#imagine being brutalised for years

[five-one-two-station]

Everybody should have their own fun, and this isn't trying to harsh anybody's buzz, but I find the impulse to make your own cutesy/badass Replika oc doing funny or heroic or badass things a little odd. Like, that character you designed as a super badass soldier, or well-armed and armored steely eyed cop type... who would they have been built to fight or police exactly? Remember who all those guns and weapons were intended for use on?

I know we're all sick of discourse over who "gets" the game, and I'm by no means scolding anybody for something that harmless, but what's interesting to me is the sense that designing overtly "cool" Replika personas and OCs, complete with the propaganda poster style imagery, feels a little...

I mean, bluntly, it's like the in-world propaganda worked, unironically, on some level, for many people. Kolibris aren't scary, they're whimsical and fun! Storches aren't notably cruel enforcers and chain gang drivers, they're Protektors! Falke isn't a camp commandant, she's a beautiful angel!

The Replikas aren't cool and heroic figures in the reality of the game. They're the carefully crafted organs of a system of control so dreadful it could do what it did to Elster and Ariane. They're victims to that system themselves too, sure - and humanising them is a nuanced and valuable observation of how totalitarian regimes maintain themselves - but that doesn't negate the fact they're also the ones who operate, enforce and perpetuate it, a big part of what the game knows and communicates about such societies. It's notable that the game makes it clear few, if any, of the Replikas actually buy into the Nation as an ideal at all - they enforce it no less pitilessly anyway, incapable or unsafe to imagine anything else.

Their affectations, pasttimes, trinkets, and even affections for each other, all serve to draw a stark contrast to how callously they regard the gestalts they keep suppressed. Their disposability is something they're conscious and fearful of themselves, but fail to recognise as a commonality with the people they brutalise every day, their business as usual. The only grief, tragedy or suffering they acknowledge is their own - they have no regard for any such things in the humans they have... well, dehumanised.

But S-23 Sierpinski was such a hellhole for most of its denizens under "normal" conditions that the nightmare it becomes is arguably an improvement; if only because there are fewer people left now to suffer it. There's a dark poetry here - because the place's banal cruelty is "off camera" to us, it's very naturally less real to us than the grief of the crying Eule. It's only natural, too, to forget how grim the Replikas' purposes are when you don't have to see anyone endure the brunt of it.

And isn't that the very same effect a state like the Nation is seeking in the first place, by disappearing people away to such dark little corners to have it done? In our world, no less than that one.

That works like a kind of propaganda too, not being able to see it - a propaganda of hidden things, as powerful as any poster. A space that's been intentionally left blank.

Kolibris are literal thought police; they intrude on people's very minds, interrogating them to death as a matter of course, with hardly a care either way. The various Protektor classes are functionally concentration camp guards and slave drivers. Falke and Adler are overseeing what amounts to a gulag, one so unimaginably awful Ariane preferred to spend years of her life alone in space to the prospect of being sent there, and inevitably worked to death, far underground.

I think there's a reason we never see one of those posters for LSTRs in game. How could we be asked to forgive our own if we ever did?

[aiteanngaelach]

ive been thinking about language a lot recently and doing a lot of studying of my irish grammar books and one thing that is always in the back of my mind no matter what is the grief over not being able to speak my own language, having to learn it in schools and at home, picking up a book in irish and feeling this unassailable choking frustration guilt and grief that i cant understand it at all. i can parse bits and pieces, stray words and phrases, but thats it. watching things on tg4 and not understanding a word and drowning in guilt over it. ive always felt this huge impenetrable wall in my mind separating me from from irish. and the prevailing attitude of most everyone i meet and talk to about irish is that yeah its sad that we got colonised and dont speak it anymore, but its dead and useless and redundant. the goverment puppets its corpse on roadsigns and documents and titles, paying lipservice to this unimaginable violence done to us as people that we cant speak our own language, but does nothing substantial that would actually help. is fearr gaeilge bhriste ná béarla cliste yeah but is there not a need for gaeilge cliste as well? this surrender to inability across the nation is such a disservice to the language and the people who speak it. im not talking about people not having perfect irish and still speaking it, of course not like i barely have any irish myself, im talking about the disrespect given to irish that it doesnt need to learnt and loved, only bastardized. my family have spoken english for a hundred years, irish for thousands of years before that, and even in that english, vestiges of irish have lingered in hiberno english form. irish hovers just out of reach for me, i surround myself with it through music poetry tv books, but i never am fully apart of it. and the thing is, something that im only just realising in recent years, is that (white) english people dont feel this! theyre not assaulted from a very young age by the knowledge this grief and inadequacy and the injustice done to their people. they dont even learn in schools about what they did to us! to every peoples across the world they colonized brutalised and exploited, every culture they massacred and did their very best to erase! they have the luxury of not caring! and thats incomprehensible to me, that people can live in this world free of the inherited grief of history, that they dont have to carry the weight of their families history on their shoulders, dont have to live with the fact that something intrinsic to them has been stolen! i have always felt like something was missing, and i cant even imagine living with a sense of wholeness, but for these colonisers that is their life! they dont have to face consequences for what theyve done to the world, they dont even have to remember! i wish i could speak irish, i wish i didnt have to know the ugly harsh syllables of this language. tá brón an domhain orm

[mrsaltieri-real]

Raw (Pre-Ghostface!Mickey Altieri x Fem!AFAB!Reader)

Word count: approx 1.5k

Warning/s: 18+ pure smut, p in v, brutal sex, rough sex, Mickey fucking when he’s in a bad mood, forced orgasm, ruined orgasm, language, DUB-CON, spanking, pussy slapping, choking, degradation, slight praise, Mickey being a fucking asshole, thoughts of murder, mention of murder, tiny minuscule mention of necrophilia, etc

This is before the events of Scream 2, before Mickey goes to Windsor. Reader is Mickey’s hometown girlfriend and the plan with Mrs Loomis has already been set and as stated in Scream 2, Mickey was already a serial killer before he was Ghostface. Hope you enjoy! <3

He constantly fucked you raw.

Mickey seemed to like inflicting as much pain on you as he could get away with, never hurting hurting you, but hurting you nonetheless.

He had you with his hand on the side of your face, forcing it into the mattress while your hole was being completely brutalised by him. Tears were staining the soft mattress, your thighs were almost sticky with your arousal leaking out of you with every harsh thrust he sent your way and your ass was red raw from the ruthless spanking, muttering to you to just “Stay there and fucking take it like the cum slut you are.”

He got into these moods every so often. Sometimes he had a bad day and he took it out on your pussy, utterly focused and angry with the way he’d slam into you the minute he walked through the door, not even bothering with foreplay. It wasn’t for you. It was for him and it would seem like he didn’t give a shit about you or your feelings.

He loved how your body reacted to him, you were a drooling mess under him, sobbing and begging him to slow down as he recklessly took whatever he pleased.

“M- Mickey.” You stuttered over his name, voice barely audible over the wet, sloshy sounds of your well fucked cunt and the sound of sweaty skin slapping together. “Pleaaase slow down.” You begged, thighs shaking as he fucked you through yet another forced orgasm, the usually satisfying feeling completely ruined by his refusal to let you actually feel it as he continued to repeatedly and ruthlessly slam into you.

He let out an almost sadistic laugh, his hand that was forcing your face down moved to your hair and he wrapped it around his fist, yanking you up with such force you let out a small cry of pain. Once you were sat up, he sat back on his heels, his cock still buried inside of you and his hand released your hair causing you to almost fall forward but his arm wrapped around your chest and held you to his. You could feel his heart thudding against your back, him hot and sweaty against you. Your head lolled back onto his shoulder, completely exhausted and trembling as he pressed his lips to your exposed neck.

“Don’t act like you don’t fucking enjoy it.” He whispered against your throat before shoving you back down face first into the mattress and continuing his abuse on your raw cunt.

The worst part was, he was right. You did enjoy being used by him as his own personal sex doll. Never in a million years did you imagine you’d enjoy being treated this way by someone you loved. But Mickey coaxed out parts of you that you didn’t know existed. He fucked you senseless, forced orgasm after forced orgasm, not even bothering to tease you or deny you in the way he usually found great amusement and pleasure in. But something about this felt… different. It was like a switch had been flipped in his brain and everything he was doing to you was strictly a primal instinct.

In his foul mood you were there for one reason and one reason only; to be used as an outlet for his repressed rage and bloodlust. He couldn’t just kill people all the time, he had to find… alternatives. And his favourite was fucking you stupid, not worrying or even caring if you hated him treating you this way.

He groaned from behind you, his pace not even stuttering as he spat obscenities down at you.

“Fucking cock hungry slut. Acting like she doesn’t want this.” He practically snarled to himself, slapping your ass once again and making you yelp at the sharp sting his hand left behind “Mickey, slow down.” He mocked you with a sneer and stopped for a moment, sliding his cock out of you. You clenched hopelessly around nothing only for him to grab your arm and harshly throw you on your back, knocking the air out of you and climbing on top of you, fingers sliding toward your red raw pussy. “You’re such a desperate whore, look at you.” He looked down at your flushed, tear stained face and laughed again, hand beginning to roughly move over your oversensitive clit.

The contact made you let out a soft sob, your hips involuntarily twitching away from his hand which made his sadistic smile fade a little, eyes still blazing into yours. “Is it too much?” He asked in mock concern. You nodded your head desperately. A sudden smack against your swollen cunt made you yell out in surprise and you felt him move back to line himself back up to your ruined pussy, his hand sliding up to your throat as he began his brutal thrusts once again.

“I- I can’t…” your voice was cut off with a bruising squeeze of your throat from his hand, making you let out a muffled, broken whimper. He gradually cut off your air and watched in sick and prideful glee as you tried to gasp helplessly, a sick smile on his face and his dark eyes suddenly bright and excited. He stared down at you for a while, his hand remaining wrapped tightly around your throat for about forty more seconds. Your hand automatically flew to his that was harshly grasping your throat as red spots began to cloud your vision, trying to pry his fingers from around your throat before you saw him flinch ever so slightly. He blinked a couple of times, a flash of horror appearing on his face and disappearing just as quickly as it came. He moved his hand from your neck and into your hair, his head dropping to rest on the mattress by your head as you spluttered and gasped desperately for air. He slowed down a little, whispering in your ear, “You can rub your clit,” before gradually picking up the pace again, but not being anywhere near as forceful as before.

You briefly wondered what caused him to slow down and stop choking you. It wasn’t like he’d never done that before but he never took it far enough to cause you irreparable damage, so what was the issue? The pleasure of his increasingly less violent thrusts began to take over your confused thoughts, the feeling of him sliding in and out of you with every roll of his hips making you shiver and moan. Your shaky hand moved between you and you began to slowly tease your clit, instantly needing more and switching up to rub the swollen nerves eagerly in case he changed his mind.

He let out a loud groan into your ear as he felt your cunt clench him at the stimulation. “Good girl, good fucking girl milking me.” He cooed in your ear, hips beginning to stutter as your moans filled his head. “Make such pretty fucking noises just for me. Go on then baby, let me feel that pretty pussy cum.” His words, although still having a strange hidden tone behind them, along with the repeated stroking of his cock inside of you and the stimulation from your fingers finally tipped you over the edge and you let out a loud, unfiltered cry of deeply satisfied ecstasy, him spilling into you with a satisfied groan shortly after.

He continued to rock inside of you for a couple of seconds after, his softening dick forcing his cum deep inside of you as you panted and twitched beneath him. He gently pulled out, making you wince in pain. Was it possible for a pussy to get bruised from the inside?

He collapsed next to you, chest heaving and his hands moved to his face, pressing his palms against his forehead. You glanced over to look at him but to your surprise, he didn’t look satisfied or blissful in any way. He looked completely lost.

“What’s wrong?“ You asked him quietly, voice hoarse and weak. You didn’t receive an answer.

When he was choking you and fucking you relentlessly, the twisted killer part of his mind had almost made him do something he never had even dreamed of doing to you. He hadn’t killed in a while and he was leaving for college in the next few months.

The plan was set, he knew what he had to do when he was in Windsor and carrying out his predecessor’s mothers revenge scheme in return for the fame and the cash and you simply couldn’t be a part of that. All of the pent up aggression he was feeling from not killing in order to stay under the radar was supposed to be diverted onto you, his girlfriend, by fucking you stupid, knowing how much you secretly enjoyed it when he used and brutalised you. But what if it wasn’t enough for him anymore?

Where he did love you and God, he fucking loved you, the killer part of him wanted to kill you while he was fucking you, watch the life drain out of your eyes whilst you tried to feebly and pointlessly fight against him and give him the best high of his fucking life when he would spill himself into your limp, lifeless body.

And knowing that that is what even the smallest part of him wanted to do? That scared the hell out of him. But what scared him even more is knowing full well he could do it so fucking easily and you’d die blissfully ignorant.

[krikeymate]

Gonna need a one shot where instead of Chad getting stabbed repeatedly during that theater chase scene it Sam that gets stabbed repeatedly :)

Tara thought she knew what pain was.

She was born suffocating. She spent a childhood in and out of hospitals, and with glass speckled skin from another night in her mother's presence. While other kids were discussing cutie marks, Tara was thinking of bruises.

Last year she was stabbed 7 times. She had straddled death's door. She had lived long enough to be thrown about, to rip open her stitches multiple times, to discover what it's like to be betrayed in the most intimate way.

Not even 48 hours ago she stared down the barrel of a shotgun, she had her home invaded. She lost another friend. She's sure she'll lose more before this night is up.

Death is no stranger to Tara Carpenter.

But seeing it happen... it hurts so much more than she could ever have imagined.

Every snick of the knife feels like being stabbed by the girl she loved all over again, the way she experiences every night in her dreams. Except it's worse, because it's not her body bleeding out.

It's Sam's.

Sam who stays stoic, who struggles in their grip despite the knives that pierce her. She doesn't know how she does it, how she stays so strong. Her sister is the one being attacked and yet she's the one screaming and crying.

When Sam falls to her knees, Tara knows she's not going to get back up.

She keeps fighting anyway, because Sam has stopped. If Sam won't fight for herself, then Tara will. She has to. Someone has to.

But Sam just meets her eyes and tells her to go, to run, through blood-soaked lips, a wheezing chest, shining eyes.

Tara hates her in that moment, for giving up.

But not as much as she hates Chad.

Chad who she has to fight against, Chad who wrapped his arms around her and held her back while Sam was brutalised.

He could have helped. Why didn't he help?

She struggles in his grip with everything she has, begs him to let her go, to help her, to please, please god help her. But all he has to say is "it's too late," as he pulls her from the room.

Tara watches a tear fall from her sister's face as she's released, between the crack of the closing door, and all she can wonder is why Chad is so fast to run every time Ghostface appears, how he's never there when someone dies. How he was the first to throw around accusations.

She wonders how Ghostface got into her apartment, if maybe she had lost a friend long before tonight.

[saltwaterandstars]

I while ago I saw @doctornerdington recommend the book Body Work by Melissa Febos. I recently bought it and I'm about halfway through reading it. So far I think it's excellent and I'm finding it helpful, but it's stirring up lots of thoughts and feelings and so I've decided to write some notes about that to keep a record of how I'm responding to it. So, under the cut it a personal essay of sorts. It's not a statement about what I think anyone else is experiencing or should do, it's just a record of my own experiences, thoughts and feelings about which are being evoked as I read this book. If you do read what I've written and want to comment, I'd welcome that, but it is quite long and I'm imagining not many people will read it. If you are going to have a read though, please note the content warning tags. I wasn't sure really what it needed tagging for, so if you do read it, let me know if you think it should be tagged differently.

Body Work is a series of essays by Melissa Febos. On one level it’s a book about writing memoirs—writing about personal experience. But the book is about much more than that. She talks a lot about the scripts we have taken in from society, from the patriarchy, scripts that we unconsciously write from, but also the same scripts that we shape our selves and our lives around. I’ve just finished the essay Mind Fuck, which is ostensibly about writing sex scenes. But in exploring what goes on when go to write about sex, especially when that we includes people disenfranchised and brutalised by the patriarchy, she’s really exploring what it is to be an embodied person; what it is to understand our physical and sexual realities, to live them, to make conscious choices in relation to them, and to write about them. She talks about the importance of identifying and getting beyond the narrative threads that were previously sewn into me by sources of varying nefariousness or innocuity.

I’m finding reading the book personally very helpful but, of course, it’s only helpful to the extent that it’s disturbing me, that it’s leading me to bump into and acknowledge the scripts—body-related, sexual, and otherwise—that I’m still living in accordance with. It’s interesting that this process feels to me so desperately uncomfortable, terrifyingly unsettling, actually, and yet, at the same time, it also feels like such a compassionate thing to be doing for myself.

I’m a white woman in my late 50s. I come from a poor, working class background, but through education and profession I am clearly middle-class now (and class is still a big deal in the UK, even if it’s not as explicit as it used to be). I look and sound middle-class and have the privileges that come with that. I’m bisexual but have been in a monogamous relationship with a man for 25 years, so pretty much everyone who knows me or interacts with me sees me as straight. To a very large extent, for the first four decades of my life, I tried very hard to live within the straitjacket placed on me by the patriarchy, especially in relation to my body. I spent many years trying not to gain weight, trying to be conventionally, heteronormatively attractive and so on. And like many women, I was fully aware of where those scripts, those rules, were coming from and the harm they were doing me, but I was just too scared to even attempt to let go of them in any kind of meaningful way.

There were ways in which I did live beyond the patriarchy’s imposed limitations. For example, I had a successful career in a male-dominated profession. But in my 20s and 30s especially, I attempted to do that while still trying to be seen as attractive and well-behaved and unthreatening (which would be hilarious if it wasn’t so heart-breaking—I was threatening just by existing in those spaces—I couldn’t be there and be successful and not be a threat.)

I also had a sex life where, at least some of the time, I experienced myself as having agency and freedom. But I lived that part of my life pretty much secretly. I wasn’t ashamed of my sexual behaviour; I just didn’t trust that society—including many of the people in my day-to-day life—would value and respect me if I allowed myself as a sexual being to be more fully seen. So I hid myself from view—not an uncommon coping strategy for me.

In my 20s to 40s, I was frequently fearful and anxious. Whenever I did something that challenged the scripts, the rules, I was very scared. I am not a feisty, up-for-a-fight kind of person. I find breaking rules difficult, and being a ‘difficult person,’ challenging other people, even just disagreeing with other people, feels disturbing to me (this can’t possibly have its roots in my childhood—surely not?!) So when I did do political things, feminist things, when I stood up for colleagues, said no to unreasonable demands, just disagreed with people, even, I felt real, like I had acted authentically and in accordance with my values, but I also frequently felt like the world was about to end. At the very least, I was often just waiting to be punished and expelled from the pack. It’s a hard way to live.

My 50s have brought me—through the menopause and the development of a life-changing chronic illness, and the death of people I love—some dreadful challenges, but also, through the exact same experiences, a real increase in freedom. For one thing, I am no longer attractive in a stereotypical heteronormative way. I’m just not. My body just can’t be that anymore. And while I’ve had grief and fear around that, I do also have an ever-increasing sense of freedom because of these changes, too. And because I’ve been so ill and my poor body has had (and continues to have) such a difficult time, my whole way of relating to myself as an embodied person has had to change. I’ve had to cultivate great oceans of kindness and patience to be in this struggling body, and it turns out, kindness and patience with my body are also antidotes to the poison of the patriarchal rules I swallowed in when I was young. Who knew?!

And I have to say, the less invested I am in being seen as attractive and pleasant and reasonable, the more my fears around the imagined consequences of being authentically myself subside. In the last couple of years in work before I retired, for example, I was pretty much immune to the attempts by my (mostly younger male) colleagues to pressure or bulldoze or embarrass or emotionally blackmail me into doing what they wanted. I wouldn’t say I became fearless because I didn’t, but alongside the fear was a kind of gleeful, arms folded across my chest sense of oh this is going to be interesting.

The death of loved ones has been an immensely painful experience, but it has also functioned as rocket fuel to help launch me out of my state of fear-based inertia. I’m not going to go into details, but basically everyone else in my immediate family died young, so I’m a chronically ill woman approaching old age with a truly awful genetic inheritance in terms of family longevity. I hope I live till I’m 90, but maybe I won’t. Maybe if there are changes I need to make to be more alive and present and free in my life, I might want to get on with that. So the questions I’ve asked myself again and again in different forms over the last few years are: How many more years am I going to spend living by these shitty rules? How many more years am I going to waste not allowing myself to explore who I actually am? To be who I am? Oh, and when I die, do I want them to put something like She was always so well-behaved—on my headstone? Is that how I want to live the rest of my life? Et cetera, et cetera.

Over the last few years, in ways small and large, I’ve managed to shrug off bits of the straitjacket. The biggest change is that I’ve completely stepped away from a pretty successful but personally damaging career. I’ve also allowed myself to finally get to know my pagan self and to be that self more publicly. And regularly in day-to-day situations I’m managing to catch myself about to act in accordance with Febos’ narrative threads that were previously sewn into me. Sometimes I manage to step out of automatic pilot and to make a conscious choice to do something different, to be more authentically myself in that moment, even when that feels scary and exposing.

Which all sounds great—and it is! But if that was the end of the story, then reading Body Work would not be proving so unsettling for me. Turns out, the really difficult explorations and changes I’ve already made were actually the easier stuff. Could it be that I’ve managed to avoid the extremely difficult work by focussing on the really difficult work?! As I’m reading the book, it’s becoming clear that what still remains to be examined and unpicked is the tough stuff. So here I am again today, asking myself the questions:

Who is it serving to keep myself, my needs, my wants, my interests, my values, hidden from view and not enacted in the world?

And how is doing all that serving me, too?

And how many more of my precious remaining years do I intend to spend in this understandable but deeply unsatisfying holding pattern?

[tinnictheguardian]

Dimitri’s sins during his savage boar phase

What “evil” acts did Dimitri commit during his savage boar phase? This is a topic that keeps coming up because Dimitri is extremely hard on himself regarding his actions during his 5 years as a vagabond. So what does the game say?

In his notes it says:

1181 - Escapes the coup of Fhirdiad and becomes a vagrant. 1182 - Begins murdering Imperial generals/soldiers controlling former Kingdom territories. 1185 - Pursues Imperial troops and ends up at Garreg Mach.

During the start of the Azure Moon War Phase, Yuri tells you, “ You've been snoozing awhile, so allow me to fill you in. There's a madman roaming Faerghus. Imperial troops entering Kingdom settlements are destroyed seemingly overnight. Townspeople on the front lines are terrified, and yet they simultaneously treat this as though he's some sort of hero blazing through the land. Can't imagine their surprise when they realized it was their own prince. ”

Gilbert fills you in more with the following, “ As for myself, I only began to hope three years ago, when I chanced upon some compelling rumours. An Imperial platoon attacked without warning. Incident after incident of Imperial generals being slaughtered in Kingdom territory. It is said that each died in such a brutal, gruesome way that...it is hard to imagine they were killed by human hands. ”

What Dimitri says himself is, “These hands of mine have taken so many lives... Nobles and commoners. Adults and children.” 

I would like to note that Sothis refers to all the students, who range from age 16 to 21, as “children” and also, Fleche is both an Imperial soldier and a child because she is below the age of majority. But even by modern standards, killing Fleche is NOT a war crime because she’s an active combatant.

By modern standards, if you take Fleche alive you have to treat her as an innocent victim and do what you can to demobilise her. But if she’s pointing a weapon at you, you can shoot her. Obviously soldiers who are not total psychopaths would and do find the act of killing children, even in an active combat situation where said children are trying to kill you, soul-shattering. But the point is that you are allowed to kill opposition child soldier during active combat.

By medieval standards, which is what Fodlan follows, Dimitri is in the clear as long as the nobles, commoners, adults and children he killed were soldiers. Based on the information we have, it seems clear that Dimitri ONLY killed soldiers.

So the problem wasn’t WHO he killed, he only killed Imperial soldiers who were invading Faerghus, but HOW he killed. He was brutal and gruesome. This does seem to go against the codes of chivalry that Faerghus seems to hold and also I don’t think the Serios faith would preach it being okay to be needlessly cruel to your enemies.

Another thing to note is that Dimitri doesn’t do the dehumanisation thing when it comes to opposition soldiers. In his B-support with Byleth he recalls the time he came across a dead soldier’s body during the Western Rebellion when a minor, non-crest bearing line of the Blaiddyd family challenged his claim to the throne and Rufus’s regency. He says of the soldier, “ He was clutching a locket. Inside was a lock of golden hair.  I don't know to whom it belonged. His wife, his daughter...mother, lover... I'll never know.  He was a soldier. An enemy. Someone we had cut down without hesitation. But in that moment, I realized he was also a real person, just like the rest of us. “

So Dimitri was brutal to people he never dehumanised to make it easy for him to kill them. So he instead dehumanised himself. He was a monster, a beast, barely human and that’s why he wasn’t just killing but brutalising them. It was most likely a horrible negative loop. 

I am killing these humans out of rage and hate. They are invaders but they are still human. I cannot be human if I am committing these acts. I am a monster. Monsters have no mercy when people invade their territory. 

I can totally see this loop playing in Dimitri’s head and without his friends to check him, like they do in Hopes, we get the Dimitri we see in Azure Moon who is finally checked by Byleth. When he’s unchecked, as he is in Verdant Wind, he of course leads his friends and the last of his loyal followers to doom.

So, basically, Dimitri, didn’t kill anyone he wasn’t supposed to but was more brutal then he should have been. I think it will depend on individuals how grave they rate his sin of being brutal on the battlefield. 

[ayrennaranaaldmeri]

i saw a horrible post so i must rage

I am literally fucking losing it like if you really are (sorry) that fucking stupid and didn't pay any motherfucking attention to the motherfucking information this motherfucking game gives you about what githyanki ascension is and think lae'zel's ascension ending is only fucking questionable and there is literally no fucking cure for your brainrot bc your listening and reading comprehension is dead. lae'zel became lich food, she's dead. she's gone. it's not just ominous, it's bad. she's fucking dead. WITHERS COULDN'T FIND HER.

like for the love of god you can like a negative character development ending, i.e the "bad" ending without trying to twist it like its secretly a good ending.

you are so disingenuous in how much you need g*d!Gale or ascended!ast**rion to be a morally good choice for you to make that you'll treat the extinguishing of lae'zel's life as only ~questionable or try to justify sh*rheart as well its not so bad when it's like did you have your eyes open at all during this character's storyline. genuinely. why would it be bad for a character who has a divine shock collar that gives her unbearable pain every time she committed wrongthink by being herself (and yet she still keeps committing wrongthink for a few decades bc that's just who she is), to then shackle herself to the one who gave her the divine shock collar, esp when one of the major steps towards that is made when she's completely uninformed and just thinks she wants to do that and isn't really aware that the goddess she's about to kill the gay aasimar for had her kidnapped as a child and have regularly had her brutalise her parents and wipe her memory since then for like over 30 years. you can enjoy evilheart but that doesn't really stop it from being the worse ending in terms of how happy she is.

Like, imagine calling it "the endings where characters get what they want" and then saying its bad writing if they're all bad. all that means is that you fundamentally misunderstood the text bc that is an extremely shallow read lol bc none of these people are experiencing the level of contentment they do in their (and i know this is a very scary word but its okay i promise) good endings.

[mykristeva]

Thomas Bernhard

People brutalise everything.

In darkness everything becomes clear. And this is true not only of appearances, of the pictoral - but also of language. You must imagine the pages in the books as completely dark.

No matter where you look, you are looking into artificiality.

Circumstances are everything, we are nothing.

It is suddenly too late and you can no longer walk away... No longer being able to alter this problem of not being able to walk away any more occupies your whole life.

People fill their heads without thinking and without concern for others and they empty them where they like.

The world is always full of a stench, because everybody is always emptying out their heads.

We live in a time when one should be at least twenty or thirty years younger if one is to survive.

If we observe ourselves, we are never observing ourselves but someone else.

We may not ask ourselves how we think, for then we cannot judge how we think because it is no longer our thinking.

Slowly but surely all intellectual activity in this country is extinguished.

Existence is misconception.

I prefer being alone. Essentially it is an ideal condition. My house is also actually a vast prison. Which I like very much...

[happyendingsong]

5star thots <3

i had sooo much fun with the quarter final night, every match was banger after banger after banger and the crowd was eating it up and i was so excited with the final four.

and unfortunately the finals didn't live up to it for me ! mayu vs maika felt like it ended just as it was getting going which was a bummer, and saya vs hanan was hard to really get into because obviously saya would be going over and we had just seen this match a few days ago.

i wish there was one more big match on the card and not just filling time with anna jay and xena, hashtag hater hashtag the hater's temperment.

the god's eye vs neo genesis match was fun (love the spot of all five members of neo genesis in like a starburst formation crashing into their opp sat at the ring post, so cute). i love getting to build neo genesis's identity as a unit, but i was a little disappointed with this being the next beat in syuri's story after such an on-the-warpath 5star. the promo package for the goddess league used a clip of syuri and saki teaming together and if we get them as a tag team all will be forgiven. <3

hanan looking on during rina and hina's match was sooooo :( <33333

looooved the natsupoi/thekla moments during the cosmic angels vs h.a.t.e. match, woof. a lot of what thekla is doing doesnt fully work for me (like part of her h.a.t.e. manifesto calling out girls holding starbucks coffee cups. boo corny stupid boring fart sfx toilet swirl sfx. call the audience perverts again.) but with everything with natsupoi she brings SUCH great character work.

looove the energy ruaka and yuna are bringing too and i loved yuna getting her licks in! i feel like there's such a disparity between the cosmic angels that means tam/natsupoi/saori (the cule) and the cosmic angels that means all the others, like it's hard imagining them all standing in the same room and having a conversation, let alone being in the same faction and working towards the same goals. (which speaks to what theyre doing with tam being a shit leader, like it does seem like a conscious choice but i wish it manifested in some more friction or smth.) it was v sweet getting some interactions between yuna and poi and saori here at least!

i was really looking forward to the tora vs tam match, especially after the tag team match on the quarterfinal night where tam clocks that tora's knee is also in bits. the second she started targeting the knee, tora just fell apart and tam mocks her for it after, very smugly "we're not so different huh." and tora lashes back like "do not fucking compare us, you havent been through a fraction of what ive endured, ill show you when i finally rip your leg off this weekend" etc.

i loooove that angle. tam wrote that thread about how this 5star was about overcoming the fear she's had with wrestling since coming back from injury at the start of the year. having her knee brutalised again and again and getting these losses made her face that fear head on, and she's finally ready to hit play since time stopped with her match with tora last year.

and it's clear that tora is SO consumed by that fear, like that acl injury took a year and some change off her career and every time she gets an inch she loses all momentum. she's trying to consume tam with it too, she wants to inflict the worse thing that ever happened to her onto tam because she needs to leave her broken. tora offers her the title match not to have a match but to land the finishing blow and kill her herself. idk it's fascinating!! girl the neuroses the paranoia the projecting!!

and we'll see how all this plays out obviously, maybe they're cooking, but i really wanted tora to go over here u_u. i really want tora to be a credible threat and i think there are so many directions to go with this big bad leader of hate compelled by this really deep seated fear and bitterness. i really wanted to give that more time to grow and fester and spill its way into every fracture of the roster so that it'd be way more satisying when love/frindship/whatever eventually wins out.

i wanted tam to get swallowed up by this manifestation of her fear, by someone who was swallowed up themselves. if we're doing tam at rock bottom, lets fucking do tam at rock bottom like ! like having her lose here and have her scratch and claw to earn another title shot at the end of the year or whatever wouldve been so satisfying.

i was really really into the match until the interference stuff. and i loooove shitheel interfernce stuff but h.a.t.e. are always booked to be such fucking morons, this is so humiliatinggggg...... like tora getting the steel chair and hitting tam in the head, HELLO? this whole thing started with her chairing tam's knee, the whole point of this match is meant to be tora getting tam in a confined space to finally saw off the piece of thread holding her ligaments together. why isn't she using the first instance of the ref getting distracted to drop any pretence of this being a sports match to put tam in a saw trap. what's happening.

and oh my god im so sick of h.a.t.e. being used as these bumbling fools what the fuck are we doing...... literally lining up to trip over their own banana peels one by one. like the spot of konami accidentally spraying tora in the face and flailing her arms, then ruaka accidentally crashing into tora and flailing her arms too, MORTIFYING. i wanna be on board with h.a.t.e. sooooo badddddd there's so much fun to be had there but this is such a fucking farce like. can tam even be proud of a win here, like it's such a lose lose for everyone involved. poor tora, jesus christ.

i was pretty sour going into maika vs saya as a result and it took me a while to get into it, but they did kill it and they ended the night on a high note for me! loooooved the spot of maika holding onto saya's wrist and not letting her go as she hits her with the lariat again and again, and then saya doing the same with her kicks. wah.

saya's acting at the end was crazyyyyy, the crybaby heel shit is really really fab as a nod to the "i wanted to see you cry" thing. soppingest wettest meow meow fr.

love u maika <3333333 so glad she got her win here, i was really on edge after tam's win that they'd be going with saya instead but i think maika is still the right call. tam had been saying before maika lost the belt, smth like "bc i had to drop the belt due to injury, maika never got to experience taking the belt out of someone's grasp, someone who poured everything they are into that belt. ill show her what it's like from the other side when i take this belt from her." so there's obviously a lot of ground to build this feud on and they're gonna kill it etc

this is a chapter they never got to have the first time, and im glad they're getting to have it now, but i REALLY wish we were getting it months from now. it's such a shame to treat tora as a footnote in all of this when there's soooo much to be tapped from that. she had a long fucking reign in her! what's the point in pretending h.a.t.e. are this big threat putting the entire company on notice, the successors/dismantlers of both queen's quest and oedo tai, if they're so easily thwarted and forgotten. they're bumbling!!!!!

and with maika and tam, they've already set that match to be a couple weeks from now BOOOOOOOO. why are they so eager to burn through everything so quickly, chew your fucking food!!!!! like there's such an easy and fun plot beat to have in everyone who beat tam in the 5star rocking up to the ring like hello where are our title shots. and tam wanting this gauntlet challenge over a few months overcoming all these past losses from this year, like tam eats that shit up!!!! and then have her vs maika at queendom at the end of the year so there's actual momentum and intrigue in it.

idk this breakneck pace they're doing with everything makes it hard to get my teeth into anything, like it's hard to feel like the investment is gonna be worth the payoff. which sucks that im feeling like this after ive been so into the rest of the 5star! like having tam completely and immediately wipe out was so exciting, and i love how open the field felt for everyone.

it's a shame to end the 5star on a sour note, and maybe it'll be clear in a few months that this was all part of a bigger better plan. one can hope

but jesus christ they need to book h.a.t.e. better. babygirl tora you will always be famous.

[catullus0525]

Chapter 1: Dim And Remote The Joys Of Saints I See (1869-1895) -- Part II

The trouble was not of conscience alone. Over the next years of his life, Robbie came to realise the hefty price he shall pay for being unapologetically homosexual in an intensely homophobic society.

By the accounts of those who knew him, Robbie was a short, delicate, and somewhat feminine-looking boy in his youth. Arthur Humphreys, a London bookseller who had known Robbie since the 1880s, remembered him as a ‘pathetically pale’, ’very delicate looking’ youth who sported flowery ‘Liberty’ ties and had ‘a tendency to be aesthetic in his dress’. Alfred Douglas, who had known him since the early 1890s, described him as an ‘attractive’ but ‘rather pathetic-looking little creature’ resembling ‘a kitten’. Rupert Croft-Cooke, who had probably heard much about Ross from Douglas, wrote that ‘Robert Baldwin Ross was an amusing little queen’ and ‘an invert’, who liked ‘older men of intelligence and social position’ and ‘looked for soldiers to play male to him’. And Neil McKenna went as far as saying that ‘[t]his slender, attractive and impulsive boy was a beacon for men who were attracted to younger men or boys and who often wanted to anally penetrate them.’. We may thus reasonably presume that Robbie’s refusal to adhere to the masculine norms of the day made him easy target for bullying, which was compounded by the fact that he never deliberately concealed his sexuality. Indeed, Richard Ellmann briefly mentioned that even before he got into university, Robbie had been ‘beaten for reading Wilde’s poems’, which were already considered effeminate if not homosexual.

In 1888, Robbie got into King’s College, University of Cambridge to study History. He was unabashedly progressive in a College known to be ardently conservative in his time, and he was not afraid of voicing controversial opinions. For instance, in support of King’s recent changes in admissions procedure to admit non-Etonians, Robbie wrote: 

…however much the lovers of Eton, and those whose conservative prejudices are something more than mere sentiment, may regret the admission of non-Etonians into the place, we believe it was the salvation of the college, for in these advanced days an exclusively Etonian college is impossible for Cambridge. The change naturally brought evil with good, and among those who battered at the doors for admission under the new regulations, there came some of the most undesirable Undergraduates that could well be imagined. Not only long-haired, but the short-haired and the no-haired came — the purely social and the socially pure. 

Already estranged from most of his Eton-educated peers by the fact that he had not attended a public school, Robbie’s opinionated nature, and most likely also his visibly queer outlook, infuriated the public school boys at King’s, who were determined to teach him a lesson by violence.  Six months after he got into Cambridge, in one freezing evening, Robbie was dragged from the dining hall all the way to the college lawn, manhandled by six students, and ducked into the icy cold college fountain.. This, as Maureen Borland pointed out, could ‘well have resulted in the victim dying of pneumonia’ in Victorian times. The College was entirely unsympathetic towards Robbie: the six assailants were granted the honour to dine with a Tutor right after they left Robbie brutalised and shivering on the college lawn; and adding insult to injury, three days after the incident, the College decided that both the assailants and the assaulted had been guilty of breaking College rules, so no further action was to be taken. 

The bullying and the miscarriage of justice left Robbie severely traumatised. According to Oscar Browning, then the Fellow for History at King’s, Robbie suffered ‘a violent brain attack’ as the result of ‘outrage preying on his mind’. This was likely an euphemistic under-statement given the Victorian attitude towards mental illness. By some accounts, Robbie was suicidal after the incident and had to be brought home from university. Though he returned to Cambridge two months later and managed to wrangle a reluctant apology out of his assailants through persistent effort, he never fully recovered from the traumatising incident and had recurrent episodes of measles, pneumonia, and mental breakdowns afterwards. Moreover, perhaps realising that he would forever remain an outcast in an institutionally homophobic college, eventually Robbie decided to drop out of Cambridge. The decision could hardly have been an easy one, for, prior to the incident, Robbie had enjoyed Cambridge a great deal. 

After dropping out of Cambridge, Robbie made the monumental decision to come out to his family. It was an unbelievably courageous act in 1889, only four years after the notorious ‘Labouchere Amendment’ made all homosexual acts punishable by up to two years of imprisonment and hard labour, on top of the already draconian (though unenforceable) Offences against the Person Act 1861 which punished sodomy by life imprisonment. Few in his time were as brave. As Neil McKenna wrote, Robbie was one of the extremely few late-Victorian men who were open with their families about their sexuality since a young age and made no ‘prolonged attempts to divert his passions towards women’ Indeed, as we shall see later on, Robbie never considered marrying to conceal his homosexuality and probably tried to dissuade his homosexual friends from doing so. However, McKenna’s claim that there was no doubt or self-recrimination but only ‘joyous acceptance’ on Robbie’s parts went a bit too far: as a young adult made suicidal by violent homophobia, it was highly unlikely that he did not struggles before coming out to his family. 

We would never know what was going on in Robbie’s mind back then. Was he trying to explain to his family his decision to drop out of Cambridge? Was he crying out for understanding and support? Was he defying a hostile world full of harsh prejudices? Or was he simply sick and tired of concealing himself? As with many other parts of his story, we could only guess.

Nor do we know exactly how his family reacted. Biographers had different ideas: Bogle did not record any significant reaction and merely said matter-of-factly that his family found him a job in Edinburgh not long after he left Cambridge; Borland wrote that his family was ‘distressed’ and tried to ‘force him to change his mode of life’ by throwing him out; and Fryer claimed that his brother Aleck and his mother were not judgemental about his sexuality, though his younger sister Lizzie was vehemently against it. I believe Borland’s theory is more credible. For one, his brother Aleck wrote to Oscar Browning saying that: ‘He [Robbie] must leave home…my present idea is to leave him to his own devices. I think it would be much better for him if he had to make his own plans and carry them out himself.’ These euphemistic words hardly belie the harshness of the deed: though Robbie later proved himself capable of ‘making his own plans and carrying them out’, it hardly justified his family’s decision to banish him to Edinburgh at a time when he was distressed, vulnerable, and desperately in need of care. Secondly, the cold and puritan Edinburgh hardly suited Robbie’s constitution, and the job Aleck found him was a minor editorial position with a bunch of ‘sports-loving, hard-drinking, nationalistic young men’ whom Robbie probably did not find pleasant. It is therefore highly unlikely that Robbie willingly took up the job. Thus it is reasonable to postulate that after being bullied out of Cambridge, Robbie was thrown out by his otherwise loving family for his sexuality and left to fight the battles of life without support. 

We could only imagine how difficult it must have been: he was a teenager on the cusp of adulthood, had his education disrupted, wronged by the world, cast aside by his own family, and left stranded in an unfamiliar city. His health suffered, and he became so unwell that he had to be brought back to London after just a year. Yet, from his humble lodging in Rutland Square, Robbie was still writing to his former supervisor at Cambridge voicing his indignation and articulating his longing for justice. This stubborn tenacity never left him in his subsequent years. 

With his tenacity and his nascent genius for friendship, Robbie survived the harsh ordeal and made his first friends in literary London over the next couple of years. Foremost in his connections was, of course, Oscar Wilde, which shall be the focus of the next section. Through Oscar, Robbie connected with other ‘disciples’ of Wilde and became part of the 1890 group —— that group of liberal and libertine queer young men wearing green carnations and setting the fashion of the age —— who included Reggie Turner, Max Beerbohm, and of course, Alfred Douglas. According to Max, the group found Robbie ‘cozy and useful’.

Following Wilde, Robbie befriended More Adey at around 1890, an Oxonian expelled from Keble College for his conversion to Catholicism. Adey was eleven years older than Robbie and shared much of his artistic taste. In 1891 they collaborated on a new edition of Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin (Oscar Wilde’s great uncle) and referred to themselves as two halves of the same person. In that same year they began cohabiting and would lived together for the next fifteen years. Nobody can conclusively ascertain the nature of their relationship, some maintained that they were but platonic roommates who never shared a bed, whilst others believed that some form of long-term romantic relationship must have sustained their prolonged cohabitation. The only account of their interaction comes from Siegfried Sassoon, who knew Ross and Adey later in their lives. According to Sassoon, Adey was a kind but slightly unkempt and reclusive man with ‘lustreless dark eyes’ and a beard which looked ‘a bit moth-eaten'. After spending so long living with Robbie, the two men began resembling each other in their habits and mannerisms. He also had a ‘customary chair’ in Robbie’s flat even after they ceased to live together, and would shuffle into Robbie’s conversations late at night to ramble about the failures of the British government in his chair with no awareness that ‘two o’clock in the morning was the wrong hour’, whilst Robbie would tolerate his quirks and sit up with him regardless of the hour.

Then, in 1892, Robbie befriended Aubrey Beardsley through Aymer Vallance, a family friend. Robbie was dazzled by the ‘strange and fascinating originality’ of Beardsley and delighted in the subversive elements in his artistic designs. He later celebrated Beardsley’s decadent artistic style by comparing how he shocked the English public to how Juvenal’s satirised Roman society. Aubrey, in return, delighted in Robbie’s company, and over the next couple of years he frequently invited Robbie to lunch with him at very short notices when he needed artistic and personal advice. 

Meanwhile, Mrs Ellen Beardsley, Aubrey’s mother, also took a great liking to Robbie as a reliable anchor in her son’s turbulent life. This was to become a lasting friendship. Though Robbie was twenty-three years her junior, his mature temperament and naturally caring disposition made him a trusted personal friend to her. Ellen often confided with Robbie the difficulties she had with her son’s turbulent mood and unstable health in great details. Upon occasions, she even relied on Robbie for advice on parenting: notably, in September 1893 Ellen entreated Robbie to ‘bring Aubrey to his senses’ and ‘shame him into proper behaviour’. In return, Robbie was to assist Ellen and care for Aubrey till the end of the latter’s life. 

In that same year, Robbie befriended Edmund Gosse, who was twenty years his senior and ‘a great arbiter at the Savile as well as within literary London’. Gosse found Robbie very charming, and Robbie soon became a favourite with every member of the Gosse family. Through Gosse, Robbie made connections with many artists at different stages of their career, amongst whom counted Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell, R.A.M. Stevenson, Henry Harland, and D.S. MacColl, to name a few. Moreover, Gosse was to become some sort of life-long father figure to Robbie. In particular, during Oscar’s trial and imprisonment, Gosse was to be one of the few reliable shoulders Robbie could cry on, which for him was possibly a lifeline out of despair. 

These friends of Robbie’s did not always mingle well with the Wilde circle. Chiefly amongst which was the animosity between Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. Despite Wilde’s claim that he ‘invented’ Aubrey Beardsley, it was Ross who introduced Beardsley to Wilde and persuaded the latter to commission the famous illustrations for Salomé from Beardsley. However, despite their shared aestheticism and mutual artistic appreciation, they did not get along. According to Harris, the disagreement was chiefly artistic: in conversations with Beardsley Oscar showed ‘a touch of patronage, the superiority of the senior, […] and often praised him ineptly’, whereas Beardsley spoke of Oscar as a ‘showman’, who knew way more about literature than about art. Consequently their later-immortalised collaboration on Salomé was hardly collaborative at the time: Aubrey’s caricatures got on Oscar’s nerves, whilst Oscar trivialised Aubrey’s art as ‘the naughty scribbles a precocious schoolboy makes in the margins of his copybooks’. In the end, the relationship between Oscar, Aubrey, and the publisher of Salomé became rather strained, and the illustrations were sent back for re-working multiple times, much to Aubrey’s displeasure. However, their artistic differences probably had something to do with their respective sexualities as well. Despite his aesthetic appearances Aubrey was, for all we know, not interested in Uranian culture and disapproved of Oscar’s openness about his sex life. He once complained to Trelawny Backhouse that Oscar had bragged to him about having had ‘love affairs and resultant copulations’ with five boys in one night and had 'kissed each one of them in every part of their bodies’ including the dirtiest parts, which gave him ‘nausea like an emetic’. Later, Beardsley described both Wilde and Douglas to Robbie as ‘really very dreadful people’. Such personal disgust most likely animated their professional fights.

More Adey likewise disapproved Wilde’s flaunting of his sexuality, but his disapproval was more likely out of caution than disgust. Throughout his life Adey preferred to keep his private life strictly private, and he appeared so sexually aloof that few questioned his sexuality despite his 15-year-long cohabitation with Robbie (who was a ‘known homosexual’). However, like Beardsley, he seemed to have thought of Wilde and Douglas as dangerously corrupting influences on Robbie even if he stopped short of calling them ‘dreadful’. He once confided with a Catholic priest that he hoped to save Robbie from the ‘evil’ of Wilde and Douglas —— presumably meaning promiscuity with men.

But Robbie was hardly untouched canvas. Apart from the many sexual encounters he (probably) had in school and in Europe, from what we know, Robbie did enjoy himself rather liberally in queer London before 1895. Though we could not ascertain the extent of his involvement in Oscar and Bosie’s private ‘evil’, we do know that in Oscar’s ‘Neroian’ years Robbie was often a loyal fawn at his side. The three of them also shared liaisons with beautiful youths, though of those liaisons only bare outlines remain from a scandal in 1893. In that year Robbie fell hard for a young man called Claude Dansey, and after prolonged correspondence they spent a few nights together in Robbie’s London home. Afterwards, as Max Beerbohm whispered to Reggie Turner, Bosie ‘stole’ Claude from Robbie and ‘kept’ him at the Albermarle, leaving Robbie pining sadly for ‘the desire of his soul’. We do not know exactly what happened at the Albermarle —— we only know that many years later the notorious tale-weaver Frank Harris alleged that Oscar Browning had told him that at Albermarle Claude Dansey slept with Bosie, then Oscar, then a woman (most likely a prostitute) paid by Bosie —— but regardless, Claude went back to school three days late. Consequently, the school master Biscoe Wortham interrogated Claude on his whereabouts and intercepted a few letters from Bosie, which led him to discover Claude’s relationships with both Bosie and Robbie. This revelation came as a shock to Wortham, for Robbie had been a family friend. One thing led to another, Wortham then discovered that his elder son also had a brief fling with Robbie a few years back when both were teenagers. Both Wortham and the old Dansey threatened to sue Robbie for indecencies —— for some reason they were apprehensive about bringing up either Douglas or Wilde —— but Oscar Browning managed to dissuade them from prosecution. 

In the aftermath of the affair Robbie was once again banished from home, except this time he had to go further than Scotland. His relatives denounced him as the ‘disgrace of the family’, the ‘social outcast’, and the son ‘unfit for society of any kind’. Like many gay men in the eye of the storm in the 1890s, he left his career and life behind for Europe. Bosie likewise went into exile to Egypt. He stayed in a house owned by his elder brother Jack and his wife Minnie, but they hardly spent time with him, so he spent most of his time alone except for attending gatherings of the English Literary Society. As with Oscar Wilde years later, the solitude and the shadows of the scandal left Robbie rather miserable. A reply from Max Beerbohm in 1893 showed that Robbie could not help but catastrophise about his grim future as a social pariah. He briefly made two trips back to London in 1894 but was sent away to North America by his family not long afterwards. Not much is known about him afterwards till 1895. 

[pausedclementine]

(Blind)ed.

Okay...first post on Tumblr perhaps, ever? I used to have an account way back when this was the only way to express my dire emo innards, however I only ever pressed the re-blog button. No originality resided within 13 year old me it seems.

I have spent the past few hours searching for a blogging platform however each and every one seems to want me to practically design a website of which is professional and gleaming and hyperlinked to the highest heavens- not happening. Although I am in my twenties, I am the daughter of old-hearts, so technology has swept over my head in the most unforgiving of waves.

I come to Tumblr to shout (quietly) into the void. I am not here to gain a following or even one or two pairs of eyes to read the sentences and paragraphs which will drool from my fingertips onto different screens; perhaps they will remain just on mine. I need an outlet. I have purchased a brand spanking new laptop in order to do just this so I guess I better make it worth my £305, an extortionate amount for me as I am, as my Mother says, 'tight as a ducks arse'.

After setting this laptop up, checking my emails as if I am CEO of a company and downloading all the relevant apps of which I deem to be necessary to my now bland and excruciating existence, I have settled on the sofa within my family home to write this initial post. An oxblood red Chesterfield sofa, the dream. Sat upon this leather art form with the blinds closed, I can hear the world carrying on beyond the wooden slats, blissfully oblivious to the pain and fuckery within this address.

You see, (haha) ,recently I have had 2 operations on my left eye. As a woman who has never had surgery in her life, to be faced one Sunday evening with an emergency eye operation was terrifying. All went smoothly with the first and because of the scarring and ruin left by the first, a second operation was necessary to clean up the brutalisation left behind by the nimble fingered medics. So, two operations in a matter of days. I am now without a lens in my left eye and also without sight. I can see blurry shapes, likened to that of a colour blindness test. As I type this, I am doing so with my left eye shut, my right eye is going to be strong enough to see to the moon when my left eye gets amended, I am almost sure of it.

Of course, when one of your eyes is getting cut into to remove shards of windscreen glass, general anaesthetic is a requirement. Having never had surgery in my life, this was one 'drug' I had yet to sample. It's bizarre how everything enters your body via the cannula when you're in hospital. *Side note, just Googled cannula to double check the spelling and you can bloody order them online...?!* I remember the doctors mainlining the anaesthetic into my bloodstream via the cannula feeding off the back of my hand and the oxygen mask on my face feeling like it was stealing the air rather than providing it. The feeling of suffocation was awful but the sleep that followed was glorious. I woke up from that first surgery deciding that I liked it.

Being half blind, temporarily, consists of eye drops, eye gunk and a hatred for any light source. I am living life like a vampire, sunglasses and hoods, blinds down, lights off. It's harrowing however has imposed a sleepy, dulcet tone on every room in the house. Even my laptop has had to adopt the 'night light' setting; giving the screen a delicious yellow hue. I hate the darkness, I love light and sunshine and 100 watt light bulbs. Imagine waiting all year for the summer months and then when they arrive, you can't go outside and burn your retinas, scorching the emblem of the sun into your mind and brain. Instead here I am, behind the wooden blinds, half blinded and half existing.

Today is day 10 since it happened. It's difficult to come to terms with the fact that I am here, typing this. I feel greedy and self indulgent, existing. Every day since I have wished that the doctors gave me too much anaesthetic, disabling my eyelids from ever opening again. I am not sure if that is possible, to over-administer general anaesthetic. I swear I have heard of pet guinea-pigs being killed accidentally by vets giving too large of a dose. I wonder if I should have asked them pre-op, but that being said...I would probably be writing this from the psychiatric ward where I doubt internet connection is allowed.

Of course I am thankful to be here, I just feel fucking atrocious that an invisible force allowed me to be and not him.

[carpecerevisiam]

I’m thinking bad thoughts again…

The thing is, Pierce had a *mind-wiping* chair, and a group of soldiers loyal only to him. Soldiers he may not have strictly really needed, because:

SHIELD was doing most of his dirty work for him

Anything too dangerous for SHIELD to handle, or too dirty for SHIELD to be involved in, could be taken care of using the Asset

I’m not saying STRIKE weren’t useful, but they weren’t as important to the success of Insight as the Asset was, or the helicarrier crews, or heck even the techs who maintained the Asset.

STRIKE were expendable, because soldiers are far easier to replace than scientists, and the Asset was too precious to risk.

Sure, the men and women on STRIKE don’t have the enhanced physiology the Asset has and therefore can’t take the same level of brutality that it can, but there are upsides, too - unlike the Asset, these people will scream, and cry, and beg. The Asset’s mind has already been broken down; it doesn’t know what fear is any longer. But that’s not the case with STRIKE.

And when you’re done with them? Wipe them, falsify their medical reports and there you go. Clean slate.

Ready for the next time.

[googledocsdyke]

it is SO funny that eric kripke originally envisioned dean as a “han solo” figure to sam’s “luke skywalker” because like. sure dean has the fast car and the scoundrel grin but he actually could not be further from han as soon as you begin to break down his actual values and priorities as a person, as a character. like han’s ENTIRE deal is that he is in the world for himself alone (at least until he meets luke and leia) and is jaded to his bone by Harrison Ford Sexy Cynicism TM and has the kind of loose morality where he sees every interaction as a transaction where he can accumulate money and freewheel out of town and i can hear you all saying ohhhh just like dean winchester but NO! you are wrong! dean’s morality from the very first episode is SO tightly knotted to filial and familial duty and to Fulfilling His Particular Path as a hunter like not to quote this in 2020 but literally saving people hunting things the family business!!!!! 

can you IMAGINE dean winchester being like “if i rescue leia what’s in it for me” lmfao i have to laugh. yes he too cares about very few people but that is because his heart is bound SO TIGHTLY to a miniscule family that there is no room there for anyone else. yes he too seems amoral and obviously like . Kills People but that’s because his morality is ENTIRELY centred around his almost video-game-protagonist questlike duty (he is literally thee Righteous Man) of the limited to-do list he has set out for himself: protect brother, please dad, save world, save cas, etc. han solo doesn’t have a fucking to-do list!!!!! dean winchester would never run away from home!!!!!!!! he’s not even CYNICAL the way han is like this is the man who after thirteen years of onscreen brutalisation and betrayal and disappointment and horror and pain is still fundamentally like YES we’re in my favourite scooby doo story i hope it ends well :) like he is so deeply earnest about the things he cares for and it JUST doesn’t add up as a han equivalency none of it does

and it all just feels so indicative of a fundamentally early 2000s nerdboy approach to building character where dean winchester was first conceptualised not as a Person but as a compulsive repetition of established tropes, established Maleness, rephrased again and again as some kind of fucked-up substitution equation (impala = millennium falcon, seedy kansas bar = cantina, i love you = i know) that fails to recognise that man (protagonist) cannot live on aestheticised References alone . which has all been covered repeatedly by people much smarter than me but it still bears repeating because it’s CRAAAAAAZY and i also CANNOT STOP thinking about how a genuinely good and complex character emerged from these tired repetitions. like eric kripke went “this guy is a collection of Things That Indicate Coolness just like my favourite action hero” which just became an INCREDIBLE case of backfiring because 90% of dean’s action hero masculinity now only reads as sublimated gay desire à la “this man has wanted to fuck harrison ford since the 80s”. and so like somehow dean’s complex personhood not only pushed THROUGH those tired tropes but also made them more legible in a totally new way like i really do believe that dean winchester is a real person pulled to the surface by a text that vehemently hates him all while insisting that it is writing him out of reverence and love. the writers love dean but only in the way that john “loved” him: they love what they engineered him to be and hate not only what he ended up becoming, but what he always was. 

[theladyofbloodshed]

I was reading buffer and it got me thinking all the sisters bar nesta had a good first time with someone they chose yet nesta got with some rando that probably didn’t care about her pleasure. And that’s not even including her assault. Seriously Sarah did everything to screw over nesta

I’ve seen people say that sjm doesn’t like to write first times which is fair enough but they can be written softly. I think I’ve written 4 now and they don’t have to be written with all the roaring and pounding sjm is so fond of. The fact that she’s written that Nesta can’t even remember who it was properly is so sad when Nesta was brought up believing her first time would be to her husband 😭

Nesta got very rough sex after she’d been attacked by the kelpie. Cassian should have recognised that she latched onto that as a coping mechanism and actually took care of her since he says her body is brutalised and Amren says she looks like a cat tried to eat her 🤷🏻‍♀️ Idk how he could have sex with her when she was so badly beaten up. Disgusting behaviour tbh. I don’t care if Nesta asked for it, she wasn’t in the right place of mind. If she’d asked for a bottle of vodka, they wouldn’t have given that to her.

I also get that people say Nesta just “gave away” her virginity because it was a sign that she had lost all value in herself. I’m on the fence with it. One on hand yes I can see that happening, on the other not at all.

Nesta was taught to pride her virginity. Except for the two brief kisses with Cassian, I don’t think Nesta had even kissed somebody before. Her mother taught her that her only value came from between her legs essentially. So yeah I can see her just sleeping with anybody because she doesn’t care anymore about herself.

But at the same time I can’t see her compromising that. She was never really a drinker. She’s never hungover or drinking to excess with the ic and then she does a sudden 180 and she’s apparently getting wasted every night. I see Nesta as an introvert who forces herself to be amongst people as it’s expected but she can’t wait to be alone so I don’t see her inviting random men into her house. She’s too smart to go home with random guys and not recognise the risk (but that feeds into her not caring about herself). And I can’t imagine her taking two men home which she mentions doing briefly. She trusted Tomas - a boy she’d known for years - and he attacked her. I just don’t see Nesta meeting a stranger and bringing him home no matter how drunk she is because her warning bells would be going off.

She was taught to be modest for 25 years and that she should marry - I just can’t see her compromising that so quickly or without feeling deep shame that she did especially in prythian a place which she still kind of resents at this point. I can imagine her still being repulsed by fae males on principle. I also think she would have still harboured feelings for Cassian since that was her first kiss, they had the declaration when they were about to die etc and I just see her has a hopeless romantic who would be still thinking about it every day.

I can see Nesta spiralling but I’d have had her exile herself. Doesn’t ever leave the house. Might go out once a week to buy groceries that go mouldy. Spends most of the day under the covers completely numb. Has no energy to cook or clean. No joy in anything. Just sleeping all the time. But that’s too similar to Elain so Nesta had to be punished for her depression instead of being looked after and loved 😭😭😭

*Also virginity is a social construct but Nesta was taught that it was something valuable and believed it was - I don’t agree with it but that’s how prim and proper Nesta was brought up 🤷🏻‍♀️

[decennia]

okay so I would love to know anything about Lorna in The Batman specifically definitely not for Atticus crossover purposes… no…

she really has been reduced to a cameo appearance in this film, but with a definite promise of more to come in the future.

at this point in lorna's story, she's already done her time in arkham and has been released for about a few years, wherein she left the city and has been working for the military. it is suggested that crane's experimentation on her has already provided the cracks in her psyche.

alfred mentions her in passing to bruce a few times throughout the film prior to the funeral:

first, when bruce returns to the batcave following his investigation of the mayor's murder. alfred tells bruce that a "miss lovestrange" had called, but it is quickly brushed over as they review the footage from the camera contact lens.

she is brought up again when alfred reminds bruce to call lorna back during the blueberry scene. he doesn't.

her third mention comes when bruce is getting ready for the funeral, a newspaper on the table announcing lorna lovestrange's return the night prior. as the lovestranges were greatly influential, and lorna was kept out of the public's eye for most her life, a sighting such as this was a rarity. alfred notes that lorna's return is likely linked to the funeral, and that if bruce should encounter her, that she could do without the cold shoulder he often gives alfred. bruce chuckles a little at this. the chuckle dies down, however, when alfred reminds bruce that lorna has been through enough. bruce shows genuine remorse, perhaps hinting at a role he may have played in her having been committed to the asylum.

at the funeral, their reunion is brief and crippled with awkwardness. the conversation is stilted, bruce's mind otherwise occupied, while lorna is very clearly trying. it is the first time her time in arkham is brought up, clueing the audience in on where we are in lorna's character arc.

she helps the masses evacuate the building, but the first signs of cannonade come when lorna is on the verge of returning inside to disarm the bomb threat herself (her fearlessness being mistaken for stupidity by police chief bock) before the batman makes his entry.

lorna is later seen watching the news of thomas wayne's sin scattered history as well, visibly shaken by what she is hearing. she turns away from the television as soon as the word HUSH arises on screen, something cannonade's die-hard fans cling to as ironclad evidence of lorna's future decline and thomas elliot's arrival.

an interesting addition to this iteration of lorna is her obvious distaste for the batman. she believes that his presence makes gotham worse, and finds herself justified during the riddler's final act.

she is present during the final battle against riddler's men, but rather than assist batman, she watches him be brutalised, all while wearing a faint smile on her face, before selina steps in to help him.

she remains in gotham for the martial law being put in effect, though her relationship with bruce very much is left unknown.

i had initially toyed with the idea of the lovestranges being one of the riddler's targets, too, but the only thing they're truly guilty of is covering up lorna's time in arkham and the cause.

lorna's history very much parallels martha wayne's past, which could perhaps earn her some softer words and an ounce of sympathy from bruce. i can imagine bruce finally returning her call while waiting for alfred to wake up in the hospital, a whispered sorry being all he can bring himself to say.

[justforbooks]

Top 10 true crime novels

Adding an intense layer of meaning to well-known facts, authors including Truman Capote, Kate Summerscale and Gordon Burn raise this genre far above its grubby reputation.

Fictionalised true crime is an odd sub-genre containing either very bad or absolutely fantastic books. They go beyond the non-fiction recitation of known facts to imagine the subjective experience of the actors, they fill in the unknown or re-order known events so that they make narrative sense. This can add an intense layer of meaning to already well-known stories, alongside the added frisson of being broadly based on fact.

Crime fiction and fictionalised true crime are intimately related: Edgar Allan Poe, often lauded as the godfather of crime fiction, wrote his second crime fiction story, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt (1842) as a retelling of the real case of Mary Cecilia Rogers.

Every generation seems to discover true crime novels anew and is astonished by how moving and profound they can be. True crime is still regarded as a low art form and, somehow, a shameful area of interest. I like low art. I like comics and zines and street art precisely because they’re so poorly curated. Often writers who produce works of this kind move on to more respectable forms and these earlier forays are played down as aberrations or experiments.

This is a very male list but the recent explosion in true crime podcasts and documentaries and the predominantly female communities that have formed around them will, I suspect, lead to more women choosing to write these books.

1. A Universal History of Iniquity by Jorge Luis Borges This is a collection of short stories published in the Critica newspaper between 1933 and 1934. Borges covered stories such as John Murrell, a horse thief and preacher who led a slave insurrection in 1835, as well as Ching Shih, the Pirate Queen, and Billy The Kid, whom Borges renames Bill Harrigan. The stories are all fractured and told in imagined scenes with lumps of exposition. In a later edition, Borges wrote an introduction: “These are the irresponsible game of a shy young man who dared not write stories and so amused himself by falsifying and distorting (without any aesthetic justifications whatever) the tales of others.” Despite what he says the book is captivating.

2. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje A retelling of Billy’s journey through New Mexico, looking back over his criminal history, at the myth-making and stories forming around him. He uses a strange, scumbled sort of voice in parts of it that feel like the outlaw’s thoughts as he narrates the events that led to his fated, short and violent life. I have bought this book almost five times and keep giving it away.

3. Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn Burn’s book about Fred and Rosemary West’s lives and murders affected me in a way that perhaps all true crime should: it left me feeling saddened and soiled. He vividly portrays the actual life of serial killers, the shallow affect, the casual brutality and suburban brutalising around the explosive events we hear about when the bodies are found. He talks a lot about the way Fred West’s language was a signal and uses phrases over and over in reprises that are operatic. I know he found the book harder to write than Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son, his study of Peter Sutcliffe, and the depth of his immersion shows. It is profoundly moving in a way that true crime very rarely is.

4. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale This centres on the brutal murder in 1860 of a three-year-old boy in the middle of the night. The case was written about by Dickens, Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins. Its appeal is obvious: it happened in an elegant and slightly isolated Wiltshire house with a small group of people and forms exactly the sort of perfect, closed-house mystery so beloved of cosy crime novels. Summerscale uses fictional points of view to present all the facts and it’s an amazing experience to read it.

5. The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère This retelling of Jean-Claude Romand’s family annihilation in 1993 unpicks a lifetime of minor deceptions and builds to a climax that still shocks even though you know from the beginning what has happened. It’s cold, dispassionate and very frightening.

6. Nationality Wog: The Hounding of David Oluwale by Kester Aspen David Oluwale was a black man who died in 1969 after a sustained campaign of harassment by police in Leeds. This book shows what fictionalised true crime can do that nothing else can. I’m afraid I’m quoted on the back. I read it when it came out in 2007 and was so blown away by it I persuaded Kester to meet me to talk about it. This is the sort of story that can only be told in this form because so much of Oluwale’s subjective experience could only be represented by fictionalisation. It’s an insight into the times and the lives of people living in a culture that persecutes them.

7. Occupied City by David Peace This is the second book in the Tokyo Trilogy. It’s fiction but also weaves in the true story of a mass poisoning in 1948 known as the Teigin Incident. A man wearing medical uniform walked into a bank in downtown Toyko saying he was there to warn the workers about an outbreak of dysentery. He ordered the staff to take the medication issued. They did, but it was poison. Twelve of the people who drank it died and the bank was robbed. The book offers a glimpse into a world with a population so passive that they would take the poison, yet where the police and judiciary were so untrustworthy that the perpetrator is still in dispute over half a century later.

8. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote Really, the most famous on this list. Capote is a god and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. He claimed to have invented the genre of the non-fiction novel but, for me, that discounts all autobiography. He immersed himself in the case, extensively interviewing the murderers of a family slaughtered at a small Kansas farm. The conflicting loyalty almost broke him. It’s one of those books that shouldn’t work but, once started, cannot be abandoned.

9. The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer A fat book by an important man who hated women. I resented and enjoyed this Pulitzer prize-winning book about Gary Gilmore, published 13 years after In Cold Blood. It is very readable and set the conventions of the genre for a long time. It begins with a history of the geography and culture of the area, Gilmore’s family background, his early life and then moves onto his crimes and the consequences. If you like fat books by important men, you’ll love this.

10. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James It’s a stretch to include this glorious book because it pushes the parameters beyond a tale of individual criminality to fictionalise the crimes of nation states, governments and the CIA, but it covers the crack wars of the 1980s and the attempted murder of Bob Marley, attempting to make sense of the incomprehensible, which is surely what this form is all about.

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