutching, but that feeds into the “lol people in the past were all much stupider than we are today” kind of historical fallacy that I often and vigorously shut down. (Honestly, I’m not sure how anyone can ever write the “omg medieval people believed such weird things about medicine!” nonsense again after what we’ve gone through with COVID, but that is a whole other rant.) The thinking ran that women shouldn’t read novels for fear of corrupting their impressionable brains, or if they had to read novels at all, they should only be the Right Ones: i.e., those that came with a side of heavy-handed and explicit moralizing so that they wouldn’t be tempted to transgress. Of course, books trying to hammer their readers over the head with their Moral Point aren’t often much fun to read, and that’s not the point of fiction anyway. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

Fast-forward to today, and the entire generation of young, otherwise well-meaning people who have come to believe that being a moral person involves only consuming the “right” kind of fictional content, and being outrageously mean to strangers on the internet who do not agree with that choice. There are a lot of factors contributing to this. First, the advent of social media and being subject to the judgment of people across the world at all times has made it imperative that you demonstrate the “right” opinions to fit in with your peer-group, and on fandom websites, that often falls into a twisted, hyper-critical, so-called “progressivism” that diligently knows all the social justice buzzwords, but has trouble applying them in nuance, context, and complicated real life. To some extent, this obviously is not a bad thing. People need to be critical of the media they engage with, to know what narratives the creator(s) are promoting, the tropes they are using, the conclusions that they are supporting, and to be able to recognize and push back against genuinely harmful content when it is produced – and this distinction is critical – by professional mainstream creators. Amateur, individual fan content is another kettle of fish. There is a difference between critiquing a professional creator (though social media has also made it incredibly easy to atrociously abuse them) and attacking your fellow fan and peer, who is on the exact same footing as you as a consumer of that content.

Obviously, again, this doesn’t mean that you can’t call out people who are engaging in actually toxic or abusive behavior, fans or otherwise. But certain segments of Tumblr culture have drained both those words (along with “gaslighting”) of almost all critical meaning, until they’re applied indiscriminately to “any fictional content that I don’t like, don’t agree with, or which doesn’t seem to model healthy behavior in real life” and “anyone who likes or engages with this content.” Somewhere along the line, a reactionary mindset has been formed in which the only fictional narratives or relationships are those which would be “acceptable” in real life, to which I say…. what? If I only wanted real life, I would watch the news and only read non-fiction. Once again, the underlying fear, even if it’s framed in different terms, is that the people (often women) enjoying this content can’t be trusted to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and if they like “problematic” fictional content, they will proceed to seek it out in their real life and personal relationships. And this is just… not true.

As I said above, critical media studies and thoughtful consumption of entertainment are both great things! There have been some great metas written on, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how it is increasingly relying on villains who have outwardly admirable motives (see: the Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) who are then stigmatized by their anti-social, violent behavior and attacks on innocent people, which is bad even as the heroes also rely on violence to achieve their ends. This is a clever way to acknowledge social anxieties – to say that people who identify with the Flag Smashers are right, to an extent, but then the instant they cross the line into violence, they’re upsetting the status quo and need to be put down by the heroes. I watched TFATWS and obviously enjoyed it. I have gone on a Marvel re-watching binge recently as well. I like the MCU! I like the characters and the madcap sci-fi adventures! But I can also recognize it as a flawed piece of media that I don’t have to accept whole-cloth, and to be able to criticize some of the ancillary messages that come with it. It doesn’t have to be black and white.

When it comes to shipping, moreover, the toxic culture of “my ship is better than your ship because it’s Better in Real Life” ™ is both well-known and in my opinion, exhausting and pointless. As also noted, the whole point of fiction is that it allows us to create and experience realities that we don’t always want in real life. I certainly enjoy plenty of things in fiction that I would definitely not want in reality: apocalyptic space operas, violent adventures, and yes, garbage men. A large number of my ships over the years have been labeled “unhealthy” for one reason or another, presumably because they don’t adhere to the stereotype of the coffee-shop AU where there’s no tension and nobody ever makes mistakes or is allowed to have serious flaws. And I’m not even bagging on coffee-shop AUs! Some people want to remove characters from a violent situation and give them that fluff and release from the nonstop trauma that TV writers merrily inflict on them without ever thinking about the consequences. Fanfiction often focuses on the psychology and healing of characters who have been through too much, and since that’s something we can all relate to right now, it’s a very powerful exercise. As a transformative and interpretive tool, fanfic is pretty awesome.

The problem, again, comes when people think that fic/fandom can only be used in this way, and that going the other direction, and exploring darker or complicated or messy dynamics and relationships, is morally bad. As has been said before: shipping is not activism. You don’t get brownie points for only having “healthy” ships (and just my personal opinion as a queer person, these often tend to be heterosexual white ships engaging in notably heteronormative behavior) and only supporting behavior in fiction that you think is acceptable in real life. As we’ve said, there is a systematic problem in identifying what that is. Ironically, for people worried about Women Getting Ideas by confusing fiction and reality, they’re doing the same thing, and treating fiction like reality. Fiction is fiction. Nobody actually dies. Nobody actually gets hurt. These people are not real. We need to normalize the idea of characters as figments of a creator’s imagination, not actual people with their own agency. They exist as they are written, and by the choice of people whose motives can be scrutinized and questioned, but they themselves are not real. Nor do characters reflect the author’s personal views. Period.

This feeds into the fact that the internet, and fandom culture, is not intended as a “safe space” in the sense that no questionable or triggering content can ever be posted. Archive of Our Own, with its reams of scrupulous tagging and requests for you to explicitly click and confirm that you are of age to see M or E-rated content, is a constant target of the purity cultists for hosting fictional material that they see as “immoral.” But it repeatedly, unmistakably, directly asks you for your consent to see this material, and if you then act unfairly victimized, well… that’s on you. You agreed to look at this, and there are very few cases where you didn’t know what it entailed. Fandom involves adults creating contents for adults, and while teenagers and younger people can and do participate, they need to understand this fact, rather than expecting everything to be a PG Disney movie.

When I do write my “dark” ships with garbage men, moreover, they always involve a lot of the man being an idiot, being bluntly called out for an idiot, and learning healthier patterns of behavior, which is one of the fundamental patterns of romance novels. But they also involve an element of the woman realizing that societal standards are, in fact, bullshit, and she can go feral every so often, as a treat. But even if I wrote them another way, that would still be okay! There are plenty of ships and dynamics that I don���t care for and don’t express in my fic and fandom writing, but that doesn’t mean I seek out the people who do like them and reprimand them for it. I know plenty of people who use fiction, including dark fiction, in a cathartic way to process real-life trauma, and that’s exactly the role – one of them, at least – that fiction needs to be able to fulfill. It would be terribly boring and limited if we were only ever allowed to write about Real Life and nothing else. It needs to be complicated, dark, escapist, unreal, twisted, and whatever else. This means absolutely zilch about what the consumers of this fiction believe, act, or do in their real lives.

Once more, I do note the misogyny underlying this. Nobody, after all, seems to care what kind of books or fictional narratives men read, and there’s no reflection on whether this is teaching them unhealthy patterns of behavior, or whether it predicts how they’ll act in real life. (There was some of that with the “do video games cause mass shootings?”, but it was a straw man to distract from the actual issues of toxic masculinity and gun culture.) Certain kinds of fiction, especially historical fiction, romance novels, and fanfic, are intensely gendered and viewed as being “women’s fiction” and therefore hyper-criticized, while nobody’s asking if all the macho-man potboiler military-intrigue tough-guy stereotypical “men’s fiction” is teaching them bad things. So the panic about whether your average woman on the internet is reading dark fanfic with an Unhealthy Ship (zomgz) is, in my opinion, misguided at best, and actively destructive at worst.

[yenslilac]

Daenerys Targaryen and Ophelia: An Essay

I wrote this a while back, just after Season 8 ended. After a few edits, I decided to share it with you! Disclaimer: I wrote this fueled with rage at 11 at night for two weeks straight. Don’t judge. 

Part 1: The Heroine Goes Absolutely Bats**t Crazy

Ophelia. Known throughout time as That Crazy Chick Who Drowned Herself. What a legacy. And Daenerys: She Who Toasted A City Like Marshmallows And Then Was Offed By Her Nephew/Lover. The sad thing is, these are my heroes. What a life. But the ‘Insane Heroine’ trope is prevalent in many forms of media – Dark Phoenix is another example. At first glance, Daenerys and Ophelia have very little in common; Daenerys is a powerful and assertive leader, and Ophelia is a background love interest. The one thing that unites them – they go crazy because of rejected love. While their descent into madness is slightly different; Ophelia is pitiful, Daenerys aggressive, both end up dying indirectly or directly as a result of their lover. Lovely. Let’s talk first about Ophelia – She is rebuffed Hamlet, the original pathetic sad boy, and at the death of her father, goes insane. After several performances of her insanity, she makes her way to a river where she falls (or throws?) herself into the water and drowns. This is witnessed by Gertrude, who then goes on to tell her brother Laertes of her death. It’s a pretty monologue, describing the flowers and plants growing along the riverbank, and how pretty and peaceful she looked as she sank under water and DIED. Remember this. Then my girl Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals and the First Men etc. etc. Oh boy. Ohhhhhh boy. What can I say except **************** ***** ** **********. Thank you for your time. But she like Ophelia, was scorned by her Boyfriend Who Felt It Was Just A Little Weird That She Was His Aunt. But like, your paternal grandparents and the rest of your great-whatever grandparents were siblings, and your maternal grandparents were cousins so… But I digress. Wait no, this is what it’s all about. I’m back! I un-digress! So, she goes ‘insane’ cause she can’t get laid (don’t we all?) and roasts a whole lot of people and becomes… Hitler for some reason… So, Boyfriend Who Felt It Was Just A Little Weird That She Was His Aunt And Really Wishes He Can Just Catch A Break For Once Is It Really Too Much Too Ask is egged on by Murder Sister™ and Smarty Pants McGee to kill her. Just like my friends! He makes out with her and stabs her (best of both worlds!) and she dies. Very prettily. Remember this. You know. YOU KNOW I’m going to rant about this.

Part 2: Heroic Man Kills The Crazy Lady Like The Feral Dog She Is (But Feels Sad About It) 

Trope as old as time… why is this still fine… surely there’s a better plot deviiiiiice. “Duty is the death of love…” Shut up. Shut up. No, it isn’t. There is a thing called multitasking. You should try it. But let’s recap. Woman goes crazy because of lover/hero of the story rebuffing her because he’s got issues of his own that he doesn’t care to share with her, and close friend/family member is killed. This is when the paths of the Hero diverge. Hamlet does not actually kill Ophelia himself, but his careless actions towards her eventually drive her to suicide. Jon, on the other hand, does kill Daenerys, (no, I’m not mad. I’m just disappointed) by a knife to the heart while snogging her. (I’d like to take the opportunity to say that this was ridiculous and yes, I will die mad about it.) What else is similar? Hamlet holds Ophelia’s (or in some adaptations tries to) dead body in his arms as she is about to be buried and Jon holds Daenerys as she dies. They cry and wish it didn’t have to be this way, but really guys, this is Your Fault.

The problem with this trope in particular (and I’m talking about a lot of other examples here, like Dark Phoenix and Wolverine) is that it renders the killer sympathetic. They didn’t want to do this, but it was for the good of humanity, it was a mercy, blah blah blah. Really? Did someone make you kill her? No, a sense of moral justice does not count. Hamlet abuses and humiliates Ophelia then claims he loved her so much that ‘forty thousand brothers could not…” Creepy. I have to say, creepy. And Jon Snow. “Was it right? It doesn’t feel right…” I’m glad you came to that conclusion. I really am. But I knew this from the moment you stuffed that butter knife into her spleen, so honestly you don’t have any business feeling sorry for yourself. If there’s one lesson that Game of Thrones and Shakespeare has taught me, it is:

(not an artist, don’t judge)

Part 3: Someone Died And The Director Said, “Cool But Like… Make It Fashion.”

Do you remember what I told you to remember? Did you? Cause I’m about to RANT.

Throughout time (like 500 years) men have been painting Ophelia’s drowning – the probable suicide of a tormented young woman – and made sure she looked hot while doing it. True, the description of her death is pretty and all, but depictions of her floating just below the surface, a dramatic and lovely pose and flowers strewn around her glamorise her death – something many other people have taken note on – and give her death something of a peaceful, serene departing note, rather than the death of a woman so deranged she did not appear to understand the gravity of her situation as she sank under water. Daenerys suffers a similar case of SDPS (Sexy Dead Person Syndrome). Let’s go through it step by step, shall we? While in an embrace with someone she loves and trusts, she is stabbed in the heart area (I guess?), and she dies. The End. My respect for white men flew off with Drogon. But I haven’t complained properly yet! Compared to other characters, like Myrcella, Joffrey and Catelyn Stark to name a few, her death was very clean. In these other examples, blood runs down their faces or spurts out of their neck in suitably graphic fashion but Daenerys’ case, two thin lines of blood trickle from her nose and mouth. Pretty, pretty. We get a brief shot of a pool of blood on the snow as Drogon picks her up, but blink and you’ll miss it. She looks shocked and confused as she dies, yet the next shot of her face shows her eyes are closed and an almost peaceful expression on her face. Not only this but we don’t actually get any proper Last Words, when she knows she is about to die. She makes no sound at all. She dies prettily and quietly. We also don’t see the knife at all until she is dead, removing any very graphic nature from the scene. A lot of the camera shots are of Jon’s face. This scene is not about Daenerys Targaryen’s death; This is about Jon Snow’s inner turmoil as he selflessly sacrifices the woman he loves to save the rest of the world. Hold up one second I gotta……

I mean, come on. Daenerys is barely mentioned after her death. She, a woman who freed hundreds, no, thousands of slaves and worked hard to reach her goals (albeit a little dragonfire-y) yet she dies without a whisper and is forgotten almost immediately. She becomes less of a central character and more of a catalyst for other men’s rise to power (see Bran the Broken). Wait, what about Sansa, you cry? Well, at this point, she was so out of character I’m striking her from the narrative. Bye bitch 😊 The same goes for most of the other women in the last season. They become plot devices with a little agency and that’s about it. Missandei? Unnecessarily killed to create the “Mad Queen”. Cersei? A compelling villain reduced to a ‘crying girl who wants to be comforted’. Arya? Kills the Night King and then, I dunno. Sansa? Suspicious of Daenerys because of reasons, betrays her brother/cousin because she doesn’t want Daenerys on the throne, then just ‘forgets’ about this whole thing to become Queen in the North. Brienne? Honourable knight left sobbing after her one (k)night stand left her. Another thing that many of these women have in common (the ones who survived to the final episode anyway) is that none of them have romantic endgames despite this being set up. Arya and Gendry have been close friends in Season 2 and 3, then <3  and everyone (i.e. me) thought that you know, they get together and stuff, because that’s what the writers seemed to be setting up. But nope. Arya’s all like ‘I wanna kill the queen’ (which she never does) and throws all that out the window. (But Gendry was totally on that ship at the end). Brienne and Jaime seemed to finally stop eye fricking and then got straight to the actual fricking but nooooo. “I lOvE CeRseI! WE’re bOTh tERrIble PeOple!” And of course, the crowning glory:

And the woman who actually does come out on top is Sansa, a largely unemotional, suspicious woman whose brother is now the king and made her a queen because she’s his sister. Riiiight. That’s totally not nepotism or anything. 

The End: But Boy, Am I Just Beginning

To conclude, the ending of Daenerys Targaryen was largely misogynistic as it painted a brutal and dishonourable murder as an act of mercy and gave the killer (sorry man, I feel like I’m throwing you under the bus here, but it must be said) a sympathetic angle as a heartbroken martyr sacrificing for the greater good. I had high expectations, I really did, but you just took it anD THREW IT IN THE DIRT. Good god. But it’s fine, I have fanfiction anyway.

Thank you for reading this, if you stuck around this far!

[luxfurem]

@treppenwitzz​​ asked: i need all the deets about your bellatrix... ALSO ANJI i wanna know more about anji | MEME.

So... this ended up really long and therefore it’s under the cut! I sort of left out the “who they could get along with” part but I also feel like that really just depends on verses and such, so we can totally discuss that sometime  🥺🥺🥺

Bellatrix Lestrange

TW for mentions of alcohol, abuse, death and miscarriage

TROPES/ARCHETYPES: The Champion, Femme Fatale

Bellatrix is the very first muse that I officially wrote on indie, but also a muse that I’ve explored in the many group rps I’ve been in in the years before that. Because of that, she’s been through a lot of changing and tweaking over the years, but I like what I’ve got going for her now.

I’m absolutely a big fan of villain characters and I support the humanizing of them because in my mind, it is all the more terrifying that a villain could like the same things as you, could be like you, but be capable of such terrible things. I think it creates a frightening perspective that’s the quiet sort of terrifying, and it’s what I aim to do with Bella. I wanted to create a villainous woman who is powerful without being sorry for it.

I do want to stress that a villain doesn’t necessarily become worthy or deserving of pity or redemption because their story contains sad aspects. In the end, everyone encounters terrible and sad things in life, and it’s what you do with these experiences that matters. If you become bitter or vengeful, that is a decision, and the consequences of however you decide to treat the world after are not cancelled out because of the reason why you became this way.

On the one hand, she is this terrifyingly powerful witch who, despite her comparatively young age, climbed up the ranks of the death eaters to the position of lieutenant at Voldemort’s side, but on the other she is someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s wife. I wanted to explore how these two aspects of her story intertwine, or, in some cases, clash.

My Bella is a bit canon-divergent in that I absolutely refuse to write a woman who’s completely submissive to a man, especially one that doesn’t deserve it. Of course, I don’t want to stray too far from her original arc in that I still believe she’s absolutely starstruck by Voldemort, but she is more interested in his abilities, his mind and his cunning than she is in him as a partner. It’s a different kind of infatuation, where she isn’t all too sure if she wants him or wants to BE him. In time, she settles with neither, and becomes his champion, instead. She’s a knight under his banner, a soldier under his command.

Much of Bella’s arc comes down to a dominant woman living in a society that doesn’t like dominant women. Pureblood circles are catered to the pureblood man, whereas the woman’s job, much like in societies of previous eras, is to bear a husband's children to continue the pureblood line. It’s a crude and sexist thing, and Bella wants none of it. From a young age, she rebels against her father’s firm beliefs in the way things are supposed to be, and rebels against her mother’s attempts to “guide” her back to how she’s supposed to be. She’s the feral child with the holes in her dresses, the scrapes on her legs from climbing trees and running too fast. Her long hair always tangled and messy. She knows that as a girl in the Black family, the highest achievement would have been to become matriarch, but even that wasn’t ever going to be enough for Bella.

When her mother dies, about two years after the birth of Narcissa, the matriarch of the Black family, Walburga, takes over the role for a short amount of time while her father drinks his grief away. After Sirius is born, however, even this steadiness falls away, as their aunt spends her full time caring for him and the second son, Regulus, born a year after. This leaves Bella to assume responsibility for her sisters at the age of 8. Her fights with her father, their temperaments going head to head resulting in situations I don’t really care to divulge about.

Once accepted into Hogwarts is where things start to divert. From one day to the next, her previously always messy hair is neatly combed back into a braid. Her clothes are pristine, not a spot in sight, and her sharp commentary is kept to a minimum. To all those around her, it seemed she had finally heeded her mother’s wishes, and embraced her place in society. But to those who knew her well enough, to her sisters and to her cousins, there was a stubborn fire burning behind those crow-black eyes, burning higher and brighter the more time passed. It was only a matter of time until the fire either consumed her, or consumed those around her.

It was at the age of 17, during her last year at Hogwarts, that Bellatrix was introduced to the Dark Lord. She’d seen him before, of course, but the Black family had stoically kept their stance on the matter of his campaign neutral, although this wouldn’t last. Her fiance-to-be, Rodolphus, who was a few years her senior, had already joined the ranks, and Voldemort’s actions could no longer be brushed off as a mere whim by the family. And Bella, who desired more than the life of a housewife, saw this as an opportunity to lift herself up.

I want to stress that I, as both a Tom Riddle and Bellatrix writer, don’t think their dynamic was of a romantic or lustful nature at all at this point in time, if ever. Voldemort saw the fire and the potential, and decided that he wanted both of these things for himself, for his ranks. She exceeded expectations and he decided that, if anyone was worthy to be his student, it was her. Over the course of the next two years, he trained her in the dark arts, eventually revealing her, at the age of nineteen, to be his new lieutenant. This was met with some resistance, of course. but Bella was quick to silence that. After all, she had risen above her station, and it had taken effort. She was not about to lose that to a bunch of butthurt men.

It’s also around this time that she marries Rodolphus, whom she puts through the ringer for months before and even post-marriage. She hated the idea of being passed from one man (her father) to another (her husband), as if she is nothing more than a possession. The marriage was arranged, and this bothered her, too, considering her lack of choice in the matter. And because she couldn’t exactly fight her father on it, she fought Rodolphus instead. On every turn, hoping he would be turned off and cancel it. After all, a man’s voice, even if he was only an heir, and not patriarch, still sounded louder than a woman’s voice ever would. But it only seemed to invigorate him, pulling closer the more she pushed. As if he were attracted to the fire, wanted to scorch himself just to stand in the light. He never forced her and he never would, even as she refused to let him into their marriage bed for months, even as she taunted him and ridiculed him. The marriage, in time, seemed to grant her a certain freedom that she never had as a daughter of house Black. She could go where she pleased, do as she pleased, pursue her position among the death eaters as she wanted to. She lost her wariness towards him, her anger. And eventually, she learned to love him.

Bellatrix used to be closest to her sister Andromeda. The two of them were, for a long time, practically inseparable, two halves of a whole. It was as if they should have been twins, and what one lacked, the other would possess. Where one went, you could soon expect the other to be. That was, of course, until Andromeda defected. When she did, Bella’s whole world collapsed. Her castle was captured from the inside, by sadness, by grief and by anger at the deceit. Because Andromeda hadn’t chosen her. Had chosen a “filthy mudblood” instead of her own sister, who had always cared for her, always been there for her. If Bella had had a mean streak, before, it was now full blown, a riptide that would destroy everything and everyone that didn’t get out of her way. She was devastated by the loss, and would never quite recover from it. This event had a huge impact on her view on muggleborns. Whereas before she allowed herself a certain tolerance, where she still viewed herself as holier than but limited her disdain to snooty looks and haughty comments, she now was actively hostile, threatening and garnering a reputation among the ranks of the death eaters for her ruthless, cruel actions.

During her marriage, Bella was pregnant exactly 4 times, but all 4 pregnancies ended up miscarriages fairly early on. It’s my belief that her problems stem from the inbreeding within the family and the English pureblood society in general. Contrary to her other beliefs on the woman in pureblood society, she was interested in being a mother and had the motherly instinct to go with it. Her not being capable of bearing children left her feeling devastated and hardened her heart. In AUs where she does have children, whether of her own or adopted, she develops a sort of caution, a knowledge that she isn’t just responsible for herself, but for this child as well. In these AUs, it keeps her out of Azkaban.

Speaking of Azkaban, I usually don’t write about her time there or really post-Azkaban, and this is mostly because I hate the narrative that she’s “crazy”, and I think it’s harmful towards people who have mental health problems. I believe, due to how Azkaban’s dementors suck the happiness out of people and how Azkaban looks like hell on earth, she suffers from a form of PTSD, but she is not “crazy”.

A few loose facts about her:

is bisexual but leans towards men

loves to write poetry, but she never shows it to anyone.

has a very low tolerance for alcohol and barely drinks.

loves coffee and can’t function without drinking it every morning

is obsessed with taking care of her hair. It’s long and dark and very well-maintained

loves to wear red lipstick

forced herself to learn to use her wand with both her left and her right hand

Anji Terryll

TROPES/ARCHETYPES: The Antihero, The Living Legend, The Reluctant Hero

Anji is actually one of my older muses, who doesn’t see the light of day often because I suppose the Skyrim fandom is sort of dead. On top of that, she’s a female oc. i don’t think i’ll need to explain this. Regardless of that and the lack of information I’ve put online about her ( which I actually seek to remedy by writing this ), she’s a quiet favorite who will never disappear from my roster.

I wanted to create a person who fate had been thrusted upon unwillingly. I wanted to create a woman who had never planned to do anything that didn’t benefit herself in life. Anji’s early life consisted of what was barely a life at the orphanage in Riften, where she watched the Thieves Guild lift jewelry from a man’s pocket with the man none the wiser. She never entertained the idea of being an honest worker, because she’d seen how the jarl treated honest workers. Of course, she knew that if she were to be caught thieving, the storm she’d call over herself would be worse, but that was only if she was going to be caught.

So she got herself into the Thieves’ Guild, worked her way up the ranks to Guild Master, before, near the border, she was caught stealing a horse and shipped off to Helgen, where the main story begins.

Anji is, from the start, reluctant about her supposed fate. She never believed in prophecies and rarely in Gods and now, everything was real, everything was true. And she was the main character of a legend. Thrust into a role she doesn’t think fit her. She isn’t who these people deserve, a thieving woman who serves only her own benefit. The people deserved a selfless knight, advocating for the survival of mankind, believing so wholly in oneself that they could overcome a legendary monster like Alduin the World-Eater. Someone who isn’t her. So she rejects her abilities, rejects her destiny, and pretends for months that she isn’t the one the Greybeards are calling from the Throat of the World.

And for a time, it works. For a time she can focus on the physical gain, the money she earns, the reputation. But in the back of her mind, the knowledge scratches at the door she keeps it behind. She sees the destruction the dragons are causing all over Skyrim, the terror of the people. The loss of morale. She tells herself that she decides to see what these Greybeards have to say, if only to tell them they’ll need to find someone else.

But she comes to learn that there is no one else. There is only her and her bow, and her lack of morale, against an ancient dragon.

Anji is the Reluctant Hero, the Unlikely Hero, not the woman you’d expect when one mentions the Dovahkiin. She’s slight and flighty, quick as a whip with her twin blades, relying on speed above strength. She prefers sneaking through the shadows instead of fighting her way through boldly and openly, and she never starts fights she can’t win. This doesn’t mean she won’t kill, and doesn’t mean she won’t use her powers, even for personal gain. She enjoys the power of the Voice and, as lore suggests, overtime grows more and more powerful (think: her voice can at some point burn the ice off a mountain), but she hates the responsibility that comes with it and will never fully accept it. She’s practical and quick-witted, more on the serious side of the spectrum, although she possesses a funny streak that only shows up in intimate settings ( think: close friends/guild/lovers ) or when she’s completely drunk. She observes each angle of a job or mission before proceeding, wanting to be ahead of each trap she might run into.

A few loose facts about her:

is bisexual but leans towards women

has absolutely no interest in bearing children, adopting is fine though

favors her bow over her twin blades

carries two daggers in each boot

In some verses she can be a werewolf for absolutely no other reason other than that i can

in modern verses she owns a martial arts school

Play smart not hard

[eternalgirlscout]

a while back @lesbians4sokka (i think? sorry for @ing you if i’m thinking of a different blog) asked me to share my thoughts about The Rise of Kyoshi, and seeing as i just finished the book last night (because i am a monster who gets most of the way through a book and thinks “if i keep reading it’ll be over i can’t have that”) i’m finally doing it now!

this got long as hell OOPS

spoilers under the cut

I want to talk about vengeance and justice in this novel.

back when I was only maybe a third of the way through it, i said on twitter that i was excited to see an avatar with an “opposite moral trajectory” to aang; in AtLA, aang has to learn to value justice over conflict avoidance, whereas RoK’s kyoshi has to prioritize justice over revenge. they come to similar conclusions from wildly different starting points. now that i’ve finished the book, i can’t decide how much i stand by that assessment. it feels reductive--which is a testament to the strength of F.C. Yee’s storytelling. while yes, aang and kyoshi both learn a great deal about justice, they act justly in very different ways.

aang, for reasons i like and appreciate from storytelling, ethical, and characterization perspectives (if you haven’t read my The Lion Turtle Is Good, Actually manifesto, you are legally obligated to do so now) has a strict rule about how he enacts justice that aligns with his beliefs and duties to the legacy of the air nomads. rather than killing people who abuse power to oppress others, he takes away the mechanism by which they accomplish violence--namely, their bending. in LoK we see that he continues to use this ability as an alternative to taking a life for at least most of his career as the avatar when he takes yakone’s bending.

kyoshi, on the other hand, has a very different philosophical development and ultimate approach to justice. her last conversation with lao ge summarizes the conflict between the mode of justice that works for aang (though obviously AtLA takes place chronologically after RoK, the novel is well aware that the reader has almost certainly seen the series first and takes ideas and details from it to flesh out the world, which i think is another strength of Yee’s) and the mode of justice she creates for herself.

“I feel... inconsistent. Unfair. Like I should have either killed them both or let them both live.”

...

“If you had a strict rule, maybe, to always show mercy or always punish, you could use it as a shield to protect your spirit. But that would be distancing yourself from your duty. Determining the fates of others on a case-by-case basis, considering the infinite combinations of circumstance, will wear on you like rain on the mountain... You will never be perfectly fair, and you will never be truly correct,” Lao Ge said. “This is your burden.” (405)

the stark difference between aang’s philosophical background and kyoshi’s leads them to very different outcomes with regard to their choices as the avatar. yes, aang makes decisions on a case-by-case basis as well, but he is not interested in retribution as much as restoration and has a line he will not cross. i could argue that kyoshi sees the two (retribution, restoration) as inextricable in the pursuit of justice.

but what about vengeance?

kyoshi’s hatred of her parents wears away over the course of the novel, but her need to enact revenge on jianzhu only becomes more urgent. she is not universally vengeful, but she does not let go of revenge as a goal until she has it... sort of.

speaking of which, i fucking screamed when yun showed up again. i had a feeling we hadn’t seen the last of him, but the timing of his appearance and the change in him hit me like a lightning bolt. sorry, i have to gush for a second about how interested i am in what’s up with him. i am a sucker for a literal dead boy walking, for someone who has been turned into something Other by forces outside their control, and no matter what kyoshi ends up having to do to deal with him, i know i’m going to go feral for it. this is a Yun Stan Account until further notice.

anyway. it’s fascinating that kyoshi doesn’t actually get her revenge per se. yun does. he avenges himself, and it (likely) only causes more problems for kyoshi. and i think the distinction between vengeance and justice is quite wonderfully articulated afterwards:

How could such a container [as Jianzhu’s body] have held the volume of her anguish, her wrath? If any feeling at all pressed through the numbness... it was the ire of a hoodwinked child who’d been promised the end of her bedtime story only to see the candle-lights snuffed and the door slam shut. She was a girl alone in the dark. (430)

she gets the outcome she wanted: jianzhu dead. but her path to him “simply ended.” she has pragmatic advantages now that he’s out of the way--freedom, for one thing, and rangi’s safety, but those weren’t the things that drove her to want her revenge. there is a hollowness to it, a lack of catharsis. revenge is about the self, not the other.

and selfhood is something else kyoshi gives up.

one of the most striking lines in this novel appears when she walks into the tea house to meet jianzhu. at this point, kyoshi has assembled a motley outfit of expensive armor, theater costume pieces, battle accessories, outlaw facepaint, and bending aids for the heretical air nomad. she looks fucking weird. she’s like a video game PC wearing all the highest-stat armor she could loot from random dungeons and none of it matches. literally an assemblage of the places she’s been and the people who have helped her.

This was who she was now. This was her skin. This was her face. (418)

as the avatar, kyoshi has to be a symbol more than a person, even though she is fundamentally a human being as fallible as anyone else. the people who hear of her defeat of xu think she’s a spirit or a dragon in human disguise--regardless of what kyoshi wants and who she is, the world expects her to be something More. so, she gets dressed up and gives them what they need to see.

watching that transformation over the course of one novel is incredible. the path from the girl she is at the start of the novel to the woman we see advise aang that only justice will bring peace is far from over, but the trajectory is more than established. i’m really excited to see what Yee brings to another novel. kyoshi is just getting started.

some other miscellaneous thoughts:

i loved the choice to have a YA writer write this novel. not just for the obvious reason that Avatar is a franchise primarily for kids and teens, but because a lot of the common stylistic elements in YA fiction serve this story incredibly well. (by no means are any of these universal, of course; YA is a broad category of literature with huge stylistic and generic diversity, but in general it has these strengths.) the third person limited pov that switches between various characters gives a vital breadth to the story. there are a lot of moving pieces, and being able to see most of them in real time cuts back on exposition and heightens tension when you can watch their collision course. the focus on the given pov character’s interiority is put to incredible use, especially on the occasions when kyoshi enters the avatar state--and when it’s revealed that jianzhu hides things from even the reader, it becomes all the more staggering what a cunning bastard he is (jianzhu hate blog right here). kyoshi’s blushy crush on yun and even blushier crush on rangi are so good and are woven naturally into the story (bi fuckin rights babey!). that’s a teen with a big heart right there. also, fun swerve to the love triangle trope to get one of the love interests eaten by a spirit a few chapters in! his mind...

the part where kyoshi runs through a stone wall and leaves a kyoshi-shaped hole had me rolling, not just because i was impressed by how well that visual gag worked in prose but also because i can’t believe neither (to my memory) AtLA nor LoK pulled that.

HIDDEN PASSAGE... HIDDEN PASSAGE... THROUGH THE MOUNTAINS...

again i say: bi fucking RIGHTS

and i guess that’s all. stay tuned for the masterpost of Rise of Kyoshi memes i made as i read the book because i have a whole folder of them

[wonderwomanfantasy]

Princess

again, not putting the whole request here just the first little bit 

Alpha!Todoroki x Omega!Reader 

another Mideavl AU because someone needs to stop me  

word count: 2,100

warnings: Kidnapping, implied torture, starvation. implied sexual assault 

Summary: The Alpha prince Todoroki is in need of an omega, and as unfortunate as it may be, that means the royal family has to deal with an omega dealer. one way or another this is sure to be a life-changing day for you. 

Enji was happy, a rarity in the kingdom. Enji had been trying for a long time to produce an Alpha heir. And he had finally done it. His youngest son, Shoto had just presented as an alpha. Enji himself was an alpha, and he was of the belief that only Alphas should rule. So the king was happy, and when the king was happy, everyone was. And when everyone was happy, there was money to be made. There was a party to be held in a week and  Elise was heard just for that reason.

If Alphas were rare then Omegas were unheard of. And Elise was the only Omega trader in all the land. He hardly had to ask for an Audience with the king to receive one. He was old and ragged but he was treated with the utmost respect. even the king must bow down to him, and that was the best feeling in the world. 

Elise hated leaving his omegas behind but the Pens weren't exactly mobile, so he came alone and left with a royal entourage. Elise sometimes wondered if he was meant to be an Alpha, the drive inside of him to collect omegas was extremely alpha like, he had such a nose for those delectable little things. The whole march back to the pens Elise thought about the Omega's he would present to the tropes. He thought of the new Omega they had bought. Things had started so smoothly with her. Her parents were practically giving her away, a few shillings latter and he had a new, beautiful Omega. She was easily the prettiest little thing in his collection. But she was a cat, lashing out at any and everything, howling and spitting. One might even call her feral.

Enji was embarrassed about how little he knew about his own son. When Elise asked for the King to choose an Omega for his son, he realized how clueless he was on Shoto's tastes. So he did what a king did best, he delegated. Natsuo probably knew Shoto better then he did. Probably. So Natsuo was chosen to Travel back with Elise, not alone of course. Unfortunately, Natsuo also knew very little about his brother, but maybe the Captin of the guard Izuku Mydoria would have more insight to the Cold Prince's preferences.

The walk to the Omega cages was short, only a day and a half and the pay off made the journey worth it. Natsuo's head was spinning, he had never smelled an omega before let alone ten. The mixing scents of Grapefruit, Pine, and Sugar were almost too much for him. Elise showed off his best Omegas, the ones who had been broken In and were ready to find an Alpha mate. Izuku wasn't as distracted by the Omegas as Natsuo. He watched with sharp eyes as the Omega performed their complex mating dances. But he wasn't focusing on their spins or dips. He looked at the bruises on their legs and the ribs that showed through their ragged clothes. Omega's were treated worse than cattle.

“what happened to your hand?” Natsuo asked pointing at a Handler. Izuku flicked his eyes to follow Natsuo's finger. The Handler tensed and hid his bandaged arm behind his back.

“answer the prince,” Elise hissed, fire burning in his eyes.

“One of the new Omegas my prince, She went into heat, I tried to help her and she lashed out.” he explained quietly. Elise should have known the new bitch was the problem.

“She has yet to be broken In,”  Elise hissed. Izuku shot a look to Natsuo. they could save an Omega before it was too late.

“the prince may enjoy taming a wild little thing, show us to her,” Natsuo demanded. A blood vesicle near Elise's temple pulsed. This was bad, what was he going to do if she bit the prince?

“I just need a little more time with her then She'll be a perfect mate,” he assured them

“Time is the only luxury we cannot afford, Show me to the Omega,” Natsuo demand. Elise sighed.  He couldn't very well say no to the prince. He leads him through the pens to the omega.

“she's in there my lords. This is as close as we can get, safely.” Elise said

“open the door I want to meet her,”  Natsuo demanded. “now.” he could smell the omega threw the cage doors, it was intoxicating. Elise ground his teeth but opened the cage door. And you had the audacity to hiss at the prince and his guard.

“If you come near me I'll take that handoff instead of just marking it up to you bastard,” you shouted standing up to your full height. You were as weak and as beaten down as the other Omegas but you wouldn't know it just by looking at you. There was a fire in your eyes.

“Oh she'll do Nicely for the prince,” Izuku said.

“yes, get her ready for travel,” Natsuo agreed, nodding his head. You hissed again getting in a fighting position. But Natsuo wasn't afraid of you, he should have been, just because you were small, and sickly didn't mean you couldn't put up one hell of a fight. Natsuo approached you slowly with his hands up while Elise disappeared into the shadows to prepare your cart and figure out a price.

“I'm not going to hurt you, We want to help. Get you out of here,” Natsuo assured you taking a step forward, you attached quickly scratching at any inch of bare skin you could claw at, He didn't fight back, he didn't even try to restrain you. You stopped fighting him to catch your breath,

“I want to help you, Now come with me,” he smiled kindly at you. Blood dripping from his cheek where you had caught him with your nails.

You decided trusting Natsuo and Izuku was a good idea the second you entered the castle. They gave you a bath with warm water, you reveled in the feeling of being clean. Scrubbing the dirt from your body. Then they dressed you in the softest, most comfortable dress you had ever even dreamed of. And the food. Anything you wanted and as much as you wanted. And all you had to do was ring a bell. You could get used to a life like this. You gorged yourself until you couldn't force down another bite.  The bed was almost better than the food. You had never slept so well in your life.

When you awoke, bright sunlight streamed through the heavy drapes that covered your windows. It must be noon already, Natsuo stood at your doorway

“I was just about to wake you, we have to get ready for the Ball tonight,” Right the ball where you would be given away to an Alpha, Natsuo promised he would help you escape before the end of the night. You would be given to the crown prince, Shoto. Then you would fade into the crowd, never to be seen again.  

A group of four or five attendants followed Natsuo into your room they swarmed you without a second thought they attached you with powders and perfumes, brushes and Lace. The Dress they stuffed you into wasn't nearly as comfortable. You caught yourself in the refection, you looked like a completely different person. Then just as quickly as they had appeared, the flock of women disappeared.

“they are demons aren't they?” Natsuo chuckled. “come along, The first few guests have already arrived,” you spent the first half for the ball by the Buffet table stuffing your face with delicate pastries called Cream puffs. You ignored The noblemen who tried to start conversations with you and the Ladies who commented on your dress. You were only distracted from the food by a strange new scent. At first, you thought it was another batch of Cream puffs straight from the kitchen but when you turned you saw it wasn't food, it was an alpha.

Shoto was still getting used to the scents of people, they were so intense. He caught your scent the moment he walked into the ballroom. He was hooked instantly. He knew he had to find the source of the aroma that instant. But he kept getting stopped. Everyone wanted to talk to the crown prince and everyone wanted to tease him with the gift they had oh so graciously got him. He tried to be polite but it had been hours and he was getting frantic. The Alpha inside of him was impatient. Finally, he found you. He saw your shoulders tense as you smelled him his breath caught in his throat when he saw you. He had never seen a woman so beautiful.

Neither of you could seem to form words. Both of you took small steps toward each other until you were inches apart.

“Hello, I'm Shoto Todoroki,”

“(y/n) (l/n), It's a pleasure to meet you,” Shoto found himself staring. of course, he had never met an Omega before so he had no way of knowing you were any different from the countless betas here but you knew at once he was an alpha. 

Shoto’s inner alpha wanted you, bad. it took every ounce of his self-control not to sink his teeth into you right that minute. “can I have this dance?” he asked holding his hand out. 

you expected at once letting the strong alpha pull you on to the dance floor. you had never danced before. Shoto didn’t seem to notice you tripping over your own feet or stepping on his toes. he twirled you around the ballroom floor. 

He opened his mouth to ask you something, anything but he was cut off before he could say anything by a loud blaring of trumpets. No, this was all too soon he was supposed to go to the front of the room and receive his gifts but he didn’t want to leave you, he felt like he might die if he was separated from you now. his fingers dug into your waist holding you protectively. 

The crowd was looking at him expectantly but he couldn't take his eyes off of you. Natsuo tapped his shoulder “mind if I cut in?” he asked teasingly, He did mind actually. buy you let go of Shoto and came to Natsuo’s side, Shoto hadn't known Natsuo had brought a date. He felt like he was going to be sick, but there was nothing more he could do, he let the crowd push him towards his father. Shoto barely passed comments on the gifts as they were presented to him. Most people thought of him as stoic anyway, his attention was only piqued when he heard the word Omega.

His inner alpha couldn't help but be excited, his father had found him an Omega. The crowd parted to reveal the Omega in question, it was you. He had to stop himself from lunging at you. Turns out he didn't have to, the onlookers pushed you into his arms. He felt pride as his fingers found home on your skin.

The rest of the Ball was a blur, Todoroki didn't really care, you were by his side, nothing else mattered. He tried his best to talk to you but he found himself tongue-tied.

You weren't following the plan, you knew that. Natsuo kept looking over your way as a sort of signal to you but you ignored him you wanted to stay right where you were. Todoroki was so quiet but that only made you want him more. Your inner Omega wanted to crack past that shy extortioner and get to know him.  Finally, Natsuo marched up to you and your Alpha.

“Excuse me, I need to borrow your Omega for a quick second dear brother,” Natsuo said through gritted teeth.

“No,” Shoto said fiercely. Natsuo's eyes widened, he wasn't a man accustomed to hearing no, especially not from his younger brother

“excuse me?”

“It's alright Natsuo! I've u-uh changed my mind,” you said trying to be delicate, it looked like Shoto was about ready to rip his brother's throat out.

“are you sure (y/n)?” Natsuo asked, not taking his eyes off of Shoto.

“positive,” you said slipping your hand into Shoto's. Natsuo nodded and left.

“what was that all about?” Shoto asked still not relaxing

“oh your brother is such a Sweetheart he saved me from that awful Man I think I'll always be in his debt.” you gushed squeezing his hand. He seemed to relax at that.

“I suppose I am in his dept too, after all, he brought you to me.” with that, he kissed you. 

[aubrey-plaza]

I've seen a lot of fic rec lists lately given everything happening. Do you have any recommendations to get us through the lock down? p.s. I love everything you write.

omg thanks anon!!

I know these are scary times so have here a quick and dirty list of my fave fics starting with Staubrey and then just... veering offcourse. They’re all femslash except the one I marked with an asterisk but yeah. 

as always, I’m not gonna rec my own fics on my this list bc that’s cheating but if you wanna read them pls click this link and that ends the self promo for today lmao

 recs under the cut!

Stacie x Aubrey

Snowbound  

by ACamp_toner / @stepintotherevolve​ (22.171, complete, rated E)

summary: The Bellas go on a ski trip and Staubrey happens

notes: this has amazing smut and features just enough jealousy to spark these two idiots into a meaningful talk. there’s also side bechloe and a healthy dose of humour.  

The Howl

by @tiny-maus-boots​ (30.739, wip/currently being written, AU)

summary: Stacie's pack is forcing her into a corner but Fate has other plans for her - if she doesn't die first.

notes: werewolf!Stacie and vampire!Aubrey who meet on a full moon and fuck. there’s more to it and a great backstory that’s being wonderfully developed (trust me, I’ve been told of the plans and I’m ri-ve-ted). also has some amazing soft moments and a fab spark of heat.  

Prelude in Lydian Mode

by knappster / @ss-staubrey​ (5972, complete)

summary: Remember tonight... for it is the beginning of always.

notes: I will rec this fic til the day I die. It’s such a lovely brand of staubrey and a perfect example of the idiots to lovers trope.  

and the songbirds are singing (like they know the score)

by angelranger (2326, complete)

summary: It came as a slight surprise to Stacie that Aubrey, the same Aubrey who had grown up in a strict and dysfunctional household, was just so good with her daughter.

Bella seemed to unearth a side of Aubrey that was just so unbelievably soft, a side Stacie is almost positive even Aubrey didn’t know existed. But there she is, sat on the carpeted floor in front of the coffee table, sat right next to Bella, drawing outlines for the four year old to colour in.

notes: oh god i love a good, soft bella fic and this one hits all the right notes. it’s sweet and lovely and features singing Bella to sleep which is like. my weakness. go leave some more love on this deserved fic!

Sansa x Margaery

The Crackpots and These Women

by Netgirl_y2k (8089, complete, WEST WING AU)

summary: "You're in charge of press relations," Yara told Margaery, gesturing to Sansa. "Relate.”

summary: yeah you read that fuckin right that’s a West Wing AU. My love for this mashup has no bounds. It’s so perfectly coy, the way I imagine adult Sansa and Margaery would be, combined with the hopeful tinge of WW, and the pining of a somewhat open ended yet hopeful finish. If you like either of these universes, read this.  

Kind Regards

by MsCFH / @hell-much (9835, complete, explicit, part of a series!)

summary: Margaery Tyrell is determined on setting foot in the Northern market of Westeros by establishing a collaboration between the Tyrell Corporation and Stark Incorporated.

The only problem? The likewise gorgeous and stubborn Deputy Managing Director Sansa Stark.

summary: holy hell this fic is amazing. they hate each other SO MUCH. the author has a vibe setting skill that makes me want to weep. the smut is off the charts hot like there are literally no words. go read it and then read the series bc it’s *that good*. please go get your church lady fan before reading because you WILL need it.  

EXTRA NOTE: same author is writing a post-s6 canon compliant fic where Marg is actually still alive and if you’re looking for a full weekend activity, go ahead and binge this one (it’s a wip but is still being updated)

lay all your love on me

by 1once (9498, complete, show-compliant)

summary: It has been eight years since her demise.

But for the world of her, she cannot figure out why. For what? Why was she alive?

notes: i will say just one thing: flower. magic. okay, i’ll say more things. this fic is the redemption show!marg deserved combined with the fun supernatural magicky aspect of flower magic that’s just so in character. reading this fic feels the way a warm cup of tea in your hands on a cold winter’s day does.  

til you come back home

by heart_nouveau (7978, complete, AU - modern setting)

summary: “Using one-night stands to distract myself from my crush on my roommate counts, right?”

-

Margaery Tyrell is an ambitious law student who needs a perfect grade point average if she wants to stay at the top of her class - and she is not going to throw that away by falling for her very attractive, very sweet roommate, one Sansa Stark.

notes: margaery is a moron with feelings aka my favourite type of character.  

Birds of Prey’s Dinah x Helena

Siren Call

by ThanksForListening (3300, complete, part 2 of a series) 

summary: "It always happened in the quiet moments. The early hours of the morning, when the leftover energy from a mission hadn’t quite disappeared yet. The sleepless nights, when memories clawed their way into her mind and wouldn’t let go until her screams released them. The lazy afternoons, when the radio played softly and melodies she’d almost forgotten danced around her lips. It was only when the world went still that Dinah felt her watching.

She didn’t remember the first time she noticed it. The staring. Maybe it was because Helena was always watching everything and everyone around them that Dinah didn’t realize how frequently that attention fell on her. How it felt different. Helena looked at the world with suspicion and anger and indifference, but not her. She looked at her with something much softer, something she hadn’t found a name for just yet. No word in her arsenal was deep enough or strong enough to describe it.

Whatever it was, she could feel it now.”

notes: gahhhhh this fic. “What do you see,” she finally asked, “when you look at me?” is a line that I’m gonna think about until the day I die. this is the second fic in a series and you can read it as a standalone but the first fic is also fuckin amazing

after the afterparty

by novoaa1 (1181, complete, set right after the movie ends)

summary: The Canary had let loose a delighted snort at that, as if she found the whole thing somehow laughable.

(Which it wasn’t, to be clear—laughable, that is.)

“Are y'all seeing this shit?” she’d turned to ask the rest of them, earning a giddy squeal from Harley and a bemused scoff from Montoya even whilst Helena remained stock still in place, dutifully blinding herself with one hand. “Absolutely adorable.”

“Shut up,” Helena had hissed back more out of instinct than anything else, though her tone was markedly devoid of any real anger.

(And if Helena had felt her cheeks flush ever so slightly beneath her palm at the Canary’s glib assertion, she certainly didn’t let on.)

Or: Sionis falls. The rest of them remain.

notes: just. read it.  

knew your love (before i kissed you)

by z0ejake / @zxyjxy (58.263, wip / currently being written, rated E for the last chapter)

summary: Surviving the massacre of your entire family at the age of eight is a pretty impressive feat. Training for fifteen years in Sicily until you can kill a man with one hand and a hairpin is also a pretty impressive feat. Returning to the city where your family was cut down and killing every single person involved in their deaths is maybe the most impressive feat. Somehow, it's never been enough for Helena.

notes: bro this fic is a masterpiece and zoe is a genius. features absolute moron feral dumb jock helena and my favourite version of dinah: patient and endeared and a little teasing.  

the war is over (and we are beginning)

by ace_verity (12.573, 5/5, complete)

summary: The thing is, Helena has no idea what comes after.

The past fifteen years, she’s had a singular goal. She's never given any thought to what she’d do once she killed the men who murdered her family in front of her.

Maybe, Helena realizes, she never actually thought she’d make it this far.

—

In which Helena Bertinelli joins a team, buys a cactus, beats up criminals, goes to church, bakes bread, and falls in love.

(Not necessarily in that order.)

notes: this fic is beautiful and perfectly explores a lost Helena. I also love the way Renee is written in this and the whole vibe of the story is just *chefs kiss*

cheap shampoo

by OfElvesAndAliens (1609, complete)

summary: The thing is, Helena is a rigidly focused kind of gal, iron rage forged into skilled precision. Dinah has also noticed it in the little things, like the way she frowns a bit when she's doing something as trivial as writing, her penmanship always neat and firm. That same tiny furrow of her brow is showing up again while she's methodically whisking some eggs in a bowl.

Dinah finds it cute. Fucking sue her.

notes: oh god but i love a bedsharing fic and this one? feeding and post-mission and just winding down together??? ohhhh my god

two extra random goodies just for fun:

Lamplighter

by the_years_between_us (116.915, wip, rated E)

show/ship: The Fall, Stella Gibson/Reed Smith

summary: Stella gets a call from Reed directly following the final episode of The Fall S3.

notes: this is one of only a handful of wips that I’m keeping up with and reading constantly. It’s written like goddamn poetry and I love an older ship with more baggage, because the emotions here run so much higher with their shared history and the tentative steps they’re trying to take. Also, given the source material, this is almost cathartic to read.  

Nothing to Lose*

by tielan (8013, complete, rated E)

fandom/ship: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Maria Hill/Steve Rogers

summary: “It’s one of the traditional rituals of manhood,” Natasha observes as they’re sparring. “Kill a man, fuck a woman.”

notes: listen. i know. okay? i know this seems like a crackship. but I love it SO MUCH and this author writes so well that I’ve been fully converted. ~something some of you have told me I do for you~ so go read this fic, and then read the others, and then fall in love and join me in this lonely ship. You won’t regret it.  

I’ll be writing while in isolation so if you have any Dinah/Helena or Stacie/Aubrey prompts, shoot ‘em my way!

and also hit me up for anything, as always. 

peace and love, and stay safe everybody!

[haich-slash-cee]

Being Human (UK)

This is a show that I recommend to people... but I add a lot of caveats.

The recommendation: A werewolf, vampire and ghost are flatmates. This show is hilarious! So much macabre and slice of life humor! And horror and whump!? Also, the show was run by a side-channel of BBC (BBC3) and I guess they had no production money, so the actors mostly look human and they just refer to each other as being a 500-year old vampire or ghost or whatever. Which makes it even better. The werewolf is Jewish, recites a Jewish prayer at least once, and hangs out watching “The Real Hustle” with the vampire. They work in a hospital as janitors. The ghost has a habit of making everyone tea to soothe herself and the flat is cluttered with tea mugs everywhere all the time. Also, people do get fang-y or wolf-y or do weird poltergeist stuff. And gore happens.

Longish post, more below the cut.

PS, this is the 2008-2013 UK version of Being Human, which I hear had a cult following. There’s certainly stuff on Tumblr. I found the BBC version through the US remake of Being Human, but I’m much more charmed by the BBC version. (The US version has the vampire and werewolf as hospital doctors? Why?) Also I watched the show maybe 4, 5 years ago, so impressions are from that.

And the caveats: There’s a lot of sexism which was hard to watch. It’s engrained in the premise and plot and occasional gross sexist jokes. And there’s other problematic stuff in the writing. It’s like having glass shards show up the meal you are enjoying, and it’s why I’m not sure I’ll rewatch the series (or not in it’s entirety, anyway). There’s also a limited spinoff web series called Becoming Human which also had some problems for me, including some gross sexism and fatphobia. (John Boyega from Star Wars does show up as a character in that series, for anyone interested.)

Back to Being Human and overall series recommendations. So the 1st season was good. I kind of forgot what happened in the 2nd and 3rd season (I think they got depressing and slow?). The 4th season picked up again, much to my surprise, and I remember liking the 4th and 5th season a lot. Even though��[spoilers] there was a complete cast change by this time. But it worked, somehow. The show did go from at least having one woman of color to having an all-white cast at the end, which was not great. And there’s other racism too.

For people who like their happily-ever-after: uhhh so I vaguely recall that a lot of characters don’t really get a happy ending. Granted, half of them are walking around dead already, so...? Overall, the ending of the 5th season is... Is that a happy ever after? Happy for now? The Bonus on the DVD kind of makes it a happy-for-now with a continued possibility? It’s an acceptable HFN?

.....And now, the notes for all the hurt/comfort people and whumpers:

Holy crap people, there is SO much h/c and whump!?

OK first -- George the werewolf. George’s transformation sequence, SUPER whumpy.

Also, George ends up naked often, come to think. And he screams a lot during the show, for various reasons. The actor himself, in the bonus DVD interviews I think, cheerfully says something like, “People really like the way George screams, I do too.” (This is like when David Tennant cheerfully talked about how he enjoys playing a character who is unconscious and sick and gets fussed over by people.) And George is a very sympathetic, nerdy character who is easy to feel for. Who occasionally turns into a SNARLY SCARY WEREWOLF AGAINST HIS WILL. As mentioned, I think I liked season 1 George more than seasons 2 or 3.

Emotional hurt/comfort -- so Annie the Ghost provides a lot of the emotional centering, as I recall. Throughout all 5 seasons, all the characters lean on each other for support and there’s a lot of lovely warm fuzzies from that. Also, one of the later werewolf characters, Tom, is generally a sweet kid. I’m glad they didn’t do too much of the transformation horror with him, honestly. George/Russel Tovey could carry that, but I thought Tom’s strong point was looking puppy-eyed and folorn-eyebrow’d and trying to navigate the world with a mix of naivety and half-feral-ness.

Above: exhausted naps on the couch.

Below: Classic Being Human humor. A review of house rules and vampire stabbing etiquette, between Annie and Tom --

[Spoilers from here on] Okay, so as mentioned, the cast changed over between season 4-5. And to my surprise, I think I loved the new trio as much as, or more than, the original trio. I liked how loud Alex the ghost was. And I liked both Annie and Alex.

Also, I did not expect this either, but I got so interested in Hal! Yo! First of all, Hal is a centuries-old Vampire and speaks/looks like, idk, a Regency Character. And then 19-yr old Tom puts Hal to work at a fast food shop and bosses him around, and Hal’s indignation is hilarious. So already, this is excellent.

And somehow, Hal is very, very whumpy? So: the character of a “vampire who is trying to be good and suffers” is not new, and I’ve encountered versions where I haven’t been interested. (I was lukewarm about Mitchell, the original vampire in the show.) But for whatever reason, I really dug Hal. Maybe, for me, Hal was just the right mix of very serious and earnest but also ridiculous and tragic all at once. (I read some interviews with the actor Damien Molony, who mentioned how he’d done a lot of history and addiction research in to prep for the role. The new trio actors also had a lot of chemistry and fun on sets, it sounds like. So I might be picking up all that.)

Also, Hal is actually two characters -- the ridiculous indignant serious Good Hal who is desperately trying to keep the horrible, rude, murderous, Bad Hal from taking over. But, as one of the show producers, a woman, cheerfully commented in the DVD extras: “And then Bad Hal shows up, which is great, everyone likes a bit of Bad Hal”. 

Honestly, why do we even pretend to hide our fascination with the macabre and the whump, when showrunners and actors are cheerfully not hiding it all.

Here’s clips of Good Hal in Season 4:

Oh, I forgot about this part until I rewatched the last clip -- but at the end of season 4, Hal asks his flatmates to forcibly bind him to a chair, because he’s trying to fight off Bad Hal. Based on my perusing of the whump community, pretty sure that scenario is of interest to someone.

Also notable is the episode “No Care, All Responsibility” (Series 5 ep 3). In one scene in particular, where Natasha has offered Hal a way to control his bloodlust and there’s this mix of vulnerability and power with Hal asking Natasha to put a stake against his heart, I remember thinking -- “I bet a woman wrote this ep and I bet she knew exactly what she wanted”. And I was right, that woman is Sarah Dollard, a queer woman who has also written a lot of other things (including Doctor Who). She also wrote Being Human goofy web extra eps with Alex, Hal and Tom called “Alex’s Unfinished Business” and they are so good ! (Interview). 

Also... the opening 3-minute backstory in “No Care...” made me cry. You get a glimpse of the show’s baddie showing real care and emotion in rescuing this little kid (an important character). When this kind of scene is done well, it just gets me. every. time.

Anyway here’s an appearance of Bad Hal (much later), being completely awful, murdering people and turning them into vampires and singing Broadway tunes during this.

Side note on Vampire narratives. Although Hal’s narrative arc of season 5 was interesting, and I’m aware this is show is urban fantasy, I still have qualms of the show enforcing IRL stigmas/ideas that addition is incurable and addicts are doomed. They’re not. (General overview on NIH page.) Addiction research is a growing field. From listening to NPR and reading articles, my impression is that addiction treatment will change quickly in the next few years. Related to the vampire blood addiction trope, Terry Pratchett covers vampires finding ways to be “dry” (one vampire, Maladict, swaps out blood addiction for coffee addiction) and you can find fanfics about the topic as well. (General link to Being Human Ao3 fanfics, why not.)

Side note on Hal’s dual characters -- recently, I did consider, “Is there overlap with Hal and portrayals of Dissociative Identity Disorder (MPD) folks?” IRL DID people have complained about movies with gross portrayals of people with DID. To me, Being Human’s Hal feels removed from that and closer to a fantasy.... but, I’m also not multi, so.

* Update: after having learned more about plural history, I’m even less sure now. (Note: my opinions are of someone who isn’t plural, as far as I know, so note that.) There’s a number of early problematic movies and books that hugely affected the popular narratives of plural people in the west, and still affect how therapists and non-plural people treat plural people even today. These include the movie “The Three Faces of Eve”, which has the narrative of “Good Eve, Bad Even, and later smushed together become ‘Fixed Eve’ or whatever”. There’s practically a whole lecture series on how the books/movies were made with sensationalism and formulas in mind and pretty gross things. Chris Costner Sizemore, the IRL Eve, had to fight the movie studios in court because the studios claimed they owned her life story. (There’s practically a whole lecture series on early plural history in the west, I might link more information later). Like, even today, multi people feel pressured to hide their plurality because they are afraid singlets or other people are gonna say “oh so which one of you is the ax murderer”, or that they are going to be fired from work. So.  

This post turned into a “Being Human seasons 4 + 5 Appreciation Post”. I guess Season 1 and 4, 5 were my favorite. I watched the show through library DVDs, but I think there’s eps of the show on YouTube. The DVD extras are probably on this YouTube playlist?

(Also, there is a pilot episode, with different actors except George/Russel Tovey. I don’t think one needs to watch the pilot to watch the main series; I kind of recall that the main series recycled some of the pilot. There is a funny scene in the pilot where George and Mitchell meet Annie.)

Being Human: a macabre, hilarious, horror-filled, flawed, sometimes dragging, emotional, whumpy, oddball show that I still think about sometimes.

[dauntless-dragayn]

nobody asked for it, but i liveblogged my She ra s3 reactions

[ part one ┊ part two ]

spoilers, obviously (under cut bc it’s rather long)

episode one

DAMN THEY DID NOT HESITATE TO DIVE RIGHT INTO SHIT

(oh yeah this is a split season so that makes sense..)

FUCK SHADOWEAVER FUCK SHADOWWEAVER

Angela loses points for not having a proper prison but gains them right back for not letting Adora in to interrogate Shadowbitch

Glimmer: we shouldn’t let her manipulate you

Adora, immediately: //decides to manipulate / trick her friends

Side note, interesting episode title..

Adora’s friends: //arent fooled at all THANKFULLY

adora honey youre a terrible liar. and your friends are too smart

Catra bby..

SCORPIA BBY

Catra: i cant handle this emotionally vulnerable shit

GOOD THEYRE WATCHING ADORA

Aaand theyre asleep

Oh this is great

Glimmer’s target practice cjdhjdnf

Oh Adora wants to change Shadowbitch.. honey.

GLIMMER IS WITH HER GOOD

ANGRY GLIMMER !!!!!! PROTECTIVE GLIMMER !!!!!!!!!

God Adora calling out Shadowbitch is everything

LET HER DIE

DONT HEAL HER

GDI

YOU CANT TRUST HER

Fuck this is cool

Shadowbitch’s two reasons for (SUPPOSEDLY) turning is to get revenge on 1) Hordak and 2) Catra While im sure Adora is all behind the first one, she certainly wont let the second happen.

Okay but who SENT Adora through that portal??

“Don’t I get a say in what happens to me? Don’t I get a choice?!”

:’0

The worst thing about this is that LightHope is basically telling Adora the same thing the Horde did: you dont have a choice over your life, your ambitions, your responsibilities. Fuck LightHope.

“It is happening again.” HM

“Are you okay?” “I’m not sure yet.” baby.. i felt that

episode two

What a COOL shot of Adora

Fjejhd of coUrse Glimmer didnt tell her mom

Poor fucking Angela

Ive never related to Bow more in this moment ⁃ bird ⁃ Trying to navigate whEN FUCKIG GOOGLE MAPS ISNT WORKING- coughs i mean, the navigator machine

Oh shit Hordak cares about Entrapta

ADORA PUTS HANDS AROUND HER EYES IN PLACE OF BINOCULARS SKFBFJFNMC

“Just act tough” oh yall are so bad at this

its Her time

I just watched this clip of Huntara last night

Adora is gay

Huntara is also gay she was just FLIRTING with a WOMAN at the BAR

 The ‘purposefully gets names wrong’ gag will always be my favorite

ADORA’S ~TRYING TO BE SMOOTH~ VOICE IS HILARIOUS BUT ALSO.. 👀

 anybody got a map? oh wrong show sorry

listen i cant blame Adora how could you NOT be in love with her

OH SHIT WE CAN SEE HORDAK WITHOUT HIS ARMOR

Ugly ass twink bitch

Adora getting an outside perspective on the war and how it effects Etheria should be interesting

Wait where are Glimmer and Bow ?

Adora being called “blondie” 👌👌

ADORA WANTING TO IMPRESS HUNTARA ️‍👌🏳️‍🌈✨

Oh theyre there they just fell behind

Huntara led them into a trap didnt she

Gdi

Oh she took Adora’s sword fuck I mean ofc she did but mm That would be her only chance of escaping

HORDAK HISSING AT ENTRAPTA DKDJF

Okay Entrapta is a top

Hordak is a clone?? Bitch what

//falsely sympathetic voice/ aww hordak just wants to impress his higher up with planetary conquest..

they even called this expedition a roadtrip awe

Wow theyre really playing up this Hordak + Entrapta friendship and bonding huh

Oh Glimmer is such a badass

ADORA JUST FUCKING TACKLED THIS WOMEN WHOS TWICE HER SIZE TO THE GROUND

Bow: awkward HAH of victory

Glimmer: sticks her tongue out at the enemy

God i love this battle sequence so much

THE MUSIC!!!!!

Im watching it again

Adora’s laugh before she says “I AM She ra”  😍

Theyre both ex Horde soldiers oh shit!! One so trusting and one so fearful, so closed off to anyone

“I’m not gonna run anymore. I face my problems head on.” fuck yeah!!!

Netflix referring to Bow Glimmer and Adora as the “squad” omg

-rewatching the fight scene from 18:30-

diD HUNTARA JUST ROAR LIKE A LION?!

I love the repeating of lines to each other thats such a good trope too

“Thats mine!” ”Then come and take it.”

Also I like seeing Adora fight and pull off really cool moves but not like, flawlessly. Like her backflip- she almost falls. Or when she swings Huntara’s sword and it doesn whip out at first.

HUNTARA JUST ROARED AGAIN

ANOTHEr EXAMPLE OF THEIR MIRRORING IS WHEN HUNTARA HOLDS ADORA’S HEAD UP WITH HER SWORD AND THEN SHE RA DOES THE SAME

Thats totally foreshadowing the connection of their backgrounds with the Horde huh

The “‘You know about She ra?’ Heheh, I AM She ra” moment is so good okay I need to call it out again. The way she flashes her sword in front of her face? Amazing. Spectacular. Im gay-

The end of this episode be like: //women supporting women

Mara’s ship!! Dun dun dunnn 

episode three

Edgy Catra in the Crimson Waste shot: ✔️

“Nothing matters anymore!” :(

Hey that place looks familiar!

Isnt Scorpia FROM here?? How does she not know anything about it??

“Maybe I should have skipped force captain orientation eh?” THIS RUNNING JOKE DKFNFK

Catra bitching about Hordak is a whole mood

CATRA HISSING AT THat FROG THING SHE PUSHED FROM THE COUNTER IM-

Wait satyr lady never said the second rule Prettyyy sure the second rule is that no one annoys Huntara, but shes not here! So what the hell are YOU gonna claim it is?

Catra’s monologue in the bar is everything

Catra stealing the jacket is such a ME move i see a leather jacket i go feral

Bow you’re such a nerd ily

Well duh the ship is empty its been looted for years

Do your She ra thing i bet thatll uncover something //wiggles eyebrows

Yeehaw! Look at that i was right

Its not haunted theres a repeated message echoing ..

Scorpia you’re gay

Also IM gay Catra in a jacket is 👌😩

HER ORDERING PPL AROUND AT KNIFEPOINT IS 👌👌👌😩

 Aw look at Scorpia in her element

“Im gonna call you Kyle” KDHFKDJFJFK

Catra’s little smirk.. ️ ❤️️ Scorpia’s reaction is a whole mood

THEY DO MAKE A GOOD TEAM! ITS A GOOD THING SCORPIA FOLLOWED YOU HERE INTO EXILE H U H CATRA

That giant skull tho

OH ITS TIME IVE SEEN THIS CLIP

announcer voice: ITSSSSSS TONGUELASHOR

listen i know he’s an idiot with a dumb name and catra kicks his ass but i love me a buff lizard person,,

a broadcast.. oH ITS MARA HERSELF

“And I am gone.” sounds like.. something someone would say in a message if they didnt want to be looked for and found

Adora ... :(

Your frustration is so warranted

I wish i could give her answers

OH SHIT ITS MARA BUT NOT SHE RA-ED THIS TIME

“I was supposed to be the last.” wh..

Even Tongue Lashor’s insults are dumb

SCORPIA INTERRUPTING TONGUE LASHOR IS PRICELESS

HE EVEN SAYS “WHIP” KDHFJ

Catra mimicking his evil laugh..

Listen imma say it again (my scalie is showing) Tongue Lashor’s design is great

Catra just winked at Scorpia, yoURE GAAY

 @ Mara’s dialogue.. that was uh. A Lot The biggest thing that jumps out to me is the fact that theyre in an empty dimension?? And the fact that Mar BROUGHT A WHOLE PLANET there. Thats some real power. Oh yeah, and LightHope is lying / working against the She ras / wants to bring destruction to the planet. But thats not surprising

Oh hey darts! Now who took the dart gun..

oh thats right!

Catra and Adora time baby

 HEY ADORA

Adora is uh,, alone captured by Catra

This should be interesting

SCORPIA IN THE JACKET THOOOOO

“A toast to Scorpia” //clutches chest

Hey yall this is cute but reminder that cattadora is endgame

“When we go back” nahhh

Also fuck Catra heard that hologram??

CATRA BLUSHIG

“We could rule the Crimson Waste together!” Scorpia you are SO gay

“I have to go check on the prisoner” her ex

“Shadow Weaver left me for you..?” Uh fuck

She has tears in her eyes oh bby

I cant believe im already halfway through the season jfc fuck split seasons

(part two is up now!)

[carumens]

expand your literature friday nº1

Author: Ana María Matute

Notable works: Pequeño Teatro (1954), Luciérnagas, eng. Fireflies (1955), Los Hijos Muertos, eng. The Dead Sons (1958), Olvidado Rey Gudú, eng. Forgotten King Gudú (1996).

Obviously, whole theses and analysis could be written about this amazing writer and her work. There will be loads of thing about Los Abel that I would love you guys to know, but that I can’t just include in a Tumblr post. Hopefully, this will be interesting enough to you!

*WARNING. The book I’m going to be talking about has never been translated, so all the quotes and excerpts below have been translated by me.

So, without further ado, proceed and enjoy!

Brief Introduction

Ana María Matute (1925 - 2014) was a Spanish writer and member of the Real Academia Española, which, summing it up, is the insttution that regulates the Spanish language in Spain. It’s a great honor to be a member of the RAE, and she was the third woman in the history of this institution to be conceded a seat in it. She is considered one of the most personal and raw voices of the 20th century in Spanish literature, and one of the best posguerra (which is the period following the Spanish Civil War) novelists. She wrote novels, short stories, children tales and essays. She was considered in 1976 for the Nobel Literature Prize and won numerous literature prices, among which was the Premio Cervantes, the most prestigious literature prize in the Spanish language.

Matute was a professor at university, and she traveled to many cities to give lectures, especially to the US. In her speeches, she talks about emotional changes, the constant changes of the human being and how innocence is never cmpletely lost. She said that although her body was old, her heart was still young.

Here is a small article by The New York Times, published some days after her death in 2014, that contains some more info about her biography and career.

Style

Matute deals with many political, social and moral aspects of Spain during the post-war period. Her prose is lyrical and practical, and she incorporates techniques associated with modernism and surrealism. However, Matute is considered a realist writer. Many of her books deal with the period of life ranging from childhood to adolescence to adulthood.

Matute uses, as a primary resource, pessimism, which, in her novels, often manifests in the form of alienation, hypocrisy, demoralization and malice. About her work, it is said that although the arguments of each of her novels are independent, they are all united by the general theme of Civil War and the portrait of a society dominated by materialism and self-interest.

Also, during the 1940s in Spain, a new literary aesthetic, which came to be known with the name of tremendismo, was born. The main aesthetic features of tremendismo revolve around the experiences of authors during the Civil War, and the misery and insecurity that were characteristic of post-war Spain. Tremendismo is heavily based on pessimistic, determinist and fatalist philosophies; it shows the darkest aspects of life, such as failure and death, and relates them to existentialism. Protagonists of novels belonging to tremendismo are usually marginal beings from the lowest layers of society, with primitive minds and without spiritual values or sensitivity. They often commit errors that lead them to tragic consequences, but they can’t be blamed because it is society that leads them to act that certain way. In this way, the worst part of human beings, highlited by an unfair society, is shown.

Los Abel 

“I have arrived and nobody waits for me, because I have not warned anyone and I do not know anyone. It is difficult to define contours. The town, sunk in the bottom of the valley, is a ghost of violet lividness: like an unfortunate overcrowding of half-ruined hovels.”

Los Abel (1948) was Ana María Matute's first published novel and is, to this day, basically unknown. “Why are you going to talk about a novel that is not even considered her most relevant work?” you may ask. Well, simply because I love it, and it was a major inspiration for both my first poemary and my current WIP, Sunflowers at Night. The publication of this work was considered a literary revelation, a fact that would be confirmed in the successive works presented by its author.

Ana María Matute wrote Los Abel, a work that obtained a brilliant classification in the 1945 Premio Nadal, at the young age of 21. Inspired by the biblical story of Adam and Eve, a reflection of the enviroment after civil strife, it’s the dark story of a family living sad and tormented lives, very few of which escape the climate of anguish and exhaustion. Matute manages to create a tense, passionate and even feral atmosphere.

Plot *(WARNING. Spoilers ahead.)

The story is told in the first person by two different characters. The narrator in chapters I-IV is a young man who returns to a town he visited with his mother when he was a child. In these chapters he remembers his first encounter with the Abel family and then describes the town and the people who live there during his visit. The man rents the old house of the aforementioned family and there he finds the diary of Valba Abel, one of the sisters who lived there. So, the second narrator is Valba, or more precisely, chapters V-XXIX represent her personal diary in which she tells the sad story of her family.

This story takes place in a post-war rural landscape, where the family, formed by the father and his seven children: Oswaldo, Augusto, Tito, Valbanera, Juan Nepomuceno, Octavio and Ovidia — who prefer to be called by the nicknames  Aldo, Gus, Tito, Valba, Juan, Tavi and the youngest simply, the Small One — all with very different personalities. Their mother has died and the father tries to maintain the unity of the family, using their land and house for that. However, life in a poor monotonous rural area  is not enough for young people who show different abilities and have their own interests. Only the older brother, Aldo, is interested in cultivating the land and continuing with the traditional life of their parents: the other siblings want to escape from the village and live in the city.

After some gray and depressive winters, the children leave, one after the other, the orchard of their father, and move to the city. There they try to start new and different lifes, but their destiny takes them back to the village, where two of the brothers, Aldo and Tito, different as day and night, have such serious problems with each other that the first kills the second.

The protagonist

Valba is the representation of the rare girl, a very common protagonist in female post-war novels, who has a lonely character, looks unfeminine to other women and who is looking for her own identity. But in addition to the features that are typical to the rare girl trope, Matute adds to Valba a kind of darkness and depth. The town doctor describes her with the following words: "What deep eyes: a whole world enclosed within. To tell you the truth, I have never seen a look like that. Only sometimes do beggars in ditches have that look, or the hungry. And she looked like a child, with her indecisive hands. She had wolf teeth, hurtful as little daggers.”

After the death of her mother, Valba has to leave her studies in the city and return home, where she has difficulty finding her place among her brothers. She often feels redundant, without a way out and guilty that she lets her life go by without really living it, repeating phrases like: "I felt ridiculous, useless, small" and "I'm tired of not living." Even though she doesn’t like her sitaution, she doesn’t really try to make it better, thus acquiring a typical property of the protagonists in tremendismo.

The few moments of joy in Valba's diary are related to love or with the hope that she would find love. The romantic story with Galo, an artist in the city, offers hope for a happy ending but becomes a failure that destroys Valba's soul and eliminates her optimism for a better future- She feels indifference towards life: "How many hours still extending before me! It is possible that I will still live for many years; what a great tedium youth is, how a great tedium, a whole life still to be traveled, to drag behind me! "  Valba also loses the ability to see love as something pure and beautiful: "I was like the top of a mountain. If I ever loved again, my feeling would drag a chorus of ridicule and parodies."

The violent and extreme situations are typical of tremendismo. In the case of Los Abel it’s not so much about violence as it is about death and intense moments forming a continuous chain during the story. Valba's narrative begins with the death of her mother who leaves her husband and seven children behind, some of them very young, who have to grow up under the harsh guidance of their father. To this event follows the death of the village’s teacher and although no one really cries for him, it is an adversity for the people. Later, Juan gets sick and ends up crippled. Then, when the littlest sister is preparing for her First Communion, the church is burned. A flood follows the fire: the river rises on its banks and threatens to take the house of the Abel with him. But the house, the strongest link in the family, continues in its place, at the foot of the mountains. In these mountains, Valba's father loses his life later on, and this event marks the beginning of the last chapter of the Abel family. Afterwards, there is no unifying force and the brothers who have remained in the village leave their home one after the other.

Matute completes the book with a violent ending. As we mentioned, Aldo, the eldest brother kills Tito, the luckiest brother of the seven. This crime is caused by years of envy and anger that have been growing inside Aldo. When he gets home and sees that Tito, whom his wife loves, is doing successful restructuring in the land of their parents, he can’t tolerate the injustice and shoots him. With this event, Matute uses for the first time the symbol of the Cainism, the known crime of the Bible, very frequent in her later works.

And so, the novel ends with this sublime piece of writing I felt the necessity to share with you guys:

“The two thunderous shots resounded, much more than the whole storm of our flood. The walls trembled and a thousand cries creaked on the stairs. The two bullets sank into that golden flesh, into that chest that always breathed rhythmically. But what revenge was that? What revenge ...? My God, Tito was youth! And I fell to my knees, and with that blood of his that was already sliding between the joints of the mosaics, I wet my face, as if it were a caress. 

This is what I read."

And...

I really hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it! If you guys have any questions, please ask me!!!

Leave me your comments and opinions too!

tagging:  @katabasiss @hepiit @medusaswrites @quartzses @the-idiot-who-lose-you @writeblrs @esoteric-eclectic-eccentric  @leopardsnake-stories

[aion-rsa]

Kajillionaire: How the Evan Rachel Wood Movie Explores the ‘Mini-Cult’ of Family

https://ift.tt/2RPN4hK

Kajillionaire is the first feature film from writer-director Miranda July in which she isn’t also the star. It’s a different experience, stepping outside the frame and choosing instead to cast Evan Rachel Wood as her unconventional leading lady. But as the artistic polymath also tells us over a digital interview, she also “never [has] to stop looking at it from the outside.” The ‘it’ being an intimate portrait of a dysfunctional family of small-time scammers.

“I could go further,” July says during her conversation, “I could be more devoted to the actors… I wasn’t in there with them, in the fire.” This remove allowed her to be open to the final product, and letting it differ from her initial script. That and the confidence that comes from a long career of many hats.

“I’ve been now just making things in all mediums for a long time,” says July, a performance artist of all trades—from punk theater to sculpture installations, to a messaging app—who is used to wearing a dozen hats on a single project. “When you’re younger, you get really freaked out when things aren’t going according to plan; and by this point I think, ‘Well, there’s another way that’s gonna end up being the right way that’s different from what we planned.’”

That adaptability has served her especially well in the last six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, which delayed the release of Kajillionaire (among many other films) into theaters. Yet there’s a touch of self-fulfilling prophecy that July learned to embrace chaos in the current life-changing circumstances from her project about a brood of truly bad con artists whose attempts to score big earn them more problems than windfalls, with their half-baked schemes often spinning wildly out of control.

Though she wasn’t in front of the camera, July worked closely with Wood to develop the character of Old Dolio, the twentysomething daughter of a pair of lousy con artists (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger), who nonetheless shares her parents’ fierce conviction in their scavenger lifestyle. Not only does Old Dolio not resemble July’s two avatars in her past films, Me and You and Everyone We Know and The Future, but her absence of femininity or softness distinguishes her from most twenty-something cinematic heroines.

“I’ve been wanting to work with [Miranda] for years and just jumped at the opportunity,” Wood says. “And then when I saw the kind of film she was creating, and the heroine that was Old Dolio, I was elated because you never get to see a leading lady look or act or sound like Old Dolio, and I had also never really read this script. And I’ve been doing this [for] over 25 years now, I’ve read a lot of scripts. So to actually be able to read a script that was so original I couldn’t compare it to anything else, that’s what excited me more than anything.”

With her lank hair, baggy tracksuit, and guttural voice, Old Dolio possesses the raised-by-wolves ferality of someone reared outside of mainstream society, especially with regard to hyper-feminized gender norms. Yet she’s clearly devoted herself to the Dynes’ scams, leaping, diving, and twisting herself into poses to evade security cameras—or just their long-suffering laundromat landlord.

“I’d never had a character who was gonna take some real work to get into,” July says. “I didn’t know if any of that was going to work, but I did think that rather than just arbitrarily come up with these physical restraints that it was important to sort of limit her intellectual state. I mean, she’s a full complete soul in there, but she’s not used to articulating, internally or externally, about her emotions.”

They workshopped the character together for about a week, with references and videos, so that they could build up what Wood describes as a “toolbox” once they got to set. “We had our own language that we had built for Old Dolio,” the star says. “Miranda could just call something out, and I would know what she was talking about. She would yell out, ‘Proud lion!’ ‘cause that’s one of the animals we had picked for Old Dolio, that she would emulate and have the same energy [as], and also when she needed to be slightly attractive for [Gina Rodriguez’s character] Melanie.”

That toolbox also gave them verbal shorthands for keeping Wood in-character; if it seemed like any feminine qualities (i.e., any of Wood’s own personality aspects) were coming through, July would yell out “hands” or “voice,” and her lead would remember to adjust her gestures or lower her voice.

In doing so, July says, they honed Old Dolio “until it was just physical. I was like, well, that sets her up inside her mind, her state, and from there she can probably do anything, was the hope. She could say these lines, she could do a tuck-and-roll.” While July had written in Old Dolio’s eccentric physicality before they began developing the character, she was gratified to see that Wood had no problem truly embodying the character.

“Evan actually could limbo, Evan could roll. You write all this stuff and then you’re braced to have to adjust to reality, but in Evan’s case, I never had to.”

Matching Old Dolio’s signature moves are the emotional and ethical gymnastics she must undertake as part of her family’s cons: whipping out the Catholic schoolgirl uniform when sweet-talking some rich marks; impersonating a stranger for a measly $20; forging signatures as easily as breathing.

“I related to Old Dolio in that way of a very unconventional upbringing and childhood,” says Wood, who has been acting for most of her life. “I was working since I was five, and sometimes seen more as a peer than as a child, and as a child star you can very easily confuse adoration and love, or performance and how it relates to love.”

Yet for all the necessary evils to which Old Dolio commits herself, she lacks the social intelligence to entirely pull them off; and her parents have no qualms about letting her know that they find her wanting.

“I think as Old Dolio understands it,” Wood continues, “love is a performance, in how well she does in these cons, and that [it’s] the only way to win her parents’ approval, and she convinces herself she doesn’t need anything else.”

Like money, Old Dolio can get by on a dearth of love—until the Dynes meet Melanie (Rodriguez), a bubbly young thing who is all too eager to get in on their schemes. Flirty and feminine where Old Dolio is awkward and androgynous, quick-thinking in a way that reveals a whole host of life experience, Melanie allows the Dynes to expand the scope of their cons; but Robert (Jenkins) and Theresa (Winger) also begin to project on her all of the affection that they’ve always withheld from Old Dolio in the name of supposed authenticity. “You get the sense that she knows something is missing,” Wood says, “and she can’t quite put her finger on it until Melanie comes into the picture.”

The slow-burn queer romance between Old Dolio and Melanie helps the former begin to envision a life outside of the Dynes’ restrictive existence of diminishing returns, and to experience a love (or at least the sense of being wanted) that she has long been lacking. But not even July initially intended for first love to be part of Old Dolio’s journey of self-discovery.

“I actually had Melanie in there a little bit before understanding that there was a romance,” July says, “and so Old Dolio had this repulsion and this reaction against her, and the parents adored her. And then I was like, ‘Ah, wouldn’t it be [wonderful] to give this woman all the joy of being loved by her.’ I just wanted that for Old Dolio.”

“We agreed that it was so easy to fall in love with each other,” Wood says about developing the romance with Rodriguez. “We had that chemistry right away. And with a character like Old Dolio, you have to be incredibly forward, because she just doesn’t get it, or doesn’t want to. Again, she had no exposure to things. It’s all new to her. What I love is that gender is never spoken about, and sexuality is never spoken about, it just is. And it’s a part of the film, but it’s not what the film is about.”

The absence of gender that Wood found so freeing seems to have been by design, as July explains that she was aware of gendered tropes and expectations when crafting this romance. 

“I always thought that if Evan’s character had been a guy, that the second Melanie entered the movie, you would know that there was gonna be a romance,” she says. “You could make that a real slow-burn, you could totally work against it and hide it, because you just know already, because of the formula, that they were gonna end up together. So I enjoyed treating it the same way, like not overly indicating, giving it the same artfulness—holding my cards like that, and trusting it, just trusting.”

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One of the most artful moments in the film, which demonstrates not just the trust between July and her leads but also between Wood and Rodriguez, is Old Dolio’s dance. The scene is part of Melanie helping Old Dolio check off a list of formative life events she has been lacking up until now; the latter has never had the teenage experience of rocking out in one’s bedroom alone or with a friend. Yet the dance itself—set to the telephone hold music that is Old Dolio’s ersatz soundtrack for her own life—is entirely about Melanie being witness to Old Dolio’s pent-up anger and joy, poignantly inelegant yet hopeful.

Wood describes how she and Rodriguez each surprised one another: Rodriguez had not seen Wood rehearse the dance prior to shooting the scene; and when the cameras started rolling, the tears in Rodriguez’s eyes were completely authentic. 

“She’s just that kind of actor,” Wood says. “She throws herself in, and she’s right there with you, just giving you everything.” Such moments also underscore why Wood feels like Kajillionaire was at times like shooting two different movies.

“There was the one with the Dynes, and there was the one that Gina and I were doing. And that was always so beautiful and tender and sexy and heartbreaking. That’s when we really got to lean into the heart and soul of the film.”

Arguably, what most identifies Kajillionaire as a Miranda July film is the surreal imagery of pink soap bubbles cascading over the wall of the Dynes’ shabby rented residence: an instantly familiar sitcom shorthand for a situation about to get out of hand, but that in July’s framing becomes strangely soothing. What began as the explanation for why they were able to live somewhere with such cheap rent—every day they must clean up the bubbles, only for the laundromat to inevitably produce more—took on a dreamlike beauty as July decided to link the bubbles to a recurring visual device in her films. In the case of Kajillionaire, the director says the bubbles “tap into that primal anxiety… they have to dispose of it in this Sisyphean way, but it keeps coming.”

Sisyphean could perhaps also apply to the staggered timing for Kajillionaire’s release. Following the film’s production, Annapurna Pictures declared bankruptcy, and July was forced to find a new distributor at Sundance; they did in Focus Features. The movie premiered at the festival in January 2020, weeks before whispers of COVID-19 began permeating America, and once the nationwide lockdown and quarantine began, its June release was pushed to September. While July acknowledges that she was of course disappointed “not to get to do my well-laid plans for this movie,” watching the film finally get released six months into COVID has given her a change in perspective.

That was due in large part to hearing from people within the last several weeks who were watching Kajillionaire for the first time during quarantine. “There was no other version of the movie to them but the one that they saw now,” she says. “It’s not that it’s a different movie, but there’s so many things in it that they spoke so intensely to me about—just a lot of little resonances with this time, and I think that made me feel like, ‘Well, maybe I was making it for us now.’”

July has found the silver lining on the metaphorical soap bubbles, in that Kajillionaire might be coming out exactly when it is supposed to. “That is the reality of what has happened,” she says, “so there’s no point in thinking that six months ago was my true time—like, no, I have to own it, this movie is for now.”

While filming Kajillionaire, Wood was also wrapping up three seasons’ worth of character arc for android Dolores on HBO’s Westworld. “There’s certainly parallels there,” Wood says of Dolores’ becoming self-aware and breaking out of her own loop compared to Old Dolio’s story. “I think that journey inward and that journey to consciousness is part of all of our journeys.” But her real takeaway is about breaking out of toxic loops, plus concerns of family as a whole.

“I’ve heard Miranda speak about families and how each one of them is its own mini-cult, in that they all have their own set of rules and morals and standards,” she says. “Each one is a little different, and we all go through a moment where we have to start defining ourselves separate from our family: what that looks like and who we really are, and what we really want. And sometimes that does not match up with the family that we have been raised in, and it can be quite jarring and traumatizing. Especially when you make the decision to share your true self with your family. I know queer people can certainly relate to some of this, and that idea of discovering who you are and sometimes having to leave the only thing that you’ve ever known.”

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Wood hopes that Kajillionaire moves audiences to reconsider their childhoods and their own parenting styles, but her greatest wish is that it reaches the people who may never have seen themselves reflected back in film before: “I hope if there’s any Old Dolios watching, that they feel seen, and like they got to be the leading lady.”

Kajillionaire will be released in theaters on Sept. 25.

The post Kajillionaire: How the Evan Rachel Wood Movie Explores the ‘Mini-Cult’ of Family appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/32T6RTK

[mst3kproject]

Panther Girl of the Kongo

Panther Girl of the Kongo comes to us from Republic Serials, whose logo was mocked over and over every time it appeared in front of Radar Men from the Moon.  It stars Phyllis Coates from Invasion USA and Myron Healey from The Unearthly and The Incredible Melting Man.  It's also got giant lobsters for its monsters, and oh, yes, this is every bit as unbelievably silly as it was in Teenagers from Outer Space.

Our heroine is Jean Evans, wildlife photographer and vine-swinging Panther Girl!  She and her crew are looking for a lion, but instead they find a giant crawdad that wrecks their camera!  Understandably concerned (giant arthropods in the 50's were normally a sign of radiation), Jean calls up her friend Larry Sanders, a safari guide. Together they discover a truly diabolical plot: mad Scientist Dr. Morgan has discovered how to mutate arthropods into giants!  What's he doing with them?  Well, it just so happens that he's also found a hitherto unknown diamond mine, and is determined to scare the natives away[crustacean needed] so he can claim the land and have the gems all to himself.

There are thirteen episodes of this and almost all of them contain a furniture-smashing fistfight scene.  I'm amazed they didn't run out of Jungle Hut props.

Let's get the technicalities out of the way first.  Like Radar Men from the Moon, Panther Girl of the Kongo is designed around a series of cliffhangers – every episode must end with the hero and/or heroine in mortal peril so that the audience will come back next week to find out how they escaped.  The answers are usually not exciting: at the end of Episode One (The Claw Monster!) Larry is knocked out by members of the evil Returi tribe while Jean is menaced by a crawdad.  At the beginning of Episode Two (Jungle Ambush!) it turns out Larry was only momentarily stunned, fights off his attackers, and saves Jean in the nick of time.  At the end of Episode Six (High Peril!), he appears to be about to fall onto spikes, but in Episode Seven (Double Trap!) we see that he actually lands well away from them.  And so on.

The monster effects are... well, they're awful, but they're entertainingly awful.  The crawdad attacking the miniature camera is pretty great, as is the one that's shown 'growing' by putting successively larger crawdads in a miniature cage!  The giant puppet claws that reach out from behind rocks and trees to menace people are utterly hilarious – and of course we never see any blood on the 'injuries' these cause.  And man, if you think the crawdads are stupid, wait until you see the movie's truly abominable gorilla suit.  We saw better-looking shit in Season 11 Bigfoot movies!

There is a lot of stock footage here.  Critic William Cline described the plot as functioning ‘to move the heroine from one piece of stock footage to another’.  There's a sequence in which Jean promises some guests film of the strange creatures she's discovered, but adds that it's on the same reel as some of her other footage, which they'll have to wind through first.  This is an excuse so that we can look at a bunch of documentary animal footage showing creatures like giraffes and cranes that definitely do not live in the jungle.  There's a totally unnecessary recap episode.  Jean's elephant friend Beela exists almost entirely in stock footage, and the same stock footage every time she appears (to be fair, this would have been way less noticeable in a weekly serial than it is watching the whole thing in a day).  All the vine-swinging is from the earlier serial Jungle Girl, and is clearly a man in a dress and a wig!  At least they matched the costume.

But we all know by now that what I love talking about in these pieces of antique media is their politics, so let's take a look at the political situation presented to us by Panther Girl of the Kongo.

We are shown two tribes, the Utanga who are Jean and Larry's hosts, and the Returi who work for Dr. Morgan.  Do I need to specify that both are totally invented?  No?  Good.  The prop and costume department gave these two peoples distinctly different looks, but these are designed less to suggest different cultures than to establish who are the 'good' and 'bad' Africans.  The 'good' Utanga are a little Westernized.  They wear textile clothing without much embellishment beyond Chief Danka's beads and feathered headdress, and live in houses with domestic animals such as chickens.  The Returi, on the other hand, wear 'leopard skins' with body and face paint and jewelry made of bones and teeth, carry weapons everywhere, and seem to be a more nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe.  The treatment is intended to dehumanize them, making them the obvious 'bad' guys.

The two tribes seem to coexist peacefully.  As in Voodoo Woman it's the white people who have brought trouble with them as they seek resources.  Voodoo Woman hinged on Dr. Gerard's quest for power and Marylin's for gold, while Panther Girl of the Kongo concerns Dr. Morgan's interest in diamonds.  The gems are quite useless to the local people who own the land, but very valuable to Morgan.  He can't ask permission to mine the area because he doesn't want to have to pay taxes or fees on his finds, so instead he sets out to steal the land.  In order for him to get the resources he needs, the natives must be either driven away or enslaved.

The monsters are intended to frighten off the Utanga.  With the Returi, Dr. Morgan employs a different approach – he keeps them compliant by providing them with a 'tonic'.  Exactly what this is, we're never told, but it's addictive and mind-altering, making those who take it more obedient and less concerned with their personal safety.  I expected this to be a plot point somehow, but it's never returned to.  It is reminiscent of a number of situations in real-life history: the fur traders would give the Native Americans alcohol in exchange for beaver pelts, and the British would sell the Chinese opium for tea.  Now that they're under his thumb, Dr. Morgan can have the Returi do a great deal of his dirty work, while blaming the violence on the 'primitive tribe' who don't know any better. When one of the Returi men is shot and hurt, he is simply abandoned despite his friend insisting that he needs help.  In Dr. Morgan's mind the natives are either tools or inconveniences.

There's a thread of the White Saviour trope in the story, too. While Dr. Morgan considers himself the master of the Returi, Jean and Larry seem to think of themselves as the protectors of the Utanga. Jean says that with the monsters running loose in the jungle, the men of the village would rather stay home to protect their families than go out and hunt the creatures down, so the latter job is left to the white people.  Indeed, Morgan's men are counting on this – they believe the Utanga will depart at once if Jean and Larry are killed and therefore no longer able to protect them.  Later the Utanga actually do flee en masse, and the white people have to promise protection to make them come back.  The government and police force who will solve the problem if Jean can only find proof against Dr. Morgan are also white – history would suggest that they're Belgians, but they speak with British accents.  I guess the writers didn't research anything else, why would they bother to get that right?

In this case, I really don't think any of this is social commentary.  It's much more superficial than it was in Voodoo Woman, and I get the idea that it was written this way because somebody just figured that was how things worked in Africa.

Another thing I find kind of interesting about the series is how, despite the jungle and savannah setting, Panther Girl of the Kongo often feels like a western.  This may be mainly on account of the 'mining' plot – trade diamonds for gold or silver, give the two tribes faux-Native-American names instead of faux-African ones, and shift us from the jungle to the desert, and the whole 'chase the locals away from the undiscovered mining site' plot would work equally well.  When we see a larger settlement than the Utanga village, many of the sets have a very 'wild west' feel to them, possibly even being hastily-redressed leftovers from a western movie. There are certainly plenty of shootouts and barfights that would be right at home in a cowboy movie, and probably contribute to the 'western' atmosphere.  Such a story could even keep up Jean's friend-to-animals persona, having her hang out with bears and feral horses instead of lions and elephants.  'Coyote Girl of Nevada'?  Why not?

The ease with which this could be done speaks to something else: the formulaic nature of the story.  It's made of tropes, pieced together into a plot that would use (as Cline noted) as much of their stock footage as they could.  The only reason it's a jungle story rather than a cowboy story was because they happened to have the jungle footage on hand.  If they'd had stuff left over from Radar Men from the Moon instead of Jungle Girl, it might well have been a space story instead ('Rocket Girl from Venus'?).  Panther Girl of the Kongo was the sixty-fifth serial Republic had produced, and like Disney with its princesses, they pretty much had their formula down.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing.  If you just sit and watch it, Panther Girl of the Kongo keeps the animal footage and jungle peril coming steadily enough to keep you from getting bored, and the story is reasonably engaging.  The monsters and gorilla suits aren't believable for a minute, but they're amusing, and the bite-sized serial format means you can watch a couple, get tired of it, and come back to it later, when the title cards will kindly remind you which heart-stopping cliffhanger you left off on.  Each episode has a mini-plot that contributes to the overall narrative while also feeling acceptably self-contained, and Jean is a fairly capable heroine, saving Larry's life almost as often as he saves hers.

It’s not art.  Indeed, it’s clearly a sort of assembly-line product, but I can see how this stuff made money.

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Review: The Blade Itself

by Wardog

Tuesday, 01 April 2008Wardog is really fucking impressed.~

This was another of my Hay-on-Wye One Pound Bargains (the first being, of course,

Locke Lamora

) except it's been gathering dust under my bed for the past six months. What can I say, the cover was a bit lame and the blurb on the back made it sound a bit generic and, let's face it, it was available in bulk via an outlet booksellers on the Welsh Border for less than my breakfast croissant so how good could it be? Well I'm pretty much kicking myself for the delay because the answer is bloody good actually. Bloody bloody good. Possibly the best fantasy I've read for a very very long time.

Into a cocked hat with you, Mr Locke Lamora. This is the Real Deal.

The Blade Itself, which is the first part of a trilogy because fantasy cannot be anything else although it gets points from me by not being a fucking septology, has three main protagonists, and the story unfolds through each of their perspectives. They are: Captain Jezel dan Luthar, a shallow and feckless swordsman in the King's Own, Logen Ninefingers, a battle-weary barbarian and Sand dan Glokta, a crippled and bitter Inquisitor who was horribly tortured during the war. So much so GRRM I know, but here it really really works. The POV switching is deft and absorbing and there's a genuine difference in narration and perception between the three characters - Glokta's sections are dominated by his sarcastic interior monologue and Jezel's actually seem to pout and whinge at you:

He had always assumed that everybody loved him, had never really had cause to doubt he was a fine man, worthy of the highest respect. But Ardee didn't like him, he saw it now, and that made him think. Apart from the jaw, of course, and the money and the clothes, what was there to like?

The stories interweave but only occasionally overlap; however the fleeting opportunities to see a character you've grown familiar with through the eyes of another are fascinating and serve to deepen your understanding of both characters in a quite subtle ways. It's also a world-building winner because knowledge of the world (which seems quite detailed but, thankfully, is never presented in those indigestible chunks so popular with fantasy writers) filters down to you gradually through the different character's responses and preoccupations. When you first see the city the other characters inhabit through the eyes of the barbarian, for example, it's startling and arresting and gives you a whole new insight into something you've pretty much taken for granted throughout the book so far. If Abercrombie's technique can be faulted at all (and I hate myself for even mentioning it), it's that he's presented his three protagonists so effectively that his occasional deviations into other characters (and to be fair, these are rare) seem jarring and I often found myself skimming in order to get back to the people I cared about as quickly as possible.

The secondary cast consist of a finely tuned assortment of the types of people you might expect to find in this kind of book: a man of common birth striving for advancement and recognition in the King's Own, a scheming Arch-Inquisitor, a cantankerous old man who may or may not be (but probably is) the all-powerful First of the Magi, a feral slavegirl, grasping nobles, pretentious officers and corrupt officials. The world they inhabit is dark and gritty (typical low fantasy fare in fact): the book is set in the Union, a sprawling confederacy of disparate countries (presumably an analogue to Europe) united under a, in this case, completely weak and hopeless King and a parliament of hereditary, bickering nobles. The Blade Itself concentrates mainly on establishing its characters and their position within the larger events taking place on the fringes of their awareness: there's clearly going to be A Big War although the details are as hazy to the reader as they are to the characters. Bethod, ruthless Barbarian king cementing power in The North, the Emperor Uthman al-Dosht eyeing up The East.

I think this may be The Blade Itself's only arguable weakness: it's pretty much a 400 page prologue. There is a sense of a gathering storm but there's very little elucidation of the over-arcing plot, which I presume will focus on the Big War through the eyes of the individuals caught up within it. This is not to say the book is devoid of excitement or tension, it's just that if you want to get into the thick of things straight away ... well ... why the hell are you reading fantasy trilogies? It may be a slow build but it it's so damnably well done that it's a pay off all on its own and I found myself so absorbed by the characters that I didn't care it was primarily set up for the books to come.

The other thing to note here is that my crude summary in no way does the book justice. Its generic premise and easily recognisable fantasy world are actually strengths: Abercrombie manipulates the usual fantasy tropes so skilfully that the book is both a delicate riff on the epic fantasy genre itself and an epic fantasy masterpiece in its own right. Its sly playfulness is one of the (many) pleasures of the book:

"How's the book?" asked Jezal. "The Fall of the Master Maker, in three volumes. They say it's one of the great classics ... Full of wise Magi, stern knights with mighty swords and ladies with mightier bosoms. Magic, violence and romance, in equal measure. Utter shit."

To some extent it reminds me of The Lies of Locke Lamora but only because they both seem to share a similar self-referentiality when it comes to the mainstays and expectations of the genre, and a healthy affection for the word fuck. If I was feeling momentous I'd dub it post-modern fantasy. But actually I think Abercrombie is better, particularly because he has a fine ear for dialogue and, although there are plenty of irreverent fast-talkers to be found within, it is at the very least possible to distinguish between them. His characters are complex, complicated and far from sympathetic but nevertheless they feel utterly and convincingly human. Jezal may be a shallow and selfish waste of space but you applaud his occasional moments of heroism. Glokta tortures people for a living and yet still you root for him. And although Logen, the thinking man's barbarian, was initially the least interesting of the three to me, after a while I really came to appreciate Abecrombie's take on this fantasy staple. Logen is a killer exhausted with killing, living in a world that has no other use for him:

He could have bragged and boasted, and listed the actions he'd been in, the Named Men he'd killed. He couldn't say now when the pride had dried up. It had happened slowly. As the wars became bloodier, as the causes became excuses, as the friends went back to the mud, one by one. "I've fought in three campaigns," he began. "In seven pitched ballets. In countless raids and skirmishes and desperate defences, and bloody actions of every kind. I've fought in the middle of the driving snow, the blasting wind, the middle of the night. I've been fighting all my life, one enemy or another, one friend or another. I've known little else. I've seen men killed for a word, for a look, for nothing at all. A woman tried to stab me once for killing her husband, and I threw her down a well. And that's far from the worst of it. Life used to be cheap as dirt to me. Cheaper. I've fought ten single combats, and I won them all, but I fought on the wrong side and for all the wrong reasons. I've been ruthless and brutal, and a coward. I've stabbed men in the back, burned them, drowned them, crushed them with rocks, killed them asleep, unarmed, or running away. I've run away myself more than once. I've pissed myself with fear. I've begged for my life. I've been wounded, often, and badly, and screamed and cried like a baby whose mother took her tit away. I've no doubt the world would be a better place if I'd been killed years ago, but I haven't been and I don't know why."

Logen, if anything and unlikely as it sounds, is (at the moment at least) the moral centre of the book. Although his battle cry is "I'm still alive" his life of violence has led him to a point where mere survival is no longer sufficient and the decisions he makes over the course of the book are based on an emergent, personal moral code. For the battle weary Logen, fighting has become something he will no long do out of necessity or for profit: he is fighting for a cause. Jezel, by contrast, in training for the fencing Contest, fights for glory and even then he only really puts any effort in because he wants to impress a girl. And Glokta, who does terrible things to people over the course of the book and knowingly allows himself to be used as a tool by the ambitious Arch Lector Sult, too physically and emotionally broken to really take any pleasure in survival at all, has no idea what motivates him to do the things he does.

That same question came into his head, over and over, and he still had no answer. Why do I do this? Why?

Glokta is most certainly the most difficult character in the book. Really, he can be thought of as a little more than a villain but the agony of his day to day life is described in such detail, and with such bitter wit, that it's very hard not to feel sympathetic towards him. However, although he's a fantastic character, I cannot help but wonder if his portrayal is entirely successful. The fact of the matter is, he kills and hurts people without remorse or regret and yet it's remarkably easy to forget it as you get drawn into the story. You might say this is yet another strength of the characterisation but I think that if you are going to find yourself responding positively to a character who is a torturer then you have to be able to do so with full knowledge of what that character is capable of doing. You might also say that this is a problem with me as a reader and that I shouldn't need to see constant and gruesome teeth-extraction scenes to remind me that somebody is a Bad Man but I actually suspect it's something to do with the nature of fiction itself (yeah, heaven forefend it was me).

Seriously though, and with all due self-irony, it's easy to forget - especially when it comes to fantasy where getting completely subsumed in the world is an expected part of the reading process (or "fun" if you're feeling generous) - the artificiality of fiction. We do not, however we might wish to pretend otherwise, respond to fictional people and situations as if they were real. We do not grieve for the fictional dead. We don't care about the billions of lives lost on Alderan, we just think it's really damn cool and evil that a whole planet got blown up by Darth Vader. Similarly, the people Glokta tortures have no narrative presence of their own. Therefore, it's hard to care that horrible, horrible things happen to them and it's hard to condemn Glokta for perpetrating the horrible horrible things. The issue here is not about morality it's about narrative: it's not whether or not the reader should be able to forgive Glotka for his unforgivable actions, it's why they should be so easy to forget.

But to bring this back to where it's supposed to be: The Blade Itself is an exceptionally accomplished and, indeed brilliant, debut. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Just one more thing: Fantasy Rape Watch

Women raped: 0

Somebody give the man a big gold star.

A brief aside on the subject of women in The Blade Itself since it's something that seems to be preoccupying us here at Fb: women tend to be peripheral to the novel as a whole. However, given the world, this seems entirely appropriate. The few female characters who do have parts to play are well-written, interesting and can hold their own against the men. None of them get their pale breasts fondled by rough barbarian hands. Win!Themes:

Fantasy Rape Watch

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Books

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Joe Abercrombie

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Sci-fi / Fantasy

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Arthur B

at 23:17 on 2008-03-31

I've fought ten single combats, and I won them all, but I fought on the wrong side and for all the wrong reasons.

And with that, you've sold me on it. I know you said you'd lend it to me, but I'm tempted to just go to the Works and pick it up - ISTR that they have some cheap copies going there - since if you give it to me I'll want to keep it and then we will have to fight.

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Wardog

at 10:37 on 2008-04-02I feel absolutely evangelical about it - I would walk down Iffley Road just to give it to you, I think it's THAT good.

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Arthur B

at 15:19 on 2009-09-22So, I've finally gotten around to reading it a year and a half later and I'm pretty impressed.

I agree that the book is let down by the fact that it's a prologue, but I don't think it's let down that much. It's clearly the setup for Bayaz getting an adventuring party together to go to the edge of the world, but it almost never explicitly focuses on that, and always makes sure there's heaving, groaning piles of other stuff happening at the same time to make up for it like the war in the North and the fencing contest. If Robert Jordan had written this it would be 400 pages exclusively about Bayaz and his companions shopping for travelling gear.

Personally, I don't think the things Glotka does are that forgettable - we get constant little reminders of the lives he's destroyed throughout the book, like the bit where he casually mentions that the man he wrecks right in the opening chapters has "moved up north", and the implications of the responsibility he's given at the end of the book is pretty horrifying. Also, Glotka constantly thinks about his own torture, because his thought processes end up warping everything and making them all about him and the fact that he was tortured, but whilst he's a self-centred prick who can't see beyond his own pain I think at the same time his pains and tribulations are also a nice reminder for the reader about the implications of what Glotka does. That said, I think this is a point where people's interpretations will vary.

Oh, and on "Women raped: 0", I'm not sure that's

completely

true. I think it is pretty clear that in her past Ferro was either raped or in dire peril of being raped, but I think it's allowable because a) it's backstory, backstory inherently less real than stuff that actually happens onstage, and b) she actually acts like someone who has been brutally victimised in her formative years and then spent years as an outlaw running a guerilla campaign against the authorities. Pretty classy work on JA's part.

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Arthur B

at 15:22 on 2009-09-22Oh, there was one thing that got to me though - the world didn't quite hang together in a coherent manner, Abercrombie seemed to want to have the Renaissance-era Holy Roman Empire bordering Viking-era Scandanavia, and there were some puzzling things that came out of that. I'm all for fantasy worlds not sweating it too much when it comes to emulating a particular time period - deliberate anachronism can be pretty fun - but the Northmen don't know about crossbows?

Seriously?

That's the sort of weapon where once it's discovered it gets propagated

fast

because it's too useful not to adopt.

On the flipside, I did like the fact that Logen and Bethod and the other Northmen have no doubt that Bayaz is who he says he is, whilst in the Union they all freak out about it. It implies either that things are wilder and woolier and more magical in the North, or that time actually passes more slowly there; I'd be interested to see which.

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Dan H

at 23:27 on 2009-09-22It's pretty much standard in Fantasy for you to have Renaissance city-states, Vikings, Knights, Egyptians and Samurai rubbing shoulders in the same setting (often along with Victorian street urchins and spacemen).

It's also pretty standard for "civilized" people to be all "no no, the big dark evil is totally not coming" while "simpler" people are like "zomg".

Just once I'd like the civilised people to be right. After all, most things that people Don't Believe In Any More are - y'know - genuinely not real.

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Arthur B

at 00:50 on 2009-09-23

It's also pretty standard for "civilized" people to be all "no no, the big dark evil is totally not coming" while "simpler" people are like "zomg".

Again, a setting feature which made me genuinely wonder whether time passes more slowly the further you get from the central nation in the book. If 500 years have passed in the Union whilst only 15 have passed in the utter North a lot of this stuff makes sense: the Northmen don't know about crossbows because from their point of view they were only invented days ago, the Union have forgotten about magic and the Dark One because to them it's ancient history whereas to those at the periphery it's recent news, and Bayaz can have an influence on the life of the Union spanning generations because all he has to do is step beyond the mountains and time, for him, slows to a crawl.

This is almost certainly not the case but it would be fun to imagine a world where it was true.

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Niall

at 11:25 on 2009-09-23

it would be fun to imagine a world where it was true.

I believe this is the concept underlying Jo Walton's Lifelode. (Also some short stories by Stephen Baxter, eg "PeriAndry's Quest", "Climbing the Blue".)

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Jamie Johnston

at 22:49 on 2009-09-23I vaguely remember being absolutely fascinated by a slightly-outside-my-syllabus lecture (weren't they always the best kind?) about the Rus, a slightly mysterious pagan people from the northern Volga who pop up from time to time in Byzantine texts and who, the lecturer argued quite convincingly, later ambled vaguely westwards and arrived in Scandinavia just in time to become the Vikings. Maybe Abercrombie vaguely remembered a similar lecture.

Studying ancient and medieval history totally ruined the whole fantasy genre for me. I can't read any specimen without getting incredibly frustrated by the many many ways the fantasy world at hand would never under any circumstances work the way the author wants it to. (Not in a 'No, there can't be dragons' way, just in a 'No, if you had domesticated dragons it would completely revolutionize long-distance transport which would internationalize urban élite culture and thus destablize the ruling theocracy, not to mention the implications for agriculture...' way.) It makes me rather sad.

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Arthur B

at 23:12 on 2009-09-23This is the sort of thing which was simply never a problem with pulp fantasy of the Howard/Leiber/Clark Ashton Smith vein - because that genre was dominated by short story, no particular story revealed enough of the world that you could see where the seams were. Leiber's stories, for example, are all set in the environs of Lankhmar, and because you never really get to see the wider context of where Lankhmar fits in with the global political and economic scene none of that stuff matters even slightly and you can just forget about it and have fun.

Brick-sized novels tend to be trickier, especially since the instinct to write a fantasy story longer than 50 pages seems intimately tied to a love of excess worldbuilding. The more detail you provide about the setting, the more you reveal of the economic and political underpinnings, and 99% of the time they're going to turn out to be made of wet cardboard and string (because coming up with a convincing society from scratch is horrifyingly difficult).

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Arthur B

at 01:07 on 2009-09-24(Oh, and I'm pretty sure that the Union isn't based on Byzantium but the Renaissance-era HRE, so Abercrombie almost certainly isn't thinking of the Rus. The Union appears to incorporate at least the southern extremities of not-Scandanavia, for starters, and there's an utter lack of Greek-sounding names.)

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Dan H

at 11:38 on 2009-09-24

'No, if you had domesticated dragons it would completely revolutionize long-distance transport which would internationalize urban élite culture and thus destablize the ruling theocracy, not to mention the implications for agriculture...' way

Ironically, I often find that sort of thing actually balances out quite well.

"But if you could do that, it would totally revolutionise agriculture..."

"... which sort of explains why 90% of your country isn't covered in farmland so - fair enough then."

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Jamie Johnston

at 22:52 on 2009-09-24

This is the sort of thing which was simply never a problem with pulp fantasy of the Howard/Leiber/Clark Ashton Smith vein...

Perhaps I should try mining that vein. Where's a good place to start?

... the Union isn't based on Byzantium but the Renaissance-era HRE...

D'oh, yes, you did say exactly that in the first place and my brain perpetrated an unhelpful act of lumping all post-Roman imitations of the Roman empire together.

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Arthur B

at 22:54 on 2009-09-24

Perhaps I should try mining that vein. Where's a good place to start?

Any of the Fantasy Masterworks reprints of their work is decent (as is Lord Dunsany, if you want something a bit more poetic... and come to think of it, their compilation of Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories is pretty good).

Be aware that Leiber's output is a bit more variable than the others - the earlier Lankhmar stories are generally better than the later ones - and the Masterworks reprints of Lankhmar put the books in their internal chronological order, not the order of publication. So it's worth skipping to the stories with the earlier dates of publication when dipping into those.

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Ash

at 20:49 on 2011-03-15

time passes more slowly the further you get from the central nation in the book

Which raises the question, how does this work exactly? If 20 years inside makes 1 year outside, what happens when you cross on the border? Do you get ripped apart? Can you cross on the border? What about the cycle of day and night? Does one side have extremely long/short days and nights? If not, why not?

I don't know, it seems that it poses more problems than it solves.

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Dan H

at 22:36 on 2011-03-15I don't for a moment think that the Abercrombieverse actually works that way (it seems a pretty out-there way of describing what boils down to a bit of cod-fantasy world-handwaving) but I don't think it would actually be *that* hard to deal with, the same thing happens in the real world on a much smaller scale (time is slower in strong gravitational fields so clocks really do run faster in orbit than near the earth - GPS satellites need to be calibrated to take this into account). As long as there's a relatively smooth gradient, it shouldn't matter when you move from one to the other.

If it's got sharper edges, then you're dealing with something more like fairyland or Narnia - it's basically a metaphor for the way in which things can seem to change radically when we are separated from them for what appears to us to be a short time (this happens to me in real life all the time, you'll meet somebody you haven't seen for a while and they'll turn out to have had a baby or become a vicar while your back was turned).

But it's fairly clear that the world of The Blade Itself does not actually work that way anyway, so the point is rather moot.

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Andy G

at 23:51 on 2011-03-15Just re-read this review. Two things leapt out at me.

Firstly, I must read these books again.

Secondly, it was Grand Moff Tarkin who blew up the whole planet, not Darth Vader!

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Arthur B

at 00:24 on 2011-03-16And Tarkin did it wearing comfy slippers too.

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Wardog

at 09:33 on 2011-03-16Incidentally, I don't think you're allowed to have a 'verse if you name has more than 2 syllables in it. Maybe it should be the Joeverse.

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Ash

at 20:01 on 2011-03-16

The point is rather moot.

Sorry, I just like to overthink things.

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Alasdair Czyrnyj

at 20:21 on 2011-03-16

Sorry, I just like to overthink things.

Fortunately, that's the raison d'être of this website.