#it is remarkably easy to exploit something with good intentions to your own ends

[bluewithpurplepolkadots]

I think the weirdest fandom criticism I keep seeing is the insistence that distaste for certain redemption arcs is solely based on Christian based ideas of purity and suffering and like while a part of me gets this idea, I’m kind of like… the religion that focuses on and is literally famous for forgiveness?

You don’t think those defending often criticised redemption arcs, don’t have any potentially similar blind spots which can show in really ugly ways? That they are somehow immune from such influences?

Christian forgiveness, sometimes takes it too far and can push it to the detriment of victims in their communities and beyond. Especially when the abuser is more powerful in some way in their community. (And let’s be real: abusers by definition always have more power in some way, it’s when they get up the nose of someone with more power than them or those people give a shit /enough people group together against it that sparks can fly).

While I have experienced the anxiety from ‘all sins being equal’ and the resulting guilt: it also has very famously gone the other way and had people downplaying really horrific stuff. To dismiss those hurt. For after all: ‘we’re all sinners’.

Rather like in some of these botched redemption arc stories where the villain and hero almost always have to be bosom buddies: it can have communities make the victim have to interact with the one who hurt them instead of being allowed to at least peace out without losing everything they have ever known. That this will allow access to future and past victims because forgiving means forgetting to them. (Or at least pretending to). Because having a missing stair for new members or those unaware is apparently also fine?

But only being for punitive and worthless punishment can have Christian roots? The reverse extreme doesn’t have this issue? Nah mate.

Like maybe it’s more that almost any major religion or philosophy has its good sides or even ideas you can understand the root/benefit of: but almost nothing is above being exploited or abused by those in power. There’s nothing immune from corruption.

Personal interpretations can go to bizarre lengths. Leaving interpretations up to others to do it for you has its own obvious issues. It’s life and it’s messy just in general. Even trying to find a middle ground between the two methods and discussion can be hard. And you are going to fuck up sometimes. There’s no easy trickty trick trick or perfect level you can keep to forever for perfect results every single time you have to make a decision. You can fail by refusing to make one too.

Christianity has major political and social powers itself in a wider society to the point it’s shaped it for centuries, even affecting non-believers internally in ways they don’t think about.

The perfect religion or philosophy does not exist. It never will. All you can do is the best you can and keep trying. And even then like I said: you’re going to fuck up.

A redemption arc isn’t always good or a good idea just because you projected onto/lusted after the character getting or not getting it. It isn’t always bad it happened because you can’t personally relate or like the character either.

[nataliaphantomhivesblog]

Newsflash: Dazai cares for Chuuya

Before reading any further, I will be talking about stormbringer, so spoilers ahead!! Translation credits go out to: @popopretty on tumblr, make sure to give this kind human some love and appreciation<3

Also if you want to read the first few chapters of stormbringer: @buraihatranslations is currently translating it, give them much love and appreciation as well, they deserve it!!

Honestly, I have been so obsessed with Soukoku lately and I think the reason behind this is because when it comes to Soukoku, their feelings for each other are not as easy to grasp as love or hate, it is much more profound than that. There is care, hurt, trust, resentment, companionship, bitterness, and consideration...And ironically enough, thats just the tip of the iceberg.

If we break down their individual feelings towards each other, it will be easier to understand their bond.

On Chuuya's end, his feelings are much more clear due to his expressive personality. He wears his emotions on his sleeves, he can try and hide what he feels towards Dazai but his true feelings tend to unravel easily.

He sometimes tries to mask his feelings towards Dazai by throwing insults, but his facial expressions are enough to contradict what he is saying.

Chuuya's feelings towards Dazai can be easier to comprehend. He obviously feels this certain betrayal due to the fact Dazai left the Port Mafia. Not to mention, he and Dazai have always had a rivalry relationship.

In the Soukoku wiki page, it is stated that Chuuya is aware of Dazai not experiencing a proper childhood, therefore allows him to act as childish as he can and lets him tease him relentlessly. I don't know how reliable this source is, but either way I think its worthy enough to add.

In the Dragon head conflict when Dazai was out of sight, Chuuya told Mori to forget about Dazai. That was until Hirotsu mentioned a microscope, Chuuya quickly realizes it was code language because he remembered a previous conversation where Dazai says he needs a microscope to be able to see Chuuya properly.

The moment he figured out it was a tracker, Chuuya did not hesitate to jump in and rescue Dazai. But here is the catch: No one but Chuuya knew about the microscope, if Chuuya really didn't care for Dazai he wouldn't have mentioned the microscope and kept all this under wraps, leaving Dazai in a mess.

Chuuya trusts Dazai with his life. He never hesitates to leave his life on Dazai's hands when it has to come to it. Chuuya and Dazai have known each other for years, for Chuuya to be able to trust Dazai that much is because Dazai also cares for him too, right?

The answer here is yes, Dazai cares for Chuuya. In a superficial level, it doesn't seem like Dazai truly cares, but I can assure you that he does care for him. Weather you like to think of his care in a platonic or romantic manner, the care Dazai has for Chuuya is undeniable and extremely significant for Dazai's character.

I think that stormbringer establishes this idea even further. There is one specific moment in this light novel that shows his genuine concern towards Chuuya's well being:

"There is one problem." Dazai cut off his sentence hesitantly. "It has nothing to do with the sucess rate of the plan. It is a matter we have to overcome in the end but... It may require some time to decide."

"What's with you?" Chuuya raised his eyebrows at Dazai. "Stop dramatizing it. Just hurry up and say it."

"I said earlier about this control spell to open the 'gate' that is used to reset the command inside Chuuya, right?" Dazai spoke with a strangely restrained voice. "If we use that, the logs of the command formula that were written in the past will be erased. That means...even if the memory erasure was used on Chuuya in the past, the traces of that will be erased as well."

"What?"

"I told you before right, the memory erasure command. The only way we can confirm if Chuuya is human or not is to check the history to see if the memory erasure command was ever used. It means..." Dazai looked at Chuuya with eyes that he had never looked at him before. Those eyes were serious. "If we use that control spell, the method to confirm if Chuuya is an artificial personality created by a string of code, or just a normal human being, will be lost. For good."

The time had stopped.

Chuuya opened his eyes and looked towards Dazai but his eyes were not seeing anything. The wind blew between the two of them. Even so, Chuuya did not blink.

"Verlaine became like that because he was tormented by the curse that he was not human. That only is enough of a big problem. The matter of being human or not." Dazai looked at his pocket watch, gave it a glance and continued. "I can delay the time until the plan starts for about two minutes. I will send an order for my men to wait... You can think about it alone for a while. Cuz I guess its hard for you to collect your thoughts with me around."

Having said so, Dazai turned away and walked down the stairs, leaving Chuuya alone.

Dazai fixated in his pocket watch. Two more minutes. Too short for a life decision. But he couldn't afford more than that.

Inside Dazai's head, he was planning a procedure to swith to an alternative plan in case Chuuya refused, at a tremendous speed.

This section in stormbringer is personally one of my favorites, this is a very rare moment between both of them, but especially for Dazai. Like I stated earlier Chuuya wears his emotions on his sleeves, therefore even if he tries to mask his care with insults, its still painfully noticable that he genuienly looks after Dazai. Chuuya also sometimes show a vulnerable side of himself to Dazai, especially after using corruption.

Dazai on the other hand is extremely unreadable. Its hard to understand his true intentions and if he really cares for people or only sees them as a pawn. In this moment though, Dazai was being painfully genuine. Dazai literally prioritized Chuuya over the mission. He was already thinking of coming up with an alternative plan just in case Chuuya refused, obviously the sucess rate of the alternative plan would be lesser than the actual plan Dazai had in mind, he choose Chuuya's wellbeing over a mission.

In this section, Dazai wasn't throwing jokes or witty remarks, he was being serious. Because Dazai knows how desperately Chuuya wants to be human. He knows how important being human is to Chuuya.

Dazai wasn't manipulating Chuuya by giving him the chance to decide, we can see that Dazai was literally showing a lot of hesitation when mentioning this to him, we also get to see what Dazai was thinking, and we can tell he wasn't thinking about manipulative his movements in any way. All of this wasn't coming out of manipulation, it was coming out of pure care.

After six steps, Dazai reached the stair. He stepped on the stair and started walking down. Three steps down the stair, he heard a *clang*, a cool sound of metal echoing behind him. It sounded like the metal was kicked by the sole of someones shoes. The moment Dazai realized what the sound was, Dazai turned around in surprise.

There was already no one at the top.

Dazai was dazed for a moment, then he loosened his lips and laughed.

"Trying to act cool, huh?" Dazai smiled, both annoyed and relieved. Then he turned on his radio and sent out his order. "Chuuya has sallied, everyone get ready for battle."

I personally love this part so much, relief washed over Dazai the moment he noticed that Chuuya was going to go through with the first plan, which proves my point that he wasn't manipulating him and how Dazai was under a lot of stress because he wasn't sure if the alternative plan would be as effective as his original one.

Yet he still was willing to go through the alternative plan if Chuuya refused, because Dazai values him and regards his wellbeing.

Dazai was being surprisingly gentle in this section, he was being honest. There was no ulterior motive behind his actions here, just a boy looking after his partner.

"So i'm going to send an order to my men to prepare for action... Is that okay?"

"Of course it's okay." Chuuya turned to Dazai. "Why are you asking me such a thing?"

Dazai didn't answer right away.

That was an unusual expression. It's like he was trying to say something, but he had to arrange the words in his head to decide where he should start. An expression he rarely shows.

This was right before Dazai drops the bomb to Chuuya about the memory erasure command. He was even asking for Chuuya's opinion on sending his men to get ready, this was the first time Dazai ever showed actual concern without masking it with witty remarks. You can tell that Chuuya isn't used to this.

And when you think about it, when Dazai and Chuuya have missions together, Dazai always uses corruption as a last resort and he always allows Chuuya to make the decision if they will be using it or not.

I personally belive that the main reason Chuuya trusts Dazai with using corruption is because The Sheep used to exploit his powers too much, but Dazai leaves the decision to use corruption up to Chuuya. Dazai understands the physical and mental toll corruption takes on Chuuya and therefore leaves the choice up to him.

Theres another section in stormbringer that I really enjoy, it doesn't necessairly show solicitude but I still think this should still be taken into consideration:

"You seem pretty confident that Chuuya is human, don't you?"

"I am," Dazai laughed with a sigh. "There is no way a man-made code could create such a personality that I detest so much."

Throughout the whole story, Dazai is more than determined that Chuuya is human. The main reason Dazai finds Chuuya so intresting is because of how frighteningly human Chuuya can be, because of the fact that he always wears his emotions on his sleeves, something Dazai rarely does himself. Thats personally a nice sentiment from Dazai's end, even when Chuuya struggles completely when it comes to believing in his own humanity, Dazai still can't help but see him as a human being.

Also I am aware that Dazai literally said he detests Chuuya here but he also sighed and laughed while stating this, showing us that he isn't being serious about hating him.

And its not only in stormbringer were he shows his concern towards Chuuya. In fact, in this following manga pannel Dazai is telling Chuuya that if he is willing to listen him, he will stage his own escape so that Chuuya doesn't get punnished.

Honestly, if Dazai didn't care enough for Chuuya, he wouldn't have mentioned this to him. Chuuya didn't care enough to realize that he literally unwillingly freed Dazai which would get the pm mad at him, so the fact that Dazai is literally helping him out is no doubt out of care for him. If Dazai didn't have any regard for Chuuya he would've not staged his escape or mentioned anything to Chuuya, eventually incriminating him.

There are many misconceptions when it comes to Dazai's feelings towards Chuuya, people think that he doesn't care for him due to the fact that he left the Port Mafia, leaving Chuuya behind. But heres the thing: Dazai's intentions had nothing to do with Chuuya. He left the organization for his own good, he left it to fullfill Oda's wish.

"If Dazai cared for Chuuya then why didn't he take Chuuya with him?" the reason is simple, he knows how much the PM means to Chuuya. In stormbringer it is shown that Chuuya feels as if his humanity is attached to the people he is loyal to, in this case its the port mafia. Verlaine wanted to get rid of the pm because he believed that the pm is what kept Chuuya's humanity, eventually making Chuuya believe that he is only human if he stays loyal to the pm. Dazai knows this. Thats exactly why he didn't take Chuuya with him or even explains to Chuuya why he left, he knows it would be selfish to basically rip Chuuya's sense of humanity apart.

I have a feeling that if Dazai told Chuuya about the real reason he left the Port Mafia, Chuuya will not only feel conflicted about being in the pm, but he would also have an inner conflict with himself as a human.

People also think Dazai may not really care for him because of the fact that after the fight against Lovecraft he actualy deserted him, maybe that part was truly just supposed to be seen as simple humor, but either way I want to talk about it. Chuuya's only request to Dazai was to take him back to base safe, so why did Dazai leave Chuuya behind?

I mean he has carried Chuuya back to saftey before with no problem, for example in stormbringer when Chuuya uses corruption for the first time Dazai carries him back to the billiards bar and not to the mafia’s base so that he could say goodbye to his passing friends.

The reson behind this is because Mori needs to know that unlike Dazai, Chuuya is absolutely loyal to him. Leaving Chuuya the way he did will make Mori believe that these two really are at each others throats and that Dazai is insignificant to Chuuya. Making it seem that for Chuuya, the mafia comes first before anything else.

Therefore Dazai established Chuuya's saftey within the mafia since not only does Mori want these two to be hostile with each other, he doesn't want Chuuya to eventually turn against him if he truly found out more about Dazai's true reason of departure. Then again, this isn't canon but it is a logical assumption.

Not to mention that although Dazai did leave him behind, he folded Chuuya's coat and hat before taking his leave. There is also an an extra chapter where Ozaki Kouyou was talking with Chuuya but when he left he forgot his coat, which made Kouyou came across the coat; where she noticed a badge sewed inside saying "Name: Hatrack", she smiled fondly thinking to herself that some things just never change, in this case, Dazai and Chuuya's bond.

Dazai literally took his time to sew this into his coat just to tease him, it was a simple gesture but it shows us how their dynamic will never change. No matter what these two go through, they will always share a bond that consists on teasing, trust and underlying care.

All of this actually makes that theory of Dazai planting a bomb under Chuuya's car for the sole reason that the PM doesn't find Chuuya as an acomplice who aided Dazai on his escape much more feasable.

For Dazai to just plant a bomb under Chuuya's car with no motive makes no sense because if Dazai's true intentions were to simply mess with Chuuya, he would've most likely made it clear at that time. Dazai always has an underlying motive behind his actions, and in this case it is very likely that he did that for Chuuya's sake.

Don't get me wrong, I am aware that the bomb incident could've just been a comedic moment and I shouldn't look too much into it, but there is still a posibility, right?

These two hold so much trust and care for one another, yet they also hold a lot of bitterness and resentment. In the end the good aspects of their dynamic outweighs the bad.

Either you see these two in a platonic or romantic way, you can't tell me that their bond isn't significant.

Thank you so much for reading!! I wanted to talk about this for a while because I feel like people misinterpret Dazai's feelings towards Chuuya a lot so I hope this clears up things a bit<3

[mostlycompetentwriter]

Can I request something for tmt? a one shot tho nothing too long I just love tmt jisung he’s my ideal type 🤧😂

Pairing: Fem!Reader x Han Jisung

Genre: Sequel; Drabble

Warnings: Smut and Language

There were two Jisung’s in my book.

The sweet, adoring version of him that I loved who brought me flowers from the store, or who spent long hours staying up with me late into the night to talk about whatever happened to cross our minds.

Then, there was the Jisung who called himself J.One.

The rapper version of him who commanded the stage with an intoxicating charisma, who winked and rolled his eyes as he moved with Chan and Changbin, gesturing to the crowd and ad-libbing into the microphone in unexpected bursts of energy.

He was impossible to resist, but he was all mine. And I had never felt so lucky in my entire life. Despite our rough start, I wouldn’t trade our relationship for anything in the world, and I had become a mainstay at his concerts.

Tonight’s performance ended with their new song, the one that was rapidly rising in the ranks on SoundCloud and garnering more YouTube videos than the average Among Us collaboration. I could tell that the crowd loved it, cheering and screaming even louder once the familiar bass dropped over the speakers. 

In these moments, it was easy to see why Jisung was so enamored with this world of underground music and late-night clubs and bars. 

“The one in the middle,” a girl yelled into my ear. “He’s really good!”

She was referring to Changbin and I forced myself to nod. “Yeah, he’s alright.”

As long as you don’t let him seduce you, I wanted to add, but perhaps it was better for the group’s image if I didn’t go into long-winded detail concerning Changbin’s exploits. Chan was no better, but at least he had the decency to feel bad and apologize. It made it easier to see him whenever I visited Jisung at their studio.

Changbin on the other hand? Well, he was still inclined to send me flirty looks and whisper rather inappropriate things that I doubt Jisung would want to hear. But that was an argument for another time.

Tonight was all about Jisung, and I could tell that the girl sitting next to me and her posh group of friends were shocked when Jisung and the rest of his group made their way over to me.

“Baby,” Jisung purred when he was close enough, sliding an arm around my waist before bringing me in for a passionate kiss.

It was enough to steal the breath from my lungs, and I pulled away to send a knowing look in the direction of the girls who were watching us with wide eyes and gaping mouths. “You were amazing!” I told Jisung, offering a friendly nod to Chan and Changbin who were already busy scoping out their exploits for the night.

“I feel amazing,” Jisung admitted, and then his mouth was next to my ear. “They gave me my own backstage room. Wanna see?”

“Of course,” I said, grinning because I knew that Jisung’s intentions extended far beyond merely asking me to admire his dressing room. 

“Come on,” he said, taking my hand and waving off Chan and Changbin who weren’t even cognizant that their third wheel was leaving with his girlfriend. Hopefully, to screw her brains out because I desperately needed it.

“Your new song was really popular,” I remarked casually as Jisung weaved us in and out of the crowd.

“Yeah?” he smirked. “We spent weeks working on it. I think Chan was ready to call it quits at one point.”

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t,” I said, feeling myself grow more excited as we disappeared behind the curtain partitioning off the rest of the grimy bar.

It was much less crowded in the back, and Jisung’s hand was already squeezing at my ass as he turned the knob on the door labeled with his name written in bright colors on a slab of wood.

But once we were inside, Jisung ensured that the door was locked before pressing me back against it, reclaiming my lips with desperation. “Slow down, baby,” I gasped between kisses, feeling my way down Jisung’s shirt to palm the tight bulge over his gold-colored pants.

They were skin tight on his lithe frame, and I knew that his erection was straining against the tight material. “Can I fuck you, baby?” Jisung asked, and I smiled the familiar shyness in his eyes, listening to him whimper as I continued to add more pressure against his cock.

“How can I say no to you?” I asked, loving that he was still inclined to act the part of the well-mannered boy who used to follow me around with discreet looks aimed in my direction.

“There’s a condom in my bag,” he said, reluctantly moving away to locate his stuff piled high against one of the chairs.

In the meantime, I wandered over to the stuffy gray couch tucked away in the corner, ignoring the smell as I hitched up my dress before bending over the back. “Sungie?”

“Yeah, ba-” he broke off with a stuttered moan, taking in the sight of me bent over for him just the way he liked. “Y/N,” he whispered, eliminating the space between us with three measured steps before his hands were tugging down my panties and squeezing the soft flesh of my ass. “So beautiful,” he said, and I shivered at the sound of him undoing his belt, pushing down his jeans to mid-thigh along with his boxers. 

“Are you ready?” I asked, reaching back to press two fingers into the gaping mess of my pussy, clenching and unclenching as I stretched myself out for him.

I was already wet just from hearing Jisung’s voice alone, admiring him dancing across the stage and, at one point, grinding against the floor.

Jisung groaned in reply to my question, ripping open the condom to tug it over himself. The motion was well-rehearsed at this point, even though he had fumbled the rubber a couple of times during the early part of our relationship. But we fit together like two essentials parts of a machine, and I almost knew his body as well as my own.

“I’ve got you,” Jisung said, pulling me out of my thoughts when he rubbed the tip of his cock against the entrance to my wet cunt.

“Please,” I practically begged him, and Jisung knew better than to tease me for longer than was necessary with our foreplay, and he was sliding home with a long, languid thrust of his hips that had me accommodating the size of his erection as my walls held to him tight. “You’ve got to give me more than that, Jisung!”

“More?” Jisung repeated, sounding a little more confident as he placed both hands on my hips. 

I nearly screamed when he started a frantic pace, fucking his cock in and out with perfectly timed thrust of his hips, rolling against my ass with every stroke. I could feel each drag of his erection, filling me so well, to the point where it felt like I could already burst from the friction rapidly building inside of me.

I clenched my hands tighter around the cushions in front of me, closing my eyes as my clit brushed against the rough texture of the couch with every penetration. He was stimulating every part of me, hitting my g-spot at the perfect angle, hitching one of my legs further up around his waist so that he could keep going, faster and faster until I started to grow light-headed from the pleasure.

“I’m close, Jisung,” I warned him, clenching down harder around him to ensure that he felt as much pleasure as I did.

His resounding moan was more than enough confirmation that Jisung was feeling every inch of me, and I could just imagine the look on his face: the concentrated scrunch of his nose and the thin bead of sweat that pooled atop his upper lip.

There was always something riveting about Jisung when he was fucking me, head tossed back and neck exposed. He always liked to watch the place where his cock was stuck inside, using his fingers to feel just how close were in those moments. Sometimes, he might stick his finger in alongside his erection, and that was enough to make me feel even fuller, like I could literally mold myself to him. 

The mental image alone was enough to stoke the flames licking at my loins, and I could feel my impending orgasm growing stronger by the minute, especially in conjunction with the loud squelching sounds of his cock hitting me between his rough grunts. 

It was dirty and obscene, and I tried not to think about the fact that anybody could walk by, including Chan and Changbin, and hear just how good Jisung was fucking me. 

But it was worth the risk, and there was nothing that could ever bring me closer to Jisung, practically feeling him touching my cervix with how deep he was reaching. Like he was determined to split me in half, using just his cock and fingers to completely break me down. 

I moaned at the thought, eyes rolling back into my head when Jisung suddenly wrenched back and slammed forward with a powerful thrust, forcing my back to arch even further as he gripped tighter to my ass. In response, I reached back behind me to catch Jisung’s hand, digging my nails into his palm as I suddenly erupted around him. Experiencing wave after wave of unmitigated desire as he fulfilled my deepest urges, grinding his cock against my ass as he moaned and whined in response. 

He rode me through my high carefully, sliding his cock gingerly between my pulsating walls, still chasing his own pleasure while remaining mindful of my oversensitivity. But I wanted to feel him cum more than anything, and I told him as much with an exaggerated moan that sent his hips stuttering twice against mine before I felt his release. Something warm and sticky, even though it was hard to appreciate the sensation with a thin layer of latex keeping him from leaking.

Still, I winced when Jisung pulled out, tossing the used condom into the trash as I reached back down for my panties to pull them back into place before falling onto the couch with a sigh. “Fuck,” Jisung cursed, using shaky hands to readjust himself, stuffing his spent cock back into his boxers and jeans. 

“Come here,” I said, holding out my arms and inviting him closer into my embrace, nuzzling at the thin layer of sweat building at the base of his neck, inhaling the musky scent of his cologne.

“So good for me,” Jisung said, turning around so that our noses brushed. “Did you like it?”

I smiled, wondering if there would ever come a day when Jisung didn’t question just how amazing he made me feel. “I always love it,” I told him sincerely, reaching out to push a wayward strand of hair behind his ear before leaning in close to whisper a kiss against the pucker of his addictive lips.

[willsimpforazula]

Sokkla Month Day 3: FMA:B AU

A/N: NGL i did toy with making sokka as mustang and azula as hawkeye but it be like it do. It was either this or Fate/Stay Night AU where someone needs a mana transfer (if you didn't know what a mana transfer is, good. pls stay pure) Anyways, without further ado-

Tunnels

Fifth Laboratory

Central City

As soon as Envy started to brag about how Ty Lee couldn't bring herself to shoot her wife in the face and the look of shock on her face, Sokka knew by the way her entire body was tensing up that this was not going to end well for both sides. While Envy was still oblivious, Sokka braced himself for the screams that were sure to follow the smug laughs.

"Congratu-fucking-lations Envy, you've just played yourself." Azula coldly smirked, her face in a sort of grin that reminded Sokka way too much of Kimblee that it sent a chill down his spine. Pocketing her gloves to reveal a transmutation circle etched into the top of her hand, she turned to look Envy in the eye before snapping her fingers.

Instantly, the room was filled with the agonizing screams of the homunculus as its tongue was set ablaze in a flash of turquoise. Glaring at Azula, she merely remarked "Remarkable, isn't it? After all, the human tongue has a rather high percentage of fat, which makes it oh so easy to burn."

Turning to the rest of the assembled group, Azula barked "Go find this Father guy, me and the lieutenant will deal with this sack of shit."

"You heard the man, let's go."

"But-"

"That's an order." Sokka barked to Aang.

"Look kid, we don't got much time." one of the Chimeras urged. Reluctantly, they started to move deeper and deeper into the tunnels. Before Envy could even move to block, it found itself on the receiving end of another sapphire barrage, scorching it from head to toe.

"So, you're the one who burnt Lust to a crisp." it huffed and puffed, as it spent the lives the Philosopher's stone contained to regenerate its health.

"Then you know just what kind of fate awaits you."

Enraged, it abandoned its human disguise and took on it's true form, a massive green hulking beast that had a host of faces stretching against it's very skin, their death masks an unnerving sight.

"I was just going easy on you, but now I'll make sure you and your pretty little boytoy there is going to- AHHH!FUCK!"

"You truly are a special kind of dumbfuck aren't you? First you openly brag about killing my closest friend, now you give me a bigger target to hit?" she laughed, before zapping him with rapid strikes that soon filled the air with smoke, soot and the ever familiar smell of burning flash that for a brief moment, transported Sokka back to that hot, blood-soaked sands of Ishval.

Sensing that it probably wasn't the best idea to hang around in the place where Lust got fried by her, it chose the only sensible option and ran on all fours into the labyrinth.

"Sokka, stay here. This one's mine to settle."

"She was my friend too!"

" Lieutenant Sokka Hawkeye , this is a direct order from your superior to stand down."

"Fine."

Turning to face the tunnels, she strode in with a singular purpose and aim. To avenge the death of Ty Lee.

-----

"Scar?"

"What is it?"

"I need to talk to you?"

"It's about the Colonel, isn't it?."

A nod. "I figured as much.", he sighed, "That face, the rage, I used to be like that long ago. The way I see it, she'll burn herself up long before she'll even get a chance to recover."

As if to emphasize his point, the sounds of Envy's tortured screams as it was relentlessly pursued echoed through the corridors. "Come, we need to keep moving." Reluctantly, Aang nodded and grit his teeth, steeling his heart to the blood curdling screams of someone getting burnt repeatedly.

-----

"Show yourself, you freak! Weren't you all high and mighty, boasting about your exploits, hmm? Too scared to pick on someone your own size?" she taunted, eyes peeled for any sign of movement.

"Come out come out wherever you are...or else I'll burn off your skin, bit by teensy bit, you worthless piece of crap." she continued, her voice raising by several octaves and taking on an almost sadistic tone.. Hearing the echoing cries and the almost  sing song taunts, Sokka could stand it no longer and headed down the tunnels, his pistol at the low ready.

------

Turning a corner, Azula heard an all too familiar voice call out "Hey there, Colonel." Snapping around, she saw Ty Lee standing in her uniform leaning nonchalantly against the wall, before she lunged at her. She won't dare to touch her, not if the-

Her thoughts were cut short as Azula's face, twisted with rage, blasted the lookalike with an unceasing torrent. For good measure, she even charred the cartilage in its left knee and burnt out the soles on the right foot in addition to singing its eyes.

"If you think I'm afraid of calling in fires danger close, need I give you a lesson in who I am?" her lips curling in a feral grin before blasting her once more. At this point, Envy knew better than to try and reason with her and ran. "So much for homunculi being the superior being."  she tutted, her face stained with traces of soot and ash that left black streaks on her  creamy white skin.

Taking respite in a mass of pipes, it spotted Sokka, who was looking for her, hoping against hope that she didn't completely lose herself. Even injured, it formed up a devious plan as it stalked him from the shadows.

"Fuck, this place is like a maze." he uttered, wandering through the tunnels. Hearing the sound of boots, he clung to the shadows. When the noise drew level, he aimed it at her face at the same time Azula pointed her fingers at him. For a brief moment, neither side let their guard down, before exhaling.

"Didn't I tell you to stay back?"

"I couldn't Colonel. Besides, someone needs to make sure you don't do something stupid."

"You're probably right. An extra set of eyes would be helpful."

Traveling a short distance, Sokka suddenly paused and leveled his gun at the back of her head.

"Do you know who your gun is pointed at?"

"Who? Don't make me laugh, when it's just us, the Colonel calls me by my first name." Turning to face her, Envy (who was disguised as Azula) smirked. "So you two really are that close huh." Letting out a small breath, Sokka executed a double tap to the chest and one to the head before replying "I lied."

Shrugging off his shots, Envy got back up and tried to rush him, but Sokka calmly slammed two rounds into the kneecaps, making it kneel on the ground as he leisurely holstered his dry gun and drew two more from his back, knocking out its arms and wrists before finally unslinging the rifle and giving the homunculus a dose of high speed lead poisoning.

Thoroughly pissed off, Envy lashed out and stabbed his shoulder, making him drop the rifle before it wrapped an appendage around him and smacked him upside the head. Before it could paint the walls with his grey matter, the real Colonel Azula arrived and toasted Envy, rendering its grip on him a pile of soot and ash.

"You truly are a glutton for punishment aren't you? First you kill my friend and boast about it, now you hurt my lieutenant? I swear I will burn you until you're nothing but a pile of ash and dust. And I've got all the time in the world, you miserable rat." Even as she spoke, her fingers snapped like a machine gun setting it ablaze over and over again.

"How many lives you've got left? Six? Sixty? Six hundred? No matter, it's all the same to me. Tell me, how does it feel to get your ass roasted by the very same person who killed Lust in the very same way?"

"Why you-GAH!!!"

"Stop, please!"

"What, not hot enough? I'll gladly crank up the heat. Stay back lieutenant, it's going to get a little toasty in here." Like a well oiled machine, her snap came almost naturally and any humanoid form of Envy was finally turned into cinders, whilst the tip of her gloves were starting to char and smoke. From the ashes, a green six legged slug-esque creature crawled away, it's squeaking voice lamenting at having been reduced to this form once again.

Without hesitation, Azula applied pressure on the offending creature, before commenting "So this is your true form. What a pathetic little being."

"P-Please-don't kill me!" it begged.

"Envy means jealousy, does it not? Well then, you won't have anything to be jealous of very shortly."

"Nooo please I don't want to die, not like this!!" it screeched.

Before Azula could turn the hapless homunculus into the next life, a sound of a hammer being cocked gave her paused.

"And just what do you think you're doing?"

"That's far enough. I'll handle it"

"What does it matter if it's me or you that deals the final blow? The fucker is going to die regardless, so lower your weapon."

"No. I cannot obey that."

"I will not ask again."

"Put your damn hands in the air, now!"

A burst of alchemically created earth wave soon took the decision making away from them as it launched it right into Aang's hand, who kept a vice like grip on it.

"Nice of you to drop by. Now hand it over."

"No."

"This is a direct order by a superior officer, hand it over."

"No."

"Are you asking for a fight and a court martial?"

"Bring it on by all means. But take a good look at yourself and ask, is this the face you want to lead Amestris with?!"

"Kill it if you wish, what right do I have as someone who has done the same. But I shudder to think what kind of world such a person held prisoner by their desire for vengeance would create." Scar added.

"Colonel, I have no intention of letting that slimeball live to see the next sunrise but please, this is not your fight anymore."

"No, you don't understand! I finally ran the bastard down, the bastard who killed Ty Lee! I-"

"But still, I cannot let you do something so reckless! Justice is what she needed, not this blind hatred for her killer. If this is how you act if one person wrongs you, what then will you do if a region or hell, another nation crosses you? Will you turn it into another Ishval? No, I will not let you."

"Please, let it go. I know you're better than that, Azula. I'm begging you, please!" "Go on, do what you need to. Then what?"

"Then it'll be the second last shot I'll ever take. After that, what else is there to live for?"

"No, that won't happen. That can never happen." Summoning her rage, she loosed off an intense jet that blackened the walls of a nearby tunnel, it's heat making everyone sweat like a hot August day.

Looking at the people around her, she remarked "Ironic, isn't it? Scolded by a child, lectured by a man who has all the right to seek vengeance against me for the crimes against his people and you, you-"

"-I've done it again." she ended mournfully. Clasping the hand that was still pointing at her, she gently lowered it down, saying "I've hurt you. Please, forgive me.", before kneeling at his feet, covering her face as the waterworks were out in full force. Holstering his derringer, he too dropped to his knees, and held her in his arms as she cried into his shoulders.

"Azula, I forgive you." he whispered in her ear, all caution and decorum thrown right out of the window as he rubbed her back in small circles.

"Really?" she looked up with red rimmed golden eyes.

"Really."

"Thank you, Sokka. For pulling me back from the abyss. I love you."

"I love you too, my little firecracker."

"Goddamnit Lieutenant, I can't believe you lied to me!" Envy squeaked.

"Shut up you pipsqueak, who gave you the right to speak!" Aang scolded, making it shrink back in fear.

"Hey Azula?"

"Yes?"

"We still got a transmutation circle to stop."

"Right."

"The usual place, 8 pm tomorrow evening?"

"As long as you're the one footing the bill."

"Deal. Now let's go."

[treatian]

The Chronicles of the Dark One: Breaking the Curse

Chapter 42: Playing Both Sides

The arraignment went well, or at least as well as could be expected. Mary Margaret was to be held in the county jail without bond until the date of her trial. If convicted of murder, she would be taken to a state prison outside of Storybrooke to serve her sentence. If found innocent, she would be released. He had no intention of things ever getting that far, of course. But just because he didn't want things to get that far didn't mean he wouldn't go along and not make it look good. When they stood before the judge, he made a motion to dismiss a jury and instead take a judgment from the judge himself. It was a risky move that most lawyers wouldn't gamble with. He, however, wasn't interested in gambling. He just wanted to get this sham over and done with. A trial involving a jury meant that jury summons had to be sent out weeks ahead of time, accommodations had to be made, selections had to be processed, all before getting to trial…he didn't have time for that. Foregoing a jury meant that in two days, by the end of the week, Mary Margaret could be on trial, and Kathryn could be freed, and this could be over. He would be happy about that.

But first, he had a dance to get on with, one where both Emma and Regina trusted him to do their bidding. He had to keep Emma's suspicion on Regina. In fact, he needed it to be even worse than it was now. And as far as Regina went, he just had to keep her thinking he was on her side so that she'd never suspect he was working against her. Only then, once all this was over, would Emma make herself enough of a nuisance that Regina would properly turn her attention back to her. Only then could the breaking of the Curse begin to move forward again.

It was going to be one hell of a dance.

Regina was, of course, present at the arraignment. She and Emma sat in the back of the small courtroom as Spencer accused Mary Margaret of murder, and he reminded Mary Margaret to enter her "not guilty" plea. He made his argument that Mary Margaret was hardly a threat, that she had no family outside of Storybrooke and no means to flee. Spencer did his job in reminding the court that she had very few connections in Storybrooke, and there wasn't much to keep her here. He'd lost, as he knew he would. Regina still wasn't happy. As Emma led her away back to the prison, the Mayor had approached him, finally wondering why he was doing this, why she wasn't well on her way outside of Storybrooke by now. He assured her with a calm smile as if everything were perfectly under control even though he needed to take an aspirin for the headache it gave him every time he thought of it.

"Worry not, your Majesty. There's more than one way to get a person to cross the town line."

He was about to do something stupid, something that no defense lawyer would ever do to their client. But…was it stupid if he knew he was going to do it? If he didn't mean for it to go so far? Was it stupid if it was part of a strategic move?

A pre-trial interview with the prosecution was always a bad idea. It only gave the prosecutor more fuel to throw on the fire, rarely did it ever solve anything. But if he wanted Regina to trust him in this, then he was going to have to do something stupid. He was going to have to take a planned misstep. He was going to have to let Mary Margaret hang herself with the knowledge that at the end of the day, she wasn't going to be blamed for any of this. Regina was. Emma would suspect Regina, Regina would get away with it, Emma would be angry, the feud would be reestablished.

He needed a bigger bottle of aspirin.

Spencer agreed to the interview the next day. He didn't know a prosecutor who wouldn't have said "yes" to that offer. He didn't need to tell Regina that; he assumed that Spencer would inform her, and she'd be pleased when she heard the news. Mary Margaret would be easy enough to convince, seeing how she was so terrified and pliant in this personality she'd be Cursed into. Convincing this was a good idea with Emma, on the other hand…

"A pretrial interview with the prosecution?" Emma blanched, standing between him and the bars of Mary Margaret's cell as if she could protect her friend from him and this utterly insane idea. If this trial were real, with a real risk of incarceration, he probably would have done the same thing in her shoes. "Explain to me how that is a good idea."

"The D.A. merely wishes to ask Miss Blanchard a few questions."

"She's done answering questions. And why are we kissing up to the D.A.? Why aren't we going after Regina? She's the one who's setting up Mary Margaret."

"And what proof do we have of that, Sheriff?!" he replied, raising his voice. He had a million other things to do, a million other things he'd rather be doing, but he'd started this rouse; he had to finish it. The shovel and the shard were still out there, undiscovered as far as he knew. Maybe if he got her angry and desperate, it would be enough for her to finish her job and find what was right under her nose! Maybe anger would be enough to get her to search under every fucking rock in Storybrooke to find her proof! "Just because you found the Mayor's skeleton key in the cell doesn't mean we can prove she put it there."

"So, what's your plan?" Emma asked.

"I believe our best chance of winning this case is to employ our most valuable asset."

"What's that?" Mary Margaret asked.

"Well, that's you, dear," he muttered, stepping forward, keeping his tone calm and sweet despite the frustration he felt toward Emma. "A sweet, kind, elementary school teacher. Doesn't exactly fit the prototype of a killer, now, does it?" It was a common legal move in these sorts of cases. When the evidence was stacked against the defendant, then put their character on trial. Mary Margaret's personality and reputation, despite the evidence against her, should speak for itself. Of course, if Kathryn didn't make a show before then, the judge would still have no choice but to convict her on the evidence, which was exactly why Emma needed to go out and find more of it against Regina! A good show was all this was. Until it was over, it was just a good show, carefully staged.

"That's how you're going to get her acquitted? By using her personality?"

"Perception is everything, Miss Swan, not just in the courtroom, but in life. As such, I'm sure you can imagine how the jury would perceive Miss Blanchard if she agreed to cooperate with the District Attorney." There was no jury, just a judge, but he wanted her to remember that proving her innocent was about convincing more than one person outside of the courtroom walls. "These things engender trust. It shows the jury she's at least trying-"

"Emma?" Sidney Glass's voice cut through his remarkable bullshit story, and the three of them turned to look at the former writer for the Mirror. So…either Emma had hired him after all, or this was a wonderful coincidence. He fought back a smile. Either way, he could work with it. He had plans for all of this, and Sidney Glass fit into it in his own way. He knew Regina too well. "Oh, I'm sorry to interrupt. I just, uh, came by to drop these off. I thought they might brighten the place up."

Emma and Sidney dismissed themselves into her office, and Mary Margaret approached the bars of her cell so they could continue to talk. He kept talking, but he really wasn't listening to what came out of his mouth, just repeating facts that he knew wouldn't matter because, in the end, Mary Margaret would do what he recommended; it was in her nature, the very character Mr. Gold wished to exploit. So no, he wasn't really thinking about Mary Margaret. He was thinking about those flowers he'd seen. A vase of flowers. He had an idea. One that would push Emma closer to Regina if she failed to look in the woods for the shovel. Lucky how sometimes these things just fell into his lap.

"I'm going to do it," Mary Margaret predictably informed Emma when Sidney left, and she returned to them. "I'm going to talk to the D.A."

"Are you sure?" she asked, looking between the pair of them.

"Mr. Gold's right. I know I have nothing to hide, but no one else does. I need to let people see me for who I am."

"Excellent decision, Miss Blanchard." And it was excellent timing on the part of Albert Spencer, the former King George. He always was a prompt one. "My name is Spencer. I'm the District Attorney. Shall we begin?"

And there she was, Regina Mills, striding in behind him with a slight smile on her face. Whether it was because Spencer had explained how stupid this move was and she was coming to trust him again or because she was losing trust in him, he didn't know just yet. He just took a breath and kept up the dance.

"Yeah," Mary Margaret breathed with a smile. As the five of them went to an interrogation room, he glanced to the vase of flowers on Emma's desk. Any lack of trust they possessed was warranted as he typed out a quick text message to the bird keeping an eye on Sidney to fetch one of his bugs from his home quietly.

The pressure he was under wasn't physical, but it felt physical. He felt like he could feel it weighing his shoulders down, pressing against his lungs, making it hard to breathe. Everything he did was for someone else's benefit. Every word, every action, even the smallest tick and slightest gesture, the very tone of his voice, it was all done for someone else. It was a delicate balance.

Insisting he be in the interview with Mary Margaret, that was for Emma. And for Mary Margaret, he supposed. But using a gentle tone, not one that was frightened or angry, was done for Regina to make her think that if Spencer opposed the action, which he wouldn't, then he would step down. The carefully timed stare he gave Regina before going into the room with Mary Margaret was for Regina. A gesture of trust and understanding that he hoped would fool her into thinking he had her best interest at heart, not Mary Margaret's. The quick glance he gave to Emma was for the Savior, something that hopefully conveyed a message of guilt as they tried not to look like they were in on this together.

Emma and Regina watched the interview from behind the glass. Inside the room with Spencer and Mary Margaret, he reminded his client that he would tell her what she could and could not answer and told her that she should always be truthful.

"I have nothing to hide," she stated confidently. It was good. Pride always went before the fall.

The questions Spencer began with were innocent enough. What was her relationship with Missus Nolan? What was her relationship to David? How did she feel about him? When had the relationship turned into something more than friendship? Mary Margaret answered each question perfectly; without emotion, directly, deliberately…she truly left nothing to the imagination. She would have been any other lawyer's dream. But then, after being lured into a false sense of security, the questions turned a bit more deadly. He didn't object. For Regina.

"Did you and Mr. Nolan ever talk together about what to do concerning his wife?"

"Yes, several times, it was an issue of contention between us."

"Why was that?"

"Because neither of us wanted to hurt her."

"Miss Blanchard," he warned for Emma's sake.

"Hurt her, physically?" Spencer pressed.

"No!" Mary Margaret breathed. "No, nothing like that! Well…I mean…"

"Obviously, they never wished physical harm on her," he answered for Mary Margaret, giving her a slight message and a moment to calm down and get her head together.

"I'd like to hear that from her."

"Of course," she answered, her nerves suddenly under control once more. "Neither of us wanted to hurt her physically or emotionally. But I didn't like going behind her back. I wanted David to tell her about us so that we could truly be together and stop sneaking around."

"And David?"

"He couldn't do it. Not at first. She eventually did find out."

"I see, and…" Spencer looked down to check some of his notes before returning his gaze to her. "After she learned about your affair, Missus Nolan, the deceased, came to your school to confront you. Is that correct?"

"She was hurt, and she felt betrayed."

"She struck you, in the face, was it?"

"Yes, but-"

"That must've made you angry."

"You…you don't have to answer that," he insisted. It was a dance indeed, being watched by the two women he was working with and for and against. He had to push Mary Margaret for Regina but not look incompetent before Emma. He'd let enough questions slide, and fortunately, that one was innocent enough that he had a feeling Mary Margaret wouldn't exactly listen to legal counsel.

"No, it's okay," she assured him. Predictable. "I was not angry. I was sorry for all the pain I had caused her."

"Miss Blanchard, this is not a courtroom," Spencer pressed. "I'm not here to judge you. You can be honest with me."

"Shall we end this?" he muttered hardly loud enough for anyone to hear. Careful.

"I am being honest with you," Mary Margaret insisted.

"The wife of the man you loved humiliated you in a public forum. Surely, you must have felt some anger towards Kathryn?"

"Yes, I was angry-"

"And did you ever think about acting upon that anger?" he questioned, interrupting her again. He let that one go for Regina; he let Mary Margaret get worked up.

"Of course not," she spat out.

"I have a hard time believing that."

"Wh-why?" she gasped, her anger growing. He didn't interrupt, also for Regina.

"Because you wanted Kathryn Nolan gone."

"I never said that."

"All right," he insisted, getting to his feet. That move was for Emma. And Mary Margaret, though Regina would see it as acting. Hadn't she learned…everything was an act with him. "My client is answering no more questions for the day."

"Your client agreed to this interview because she claimed she had nothing to hide."

"I don't have anything to hide," she shouted back at Spencer, who continued. He didn't stop it.

"Then, what is your answer? You wanted Kathryn gone, didn't you?"

"No."

"Even after she tried to keep you and David apart? After she slapped you in public? After she made you a pariah in your own town?"

"Yes, of course, I wanted her gone," Mary Margaret laughed suddenly, sarcastically. "She was the only thing keeping us apart. So, yeah, I wanted her gone. Is that what you want to hear?"

He shut his eyes and looked up at the ceiling. Another act. He'd wanted something like this to happen. He wanted it to happen because he knew Regina would see it as the victory it would have been if he hadn't fixed the whole thing. She would leave. And he could get on to his business. By tonight…her so-called confession wouldn't matter.

[kailerathien]

Idle Hands...

"'Ey!  Watch where yer goin', elf!"

Kai grunted as a heavy shoulder collided with her own, jostling the stack of books she'd haphazardly stuffed under one arm; the tome responsible for her distraction tumbling out of her hand entirely.

A nearly invisible tendril of inky magic caught the book before it could hit the dusty Dalaran street.  Annoyance won out over gratitude for the conspicuous manner in which it'd been saved, and Kai shot a glare at her younger sister, yanking the text free and shooing its eerie savior with a hiss.  Her sibling, intent on the man who had interrupted their return from the book shop, offered little more than what she probably assumed was an innocent smile.  Even after years of practicing the expression, Avalara looked as she always did when she got her way, like a very unsubtle cat who had made no effort to remain silent while hunting, and then devouring, the canary.

"Well?! What 'ave ya got ta say fer yerself?!"

Kai was drawn out of her own thoughts, where she'd honestly been spending entirely too much time of late, by the human's gruff demand.  

He stood at least a head taller than the pair, his pronounced glower all but casting a shadow of its own.  Dressed in worn, dirty leathers, a string of pelts tied to his belt, he appeared to be returning from a hunt.

"Smells like it too," Ava remarked in quiet Thalassian.

Kindly stay out of my head.  Remember, I know where you sleep, Kai thought tersely.

That's hardly a threat, considering the access you allowed me to your mind in a bid to protect yourself and your friends from that shadow priestess.  Should you try to harm me, I could take control of you as easily as a puppeteer with a marionette.

First, I've heard that puppeteering isn't as easy as you would make it out to be.  Second, perhaps you would be swayed to know that I've provided the key to our vault to a friend, and warned that she should only return it to me if she can confirm that I am of sound mind?  She is a practitioner of the holy arts, by the by.

You. Bitch.

Smoothing her brief, victorious grin into an apologetic smile, Kai offered in Common, "I'm really very sorry about that, I didn't mea-."  The words were, of course, cut short as a calmly scathing voice trod rudely over her own.

"Perhaps, brutish human, you ought to mind your own surroundings.  Or better yet, keep your loutish presence out of civilization until you've bothered to bathe.  Count yourself lucky that my sister touched you at all; she's no doubt a far sight more beautiful than whatever hound awaits you at home."

"Not really a compliment..." Kai muttered dryly.  

The heavily accented words had, what Kai imagined, were their desired result.  Thick brows snapped together in rage, an ominous thud resounding as the heavy boots of the man carried him into Avalara's personal space.

Avalara winced, though not from any emotion approaching fear, her fine-boned features adopting a long-since perfected expression of disgust. "Oh dear, that's not a good look for you at all, what with that already heavy brow.  Really, you are doing yourself no favors."

"Alright, Ava, that's enough,"  Kai sighed.  Given the time she'd been forced to spend with her youngest sibling, she'd grown uneasily accustomed to her violent antics and could usually head them off before any deaths occurred.  Usually.

"What'd ya say 'bout me, bitch?" the human snarled.

"Gods, don't tell me that along with that face, you've been denied the ability to understand simple phrases?  You poor man," Avalara drawled, each falsely saccharine word barbed with carefully measured acid.

"Listen here..."  The man's fists clenched at his sides before one came to rest on the large axe hanging at his hip.  "You think yer better 'en me?"

"Oh darling, I know that I am," Ava replied with a smile that could have frozen every fountain in Silvermoon solid.  "So why don't you be a good boy and apologize to my sister for your inevitable, but still quite churlish, behavior and we can be on our way."

"You think I'm gonna apologize to the likes of you? Ha!  You're lucky I don't--"

The shadows that had coiled faintly, restlessly about the priestess' fingers suddenly thickened, obscuring her hands as she stepped forward.

"Would you care to know what I think," Avalara murmured in a low, hypnotic tone.

The human blinked several times, shaking his head.  "The fuck are you doin' to me?" he demanded, his tone colored with confusion.

"Ava you've had your fun.  That's enough.  You're going to draw attention," Kai murmured, glancing around uncomfortably.  She recognized the look in her sister's eyes; hungry, angry, just slightly insane.  There was only so much trouble she could buy their way out of.

"I think, that you are having an absolutely terrible day," Avalara continued, felflame eyes that shone a touch too brightly boring into the hazy blue gaze of the human.  "Oh darling, it's not just a day is it?  Your wife and children, gone.  Nothing left to your name after you gambled everything away."

"Ava, enough," Kai demanded more insistently, reaching for the sleeve of her sister's robes.   A cold tendril of shadow caught her wrist, holding fast, before she could make contact.

"How'd ya know about...  Ahhh! Stop it!  Get outta my head!" The man caught his head in his hands, terror and agony warring for moments upon his scarred features before his expression went slack, hands dropping back to his sides as his eyes stared distantly at nothing in particular.

"Now, let's try this again, shall we?  Apologize to my sister."  The words reverberated with hollow command, and though she was no mage, Kai could feel the power behind them ringing down to her bones.

Something awful shone, for just a moment, in the man's gaze as it swung toward her, the briefest hint of his true consciousness, rage and helplessness combined, before it faded, tamped down by the control her sister had upon his mind.

"Ava..."  Kai's low voice shook slightly.  For all that she had experienced on the battlefield, there was something about the shadow magic that seemed to drive all of its wielders slightly mad that still made her incredibly apprehensive.

"I'm awfully sorry for bumpin' into ya, miss."

"Good boy," Avalara cooed.  "Now that that's taken care of, let's end your miserable, suffering existence, hm?  You'd be so much better off, as would we all.  Wouldn't that be nice?  Not having to wake up every morning to recall what an utter failure you are?  How your mistakes destroyed everything you've ever loved.  And it would be so simple, too.  All you have to do is walk straight to the edge of the city... and keep going."

"Keep going," the man agreed quietly with a nod, turning abruptly away from the pair.

The enormity of what was about to happen shook Kairielle from the trance she seemed locked in.  "Enough!" she snapped, wrenching her hand free of the bruising grasp of the shadows and catching her sister's arm roughly.  Though it took all of her strength, she managed to drag the priestess back several feet.

"You spoil all of my fun," Avalara complained, blinking slowly as she looked away from the man.

He seemed stunned for several long moments, peering bleerily at the two Sin'dorei women and his surroundings.

"Get out of here, now," Kairielle urged.

His dumbfounded gaze swung toward Avalara, seeming to silently seek her permission on the matter.

"Ava, I mean it."  She gave her sister a hard shake.  "Let him go.  Now.  Entirely."

"Yes, go on," Ava sighed dismissively.  "Before I change my mind."

Still seeming unsure of what had just happened, the human rubbed absently at the back of his neck before turning and stumbling away.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?!" Kai demanded as the door to their small apartment swung open.

"You have eyes, and you would lead me to believe a brain, have you not," Ava replied neutrally, draping herself artfully across the expensive chaise she'd insisted upon purchasing.  The sitting room was an odd clash of their two natures; expensive furniture and curios crowded with books and armor, a well-worn (disgusting, Ava had called it) chair tucked beside the mantle.

Tossing her books onto said chair, Kai rubbed her forehead with a long suffering sigh.  "You could have been seen!  We were in the middle of the street!  And honestly, Ava, bumping into someone is hardly a crime worthy of death."

"If you say so," Ava muttered, retrieving a catalogue of undergarments she'd received from Silvermoon and thumbing through the glossy pages.  "You know, we didn't have such problems in Silvermoon.  If you'd only allow us to return home--"

"We are home, so get used to it," Kai snapped irritably, throwing herself into the chair where only moments before she'd tossed her books.  Cursing vividly beneath her breath, she tossed a few of the tomes across the room.

Avalara gasped dramatically.  "Honestly.  If you keep that up, they'll revoke your librarian membership."

"This is serious, Ava.  You can't keep this up.  You think you hide your little... exploits so well, but all it takes is one person.  One person could mean the end of everything we've built here."

"Do calm yourself, sister dear.  No one is going to catch me.  Should anyone think of turning me in,"  she smiled coyly over the edge of the pages she held, "Rest assured that I can... Change their mind."

"And what of the... overnight guests that you bring home?  Can I trust that they are willing participants in your little games?"

"Now you're just insulting me.  Of course they are willing."

"Actually willing?  Or willing because you've made them so?" Kai pried, never one to foolishly take her sister at her word.

One corner of Ava's lips tugged upwards.  "This may come as something of a shock to you, considering your swift descent into spinsterhood, but I don't need my magic to convince others to do my bidding."

"You expect me to believe that all of the men--"

"And women," Ava interjected slyly.

Kai rolled her eyes.  "All of the people that you bring home are willing participants in... Whatever it is you do with them?"

"Well, first I tie them up, with my magic if they're feeling particularly advent--"

"I don't want to know!" Kai exclaimed, jumping to her feet, a hint of color warming her freckled cheeks.

"Too easy," Ava sing-songed, her gaze flicking back to the catalogue she held.

"Look, I know you want to return to Silvermoon, and we will.  In due time."

"When?" Avalara pressed.

"When I think it's safe."

"And when will that be?  When your precious Horde is under the rule of someone both competent and sane?"  Felbright eyes peeked over the edge of a page.  "Don't get me wrong, I enjoy destruction as much as the next girl, but my deeds don't usually result in war.  First Garrosh and now Sylvanas?  Do you think it's too late to ask if the Alliance will have us?"

"It doesn't matter now, we can't change the past," Kai muttered, reaching for one of her fallen books and settling into her chair.  It didn't sit well with her when her sister's thoughts so clearly echoed her own.

"Not with that attitude, we can't."

"Can you just try to behave?  For a while longer?"

Kai pinned her sister with a look.  Though they disagreed, often and bitterly, about nearly everything, there had always been a quiet understanding that when it came to the truly important things, they could rely on one another.

It was a shame that they rarely agreed on what was important.

Sighing heavily, Avalara gave a small nod, lying through her teeth as she replied,  "Of course.  I'll be good.  For now."

[madstars-festival]

Q&A: MIKE SUNDA, MULLENLOWE JAPAN (AD STARS 2019 SPEAKER)

Mike Sunda is Strategy Lead at MullenLowe Group, Japan and the brains behind Tokyo 20XX – a cultural insights specialism that connects brands with Tokyo’s creator communities. In this interview with Branding in Asia, written by reporter Lee Patten, he hints of his upcoming talk at AD STARS 2019 - it’s not-to-be-missed!

Before Mike Sunda joined MullenLowe Group, he wrote about Japanese culture for global publications including the BBC, Vice, and The Japan Times, often taking on subject matter long ignored by the domestic press in Japan.

Today, he’s bringing his cultural insights to MullenLowe’s clients as an expert in forging meaningful, sustainable and supportive collaborations with Japan’s creator communities and street cultures. He’s also coming to AD STARS 2019 next month, where he’ll explain how non-sponsor brands can leverage the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics. 

You’re going to be giving a talk at AD STARS 2019. Can you give us a sneak preview of what the talk is all about?

I’m going to start with a clip of Alex from Glastonbury, and I’ll end up by referencing Akira. Somewhere in the middle, there’ll be concrete tips for how non-sponsor brands can benefit from Tokyo 2020 via mutual growth opportunities from proximal cultural scenes and creator communities. But you’ll have to turn up to find out how that all fits together.

You’ve been in Japan for 11 years now, joining MullenLowe in Tokyo in 2015. Do you speak Japanese at work?

It hasn’t quite been a full decade as I spent a few years back London completing a BA in Japanese, but I did indeed first move to Tokyo 11 years ago and have spent the vast majority of my adult life living here. On the plus side, that means I speak Japanese fluently (and have no excuse not to). On the downside, I’m probably still using London slang that died out in the late-2000s. 

At MullenLowe, we have a remarkably diverse team for a relatively small office. The expectation is that all non-native Japanese-speaking hires have learned the language (or commit to learning), which is rare for an international agency and one of the main factors that shape our internal culture. It’s also a clear statement that although we might be part of a global network, we expect to be judged on our understanding of local sensibilities ultimately. 

Our ‘official’ language in the office is Japanese, but English-language meetings and brainstormings are common. It’s a set-up that means there’s almost always going to be people contributing in their second language, on either side, but I’d say it’s worth it for the patience and empathy that it nurtures as a process. 

You once wrote a piece for the BBC about the Shibaura abattoir and the Burakumin ‘untouchable’ class. When examining such a deeply ingrained story of prejudice and caste, was it easier to write from the outside as someone not brought up within Japanese society? 

In a field like journalism, you have to acknowledge that while you might lack the same structural benefits (press clubs, for instance) that the domestic media have access to, you’re also afforded a lot of other privileges. The fact that I am an outsider means that I am not necessarily critiqued as harshly for reporting on what might be perceived as an ‘anti-nationalist’ topic. 

Even if I am, I have support networks and opportunities outside of Japan, which local journalists might not, which makes my situation far less precarious. In that respect, I think that you can make the most of that privilege to broach taboo topics, and raise awareness where appropriate – in this case, for a group of people both marginalised within society but also rendered broadly voice-less within the domestic mediascape. 

Does that transfer to your work now with MullenLowe? Does being from the outside give you insight you might not have had as a native?

Absolutely. I think the outsider perspective is always a useful one, just as people who have taught themselves a second language can often make better teachers than native speakers. You pick up on parts of the social, cultural, or even linguistic fabric that might go unnoticed if that’s all you know. In the case of advertising, that doesn’t just apply to nationality. Especially in Japan, when salaried office work clearly represents the hegemony. 

We have native Japanese speakers from so-called ‘unconventional’ backgrounds – be it international education or diverse lifestyles and professions – who also have to grapple with being an outsider in a society that has historically not made it easy. 

Does advertising have a responsibility to pay its way when it comes to using popular culture and creator communities to sell brands?

The reality is that the advertising industry piggybacks upon cultural and creator communities. If it didn’t, we’d never produce interesting or relevant work en masse. It’s only rarely that original work comes out of the industry that comes anywhere close to having the sort of cultural impact as what emerges organically outside of the industry. 

This means there’s a responsibility to compensate the people who actually create culture, especially given that advertising struggles to embed diversity or reward maverick creativity in its own internal structures. 

Long story short: put as much money back into culture as you’re able to do. Otherwise, you’re doing nothing to sustain creator communities, which increasingly struggle to monetise their work for reasons that go far beyond advertising. 

A lot of neighbourhoods in Tokyo will be impacted by the 2020 Olympics. How will this impact Tokyo’s creator communities?

I’m very interested in the work of cultural theorists like Michel de Certeau. He describes how a city’s inhabitants rewrite its supposed ‘rules’ through their movements.

At Tokyo 20XX, we produced a series of short-form documentary videos in 2017. The videos were made with a view to look at creator scenes through the specific lens of a neighbourhood culture – in this case, Shibuya. 

The interesting thing about an area like Shibuya is that it inherently possesses the power to inspire people, creatively. We spoke to dancers and skateboarders who talk about the desire not just for communal gathering spots, but also to be ‘seen’ by spectators in a dense, urban context that only a neighbourhood like Shibuya can offer. 

Likewise, musicians are attracted to the area not just because of its clubs and live venues, but because it has a natural energy that suits their creative process. 

So will the Olympics impose on Shibuya’s creative energy? 

The tension is that the Olympics is responsible for catalysing so much infrastructural development, which upsets the organic growth of these scenes and communities. In the case of Shibuya, building over parks and implementing stricter policies towards street sports and nightlife is cultural gentrification – creator communities will be forced to make their hubs in other areas, but the fragmentation can hinder their growth and momentum in the short-term.

Given that the local Shibuya government publicly pushes a message of diversity and creativity, it needs to take care not to destabilise the very conditions that are necessary for those two things to thrive.

Do you think brands have the ability to change the world in a similar way to journalism by changing peoples’ perceptions and behaviours?

I hope so! It’s not as if journalists are necessarily trusted these days, so the challenges are similar – how do you build that trust with your audience? You can only do that if you’re consistent with your message and standpoint. 

It’s why I’m impressed, not sceptical, when Nike champions Colin Kaepernick and Raheem Sterling, or Lush decides to tackle something as controversial as SpyCops – because it’s definitely not an easy win on paper. 

For that same reason, it’s why I think most people don’t buy into Pepsi celebrating activism or Gillette promoting positive masculinity – because it’s not founded on a historically consistent approach. It screams self-serving exploitation, even if the people behind the campaigns have genuinely good intentions. You can’t rush altruism, and you definitely shouldn't expect to profit from it.  

Do you still get a chance to DJ? Which music scene is best – London or Tokyo?

I hardly DJ anymore, so I’ll answer the second part of that question from a listener’s perspective: I used to be more diplomatic about this, but now I’d just say that I lean towards London. Tokyo’s music scene is stifled by a lack of diversity and the same structural issues as wider Japanese society – age hierarchies, gender imbalance, and being far too keen to celebrate visiting international artists while failing to nurture local talent. London’s scene might be capricious, but that means there are always chances for up-and-coming artists. Also, the clubs have bigger sub-woofers than in Tokyo...

Mike Sunda is attending AD STARS 2019 from 22-24th August in Busan, South Korea. His talk is called, ‘Tokyo 20XX: The Olympic Opportunity for Non-Sponsor Brand Cultural Strategy.’ Read his interview in full via Branding in Asia 

[fidemcanem]

❛ ♡ ❜

send  ❛ ♡ ❜  to suddenly hug my muse // accepting

@lupiinee ---- cut for length (2k+)

T-3 DAYS

It’s a Monday morning.

Sirius’ body may be upright, but his soul is still in bed; he’s barely human by any recognisable functional standard. He dresses through sheer force of habit ---- James’ tie, Remus notices, and not his own, ends up around his neck, messily knotted and twisted to one side ---- but James merely snatches Sirius’ in return, so no harm done.

His eyes are half-open, sleep-heavy; he shuffles instead of expending the energy to raise each foot and let it fall again. He’s grumpy and he’s rumpled, and all somehow with that indefinable air of elegance that seems to seep from his pores. The tie, skewiff, manages to look like an artful statement of rebellion, rather than the result of stumbling fingers. His hair, unbrushed and still mussed from sleep, still falls in tasteful disarray that people might spend hours attempting to emulate.

(It is, Remus thinks, all rather unfair. Sirius has no regard for ordinary people, who have to tame their hair and straighten their clothes, and darn up their socks and manage to look passable where he looks ---- right.)

“Breakfast,” Remus says, in a soothing voice, like he’s talking to the dog and not to the boy. “C’mon. Bacon and tea and toast and marmalade.” Often, the promise of a good meal is all it takes to motivate Sirius. His table manners are shocking (a deliberate affront to his upbringing, no doubt, or perhaps it just hadn’t mattered much to Walburga to rebuke him when he was still a favoured son ---- too late now to change him, either way) and even a mouth full of food can’t shut him up, but at least he can be reliably tempted away from idiocy at any given moment with the promise of some chips.

Merlin knows where he puts it all; he’s certainly not growing.

This morning, though, it seems that even the Eden that is breakfast can’t penetrate the fog that is his brain. Sirius grumbles something indistinct under his breath, and half-turns as though to meander his way back to bed.

“Oi,” James says, and lobs a balled-up pair of socks with uncanny precision to smack Sirius right in the temple. He wobbles. “I’m hungry, you lumpy cushion. Let’s go.”

Remus takes pity on Sirius, whose hand rose to ward off the incoming sock-missile a full three or four seconds too late, pawing ineffectually at empty air after the injury had already been done. He takes Sirius by the shoulders, and turns him back towards the door that Pete has been holding open impatiently.

“Bacon, Padfoot” he says once more from behind Sirius, and steps close to wrap his arms around the shorter boy in a hug, using the embrace to shuffle him steadily towards the door. “Just think of the bacon.”

Sirius makes a noise that might be acquiescence or might just be defeat, and reaches up to clutch at Remus’ arm with clumsy fingers, and lets himself be guided, one swaying step at a time, towards breakfast.

T-2 DAYS

The tree they’re leaning against is their favourite; broad trunk and thick foliage provide a perfect and shady spot on summer days, and it’s far enough from the castle doors that it’s never too busy at lunchtimes and after school, a little too far for most to be considered convenient. Remus sits, idly shredded a leaf with his nails, watching James and Peter play exploding snap.

It’s impossible to predict who’ll be victorious. James has impeccable reactions, honed by years of quidditch, but a tendency to get distracted by Sirius, or Peter’s jibes. Peter’s got a good eye on him, and knows James well enough by now to exploit his weaknesses.

Though he prefers the sun ---- lounges in it, soaking it all up like he’s storing the heat to fuel that bright fire that burns inside him, drawing people inexorably towards him like moths in the night ---- Sirius is next to Remus, who knows full well that more than twenty minutes in the sun will leave him pink-red and tender on the bridge of his nose and across his cheeks.

It’s nice, the idle quiet punctuated only by the detonations of the cards and the cries of defeat from either James or Peter. Even Sirius seems to be quieter than usual, his laughing observations reserved to a few choice, teasing remarks.

Impulsively, Remus leans in towards Sirius, nestling close that they’re pressed close together all down one side: shoulder to elbow, elbow to forearm, and Sirius’ knee overlapping Remus’ thigh where he’s sitting cross-legged.

Sirius shifts into the touch, like Sirius always does ---- a boy who longs for nothing more than to human contact, affectionate touch, whose movements always account for the position of his friends, effortlessly solving the three-body problem to ensure a closeness to them all ---- and it seems only sensible for Remus to reach up and drape an arm across his shoulders to pull him closer still. Usually, it’s Sirius who drags Remus into a hug.

Now, with the tables turned, it’s clear to see that adjusting to fit himself into Remus’ arms is an effortless thing, for him. Remus wonders what that’s like: to be so confident of who you are to carve a space with such admirable ease for yourself anywhere you feel you ought to belong. His eyes are closed and his head his tipped back into Remus’ shoulder.

When his eyes open, the clear grey of them is startling in the summer sun, and there’s a smile curling at his lips, lifting one side of his face more than the other.

“Did you know you’ve a freckle under your chin?” Sirius asks, and reaches a finger up to poke gently at the alleged spot. Remus’ hand comes up to follow the touch, self-conscious of the soft warmth of Sirius’ touch. “I think I’ve got one there, too,” Sirius continues, conversationally, and cranes his head up to show Remus the long line of the column of his throat, summer-golden skin marred only by one or two dark freckles.

“So you do,” says, and pokes it in return; it seems the done thing.

“We match,” Sirius says, and there’s a tone of such satisfaction to his voice that Remus can’t help but wonder if, despite the shade, the tips of his ears are reddening anyway.

T-1 DAY

They’ve been camped out in this corner of the common room all evening, claiming it as their own. It’s got the squashiest armchair, Remus’ favourite, which Sirius had unceremoniously evicted a second-year from. He probably ought to feel bad, about that, but the best he could manage was a reassuring smile as the boy had reluctantly sloped away, and a grateful groan as he’d sunk into the cushions, which Sirius had magnanimously fluffed up for him, first.

It’s still a week until the full moon, but Remus is tired and a little stressed, and the ache in his bones is beginning to creep in and settle like a fine film ---- not enough to hurt, as such, but enough to make itself noticed. Enough to make him aware of each muscle in turn.

“Poor old man,” Sirius teases. “Ought to get you a walking stick. Why don’t you pop your teeth in a glass, and I can pre-chew your snacks for you.”

“You’re disgusting,” Remus remarks, dryly.

“You’re ungrateful,” comes the easy response. “Fine then; gum helplessly at everything. See if I care.” Remus feels like he ought to toss a pillow at Sirius, but is loathe to lose one of his. Peter thoughtfully solves the problem for him by smacking Sirius with one of the cushions from the sofa. There’s a brief, laughing scuffle, until Sirius flops onto the floor, leaning half against the sofa and half against James’ legs, shirt untucked and hair messy and legs stretched out in front of him.

They do absolutely nothing at all: not one of them is frantically trying to finish homework, not one of them is also reading a book, or playing wizard chess, or even talking to anyone else. It’s an evening just for the four of them, and they lounge and laze and talk about all sorts of nothing.

It’s only when the fire is dying low and the common room is mostly emptied that they stir from their little huddle. It’s Sirius first, levering himself up from the floor with a groan. His back pops audibly when he stretches his arms above his head, raising himself onto his toes like a puppet whose strings are all being pulled.

“Now who’s an old man,” Remus observes. James perks up at one of his favourite lines of teasing where Sirius is concerned.

“Geriatric old fart,” James joins in, happily. “Have to find you a nursing home, soon.”

“Don’t worry,” is Peter’s contribution. “We’ll take good care of you. Only the best.”

Sirius stretches again, reaching his hands out to each side and twisting his torso back and forth, as though he’s limbering up for something.

“Well,” he says when he’s done, arms dropping back down to his side. “As the eldest, and obviously the most mature,” ---- Remus snorts ---- “I’m for bed. You young hooligans can stay up late if you like, but I’ll be the one laughing in the morning.”

“Age before beauty,” James quips.

“And being sorely lacking in both, that puts you dead last,” Sirius fires back.

“Well, I’m going to,” Remus says firmly, because here’s a back-and-forth they’ve all heard a hundred times. Creative as those arguments might get, it’s too late to be putting up with now. Sirius offers him a hand and Remus takes it, letting Sirius pull him to his feet.

“Night, children,” Sirius grins, and Remus laughs a fond, despairing laugh, and they wander up to the dorm without James and Peter.

“All right?” Sirius asks, with false casualness, when he catches Remus absently massaging an aching shoulder with the heel of his hand before he gets into bed. He appears so abruptly in Remus’ vicinity that he might as well have apparated. There’s concern painted across his features, and he looks as though given half the chance, he’d personally tend to Remus’ every ache and pain in any way he could think of. His face is very intent and very serious, and he looks at Remus with an intensity that almost burns.

“I’m fine,” Remus answers, just like he always does. And then, because Sirius is not always so easily reassured, he pulls him into a brief hug. It’s slightly alarming, the choked-off, strangled noise that Sirius makes, and Remus ducks behind the hangings on his bed, unsure what it might signify.

T-0 DAYS

“----and I suppose it would have made sense if they’d been presenting a strong opposition, but they could barely hold a formation together. What’s the point in using your keeper offensively if the rest of you aren’t even making an effort, I ask you?”

James and Sirius are lounging, as they often do, on the same bed. All squashed up and tangled together. Sirius is a little less vocal than usual, letting James do most of the talking, but James is more than happy to fill the silence with talk of his latest quidditch match.

“----don’t you think?” Sirius tunes back in with a small hm? and blinks owlishly as he tries to remember what James was talking about. He apparently fails, and James is left a little baffled when his friend reaches over to grab his face, one palm on each cheek, and look into his eyes with a desperation that’s frankly alarming.

“James, I want to kiss Remus,” he says, faintly. All he can think about is the way Remus had hugged him last night, hands sliding around his waist and head ducked to tuck against his neck, and the tickle of breath that had wrought a surprised, yearning noise from him that he’s fairly sure he’d been unable to hide. He’d barely slept, after that, lying there in the dark and feeling like a traitorous pervert for thinking about Remus’ hands on him, on what it might be like for those long fingers to brush against bare skin instead of his shirt.

His next word is low and pathetic and spoken with all the meaning he can muster: “Help.”

[enkisstories]

The android cemetery (Ch. 27)

There was a long silence and then Emma Phillips spoke up:

“In the Oldwest, when two guys had a shootout and the one who got attacked was faster, certainly they wouldn’t have hanged that one? He only had to go to prison? Jason?!”

“Jason would like a tea, if possible”, the android designer replied. “And a cat on his lap.”

Connor raised his arm. Attached to it was Loki, who didn’t let go even as the android arm swung around like a crane. The tom clang to Connor’s forearm with all fours, like a sloth, and he was lovingly biting into it. Here and there the sleeve had already gotten ripped open, what made the event all the more exiting for the cat.

“Wow, you’re fortunate!” Daniel exclaimed, genuinely happy to see something heartwarming again after the shock just now. Even if it was his own cat befriending The Negotiator. “Loki likes you!”

“Could he maybe like Mr. Graff now instead of me?” Connor asked, almost pleading. “I… might be a dog person, after all…”

Daniel laughed, playfully punched Gavin’s arm and then the two of them went to work detaching Loki from the RK800.

Meanwhile Thor was dashing for the sofa. He vanished under it, not planning to re-appear anytime soon as long as all the bipeds were congregating in the downstairs living room.

Evelyn, too, was in a hurry to leave the room. She  walked backwards to the kitchen, dragging Emma with her.

“I’ll make one!” the child android promised, referring to the tea Mr. Graff was craving. “I know how to! I’ll make tea for everyone!”

A few moments later Emma was sitting at the kitchen table, watching Evelyn prepare the tea and listening with half an ear to the adults talking in the other room. Emma could not make out words, but at least she got the general impression that the men were keeping their calm.

“You’re lucky to get a new father”, Lyn told the older girl while she waited for the water in the kettle to boil.

“No, I’m not!” Emma protested. “Fathers are not toys that you switch out and love the new one like you did the old!”

The girl went on about this being not just about her feelings, but even moreso about her murdered father. Replacing him in her heart was akin to killing John Phillips again. Emma could not do that to her dad, not even if that Jason had been the greatest replacement father in the world. In truth Emma had no idea what kind of father - or person - the man might be. Getting to know Jason better with no intention of befriending him at all deemed her too close to betraying her real father.

Evelyn didn’t understand any of that. Already her programming was overwriting Mr. Turner with Mr. Reed and his wife with Mr. Danny. Even if the child android had wanted to stop that process, it would have been helpless against it. Emma had an idea about that, only it didn’t feel right to her to actually voice her thoughts. Instead she said: “Of course you do not understand what I’m trying to say, Evie. You are much younger than me, several years. That makes a big difference!”

Evelyn nodded. That was something she understood! From Lyn’s perspective Emma was far closer to the adults in the next room than to herself.

Eventually the kettle whistled, leaves got stuffed into glasses and water got poured over the leaves and then the two girls returned to the living room, Emma carrying a handful of spoons and the more heat-resistant Lyn the tray with the glasses.

“You have a daughter of your own now, Daniel”, Emma casually addressed her former caretaker while handing out the spoons. “Why did you never tell me?”

Daniel smiled at the girl. “She’s not my daughter, no worries! We only keep Lyn around on Captain Anderson’s orders until we have found a new family for her.”

How could this be so easy? Them chatting while handling small household items? Shouldn’t they work on their shared past instead of acting as if it had never happened? But there was only so much “working on” a person could do, whatever that phrase even meant, Daniel thought. Sometimes you just had to live.

“I’ve been properly rude to Lyn all day”, the deviant assured Emma. “I won’t replace you, not me, I’m not like that! How could I do to someone else what I had to go through?”

“But, Daniel! That’s exactly what you are doing! Evie is just like you, but you are pushing her away? That’s textbook for doing to her what has been done to you!”

“I…” Daniel was about to protest, but he could not deny that Emma was having a point there. “I hadn’t thought about it from that angle.”

Emma wrinkled her nose. “Because you never think “, she said.

There. Emma’s unquestioning hero-worship of the “coolest android in the world”, her unconditional trust were gone. What was left was a willingness to at least preserve their friendship. That was more mature, more healthy, but, damn, was Daniel missing their innocent days! Back when they hadn’t realized what jerks their parents… uh, Mr. and Mrs. Philips, of course (because he, Daniel, certainly didn’t need any stinking parents, was he Connor, or what?!) had been. And before they had started seeing boys with different eyes. Back when life hadn’t been better, but simpler.

“You might want to keep Evie, you know” Emma thought aloud. “With a friendly daughter you might find a better partner than Officer Reed!”

“I understand the appeal of letting this one dangle over the edge up on a skyscraper”, Gavin grunted, much to Connor’s amusement.

“Nah, she has a good point there!” the RK800 claimed.

“Wait ‘till you make the first mistake in love, Emma”, Daniel laughed. “Then we will talk again, the three of us, because I’m not letting go of Gavin.”

Emma shook her head. What had gotten proposed was too far in the future to consider right here in this room. There were more pressing issues:

“You must be nice to Evelyn, otherwise I will tell the police about you!”

It wasn’t an idle threat, Daniel realized. And neither was it playful teasing. He had messed up, not just in taking three lives, also in dismissing his only friend in the world. Instead of going straight to Emma with his news about getting replaced, the deviant had assumed that if John had turned from friend to traitor, then Emma would, too. That was serious, as serious as Emma was being just now. Things could never be the same between them again.

“I will”, the deviant said. “Tomorrow is Sunday. We’ll go take Lyn and not just to the museum, I promise.”

“Don’t I get asked?” Gavin snapped.

“No, Mr. Reed”, Emma answered solemnly. “You already agreed to at least provide shelter for Evelyn. That’s more than I expected from you and I should leave it at that.”

“That’s… what?!”

“If we’re bargaining here”, Jason said carefully, “consider this additional agreement, Emma: Actual criminal acts committed by them aside, I will not spill the beans about Dean being Daniel or about him - and maybe this Connor here, too - being a deviant. In turn you agree to not reveal my occupation to your mother.”

Emma sighed. “I guess I can promise that.”

It was all a bit much, all the lying, the keeping secrets and the alliances one entered into… There was certainly more to adulthood, but right now it seemed to consist mostly of using your brain to exert damage control on all the shit your heart was doing. There was obnoxious Mr. Reed, the android she was wary of despite it having saved her life, the other android that Emma knew she should not, but could not help to consider her friend, the replacement father, young Evie…

“In a fairy tale”, Emma mused, “my father would come back now, too. But life isn’t a story, so this will have to do.”

The comment made Daniel realize that their relationship would have changed, even if the events of august ’38 had never happened. How much the erstwhile child had grown! The more time was passing, the more Daniel was able to see Caroline and John the way they truly had been, and those versions existed next to his younger self’s idealized images of them. Emma to the contrary had not changed in Daniel’s perception, but for real. This wasn’t But why do I have to bother with Nature Studies when I want to become an author! – Emma anymore. The two years older Emma would discuss with her godfather how to keep the amount of Nature Studies in her life to a minimum and how to exploit that necessary minimum for her writing endeavors. So, pretty much what Daniel had goaded her into already back home, only now she would do so out of her own free will.   Looking back at how he, too, had grown ever since “leaving home”, the deviant wondered if he and Emma would sit in her room now in a parallel universe and daydream of the boys they had a crush on.

“Speaking of Happy Ends…”

Gavin shoved his phone under Daniel’s nose. With the other hand he grabbed Connor by the collar and forced him to have a look at the screen, too. It displayed a short text message from Tina to Daniel and Gavin and it read:

“Hey, guys, guess what, your girlfriend has just slept with another man!”

Jason caught a glimpse of the message, too. Seeing how excitedly the trio was showing it to each other over and over, Jason could not help but whisper “So who are the weirdos now…”

“Is it that basketballer dude?” Connor asked the other two.

“Yes!” Daniel beamed. “Now I do not have to pair Tina up with you!”

“What? That was the last resort plan you’ve been teasing all the time? ME? You must be joking!”

“Am I?”

“No”, Connor agreed after some consideration. “I know the lengths you go to when you’re desperate.” The RK800 smiled. So they would see more of Tina’s friend in the future? Connor liked that. He was hanging out with Yumiko and Macky, also spend an unreasonable amount of time with Gavin and Daniel, but all of them were co-workers in the broadest sense. Mingling with humans unrelated to policework was something severely missing in Connor’s life.

“I’m looking forward to meet Tina’s friend.”

“The poor guy doesn’t know what he’s getting into”, Jason remarked while taking a deep gulp of the tea. “So, what are we telling Emma’s mom?”

“The truth”, Connor suggested. “She learned that Daniel’s corpse was kept in the DPD’s archive and brought flowers. We can present the bouquet in case proof gets requested.”

“I guess that would be for the best”, Jason agreed. “Caroline won’t be a happy camper, but for running away in the middle of the night Emma has had it coming. And I’m not saying this as your “replacement father”, but as a sensible person!”

“Whatever”, the girl muttered.

“I’ll phone Caroline and explain why her child will get delivered to her in a police car. She was sick with worry when I left the apartment.”

Connor nodded. “I’ll drive”, he said. “You two stay here and tug in Evelyn. It’s for the better if Mrs. Phillips won’t lay eyes on Daniel and also if Gavin won’t get in a position where he might say… something Gavin-ish to her.”

“I recall she wasn’t too fond of you, either”, Daniel replied.

“Yes, you’re right. I guess in this case I’ll practice Staying In The Car while Mr. Graff takes Emma upwards. Since this seems to be such a valued skill at this workplace.”

 (END of part 5)

[casualarsonist]

Verdun review

Verdun is a multiplayer-only FPS set amongst some of the major areas of offensive in France and Belgium during WW1. It aims to recreate the clunky brutality of the era with far more attention to detail and realism than something like Battlefield 1, for instance, and where it sacrifices a certain degree of playability, it adds a niche appeal that rewards thinking outside the box.

Developed and published by Dutch indie studios M2H and Blackmill Studios, Verdun exhibits a measure of rawness that is at times intentional and at times not. It’s not a perfect game technically or by design, and while a good deal of its faults can be rightly justified by claiming ‘that’s the First World War’, the argument is whether this translates into a worthwhile experience for the consumer.

First thing’s first - Verdun is not your typical run-and-gun game. If you get your history lessons from BF1, you won't realise that most weapons in WW1 were bolt-action rifles or revolver pistols. Automatic weapons did exist, but they were heavy, ungainly, slow to reload, and didn’t have endless supplies of ammunition. Consequently, one of the first things you might notice about Verdun is that it exploits these antiquities and inconveniences as a central facet of gameplay. Everything takes time - reloading your weapon can take anywhere between five and ten seconds depending on what you’re using which puts you at a serious combat disadvantage when the enemy has a full clip ready and loaded – this means that the automatic weapons are balanced due to their longer loading times, and also that moments spent reloading in the face of an enemy advance are terrifying. And this fits perfectly in with the theme of WW1 warfare, because the name of the game for Verdun and other battles like it is attrition. You can kill as many enemies as you have bullets in a clip, but eventually you’re gonna run out of bullets, and if they haven’t run out of men then you’re kinda fucked. This may sound frustrating, and I’m not going to lie, there are times when it certainly is, but aside from the fact that it educates you as to just how absurd and futile the strategies of WW1 warfare were, an interesting side effect of all this awkwardness-by-design is that it sets a remarkably even playing field for newcomers and veterans alike. Regardless of how talented a player may be, crossing no man’s land is still going to make you a sitting duck. There’s no one tried-and-true method for getting to the other side unscathed as the placement of the enemy and their situational awareness will ultimately determine whether or not you’re spotted and shot, and even if you make it to the opposing trench, eventually you’re going to need to reload, and when that moment comes, expert or not, you’re prey.  

Because it's a one-hit kill situation with most weapons here, which has both its pros and cons; yes, it makes it easier to nail an enemy from a distance, but if at any point you allow someone to get a bead on you, you won't be celebrating Christmas this year, and 7 times out of 10 you'll never know where you were even shot from. And since most Verdun maps involve trench warfare with stretches of no-man's land in between, you will be getting killed a lot. You can't outrun a bullet, and trying to creep makes you an easy target. Advancing requires either luck, incompetence on the part of your enemies, or accurate cover fire in support. It's thrilling stuff, and dropping into one end of a trench when the enemy doesn't know you're there makes you feel like a fox amongst the hens. The game also effectively encourages teamwork between players - you’re assigned to a squad when you begin, and remaining near your designated NCO and following their orders is rewarded with improvements to personal and squad stats, and drastic increases in player experience points. You can also feel the tangible difference between acting as a lone gun and acting in synergy with your squadmates, and often times it can make the difference between life and death.

There are 4 types of gameplay, two of which are your standard DM and Team DM. The other two are the signature Frontlines mode, which pits two opposing sides in opposing trenches across a multi-stage map with the goal of taking your opponent’s zones and pushing them back in stages until they’re defeated, and Squad Defence, which is the closest the game gets to a bot match and pitches a squad of 1-4 soldiers against waves of incoming enemies, the objective being to hold out as long as possible. Of the two unique game types, Frontlines is where you will take the most punishment – get used to waiting to respawn because you’re going to die a lot. Squad Defence is fun, but can realistically go on forever – I had to bail out of an hour-long match to go to work today and didn’t get any of the associated rewards for my work because there’s no way to end the game prematurely.

Verdun’s sound design is worth a massive commendation. Fighting in the trenches at night and hearing the report of pistol and rifle fire nearby is utterly terrifying. You can follow the action by following the sounds, and after a battle the area will be filled with the screams of men shot and dying, blood trailing from their bodies as they writhe at the bottom of a shell hole. Rifles are *loud*. The sound of a shot will give away your position as much as anything else, and this knowledge just sits in the back of your mind every time you feel like a boss, sniping on the enemy from afar, knowing that every shot you take brings closer to the centre of someone else’s crosshairs

The game also looks quite good, although a tad dated, and certain tactics like watching for muzzle flashes and skylighting your enemies are very effective. At one point I managed to effectively camouflage myself in the foliage to the point that I killed two soldiers staring right at me before one of them could even get a shot off. The movement, however, is pretty bad. Clunky and fiddly controls aren't aided by very rough terrain. You can get stuck on barbed wire without knowing it was there and not know which way to move to get out, resulting in a cheap death. The game instructs you to move slowly away, but I found that to be misleading – leaping out of it is both absurd and the only way I found to reliably help myself. You can get stuck on terrain and get shot. You can get stuck behind friendlies in trenches and not be able to get past. If the game played smoother I suppose it wouldn't clash with the intentional sluggishness of the weapons, but god it'd be less frustrating.

And so this is the part where I talk about the bigger flaws with the game itself. Firstly, short of reading the manual, there's no way to teach yourself how to play - selecting a game type throws you straight into the deep end. The closest you can get to this is the co-op vs AI wave-defence game types. The half dozen or so in-game menus are all clogged with info that the game doesn't tell you the relevance of. There's no option for training or bot-matches just on your own, so when the game hurls you into the middle of a match for the first time, you're gonna get your butt handed to you time and time again. Oh, and about that, in my first play-through I was spawn-killed no less than 6 times, because sometimes it'll pop you in or behind your line, and sometimes it'll pop you right at the forefront of the attack and the enemy will kill you before you can even get your hands on the controls. You never know where you're gonna show up, and you don't have a choice. This is straight-up inexcusable. I ended my first playthrough with a crash to desktop. I started my second playthrough with a crash to desktop. This is apparently not uncommon for the game, and just highlights a certain lack of technical polish that shouldn't exist. It also undid all the progress I’d made and left my teammates in the lurch. The weapon loadouts are lacking as well. Again, this is all part-and-parcel of the realism aspect, but if you're playing as the rifleman, for instance, you get one weapon only - a rifle. You can spend points on getting one or two different versions of said rifle, but the rifle is all you have. Which means that if there's only one spot left on a team, you're stuck with one weapon and one weapon only, and you don't get a say in things (who the hell designed a rifle that only takes three rounds?!).

Verdun isn’t perfect. There is still a good degree of polish that it could use, and 2 years after release, it’s unlikely that it’s going to get it as they’re currently in the process of making a standalone expansion. But fortunately, most of my experience has been positive. The community is, generally, friendly and helpful, and the pacing and balancing of the game are uniquely satisfying. Playing against humans is a punishing experience, and results in a lot of wasted time waiting to respawn, but once you come to grips with the mechanics and start getting kills there's a certain bitter joy that comes with laying down some of the punishment you've been going through yourself. It feels authentic to a degree (I mean, they can't make a game about sitting in a bunker and getting shelled for three straight days), but there are also points where it feels clunky beyond the realism. At its core it's not a perfect multiplayer game and the distinctive setting only sets it apart by degrees, but it does a great job at presenting the unrelenting and unavoidable brutality of the conflict. Nowhere is there a more visceral and immersive portrayal of WW1. At any one time there are only a few hundred people playing, and while I haven’t had issues filling my games, I do worry about the lifespan, so I’d recommend it for a slight discount. 7/10

Good

[vdmeganlawsontei]

Best Bitcoin Quotes

Best Bitcoin Quotes

In 1999, Professor Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics stated: “I think the internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government. The one thing that’s missing but that will soon be developed, is a reliable e-cash.” Nine years later, Bitcoin was born.

“The swarm is headed towards us” – Satoshi Nakamoto, when WikiLeaks started accepting Bitcoin donation

“Bitcoin seems to be a very promising idea. I like the idea of basing security on the assumption that the CPU power of honest participants outweighs that of the attacker. It is a very modern notion that exploits the power of the long tail.” – Hal Finney

“Bitcoin enables certain uses that are very unique. I think it offers possibilities that no other currency allows. For example the ability to spend a coin that only occurs when two separate parties agree to spend the coin; with a third party that couldn’t run away with the coin itself.” – Pieter Wuille

“Hey, obviously this is a very interesting time to be in Bitcoin right now, but if you guys want to argue over whether this is reality or not, one Bitcoin will feed over 40 homeless people in Pensacola right now. If you guys want proof Bitcoin is real, send them to me, I’ll cash them out and feed homeless people.” – Jason King

“Blockchain is the tech. Bitcoin is merely the first mainstream manifestation of its potential.” – Marc Kenigsberg

“Bitcoin was created to serve a highly political intent, a free and uncensored network where all can participate with equal access.” – Amir Taaki

“When I first heard about Bitcoin, I thought it was impossible. How can you have a purely digital currency? Can’t I just copy your hard drive and have your bitcoins? I didn’t understand how that could be done, and then I looked into it and it was brilliant” – Jeff Garzik

“As the value goes up, heads start to swivel and skeptics begin to soften. Starting a new currency is easy, anyone can do it. The trick is getting people to accept it, because it is their use that gives the “money” value.” – Adam B. Levine

“At its core, bitcoin is a smart currency, designed by very forward-thinking engineers. It eliminates the need for banks, gets rid of credit card fees, currency exchange fees, money transfer fees, and reduces the need for lawyers in transitions… all good things” – Peter Diamandis

“Bitcoin is the currency of resistance.”  “If Satoshi had released Bitcoin 10 yrs. earlier, 9/11 would never have happened” – Max Keiser

“Bitcoin, and the ideas behind it, will be a disrupter to the traditional notions of currency. In the end, currency will be better for it.” – Edmund C. Moy

“There is so much potential, … I am just waiting for it to be a billion dollar industry.” “Wow, Silk Road actually works” – Charlie Shrem

“Cryptocurrency Protocols Are Like Onions… One common design philosophy among many cryptocurrency 2.0 protocols is the idea that, just like the internet, cryptocurrency design would work best if protocols split off into different layers. Under this strain of thought, Bitcoin is to be thought of as a sort of TCP/IP of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, and other next-generation protocols can be built on top of Bitcoin much like we have SMTP for email, HTTP for webpages and XMPP for chat all on top of TCP as a common underlying data layer.” – Vitalik Buterin

“The bitcoin world is this new ecosystem where it doesn’t cost that much to start a new bitcoin company, it doesn’t cost much to start owning bitcoin either, and it is a much more efficient way of moving money around the world.” – Tim Draper

“I love seeing new services constantly starting to accept Bitcoin. Bitcoin is really becoming “the currency of the Internet.” I’m most concerned by possible government reactions to Bitcoin. They can’t destroy Bitcoin, but they could really slow things down by making exchange much more difficult.” – Michael Marquardt

“Cryptocurrency is such a powerful concept that it can almost overturn governments” – Charles Lee

“Spend some time with Bitcoin. Learn it, challenge it, and use it. You can assume no government wants you adopting this system in any capacity, and for that reason alone it’s worth consideration by honest, moral, and industrious people” “Economists and journalists often get caught up in this question: Why does Bitcoin have value? And the answer is very easy. Because it is useful and scarce.”  – Erik Voorhees

“Will people be buying yachts with their Dogecoin riches some day? Probably not. But are we having a lot of fun, helping great causes and spreading the digital currency word in the process? Yes we are. And perhaps if we pool our Dogecoin together we can build a Dogeyacht and sail the world, just saying…!” – Jackson Palmer

“Bitcoin will do to banks what email did to the postal industry” – Rick Falkvinge, Founder of the Swedish pirate party

“I think the fact that within the bitcoin universe an algorithm replaces the functions of [the government] … is actually pretty cool. I am a big fan of Bitcoin” – Al Gore, 45th Vice President of the United States

“I do think Bitcoin is the first [encrypted money] that has the potential to do something like change the world.” – Peter Thiel, Co-Founder of Paypal

“So bitcoin is cyber snob currency…” – William Shatner, Actor known for lead role in Star Trek TOS

“Bitcoin is a remarkable cryptographic achievement and the ability to create something that is not duplicable in the digital world has enormous value” – Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

“Bitcoin is the most important invention in the history of the world since the Internet.” – Roger Ver

Money is a collective agreement. If enough people come to the same agreement, what they agree upon becomes secondary, whether it be farm animals, gold, diamonds, paper, or simply a code. History proves all these cases to be true. Who knows what the future is going suggest to us as money, once we see digital currencies as ordinary?” – S.E. Sever, Writer

I understand the political ramifications of [bitcoin] and I think that government should stay out of them and they should be perfectly legal.” – Ron Paul, Republican Texas Congressman and former candidate for US President

“Cryptology represents the future of privacy [and] by implication [it] also represents the future of money, and the future of banking and finance.” – Orlin Grabbe, Economist

“Gold is a great way to preserve wealth, but it is hard to move around. You do need some kind of alternative and Bitcoin fits the bill. I’m not surprised to see that happening.” – Jim Rickards, American Lawyer, Economist and Investment Banker

“It’s gold for nerds.” – Stephen Colbert, American writer, comedian, television host, actor

“What can’t kill Bitcoin, makes it (us) stronger.” – Mark Wittkowski, Online marketer, coach and pioneer in online lead generation.

“Bitcoin is a technological tour de force.” – Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder

“Every informed person needs to know about Bitcoin because it might be one of the world’s most important developments.” – Leon Luow, Nobel Peace prize nominee

“The relative success of the bitcoin proves that money first and foremost depends on trust. Neither gold nor bonds are needed to back up a currency.” – Arnon Grunberg, Writer

“The governments of the world have spent hundreds and hundreds of trillions of dollars bailing out a decaying, dickensian, outmoded system called banking, when the solution to the future of finance is peer-to-peer. It’s going to be alternative currencies like bitcoin and it’s not actually going to be a banking system as we had before 2008.” – Patrick Young, Financial analyst

“Instant transactions, no waiting for checks to clear, no chargebacks (merchants will like this), no account freezes (look out Paypal), no international wire transfer fee, no fees of any kind, no minimum balance, no maximum balance, worldwide access, always open, no waiting for business hours to make transactions, no waiting for an account to be approved before transacting, open an account in a few seconds, as easy as email, no bank account needed, extremely poor people can use it, extremely wealthy people can use it, no printing press, no hyper-inflation, no debt limit votes, no bank bailouts, completely voluntary. This sounds like the best payment system in the world!” – Trace Mayer J.D., a Leading Monetary Expert on Bitcoin and Gold

“You can’t stop things like Bitcoin. It will be everywhere and the world will have to readjust. World governments will have to readjust” – John McAfee, Founder of McAfee

…

BitcoinChaser

The post Best Bitcoin Quotes appeared first on Bitcoin Chaser.

https://ift.tt/2q1SOY3

[industriousmind]

In the Maze

Must history have losers?

By: Dayna Tortorici

One of the purposes of this section is to provide a testimony of a moment — to recognize and record, as C. L. R. James said — the questions and debates that preoccupy us. But sometimes life furnishes situations that cannot be approached intellectually. None of the usual keys fits the lock. An intellectual situation grades into an emotional situation and becomes untouchable. How do you write a history of the present, then? Sublimate, sublimate — until that stops getting you anywhere.

Two years ago, in January 2016, I wrote to my coeditors with a proposal for an Intellectual Situation about what I felt was an impending male backlash. One colleague asked, “What backlash?” Another worried it was too close to the bone. In the end I abandoned the essay because I couldn’t find a way in. I couldn’t figure it out.

What was happening was that the men I knew were beginning to feel persecuted as a class. They remarked on it obliquely, with jokes that didn’t quite sound like jokes, in emails or in offhand remarks at parties. Irritation and annoyance were souring into something worse. Men said they felt like they were living in Soviet Russia. The culture was being hijacked by college students, humorless young people who knew nothing of real life, its paradoxes and disappointments. Soon intellectuals would not be able to sneeze without being sent to the gulag.

Women, too, felt the pressure. “Your generation is so moral,” a celebrated novelist said to an editor my age. Another friend, a journalist in her fifties, described the heat she got from online feminists for expressing skepticism toward safe spaces. “I’m conservative now,” she said, meaning to the kids. But the most persistent and least logical complaint came from men — men I knew and men in the media. They could not speak. And yet they were speaking. Near the end of 2014, I remember, the right to free speech under the First Amendment had been recast in popular discourse as the right to free speech without consequence, without reaction.

The examples in the press could be innocent and sinister. A Princeton undergraduate, the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, could not argue he was not privileged in Time magazine without facing ridicule on Twitter. A tech executive could hardly make a joke without being fired, a young tech executive told me. “Take Mahbod Moghadam,” he said. Moghadam was one of the founders of Genius, and had been dismissed for his annotations of the shooter Elliot Rodger’s manifesto. (“This is an artful sentence, beautifully written” he wrote. Of Rodger’s sister, he added, “Maddy will go on to attend USC and turn into a spoiled hottie.”) Once, on my way to work, I heard a story on NPR about a Pennsylvania man named Anthony Elonis who was taking a First Amendment case to the Supreme Court. He was defending his right to make jokes about murdering his ex-wife on Facebook, in the form of non-rhyming, rhythmless rap lyrics. “I’m not going to rest until your body is a mess, / soaked in blood and dying from all the little cuts,” he posted. When she filed a restraining order, Elonis posted again. “I’ve got enough explosives / to take care of the state police and the sheriff’s department.” Posts about shooting up an elementary school and slitting the throat of a female FBI agent followed. When he was convicted for transmitting intent to injure another person across state lines, via the internet, he argued he was just doing what Eminem did on his albums: joking. Venting, creatively. Under the First Amendment, the government had to prove he had “subjective intent.” His initial forty-four month prison sentence was overturned by the Supreme Court but was ultimately reinstated by an appeals court. I learned later that he had been fired from his job for multiple sexual harassment complaints, just after his wife left him.

How did I feel about all this? Too many ways to say. The aggregate effect of white male resentment across culture disturbed me, as did the confusion of freedom of speech with freedom to ridicule, threaten, harass, and abuse. When it came to the more benign expressions of resentment, in the academy and in the fiefdoms of high culture, I was less sure. On the one hand, I was a person of my generation and generally thought the students to be right. Show me a teenager who isn’t a fundamentalist, I thought; what matters is they’re pushing for progress. The theorist Sara Ahmed’s diagnosis of teachers’ reactions to sensitive students as “a moral panic about moral panics” struck me as right. (Her defense of trigger warnings and safe spaces in “Against Students” remains one of the best I know: trigger warnings are “a partial and necessarily inadequate measure to enable some people to stay in the room so that ‘difficult issues’ can be discussed” and safe spaces, a “technique for dealing with the consequences of histories that are not over. . . . We have safe spaces so we can talk about racism not so we can avoid talking about racism!”) I also agreed with my colleague Elizabeth Gumport when she observed, speaking to a man in mind but also to me, “It’s not that you can’t speak. It’s that other people can hear you. And they’re telling you what you’re saying is crazy.”

Still, I had sympathy for what I recognized in some peers as professional anxiety and fear. The way they had learned to live in the world — to write novels, to make art, to teach, to argue about ideas, to conduct themselves in sexual and romantic relationships — no longer fit the time in which they were living. Especially the men. Their novels, art, teaching methods, ideas, and relationship paradigms were all being condemned as unenlightened or violent. Many of these condemnations issued from social media, where they multiplied and took on the character of a mounting threat: a mob at the gate. But repudiations of the old ways were also turning up in outlets that mattered to them: in reviews, on teaching evaluations, on hiring committees. Authors and artists whose work was celebrated as “thoughtful” or “political” not eight years ago were now being singled out as chauvinists and bigots. One might expect this in old age, but to be cast out as a political dinosaur by 52, by 40, by 36? They hadn’t even peaked! And with the political right — the actual right — getting away with murder, theft, and exploitation worldwide . . . ? That, at least, was how I gathered they felt. Sometimes I thought they were right. Sometimes I thought they needed to grow up.

The outlet of choice for this cultural moment within my extended circle was Facebook. More and more adults were gathering there, particularly academics, and reactions to campus scandals ruled my feed. A mild vertigo attends my memory of this time, which I think of, now, as The Long 2016. It began at least two years prior. There were reactions to Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance, to Laura Kipnis’s essay in the Chronicle Review, to Kenneth Goldsmith’s Michael Brown poem, to Joe Scanlan’s Donelle Woolford character in the Whitney Biennial, to Caitlyn Jenner’s coming out as trans, to Rachel Dolezal’s getting outed as white, to the Yale Halloween letter, to Michael Derrick Hudson writing under the name Yi-Fen Chou to get into a Best American Poetry anthology, to the phenomenon of Hollywood whitewashing, to sexual abuse allegations against Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes. Meanwhile, in the background, headline after headline about police murders of black people and the upcoming presidential election. Many of these Facebook reactions were “bad” — meaning, in my personal shorthand, in bad faith (willful misunderstanding of the issue at hand), a bad look (unflattering to he or she who thought it brave to defend a dominant, conservative belief), or bad politics (reactionary). Yet even the bad takes augured something good. A shift was taking place in the elite institutions. The good that came of it didn’t have to trickle down further for me to find value in it. This was my corner of the world. I thought it ought to be better.

The question was at whose expense. It was easy enough to say, “white men,” harder to say which ones and how. Class — often the most important dimension — tended to be absent from the calculus. It may once have been a mark of a first-rate intelligence to hold two opposing ideas in mind, but it was now a political necessity to hold three, at least. And what of the difference between the cultural elite and the power elite, the Harold Blooms and the Koch Brothers of the world? While we debated who should be the first to move over, pipe down, or give back, we seemed to understand that the most obvious candidates were beyond our reach. What good would it do, for us, to say that Donald Trump had a bigger “problem” with black voters than Bernie Sanders did, or that Donald Trump would be kinder to Wall Street than Hillary Clinton would? To do so would be to allow a lesser man to set the standard for acceptable behavior. We would tend to our own precincts, hold our own to account.

This may have been bad strategy, in retrospect. Perhaps we lost track of the real enemy. Still, I understand why we pursued it. It’s easy to forget how few people anticipated what was coming, and had we not attempted to achieve some kind of equality within our ranks, the finger of blame would have pointed infinitely outward, cueing infinite paralysis. Shouldn’t that domino, further down the line, be the first to fall? Yes, but we’d played this game before. Women of color couldn’t be asked to wait for the white male capitalist class to fall before addressing the blight of racism or sexism on their lives — nor, for that matter, could men of color or white women. It was not solidarity to sweep internal issues under the rug until the real enemy’s defeat. Nor was achieving a state of purity before doing politics. But a middle ground was possible. Feminism and antiracism shouldn’t have to wait.

Only they would have to wait. By summer 2016, Trump, the echt white-male-resentment and “free-speech” candidate, had proven all kinds of discriminatory speech acceptable by voicing it and nevertheless winning the Republican nomination. A low bar, to be sure, but even his party was horrified when the Access Hollywood tape leaked a month before voting day. Trump’s remarks crossed a boundary his apologists didn’t expect: the GOP’s standing benevolent-patriarch attitude toward white women and sex. How depressing it would be, I remember thinking, to muster a win on so pathetic a norm as the purity of white femininity. But I was desperate. I’d take just about anything.

And then, despite the outrage, we didn’t win. Although it matters that Trump won the election unfairly, it shouldn’t have even been close. Perhaps I’d forgotten what country we lived in, what world. Sexual harassment was by and large accepted as an unfortunate consequence of male biology, and joking or bragging about sexual harassment was a comparably minor offense. Months later, I walked down the street in Manhattan and saw a row of the artist Marilyn Minter’s posters wheat-pasted to a wooden construction fence. Gold letters on black read DONALD J. TRUMP above a two-tone image of his smiling face, and across the bottom, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. In between was a prose poem of Trump’s words captured on the hot mic, iterated across the span of wall:

I did try and fuck her. She was married.

I moved on her like a bitch,

But I couldn’t get there.

And she was married.

You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful.

I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss.

I don’t even wait.

And when you’re a star they let you do it.

You can do anything . . .

Grab them by the pussy.

You can do anything.

You can do anything was the refrain of my childhood. I was a daughter of the Title-IX generation, a lucky girl in a decade when lucky girls of lucky parents were encouraged to play sports, be leaders, wear pants, believe themselves good at math, and aspire to become the first female President of the United States. The culture validated this norm. Politicians and advertisers loved girls. Girls, before they became women, could do anything. (Women were too old to save, an unspoken rule behind all kinds of policy. Need an abortion? Better to keep the kid, who has not yet been ground down by life.) But if girls were taught to be winners, boys were not taught to be losers. On the contrary, to lose was a man’s worst fate — especially if he was straight — because winning meant access to sex (a belief held most firmly by the involuntarily celibate). Even then I understood that someone’s gain was bound to be perceived as someone else’s loss, and over time, I learned not to be too brazen. I maintained a prudent fear of the falling class. Even when men weren’t dangerous, they weren’t defenseless. Some still had the resources to bring you down, should you be unlucky enough to be crossed by one.

Combine male fragility with white fragility and the perennial fear of falling and you end up with something lethal, potentially. Plenty of men make it through life just fine, but a wealthy white man with a stockpile of arms and a persecution complex is a truly terrifying figure. Elliot Rodger, Stephen Paddock: both these men had money. This is not to say that men punishing women for their pain is a rich thing or a white thing or even a gun thing. It occurs across cultures, eras, and classes, and the experience of being on the receiving end of it varies accordingly. As Houria Bouteldja writes in “We, Indigenous Women”:

In Europe, prisons are brimming with black people and Arabs. Racial profiling almost only concerns men, who are the police’s main target . It is in our eyes that they are diminished. And yet they try desperately to reconquer us, often through violence. In a society that is castrating, patriarchal, and racist (or subjected to imperialism), to live is to live with virility. “The cops are killing the men and the men are killing the women. I’m talking about rape. I’m talking about murder,” says Audre Lorde. A decolonial feminism must take into account this masculine, indigenous “gender trouble” because the oppression of men reflects directly on us. Yes, we are subjected with full force to the humiliation that is done to them. Male castration, a consequence of racism, is a humiliation for which men make us pay a steep price.

Women pay the price for other humiliations as well. The indignity of downward mobility, real or perceived, is a painful one to suffer, and a man takes it out where he can (Silvia Federici: “The more the man serves and is bossed around, the more he bosses around”). Whatever else it may be, sexual harassment in the “workplace context” is a check on a person’s autonomy, a threat to one’s means of self-support. It can feel like being put in place, chastised, challenged, or dared. Sure, you can do anything, it says. But don’t forget that I can still do this. The dare comes from winners and losers alike. Either you accept it and pay one price or you don’t and pay another. All of it always feels bad.

I imagine that some people feel good about bringing perpetrators to justice, such as it is under the system we have. But I imagine just as many do not want to be responsible for their offender’s punishment. They might say: Please don’t make it my decision whether you lose your job, are shunned by your peers, or get sent to prison. Prison, unemployment, and social exile are not what I want for men. I’m not here to be the police. I don’t want to be responsible for you.

There are many obstacles to honesty in conversations about sexual assault. Loyalty and pity, fear of judgment or retaliation, feelings of complicity or ambivalence — all are good enough reasons not to talk. Alleging sexual misconduct also tends to involve turning one’s life upside down and shaking out the contents for public scrutiny. It’s rarely done for fun.

When victims do want to talk, however, the litigiousness of men proves an obstacle to honesty. It is not unusual for women who speak too liberally about men to be threatened with legal action. Of all the striking things in Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker articles about Harvey Weinstein’s sex crimes, what struck me most were the allusions to Weinstein’s lawyers. “He drags your name through the mud, and he’ll come after you hard with his legal team,” said one woman who asked not to be named. Another chose to pull her allegation from the record. “I’m so sorry,” she told Farrow. “The legal angle is coming at me and I have no recourse.”

In the weeks after Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey first reported the story in the New York Times, as colleagues and strangers on the internet moved to identify the Weinsteins within their own industries, I felt uneasy. Behind every brave outing I saw a legal liability. I suppose that’s what happens when you know enough men with money. Such men are minor kings among us, men with lawyer-soldiers at their employ who can curtail certain kinds of talk. While I do believe in false allegations, and I do believe that women can be bullies, it’s hard, sometimes, not to be cynical about the defense. Some men love free speech almost as much as they love libel lawyers.

“Smart or reckless or both??” I texted my friends when I first saw the Google spreadsheet, titled “Shitty Media Men,” that compiled the names, affiliations, and alleged misconduct of men in my field: writers and editors of books, magazines, newspapers, and websites. The document had been started anonymously, and though intended for circulation among women only, it was visible (and editable) to anyone with the link. I saw the names of men I knew and men I didn’t, stories I’d heard before and a few I hadn’t. “The List,” as it came to be called, didn’t upset me, but neither did it give me comfort. Mostly I worried about retaliation: the contributors getting sued or worse. “Reckless,” a friend texted back. “Not sure how but definitely reckless.”

By then I was once again preoccupied by backlash. The day the Weinstein story broke in the Times and five days before Farrow’s first article, an investigative piece on BuzzFeed had described the range of people who’d sustained an email correspondence with Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart editor who’d once been the face of the company. In addition to the usual alt-right characters, there were “accomplished people in predominantly liberal industries — entertainment, tech, academia, fashion, and media — who resented what they felt was a censorious coastal cultural orthodoxy.” Named among them were two writers I knew, both men, who according to the article had tipped off Milo for stories. One of them was a Facebook friend. He vehemently denied the allegations and said he hadn’t written the emails provided by BuzzFeed as proof. The other, as far as I know, said nothing. He was the managing editor of Vice’s feminist vertical (he once profiled Ann Coulter) who emailed Yiannopoulos with the request, “Please mock this fat feminist,” linking to a story by Lindy West.

The article had made me feel naive. These were the people I’d given the benefit of the doubt, the professional acquaintances who adopted such strong anti-identitarian poses that I often couldn’t discern their true sympathies. I figured that like the liberal professionals in the throes of a moral panic about moral panics, they shared the goal of collective liberation but disagreed about how to reach it, and in their disagreement came off as more resistant to change than they were. But what if some of them were not just acting like reactionaries? What if they didn’t share the goal?

In the case of Milo’s pen pals, their connection to the right was far from abstract: they talked, griped, shared notes. The lesson was that if someone sounds like an enemy and acts like an enemy, he may in fact be an enemy. I wasn’t sure what this meant for the men on the List. These were men I’d known to say “woke” in a funny voice, to make intellectual arguments against the redistributive efforts within their control — who they published or how they assigned. They lamented the intrusion of politics on quality art and warned of the perils of hysteria, witch hunts, and sex panics. To prove myself worthy of their confidence I tried not to leap to conclusions. But the allegations against men like this were damning: rape, attempted rape, sexual assault, choking, punching, physical intimidation, and stalking; “verbal intimidation of female colleagues”; “sexual harassment, inappropriate comments and pranks (especially to young women).” Even if half of it was false, I knew at least some of it to be true. At some point it’s irresponsible not to connect what a man says with what he does. In the days following the BuzzFeed article, “Who Goes Nazi,” Dorothy Thompson’s famous Harper’s piece from 1941, sprang to the collective mind:

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times — in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

None of the men I had in mind were Nazis. None resembled the men who’d marched through Charlottesville with tiki torches shouting, “You will not replace us!” But there was another spin on the game, and this was the one that worried me: Who in a showdown would accept the subjugation of women as a necessary political concession? Who would make peace with patriarchy if it meant a nominal win, or defend the accused for the sake of stability? The answer was more men than I’d been prepared to believe. I’d have to work harder not to alienate them, if only to make it harder for them to sell me out.

And so I talked to men. Men on the List, men not on the List, men secretly half-disappointed that they’d been left off the List, mistaking it for some kind of virility ranking. In the past I’d argued that it shouldn’t be women’s job to educate men about sexism, and I sympathized with the women who said so now. But reality isn’t always how it should be.

Perhaps it was just time for my shift. People take turns in the effort to explain collective pain, and I’d tapped out plenty of times before, pleading exhaustion, depression, and rage. The fact that I had the emotional reserves to discuss harassment at all implied that it was my responsibility to do so. (“It is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes,” Audre Lorde wrote in 1980 — “a constant drain of energy.”) This is not to say I was good at it: I overestimated the length of my fuse, listening, talking, reasoning, feeling more or less levelheaded — then abruptly shutting down or crying. It was nevertheless more than some friends could muster. From each according to her ability, et cetera.

If my approach was too much about men, my defense is that the situation was about men from the beginning. The shared experience of sexism is not the same thing as feminism, even if the recognition of shared experience is where some people’s feminism begins. It was to be expected that the discussion turned to men’s fates and feelings. How could guilty men be rehabilitated or justly punished? Under what circumstances could we continue to appreciate their art? As think pieces pondered these questions, other men leapt at the opportunity to make their political enemies’ sexual crimes an argument for the superiority of their side. It might have been funny if it weren’t so expected, so dark. When a friend and former colleague mentioned the “male-feminist” journalist who had choked her at the foot of his stairs, right-wing outlets rushed to “amplify” her voice. The pro-Trump website Gateway Pundit quoted her without permission; the Men’s Rights activist and alt-right personality Mike Cernovich retweeted the blog post to his 379,000 followers; Breitbart followed up with its own story. “My therapist said that I should sign every tweet with ‘also the alt right sucks’ so they can’t use my tweets in any more articles,” she joked.

Leftist men celebrated the fall of liberal male hypocrites, liberals the fall of conservative ones, conservatives and alt-rightists the fall of the liberals and leftists. Happiest were the antisemites, who applauded the feminist takedown of powerful Jewish men. It seemed not to occur to them — or maybe just not to matter? — that any person, any woman, had suffered. Outrage for the victims was just another weapon in an eternal battle between men. I remembered the emergency panel Trump assembled in response to the Access Hollywood tape with Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, and Paula Jones — women who had accused Bill Clinton of harassment or rape. A fourth woman, Kathy Shelton, had been raped by a man Hillary Clinton defended in court as a young lawyer. As the adage goes: in the game of patriarchy, women aren’t the other team, they’re the ball.

All this posturing made optimism difficult and clarity imperative. Patiently, my peers and I explained to men that we understood the difference between a touch and a grope, a bad time and rape, and mass online feminist retribution and a right-wing conspiracy (how credulous did they think we were?). Meanwhile, we wrung as much change as we could from this news peg. We called meetings, revised workplace policies, resumed difficult conversations we’d have preferred not to. As we learned during the Long 2016, the self-evident harm of sexual assault is not self-evident at all: no automatic mechanism delivers justice the moment “awareness” is “raised.” Donald Trump remains the President. Social media, the staging ground for much of this reckoning, remains easy to manipulate. Our enemies pose as allies, and our allies act like enemies, suspicious that our gain will be their loss.

Must history have losers? The record suggests yes. Redistribution is a tricky business. Even simple metaphors for making the world more equitable — leveling a playing field, shifting the balance — can correspond to complex or labor-intensive processes. What freedoms might one have to surrender in order for others to be free? And how to figure it when those freedoms are not symmetrical? A little more power for you might mean a lot less power for me in practice, an exchange that will not feel fair in the short term even if it is in the long term. There is a reason, presumably, that we call it an ethical calculus and not an ethical algebra.

Some things are zero sum — perhaps more things than one cares to admit. To say that feminism is good for boys, that diversity makes a stronger team, or that collective liberation promises a greater, deeper freedom than the individual freedoms we know is comforting and true enough. But just as true, and significantly less consoling, is the guarantee that some will find the world less comfortable in the process of making it habitable for others. It would be easier to give up some privileges if it weren’t so traumatic to lose, as it is in our ruthlessly competitive and frequently undemocratic country. Changing the rules of the game might begin with revising what it means to win. I once heard a story about a friend who’d said, offhand at a book group, that he’d throw women under the bus if it meant achieving social democracy in the United States. The story was meant to be chilling — this from a friend? — but it made me laugh. As if you could do it without us, I thought, we who do all the work on the group project. I wondered what his idea of social democracy was.

As for how men might think about their role in a habitable future — or how anyone might, from a position of having something to lose — a visual metaphor may be useful. Imagine walking through a maze, for years and years, to find that your path has dead-ended near the exit. There’s an illusion of proximity, of closeness to the goal: you can see the light through the brush, hear the traffic just outside. It’s difficult, in that moment, to accept that you’re not in fact close — that you can’t jump the hedge, and that to turn around would not be to regress but to proceed. You turn around not because it is morally superior or because it will get you into heaven, but because it is your best and only option. Perhaps redistribution is like that. To attempt it is not to guarantee that the future will be better than the past, only to admit that it can be.

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/the-intellectual-situation/in-the-maze/