#i need to start drawing des in more dynamic poses. it's not him if there's not drama in what he does | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hubbytaeil · 4 years

Note

hello! can u please do angst #6 from your prompt list for johnny?? maybe some enemies or fake dating ?! thanks <3

Johnny + #6 It’s a real shame nobody asked for your opinion

genre: kind of angst, reneissanse!au

synopsis: an alternative universe in which reader is a Medici and Johnny is a Pazzi in 15th Century Florence. In case you didn’t know, Giovanni is the equivalent of John

tw: mentions of blood and death

word count: 3k+

a/n: there i go again putting together two of my favourite things together aka Johnny and Italy so really this is pure self-indulgence. On top of that, this will be the last post I make. I’ve been thinking a lot, I’ve put two and two together and I understood that I’m about to enter the busiest period/year of my life, but that’s adulting right? Either way, it was fun to be here while it lasted, thank you for your support but I feel like I need to concentrate on getting my life together now. Remember to take care of yourself, nenétte says goodnight <3

It was a perfect night for a celebration; it seemed as though the whole city of Florence had gathered in the presence of the Corsini in their great villa. Music played gayly and the atmosphere was filled with laughter and joy. You knew very well this was all your friend Matilde’s doing, her social gatherings were known to be the most entertaining throughout the republic. The reason of the celebration was unknown but the guests were having a splendid time. When you finally questioned Matilde about it, she just shrugged her shoulders.

“Must a lady always have an excuse for her to wish for good company and a good laugh?” she whispered in your ear so that she would not be heard by her older sisters.

“Oh, most certainly not. Yet, I am still rather perplexed on why the lady in question has to invite the entire city in her home to simply have a laugh.” you responded, holding her hand in a teasing manner.

“We should enjoy ourselves for as long as we can, y/n. Just like your brothers always say, don’t they?” you nodded at Matilde’s statement, glancing over at your brother Lorenzo engaged in what seemed a heated conversation with one of the guests. You always regarded yourself to have had such a lucky disposition, having been born in one the most influential families of the peninsula. Yet, your true luck laid in the wonderful family members you had been blessed with. A young lady such as yourself could not have hoped for a better environment to grow up in, surrounded by illustrated artists who would always come in and out of your household, the toms of the library of your beloved father, God rest his soul, and, of course, the presence of your ever so outstanding siblings. Lorenzo noticed your gaze towards him and he saw how must’ve been lost inside your numerous thoughts. He shook his head slightly. Divertiti. Have fun, he mouthed. You smiled enthusiastically, remembering what such beautiful lines of wisdom you had found lying on his desk along the piles of scattered papers. You felt the need to share them with Matilde.

“As my dear brother would say, del domani non c’è certezza. Of tomorrow there’s no certainty.”

“And would your other dear brother say, sorella?” Giuliano intruded in your conversation but Matilde was not at all displeased. Giuliano had that effect on every lady (or lord), with his astonishing complexion and rather captivating character that at times could be considered rather bellicose.

“Well in your case, you would just simply sneak away with the fairest lady here present and leave your younger siblings to watch out for themselves.” you affirmed, of course he couldn’t help but smirk at truthfulness of your words.

“Not this time, y/n. Tonight I’m very determined to protect you from the rapacious gazes of Florentine society. Mother’s orders.” Said Giuliano sternly, locking his arm with yours, leading you to dance and separating you from Matilde.

“Is that so, Giuliano? Is any of the gentlemen here present organising some sort of coup against my character?” you implied, trying to veil your cheeky smile. As the music initiated, you let your brother guide you in the sea of people, hoping not to get the wrong steps and end up on someone’s feet, just like what happened last time with one of the Albizzi boys.

“Not that I know of, no. But who knows what are these pompous bastards’ ways to smear our family.” your brother hissed when he got the chance to be close to your ear as he made you turn.

“You’d know better not to utter such profanities, messere.” you muttered, mocking your childhood governess which made Giuliano laugh silently as he positioned you both in line. You continued on dancing and you could feel your brother glaring at every gentleman whose turn was it to dance with you. Much to your determined protector’s surprise, you had never cared much for the company of men, therefore you were sure you could defend yourself in case of uncomfortable or inconvenient situations. You limited yourself to exchange the bare minimum of pleasantries, enough for you to be polite but not enough for them to justify any sort of pursuing. An equilibrium soon to be disrupted by a young man, all dressed in black, who you had never seen before, not at any of Matilde’s parties or in church or even in one your brothers’ company. The gentleman, who most definitely stood out for his imposing height, took your hand and led you forward. You had never felt intimidation in the presence of the opposite sex, as opposed to what all decent ladies are taught, and yet there was something about him that made you both fear and admire him, with his hair long and dark and his serious gaze.

“Are you enjoying yourself, my lady?” his raucous voice filled your ears as he made you sway past him and back at his side. You tried to compose yourself.

“Most definitely, my lord. I reckon you are as well.”

“I am certainly, though it is rather unfortunate that no other lady can dance as well as you.” whispered the puzzling man, in the corner of your eye you saw a smirk. That must have been the dreaded coup Giuliano was worrying about. You were ashamed to admit that being charmed wasn’t as unpleasant as you had expected. You could’ve even get used to it if it meant looking into the stranger’s beautiful eyes and how they glowed under the candle lights. They irradiated a particular light, making anyone believe that they held some type of knowledge a common person could not aspire to.

“It is the mere product of practice. Truth to be told, I find books more entertaining at times.” you took a step forward together, hand in hand.

“Is that so? And in what readings have you most interest?” you smirked at his question, holding in a chuckle, resulting in him frowning as he waited for your respond. He pulled you in and then you spun around him.

“I’m afraid if I told you, messere, you wouldn’t want to pay me such honouring compliments anymore.” You showed him your most endearing smile and he gladly reciprocated, staring at you attentively as you draw a circle around him.

You were doleful to let go of his hand just to give it to another gentleman. Faster than you expected, the dance came to an end you were already anticipating to resume the conversation with your newest acquaintance. You felt silly in not having asked for his name. You spotted his eyes again the crowd and he was svelte to start making his way to you. But before he could reach you, you observed how his eyes shifted from you to something that was behind. His expression had darkened. You turned around to realise how that something was no other than a rather crossed Giuliano. The young man froze where he stood, meanwhile Giuliano was quick to grab you gently by the arm.

“I most definitely have oppositions about your taste in men, y/n.” your brother grumbled, not taking his flaming eyes off the gentleman dressed in black.

“I actually found him to be the most agreeable gentleman to dance with me tonight. What could your oppositions be, brother?” you glanced over at him once again, wearing a pleased smile. This time he didn’t even flinch, he had reassumed the initial austere expression. It set off a bitter taste in your mouth.

“Do you really wish to know the reason of my oppositions?” Giuliano’s tone was strange. You knew he was hiding something from you. You nodded impatiently, only wanting to find out the dynamics of this sudden change of mood.

Giuliano let your hand rest on his as he made his way to the unknown man with you at his side. Your heart sank in your chest once you were face to face yet again with the handsome stranger. What was your brother trying to do?

“Giuliano de’ Medici.” spoke the tall man. You were not surprised at him knowing who your brother was, but it didn’t explain at all why this was your first time seeing him.

“Giovanni de’ Pazzi.” responded Giuliano. Your throat ran dry at the sound of that name and your head was suddenly heavier.

It couldn’t be. He was a Pazzi, but how was this possible? You had never seen him around any other person who carried such dreadful surname. All good dispositions towards the man changed in the blink of an eye. And all it took was a bloody name.

“Tell me Giovanni, how was England? It was quite a lengthy stay, wasn’t it?” Giuliano posed his question, but the usual tone of mockery was not trying to be hidden by any means.

“It was indeed, lengthy enough for me to start calling myself John, like the locals did. But I have missed Florence very much.” John’s tone on the other hand was firm and poised, hard to believe he was a Pazzi if one didn’t notice the deadly spark in his dark eyes, the same spark you had mistaken for a sign of a respectable man.

“May I present to you my sister, y/n de’ Medici?” the reveal of both of your identities had banished any sort of possible affection between you and John. There you stood face to face, a pernicious look in both of your eyes. You bowed never letting your gaze leave him, not interested in being polite, not to him or any member of his family.

“It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance, madonna. I certainly look forward on having more conversations regarding our favourite lectures.” his devious smirk didn’t look as charming anymore, not when it reminded you of the odious man who was head of his family.

“I certainly do, messer Pazzi.” you responded with not even a drop of sincerity, you made sure the message was clear. You heard an unpleasant voice calling out John’s name. It was Francesco de’ Pazzi.

“If you’ll excuse me, my brother requires my presence.” John bowed elegantly and was swift to leave you and Giuliano alone. You squeezed your brother’s hand as tight as you could after John was far away enough.

“Say, what would you do without me, sorella?” Giuliano was glad in having succeeded in your mother’s plan but you felt deceived and most importantly, you felt uneasy having been so close to someone who despised your family so deeply. Though you were relieved in having been saved from stepping into the lion’s den.

“They should hang these Pazzis’ portraits around town so that decent young ladies don’t make the grave mistake of dancing with them.” you whispered bitterly.

“You seemed quite glad in the moment; I’ve never seen you look at a man like that.” Giuliano teased you.

“Do shut your mouth, and don’t mention this to anyone.” you warned him, your voice shaking thinking about John’s hand touching yours, about his eyes piercing through you like an arrow.

“Whatever for? Lorenzo always speaks of ending this rivalry once and for all. Perhaps, he’ll be happy to acquire a Pazzi as a brother-in-law.” Giuliano spoke with poison in his voice, since he clearly didn’t agree with his oldest sibling. Not to mention just weeks prior Francesco de’ Pazzi and Giuliano had been involved in a fight around the market place. Giuliano had a tumultuous character and it didn’t help the devilish rumours the Pazzi would spread about your family. You clang at Giuliano’s arm like you did when you were child.

“I shall never speak to a Pazzi ever again, let alone marry one. Just the mere thought makes my skin crawl.” had you and Giuliano been alone, you would’ve spat on the ground.

“Well, you’re in luck, I’d never let you commit such treason against our family, but must importantly, against me.” you both chuckled softly, hoping not be observed by anyone who would report what you were saying to the people involved.

“I know you two are up to no good, whatever is going on?” Lorenzo approached you, assuming a concerned look.

“Absolutely nothing, brother. I was just mentioning how all eyes seem to be on y/n this evening.” confidently answered Giuliano, tapping on the palm of your hand.

The evening was far from being over. Though, unlike your brothers, you required fresh air from time to time during crowded banquets such as these. You asked Matilde to join you on one of the balconies but she kindly refused after Giuliano finally asked her to dance. Therefore, you made your way alone. You rested your palms on the reeling, breathing in and out, looking up at the sky and following the trail of stars.

“You know, my uncle always says you Medici spend so much time looking up at the clouds that you forget what really matters.” a familiar voice sent a chill through your spine, making you shiver in result. You turned around to see John standing in between the pillars with a smug look on his face. Perhaps he thought he had conducted you into some trap. You pitied him.

“And my dear brother Lorenzo always say that you Pazzi waste all your great potential in going after what is out of your reach.” you replied severely, your back as straight as it could be. John snickered at your comeback. He looked rather dangerous with his face beaconed by the torches hanging on the wall, almost like Lucifer after having fallen from heaven. You had to admit, there was a hint of fear inside of you but shut it out as fast as you could.

“Have you been sent here to antagonise me?” you asked him since he hadn’t spoken.

“You are a Medici indeed.” John affirmed almost to himself, observing your every feature. “But no, I hadn’t such intentions. Though I could, if you were inclined.” said John, taking a step towards you.

“You’d be wise not to antagonise the wrong person, messere. One may even get hurt.” you warned him, looking at him dead in the eye. You were not used to stepping down to anyone, you were proud and not ashamed of it. Thought you two seemed to share this particular trait. It was a silent quarrel.

“Well, if that isn’t an inviting prospect.” John grinned, not taking your fervour seriously.

“So, you have come to antagonise me. I guess it runs in the family.” you raised your eyebrows in false surprise. “Did your uncle have to bring you back here all the way from England for this sole purpose?” you laughed in his face but his expression didn’t mutate. Yet his body seemed to tense up.

“The reasons of my return certainly do not concern you, my lady. Furthermore, I gathered you were enjoying yourself mingling with a Pazzi. Now, that’s not a behaviour worth of a Medici, is it?” John scolded you and rage created a stinging sensation that spread throughout your body. You tightened your fists, to the point where they hurt, anything not to let wrath cloud your judgment.

“I do not believe you are to be the best individual to judge what is worth of a Medici or not.” you stated as you commenced to circle around him.

“You have just returned to Florence and you are probably following your brother’s orders to please him. In that case, I wouldn’t blame you for your foolish provocative attempts.” you completed the circle as you said this.

“but I would blame you if such behaviour had been deliberate. Oh, it would’ve been so unfair to me, messer Pazzi.” you affirmed, sarcastically raising the pitch of your voice. You stood once again face to face, far away from the brief moment of propensity that you two had shared hours prior. You weren’t sure if his lively eyes regarded you as a prey or as his equal. John contemplated you, his opponent, before breaking into a smile.

“And what a pain it would be, y/n” You saw him move his hand preparing to reach for yours until he refrained himself “for you to know that I’ve been unfair to you.” John knew how to play this game very well indeed, whether he had learnt from his brother or anyone else in the family. Did he stop himself because in him there was enough decency left that didn’t make him want to compromise a young lady? Or perhaps did he want to prolong the fun he was having?

“Your perseverance is admirable, Giovanni” you saw him wince at his real name being pronounced. “though too much of it could lead to dangerous outcomes.” your venomous threat didn’t make John retreat but you could see that he was impressed by it.

“I certainly hope this fierceness of yours doesn’t get you into trouble, my lady.” he whispered.

“And it is a real shame no one has asked for your opinion in regard of my character, my lord.” you stared into each other's eyes like sword blades colliding. It was a tie.

“Y/n.” you heard Lorenzo calling your name, though it resounded like white noise in your ears. He informed you that it was time to leave. You looked over John’s shoulder and saw him looking rather preoccupied. You were glad that it wasn’t Giuliano or else he would’ve challenged John straight away after seeing you alone with him. You didn’t even bother bowing to John and you simply took heavy steps towards your brother.

“Are you alright, y/n?” Lorenzo questioned, rubbing one of your shoulders.

“I’m feeling splendid, do not worry about me.” you reassured him. You glanced back at John whose expression was cryptic. You worried if that expression was going to haunt your dreams that night.

“Have a good night, madonna. I’m sure we’ll have plenty of other occasions to talk about Ovid.” John hinted at the conversation you had during the dance and it made you fume with both rage and humiliation. You saw your brother’s expression darken at John’s words but he remained calm, even if the grip he had on you said otherwise. You, on the other hand, were seeing red. It was beyond unfairness; it was absolutely evil. You pushed aside the fear of John spreading vicious rumours about you being promiscuous or loose solely based on that conversation.

“There’ll be no need.” you affirmed, succeeding in keeping your voice stable. “I believe we have nothing more to say to each other. Have a good night.” and like that you stormed out alongside your brother, utterly infuriated at the state of wrath John had put you in.

“You and Giuliano are going to be the death of me, you know that?” Lorenzo muttered in your ear after you two had reached the carriage.

“I’m so sorry, brother.” you lowered your gaze.

“I believe you have done nothing to be sorry or ashamed for.” he made your raise your head and look in his eyes. “Furthermore, at your age I was way more reckless than you are right now.” he made you chuckle which slightly lifted your spirits. It didn’t shake off the feeling that you had made a terrible enemy that night. John eventually came to visit you in the first nightmare you had in years. One in which he was standing victorious over Giuliano’s lifeless body who laid on the altar of the Duomo, the holy cloth covered in his blood.

#johnny au #johnny scenarios #johnny imagines #johnny fic #johnny angst #nct 127 imagines #nct 127 scenarios #nct au #nct imagines #nct scenarios #nct dream scenarios #johnny smut

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elizabethrobertajones · 6 years

Text

14x03 watching notes

Just finished watching and said, out loud and to no one: “Awww Jack.”

(This is not a spoiler, he’s just so sweet.)

Hallo, I am watching from bed despite having 3rd hand inherited a 2nd monitor over the weekend so theoretically my watching experience would be back to giant comfortable side-typing glory.

But comfy.

Easily accessible stuffed toys because Bobo Fucking Berens in Dabb era has made me cry more at this dumb show in the last couple of years than I cried in the previous ten.

Expectations: it's our Dean episode to make up for no Dean until now, and also Jody is there to see Sam's beard, and also Cas continues to be party!Cas, and Jack's shirts get darker and darker.

Side note: I think I was rushing out the door before I could talk about our lil Nougat of Denmark properly last episode where he was all, so we're killing my uncle then, and Cas was all D: D: D: D: D: who raised you. (Dean. Dean did. In this regard the boy is his father's son.) This, of course, is another Shakespearean irony than is being returned to Dean via Jack.

The point of this focus is very much to show Jack vs Cas mindsets on it when we're getting Dean returned to us, and I assume considerably more nuance is being added to the story. But for now, Jack being ready to kill his father to kill his uncle because his father was ready to kill him to kill the ghosts he saw of his enemies in Jack is more than enough of a pile of tragedy level angst to be working with.

I just need it to be clear that as far as I'm concerned, Jack is working in a completely different genre from EVERYONE ELSE around him, and the fact that it's the protagonist of a tragedy is fairly alarming, as it's a mindset that Sam, Dean and Cas have hurdled over since season 5/6 and though Dean still assumes he'll die bloody, he is at least capable of dreaming of a happy ending, and a lessening of the angst load has allowed that. Their personal stakes in the story are dwindling, in a sense, while Jack has showed up with like FOUR FATHERS and an evil uncle, which is so much potential family angst Shakey would have exploded. "Wait you can just addeth extra fathers thence addeth extra angst!?!?"

Yes my dude, yes.

*hits play* *Sam ruggedly cocks his pistol* You're stealing this whole shtick from Dean and I think it is time for the angst that you were the one dramatically cocking a gun and being the yes reductive heteronormative blah blah penis of the dynamic while Dean was not there to do it.

Oh no we immediately start with more Jack angst recap and aside from everything I just said I remembered that Bobo personally murdered me in 13x03 with the Jack n Sam stuff and here we are a year later.

Mr Stark I don't feel so good

THE BEARD EXCHANGE IS LITERALLY THE OPENING SCENE. BOBO I LOVE YOU. Thank you for breaking the tension and immediately drawing attention to how Sam has been busy and miserable. I think 14x01 set up well that every time he even had a moment to sigh his phone would ring again, and hence the beard appears as Sam eskews personal grooming and comfort in exchange for finding his brother. Jody is gonna draw attention to it at some point too because we have the promo shot of her nice peach fuzz-ing him, and I sincerely hope this is bookends to the episode and the next episode Sam is clean shaven with no comment except Jody prodded him in the face, and let me tell you only Bobo has me fantasising about the narrative framing of an episode like this.

God i'm a nerd

Anyway more seriously, this exchange coming out of the blue has a clear motive: Dean is up and about, still so freshly de-Michaeled he's in a waistcoat (and LORDY the only other scene he was in a waistcoat? 7x12's ending scene where Sam turns into such a moron in Jody's presence he's waving blushily at the door still AFTER SHE HAS GONE). Complaining about not being able to eat and sleep might be a sense of hyperbole to catch given the lack of elapsed time, but it also warns us that this might be how Dean reacts to being un-Michaeled. Or would he not, given he's up and about and snarking like his old self? How damaged will he be and how much can he repress into snark? He is playing off the very idea that this experience will have been damaging to his psyche and of course Michael did a ton of stuff which was expressly tuned to BE damaging to his psyche, then punched a mirror and shattered Dean's reflection for extra emphasis.

So all this question of how Dean is doing is loaded into the very opening line before he's even taken off his waistcoat, or of course, had enough time to truly eat/sleep/develop massive tells of the psychological trauma he may or may not have taken.

Obviously the show wouldn't be the show if he were fine, so I'm taking it as a question posed.

Then of course it slides into Bro Banter to prove it's Dean, remind us JUST how much we missed this snarky genre savvy fucker, and to make Sammy smile.

Also we're mocking Jared for being friends with that one Duck Dynasty guy who Jared's fans insist is the least awful of the bunch and also who you end up hanging out with when you're most embedded in the Texan stardom scene rather than living in Hollywood or whatever.

(God imagine being famous and from Atlanta and sticking true to your roots and you end up with the Queer Eye guyses as your BFFs instead)

Listen Bobo showed his socialist party membership card on twitter, he has no fucks to give about waving his politics around and I love him.

"If you're going to ask if I'm okay, you don't have to" (I am making fun of your beard, what more do I have to give you, bro?)

Buddy, I have been watching your face for over a decade and you have the sad tired pink eyelids of a Dean who is both tired and miserable.

Oh NO Dean walks into the main room expecting his comfy quiet library and war room full of 3 trusted family faces, and finds the bustle of Boss Sam's operation. The upcoming noise of these people before he turns the corner is an immediate warning that we should have expected this as dramatic irony for Dean's comfort levels from the start, and now he's back, well.

Panicked eyes.

He needs quiet recovery with his peeps, not alarming sudden change. A rug pull immediately after possession is a terrible thing to deal with. I've been wondering if this is a full reverse of season 6 for Dean - from the trustability of the hunter compound to the fact he lives in it, to the Samuel running it. But the effect is the same. Dean comes back from quiet time off to a change he can't handle and Sam in a new position in a family/hunter heirarchy. In this case, not Samuel's soulless goon, but a fully bearded Boss Sam King Of Hell Sir who Runs Shit competently in a way we the viewer trust implictly as Sam having Done Well, and also that the AU peeps might be a bit rough or untrained in some ways but 100% reliable in that they really do have no ulterior motive and every reason to think of Sam as an AU Moses who popped up and walked them to another land of safety and comfort.

Like, Dean, welcome back, you have Hamlet, Moses and Mobby to deal with. Cas seems to be the same as you left him, though. If somehow, impossibly, squintier.

"Right, Chief told us"

GOD I MISSED JENSEN'S MICRO EXPRESSIONS

You know how Michael sucks? No micro expressions. Guy doesn't have an anxious bone in his body.

This little bundle of neuroses I have chosen to love is full on having a meltdown on the other hand.

"Dean? Is it really you?" "Hey kid"

HUG. THE. BOY.

I suppose this is better than last year when he had a hug from a shapeshifter and had to wait to episode 6 for a hug from his father, but REALLY this season has been tormenting me with how bad Jack feels and even a hug from his gramgram isn't enough to satisfy how he should have been hugged by Sam, Cas and now Dean already this season.

We're only on epiode 3 and he's already got more hugs than he had this point last year. Deep breaths, Lizzy

Children need a lot of cuddles to affect their development into sensitive people okay? Dean got a lot of hugs up to age 4 and Sam basically did not, and he's an awkward moose and Dean is snuggly. I want Nougat to have the same development into a sensitive lad because he has EIGHTEEN FUCKING PARENTS AND NONE OF THEM HUG HIM

CAS HEARD 'DEAN' FROM ACROSS THE BUNKER, ARRIVES IN A BLUR

GOOD NOUGAT, HUG DEAN.

But like, dude, Cas just showed up at a run and made the gooiest eyes at Dean who made them back, and now you're officially cockblocking, so naff off, kid

I watched with prayer hands and Cas just got gooier and Dean got sulky he didn't get a Cas hug and this is officially the worst. Bobo, you let me down, my guy.

I mean no, Cas's gooey eyes were

...

Cas doesn't do gooey eyes. He squints. Squintily.

Who is this guy

Lol Mobby aren't in the episode because they stayed back to clean up - Sam gets stammery to Jack. Is he scared to imply they're maybe banging because he finds it weird but everyone else present is an even worse audience to announce this to for one reason or another (historically coped much better with the concept of dad sex when discovering adam and also didn't drive the car off the road into a ditch on finding out mary banged ketch), or is he trying to protect Jack from the concept of Michael leaving a pile o dead bodies for one reason or another, knowing Michael is his rage button?

He was the one who dealt with Jack trying to stay back in the AU to fight Mikey instead of just coming home.

"Speaking of clean up, I need a shower" *gestures vaguely* *Cas opens his mouth like why did I have a reaction image here? Do you want -* *closes mouth* *dean leaves*

Guys. You fucking suck. Go take a shower together and work things out.

"Still okay, I promise" *bisexual finger guns at Cas*

cut to: Cas squinting after Dean like "is he implying something"

"..."

"I really feel like he was trying to communicate something to me"

"..."

"I have no idea what Dean just hinted loudly to me twice in short succession and now that he has gone to shower I guess I will never know what he was attempting to communicate to me"

"Where's Nick?" "Hopefully not in this episode. Let's just say he needs some time because he's in a dark place and hope that's ALL we have to say about him"

Oh no. "Sam. Dean. How is he really?"

Cas has a one track mind.

But then we get the shot of Dean opening his door and they're still talking about him over the top of it, but it's that same shadowed shot of himself silhouetted in the doorway, the inner darkness represented by his room... Sam went into his and stripped himself of the tools in his pocket but before he could sleep, Jo called and set them all off again with the next lead.

Now Dean opens his door and turns on the light so we can see his inner self in a moment of peace and privacy, but essentially with a voice over about how he's super not okay.

Just how we left it. You can't even tell that for the last 2 episodes/3 weeks Cas has been coming in and snuggling your pillow every time he's not in a scene because where the fuck was he inbetween scenes in 14x02

God I have missed lingering shots of Dean's room, equating his inner space to his inner feelings. *paws lovingly at the shot* Dean's room all tidy and orderly and as he left it, yet feeling somehow very very empty and off-kilter in an unfamiliar way because he hasn't been here for so long.

It was all serious then guitar music started playing as Dean started stripping

and look

I saw the promo pics

you saw the promo pics

some person in the audience is like... why are we lingering on Dean getting undressed alone in his room while guitar music kicks up?

Is this what all that winking and finger gun action was about?

(Dean didn't wink but I took a lil break to chat with Mittens and the moment has evolved into him gurning at the door for like a minute trying to remind Cas that this means he joins him in the shower in 5)

"Fuck this shirt in particular"

I still think it was the audacity of wearing a bow tie that dragged Dean to the surface last episode

I love how Dean changes from this plain white t-shirt which is completely clean and shiny, into his normal dark dark brown shirt between scenes. I hope he got to shower. Whatever happened, this scar could have said "Ha ha ha I'm behind you", and he would have finished stripping down right to the skivvies then started fresh with his own boxerbriefs before freaking out and rushing to show the others.

But yeah, he's PISSED and embarrassed about Michael. You don't throw a guy's shirt on the floor like that unless you feel SERIOUSLY used, and here we end up with a creepy sort of STD metaphor, complete with the visual similarity to the clap: https://www.giantmicrobes.com/uk/products/clap.html

Bad fling, Dean?

Poker!witch gave Sam the clap in the episode which was totally not a metaphor about Sam getting the clap then beating poker!witch at his own game like nearly 20 episodes before he was possessed by Lucifer then beat him at his own game.

"Do the whole vulcan mind meld thing" Listen, James T Kirk, you can't just MAKE yourself one of the most iconic slash pairings of all time by comparing - wait

wait a minute

*Checks slash history books and sees them as a dictionary definition or two*

Anyway.

Dean's so eager for Cas to jump into his head. Just, like. Again. We all said it but immediately after that shirt throw? It REALLY emphasises that Dean sees Cas in this transcendant way to being used by an angel that got in his head. And left an STD mark on his arm. He can just immediately think, well, that sucked. But here's MY angel and I'm just gonna rev myself up and present my head for inspection and this isn't even a thing I'm concerned about. Hit me, big guy.

Oh come the fuck on Bobo.

I didn't have time to hit pause to have a heart attack about Cas putting his hand over The Scar, the one on the wrong shoulder, to get a clearer reception, because there's a HISTORY in scars, okay? They leave a mark and to the discerning poker and prodder like Cas that history can be read in the mark... And Cas sees... Michael being stabbed by a spear. Not just, like. Seeing Michael being stabbed by a spear, mind you. He sees it in a Bobo episode in a way wildly reminiscent of Patience seeing Claire/Kaia getting stabbed by a VERY SIMILAR LOOKING SPEAR and getting her Wayward introduction that way, when the whole Dreamhunter thing ended up being a massive Destiel parallel and Kaia getting stabbed already mirrored CAS getting stabbed by a spear (Michael's, natch) in 12x12, never mind the other stuff.

So Bobo has just built up a Destiel Dreamhunter sandwich, with Destiel nonsense either side, complete with bonus shoulder scar imagery, and a nice gooey dreamhunter centre.

Bobo, if you hadn't noticed, is really really really really reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally bitter he isn't off writing Wayward Sisters and hanging with his girls.

There's still a bunch of stuff to add up here, about why and who and how it all connects, which would involve dragging in these other spear-y episodes to assemble the full picture, so I'm just gonna hit play now I'm recovered from the shock :P

Oh dude it was a hooded figure who even LOOKED like bad Kaia and tbh at this point I'd say maybe even was?

Like, how many pronged spears are out there anyway and Jody's dealing with it so is it local? Did Michael pop up on Kaia like hey so you and I are both from alternate universes, what do you wa - OW FUCK JESUS FUKKIN CHRIST -

"Dean, who was that?"

Dean recognised her, and Cas was mind-melded enough with him to know that Dean did... Good grief I can not handle Dean and Cas existing on an emotional plane.

It's enough to mean they're the ones who call Jody with a tip off for HER rather than months of them asking her to help THEM.

Introducing us back to the Wayward world - South Dakota mug, and a text that Claire is a little angel who has been training her gals and even did the laundry.

I'm so happy

Eyebrow raise

God, Kim Rhodes is the most beautiful woman on the whole show and that's saying something considering, like. Ruthie. Lisa Berry. Something about the way she uses her face is so full of intelligence and humour that I am HELPLESS in her presence

God damn I want that fabled Girls' Night episode. Billie comes along too on a night off.

Rowena calls her up for chats sometimes these days, they're actually really good pals.

Sam you fucking moron you can't even finish a sentence in her presence. Just slap Dean on his WOUNDED arm and throw the ball to him.

Everyone leaning over the phone... This is the closest Cas has ever come to Jody.

"Jody, that's the good news."

Jody recognises that gravelly voice and snaps to holyshitanangel attention. "What's up?"

The implicit thing here is that Cas and Jody know each others' voices and are on at least chatting acquaintance. I would like to think they're invited over for beer at the same time but we have no proof..................... yet. This is Bobo on a "fuck you" rampage so I'm just, like, gonna wait see.

Bad Kaia has been going around ripping heads off things. DAMN, GIRL.

Considering the placement of the pronging was ~random~, in the sense that she can meat fork you anywhere, that means the placement of it on the meat of Dean's arm where the handprint once was on the other is even MORE significant in a metaphorical sense, of writing about "the scar" in the way of giving it a mystical property tied into the wider framework of all these relationships and events at once. The amount piled onto a simple stabbing is unbelievable, and the use of the scar as the vector for all this is definitely the byline of the episode given the title and all. It's brought Kaia back to us, given Jody the clue she needs.

And more dramatic irony that Claire was just asking to help, and Jody was like DEFINITELY HUMAN, SO ALL MINE. HAHAHA. And now we know, no, it's not all "human", it's bad!Kaia and that makes her CLAIRE'S.

I keep stopping to seal clap

it's 7:20am

Cas is packing up to leave with them!!!

And Jack looms blurrily into the background in his darkest t-shirt yet. And he's been RAPIDLY cycling through them.

In a sense this is good laundry practice, in order that you have a full load of lights followed by a full load of darks.

Metaphorically, however, this is BAD.

Jack sounds pissed they're all wearing jackets and packing bags, and he's wandering around in an over-sized dark grey t-shirt (one of Dean's? AUBobby's? It doesn't look like his standard fare which fits his body, this makes him look SMOL), with no idea we were off to kill the wizard.

Let's be charitable and say he wants to meet Jody and hang out with Kaia again.

But more likely Bobo is once again messing with Jack's inherent darkness in his presentation, especially as right now, once again while Jack is being The Sweetest Little Cookie, meeting his grandparents for ice tea and looking through the family photo album with misty eyes, he is ALSO Prince Nougat of Denmark and this is causing some serious darkness slippage because, well, revenge. Revenge is bad, kiddo. Don't need a ghost of your dead father (hey Dean's back) to tell you that.

The accusatory tone is enough to warn us that Jack's not doing so well and I'm going to assume drags Cas away from a mission with Dean followed by cooldown eating pizza and watching flicks with the girls.

"Kaia's killer is in Sioux Falls" Buddy. "He, she or it can hurt Michael" BUDDY.

I suppose they're bringing Cas because Bad Kaia kicked their asses and they assume Cas is the same height as her pet/metaphor for Kaia's inner fucked-up-ness so he can probably fight it??

"Michael's my enemy too! I fought him. For MONTHS." JACK sweetie. You can't just go around like, having an enemy list. And comparing it with your collective fathers' list.

The line about bringing Kaia into it and being responsible for what happened to her is good, though. Jack's got a social consciousness and that is lovely because he keeps doubting his goodness but when it comes down to it he wants to meet his grandparents and feels bad that Kaia got dragged into things and killed.

Of course, not realising this is Bad Kaia, they're all off to get MORE revenge on that thing that killed her.

Aw, Dean, no, don't point out how smol he is. He's wearing a huge baggy shirt to emphasise it already.

"I didn't - I didn't MEAN to be a dick" Whoops. Well, you were. You also missed the part where Jack went from smol precious child to angsty teen.

Fun fact: Hamlet was supposed to be like 18 or whatever, but because a famous actor wanted the lead role but was like, idk, 50, Shakey bumped up Hamlet's age a lil so he could get away with it, making him more of, like, a giant manbaby who is still functionally a teen in all ways except he keeps getting portrayed by middle aged men.

So, of course, we have our one and a half year old Nougat who is a 29 year old actor now getting into his terrible teens, and if that isn't the funnest nugget of trivia...

... then you are not as much of a nerd as I am about irony, coincidence, and neat overlaps of thingies.

Point is: get me a version of Hamlet where the other expected actors are adults of course, but Horatio and Hammy and his squad are dumb teens.

Lol Bobo just randomly introduces a cool lady hunter who is dragging a random victim of a hex down into the bunker to be healed by an angel. That poor girl is going to have a story to tell.

A lot just happened in a few seconds but at least Jack, who has stormed off for his nth teenage sulk of the season, now has a Cas trapped in the Bunker with him.

Dean n Sam gonna get their asses kicked by Bad Kaia

honestly is this just a ploy not to keep Cas where Jack is, but to keep Misha away from stunt fighting?

Anyway Dean communicates most of the above to Cas silently, and tells him that he should stay with Jack and also heal this girl and they have the most married eye conversation about what needs to be done, which is wonderful that they've been having these silent conversations all Dabb era but this is definitely the wordiest so far. I mean one of their more recent was just "Dean I can hear that cowboy music in your head" "what cowboy music?"

DEAN DOESN'T EVEN LOOK THRILLED TO BE DRIVING BABY AGAIN.

Sam mostly looks concerned he's hitting 80mph

I don't know anything about American speed limits but this is an alarming speed to me because in the UK 70 is usually like, the Most, and we don't have enough long straight roads that when there's no speed limit it's ever really recommended to go super fast because you will flip your car and die because all our roads are one and a half car length wide and extremely wiggly. And our motorways are congested enough you're more likely to be in a traffic jam than top speed anyway :P

I love that Dean measures people by their favourite Spice Girl. Hey Dean the 90s called, they want their pop culture relevance back.

You gay icon you.

(I'm reminded of 12x07 and Bobo and a similar conversation where Dean listed off all his manly manly historical faves)

Dean thinks Cas can handle it back home :')

"Something huge happened and you won't really talk about it!"

Okay Sam, he's traumatised and that's surface text.

You do realise the entire massive subtext is his repression and yet another metaphor for some huge queer experience and that this is the same conversation as 10x04 when he was grumbling into his chin about being embarrassed about what he did with Crowley? You realise that right?

Stop poking him about it, he'll talk when he's ready to open up. In the mean time he's feeling used and ashamed that this fling didn't go as planned after the whole first flirtation with waving his wings around and killing Lucifer where it all seemed fun to embrace his ~true self~ and have a crack at being a Flaming Michael Sword.

Also of course, we might just take him on his word that he really does NOT remember most of everything that happened because if he was truly repressing that much he wouldn't have been so gung ho for Cas to read his mind earlier but this mood pre-dates that so even if he remembered everything when Cas poked his brain, which seems unlikely as Cas saw it too, the wider sulk about his Clap Scar is more than just this.

It's a common experience, though, that Dean is repressed and moody, and Sam barrels in there trying to make him talk about it before he's ready, so the pressing is in character, regardless, that Sam doesn't trust that Dean is telling the whole truth and that there's some huge secret he's holding back.

The best part of queer subtext is that whether there is one or not it works - if there isn't, it's a metaphor for the obvious. If there is, same as above but the metaphor is concretely attached to whatever Dean is not telling Sam, and that in turn then becomes a part of the queer subtext, offered up on a platter to tell us more about how Dean is handling his post-possession shame of being, essentially, roofied after thinking he'd agreed to a consensual fling with a dude on his terms of entry and no strings attached, no walk of shame like he did when he was undressing earlier.

Poor guy can not catch a break. Shoulda hooked up with Aaron when you had the chance so your first time having a dude in you wasn't such a big deal, but just a nice booty call to keep in your phonebook. Now it's all Crowley this, Michael that...

"We need to deal with it." "Okay, I'm literally going EIGHTY to deal with it"

Dean, that's.

that's not therapy

"How can I be running from something when I'm RACING towards it" "I don't know, it's kinda your thing"

Sammy boy you have been trapped in the same car as Dean for way too long. Your analysis is getting deep. Deep deep cuts. Leave him alone.

I mean this is a guy who dealt with a gay panic by hooking up with Crowley and singing karaoke for him so.

"I just *need* you to talk to me. Slow down."

Oh SAM you said a good and interesting combo of words there. Dean, go 70 instead of 80, give us some time to feel this out because I've been FREAKED and, for you, you got a time skip but I lived it all real time and it SUCKED, and I'm hurt too by this. Reminder: our family does not do well with LOSING each other, and this is every conversation we've ever had post-thinking that happened, and I did things responsibly and grew a beard and became Boss of a bunch of peeps and also King of Hell but we'll talk about that later... Like, slow down. I have my issues too. There's 2 of us in this car and you can't go 80 and time skip to the end of this conversation either. Not when I have 3 weeks of angst packed into it.

Also: classic Sam projection. Trying to get Dean to open up because HE has pain he wants to air, instead of just bringing up how he felt, he tries to get Dean to open up, and when this continues, as always, not to be how Dean deals with things, Sam gets upset because it never gives him the opening to talk about his shit until it's an argument...

You could have just started the convo, sorry about the beard, I really mean it when I say I haven't had a moment to myself for 3 weeks, it's been HELL and funny I should mention Hell, er, did you know you can kinda just declare yourself king these days... heh

At least he's using racing metaphors about wanting to catch up and also, like, catch up

Dean responds to the sport metaphors

Dean is like nah call Jody we're almost there. I skipped ahead.

Look, I'm delivering you to your boo, what more do you want?

Jody smiles at the sight of them in a way which is almost as revolting as Cas smiling at seeing Dean again

Hugs!

Send Jody to the Bunker to HUG OUR BOY

"How'd you do it?" "What, me vs some assbag archangel? Who would you pick?" "You, every time."

And this, guys, is how Jody is never, ever patched into their angst, because they present a narrative where Dean just kinda chucked off Mikey and sent him packing and it's all cool and he's a hero.

Jody has at multiple points threatened to beat Dean into submission in order to hear a true version of how he's doing and he has so far not given in and sat at her kitchen table with a box of tissues to sob through his crap, but I hold out eternal hope like the fool I am.

Anyway it's also telling RIGHT AFTER that last conversation where Sam was probing Dean so intensely, that this is the version of "I'm fine" that Dean is going with, and even though Sam KNOWS there's more to it, this is the wall Dean is projecting, even to him. Even when he knows Dean is freaked by it and doesn't know all the details.

Jody goes up like 18 pitches "Heeey I liiIIIiiike it!" she squeaks, forcefully tweaking Sam's beard because "nice peach fuzz" is too understated both for Jody and the volume of facial hair Sam has produced without comment until Dean came back and Jody showed up.

Dean has never been so offended in his life

*Jody continues giggling to herself while Sam desperately looks for a normal conversation*

AHAHA "I haven't been home since I talked to her........... I may be avoiding her"

Yeaaaah, bringing up that it's not just a normal human beheading and weird stab mark, but ALSO a KAIA-RELATED ONE maaay be... too much.

i'm going to be honest I've been so thrilled about everything I forgot to check what cast is flashing up on the screen

Anyway there is very much a subtext to Jody's avoidance of telling Claire what's going on that she knows how much she loved Kaia and how much of an issue this is - even if it's gonna be for revenge, because they don't know it's Bad Kaia - this is something where Claire's feelings make a MESS.

Bobo gets in Sam's serial killer thing, Dean is staring into the void like am I still even here or am I in hell. Is this a hell that Michael conjured. Mikey. Hey. Mikey. I figured it out. We're done here. Let's go back to regular torture. Michael. This is the bad place. Michael.

Dean stomps off into the woods because waiting for daybreak means being stuck in the same room as Jody and Sam flirting for a few hours.

Jody firmly pokes Sam in the chest with a map.

Sam.

A raven caws in the background, and Jack is wearing layers, the darkest shirt yet, a thick corduroy jacket in the style of early Sam, and is packing a bag.

He wrote a note and his handwriting is as disgustingly adorable as I thought it might be.

Alex wrote "Jack" with a cutesy backwards K in an autograph for someone who requested it at a con and I thought that was a cute detail but not how Jack would write and the real story - and I assume like with others they made him write it in character - is much more nuanced. His letters are competently shaped like he knows exactly how they should be, but shakily written, like he's not used to holding a pen, because, well, he isn't. He's not developed the muscle memory for it, just as he hasn't for fighting and all the other stuff, because in may ways he IS still a smol toddler with no life skills. His capital letters are huge and precise, like he knows he has to write them big, but disproportionate - putting so much emphasis on the titles of the people around him, the capital letters a metaphor for their influence on him. There's something clearly unconfident about writing and yet for all that obviously written by someone intelligent enough not to make basic errors of backwards letters and other things. He knows exactly how he is SUPPOSED to do it, but the execution is shakey, and disproportionate and generally looks unschooled and painfully revealing of his entire state of being.

Is this the scene where Bobo said out loud to an empty room, awww Jack.

I've been dreading that since the hiatus.

Maybe I should dig up that post and use it as the title for this one.

Triss is gonna die, Jack stopped by the stairs up out the Bunker in the war room, heard and saw Cas moving around, then in a fit of conscience or missing him already or something, stopped by to open the door and look in.

They have DEFINITELY expanded the Bunker set, in the sense that they've attached extra rooms to it or Wanek has sat down and made some parts more standardised, because they've shown off the corridor connections in every episode so far, and in this one we're seeing a never-seen-before connection which actually explains what is behind that window and how it fits. I mean, I'm pretty sure we've seen this particular room a few times, window and all, but never actual connections which show connected sets, so much as scenes starting or stopping there with no transition.

"She's been enchanted" "Like sleeping beauty" Jack says with awe "Awwwwwwwwwww" Lizzy says with awww

I honestly can't tell which moment Bobo said "Aw Jack" out loud about because we're getting such a series of them

Anyway, Hamlet, the great procrastinator, is distracted away from his mission to kill his uncle.

Not sure about the overlap of hearing things from the other side of a wall but I mean at least he's not going around stabbing people so

Jack also seeing all the important work they do for other people, even randos, and Cas getting involved in huntery business, distracted from emotionally nurturing him because of sleeping beauty there, and phoning rowena, doing the work to unknot a spell...

If we get Cas doing spellwork I'm gonna die, it's been Too Long.

Cas [squinting]: "Are you going somewhere?" Sleeping Beauty: "ooooww" Jack: "No."

Hon, that was so suspicious you are lucky this is Cas and not one of your other dads.

But. Aww Jack to an empty room.

"If I get a vote I'm team stick together" Jody remembers 9x19

Also Sam remembers bad!Kaia kicking their butts. They're on her natural territory

she is the Predator.

Sam keeps LOOKING at Jodio.

Look, I just

Cas keeps looking at Dean, Dean keeps looking at Cas

Jam won't stop looking at each other

That head is a Warning.

Come no further, mortals

I think Bad Kaia lives here

Vampires.

they really need to figure out how to biologically identify them except for teeth because they really come up against a lot of dead ones

"I brought tissue samples home, Alex ran them underneath the microscope"

Look, girls supporting girls, I knew what they needed to do before they did it lol

Dean: I was stabbed here

YAY I went frame by frame before the reveal and that is Kaia's face in there, the hood less spooky than before and more open to reveal her

Dean: bout to be stabbed here again

Dean finally has the moves to take on Bad Kaia after a season or two with the new stunt guy

but then her hood falls back and he's STUNNED

Now everyone is stunned

I think they've been using the Wayward Sisters Bad Place soundtrack for this but I'd have to check

the music is so very different and I'm not good at music ear thing

Cas: *eye twitches violently* Me: Cas why are you having trouble with this line Cas: "... marked.................... 'gross stuff'"

Cas, internally: Why did I marry into this family

Future MoLHunter 100 years later: "Man, this place is sweet, but the filing system is balls to the walls." Other Future MoLHunter: "Babe, you did not read the Winchester Gospels before your initiation?" F MoLHunter: "There is a drawer here marked 'hands of god' and the only thing in there is a pair of chopsticks and a ladel" OF MoL Hunter: Okay I will give you that. -

Me out loud to an empty room: aww Jack

He's so concerned about Sleeping Beauty, and he can't do anything about it but he's curious.

Maybe he CAN fix her and this is how he gets a lil power back.

I hope so because awww Jack being so concerned about her.

This is a Good Procrastination From Revenge

Hamlet, take fucking notes

"Is that your dad?" "One of them, yes." Aw Jack

Aw Bobo

Jack's flipping around on family - he's accused them of talking about nick/Lucifer as his father, he's disowned everyone but grampa and grammy Kline, and now he's fondly thinking of his three hero dads

He's really struggling to work out his place and what sort of family set up he belongs to and to be fair, he has so many fucking options and all of them are somewhat disastrous or tragic, so he's 100% in his right to be fuckin confused.

On the other hand Sleepy Beauty has no context so she's gonna assume Cas is gay married with a kid Jack's age and that's like, not untrue.

"My mom... but she probably hates me" "Why?" Jack says, horrified at the entire concept that a mom could hate a child, because, well, Kelly's love was COSMIC for him "because I left," she anvils

"I was sick of being treated like a kid, and i thought I could make it on my own" Oh boy. She's just expositioning how Jack feels and immediately telling him if he leaves he'll fall in with a witch, who curses her with an AGING spell which will make her old before her time.

I feel like there is probably... a metaphor........... in here...............

Also a reverse of Dean's aged down curse, because the girl and her other victims were hansel and greteled.

I had a sudden whim a couple of nights ago to see aged down Dean and current Jack hang out. Bring back Dylan Everett to go play basketball with Jack out on the front step.

"Gave us all nice things," she says, clutching at a HUGE EVIL EMERALD PENDANT AROUND HER NECK

Jack.................................

Is that cursed

"She said having us there kept her young" She put her own age into that locket

dang I should get a bonus point for bringing up poker!witch before he was relevant

I'm always curious about the show's implications about witches maintaining their youth by sucking it from others, because almost every witch we've met who had a focus on age was doing it for that reason, whether it was eating children or playing poker.

And we have a 300 year old witch chilling around who we don't know anything about when it comes to immortality, except that she has it and she bestowed it on Oskar so it's clearly a spell she can do rather than an inherent trait of reaching a certain level of magic practitionery.

"Then it started taking me too. Even faster than the others!" yeah because she killed the witch so she probably has to suck poor sleeping beauty dry in order to regenerate and skulk away and start over somewhere

PS: Sleeping Beauty is really doing an amazing performance here. I 100% am in Jack's shoes of being horrified and wanting to protect her

"Cas is going to fix this. I promise" Sweetie! Have you ever called him Cas rather than Castiel before? It seems weird. He even wrote castiel on the letter

Sam deducts Michael's entire plan off the clue that Alex couldn't detect the vamps in her sciencing, and based on having been attacked by super werewolves.

But why is Michael cleaning up these people?

Unless he's taking threats off the board who would be too cool and powerful and may challenge him...

"Doesn't change the plan" "but Dean - "

Dean walks off

Dean has no time for Sam suggesting maybe this is something awful because of Michael that Dean might know about or else be weirdly intimately connected to because of his weird Michael-based condition.

We have no clue what's going on and Sam doesn't like that and Dean's powering through and Jody is hovering in the background like WOW I can see why you leave me out of all your dumb main plot angst normally. Never done me one of these MAIN PLOT ones before. Can we go back to normal MotW where you're low key angsting in the subtext about whatever currently ails you?

Jody slaps Sam on the lower back

lower, babe. Lower.

Cas does magic, boom purple smoke!

Aw no she's still withered.

Jack, take her necklace off and smash it

because you did the good work of a hunter and talked to her and through being kind discovered what was wrong with her

Jody has a phone provider that gets her signal in the wilderness

"Claire's been doing so good, but anything connected to Kaia... she's a powder keg"

"FIRST LOVE STRIKES QUICK, AND TO LOSE IT LIKE THAT"

okay no Jody didn't shout it, but Bobo did.

ILY Bobo

I'm like 0% surprised but I am guessing other people who had been less trusting are throwing a complete party to have it textually confirmed like that. I felt like Bobo's intent especially when he went on the record in that stream AND he had been saying already that he shipped it right after Wayward Sisters, that he never ever meant to be coy about Dreamhunter, and confirming that Claire was madly in love with Kaia was a top priority on his fuck you list since he didn't get to write the show he wanted in order to work on this naturally.

Sam nods like fair enough, happened to me with Jess, but uh wow okay no i did not - yeah okay yeah

"He's not ready for this case" "maybe he needs it"

Jam jam jam jam

I mean

Yeah mature adults discussing issues together and working out how they feel about Dean rage-hunting Bad Kaia

hey look it's that one cabin that has been in like every episode of the show in the same way that one little stoney valley was in every episode of BBC Merlin

Has she lost her spear??

Dean, that was RUDE, you're so horrible to all these versions of Kaia

That zoom up on his face is one of the top 10 Dean Is Not Okay zooms of the show

So not like "bad cas" or "new bobby" are Dean's definitions for AU peeps - no word on what Charlie is to him, maybe because AU Charlie is a real issue for him to define as he couldn't help treating her like his Charlie.

But Bad Kaia insists that she is to Kaia what she is to me - they're joined in a different way. A way that back in Wayward Sisters was implied to be a dreamwalking connection of a very different sort, something anchoring our Kaia to the bad place and their connection was... weird.

"That was an accident. I was trying to kill the blonde" She's remorseful about killing Kaia but upsets them even more by reminding them that she was out for Claire instead.

How about we kill no one, bad Kaia

Oh no, Michael keeps sending monsters after her... Now she sounds like the original Kaia just because she's got "always more" things out for her. I suppose Michael learned of her through Dean, found her, and either wants to stop her or capture her because she has universe-crossing dreamwalking abilities, and woooow that will be useful to him.

NOOO SLEEPING BEAUTY DIED. THIS IS REALLY BAD. JACK COULDN'T SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAVE HEEEEEEEEEER

waaaaaaaaaah

Stop fuelling Nougat having an interesting dark arc about his entire self and purpose and let him just hang around the bunker and watch TV and eat nougat and be hugged. Can we not just have a son who is okay and nothing is wrong with him?

Oh no even the random hunter (did I really catch her name as Brunhilda or did I imagine that?) is crying at Jack crying over Sleeping Beauty dying. Cas is contractually obliged not to cry or do complicated stunts but he looks miserable too.

Oh, jack figured out the pendant?

But can they actually save Sleeping Beauty?

Sam as usual getting in before I can - "Break her!??!?"

don't you dare hurt Kaia any more, she's already told you what she knows, Michael hurt her, you punched her out with the same face and then threatened her a bunch. She might be a snarky monster-hunting feral woodland weirdo but she's still Kaia-like and you have a history of being completely horrible to Kaia-like girls when you're in a bad place.

And it turns out Dean just wants the spear that pronged him, to figure out what it did and how to hurt Michael with it. To go on his own revenge mission that he denied Jack because, guys, we are now in competition for who gets to have the angsty anti-Michael revenge mission. Jack and Dean literally competing to be most angsty about it.

Jack is being considerably more productive even if Dean solved the Kaia mystery.

But yeah. Revenge sucks you guys.

Dean you need to eat a snickers and take a rest.

smiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirk because fuck you Dean for always hurting me and the other Kaia who is probably also me.

Jack is being much smarter.

The smartest cookie.

Who needs powers when you are a good cookie.

"She wasn't cursed. This was."

GOOD COOKIE.

I vote Jack gets to kill Michael. Dean has lost his Michael killing rights.

"You're no different from him. Threats, violence, anything to get what you want." "I am nothing like him."

Hon.

"Yeah you are. And you always have been."

I don't know if Kaia knows or if she's pulling a gambit, but acting like a mystic know it all and reading Dean stone cold in a villain way sure did take some of his rage away into that good old Dean self-loathing and fear, which was one heck of a good chess move regardless of if she can magically read him or not.

No I don't think Dean is these things but Michael is a means of exploring Dean's "blunt little weapon" sort of mindset that he has suffered from because of John's upbringing all this time, and Michael emotionally mauling Dean to the point of being a non-functioning worst version of himself who threatens Kaia (AGAIN) really is an on the nose way to display the sort of trauma that Michael tore into his psyche.

Crap I need to go to yoga, but this is too good to rush so even though I don't have much left, I will be back for proper notes in a bit!

Him smash magic glowy thing with hammer

just like i told myboy to do!

Cas's hair is ridiculously spiky.

"What happened?"

YOU MADE NOUGAT FEEL GOOD ABOUT HIMSELF THAT'S WHAT HAPPENED

Aww jack to an empty room

Sam I have been gone for hours. How have you not tackled Dean to the floor and apologised to Bad Kaia

"I saw what you did to her, when you got angry. You shoved your gun in her face." To be fair, at the time Dean had also been emotionally mauled by the feels bear because Jack gave him a vision of Mary being tortured in Hell-equivalent and he was also fucked up beyond belief.

Kaias really are seeing the worst side of him all the time.

Bobo likes breaking Dean

That was enough to make Dean let go

Also to ask a really good question about how she knows!

I'm way more curious about Kaia than Dean yelling at her :P

Then she points out that he's angry and impatient because he's scared, like, duh, but sometimes he needs to be reminded that he can have "weak" emotions like that because he wants to be all tough and on the case and instead he's freaked out because Michael has messed him up completely. Like. Stay home. Help the boy with lore or something. Take a pyjama day.

Wheee full flashback!

The early evening light gives it a Bad Place colour tinge, which is awesome.

I can't believe Mikey shows up in his hat but not his jacket.

He says he's BORROWING Dean here. Hm.

Also, what I suspected, that he sensed her around and was just curious. Probably having a "what the fuck that's KAIA!?" from Dean inside him and being like Kaia huh? Time to chat.

Mikey do you literally not have your own version of that fuck off huge spear they stabbed Cas with a couple seasons ago, or do you just collect cool spears?

There's something more than usually terrifying about his face in this conversation.

And he now says there's a war coming and thinks something weird like Bad Kaia might appreciate being on his side.

Oh boy.

"Wild one" that's so cool

Michael really has some great lines for being a massive pillock

Omg he fight good too

AAH this is Kaia's memory and she's psychically implanting it in Dean's head

"Stop!" he says, clearly not enjoying watching himself beat up Bad Kaia and, like, realising exactly how awful it looks to do this when he has to watch himself from the outside and for all we know feel her pain too.

Of course Dean being desperate to get the spear to fight Michael could come across with a blur of ambiguity of Michael being desperate still to have it, whether to stop Kaia using it or because he just really wanted it and doesn't like being told no.

The concept that Michael just disappeared from Dean still lingers.

So many fights with a whole bunch of people this season. Maybe just because there's so many friggin characters

"Now you're in trouble" *Bad Kaia literally leaps through a window to avoid dealing with this* I love her

NICE STAB

thanks for saving Jody

Well that was quick

Also you're badass and terrifying and I think Claire might fall in love with you too >.>

"I'm used to it" Oh babe.

She literally raised herself in a terrifying doomy forest so

I mean at least this world has dry crackers and beans. SCORE

Jody has got a LOT of thinking to do about how to phrase any of this to Claire.

"So there's a feral Kaia living in the woods outside of town"

Awww Sam offering her a lift to the hospital

Bobo wants us to remember 9x06 and Dean having to tend Cas's broken hand maybe

Sam. Hug her right now. RIGHT NOW.

Nope Jody just looks really tormented

She's in a reverse Jack position - one mom to 3 hunters instead of one kid to 3 hunters :P

Hey look it is Jack and one of his fathers.

"Jules is off!" Hey look Sleeping Beauty was called Jules. Nerdylittleshit doesn't read these notes however so she will never know that I decided this character was named after her :P

Cas apologises for not being there for Jack, because it took this long to realise he's the father who's always at work while others have taken the stereotypically maternal role to Jack, Cas just gets to be the cool strong father who is usually dead, captured or just busy saving people and too busy for Jack as a result.

"It's okay," Jack says, sounding considerably more emotionally balanced about it than he had in 14x01 when everyone was neglecting him

"Today you PROVED that you have the mind of a hunter. And the heart of a hunter" Raised by the best, bitches!

Awwww Cas wants to be a hunter with Jack! They can get a terrible car and hit the road and do an easy case and bond as they go and eat crappy food at diners and

Jack develops Nephilim Flu in response to having a nice moment with a father because he's so unused to being treated with full attention.

Cas: *squints*

"Must be getting my first cold!"

I have a cold too Jack! Awww!!

Cas is going to make him some soup. This is too sweet. I don't even have words for any of this it's just gross. My teeth hurt.

Jack I swear to god if you stopped your revenge quest and it hurt you so bad inside you're about to cough up a lung I am going to LA to kick the writers' asses in person so if you dare be even the slightest bit consumptive

Oh thank god the scene changed before he coughed blood into his hand

Awww and then Dean admits Sam was right, while still being the one driving on the way back.

I wonder if they filmed these side by side. "Dean slow down" "Sam you were right"

"What Michael used me for" Ouch, hearing him say it like that... Sad sad thoughts.

He just wanted to skip ahead and have it all done because revenge makes you feel SO much better.

"Dean... you did what you had to do" Okay it's even worse hearing someone else justify it rather than hearing that phrase come out of someone's mouth. At least when they say it about themselves they're just in a bad place. I don't even know if this is a pavlovian response I'm having but really flipping it around to have Sam say it is a validation - Sam certainly thinks things are better off with a dead Lucifer and would have a favourable bias, because it got the job done and whatever Mikey is up to at least it's not Lucifer doing it. Because even if Lucifer were doing the exact same things it would just be intangibly but clearly worse.

"It wasn't a blink, being possessed."

Dean says to Sam, who has been possessed by an angel twice and when it was Gadreel, for almost as long as Dean was Michaeled

Dean's so freaked out because fighting the drowning sense of being possessed was so horrifying and made him feel so weak and useless and he didn't even win that fight, Michael just bailed and let him have it back. With the "I own you" hovering over him.

It certainly reeks of being haunted by a bad relationship. The sense the nasty abusive ex hovering around outside the place you work every night...

"And it's all on me, man" No it isn't, he got through because Lucifer told him how.

Well I mean if you wanna go cosmic consequences, yeah it is because Billie done told you not to go universe hopping and that's several billion dominoes you messed around with doing exactly that

But despite how I spent all of season 13 SHRIEKING at you not to do it while knowing full well you did, and how this is technically your cosmic hubris for doing that, I also don't actually blame you on a personal level, Dean. Just, like, so you know once I get back to the shrieking. Because ow you are very sad and in pain and if Nougat wasn't coming down with Nephilim Flu in the other scenes I'd basically rank you No 1 for wrapping in blankets and feeding soup.

You're still in the top 10. Jodi had a pretty bad day too :P

Oh COME ON JACK

*starts packing my bags for the ass kicking*

Aww Jack to an empty room

Um EXCUSE ME HOW MANY CONSUMPTIVE TISSUES HAVE YOU GONE THROUGH?

GO FIND YOUR FATHER RIGHT NOW

HAVE YOU BEEN DOING THIS FOR THREE WEEKS?

Well no wonder you've been in a panic to get Michael killed.

SHEESH.

Dean's back and he's gonna kick your ass because he remembers when Sam did this in the Trials and he is very very anti consumptive family members.

#Asks #rape mention cw #for thematic parallels to the whole Michael-ing thing #because consent drama and angels as per usual #14x03 #season 14 spoilers #my stuff

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mandilo · 6 years

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Touken Ranbu in Paris - Shunya Fan reporting on the shows

So yesterday (as i started to write) i attended the 2 toumyu shows. first near the right exit then middle 3rd rank. that’s very different experiences and i only regret not having experienced the other side too because of shunya !

First it was a pleasure to meet my friends in the flesh and meet fun persons ! I didn’t take photos but the germ..ans are fun to hang out with!

The “stage” part and the differences are pretty well described by other fan reports. A few things to know before i start :

- i am a big Shunya fangirl(read i will gush over him) and i will barely mention Ryuji however since as expected, i wouldn’t add anything to what’s already been said.

- i love the show but the subtitles were attracting my attention a little too much during the first show but the second show was more enjoyable thanks to knowing what to listen for and not being easily able to see the screens !

Now let’s get to business the shows ! It will under the cut because it’s a massive impression and spoilery dump for small specific moments !

The contrition/excuses were very Japanese and everyone was very tensed. And.... well very emotional but since I’m very short sighted i could catch the faces at the first representation. However during the second one when Ryo was on stage since the beginning i felt they were less tensed!

As difference between the representations, outside of Tsubasa’s drawing session were he forgot the stylus during the second one, the “honpen” part was pretty much the same. Not a difference but seeing Daichi passing close and in awakening state, he is very impressive (I completely agree with the feeling in the tweet I saw just screaming in all caps “IWATOOSHI’S NIPPLES”) ! Kimi no uta and the entire opening of the second show had my friend and I crying. Being on the third row with a very good view of the faces, it left a very lasting impression!

For the sentences to the saniwas, we had Mario performing the first one! As was already said he opened his vest to reveal his back (he knows how to please his public) and as he was having trouble closing it again, Daichi came to the rescue in a moment(daichi was in a very big brother mode) i really wish has been captured.

The second to be punished for slacking off for our delight was Tsubasa. Pretexting to have been too busy praying at the French “tori”: l’arc de triomphe ^^. The team dynamic trying to explain that the arc is not a tori was hilarious. I didn’t quite catch the meaning of the sentence itself but he ended with the gesture of a hug and Shunya came immediately to hug him!

The live part as a whole was good; i love the trio ishi/iwa/ima and the public song. Seeing otokomichi live was a dream come true. And I really want to see again the duo Ryo/Mario because the choreography we saw is very promising !

As expected seeing them passing close was awesome, I had Tsubasa and Mario passing and stopping near on the 2 shows Ryuji passing and waving and Shunya passing too very quickly but Daichi only happened to come near on the second show. Tsubasa’s smile is really a gorgeous and a dreamy thing to see directed your way and having both him and mario pose together is an image i won’t forget. I was in an aisle seat on the second show and Daichi’s big smile, Shunya running everywhere so fast were not as dizzying as Mario just passing by.

Daichi has improved so much in both acting and singing, so has Tsubasa’s voice and Mario is more regal than ever. To me all the first 2h the first and second time was vocally perfect, visually amazing and so touching. Yoshitsune and Benkei’s actors were also very impressing since neither of them had an easy task. The affection the whole team has for each other really shines through and all the sanjou caring for the character of imanotsurugi in the stage is really natural.

Shunya: the improvement of his singing is obvious, his voice being more stable more rarely sounding pushed to its limits; when it comes to dancing and fighting he was on fire (to my eyes the best dancer of the second show)! The strain of the 5h of representation seems not to exist on his energy even though the modifications have added more acting and fighting to Daichi and Shunya. And I think Shunya worked a lot to give us the best fighting he could ! Ima was portrayed as more bold, more self-assured in his desire to save yoshitsune and his brother to the point where ishipapa felt more like restraining him for his own good than protecting him. Plus all his interactions with Daichi, Tsubasa and Mario on stage and during the public scenes were the cutest, more awesome thing ever !

Let’s admit it, Mario as Mikazuki is hypnotic, regal and fries my brain as easily as he smiles, his costumes are always eye catching and generally designed with his more noble presence in mind wich makes it difficult for me to remember some parts because of an overwhelming presence of shunya’s little cute interactions and Mario in my memories. Unlike Ryuji who stayed very concentrated on the stage Mario really played as much as he could with ryo up in the technical booth, the stage didn’t feel as empty. The heavier impacts of ryo’s absence were on mario’s shoulders and he really needs to be applauded for being able to carry alone the stage and so many implications for tsuwamono.

#toumyu #musical touken ranbu #impressions

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feynites · 7 years

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Dirthamen and spirit babies! Tagging @selenelavellan because it’s dirthalene!

Selene brings Dirthamen food, sometimes.

It is a new habit that he has noticed. It began during a particular busy week, which featured a council meeting, several stressful incidents with his father, and a forced cancellation of his usual visit with Mana’Din. And a technical issue with several city structures that had baffled the architects involved to the point where Dirthamen himself spent many nights pouring over schematics, endeavouring to locate the source of the unwelcome anomalies.

One morning, Dirthamen had looked up from said schematics to find a platter of breakfast foods being lowered onto the desk in front of him. Which he thought strange, since he had not sent for any food.

Looking up, he had found Selene to be standing on the other side of the platter.

“I thought you might be hungry,” she had told him. Brows furrowed, just slightly, but tone resolute.

Dirthamen had been hungry, in fact. He had lost track of that particular physical need, but it struck him at once with the scent of the food that he had probably gone too long without eating.

“I am. Thank you,” he had replied. This had eased the furrow in Selene’s brows – and she had ended up staying for an hour, eating with him and asking questions about the anomalies, until Dirthamen found himself feeling better. Which was somewhat odd, because he had not realized that he was feeling poorly until that began to change.

That incident seemed to mark the start of a new trend. Sometimes, Selene brings Dirthamen food. Often, she eats with him. He has never requested it of her, and carrying food trays is not among her duties, but thus far she has only brought him food when he has found himself in need of it. He does not know how she can tell such things, when Dirthamen himself often loses track of them. But he is appreciative of it.

And it is… it is very pleasant, to have her company. She is good at discussing issues and seeing aspects to problems that he often does not consider. For example, the architectural issue had turned out to be a matter of deliberate sabotage, which Dirthamen had not anticipated, but which Selene had been able to note the signs of. Why someone would sabotage water generators remains a mystery to him, but once the cause was determined, the solutions became easier to devise.

Dirthamen has lost count of the number of times Selene has brought him something to eat, when the spirit first appears.

It is a small one. Resting next to an empty food platter, which the servants had not touched because Dirthamen had left it on his desk, and things left on his desk were not to be tampered with. The spirit has a shape that makes him think vaguely of cats and of birds, but not of griffons. It is small, and round – yet lithe, and with a pair of wing-like appendages that flutter up from it. It tilts a face towards him, though it does not seem to have eyes.

The air around it is softly warm. The spirit purrs, when Dirthamen attempts to shoo it, and instead of leaving, it clambers up to his shoulder and wedges itself next to his neck. The sense of warmth increases, along with a quality of familiarity which he recognizes. A note to the magic of the creature which he has felt before, and which gives him a long moment of pause.

…Ah.

This is one of his, then.

A warm emotion… how atypical.

“What is your name?” he asks the spirit, quietly.

“Affection,” it says, in a voice that is surprisingly deep, and yet equally carefree.

Dirthamen nods. Fear is already coming. He debates within himself and his aspects, but, the wisest thing will be to have Fear take Affection somewhere deeper in the Dreaming. Further away, where their arrival will not draw notice, or malice.

Where it will be safer.

Falon’Din is gone, Deceit reminds them. As if that requires a reminder. We could let it stay…

Dirthamen refuses the notion immediately. Reflexively, but utterly. The world does not require Falon’Din to pose a danger to small, new spirits. The Dreaming may not be utterly without dangers, but it is still a safer place. Fear wings their way in through one of the walls, shimmering slightly as it passes through the solid materials, and then comes and wraps talons around Affection.

The smaller spirit lets out a piteous sound of denial, and attempts to cling to Dirthamen’s neck. Fear gives it a reproachful shake, though – not hard enough to do any damage, but firm enough that Affection lets go in surprise, and is then easily lifted away.

Dirthamen watches through Fear’s eyes as Affection is carried off. Away into the Dreaming. Fear takes it so far as Mana’Din’s lands, to a space tied to a quiet little village. There are warm feelings, there. Suitable for the spirit’s kind, and the place is mostly healed of Falon’Din’s lingering strife. Fear still moves deeper into the Dreaming than the surface level, though. It takes the better part of the morning for it to find a suitable place for Affection. Close enough to the surface that the spirit will be able to feel the radiant energies of the village, and draw strength from them. But deep enough that it will not be easily captured or noticed by the denizens.

It is the best they can do.

Dirthamen’s shoulder remains warm for some time after the spirit is gone. And he finds it difficult to apply himself to his tasks for the day. His mind wanders, and keeps turning back and back, to the last warm spirit he had…

…But Gentility is long gone. Like Contemplation and Awe before it, and Resignation and Silence after it.

There is no point in dwelling on it. But Dirthamen lets himself linger in the longing of ‘what if’ for the better part of the day, and then the next, before he can bring himself back to more immediate matters. It is difficult to console himself with his brother’s absence. But, the typical guilt feels more remote when he recollects the first time he had gone to find Contemplation, and discovered only broken shards and scorched earth instead. His brother’s voice, afterwards, reminding him that spirits are fragile. The look of satisfaction in his gaze, that had seemed so strange in that moment.

Dirthamen should have realized, at that point. But he would not understand until Silence. Until it was too late for not only Contemplation, but many more besides.

Some days later, Deceit brings a matter to his attention again.

Selene is sitting in the dining hall, conversing with Melanadahl and Des, while Sairal sits beside her. There is a familiar spirit nestled in her lap. Making soft, contented purring noises as Selene runs a hand over its back. It has six legs instead of four, this time, and the wings have momentarily vanished, but the being is still recognizable. It glows in shades of soft purple and warm amber, and still does not seem to have acquired any eyes.

How did it get back here? Dirthamen wonders. It is a small spirit, and the Dreaming is a dangerous place; did Affection somehow retrace Fear’s path?

Deceit does not know. Neither does Fear.

They decide to wait until Affection leaves Selene, and then question the spirit. But Selene goes about much of her daily duties with the small spirit frolicking or resting about her. Curling on her shoulder or sitting on her desk, until evening, when she hands it to Des before coming to Dirthamen’s office. Deceit attempts to get the spirit away from Des, but Selene had instructed him to ‘keep an eye on it’, and apparently that is sufficient motivation for Des to refuse Sairal.

Selene returns several research books to Dirthamen himself. She is smiling, and seems more relaxed than usual.

When she retires for the evening, she takes Affection with her. And Sairal, as well. Deceit becomes distracted by the subsequent tactile exchanges, however, and neglects to apprehend the spirit until the early hours of the morning, while Selene sleeps and Affection rests on her pillow. It has manifested two tails, then, which waver back and forth.

When Deceit lifts it up, it purrs.

They bring it to Dirthamen’s office again. The spirit seems slightly larger than before. Its tails become wings when it spots Dirthamen, and it dashes over, and sets itself onto his shoulder again.

“Hello!” it greets. Shoving at his mask with its head.

Dirthamen lifts a careful hand to its head, to dissuade that.

“How did you get back here?” he asks.

Affection ripples. Form shifting colours from amber to purple, as it manifests a small hand, and pats the side of Dirthamen’s own head. It takes him a moment to realize that the spirit is mimicking his own gesture towards it.

“Swimming!” Affection says. “Whoosh, whoosh. Swim for happy things!”

Dirthamen considers this.

“There were happy things close by to where you were,” he notes. If they cannot figure out what compelled the spirit to move, then relocating it will be complicated. And more dangerous than not. If it had crossed through a more perilous part of the Dreaming, it would have made for easy prey.

“I not know them,” Affection tells him, cheerfully. “I know you!”

It punctuates this message with a firm headbutt against Dirthamen’s palm.

Hmm.

Troublesome. Apparently, this spirit is connected to a very particular sort of affection. Which, admittedly, is not all that uncommon for spirits born of attachment-based emotions. They can be less prone than others to wanting to explore the full breadth of what they embody, and instead seek to deepen their understanding of specific dynamics, people, or places.

“It is not safe to be around me,” Dirthamen informs Affection, plainly.

“Uhhmmm…” the spirit replies, radiating a small puff of confusion. “No?”

“No,” he confirms. “You need to be somewhere safer than this. That is why Fear took you away.”

Affection makes a sound of distress.

“Bird is mean.”

“Fear was not mean. Fear was helping you.”

Affection grumbles at this, and Dirthamen does not think it is convinced. Nor that it is properly comprehending the situation. He makes several more attempts to convey the issue, but Affection is too young, it seems, to process his meaning. It understands some basic concepts of safety and distance, but it refuses to accept his assertion that being in his presence is unsafe. And when Fear comes back into the room, it proceeds to hide under his desk, and refuses to come out until Fear has gone again.

Dirthamen has never had a spirit born of him reject an aspect of himself before.

It is… inexplicably distressing.

He is distracted enough by this development, and by his duties, that he does not keep much track of Selene’s activities. Not until she comes to his door again, anyway. Dirthamen recognizes her knock, but is still not prepared for Affection’s reaction.

The spirit is lounging on his desk when Selene comes in. At which point it perks up, looking briefly more like a canid than a feline, and then shoots off of the desk in a scrambling flurry of limbs. Tails and wings and paws and even a couple of small hands. It lets out a delighted laugh.

“Selene!” it greets, jubilantly, and all but tackles her. “Yay, Selene!”

For her own part, Selene looks stunned for a moment. But only a moment. Then she sighs and hugs the small spirit, and radiates a surprising amount of relief, before she manages to reel in the sentiment to more polite levels.

“Have you been bothering Lord Dirthamen?” Selene asks. Her cheeks darken a little, as she looks over towards him. “I am so sorry. Affection manifested… not long ago. I think it’s, well. I think it’s mine? I was managing to keep an eye on it yesterday, but it slipped off this morning. Probably followed Sairal…”

Dirthamen blinks.

Hers…?

He looks at Affection again. He is fairly certain, though, that the spirit is one his own making. The signs are all there.

Yet… perhaps, if it is plausibly someone else’s… perhaps the danger in it remaining is not so great?

Let it seem that way, even if it is not true, Deceit opines. A cover story. A secret.

“It is a very sweet spirit,” Dirthamen notes.

Selene smiles, and some faint embarrassment seeps into her aura, as Affection clambers onto the top of her head.

“And only a little one,” she says. “I want to keep it safe. There are a lot of places around here where it could get into trouble.”

Affection huffs.

“Mean bird,” it grumbles.

Selene blinks, obviously lacking the context to understand that reaction.

But…

“I will grant you leave to obtain protections for it,” Dirthamen ventures, tentatively. It would not be at all strange of him to permit a valued follower to protect a spirit of their own making. He has a reputation for doing just that, in fact. Anyone who knew what to look for would probably be able to deduce the spirit’s true origins, but, Falon’Din is gone, and Mana’Din and Mythal need not meet it. Their visits are generally announced, and it would be fairly straight-forward to keep Affection away from them. If nothing else, Fear or Deceit could handle such a task.

Selene smiles at him.

“Thank you,” she says. “Softer spirits can bring so much to a place. I am sure Affection will be very pleasant to have around, once it’s figured a few things out.”

“Hug Dirthamen!” Affection chimes in, insistently.

Selene’s cheeks darken further.

“Things like… not shouting that. I am just going to go – um, get that paperwork seen to. And start in some more lessons, for Affection. Oh! And, uh, the reports you wanted should be finished by tomorrow, I’ll make certain that they are on your desk. There are some interesting things to go over-“

“Hugs!”

“-Later.”

Reaching up, Selene pulls Affection off of her head and back into her arms, and then bows swiftly before leaving the room again. Dirthamen stands for a moment in the silence afterwards, feeling uncertain but hopeful; and strangely sad to be left alone.

He shakes the latter feeling away. But he cannot stop his thoughts from drifting. Falling into the memory of when he had first found Contemplation. The spirit occupying the quiet meditation chamber which Dirthamen had favoured, in the early days of his embodiment.

It had been blue. And still, so very still. Dirthamen had almost failed to see it, at first, as it had settled into the waters of the small fountain in the middle of the room. But the depths of its eyes were darker than the rest of it, and when he noted the spots, then it was impossible not to notice also the ambient currents of energy around it. Flowing like the water. Flowing like his own energy could, when he had rested and contemplated and dreamed deep enough to reach back to the places he had lingered as a spirit.

The rush of awe he had felt had been overwhelming. To have made a spirit, to have brought another being into existence… he had never felt an accomplishment so profound, nor so unwitting.

Contemplation used to mirror his gestures, too. Dirthamen would raise a hand, and the spirit would as well. Or sometimes it would simply watch him. It rarely spoke, except to confirm what it was. But every so often it would venture closer to the curiosity in its nature, and would reach out. Lifting stray pebbles up for inspection, or touching some aspect of Dirthamen’s face or hands or clothes.

Contemplation liked carvings. And buttons. Dirthamen had filled the fountain with carved wooden buttons, and often returned to find that the spirit had rearranged them into swirling, meditative patterns.

Until he had returned to shards and ruin and a broken fountain.

Too many times. Too many times, such things have happened.

We need to send Affection away, Fear insists, even now.

Dirthamen closes his eyes, and lets out a long, tired breath.

Perhaps. But for now, that will not work. For now… he will simply have to hope, instead.

#mana'din au #dirthalene

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Beer with a Painter: Emily Cheng

Emily Cheng, “Stupa Axis” (2016), flashe on canvas, 84 x 78 inches (all images courtesy the artist)

I feel quieted in Emily Cheng’s studio — to the point where I wondered, afterwards, if I’d even posed questions. A fountain is gurgling, and she has set out beer and snacks. The paintings invite reflection more than commentary. I had visited her studio more than 10 years ago, and at the time felt that she was a painter whose work fell outside the buzz around contemporary art; looking back, I feel as if she has been gently challenging us for years.

The forms in her paintings are suggestive of the most primary elements: the landscape; the body; religious iconography. Large circular and floral forms are often positioned symmetrically on her canvases. These forms radiate outward into planetary orbs, tendrils, and vertebrae-like networks. However, many passages are stranger, more imaginary, and less regular than one might expect: dreamy, painterly occurrences that can be bodily and abstract.

The paintings have a lightness in tone and surface quality, but they are forceful in their suggestion of movement. They seem to chart energy channels, and push us into spaces that can’t quite be articulated or described.

Emily Cheng in the studio (2015) (photo credit by Wolf-Dieter Stoeffelmeier)

Cheng lives and works in New York City. She received her BFA in painting in 1975 from the Rhode Island School of Design and studied at the New York Studio School for three years. She has had solo exhibitions at The Bronx Museum, Winston Wachter Fine Art, and Bravin Post Lee Gallery, New York. She has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Shenzhen Art Museum, Shenzhen, China; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; Hanart Gallery, Hong Kong; the Ayala Museum, Manila, Philippines; Zane Bennett Gallery, Santa Fe; Byron Cohen Gallery, Kansas City; and Schmidt Dean Gallery, Philadelphia.

* * *

Jennifer Samet: What was your introduction to art and painting? Did you start drawing or making art as a child?

Emily Cheng: I can remember that as a small child, I was happy if you parked my stroller in front of a wall with peeling paint. There are family photographs where everyone else is looking at the camera, and I am looking down at the snow. I was mesmerized by the different colors of the sparkles in the snow. These things still fascinate me — when I see special paint splotches on the sidewalk, I record them on my cellphone.

In the fifth grade, I started oil painting and looking at images of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Manet. I also saw abstract painting for the first time: de Kooning, early Guston and Pollock. My father loved Western painting, so art was always part of my everyday life. There was no question of what I was going to do.

Emily Cheng, “Into Pink” (2016), flashe on canvas, 84 x 78 inches

JS: You got your BFA from Rhode Island School of Design but also studied at the New York Studio School. I remember that Nicolas Carone was an important teacher for you. Can you tell me about him?

EC: Yes, Nick Carone was the teacher who had the most influence on me. He talked about the image. All of his students heard overlapping and different things from him. What I heard was that there is a potential for unseen things — an implied image — in painting. There is a possibility for that image to have power, which can resonate long after you’ve stopped looking at the painting.

I also remember Leland Bell, as a visiting artist at RISD, giving a lecture on a Chardin painting. Before his lecture, the Chardin was just a still life with a little dog. As Leland talked about it, it became a superhighway running in different directions, with all kinds of passages and ways to move through it. It opened up and became three-dimensional — dynamic.

I studied with Leland and Elaine de Kooning for a summer session in Paris. We spent a lot of time in museums and we would be trailed by museum-goers, picking up interested people along the way. Leland was a beautiful enthusiast of the joy of paintings. He spoke about artists who were not so popular, like Raoul Dufy.

Bell opened me up to structure in painting. When you go through a Chardin with Leland, he is not talking about composition, he’s talking about structure. Structure is bones, the spine; composition is where you place and arrange things.

If you want to think about structure in drawing you can think about Giacometti. Giacometti was all about making the unseen connections spatially connect. Things have many relational points. That also influenced how I thought about the body when I left school.

Emily Cheng, “CosmicHead3” (2017), flashe on canvas, 47 x 35 inches

JS: How does your work relate to ideas about the body?

EC: A lot of my work has to do with how we reside in our bodies, how our bodies relate to gravity, and how we can (or cannot) connect to the universe. It is about the subtle body.

A lot of what I’m painting doesn’t exist in the visible world. So, to capture its enormity and its suggestive power, you have to be able to go into your imagination, which is not always cooperative. You pull out what you can from it. I want to tap into some kind of energy that can’t be named, or that hasn’t been visualized. Silence is the moment when I see the next step, or an image waiting to materialize.

That is why I don’t listen to music when I’m painting. The way I explain it to my students is that when you have music playing in your studio, you have two artists in the room. But one artist is already articulating much more clearly than you are. It’s the same if you listen to books on tape or the radio. I understand that some people need to be out of their thinking minds. I get that. But I’m not thinking much when I’m quiet. I am listening to being.

JS: Your work can also have a map-like or diagrammatic aspect. It also often plays with symmetry — with geometric forms and symbols radiating out from the center. Can you talk about that?

EC: I’m very attracted to diagrams and maps because I like the correlation between going through something in your mind, and the physical activity of moving through that space. When you look at a map of a city you are running a system through your mind. Then you go into the city and you relive that template, that configuration.

The interest in symmetry goes back to the experience of being dyslexic, and it has to do with the standing body. Recently I was amazed to find that even in my paintings from the early 1980s, I was thinking about the body, symmetry, and Chakra-like points. I didn’t know anything about chakras back then. I was just creating a point system for the standing body. Then I took this whole other odyssey of working with planets, centers, and arabesques that were very non-symmetrical and gestural. Now I find myself back in symmetry.

I see the paintings as templates for the body, and if they were asymmetrical, they wouldn’t feel like the body. They are also about bodies in the world and universe. About ten years ago when I was working on a book, I was flying back and forth to China. There was something about flying halfway around the world, so many times per year, that I started thinking about what that meant and felt like — being above the world, detached from the planet for a short period of time. Every religious tradition discusses death as being above the world, or out of the world. It gives you a long vision of history, life, the planet.

JS: Recently, you have been exhibiting frequently in China. Can you talk about how your work is tied to your Chinese-American identity, and how that may have evolved over your career?

Emily Cheng, “Feeling at Home” (2016), flashe on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

EC: Growing up in the suburbs as an American, with Chinese parents, I accepted everything for what it was. In the 1990s, people started talking about their roots. I thought it would be very interesting to go back into Chinese culture and examine it. I found some Buddhist cave paintings that were really outside of my own experience. This began my studies into Chinese art.

As far as identity goes, when I started traveling to China, and reading sociological studies of the differences between Americans and Chinese, I would observe certain characteristics, and think, “Actually, that part of me is very Chinese.”

I began reading Buddhist and Taoist texts. After I got over my aversion to Confucianism’s sexism, I thought Confucius had a lot to contribute as well. He is very interesting socially and politically, in context with Lao-Tzu.

I was looking at a lot of Buddhist art, Silk Route painting and court figure painting, which is very different from the tradition of ink painting. Lately I’ve been looking a lot at Chinese landscape painting. In the past, I never thought landscape painting had anything to do with my own work. It is so much about the lexicon of a particular style of brushwork. Now I feel really lucky to have that link to another tradition — one in which the vastness of landscape can be expressed through the gesture of the mark.

I found out six years ago that I am related to Lin Yutang, the 20th-century writer. He wrote annotated translations of Lao-Tzu and Confucius, as well as his own ideas of living. I love how Buddhism addresses the very mental aspects of the self-consciousness, perceptions of reality, community, and one’s role in the world. The Tao gets you to look and think about yourself as a physical body in flow with the greater universe. So, together, it is quite rich.

I try to separate the institution from the original texts or ideas. In working on my Charting Sacred Territories project, I wanted to trace all this rich imagery that we have inherited from the world’s greatest religions and to show the complex interconnectivity and genealogies of each religion — branches of sects, denominations, and groups. There, you can’t help bump into the whole structure of institutions. That’s what they are. And the institutions are often at the root of our problems today. But the devotional and philosophic aspects of religion, at its best, are beautiful.

It was the same thing that made me gravitate to certain Renaissance paintings when I first traveled to Europe. Some paintings are just above and beyond others. Some paintings of Madonna and Child are sublime, while others are run of the mill.

JS: So you tie the success or sublime quality in painting to the devotional interests of the artist? That is so interesting.

EC: I can’t prove it, but yes. In some cases, the painter tapped into ideas larger than the commission. Maybe they saw the universal qualities of the mother and child and were able to express it through form in an inspired, touching way. It is difficult to talk about, because art historians generally approach Renaissance painting in an iconographic way. That is how they are trained. This discussion includes concepts of auras, and things that can’t be seen, but only felt. Our rational minds resist that, but a fresh eye can see it.

I will say that when a painting clicks, it is something akin to that devotional feeling. It is something greater than the self. That is when it makes the ultimate connection. Not every painting does that. That’s why, for me, a painting that works is so beside the point. If it doesn’t have that click, that energy, that force, then to me, it is nothing. It’s just another painting that works.

I don’t start with a concept; I start with a feeling. If that feeling is prevalent enough, it will manifest into an image. These are things that are not easy to paint, and it’s not part of our daily experience to think about them.

I have never thought of my work, or any artwork for that matter, as a reflection of our society or our culture. To me, that’s just like adding more junk into the junk. I am probably making these paintings at a particular time and place for very particular reasons. I am always thinking about the timeline from 20,000 BCE to the present. I want to be in the dialogue of all time, and not just my time.

Emily Cheng, “Hinterglem II” (2016), flashe on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

JS: You utilize a vocabulary of different kinds of painterly marks: lines, dots, arabesques and other gestural brushstrokes, even drips. How do these come together in your work, and how are they related to different painting traditions: Eastern and Western?

EC: I have recently returned, in my work, to joining the templates and the systems with gestural marks. For a decade, for me, gesture only existed in drapery and drips. I started working again with gesture through ink on paper. I was doing a residency in DaWang, China, and the artist who had the studio before me left a lot of cheap paper and black ink.

I had never really thought I had the right to work in that medium, because I am Chinese-American and don’t write calligraphy or even read the characters. But I was staying in a fairly remote place, in the mountains just above a little village. It gave me the freedom to pick up this ink and paper and experiment.

At first I started making drawings of statues — early, small Greek and Cypriot bronzes I had seen at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. I was trying to find a way into these mute figures, these strange little statues behind glass. I felt that they retained a lot to offer us in this contemporary time.

By painting them, I found a way into their being by loosening up the gesture. Ink led me to freeing up the mark and feeling that it could become part of my repertoire again. That was something I hadn’t done in decades, really.

Now I think of gesture and line as something that can work together, in and around each other. Drapery in Renaissance painting is so tactile. In Chinese figural paintings, the lines are about spirit. The figures walk with swirling drapery flowing behind. It is a way to animate and bring life to the figure portrayed. So it’s the difference between the eye moving through form and space tactilely and sensually, and the felt spirit moving through line.

With line, you can move through the painting at breakneck speed. The dots slow the eye down, like an ellipsis, a pause, so that you are not doing a “drive-by” on a painting. We are conditioned to size things up very quickly. When you can slow the eye down, it is always a good thing.

Emily Cheng, “After Shen Shicong 4” (2017), flashe on canvas, 35 x 47 inches

I’ve always loved drips in painting. Drips announce that it is a painting and bring the viewer into the experience of the moment it was made. That visceral connection is a joy ride.

I don’t feel like I am building on one tradition, because that would mean being an adherent. I have an allergy to that. I am finding my way in the dark. If I find a few little things to hold on to, along the way, I’m very happy for the experience. I’m open to many kinds of traditions and practices, which overlap. Finding the connections between them is what interests me. We don’t have to pick and choose one thing, or be monogamous in that sense. Life is too short.

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unigotchi · 7 years

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DES 102 Week 5

When I was creating these characters, I spent the two hours in lesson time just writing up ideas for them, as I do not think I am very good at art and rendering my ideas to paper (or screen). I didn’t really intend to use 2 hours on this but that’s what I did. I will include all my writing in the Read More section, but here is the information requested.

I chose a post-apocalyptic setting, mostly based on the book series Mortal Engines, a series set after a nuclear apocalypse destroyed the world. The series starts off with a group of people living in the wreckage of London, which is almost exactly the basis of my character design location as well, with the minor difference that in Mortal Engines, cities are mechanical, and move around like giant animals, eating each other for resources.

I’m really ashamed of the quality of my images, and designs, and ideas. So, sorry.

I started with creating the vague body shapes of the two characters. At this point I realized just how similar my concepts were to Roadhog and Junkrat, two apocalypse survivors who live in a destroyed city and travel around together, from the game Overwatch. My main excuse for this is that their archetypes are so, so common that it would take a long development process to make pair of characters where the main contrasts are weight and height.

These characters are yet unnamed, and little detail can be made from these images. The left character is designed to be more square in visual design, to represent how set in her ways she is, and how she doesn’t want change. She is sturdy, and capable of taking hits, and her two main weapons are a pair of industrial strength scissors and a crowbar. She does not use these much for melee, instead they are used in dismantling nearby rubble to use as makeshift bludgeoning weapons.

The character on the right is designed to look a lot more unbalanced, and top heavy, to represent how she wants to change the world and does not mind if that changes her too. Her tools are her backpack, which she uses to store materials she has scavenged, and her spanner, which is used to create small simple robots that become brief allies in fights.

I haven’t learnt much about Illustrator since last week, just that layers are much harder to manipulate. In all honestly, I just wanted to get the visual designs over with as soon as I could because I hate drawing, but I don’t think even with more work the characters would be much improved.

Below are all my notes that I wrote down when designing these characters. It’s in Read More cause there’s a hecky dang lot of it and you might not want to waste your time.

Post Apocalyptic

Potential for conflict between the characters

One is quite satisfied with the way the world is now, and one is trying to go back to how it was before the apocalypse. Their two ways of fighting might get in the way of each other at the beginning, with the large bulky weapons potentially breaking or undoing the work of the intricate mechanisms, and the large fighter would have to avoid hurting the small techie. Obviously these difficulties would be overcome further into the game as they learn to synergise with eachother, and also the player would get tired of having to control to opposing forces which are constantly putting each other at risk.

Opportunities for both characters to demonstrate unique strengths and weaknesses

Obvious size and body type differences are an easy place to start, with one being able to perform tasks (break walls, slip through cracks) that the other cannot. But it can go deeper, with the technician (they need names) being so obsessed with returning to the past that they cannot see the positives of life here and now, the scrapper struggling to cope with seeing remnants of the past as they explore over because of the guilt and resentment these images bring up.

Who

I mean they’re both clearly gay and I’m having that right here in this document so on the off chance these ever become real characters I can shove it in the face of people who try to deny it. Additionally, there are plenty of ways to explore transgender stuff in a setting where societal norms have just absolutely collapsed, and I cannot name a single trans protagonist, so I think if scrapper was trans it could present some things to explore in her backstory, but would not need to affect the present day in any way.

I’m struggling to come up with names because while I want to be racially inclusive, I don’t know HECK about different names culturally and I would like their names to have some kind of meaning. And right now I have up the ‘top 60 popular indian girl names of 2014’ and I don’t think that’s the best way of deciding names, so I’m going to leave them blank for now.

They would have an age difference, not too extreme but enough to justify the different ways they reacted to the apocalypse. I think the scrapper lady would be older, perhaps about 20-21 at the time the apocalypse took place, leaving her at around 30 now. The technician girl would have been about 14-16, leaving her in her mid-20s by the time the game takes place. This age difference creates a dynamic of having one person knowing what the real world was like, and was still coming to terms with losing the rose tinted lense of being a child, so she was living in the harshest time of her life. This contrasts with the other person having experienced a mostly positive and supporting world, and being angry that it was taken away from her before she could complete her life goals.

Their key relationship, as I said earlier, is definitely going to be each other, but maybe at the start they don’t have much more than a friendly acquaintances partnership, or perhaps even just ‘together by necessity’ (I still don’t know what that necessity is). In terms of family, I think having a very sparse group of people they are related to by blood, perhaps just the scrapper lady’s father and a sibling for the technician. I think outright stating that the rest of their families were killed would have a small effect on the player, but at this point ‘dead family’ is a little cliché and I’m not interested in a ridiculously tragic story, despite the setting. I think a general idea would be that, as society fell apart, so did social norms of relationships and family, with plenty of families completely splitting apart and losing contact. Despite what I just said about tragedy, this could lead to another contrast between the two main characters again, with the technician only realizing 16 years into their life that their parents were only together for the sake of their children, and that the family was highly strung up on high achievement and was not particularly close otherwise. Her only remaining brother could be disabled in some way, perhaps having ADHD, which in the old world would have been a burden in schools and maybe could be explored as a way of showing just how abusive techie’s parents actually were. I don’t want disability to be seen as a burden though, I want him to be succeeding in this new world, however the ways he thinks affects him. On the opposite end of the parent-child relationship spectrum, but still exploring abusive relationships, I think if the scrapper lady’s parents were some kind of British equivalent of an American republican, I can’t think of a name for that type of person in England, but when I reread this I’ll know what I mean. Maybe they were a very loving family, but were also a very hateful group of people, and scrapper didn’t feel like she fitted in. I think her father wouldn’t realize who she was in the new world, as she came out only after the family had collapsed, and he would be a low tier society member because of his beliefs that he still holds onto.

Their upbringings could dictate their motivations, with techie believing her perfect family can still be resurrected by returning to how the past was, and that everything can be fixed by innovation, contrasting with scrapper recognizing a lot of the rotten parts of the past for both herself and other people, knowing that her life is better here and now, and that a society that no longer struggles with racism is the way forward.

This returns to the idea of an anti-utopia, a world that is, in all simple definitions, perfect, with plenty of love, and teamwork, and innovation, but anyone looking at it sees a very clearly destroyed world.

This makes the problem of conflict and motivation for a game INCREDIBLY HARD. We have a ‘perfect’ world that is perfect BECAUSE of its destruction. What can jeopardise this life? I’ve created a world where I can’t see any conflict this is so dumb.

I think the original motivation for the game could be that, due to a shift in something space related, a lot of space debris is raining down. It poses little threat to people, as luckily it is falling outside of inhabited areas, but provides a lot of interest, as plenty of satellites are returning to earth (and suspension of disbelief is keeping them from burning up).

What

Scrap Harvester

Vehicle Technician

Where

A post-apocalyptic city, probably British? (because I know the UK better than America). A city based off of a real life one, but with some clearly derelict and some clearly ‘renovated’ areas. People living in these towns eke out a life scavenging for building materials that can be used to create housing and farms. This city in particular is almost an anti-utopia, being incredibly well developed but having an aesthetic of run-down, bombed-to-death suburbs.

When

Sometimes in the near future, or present day in an alternate world where society collapsed very quickly and briefly because of some unknown event (unknown because I don’t know what to make it).

Why

The scrapper lady is happy with the life she has now, as it is (somehow) an improvement on her previous life. She helps people to build their houses, and has some architectural knowledge, so leads teams to salvage any building parts they can.

The technician is trying to replicate the vehicles from before the end, in the hopes that improved transport can help recreate the old life everyone had. One day maybe she can move on from vehicles to other mechanical engineering works, and rebuild the old cities.

How

I think a simple crowbar would suffice for the scrapper lady, along with perhaps some large wire cutter-type scissors. She’s very strong, so focuses on melee, and can perhaps utilise nearby rubble and structures as weaponry as well. In terms of game mechanics, this would result in having two reliable, unbreakable weapons, the crowbar and the scissors, and then some low durability weapons that can be acquired from the countless piles of refuse all over the world map.

For the engineer, she would be the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a hacker finding use out of anything mechanical and controlling it, or building very simple robots to work alongside her. These means, in combat sense, she would be a flimsy character on her own and has to create small mechanisms that perhaps inflict status conditions on opponents.

Archetypes

It’s very difficult put these characters into one archetype, or at least it is for me, as I’ve already put so much thought into them that I see them as more than one dimensional. For the scrapper, I think that The Caregiver is very fitting, as she is satisfied in her life as long as she’s able to be helping someone. I think that The Explorer fits techie the best out of the options, and she wants to go and discover what is inside the satellites, but a lot of the points of the explorer is that they are in an enclosed society, which could not be further from the truth in this case. Anyone is allowed to do whatever they want. I think she doesn’t fit in very well, as her knowledge of life no longer has too many practical applications, with mathematics, science and mechanical knowledge being of a little use to a society where farming and building are the main jobs. Despite being loved and accepted by the community, she feels a personal burden because of how she doesn’t think she is needed, so is afraid of being abandoned.

Character Diamonds

Protective, Intelligent, Just,

Nervous, Strategic, Careless, Inquisitive

#DES102 #pre-visualisation #character designs #character concepts #concept art #my art is honestly shameful #i hate it and myself

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romancatholicreflections · 7 years

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7th May >> Sunday Homilies and Reflections for Roman Catholics on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Cycle A

Gospel text : John 10:1-10 vs.1 Jesus said, “I tell you most solemnly, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold through the gate, but gets in some other way is a thief and a brigand. vs.2 The one who enters through the gate is the shepherd of the flock; gate o sheepoldvs.3 the gatekeeper lets him in, the sheep hear his voice, one by one he calls his own sheep and leads them out. vs.4 When he has brought out his flock, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow because they know his voice. vs.5 They never follow a stranger but run away from him: they do not recognise the voice of strangers.” vs.6 Jesus told them this parable but they failed to understand what he meant by telling it to them. vs.7 So Jesus spoke to them again: “I tell you most solemnly, I am the gate of the sheepfold. vs.8 All others who have come are thieves and brigands; but the sheep took no notice of them. vs.9 I am the gate. Anyone who enters through me will be safe: he will go freely in and out and be sure of finding pasture. vs.10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come so that they may have life and have it to the full.” ********************************** We have four sets of homily notes to choose from. Please scroll down the page for the desired one. Michel DeVerteuil : A Trinidadian Holy Ghost Priest, Specialist in Lectio Divina Thomas O’Loughlin: Professor of Historical Theology, University of Wales. Lampeter. John Littleton: Director of the Priory Institute Distant Learning, Tallaght Donal Neary SJ: Editor of The Sacred Heart Messenger ******************************************************* Michel de Verteuil Lectio Divina with the Sunday Gospels – Year A www.columba.ie General comments According to the liturgical tradition, the gospel reading on the fourth Sunday of Easter speaks about Jesus as shepherd, which is the theme of chapter 10 of St John’s gospel. This theme is dealt with in several sections or “movements”, as is often the case in this gospel. One movement is read on this Sunday each year of the three year cycle; this year we read the first movement. Jesus good shepShepherd is one of the biblical titles for a leader, a memory of the days when the Jews were sheep rearing nomads. The passage therefore invites us to celebrate people who have “shepherded” us by touching our lives, some through direct contact, others from reading about them or hearing their stories. We remember, too, great world leaders, in modern times or in the past, and recognise that they were the presence of Jesus in the world, “shepherding” the human family. The passage can also be an examination of conscience on how we are fulfilling our vocation as parent, teacher, guide, friend, or leader in the church community. Actually, the shepherd theme (or “parable”, as it is called in verse 6) is only in verses 1 to 5. In verses 7 to 10 Jesus speaks of himself as “the gate”. The special characteristic of good shepherds is brought out in the passage in the relationship of trust between them and the sheep. They are trusting and in turn they inspire trust in those whom they lead. This wonderful quality – so rare in our experience – is expressed in a series of images, each of which can touch us deeply. The shepherds “enter the sheepfold through the gate”, they are not devious; they “call the sheep by name” – no haranguing; they “go ahead of the sheep” – no looking back to see if they are being followed. The sheep “know the voice” of the shepherd; their relationship is almost instinctive, of the heart. The image of the gate is not as well known as that of the shepherd and is more difficult to enter into, but if we make the effort it can be very touching. Leaders who are like a gate are the opposite of possessive; they are content to be the humble instruments through which others can “go freely in and out”, making their own way to “life to the full”. A wonderful picture indeed of great parents, teachers, community leaders and friends. Prayer Reflection mandela Lord, we remember with gratitude the great people we have known, in the world and in our country: teachers, fellow workers, community leaders, parents, grandparents, uncles or aunts, elder brothers or sisters. We remember how they came to us openly, without pretense, passing through the open gate. We knew immediately it was someone who understood us, a voice we had always longed to hear. We felt we were being called one by one, each by name. They said what they had to say and went ahead, not looking back suspiciously to make sure we were following, and we did follow because we knew we were not with a stranger. Lord, we ask you to bless leaders in our country and in the world. Give them today the grace to look into their hearts and ask themselves are they real shepherds of the flock. Have they come openly through the gate like shepherds, or deviously like thieves? Have they come to give life or to steal, kill and destroy? Do they speak a foreign language that the sheep cannot recognise so that they naturally run away from them? Do they take the trouble to know their sheep so that they can call them out one by one, by their own names? Is their relationship with people one of trust, freeing them to go ahead of the flock, or must they always be looking back, wondering if they are being followed? Lord, we ask you today to send us many good priests, religious and lay leaders, men and women who will be like a gate to a sheepfold, without the slightest trace of possessiveness, happy to be a passageway through which many will pass freely and live life to the full. Lord, we pray for the Church as it emerges among the ancient cultures of Asia, Africa and Latin America, as it exists side by side with other faiths. We pray that we may not be envious of things that others have and we don’t, that we may never be destructive or the cause of people or institutions dying, but rather that we may be true shepherds whose only concern is that people may have life to the full. Lord, we pray for our Church which is experiencing a bad patch in our history, one of pain, scandal and betrayal of trust by some of our leaders. Help us to relearn to trust in emerging good leaders who are of trying to guide us as Jesus did. ************************************************** Thomas O’Loughlin Liturgical Resources for Lent and Easter www.columba.ie Introduction to the Celebration Who do we follow? This is the question that today’s gospel puts before us. Many of us would like to think that we follow no one, that we make our own decisions and choose our own paths. Yet, our experience tells us that we are often led — look at advertising— and often led astray: look at how many brigands have incited human beings so that the worst of crimes and destruction have been justified? But the choice of Christ as our shepherd is the choice to bear witness to the victory of life, and love, and forgiveness over the forces of death, domination, and vengeance. So where do we stand in terms of calling ourselves disciples? Homily Notes 1. In many places this is ‘Recruitment Sunday’: ‘we need priests because without priests there will be no Mass – so if there are some generous, unmarried men in the congregation, why not join up now!’ However, whether or not such appeals have any effect, it is best to avoid the whole topic as it abuses the liturgy by turning the moment in the assembly’s week when its president is charged with helping his brothers and sisters reflect on the mystery of Christ into an advertising slot. Preaching is a sacred task and no other end, however noble, can justify replacing the Sunday homily with a piece of promotional work. 2. Since the gospel text is opaque, and the use of allegory as its key usually results in something that is little more than a free association of ideas, it is worth inviting people to explore the dynamic underlying Luke’s ‘sermon’ in Acts, for this brings us face-to-face with what the evangelist saw as the kernel of the Christian vocation. So instead of a formal discourse, invite the assembly to work through the text meditativly, noting its main features. 3. The text can be conceived as trinitarian in structure. It supposes that the kerygma’s audience, both the audience described in the text and the text’s audience, begin from a position of belief in God who has brought them into existence, sent them his revelation, and exercises a providential care for them. This is the starting point of faith in God, who once the Son has been recognised will be acknowledged as Father; and with it goes a recognition of human need and incompleteness. This notion of providential care and the human predicament of sin is clearer when the whole text of Acts 2:14-41 is read – which could be summarised in a few words. Voc SunThe Father has sent us, his children, his Son. Then we are given a list, of sorts, which set out what we receive through Jesus and his victory over death – we should note that Luke locates his sermon in the context of Easter, the Paschal mystery, and its proclamation: – Jesus’s life, death and resurrection reveal the life of God; – through Jesus we are remade as a community: the People of God; – Jesus calls us to share in his Paschal Mystery and to enter his communion in baptism; and – Jesus draws us to repentance, a new vision, a new lifestyle. We as baptised people have received the gift of the Spirit. We are those ‘whom the Lord our God will call to himself’. 4. Such a recollection of the structure of the Paschal Mystery is appropriate to Eastertime. Moreover, the text of Acts lends itself to this narration of ‘the wonderful act of God’ which every Sunday Eucharist celebrates. A fitting conclusion to a homily whose style is a meditative pondering of a text is to simply read the final sentence of this section of Acts 2:42, which Luke imagines as the on-going effect in the hearers’ lives of their conversion on the day of Pentecost (the verse that opened the reading on Second Sunday of Easter), and this makes a good transition, after some moments of silence, to the recitation of the Creed. ********************************************************** John Litteton Journeying through the Year of Matthew www.Columba.ie Gospel Reflection There are several reasons for the lack of interest in priesthood as a way of life. Among them is undoubtedly the model of priesthood that is currently practised. Obligatory celibacy is another reason. But the most serious reason is the growing secularisation of society and the consequent absence of faith from the lives of many people. In general, society has become more overtly materialistic and individualistic. Attentiveness to sacred and religious matters has waned. The Church is perceived to be a remnant from the past that has little or no relevance now. In such a situation, the significance of priesthood becomes meaningless. So it is not surprising that fewer men seriously consider being a priest. A priest is a man who, having already been baptised, receives the sacrament of holy orders when the bishop ordains him. The priest is ordained to serve as a spiritual leader of God’s people in the local church. He imitates Jesus the Good Shepherd. This means that his essential role is to form and support a Christian community based on the proclamation of God’s word and the celebration of the sacraments. In particular, the priest presides at formal gatherings for worship, especially the celebration of the Eucharist. Thus he facilitates people in the expression and nurturing of their relationships with God. What, then, distinguishes the ordained (or ministerial) priest from the priesthood of other members of the Church? The essential nature of ordained priesthood that distinguishes it from baptism is that the ordained priest acts ‘in the person of Christ’ (in Latin: in persona Christi) or stands in the place of Christ, especially when he presides at the celebration of the Mass and when he absolves sin. This is not to deny Christ’s presence in the people assembled. Crucially, ordination to the priesthood brings about a change in the character of the man being ordained. This means that the priest, whose person is conformed or moulded to Christ, becomes ‘another Christ’ (in Latin: alter Christus). The priest is called to imitate the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his flock. The priest is charged with the task of knowing, loving and caring for those who have been entrusted to his pastoral care. Being a priest can sometimes be difficult. This is not to suggest that other vocations, for example, to married life or to religious life, have no problems. They most certainly do. The life of a priest requires faith, permanent commitment, prayer and humility. It is about self-sacrifice and total service of God and his people. But it is also a rewarding and fulfilling way of life. Priests share in and help to make sense of the joyful and sad occasions in people’s lives. They regularly have opportunities to share Christ’s healing and life-giving power with people so that life can be more meaningful. They teach people to be faithful to the Good News so that they are like sheep who follow Jesus the Lord who is the Good Shepherd. signs of timesNo priest is perfect. Like all people, priests are always being called to conversion. We live in a society where confusion abounds and in a Church where many members are disillusioned. We need priests today more than ever because our world is crying out for signs of hope and God’s presence in many situations that have become distressing and futile. There is still much work to be done in building the kingdom of God in our world. Priests are absolutely necessary for this task. It is time for us to pray more fervently for the priests that we have and for more vocations to the ordained priesthood. It may even be time for some of us to consider pursuing the priestly vocation or, perhaps, re-imaging the model of priesthood. For meditation I have come so that they may have life and have it to the full. (Jn 10:10) Lord, give us all a new heart and new spirit Lord, give us all a new heart and new spirit ********************************************************* Fr Donal Neary, S.J Gospel Reflections for the Year of Matthew www.messenger.ie Follow in Love The first big moment of vocation is baptism. The anointing of chrism at baptism might be called the anointing for vocation. The baptismal vocation is for witness, love and service. This is expressed in ways in which people live out their baptism in married life, single life – and within the single life, maybe religious life or priesthood. Our active witness is to the life and the values of Jesus in our lives. Teaching is not itself a vocation, for example, but the way we teach is a way of living out our vocation. It is the same with many of the helping professions and employments. Being a good neighbour can be a living out of our vocation. We witness to love in marriage, in family, extended family, and in friendship. Any love is a sharing in the love of God. In the moments of unselfish love in any relationship we are living out our vocation. When we love, we are doing God’s will! We witness to service in the wider world in our care for the poor and in welcoming the stranger. In a place of silence, let the words ‘Come, follow me‘ echo in your mind and heart. Lord, be with me as I offer myself in partnership with you to work in your world. ****************************

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INTERVIEW: Ken Garing Returns to Planetoid for Epic New Adventure

Tales of diverse groups of people setting aside the differences that divide them in order to overcome a problem or build something are new abound in all types of literature, and for a good reason. These types of stories have universal appeal, they’re inspiring, and they can be pretty fun and exciting — especially when they’re set in a far-off future on an inhospitable world that’s under siege by the robot armies of a vicious alien empire.

That was the set up for writer/artist Ken Garing’s 2012 creator-owned sci-fi adventure series from Image Comics, “Planetoid,” which followed the adventures of a soldier named Silas who found himself ship wrecked on an alien world and banded together with other stranded castaways, both human and alien, to build something greater than themselves: a community.

This February, Garing will take readers back to that world with Image’s “Planetoid: Praxis,” a new miniseries that focuses on a family and some of the fantastic and real world challenges they face. CBR spoke with Garing about making “Praxis” accessible for new readers, its connections to the original series, his cast of characters and the obstacles they’ll face, and having a creator-owned project where he’s in control of almost every aspect of the final product.

CBR: When the original “Planetoid” series began it looked like it was going to be the story of Silas, an ex-soldier looking to survive on an alien world. Silas’ story came to a definitive close though at the end of the original mini and now you’re about to launch the sequel, “Planetoid: Praxis.” So am I correct in assuming that as a whole “Planetoid” is more about this alien world community Silas helped found than any one person or protagonist?

Ken Garing: That’s right. In “Planetoid,” Silas and some other characters fought off these killer robots that roamed the surface and went on to establish a settlement in an area called the Slab — which is this big expanse of rotting infrastructure on the planetoid’s surface.

Silas was the protagonist but the planetoid itself was/is really the central character. Silas was more-or-less just reacting to what the planetoid presented him with.

With “Praxis,” we continue on with this settlement and a cast of characters a few years after the events of “Planetoid.” The time between has been a period of calm, but now change is coming to the settlement in the form of off-world visitors.

How new reader friendly is “Planetoid Praxis?” And for returning readers, was the epilogue of the first series with Onica, Nkunda and their children sort of a hint to where you’re headed in “Praxis?”

“Praxis #1” was designed as a bridge between the two volumes. So there’s some recapping of the events in “Planetoid” while also moving things forward. Honestly, the summary above is probably all people need to know. Outside of that basic setup, the drama in “Praxis” is all self-contained.

The epilogue in “Planetoid” does serve as a setup for “Praxis.” When I drew those last few pages and I immediately started started thinking about what happens next. So, for those returning readers the transition should be pretty seamless.

I also try to approach the reader-friendly issue with the story-telling itself. Clarity and readability are really important to me. I think an audience will follow you as long as they think you know where you’re going. Along the way you can slowly introduce more detail and make a complex story that doesn’t feel complex.

What’s it like writing Silas’ former comrade and one-time lover Onica in this new series? How has she changed and grown since we last caught up with her? Is her leadership role of the Slab top community she helped found agreeing with her?

She’s now the mother of two kids and she’s the de-facto leader of the settlement. But in some ways, Onica has actually not grown. She’s very capable and strong but also very stubborn.

In the past she’s had to fight to survive, but now with “Praxis” she’s put in a position where she can’t just fight her way out. When visitors start coming to the planetoid her reality becomes more nuanced and complex. She’s mostly doing everything right as the settlement’s leader but these new circumstances threaten to overwhelm her and the others.

How big of a role does Onica’s family play in this series? How has her husband Nkunda and their children Aden and Zuri changed since we last saw them?

Most of the characters have not changed since “Planetoid”, but there will be major changes going forward in the pages of “Praxis.” For example, Aden and Zuri are little kids at the beginning of “Praxis” but by the end they’re in their late teens.

The family thing came about totally organically at the end of “Planetoid.” It was not part of my original idea. But it stuck in my mind and opened up interesting narrative opportunities. There’s a larger plot developing around the characters but ultimately the family dynamic is the backbone of the story.

So much scif-fi is centered around what are essentially action-heroes. Even some really intelligent sci-fi does this. But the family dynamic seemed really unique, you know, having this cast of characters with different motivations instead of a single protagonist on a mission.

Who are some of the other supporting characters we’ll meet and catch up with in “Praxis?”

Onica, Nkunda, Aden and Zuri are the central characters. But the character Dakar comes on strong too. He was a very minor character in “Planetoid” that grew totally on his own. I just really like drawing him. He represents the sentiment from the first series. He was a loyalist to Silas and is sort of second-in-charge after Onica. He’s a warrior who is ready to fight and die for the settlement, but again that’s not always the right approach to a problem.

There’s a lot to say about the main antagonist in “Praxis” but that will have to remain a mystery for now.

Fair enough. Let’s talk about the inciting incident of “Praxis.” Earlier you mentioned visitors coming to the planetoid?

For many years, the people on the planetoid have lived in isolation. They’ve managed to form a working community but some degree of tribalism has also developed. In “Praxis” we’ll see that various off-world parties can now access the planetoid’s surface and can come and go as they please.

The visitors themselves do pose an actual threat but the real drama in “Praxis” focuses on how these changes affect the characters on an interpersonal level, within the settlement.

One of the great things about the original “Planetoid” was the world building you did. It was sort of this fun combination of lived in sci-fi like “Firefly” and “The Expanse” and the multitude of aliens featured in stuff like Star Wars or Star Trek. Will we see more of that in “Praxis?” Will we learn more about some of the alien races you established in the original “Planetoid?”

Yeah, there’s much more detail given to alien cultures in “Praxis.” In “Planetoid” I introduced a few alien races, so it’s interesting to be able and build on that. There’s also more opportunity to develop the culture of the Slab.

In “Planetoid” the population was hunted down by robot sentries but now now people have the freedom to move around and congregate. So there will be plenty of scenes exploring weird new environments on the Slab. There will also be some explanation about the history of the Slab and some rumors about a race indigenous to the planetoid.

Visually, how does “Praxis” compare to the original “Planetoid?” Did the new story call for some stylistic changes in your drawing or a new color palette?

“Planetoid” was tricky for me because I wanted the production to be really good. I didn’t want it to look like an indie comic. I wanted to make a comic that could compete with “Batman.” But until then, I had never had work in print so everything had to be figured out on the job. I would do things like little color tests in the actual comic to figure how dark or how saturated a certain color looked in print.

“Praxis” looks way better, as a result of all that. It’s way more sure-footed and bold. I also wanted to do something new with the color. I wanted to get away from muddy dark colors. Sometime it’s appropriate, but there’s so much of it out there right now.

My favorite artist and colorist is Richard Corben. Looking at his work, I noticed that he creates dark atmosphere by using deeply saturated colors. So I tried to play with that approach instead of just going with heavy grays.

If fan support is there how long do you see “Planetoid” going? Do you see yourself using the sort of “Hellboy” model of a series of miniseries?

It’s funny because the “Hellboy” model is the most obvious and straight forward to me, but there still seems to be a lot of confusion about it.

I do have an outline for a third volume and some ideas about an early-years Silas story. But I also want to do other stories in other genres too. I’ve wanted to do a comic about Bobby Fischer for a long time. I have a fantasy story and cyberpunk comic I started on prior to “Praxis.”

But, as you said, it all depends on fan support. Or the perception of it.

Finally, you’re in charge of just about every aspect of “Planetoid.” As a creator, how challenging and rewarding is a project like this where it’s yours pretty much top to bottom?

The most rewarding thing is that I don’t have to draw boring scenes. Sometimes I’ll buy a comic by some amazing artist who is known for drawing monsters or something, and the writer will have him draw a five page argument between two guys in car.

But, of course, it’s challenging too. The workload can seems overwhelming at times.

Also, the way the industry compartmentalizes artists and writers can be frustrating for those of us who do both. Writers are credited with “the story” and artists are geared towards being as technically proficient as possible. That approach makes sense, but it creates a certain type of comic book.

Then what often happens is personal work by writer/artists gets viewed through this rigid lens. So I see things where spontaneity gets characterized as “inconsistency”. Or maybe a writer/artist will try to express something political or abstract and will get criticized for not having enough “character development” or something. For me, other than Bronze Age Marvel titles and a few other exceptions, single-creator comics are pretty much all I ever look at.

Even as a kid my favorite comics were by writer/artists; Eastman and Laird’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” or Larsen and McFarlane’s “Spider-Man” comics. Then as a teenager I read comics like Corben’s “Den,” Miller’s “Ronin,” Otomo’s “Akira,” Crumb’s short stories, Gilbert Hernandez’s “Love & Rockets X”….

Reading all of these comics by writer/artists made me want to write and draw my own comics. Being able to actually do that and get them published is extremely rewarding

I hope people like this comic and support it! “Planetoid” did well based entirely on the support and word-of-mouth from retailers and readers support. When it comes to marketing this book, I’m totally clueless. So if you’ve read “Planetoid” or if you like “Praxis”, please let it be known to your retailer and online.

“Planetoid Praxis” #1 is on sale Feb. 1 from Image Comics.

The post INTERVIEW: Ken Garing Returns to Planetoid for Epic New Adventure appeared first on CBR.com.

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