#it's inhuman obviously what they make all the /children/ do but with the careers

[d12victor]

katniss doesn't by any means hate (strong word) any of the other tributes, she just has a strong preference for those from the poorer districts, hence disliking the career tributes..

[just-some-sad-bitch]

BATDAD BEING A GOOD FATHER

So I’ve been thinking about this head canon that Bruce has a very real struggle when he starts adopting children and specially when they start their own crime fighting career as Robin because, Bruce went to hell and back, he knew he was going to suffer and be put under inhumane circumstances in order to learn how to fight and survive, but at least he was always doing it willingly. But then Dick comes for the first time and he is so confused as to what to do with the little bird, how does he train this child in a way that teaches the kid how to fall from a building without throwing him from a building like an animal. So here is how I think he did it;

DICK: So I think he obviously exploited the kid gymnastics abilities to his very best, he was all about distraction and quick movement with one or two precise punches that put the bad guy down, Bruce saw a quick, agile, fearless kind of fighting style and later complemented the lack of actual physical fight with the sticks (sorry idk what those are called) and yeah, he saw talent and ran with it.

JASON: For Jason I think when he first met him he was, once again, faced with the challenge of “this kid needs to know how to knock an adult and jump out of a moving car but I’m not gonna do dat” so I think he explored the way Jason’s fighting style was literally steer fight: messy but violent, straightforward, no rules and a key element for a kid living in the street; fight to survive. That desperation and violence was maybe applied to some sort of martial art Bruce new and unlike Dick, Jason had the muscle to stand his ground on his own, however at 15 training got cut short.

TIM: With Tim he was so scared, he had just lost Jason and he was weary into training another Robin again, so he focuses on how intelligent the kid is and how that applies to battle, quick and asserted movements that can allow for a wide range of movement to get in, attack and get out. Also the long stick (sorry again with the name) he needs to make up for how scrawny the kid is and to keep him as far away from danger as possible.

DAMIAN: Now, with Damian I think it was a little different, he was already trained and the kid was a lethal weapon so actually training was focused on the deconstruction of many of his attacks, basically attack to hurt not to kill. Damian could throw a punch to the throat and leave permanent damage or take a life so Bruce had to go back to basics and teach again how to throw the same punch but with a different intention.

For Cass I think it was very similar to Damian and I honestly haven’t really read that much of Duke yet to know about his powers but I’ll get there.

Also, for necessary but horrible exercises like getting out of a buried coffin alive and knowing what procedure to follow when you are poisoned (laughing or scarecrow’s gas) or knowing how to get out a knife from your leg only if it’s not touching any important arteries, yada yada; I like to believe for all that they he was either very present and always very careful and most of the time it was kind of a “watch and learn” rather than a “I’ll stab you now what”. IDK I love Bruce only when he’s a good batdad that actually cares about his kids so there you go, some Headcanons.

[chaoticspacefam]

wonder if part of why the swtor jedi-sith conflict plays the way it does with “sith stans” and etc because the sith empire are functionally saturday morning cartoon villains - “murder and mayhem await!” compared to the more, i guess, believable evil of the republic/jedi following good ideals to bad conclusions and justifying war crimes

I'd certainly say it doesn't help things, you're right! I have...a lot of issues with the Jedi and their portrayal (especially in the Legends/SWTOR era), but I also recognise that a lot of that is very personal to me and that another fan might feel differently. Long, ranty post ahead so if that's not your deal, skip this one.

TL;DR: thinking critically about the behaviour of the Good Guys bad, I guess, since they're the good guys and you're obviously not allowed to use your own agency to decide something they do makes you deeply, viscerally uncomfortable.  And God help you if you disagree with anything they do and cite personal experience behind your (very justified) avoidance of that rhetoric/teaching, because Bad Things Justified If Good People Do Them and how dare you have different personal experiences and responses. If that's what you do, you're doing fandom wrong /s Also, bad writing choices of the writers themselves that perpetuate toxic, harmful viewpoints and/or stereotypes don't mean anything when said viewpoints/stereotypes are the Bad Guys because...Bad Guys Aren’t Supposed To Be People With Rights, Thoughts and Feelings Too, They’re Just Evil, (cringe)

Disagreeing with someone’s opinions is fine, but if you’re going to deliberately expose yourself to content you don’t like and then attack the person that is making the content because they made it and it upset you when you went looking for it....you are, in fact, the one at fault babes. No one is holding you hostage, you can block tags or unfollow a person (especially me. I really don’t care honest to god, if my posts are not your jam just leave. please.) if you hate what they post so much and are unable to just scroll past things you don’t like to stay for things you do. I’ve done it and will continue to do so, and my fandom experience is happier for it. Also, people are human and sometimes we’re tired and we make mistakes like we miss a trigger tag, and you are within your right to come to the person and point that out, but you are not within your right to threaten them because they made a mistake. Then you’re just a dick.

But I still wouldn't be the one going around (passive) aggressively attacking other fans for disagreeing with my opinions and again, this is based on personal experience, but I've seen a lot more of that stuff from "pro-Jedi" people who seem to be conveniently okay with shit like mass-genocide and cultural erasure because "the Jedi are the good guys and the (OT) Sith are fascists!"

I don't interact with the subsect of fans that do think "the (OT) Empire did nothing wrong hurr durr" unironically (and for good reason, I don't agree with that viewpoint either and the fact that half the time the "defence" of these other fans is "well you're pro-fascist then!!" lmao) but there's a very big gap between the OT Empire which is rightfully a mirror of fascism and dictatorial governments and I do, in fact, raise my eyebrows in heavy criticism and disdain at the writers of the TOR-era deliberately choosing to "justify" the ultimate end being said fascist Empire by making the Sith species (and as always I preface this by saying I am in fact white & therefore know I have priveledge and can only "relate" on a much shallower level as POC fans, but there are places where I do find them more relatable than the TOR-era Jedi which reek of conservative, pearl-clutching Christianity (which I spent way too much of my life having forced upon me by the bible-bashing Evangelists(tm) in my family) to me and I just don't have the fucks to give to spend time fixing something that's honestly traumatising for me to be reminded of):

-heavily Indigenous/POC-coded

-"tribal" and not in a properly-researched and respectfully portrayed sense but in a very deliberate "these people are savage and need to be colonised and "sophisticated" by the More Acceptible (Human) Dark Jedi" even though they had their own society, belief systems, and even had technology - just not in the "socially acceptible, conventional sense" I guess

-perpetuating this by adding slavery and all of that can of worms into the mix too, just to drive home the "evil and bad" prototype ig. I'm not even gonna speak more on this part because it just makes me angry.

-Deliberately giving them more "alien" or inhuman characteristics, which while by itself is not necessarily a bad thing, put it together with all the other things?? Big. Fucking. Oof.

-Were literally exterminated and the survivors selectively bred for ONLY the "bad and evil" traits for not agreeing with the Jedi's beliefs. Their own practises and beliefs were automatically "evil" and "wrong" just because they didn't want to "convert" (sniff sniff, Christianity, is that you?)

A direct quote for those who can't be bothered to click and read the link:

For nearly two thousand years, superstition, loyalty and sympathy were bred out as the two groups interbred, and qualities such as cunning, ambition and affinity to the Force were favored, which shaped Sith society over the centuries.[3][21][22] In the Sith Empire, as time progressed pure-blooded Sith were steadily bred out,[6] resulting in only a few pure-blooded Sith left in the Sith Empire by the time of the Great Hyperspace War.[13] Long after, the true species in the Empire were believed to have gone extinct due to the interbreeding process.

And conversely the Jedi:

-Deny young children contact with their parents, siblings and families from the moment their Force sensitivity shows (hmmmm. )

-Continually and actively support the condemnation and Exile of "imperfect" Jedi, hell, it's even pointed out on Wookieepedia, that any Force sensitive, even those who are not aligned to either faction, but that train with or follow teachings that are not Jedi Approved (tm) is labelled as a "Dark Jedi" by the Jedi Order

Although "Dark Jedi" originally referred to a Jedi who had fallen to the dark side, it could also refer to uninitiated Force-sensitives who received no Jedi training but began their careers under another Dark Jedi. Others were simply dark-side users who did not follow the teachings of the Sith or other dark side organizations.

because "oh noooo you do not follow the way of the Truth and the Light you horrible person how dare you defy The One True Correct Teaching, that makes you the Devil Incarnate no matter what" UGH.

-Continuously push the idea (very heavily) that Emotions Are Bad, which just creates a bunch of emotionally-stunted powderkegs unable to recognise, confront and deal with said emotions (and as I've said, I would know, I was one and maybe still am in some ways lmao) , then blames said powderkeg for exploding because they were never taught how to handle the emotions in the first place.

(Fuck "there is no emotion, there is peace", that's not how people work and never will be lmao)

I don't really know what else to say about this to be honest, because even though I've only been on tumblr about a year now, I'm already tired of this constant "I'm right, you're wrong" finger-pointing between those people in the fandom.

Cause to some of these "pro-Jedi" people it's an unthinkable crime to dare to have a different opinion to them and just want to be left alone, I guess. I've literally been attacked for saying "I don't like the Jedi and find dealing with their dogma too traumatising based on personal experience and trauma from my childhood so I'm going to avoid it but you do you"

I've had American Christians (tm) clap back to that with the ever-wonderful "LMAO bitch you don't have religious trauma, you didn't grow up in the bible-belt, stop trying to be edgy, shut up and go to therapy"

(all of this is sarcasm, for those who need me to spell it out for you. I'm still traumatised by the shit I went through and have to constantly check myself and my own feelings because of the toxic "habits" those teachings tried to push onto me as a child and I have zero tolerance and patience for your (not you, ssalmon, but the royal "you" as it were) victim-blaming abuse apologism "gotchas")

because 1) clearly American Christianity and the bible-belt are the only insidious and harmful subsect of Christianity and it's not like the concept of Evangelism as a whole is inherently toxic, harmful, and traumatising to those subjected to it right 2) Obviously there's a Stated Right Way To Be Traumatised and anyone who falls outside of that (Non-Existent) handbook is "faking it for attention" 3) bold of them to assume that curating my own fandom (and life) experience, and refusing to engage with things that trigger me, isn't something that I literally fucking learned in therapy lmao

Also, I find it funny how these are the people going around attacking people like me, who are literally minding our own motherfucking business, but then claim to preach “love and tolerism” and all this other bullshit. Karen, sweetie, only one of us is going around telling people they deserve to be murdered/stabbed for disagreeing with thier opinion about a videogame and pointing out that “hey, that’s...very yikes maybe don’t do that, step back and calm down” and it ain’t me (true story, this happened a couple of months ago and I don’t wanna dredge the post up because it’s very upsetting to think about) People are allowed to have opinions, and they don’t have to agree with your opinion just because that’s what you think, and the second that you sink to sending people death threats because they don’t share your opinion, you are, in fact, the asshole in that conversation.

It was even funnier because the person in question followed me first, I initially thought they were pretty cool so I followed back, then they threw a massive temper-tantrum and threw a bunch of very upsetting and triggering shit at me without my consent because I didn’t agree with them (I’d even put my opinions in tags on MY blog in an attempt to be courteous and not hijack their post with negativity, in hindsight perhaps I should have made my own post in the first place and I do acknowledge that BUT if that’s all they’d said I would have apologised and moved on, quite gladly, there was no need for them to explode the way they did at me for...making a mistake because I’m a stranger on the internet who didn’t know them & wasn’t a mind-reader and I happened to miss a trigger tag that I didn’t think of at the time lmao)

This post is getting awful long and rambly so I'm going to shut up now, but that's my take on it I guess, I hope that's what you were getting at and if it's not I apologise, I've been taking a huge step back and actively just avoiding any and all major posts related to this discourse as of a few months ago because it just infuriates and upsets me too much, it’s not worth the detriment to my mental health, I’m just here to make friends who are also hyperfixated on SWTOR and have fun vibing and talking about our characters, not get into one-sided morality debates with pearl-clutchers. 🤷

[forevercloudnine]

new 52 scarebat ship meme

(I had @heroes-etc​ give me more questions, but for scarebat this time, since we talk about it 24/7 but I never post about it. These are from this ship meme.)

4. Their favorite physical feature on each other?

There’s only one feature of Bruce’s appearance that’s scarier when he’s not wearing the batsuit, and that’s his creepy blue eyes. Especially the way Greg Capullo draws them where they’re sickly pale and have ridiculously constricted pupils.

So his eyes would definitely be in the running for Jonathan’s favorite feature, even if seeing them would require Bruce’s mask to be off, which is something New 52 Scarecrow explicitly avoids. Yes, that character trait only exists to justify why Batman’s identity is still secret after Scarecrow mind controls and subsequently institutionalizes him in “Gothtopia,” but I think it’s interesting so I’m going to pretend it’s not shoe-horned in there for meta reasons.

Actually having to see Bruce without the cowl on would definitely permanently break the illusion of Batman as a nightmarish inhuman bat demon, which I’m sure is a large part of the appeal for anyone as obsessed with fear as Jonathan Crane. But Bruce’s creepy eyes would be a serious consolation prize. 

Bruce’s favorite of Jonathan’s physical features is rough, because Jonathan is famously not great re: physical features. I’m going to say his mouth, because a) that’s where the snark comes from, and b) the New 52 establishes that in one of their earlier encounters, Jonathan had sewn his own mouth shut, so it’s one of those things where a bad first impression turned positive later on leads to more fondness than if you’d made a good impression in the first place.

I just looked up the panel where he does it and I DID forget how incredibly gross his lips look here, which makes the fact that I have chosen it as Bruce’s feature seem really funny in retrospect. But I do think that seeing Jonathan’s mouth healed and unmutilated would be a reassuring reminder of how he’s stabilized since their first encounter, at least to the point that he isn’t hurting himself anymore. Also, Bruce buys him a lot of chapstick.

Bonus alternate answer that did not make it into the Google Doc:

9. How open are they with their feelings?

Bruce and Jonathan are both pretty competent deceivers in the New 52; Bruce always, Jonathan depending on how the writer is feeling (though you could argue that Bruce just has a stronger grip on reality, while Jonathan’s skill at obfuscation varies with how lucid he is).

...I was going to use Detective Comics #23.3 as an example of Jonathan being a good liar, but actually upon re-reading I’m realizing that only 1/4 rogues buy his attempt at manipulation. So maybe he’s considerably worse at hiding his intentions than he thinks he is. Regardless, he doesn’t ever attempt to disguise his obsession with Batman.

Whether or not he’d express romantic feelings or try to hide them is debatable. There’s no Masters of Fear equivalent in the New 52 establishing that he was ever mocked or punished for expressing romantic feelings for someone, though there is a flashback panel in his origin emphasizing that he was always lonely in this regard (and coincidentally doesn’t specify that his interest is in women, which is fun).

In Green Lanterns #17 he has some internal monologue about how fear is his romance and he needs Batman to feel it, but it is an INTERNAL monologue, so it’s not clear if this is something he would express to Bruce or keep to himself. Or if he’s even fully processed it himself, given how incredibly out of it he is in this comic. Most of his spoken lines are just kind of screaming incoherently. Bruce gets pretty snippy with a Green Lantern at the end of the issue for suggesting that Jonathan should be punished for his crimes as if he were in control of his actions. 

Bruce is a similarly complicated answer, since for all his deceptions and shadowy mystery he pretty much wears his heart on his sleeve when it comes to romance. It’s just that his heart doesn’t express or process emotions the same way as anyone around him, which can create conflict. His (seriously underrated) love interest during Scarecrow’s origin arc, Natalya, spent most of her time dating him thinking that he didn’t care about her for this reason. He was trying to express that he loved her, but he mostly did so through complimenting her skills, which she never took as serious declarations of affection because he wasn’t being straightforward and she was insecure.

Jonathan does not himself seem like someone who would be especially secure in the idea of another person having romantic feelings towards him, so I assume that while Bruce might THINK he’s being open with any romantic feelings he develops, he would in reality just be really confusing.

13. How do they react to being away from each other?

I actually think that in general, Jonathan is one of the few people who would have no issue dealing with Bruce’s tendency to unexpectedly go AWOL for long periods of time, given that he himself has a tendency to fixate on his work to the exclusion of everything else.

But New 52 Jonathan specifically probably has pretty serious abandonment issues due to his father putting him in “the pit” and dying before he could take him out, meaning that Jonathan was waiting for his dad to come back for him for God knows how long, until Jonathan Sr.’s employers finally sent the police to investigate. 

So while in general I think he wouldn’t be very clingy, any impression that Bruce had died or otherwise wasn’t coming back for him would probably be incredibly triggering. If Bruce could assuage this reaction by occasionally sending updates that at least indicated he was still alive, then I doubt Jonathan would have any problems with his absence.

(@heroes-etc​: bruce sending like a checkmark emoji once a day. jonathan hears his phone ping, looks at the screen, and goes hm. good. and doesnt respond.)

Bruce meanwhile has no problem ditching literally any love interest at any time if something crime-related comes up, unless he’s considering quitting the cowl for them (as Joker probably accurately fears will happen with Catwoman in Prelude to the Wedding). But I don’t think he’d stop being Batman for Scarecrow, nor would Jonathan ever want him to — he’s interested in Batman, not necessarily Bruce Wayne.

But even though Bruce wouldn’t have an emotional problem with distance, I think he would get similarly paranoid if they went too long without contact, though for different reasons than Jonathan. Unlike some other villains (*cough* Joker and Riddler), Scarecrow has machinations that don’t require getting Batman’s attention, so if he decided to continue with his less legal experiments, he would not feel compelled to get Bruce involved. While the “World’s Greatest Detective” would probably not have an issue keeping an eye on Jonathan while he’s in Gotham, he’s considerably less capable of that in space. And Jonathan is definitely a rogue he would be obsessed with keeping an eye on, even if he reformed. 

Batman & Robin Eternal established that Dick’s first supervillain conflict AND first mission leaving the country was chasing Scarecrow across the world for an entire summer, which is kind of insane considering how early it was in Batman’s career. Like, he did not have an army of children to watch Gotham for him while he was gone. He had one child, and he took that child WITH him. He left Gotham undefended for months, JUST to catch Scarecrow. Sooo that in of itself implies he wouldn’t be great at keeping his distance.

15. Does their view of themselves differ from their partner’s view?

Well, Jonathan occasionally sees Bruce as a giant bat demon, so yes.

Outside of that very obvious differing view, Jonathan in general sees himself and the rest of the rogue gallery as more vital to Batman’s identity than Bruce considers them; the extent to which he’s right varies depending on your interpretation of Bruce’s character, but it’s definitely not something Bruce would ever consciously think or say. 

This is related to something that’s definitely a misconception of his, though, which is that the majority of Batman’s job revolves around supervillains like him. In Kings of Fear, when Jonathan blackmails Bruce into letting him come on patrol with him (which is a whole thing in of itself), he’s shocked at how boring most of Batman’s work is. Which probably goes along hand in hand with sometimes seeing Bruce as an almost mythologically inhuman figure. 

In his defense, it’s not like he has a lot of context for what the minutiae of Batman’s job is like. He’s either fighting Batman, hiding from Batman, or imprisoned by Batman in Arkham, a place where everyone else also spends all their time fighting or hiding from Batman. Which would really skew your perspective.

Interestingly, Bruce and Jonathan are both people who pride themselves on being extremely self-aware. Both of them probably inaccurately. You can rant about how you have a perfect understanding of your troubled mental state all day long, but if you’re still dressing up like a monster at night to indulge the power fantasies you created as a traumatized child by scaring the hell out of people, there’s probably a level of self-realization you haven’t gotten to yet.

Bruce however is at least self-aware enough to regularly be able to analyze his way out of fear toxin induced hallucinations, which Jonathan is unable to do — when he’s not depicted as having become immune to his fear toxin due to overexposure (as he is in Green Lanterns #17), he can be defeated with the same formulas that Batman regularly manages to resist (like his honestly embarrassing breakdown in Nightwing #50). 

Which ties into the difference between how he sees himself and how Bruce sees him: Jonathan obviously visualizes himself as a “master” of fear. He actually has the same internal monologue about fear and trauma that Bruce does in Batman: The Dark Knight #13: “Make it your own... run to what you fear... stare it in the eye... until it whimpers and backs down.” But Bruce doesn’t see Scarecrow as conquering his fear; he sees him as addicted to it, to the point of his own detriment.

Which is interesting, because Jonathan clearly sees his Scarecrow persona as a way to regain control after being victimized by his father’s fear experiments throughout his childhood. I guess Bruce’s perspective would be that Jonathan’s father instead got him addicted to fear as a child, so his attempts at agency as Scarecrow are just a) reliving his trauma over and over and b) compulsively inflicting his own trauma on others. There’s probably some truth to that, even if overall it’s probably an oversimplification (and coincidentally pretty much EXACTLY what Riddler argues Bruce is doing by “funding” Batman in Batman Annual #4, so there’s that).

20. Did either person change at all, to be with their partner?

The obvious answer here is yes, because Jonathan is a supervillain with no regard for human life while Bruce is a superhero who has dedicated his life to protecting people. So presumably one or both of them would have to make serious compromises to be together. HOWEVER. Scarecrow’s primary motivation is to research, understand and inflict fear, while Batman’s modus operandi is making his enemies afraid of him. So despite their contradiction in morals, they’re uniquely positioned to advance each other’s goals, were they to ever join forces.

Bruce never has a problem using fear toxin on Scarecrow, presumably partially out of an “eye for an eye” sense of poetic justice, but also because Batman is practical and it’s a nonlethal weapon that’s always available to him while fighting Scarecrow. If he could have fear toxin customized for his own use, it’s hard to imagine him being unwilling to use it. In Gothtopia he actually advocates for using what’s leftover from Crane’s new formula on all the inmates at Arkham, which seems about as insanely morally ambiguous as it gets. Arguably, putting fear toxin in his smoke bombs would be considerably less wrong than drugging mental patients out of their mind when they’re supposed to be receiving therapy (this is also the issue where he illegally releases Poison Ivy because she did him a favor, which is both morally questionable and relevant to the current topic).

Jonathan obviously already thinks Batman is the most interesting possible case study in fear; it’s why he keeps coming back to Bruce and Gotham despite being one of the more independent villains in Batman’s rogue gallery in the New 52. So though he would have to give up actively kidnapping people (which would be a huge sacrifice, I’m sure), teaming up with Bruce would give him unrestricted access to his favorite test subject. Unfortunately, it seems very possible that he would fall back to old tricks if he ever felt that he’d gotten everything he could out of a partnership with Bruce. Fortunately, that would probably take a VERY long time.

[notalwaysthevillian]

Heart Eyes and Headlines

Summary: Remy Sanders grew up famous. His father was an actor, and his dad was a rock star. Due to this, he ends up with a bodyguard for most of his life. After a brief stint without one, Remy decides to hire himself a new bodyguard. And this one is hot as hell.

Pairings: Romantic Remile, Prinxiety; Implied Romantic Moceit

Word Count: ~2.2k

Read the other fics by the other members of @thesquirtlesquadwrites (meaning @not-so-innocent-bi-sander and @nekoabiwrites) here!

Remy Sanders grew up having a lot of nice things. Despite this, his dads had made sure he was grateful for what he had. They had been overjoyed when he’d donated his presents to the local children’s hospital when he was ten.

Well, most of the presents.

But having two famous dads wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Due to his father being an Oscar winning actor and his dad having won a few Grammys, Remy was thrust into the limelight more than he ever wanted to be.

Around the age of thirteen, the press had started trying to get close to him to get their information on his dads. It only took Remy throwing coffee at a camera once before Roman and Virgil opted to hire a bodyguard for their son.

Davy was an excellent bodyguard, and even better at lying to the press. He had a bit of a smaller stature, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t take someone to the ground if he had to.

And he’d had to. A few times.

When Remy became a legal adult, his dads had sat him down, asking if he still wanted a bodyguard. Davy had met someone and was thinking about settling down, but was willing to watch over Remy for a few more years if necessary.

Remy had bid Davy adieu, but continued to keep in touch. Who wouldn’t when his husband was as sweet as can be?

The press occasionally hounded Remy, but for the most part had learned to back off. He couldn’t help but laugh when he heard a few paparazzi mention that Davy could be lurking around the corner.

His blissful bubble only lasted until his 24th birthday. He threw a big extravaganza, but managed to keep it a private party.

Somehow, someway, some press had gotten in. His party, and his drunken rants, had been broadcasted in the news cycle.

Mortified, Remy talked to his dads about a bodyguard again.

Which brought him to what he was currently doing. Sifting through various applications as he lazed on his couch.

“Let’s see…” he mumbled to himself as he flipped a paper over. “Emile Picani. 26 years old, no experience. But he did work as a therapist. Possibility.”

As he continued on with the applications, he couldn’t get the therapist out of his mind. It sure would be nice to have someone who’d listen to your problems, while also protecting you from your problems.

In the end, he ended up choosing one Mr. Emile Picani to become his bodyguard. He’d replied to the application with his acceptance, receiving a formally worded response back. They agreed to meet up at the local coffee place within the hour.

About ten minutes before he was supposed to be there, Remy grabbed his black leather jacket, calling, “I’m meeting my new bodyguard, be home soon!”

Barely hearing the goodbyes, he headed down in the elevator. Once he was in the lobby, he flipped his sunglasses on. It helped that they had a dual function - sun protection and camera protection.

Avoiding the paparazzi the best he could, and he’d gotten fairly good at it, he made his way into the back door of the coffee shop. The owners were wonderful, allowing him to use the employee entrance. He suspected it was because he tipped enough to keep this place running. But why wouldn’t he? They had fantastic coffee.

The owner, Logan, nodded at Remy as soon as he walked in. “Usual?”

“Yes please.”

Moving to sit at the agreed table, Remy sat so he could face the door. When Logan came over with his drink, he already had a fifty out. “Thanks, Lo.”

“You’re not usually here this late in the afternoon.” Logan commented as he wiped down a table nearby.

“Oh, I’m meeting my new bodyguard today.” Remy took a sip of the drink, reveling in the flavor. “This is perfect, Logan, thank you.”

“Isn’t it always?” He teased, before heading back behind the counter.

At four on the dot, the door opened. Remy’s eyes flicked to the man who’d walked in, looking him up and down immediately. This guy was hot as hell. He had to be about 6’4”, with the most muscled arms Remy had ever seen. How did someone make a Steven Universe shirt look that good?

Feeling the blush creep up his neck as the man headed in his direction, Remy quickly chugged the rest of his coffee.

“Did you need another one?” The man asked, hovering by the table. “I can grab one when I go get one for myself.”

“You don’t have to -”

Before Remy could protest further, the man grabbed the cup from his hand, giving him a smile. Remy tried not to think about the spark that had passed through their fingers when they’d brushed together as he watched the man walk up to the counter.

Once Logan had finished with the order, he shot a wink to Remy, who sank down in his seat. Why did this guy have to be so hot? It was hard enough hiding from the press in general, he couldn’t exactly walk down the street as...excited as he was.

“Here you go!” The man said, sliding the coffee across the table before holding out a hand. “Emile Picani, at your service.”

“Um, Remy Sanders, but you knew that.” Remy said, shaking Emile’s hand. It was super soft, this guy definitely used lotion. “So...I looked over your application and saw that you used to be a therapist. What changed?”

Emile took a sip of his drink. There was no way he didn’t see Remy’s eyes watching his mouth. “I stopped getting patients. For a while I had a steady clientele, but then people stopped liking my therapy style. I didn’t want to change who I was, so I figured it was time for a career change.”

“And you chose to be a bodyguard instead?”

“When I was going through my options, a friend of mine suggested it as a joke. But I thought it over and it made sense.” Emile’s eyes started to sparkle as he spoke. “I enjoy helping people in any way I can. Working out is a stress reliever for me, so I stay in great shape. And the paparazzi have always ticked me off a little, even though I’d never show it.”

Stashing his thoughts of ‘this man is perfect’, Remy leaned forward, resting elbow on the table and his chin in his hand. “You seem perfect for the job. But I am curious, are you a fan of either of my parents?”

“Oh, I’ve been following Roman’s career for years.” Emile finished off his drink. “Not in a stalker-y way, just in a generic fan way. And Virgil’s music is excellent, but it’s not really my style? My friend Remus enjoys it though.”

After talking for another hour, Remy’s phone went off.

Father: You coming home for dinner? Or did you get eaten by the press?

Rem: Be home soon!

“Are you cool with walking me back to the pent-the apartment?” Remy asked. “Obviously you’re welcome to stay for dinner if you want.”

“Sounds great.” Emile stood, grabbing their garbage and tossing it.

Rem: Set another place at the table.

Dad: On it

Remy lead Emile out the back of the coffee shop, before pointing down an alley. “This way.”

Almost as soon as they’d popped out of the alley, a few journalists descended on them.

“Remy! What can you tell us about Roman’s oscar nomination?”

“When is Virgil dropping his new album?”

The questions grew to a crescendo, before Emile stepped in front of Remy. His crossed arms, combined with the look on his face, made him look much more intimidating than the sweet guy Remy had just talked to for over an hour.

“Mr. Sanders is not taking any questions.” He said, his voice as cold as ice. “Please excuse us.”

Shockingly, a few of the journalists backed off. All except for Joshua, the lead reporter for Slander. While the others were distracted, he tried to move around Emile.

It didn’t go so well for him.

Before Remy could blink, Joshua was on the ground, his notebook knocked into a puddle. Emile raised an eyebrow, his hands fisted at his sides. “I said that he’s not taking any questions.”

Not giving Joshua a chance to get up, Emile nodded to Remy, who continued on down the sidewalk.

“That was incredible.” He whispered in awe when they were out of earshot.

Emile shrugged. “Part of the job, right?”

Dinner that night went swimmingly. Virgil and Roman found Emile to be an extremely polite man. When Remy told them what had happened, they’d nodded at each other, clearly approving the new bodyguard.

“I don’t know if anyone can beat Davy, but he’s a pretty close second.”

Over the next eight months, Remy really got to know Emile and vice versa. Davy hadn’t really talked much about his private life on the job, but Emile was a lot friendlier. Well, friendlier with Remy anyway. Joshua was now much less of a problem.

No, the problem now was Remy’s ever growing crush on his bodyguard.

The first time Emile leaned down to whisper in Remy’s ear, asking if he wanted to leave a party, Remy had to use all of his willpower to keep from melting on the spot. Emile hadn’t meant anything by it, but his hot breath against Remy’s ear was something Remy for sure wanted to feel again.

Whenever they went out, Emile went out of his way to open doors for Remy. It was such a simple gesture, but it was one that turned Remy’s insides to goo every single time.

In addition to his good looks and stunning personality, Emile was ripped as fuck. Remy knew that he had thick arms, but when he’d walked into the penthouse gym to find Emile working out with no shirt, the noise he made was inhuman. This was followed by him darting off to his room and screaming into a pillow.

After eight months, the two of them had started to be alone more often. At first, Remy hadn’t gone out as much, unsure of how Emile would react to his usual party lifestyle. But as he’d stopped partying, he realized he really didn’t enjoy it as much as he’d used to.

So he stopped partying all together.

Instead, he and Emile would go to places Remy had never been before. Once he’d found out that Emile had used cartoons in his therapy sessions, he dragged the man to a new art exhibit that features old cartoons in new styles. Emile’s smile had been comparable to a supernova that day, rather than its usual sunniness.

But, of course, the press had started to notice that Remy and Emile were hanging out more often.

“Um, Rem?” Roman had asked one morning, hiding a smile. “Care to explain this?”

He tossed an issue of Slander on the table. Remy groaned when he saw that it was a picture of him and Emile on the cover.

The headline was even worse.

Is Remy Sanders dating his bodyguard?

“We aren’t dating.” He hissed at the magazine, wishing he had laser vision like Roman had in his latest movie. “God, I wish Joshua would knock this shit off.”

“I dunno Rem,” Virgil said as he looked over his husband’s shoulder. “It kinda looks like you’re giving him heart eyes.”

Blood rushed to Remy’s cheeks in an instant. “I - I’m not -”

Roman merely raised an eyebrow, a twinkle in his eye. “You’re not? Because from what I’ve observed, you have a huge crush on him.”

Blushing even more, Remy stuffed the magazine in the trash and headed off to his room to get ready for the day.

Buried in his closet, for the first time, Remy heard Emile call his name. “In here!”

He felt Emile approach as he dug through his jackets. His heart was pounding a mile a minute. There was absolutely no way he didn’t see the headline.

“So, um...about what Joshua wrote.”

“God, I hate that guy.” Finally finding his favorite jacket, Remy yanked it off the hanger and pulled it on. “He should really mind his own business. So what if I have a crush on you?”

The words spilled out of his mouth before he could stop. The second he realized what he’d said, he buried his face in his hands, feeling his skin burn. “I’m so sorry, we can pretend I didn’t say that.”

“Why?”

Soft hands grabbed Remy’s wrists, gently uncovering his face. Emile looked into Remy’s eyes, his own cheeks a baby pink.

“What?”

“Why pretend you didn’t say that?” Emile leaned forward until their foreheads were touching. “I’m surprised you didn’t pick up on it by now, but I like you too.”

“You do?”

Emile nodded, his eyes darting down to Remy’s lips. “Mhmm.”

His heart bursting with joy, Remy surged forward, connecting their lips. He couldn’t wipe the smile off his face.

The next day, Slander had a new headline.

Remile confirmed!

[piermanwalter]

Thief’s Apprentice: Fashion of Various Classes of the Living and Dead

IN GENERAL

Buttons don’t exist in Veilheim because they haven’t been invented. There is no need for buttons because the living tend to first lose their fingers to the plague and aren’t dextrous enough to use buttons. Revenants are sewn into their clothes and never take them off unless they get totally destroyed, so they have no need for buttons either. 

Revenants and the living have different attitudes towards metal. For the living, gold-plated things and gold alloys look the same as pure gold. Revenants can sense substances, so if they wear gold, they prefer to wear pure gold. The alternatives are just sad.

Some professions wear an unofficial uniform, to be easily recognised, and also because these clothes are practical for how they work, and also because I can’t be assed to make a custom model for everyone. For example, shepherds never have prosthetics to advertise their ready supply of meat. Judges wear tall crowned helmets because they are literally and metaphorically higher up than anyone else in court. Reapers heavily armor their ankles to prevent accidental dismemberments and are shirtless, to show that their terrifying metal tools are for farming, not fighting, and also to prevent living reapers from suffering from heat, and also because reaping is an awesome and sexy job.

Revenants move their prosthetics by imbuing them with their souls, and the same happens with clothes. Since fabric is organic and made to store the original being’s, whether it be a silk worm or a flax plant, soul, human souls can’t make a good enough foothold in the material to move it. Still, revenant clothing is integral for sensing and personal esteem, so changing is more like a surgical procedure. Wearing a new outfit feels like nerve damage. Your skin and subcutaneous fat has died, so you were peeled and replaced with more skin and fat, and you can’t feel anything until your nerves heal. 

The debutante penchant for inventing new fashions and constantly changing clothes is similar to plastic surgery. There is the same impression of frivolous spending and vanity, but also advertising the size of your soul that enables you to be comfortable with your new outfit within hours, and also the strength of your resolve to have your skin replaced over and over. The debutantes may be capricious and wasteful, but they are not cowards.

THE DEAD

The dead in Veilheim like to wear wool heavily dyed in bright colors with metal, such as Mercury Red and Cobalt Blue. This is because revenants don’t see and instead send out tiny pieces of their souls to feel distance and substances. Their impression of color is based off how concentrated various substances are, so while the living may see fabric as too saturated with dirt to identify color, revenants can feel the copper in the fabric and know how green it is. 

Wool, as the hair of sheep, carries plague so it’s considered unsafe for the living to wear. Revenants wearing plant-based fabrics is seen as selfish. It’s also considered rude for revenants to wear multiple colors or patterns, because it forces people to expend more of their soul to see all the colors and recognise you. The long ribbons, while stylish, also serve a practical purpose. Since revenants don’t feel or have a sense of balance, if the ribbons are pointing in a direction, that’s probably where down is, and if they are waving a lot, there might be wind.

Quail Racer

As our exemplar of revenant poverty in Veilheim, Quail Racer doesn’t wear clothes, has no remaining flesh, and her prosthetics barely keep her together. Based off how tall she is and how healthy and unwarped her bones are, Quail Racer must have caught the plague late in life and died soon after. Her memory and mental faculties are so bad that she can’t obey orders or find any gainful employment. Instead, she devotes herself to taking care of, racing, and betting on quails. Quail Racer is seen as a cautionary tale of what happens if you die before your time, but she has more money than it may seem. Instead of spending it on herself, she spends it on quails. 

You can argue that revenants with poor mental faculties and a stunted understanding of the world are more carefree and can devote their time and energy to their own happiness instead of the well-being of the city as a whole without guilt, but they can only live so long like this before wearing down into senseless bones, and are often victims of crimes, ranging from petty robbery to being kidnapped for secret illegal slavery to being taken apart for raw materials. Quail Racer is much beloved by the quail racing community, so nothing too bad has happened to her yet.

Practical Cartographer

Practical Cartographer tries to present as the average Veilheimer in order to spread news of the great city to other travellers. His prosthetics are better than most can afford up front, but some revenants purposefully put themselves into debt to get a better body. Since Practical Cartographer scrounges his map materials from garbage, his business has almost no operational cost and he is no longer in debt. Most revenants of average means died before before the plague rendered them bedridden and were not rich enough in life to learn an intellectual craft, and so have a clear career path in manual or industrial labor. Although somewhat skilled and artistic, Practical Cartographer’s maps are so obviously mass-produced at low quality that for census reasons he counts as a common industrial laborer instead of an artisan, something that other people mock him for, but he doesn’t care about.

Often poorer revenants wear more pieces of clothing, so that if one piece gets destroyed, they don’t have to replace their whole outfit. Conversely, richer revenants often wear clothes in a single piece so they can flex on replacing an entire outfit. This is not an ironclad rule, so whenever Practical Cartographer gets hit with, “Why do you dress like a laborer?”, he can hit back with, “I dress like the Veiled Goddess. Are you calling our Goddess a laborer?”

Master Computer

Master Computer was spoiled in life and given the best education in finance and math, and after she died, it would be a terrible waste if she didn’t make a name for herself. Although she was not severely infected before she died, she has worked around her terrible short-term memory via prosthetic devices and communicating mostly via writing. Computers are hired to do a lot of math and take detailed records, and can be identified by the abacuses, plumb bobs, clocks, and other devices attached to their heads. Since Master Computer sends out her subordinates and apprentices to measure and record things, she has no measuring devices and is instead rigged with a huge opulent abacus with gold beads to do calculations as quickly as possible. 

She is rich, but not monumentally rich. She can afford to wear lots of gold, but not as much gold as turbo plutocrats like the civil servant triumvirate. Instead of spending on fine materials, she instead spends on prosthetics. Most cities in Surenia rarely have revenants deciding to look much different from a regular living human, but in Veilheim, where death is normalised and the finest prosthetics are made, revenants can be gigantic and/or recast in bizarre inhuman shapes if they can afford it. Master Computer can be seen and heard from far away, towering over most people and clicking and clacking her gold abacus beads and her 11 metal legs.

THE LIVING

To avoid excess plague and toxic metal exposure, the living in Veilheim tend to wear undyed plant-based fabrics. It’s fine for the living to wear patterns because they can see. Some late stage plaguebearers decide to wear metal dyes anyway because they figure they will die of the plague before they get metal poisoning. Organic dyes are also worn, but revenants can’t see light, so the finest of murex purple dyes comes across to them as a nasty greenish brown. If revenants are bad at differentiating organic substances, how do they see hair and skin color? Revenants can sense the souls of others and can get an impression of how a living being looks based off their own self image.

It’s good to keep track of your bones as they fall out. After you die, you can get them reattached. People heavily ravaged by the plague used to plait them together with ribbons, but as painkillers, health care, and prosthetics for the living improved, previously bedridden people could walk around, so the new fashion is to wear your bones wired to a ring for convenience.

Kaolin

It’s very tragic when a child gets the plague. Some children are born to plaguebearing mothers, and are guaranteed to die within a year. Some children get infected on their own and can no longer live with their family in the plague-free district. They lack the strength to endure years of being consumed by plague, and are guaranteed to go mad after they die, so plaguebearing children are allowed to go wherever they want and do whatever they want within reason. Since the children aren’t expected to live long enough to grow taller, they get one new outfit and that’s it. What remains of their lives is devoted to fun. A special hollow tower was made for them to throw themselves into when they can’t stand it anymore. Sometimes children who are too far gone to climb the tower will beg for passerby to kill them. This is horrible, but the alternative is to wait for children to slowly die in agony on their own, and then the resulting mad revenants will wreak havoc. Another alternative is rounding up plaguebearing children and killing them, which nobody wants to do.

Kaolin is smart enough to understand how precarious it is to be a plaguebearing child and has plans to return to sanity after dying. This is one reason why Kaolin is so interested in the bros: two of them have child-sized skeletons, but they are mostly not mad. Someone cared about them enough to raise them after they died.

Kios

Kios was lucky enough for the plague to first affect her spine, so she is guaranteed some level of sanity after she dies. After a life of working in breweries, farms, and distilleries, Kios has a very good understanding of plant fermentation and preservation and now spends most of her time on street corners in the market district smoking outrageous amounts of opium, playing board games, and giving fairly good perfume mixing and vegetable pickling advice. There’s no guarantee how she will turn out after dying, but Kios assumes she will become a farmer or reaper or small-time distiller or working in Agriculture Scientist’s office. 

The living want to show off how infected they are, but at the same time want to stay otherwise healthy. Hands and feet are often bandaged because they are most easily damaged. Heads are also bandaged because the thin skin of the scalp is always sloughing off and ears are leaking infectious fluids. It’s a point of pride to get the plague in a more unusual place. Kios thus has a very good reason to wear a backless dress. She lost a fair amount of her hands and feet, so she has a pretty decent ring of bones.

Astragalus Rambush

Rambush owns most of the aforementioned breweries and distilleries. As the first living person to owe taxes under the new law, he maintains an air of superiority over revenants complaining about getting stabbed through the ribcage because he got away with paying one third of what he owed by getting stabbed through the hand that was already lost to plague. His nose and lips have rotted off, but he can’t cover them otherwise he will suffocate and drown in infectious fluids, so everyone just has to deal with that. 

Rambush expects to have some level of control over the family business after he dies, and uses his status as a plaguebearer to negotiate favorable deals with revenants for his family, even though he hasn’t seen most of them since he got the plague. By wearing a cloak that is purple to the living and patterns visible to revenants, Rambush hopes to be at least partially purple to everyone, even though it’s technically an assholish thing to do. Although metal prosthetics are starting to be made for the living, they were designed for revenants and are very hard to use. Since Rambush lost an arm and a leg, his ring of bones is impressive and frightening to behold.

[sepublic]

An Analysis of Twelve Forever’s Endless Inhabitants

In which I overanalyze and discuss the meaning of some of its characters, either in-universe or on a meta level!

Swimple Dan- Swimple Dan at first seems to be another whacky character, but the episode The Locals Forever and Not Twelve Forever provide us further insight into his character’s symbolism. We immediately see that Swimple Dan is in a marriage, but a rather unhappy one- His wife verbally abuses him in Not Twelve Forever, and he lies about what he does during the day due to his insecurity about his own actual accomplishments, and the expectations placed on him by his wife. Despite being married to his wife, Swimple Dan doesn’t seem to particularly enjoy his time with her and evidently prefers the companionship of his male friend Gorbis, who is also in a marriage with a female.

          Swimple Dan seems to be another symbol of Reggie’s apprehension and viewpoint of adult life- As some dull, monotonous existence where you constantly act to do what others approve of. His poor marriage with his wife is symbolic of how Reggie looks down on love, especially after seeing her share of dysfunctional marriages. Dan likewise lying about his job and accomplishments, coupled by his wife’s insistence that she always ‘knew’ he would do great things (and how others said he’d just be dancing in the living room all day, paralleling how others probably expect Reggie to play toys in her room all day), can be seen as allegorical towards Reggie’s anxiety over her mother’s expectations and wishes for her. Reggie’s mom expects her to grow up, to be an adult and do proper adult things, and Swimple Dan lies to maintain an image of him fitting into the mold because that’s what Reggie sees adulthood as, and likewise feels like she is lying about herself to fit a societal mold.

          Potentially, Swimple Dan could also be a commentary on the nuclear family and heteronormativity. Swimple Dan is trapped in a loveless, heterosexual marriage with a woman who he seems to have no actual feeling towards and vice-versa, and the same applies for his male friend, Gorbis, whom he prefers to hang out with. The two couples not breaking off their marriages and being with the ones they actually love could be symbolic of them (and Reggie) having repressed homosexuality, and how society often causes people, LGBTQIA+ or not, to go into heteronormative relationships and be closeted due to that being the expectation and norm.

Sadmantha- Okay, do I even need to say it? We all know what she represents. Still, just to get it out of the way…

          Sadmantha is again, Reggie’s unhappiness and trauma at being abandoned by her father. Like Reggie, she is haunted by loss, and the potential of loss. Sadmantha is symbolic of Reggie being rejected- Rejected by society and her peers, hence her insistence that everyone secretly dislikes her, a sentiment later reflected in Todd Forever, where she accuses her friends of not actually liking her, and her preferring they just leave her behind than keep up the pretense of an actual enjoyment.

          She is also Reggie’s anxiety of rejection from her father- Rejected and left behind, perhaps due to not being an ideal child? Either way, Sadmantha is symbolic of the resulting self-loathing and insecurity Reggie has towards herself and regarding her friendships, and her fear of abandonment. Reggie is scared of relationships because she doesn’t want to be left behind, disappointed, and/or discover that the love is not genuine and she is not truly liked by the other.

Schmaaron- Schmaaron is, rather obviously, representative of Todd himself. Specifically, Schmaaron’s childish demeanor, need for a nurturing figure, and outright resemblance to both Todd and his older brother, represent Todd’s own issues;

          Todd, like Schmaaron, wants to be nurtured. He yearns for the caring figure that his brother provided in the absence of their father’s attention and mother’s presence. Schmaaron is childish, symbolizing Todd’s anxiety over growing up without his brother, and his wish to go back to the simpler times when he was younger and his brother looked out for and hung out with him. Todd doesn’t want to grow up and wants to stay a kid who hangs out with his brother, so Schmaaron, who resembles the two, is a child who cries for attention and an older, nurturing figure to look after him.

Guy Pleasant- Guy Pleasant seems to be representative of Todd’s resentment towards his older brother. Like his brother, Guy Pleasant is an older, ‘cooler’ person who plays guitar and has a natural affinity for music. And like Todd’s brother, he leaves Todd and others who look up to him behind in order to pursue his own life and career.

Guy Pleasant is the result of Todd projecting his anger towards his brother for leaving him behind, for not really ‘caring’ about him, as well as possible envy towards his brother’s natural talent for music and guitar. Interestingly, Guy Pleasant is shown to legitimately be a lonely person who finds fulfillment from taking care of Schmaaron (the allegory for Todd)- Perhaps Todd’s desire for his brother to find ‘true happiness’ by staying with him.

Dr Champion- Interestingly, Dr Champion doesn’t seem to be necessarily symbolic of something, but more like foreshadowing to the reveal of Endless as a not-so-friendly place…

          Although his insistence that he comes from Kentucky can come across as just nonsense (or be interpreted as him having been a toy from Kentucky who was buried and brought to life in Endless), Spring Break Forever suggests that people can lose their minds and memories in Endless, becoming trapped and one with it.

          This idea is taken further in Stranger Forever, which outright confirms this with Elmer, an ageless child who has been in Endless since 1955. Not only has he become detached from reality and his own past, but Elmer’s body has deteriorated and changed, which would account for Dr Champion not looking human if one were to assume he was at one point. Also worth noting is how Dr Champion seems to be more mentally unhinged and less ‘there’ than the other inhabitants. Additionally, Dr Champion mentions a 401K in Manguin Forever, only to realize he doesn’t know (or rather, remember) what the term means…

Borbo- Forgive me for saying this, but Borbo seems to be symbolic of Reggie herself. Both are considered to be freaks and outcasts amongst their peers, and both are children who desire to be loved and appreciated. Borbo’s wishful declaration of being Reggie’s favorite friend in Stranger Forever mirrors Reggie’s desire to be liked and appreciated by others. The two further parallel one another in their actions in The Locals Forever- When given the opportunity, both spy on their neighbors due to their curiosity, and because they want to know what people would rather do than hang out with them. In Locked Out Forever: Part One, Reggie is even seen spying on others and their antics without being noticed, just like Borbo, and is also nervous when caught.

Further adding to their similarities, Borbo also has an older, mature mother figure who frequently calls him out on his immaturity, and works hard to groom him into a more responsible person. And like Reggie’s mother, Borbo’s mom still clearly loves her child and wishes the best, and is willing to give little treats (as indicated by Borbo’s confident, unconcerned assertion that he’ll still get dessert despite his mother’s declared punishment that he won’t).

          He and Reggie are both loners, outcasts, and children who watch others from afar, in part because they envy the social interaction of their peers, desire to be with them, wonder what they prefer to do over being with them, etc. Both have mothers who are concerned for them and want them to be more mature.

Butt Witch- Butt Witch is fairly obviously a representation of Reggie’s anxiety with puberty. As if her being summoned by several books on the subject and literally confronting Reggie over said fears wasn’t enough, Butt Witch’s deep, male voice can be seen as a reference to puberty making voices deeper. Likewise, her noticeably ‘woman’ figure is a reference to Reggie’s mother’s line about how in every girl, there is a woman waiting to bloom; Butt Witch has the body of a mature adult woman. Further adding to this allegory, Butt Witch is presented as having an inhuman true form that later becomes more monstrous, further reflecting Reggie’s apprehension towards the human body and its changes.

          Additionally, as suggested by @virovac, Butt Witch also represents the idea of maturity and cynicism going hand-in-hand. Butt Witch immediately dismisses Reggie’s version of Endless as garish and immature, and she actively enjoys and is literally fueled by anger, resentment, and conflict. Butt Witch’s cruel, negative personality is in a sense a bit of a reflection of how Reggie sees her brother Dustin becoming cynical, mean, and edgy in an attempt to be more mature. Butt Witch can also be symbolic of how Reggie sees many adults as being mean, stifling, and attempting to put an end to her fun and enjoyment in life by forcing her to ‘grow up’- Just as Butt Witch frequently interferes with her adventures.

          In a less meta sense, Butt Witch is interesting in that she was not made by the puberty books, but merely summoned by them. Her dialogue indicates her as having been on Endless before, and that it was nowhere near as ‘garish’ as it is now. This, and her memories of it as being fond, and the revelations of what she considers to be ‘fond’, indicate that Endless was once a less colorful and friendly place.

          Was Butt Witch once a kid, or an adult, from the regular world who came to Endless? Or was Endless once a more visually threatening world that Butt Witch originated from? Concerningly, Butt Witch has contempt for the name Reggie has given her and yet won’t correct it with an actual name of her own…

          Either way, Butt Witch seems to have a sense of agency and self-control unique to the inhabitants of Endless.

Big Deal- Big Deal is pretty clearly an allegory for the typical, 9-to-5 office job worker that every adult usually becomes. He wears a tie, carries around a briefcase, has ‘Big Deal’ for a name, etc. Likewise, Big Deal is constantly in a position of servitude and subservience beneath Butt Witch, an uncaring boss who feeds off of his work but doesn’t particularly pay back his kindness.

            Big Deal is another symbol of how Reggie views adult life- A state of being in which an adult becomes a mindless office worker, focused only on business and brokering deals, working day and night for an apathetic boss in the hopes that their hard work will pay off and that they’ll be recognized and promoted. He is the embodiment of the bootlicking that workers are forced to resort to in order to get any form of promotion and thus a better career and life.

Manguin- Our Guy Fieri impersonator seems to be symbolic of none other than Esther herself. Like Esther, both are very organized, professional people who take their responsibilities incredibly seriously, and just as Esther mentions the pressures placed onto her by her parents, Manguin references his family’s name and how he has to uphold it by doing his job as a professional assistant well. Likewise, Manguin only appears when Esther in particular is looking for someone to act as a voice of reason for Reggie- In other words, she’s looking for someone who can fill in her own role while she’s gone.

          Manguin is Esther in that both, due to the expectations of family placed on them, keep themselves as very composed, efficient, and productive people, with a wide array of skills and an impressive resume. Like Esther, Manguin soon finds relief when he learns to ‘let go’ and stop worrying about being responsible. Unlike Esther, he doesn’t go entirely overboard with letting go and having fun, but this is potentially reflective of Esther’s fear of having too much fun and thus becoming a rowdy hooligan and a disappointment to the family name. Manguin’s realization at the disgrace of his job and family name is what compels him to go into his suitcase, after all.

          Manguin is what Esther wants to be- Accomplished. However, he is potentially symbolic of her anxieties of what will happen to her if she doesn’t rigidly adhere to the goals and duties set for her by her parents, and instead chooses to have fun and do what she wants.

Colin- Colin is one I’m not so sure over, and he might not be anything in particular. However, he could potentially be symbolic of Reggie’s social awkwardness and uncertainness when it comes to dealing with others, as well as her general ‘weirdness’.

Elmer- Elmer is obviously, what Reggie could have been. He’s framed deliberately in-universe as a dark mirror to Reggie and her desire to stay in Endless Forever.

          Both are children who were unhappy with their current lives and didn’t want to grow up, and thus preferred to stay in Endless forever. Elmer is what Reggie could become if she doesn’t grow up- He is immature and disconnected from reality, only acting on what he thinks is fun, and loses his connections to his past life. His body deteriorates, adopting the cartoon physics of Endless as he becomes one with it. His entire existence is dedicated to hoarding objects, perhaps a dark allegory to Reggie wanting to hold onto her toys in Birthday Forever. Elmer spends his existence fully-immersing himself into Endless, and remains an emotionally and mentally stunted, immature child. Like Reggie, he can also be selfish, albeit to a far worse extent.

Elmer is ultimately an exaggeration of Reggie’s worst characteristics, ranging from her immaturity, desire to not grow up, selfishness, etc. He is her, but every part of her either amplified to be worse, or else turned bad. Elmer is essentially a cautionary tale, in-universe and on a meta scale, warning Reggie of what will happen if she doesn’t choose to mature and interact with her normal life.

[jupitermelichios]

Reasons I want to pick up Gotham and drop it right into the middle of the Marvel 616 Universe (even though I’ve never managed to make a fic with that premise actually work);

- Bruce and Tony have been friends forever, and the fact that they’re both pretty bad at this whole being friends thing hasn’t stopped them yet.

- Jen Walters thinks both Bruces are great (if deeply messed up) people, and keeps inviting them both to social events. They’ve been pretending they don’t hate another for a decade at this point, and they both care about Jen enough that they’re not planning on stopping any time soon. They spend any social engagements they both attend asking hurtful questions barely disguised as small talk, and have come worryingly close to throwing actual punches more than once, and Patsy has made it her job to run interference so Jen never finds out about this.

- Janet is so completely unlike all Kate’s other friends that she’s not sure exactly why they are friends. She’s straight, and perky, and the fact that she’s the only person who knows how to design an evening gown to Kate’s very specific tastes shouldn’t be enough to form a solid friendship on. But despite that, Janet is the one who buys Kate ice-cream and vodka after her and Rene split up, and Kate is the one who ices Janet’s black eye when Hank snaps.

- Selina says Felicia is a copycat. Felicia says Selina is yesterday’s model. They meet up once a week for mimosas so they can tell one another in person.

- Dick and Spider-Man meet when they’re both way too young to be superheroing, decide that they’re going to be best friends, and never change their minds about that. Peter knows there’s nothing he can’t tell Dick, and when Dick gets too far into his own head, Peter takes him to New York and they backflip off buildings until he stops feeling like he can’t breathe.

- Kitty Pryde and Dick should never be allowed near glitter or sequins, especially not together.  They average a costume a week each for the first two years of Nightwing’s career, and they don’t give a damn what anyone else says about wing collars and balloon sleeve because damnit they look fabulous.

- It takes a lot to shock Charles, but entirely human Barbara Gordon turning up on the mansion doorstep with a backpack of clothes hanging from the handles of her chair and asking for a job comes pretty close. He makes her their IT admin, because Danger has enough to do and God knows Hank can’t be trusted with it, and when she goes back to Gotham a year later they’re all sad to see her go.

- Barbara didn’t set out to found a team, but Laura Kinney obviously needed something to do with her time that wasn’t getting recruited onto yet another X-Men black-ops team, and no one else ever seems to know what to do with Magik, and Black Widow is just damn good at what she does, and honestly any excuse to hang out with Dazzler is a winner, and next thing she knows they’re a team, and something like a family as well.

- Robin II and Speedball vs Red Hood and Penance, a love story in three acts (and one death)

- Teddy is absolutely convinced Billy fancies Tim. Billy is convinced Teddy fancies Tim. Tim is convinced no one will or should ever love him, but by God he’s going to get these two idiots to go on a date if it kills him. (And if he’s a little bit on love with both of them, well that’s his secret).

- Tim definitely isn’t moonlighting as a sidekick, he’s only just managed to stop being a sidekick, but once you get past all the deeply weird, Moon Knight is a pretty great guy and a half decent detective, and Tim’s really on board with that whole ‘protecting the travellers by night’ thing. Plus the all-white costume he’s designed for himself looks pretty sweet.

- Steph has more than enough superheroes in her life, thank you very much, but honestly the amount the Storm-Richards are offering just for babysitting it’s got to be worth it. (Turns out Gotham-shock-proof is exactly what’s needed, and Franklin and Valeria adore her, and she adores Sue and Ben, and once she’s punched Johnny out for hitting on her they actually manage to be pretty good friends. She thinks Reed is a dick, but so does everyone else in the Baxter building so that’s okay).

- Bruce has no idea what to do with Cass, but he knows some people who might. There are plenty of Avengers who know a thing or two about teaching a kid raised as a weapon how to be a person. Natasha teaches her to set boundaries, and Echo teaches her to communicate, and Spider-Woman teaches her to have fun, and all of them attend all her ballet recitals.

- Kain has no idea why Batgirl likes him, but it’s not like he’s complaining. Cass has no idea why Kain keeps insisting he’s a terrible person, but as long as he keeps being a good guy she’s going to keep being his friend. (Aracely thinks they’re both unspeakably wonderful and makes them all friendship bracelets).

- Damian is not friends with Molly Hayes, okay? He isn’t. He’s definitely not. He’s just wearing his half of their best friends necklace and agonising over what to get her for her birthday because she’s got super strength and it would be tactically unwise to upset her. Definitely.

- Just because Luke hasn’t yet managed to persuade Riri that they should get married and have beautiful super-genius children, doesn’t mean he won’t.

- Harper’s not really much for leaving Gotham, but she has to admit this whole social justice global movement thing Viv Vision and Ultimate Spider-Man have going on is pretty cool, and after all if she doesn’t join up, who else is going to represent the unique clusterfuck of problems that is Gotham city?

- Duke isn’t really sure about this whole NuHuman thing. The Inhumans have a lot of drama going on, and also they’re an absolute monarchy which he’s really not on board with, but his DNA and Gotham’s ever-present Terrigen Fog doesn’t give him much choice in the matter. He visits New Attilan periodically for training on how to use his powers, and he gets on pretty well with Flint, and Ms Marvel is awesome, but for the most part he’s content to stay way the well out of their weird-ass politics.

- Look, Terry heard the words ‘Batman can’t be on the Guardians of the Galaxy’ and just sort of reacted on instinct. It’s not his fault he’s bad at resisting challenges.

[trauma-13]

All the asks 😈

Who hurt you the most?

My dad. He essentially walked out of my life when I was 12-13, and blames me for our lack of relationship and refuses to acknowledge his part in it. 

Who have you hurt the most?

Oh hell. Uh, I really don’t know. 

Who do you miss the most?

My mom, and my friends that I don’t see on a regular basis. @car-one-responding i’m looking at you. 

Who do you want out of your life the most?

Happiness and to feel like I’ve made a difference in someones life. If that’s a stranger, a friend, my son, my husband, doesn’t matter. I like helping people. (I misread, I thought this said WHAT do you want out of life, not WHO. So to answer the original question, I wouldn’t mind my dads wife wandering off somewhere and never returning.)

Who had the biggest positive impact on you?

There’s been quite a few people. My mom and two of my nursing mentors are the first ones who come to mind. My mom taught me to never give up on your goals, no matter how hard it is and how much you may struggle. She taught me to what a good mother is, and was always present in my life no matter how busy she was in her own life. She gave me my love of nursing and helping others from a very young age, and continued to inspire me to join the nursing profession. She continues to inspire me to further my dream within this career. My nursing mentors are a married couple I used to work with, who I still speak to on a fairly regular basis. They’re the epitome of amazing nurses. D is the kindest person, she gives every patient a piece of her heart and cares for them like they’re her own family (even the frustrating ones). She’s so loving to her friends and family as well and goes above and beyond to help them anyway she can. M is also an incredibly caring nurse, who is the smartest human I’ve ever met. Not just in nursing, but in every aspect. He’s continued his education into his 60s to further his career and his knowledge to provide the best care for his patients. When I first met M, I had just started at my prior job, I was fairly quiet just because I didn’t really know anyone yet. I had worked there maybe a week or two, he put an arm around my shoulders and said “You’re kind of quiet, do you want to be friends?” and immediately he was my favorite person. Of all the people I’ve worked with through my 10 yrs in health care, D and M are the ones I miss the absolute most. 

Who had the biggest negative impact on you?

Again, my dad. I have very good and fun memories with him when I was little, like 10 and under. However, he decided his wife and her children were more important than his own and he walked out of my life. It took a VERY long time (probably 10 yrs) for me to get over his abandonment, and accept that it wasn’t my fault and there is nothing wrong with me as a person that caused it. 

Who do you wish you could be honest with?

I’m a pretty fuckin honest person, and I tell people like it is. There aren’t many people I don’t just speak my mind to. 

Who have you harbored (any kind of!) secret feelings towards?

I’m sure I have in the past, but there isn’t anyone who comes to mind specifically. 

Who would the world be better off without?

The cheeto in charge of our country. Sorry, not even a little bit sorry. 

Who do you wish you’d treated differently?

I was a dick in high school to a lot of people, and I don’t really think I had any reason. 

What was the worst day of your life?

The day I got kicked out of nursing school. I obviously got back in, but it was a horrible experience. 

What’s your greatest fear?

Failure. 

What’s your biggest insecurity?

My knowledge level. I feel like I’m not as smart as I should/could be. 

What’s your biggest regret?

Staying in my past relationship for as long as I did, and ignore all the red flags that were there since day one. 

Describe your ideal world.

Cleaner air, less crime, less pollution (across the whole world), more green/renewable energy use, a safer world for my kid to grow up in. Married to my hubby, raising our son and possible a #2, to have the financial ability to help foster rescue dogs. 

Describe your personal hell.

The current world we’re in. 

What’s a hopeless dream you’re still holding on to?

Hmm. I feel like I’ve always had very realistic dreams. So probably the slim chance that I’ll win the lottery haha! 

What’s the most embarrassed you’ve ever been?

Probably when my douche bag ex got shitfaced, the PD called on him, they called fire for an evaluation because he had a lac on his hand due to punching glass, they wanted to take him to the ER and because he was absolutely obliterated he couldn’t refuse annnnd they took him to the ER I worked at. When I got there he was in full on 4 pt restrains and had been given the magical vitamin H. I shoulda turned and walked out then (or one of the many red flags before....)

What’s the angriest you’ve ever been?

When said ex threatened to hurt my dogs because I told him I was done and to pack his shit and get out. He pulled a knife on me and said he would kill me and the dogs if I tried to leave him. I figured I could probably keep myself alive if he did attack me, but if he hurt my dogs I’d have gone to jail that day. 

What’s the saddest you’ve ever been?

Honestly? this last week. motherhood is hard. breastfeeding is fucking hard. I was having such a difficult time with breast feeding and postpartum depression that I had legitimate suicidal thoughts with a vague plan of what I would do. I’m fine now, don’t go calling for a welfare check. 

What’s the most scared you’ve ever been?

Again when douchey ex threatened my dogs. They’re my world and I would do anything to keep my kids (2 and 4 legged) safe. 

What’s the most hopeless you’ve ever felt?

Also this week. 

What’s the most frantic you’ve ever felt?

Frantic?? uh fuck, the most recent time I can think of was the day before my son was born, my OB told me I had to go to the OB triage at my hospital because my BP was high and she needed to monitor JTD and make sure he was okay. 

What’s the bravest you’ve ever felt?

When I stood up to my douche ex as he had a knife pulled on me.

What’s the best case scenario for your future?

I’m a trauma nurse at a level 1 trauma center, hubby is done with nursing school working in his dream unit (either ED or ICU, he changes his mind daily), our son is happy and healthy, if we choose to have a second kiddo that they’re happy and healthy. We own a nice house, with a good sized yard for the 2 and 4 legged babies. 

What’s the worst case scenario for you future?

Uh, I lose my rights to my son, and lose my license. 

What’s the most physical pain you’ve ever felt?

Tie between labor contractions when i was complete/ready to pop the kid out, or when I had nasal surgery and they accidentally “forgot” to give me any pain medication through the whole surgery. Honestly probably the nasal surgery, it was constant, the contractions came and went, frequently, but there was a little break in between. 

What’s the most emotional pain you’ve ever felt?

I’m going to go with when I found out my ex cheated on me and knocked up the girl he cheated with. 

Describe a time you felt like a hypocrite.

I try really hard not to be a hypocrite, I’m sure there’s times it’s happened but I genuinely can’t think of a time off hand. 

Describe a time you felt like a traitor.

I really don’t know. Again, i’m sure there’s been times, but I don’t remember any. 

Describe a time you felt like a hero.

I wouldn’t necessarily say “hero” but when I’m able to help people at work, and when my knowledge and skills benefits them. 

Describe a time you felt inhuman.

This last week. It’s easily one of the hardest things I’ve been through. I felt so detached from my family and I just didn’t care. 

Describe a time you felt like a failure.

This last week. I felt like I was failing as a mom, and that I couldn’t do anything right because I couldn’t even feed my son in the natural way I’m meant to as a female with mammary glands. 

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?

Uh. Honestly the only thing that comes to mind is when i skipped a lease with my college roommate (the first time I went to college). It’s genuinely not that bad, but I can’t think of anything else hah. 

What are you proudest of?

My son, my husband, my degree/license. 

What’s your relationship with your family like?

With my husband and son, it’s great (now). With my moms side of the family it’s great as well, I talk to my mom every day, and my gramma and grampa every couple days. I’m also fairly close with my Uncle. My in-laws are pretty good too, my mother in law can get on my nerves but who’s doesn't, honestly hah! I have a decent relationship with my half-brother, Aunt and gramma (Nana) on my dads side, and my cousins. Literally the only one I have issues with is my father and his wife. 

What’s your relationship with religion like?

I think organized religion is a joke. I’m completely against it. I don’t personally believe in God/Jesus/whatever, but I do believe in afterlife and that there is such a thing as past lives and reincarnation. 

Talk about someone you’ve lost.

My grampy died when I was in 4th grade. He was an amazing man. He was very stoic and didn’t show his emotions much, but he always included me in whatever he was doing (fishing, camping, working in the yard, whatever it was). He showed his love in different ways, more with his actions than words. 

Talk about someone who abandoned you.

I think i’ve talked about my dad enough hah 

Talk about a desire you have that scares you.

To become a trauma nurse. 

What’s something you wish you were capable of?

I wish I was able to do more first-responder stuff. I have the ability, just not the time currently. 

What’s something you’re afraid that you’re capable of?

Becoming a trauma nurse hahah 

Describe the kind of life you wish you’d been born into.

Doesn’t everyone wish they had been born into money?? 

Describe your worst heartbreak.

When my dads wife texted me and told me “youre a selfish bitch, and he would be better without you in his life” and he told me I was lying, even with the text proof. I was 14-15ish. That was the final straw, and when I stopped trying to have a relationship with him. 

Describe your worst disappointment.

When I was in nursing school and I failed the full body assessment the first time. I was anxious as fuck and over thinking everything. I technically passed based on points, but was asked to come back and re-do it once I had time to clear my head. 

Have you ever taken a fall for someone?

Taken the blame? No. Own up to your own damn mistakes. 

Have you ever forced or let someone take a fall for you?

No, I take the blame for my own mistakes. 

Have you ever done serious physical harm to someone?

I don’t think so?? 

Have you ever done serious emotional harm to someone?

I hope not, but maybe. 

Have you ever self-harmed?

It’s been about 5 years since, but yes. 

Have you ever attempted suicide?

Attempted no, but had a plan, yes. 

Have you ever stolen something?

On accident when I was like 5 hahah We were in line at the grocery store, an you know they have all the little toys and candy and wtf ever at the check out lanes. Well I was looking at something and mom told me lets go, so I continued looking at it and followed her off. Mom realized, took me back inside to return it and apologize and the manager ripped my ass in front of the check outs. 

Have you ever cheated on someone?

No. 

Have you ever been cheated on?

Yes. 

Have you ever taken revenge on someone?

Nah, people have a way of ruining their own lives. 

Have you ever seriously considered killing someone?

Not had a plan to, but remember my ex threatening my dogs? Had he done it, i’d have attacked him. 

Have you ever betrayed someone who trusted you?

I don’t think so? 

Have you ever experienced something supernatural or unexplainable?

Yeah, I regularly experience things all the time. 

[vfdarkness]

Episode 9: Blue is...

Intro: 

You’re watching television alone in your living room.

Without your involvement, the channel changes.

A pale inhuman being stares at you through the screen.

You turn the television off. And now the creature stands feet away from you.

You need my help. 

This is A Voice From Darkness.

Hello, as always this is Dr. Malcolm Ryder, parapsychologist. Here to answer your supernatural questions, warn you of otherworldly threats that span our country, and teach you a bit of bizarre American history. We have a full show tonight, so why don’t we get right to our National Alerts.

National Alerts:

Our first national alert is for North Carolina. Bars and music venues in and around Asheville have hosted a rock band called Spirit Mirror. Following each of their performances, those who were in attendance have reported they can no longer see their own eyes in reflective surface. When they stare into a mirror, there are two black voids where their eyes once were. Their eyes are not missing. Anyone who looks at the affected see nothing wrong. Only those who heard the live music of Spirit Mirror cannot see their own eyes. The band has no website, no contact number, or any other means of getting a hold of them. When asked, each music venue was unsure how the gigs were booked. To those in North Carolina, do not attend any concerts or shows featuring the band Spirit Mirror. 

Our second national alert is for central Pennsylvania. Small towns across the region have relayed to me that a man in a grey suit missing his left ring finger has journeyed into their communities and parlayed with their people. Offering them  the extravagant and impossible in exchange for the seemingly inconsequential. To the people of central Pennsylvania, do not make any deals with The Traveling Salesman. Do not meet with him. Do not shake his hand. Do not even nod your head in response when he tells you, “Good morning.” Nothing pleasant can come from any interaction with him.

That is all for national alerts.

Quick Questions: 

For our next segment, I’ll be answering quick questions you’ve sent to us either via Twitter @vfdarkness or by email at avoicefromdarkness@gmail.com. If you have a question you’d like answered on the show, please tweet us at @vfdarkness or write us at avoicefromdarkness@gmail.com

Our first question comes from Sarah. She writes, “Dr. Ryder, I moved into a new house recently. Multiple nights I’ve gone to bed in the master bedroom, but I’ll wake and find myself in the closet of one of the other bedrooms. A loud banging on the door always wakes me. I’ll call out to whatever’s causing the sound, but they only answer by furiously hitting the closet door harder. When the morning comes the noise stops. I have no history of sleepwalking or hearing things that aren’t there. What’s happening to me in my new house?”

Well Sarah, if I were to make a guess, I’d say you have two entities in your house. One trying to protect you, and guiding you in your sleep to a place they feel is safe - that other bedroom’s closet. And then a second entity that means you harm. Are the entities spirits or some other unworldly creature? I don’t know. I’d be happy to get you in touch with a good spiritualist in your area. They’d better be able to assess the nature of the haunting you’re experiencing and help put an end to them.

Our second question comes from Bob in Minnesota. They write, “I was on the road, passing through Montana and I stopped at a diner one night. Place wasn’t crowded. A large man in a t-shirt that read: They Are Here. They’ve Always Been Here sat a few stools away from me at the counter. Before the waitress came over to take my order, she spilled a container of sugar, laughed about it, and asked the large man in the t-shirt what his plans were for the fourth of July. Thought that was weird, since the holiday’s months away. Didn’t say anything about it though. Just got my food, kept to myself, and left. The thing is, I had to come back that way on my return trip. Again I stopped at the diner, about the same time of night. Place was as busy as before. I sat at the counter. The large man, wearing the same t-shirt, was already there, eating the meal he had before. The same waitress came out. She once again spilled sugar. Laughed and asked the gentleman about his fourth of July plans. He was partway through giving the answer I’d overheard my previous visit - but I interrupted. Asked why they were having a conversation about the fourth of July - twice now - so many months out. They stopped talking. Both had concerned, nervous looks about them. The waitress pulled out a bunch of papers. Coffee-stained, held together with brass tacks. She came over to me and whispered, “That’s not your line. Aren’t you off book yet?” Her finger guided me down the page of a playscript. I saw stage directions and dialogue. For the waitress, for the large man. For myself. Her spilling the sugar. Her lines about the fourth of July. His response, my sitting down, my ordering a meal - all in the script. There were lines I was supposed to say to the both of them. Things that made no sense to me. Things I’d never say. So I ran out the diner. Ran out, got in my car, and drove as fast as I could for as long as I could. What did I walk into, Dr. Ryder? Please help me understand what happened.

Bob, I’m afraid I don’t know what you walked into. I could say something trite about how Shakespeare believed all the world’s a stage, but obviously he didn’t mean that literally. If you would, please send in more information - the name and address of the diner. I’d like to visit it myself perhaps or ask a colleague to stop by there. Gather some first hand intel, so I can better understand what’s happening at this Montana diner.

That’s all the time for questions we have for your written questions. Onward to Today In Odd America, and then we’ll open up our phone lines.

Today In Odd America:

Today in Odd America we find ourselves in Guilford, Connecticut. Earlier this evening, the children of Guilford put on masks sculpted from wax - made to resemble hideous monsters. They trampled through streets with a candlestick in one hand and a bag in the other. Children playfully hit adults with their candlesticks, and in return were given candy. A bonfire was lit in the middle of the town’s square. After the fire had been burning for a few hours, a skeleton in a misshapen wax crown, dubbed the Candlestick King, was thrown in. Children cast their masks off into the flames as well, and presented the Candlestick King some of their candy bounty. At the end of the night, children buried their candlesticks in their backyards - where they’ll remain until next year. This is a holiday that only exists in Guilford.

Most believe it is a second Halloween. And seeing how the holiday is celebrated, it’s understandable to draw that conclusion.

But that's not what the Candlestick Riot is.

To better understand the holiday’s true meaning, let us go back on this day to the year 1748, when the first Candlestick Riot occured.

William Martin was twelve years old at the time of the initial event. Forty years later, he’d write a few pages about the night in his memoir on his career as a judge. No other details in the book deal with the supernatural. Almost everything else he wrote can be corroborated with other documents from the era. So we’ll take William’s account of the Candlestick Riot at face value.

Sometime late in the night, William felt a compulsion to rise from his bed. I say compulsion, though William stated it was unclear if he were controlling his body at this time, and throughout the rest of the night, or if he were merely a spectator to the acts his body committed. He left his bedroom and made his way down the hall. Behind him came his two sisters from their room. His parents in front of him, coming from their bedroom. No one spoke.

The Martin family silently shambled into the dining room. On the table were several unlit candles in brass and iron candlesticks. Each family member grabbed a candlestick with one hand and held a candle in the other. Father turned to mother. Mother to father. William turned to his two sisters - and they back to him. All at once they rushed each other. William broke the jaw of one sister, and cracked several ribs of the other. They each offered him their candles. When they did, he stopped beating them. His mother was not so lucky.

His father, Mathias, beat his wife to death with a heavy iron candlestick. Afterwards, he reached down and grabbed the blood-soaked wax from her hand. He then turned to William - who presented his three candles to his father.

This offering was accepted. Afterwards, Mathias and William made their way outside. The sisters stayed behind with their mother’s body.

The Martin’s neighbors stood outside their own homes. Bloody. Bruised. Those holding candlesticks and wax charged at each other. From across streets and yards: men, women, and children were beaten. Dozens to death. More would die in the following days of injuries they sustained. But the night was not yet over.

Those who gathered the most candles from their skirmishes lit small fires all over Guilford. They melted their wax and rubbed it over their heads. They burned their skin and hair doing so. But it didn’t stop them. They molded the wax into monstrous shapes.

While they did this, those who lost their candles but who were not too injured to walk, gathered wood and carried it to the center of town. They lit a bonfire.

Soon all ambulatory members of Guilford gathered around the fire. Two circles formed. The outer, and bigger, was filled with those who lost their candles. The inner circle all wore wax masks and held bloody candlesticks.

The outer circle locked arms and swayed back and forth. They chanted: “Flame against the shadow. Flame against the shadow. Protect us from the echo. Protect us from the echo.” 

William chanted along with everyone else. The meaning of their chant, unclear to him.

The inner circle walked closer to the fire. They let their hideous wax masks melt. They held their candlesticks in the flames - until they burned their hands.

The third round of fighting began. The inner circle consisted of only a dozen or so. Mostly men. When it was all over, only one remained. Mathias Martin stood alone - victorious. The outer circle moved in. They took the wax from the dead and placed it over his body. Once encased, he could barely move. But he stepped closer to the bonfire.

Mathias shouted, “Who is your Candlestick King?”

The outer circle reformed with locked arms and chanted back, “You are the Candlestick King.”

“Who protects you from shadow and echo?”

“The Candlestick King!”

This call and response went on for sometime. But it ended when Mathias walked into the fire.

As his body burned the outer circle chanted, “Shadow and echo are defeated. Long live the flame.” Over the chanting, William claimed he heard his father’s last words: “Keep a candle lit, William.”

The outer circle chanted until only ash was left. Ash and a skeleton clutching a heavy iron candlestick.

The sun began to rise. The outer circle collected the candlesticks and dispersed. But before reentering their homes, they dug into the earth and buried their candlesticks. Only then was the night truly over.

_________

The dead were collected. The injured, looked after. No one was charged with any crimes for what occurred.

Townsfolk were terrified the events might repeat. But the next night passed. And the next. When the anniversary of what was now referred to as The Candlestick Riot approached, Guilford again worried the event might repeat itself. But it did not. For over a century, The Candlestick Riot fell into obscurity.

No one knows when The Candlestick Riot turned into an annual holiday. A strange, childish, almost mocking echo of what the first event was, but it’s now been celebrated annually by the community for decades.

My grandfather, Professor Duncan Ryder had a fascination with the ritual. He was the one who first told me of the holiday’s history. This will seem like a non-sequitur, but he also hated Frank Sinatra. Early in Sinatra’s career, in 1940, he recorded a song called “We Three (My Echo My Shadow And Me). My grandfather believed Sinatra had secret knowledge of whatever forces compelled Guilford to behave the way it did during the inaugural Candlestick Riot.

He once confronted Sinatra at a show sometime in the ‘60s. Demanding the singer tell all he knew about shadow and echo. Security grabbed my grandfather and hauled him away. But as they did, Sinatra said to him with a wink, “Keep a candle lit, William.”

Not since the first Candlestick Riot has anything like it occurred in Guilford. Was the sacrifice made by Mathias Martin enough to ward of shadow and echo? Was the event simply a mass delusion? Or was it real… and shadow and echo have since triumphed? And the world now waits for a new Candlestick King to defeat them? The answers to these questions remain a mystery. But maybe you should keep a candle lit, just to be safe.

And now back to our main show.

ACT II

Today In Odd America music fades out.

RYDER

And we're back. Well here's a change of pace. We have two callers on the line. Both in the Ozarks - where hidden within its mountains, dense forests, hills and hollers there have been countless encounters with the strange and terrifying. Callers, why don't you tell us your names and what you're experiencing down there?

Through the phone, the sound of cars can be heard driving on back country roads.

SAM

This is Sam.

EDDIE

And Eddie.

SAM

We're visiting from the UK. We have a paranormal podcast you've probably heard of - Ghosts n' Goblins n' Gravesend.

RYDER

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with your show.

EDDIE

Pretending to not know about your competition? Alright, Ryder. I see what you're up to. We talk about weird stuff like you.

SAM

But also video games. Ghosts n' Goblins is an old game.

EDDIE

Yeah, and we're from Gravesend. So you get it, right?

RYDER

Crystal clear. And what's the supernatural situation you've found yourselves in down in the Ozarks?

SAM

That's the problem. We're not in a supernatural situation.

RYDER

Have you listened to A Voice From Darkness before? Because normally people call in when-

EDDIE

(interrupts)

No, we get it. We came all the way to the US to encounter some of the crazy stuff you talk about, and so far we got nothing.

SAM

We spent a day in Saint Louis - went to the Lemp Mansion, even got to go into the underground cavern. No ghosts though.

RYDER

Wait, so if you're in the Ozarks driving around are you deliberately trying to summon...

EDDIE

The Unwelcome Riders? Of course we are.

SAM

The Ozark Family. They're supposed to be one of the more elusive, more dangerous ones, right? I bet we'd get a ton of downloads if we captured them on audio.

RYDER

You're driving together? Thankfully they're unlikely to appear in your car. You're lucky that-

EDDIE

(interrupts)

Oh no, we're not together.

SAM

Two cars. I'm driving about a mile behind Eddie. Is that enough distance? Should we space ourselves out further? There's so many contradictory rules online about the Ozark Family.

One forum said they're more likely to appear if you have an open wound. Another said they absolutely won't if you have a copy of the bible in your vehicle. But then another forum said if you travel with a holy book, you're more likely to attract them. Help us out, Ryder, what do we gotta do to get them to appear?

RYDER

Gentlemen, I highly suggest you-

SAM

(interrupts)

Eddie, why's your car stopped in the middle of the road?

A beat.

SAM

Eddie?

A beat.

SAM

I'm pulling up alongside you.

We hear Sam's car slow to a stop. The idle engines of both Sam and Eddie's rentals.

SAM

Eddie?

RYDER

Describe what you see, Sam. What's happening?

SAM

He's just... sitting there. Staring blankly ahead. Still holding his phone. What do I do? What's happened to him?

RYDER

Sam, I'm sorry, but-

EDDIE

(monotone)

I am here. I am fine. And I am here.

RYDER

Eddie, what happened? Are you all right?

EDDIE

(monotone)

Do not worry about my condition.

SAM

Dr. Ryder - I'm staring right at him. His lips aren't moving when he talks.

EDDIE

(monotone)

Hello, Sam. You are my friend. And I am fine. You don't need to worry about me. All is well.

SAM

You are not well. I don't know what's happening, but-

RYDER

(interrupts)

Who is this? What is this? What are we currently addressing that resides inside of Eddie?

EDDIE

(monotone)

I occupy the flesh. I have access to the memories. I am the I that speaks. Does that not make me Eddie?

RYDER

People are more than flesh and memories, you are not Eddie.

EDDIE

(monotone)

My tendrils move through the labyrinth of his being. If I am not all of him yet, no matter. I soon shall be.

SAM

What does that mean? Dr. Ryder? What does that mean? Help him.

RYDER

The Resident inside Eddie - what is it you want? What is it we can give you so that you move on?

EDDIE

(monotone)

Sensation. Physical sensation. It has been so long since I've occupied a being. Felt sensation. Experienced time. Experienced Qualia. Green is green. I forgot that. It is a tautology, but I forgot that. Epiphenomena. That knowledge became lost to myself... Red is... red. Blue. Blue is... Blue is...

SAM

Blue. Blue is blue.

EDDIE

Thank-you, Sam. You are right. Blue is blue. I forgot that.

RYDER

You remember now though. Take that knowledge with you. Take that knowledge and leave Eddie. That is his gift to you.

EDDIE

(monotone)

Sam. You are my friend. Let me ask you, what should I do? Is the knowledge of these qualia payment enough to abandon this flesh? To give back these memories?

A beat.

RYDER

If you want your friend back, you need to-

SAM

(interrupts)

Yes. That's payment enough. Blue is blue. You know that now. Eddie gave that to you, so please give back Eddie his flesh. And his memories.

EDDIE

(monotone)

Thank-you, Sam. I shall.

A beat.

SAM

Eddie? Eddie? Are you-

EDDIE

(interrupts, concerned)

What happened?

RYDER

Drive. Now. Eddie, if you can't drive, abandon your rental and get in Sam's and get out of there.

EDDIE

Something's wrong. What happened? Sam, what happened? You see it all too, right?

RYDER

What's going on?

SAM

See what? I don't see anything weird.

EDDIE

All the colors. They're wrong. All different. The grass isn't green anymore... it's... it's... I don't know. I don't have a word for it. The sky's not blue. I don't know what color it is. It's strange. All the colors are wrong. I've never seen any of them before. None of the colors I see have names. What happened to the world? Why has it all changed?

RYDER

Stay on the line. Both of you. Sam - help Eddie from his rental. Put him in yours. Drive. Get out of there immediately, but stay on the line.

RYDER

(to listeners)

I'm sorry, but we're going to cut the show off here.

Until next time, this has been A Voice From Darkness.

RYDER

(faint)

You need to get out of there immediately.

Outro Music fades in and out.

[weepingvoidpenguin]

I’ll Help You

PART 1

Summary: Carlton Drake has officially crossed the line in terms of morale and humanity. He’s threatened your boss, Dr. Skirth, to manipulate her into staying with the project just as he’s manipulated all the victims he’s putting at risk to further his own twisted research. And once you witness a man die right in front of you because of it, you couldn’t continue on. Shamefully enough, you’re too scared to leave, you know how Carlton is and it terrifies you to no end so when Dr. Skirth comes up with the idea to involve an ex investigative journalist, your desperation gets the better of you and you agree to tag him along. You find yourself spending more and more time with him until it seems like you can’t pry yourself away and he grows increasingly protective of you when you vulnerably express your fears to him.

Warnings: None . . . yet

Word Count: 2,446

  You looked to your left at Dr. Skirth and smiled as the yellow symbiote merged successfully with the rabbit. It’d been months with failure after failure but not for nothing. You learned from each failure and changed according to that. 

   Dr. Skirth lit up as she observed the white creature in the box in front of her. You knew this project was a team effort but you were biased so all your pride centered around her. You were there alongside her when she trudged through the nights at the lab trying to make progress in the beginning. You’d ran to go get her coffee or ice water, whichever she was in the mood for at the time. On multiple occasions you’ve woken her up and pulled her from her drool drenched papers to walk her to the break room so she could rest on the couch. Then, the next morning, you showed up with two coffees in tow, one for the doctor and one for you, of course. 

   Dr. Skirth had graciously taken you under her wing months before this project came into existence. She’d needed an assistant for quite some time but never admitted it to herself, her explanation being that if she was tired then she was making progress through those late nights. But at a family party the word had gotten out that she had finally caved and was taking applications for the position. Now, you knew hardly anything about science excluding the little you retained in high school and whatever you managed to get through in college, but once you offered your help, she brought you onto the team anyway. You were beyond grateful. Although science wasn’t necessarily the way you thought your life would be heading, you figured as long as you could learn something new and enjoy yourself while doing it, there was no harm in leaping into that career field. It took a few months before you could actually assist on any physical labs but while you were getting her coffee and inserting her notes into a hard drive, you’d managed to teach yourself equations and terminology that went along with her field of work. She never held you back when she was certain you could advance and for that you thanked whatever gods were listening that your cousin married her because although your job description was to help her, she had really helped you in more ways than you could recall. 

   So, yeah. You were pretty proud of this intelligent woman standing on your left. But your cheery attitude dispersed quickly at Carlton’s words, “It’s too soon,” you cut him off, knowing exactly where he was going with his orders.

   Carlton raised an eyebrow at you, his mouth hanging half open. It wasn’t a secret that Drake loathed you for some reason. Practically from the first day you arrived he’d had it out for you, he tried to demean you in front of anyone who was unfortunate enough to be present and when you would simply turn away from his childish behavior, he tried to continue and crawl his way under your skin.

   Now, you didn’t necessarily think Carlton Drake was a bad guy, up until recently, that is. The way he spoke to children was always kind and genuine, he would never inhibit great potential and he appreciated intelligence like no other (you know, since it benefitted him) but after his most recent scandal with getting a man fired who had been prodding his nose deep into things that should’ve stayed buried and trying to wipe his hands clean of the deaths that he was responsible for, you’d changed your mind on what you thought of him.

   “We’re not ready for human testing yet, it’d be unethical-” Dora tried to explain but you both knew her logic would fall on greedy, deaf ears. 

   You opened your mouth to back her up, already bursting with anger at his arrogant demands but once he’d mentioned Skirth’s children, your jaw shut hard enough to make you look into a mirror later and check for cracked teeth. 

   “How are your children by the way?” He asked, obviously not giving a damn how they were and trying to get his underlying meaning across.

   Your jaw clenched and your throat tightened with fury. How dare this arrogant, greed-driven businessman threaten your fucking family. If he weren’t so powerful you would've killed him right then and there. But then again, if he wasn’t so powerful, his words wouldn’t have instilled the fear that they did.

-

   “What a fucking psychopath!” You shouted after Dora closed the door to her office.

   The volume of your voice made her flinch and you could tell she was fighting the urge to turn around and check to see if he was coming, “Please keep your voice down, (Y/N).” she lowered her hands to motion silence and when she thought the coast was clear she sighed, “But yeah. Psychotic,” 

   She walked around the edge of her desk and sat in its waiting chair before bringing her hands up to her head and rubbing it, “You don’t have to participate in this,” she offered, catching your attention away from the overwhelming anger coursing through you. “You could leave, keep your hands clean of this . . . and your conscious,” 

   You looked down at her then, her white lab coat stained with sweat from worry and the creases in her face now deep with guilt. Would you look like that if you continued working here? For Carlton? Would your conscious weigh down on you like the sky on Atlas’ shoulders? Would it be too much for you to bear with? Would people actually die from Carlton’s orders? Would you be there to be a part of it? 

   Dora still sat there, her thin fingers trying to block the light from her eyes. She was tired and worn from her head position and if it weren't for the obvious bags under her eyes, she’d look like a defenseless puppy waiting for rescue. Or, waiting for punishment. She was preparing for the toll that continuing with his orders would take on her.

   “I’m not leaving you,” you responded without much thought. “Lord knows working for Carlton is hell in itself but possibly getting blood on your hands, that’s not something anyone can take alone,” you weren’t saying you were happy with your decision and if it had been anyone else you would’ve left them long ago when Drake’s dark side began to ascend but to leave Dora alone with this psycho? No way. Besides, it’s not like you had much of a choice, he’d threatened your family and if you left knowing what you already do, there’d be consequences. 

   “I’m sorry,” Dora whimpered, her body shaking a bit, “I never should’ve agreed to let you assist.” She shook her head in her hands and sucked in shaky breaths, “I’m so sorry,”

   “Dora,” you whispered, grabbing your chair from the nearby desk and pulling it beside her, “I’m in this with you.” You placed your hand gently on her shoulder and squeezed reassuringly, “We’ll walk through hell burnt and scathed but we’ll make it out all the same,” 

   Her ragged breathing slowly steadied and you didn’t pull away until she shifted in her seat and sat back up, wiping her tears with the back of her hand as she did so, “I sure hope so,” 

-

   You nearly threw up at the sound of his bones breaking. His bones. Isaac’s bones. This poor man who Carlton swept up off the street promising safety in return for a lethal service. He wasn’t even completely aware what he was getting himself into. You’d spoken to him briefly right before he entered the lab, he seemed kind. In a sad sort of way. Like, he’d had no other choice but to be. 

   So when Carlton barely scanned over the dead body of his volunteer and called to bring the next one out, you tried to step out of the room slyly. You were scared what Drake would do if he sensed any form of weakness coming from you so you excused yourself to go to the bathroom and left quietly.

   You shuffled to the women’s bathroom and slammed the heavy door shut behind you before locking it. You whipped around, your back clashing against the cold surface of the door and slid down, the friction bringing your shirt up ever so slightly. You grabbed the collar of your lab coat and chucked it across the room, trying to distance yourself from the growing heat. You’d already managed to sweat through your shirt in multiple places but in order to avoid suspicion from Drake you grabbed a hand towel and tried to pat yourself dry. 

   You just watched someone die. A person. Like, a real person. A human being. This wasn’t some controlled science experiment that your chemistry teacher supervised and had to give permission to move onto the next step. This was a risky and unethical and overall inhumane kind of experiment that you couldn’t go home and tell anyone about when the reality of a lost life has settled into your aching bones. 

   You couldn’t tell anybody. You couldn’t tell anyone. 

   You had to tell someone.

   -

   “Ya know, hiding in plain sight is difficult enough for one of you but with two of you, it’s even worse. A blind man could see you from miles away,”

   And that’s how we’re here right now. Dora came up with the idea to search for Eddie Brock, the man who Drake had gotten fired when he’d asked a few questions that he found just a tad bit too intrusive. 

   “Okay look,” she started when we’d been caught, although it was clear from the beginning that we’d been caught by the way he’d kept looking over his shoulder all the way up this block.

   You looked at the man with the creased forehead and plump lips. So this was the guy who wasn't scared to go up against one of the most powerful guys in the state. He looked like shit. Literally. Bags that could burden any shoulder that carried it and deep grooves that showed months of constant and deep guilt. 

   You were too busy trying to size this man up to pay attention to what Dora was telling him but when they were suddenly making a beeline towards the exit, you flashed the lady at the counter a small smile and slammed your body into the closing door. 

   The cool wind danced past your face and in through your thin coat. You shivered with the sensation and stepped to the side to follow wherever Brock was taking Dora. 

   “Who’s this?” Brock asked Dora, finally looking at you since the convenience store. 

   Your eyebrows lifted and you looked between the two, “Oh, I’m suddenly part of this conversation?” You sassily spoke and took a protective step closer to Dora.

   “This is (Y/N), she’s my assistant, she can confirm everything I’m telling you,” she hastily spoke, handing him a piece of paper with our numbers written on them, “This is how you can get into contact with us,”

   Eddie hesitantly took the crumbled paper into his hand and stared down at the sloppily scrawled phone numbers. His mouth twitched, as if uncertain and his shoulders raised a bit.

   “People are dying Mr. Brock,” I spoke up, taking note of his hesitance, “We don’t know where else to go. He’s already threatened our family and . . .” you began to trail off, rubbing your clammy hands together and looking at the lights coming from the shops on the opposite side of the street, “I think he knows I’m scared,” You admitted, remembering how Carlton looked at you once you returned from the bathroom. “He’d know it was me,” you pleaded, trying to level with the burlyish man in front of you.

   He studied you hard and for what was probably too long. His eyes scanned over your face, stopping at almost every feature you had before meeting your eyes at last. 

   “Please,” You begged again, “I’ve never seen anything like this,” you chewed back the words that dried up your tongue. You hadn’t told Dora how scared you were because she’d never forgive herself if she knew of the fear that consumed you or if she knew that every sound you heard in your house caused you to jump out of your socks in paranoia. “I’ve never been so scared for anyone before . . . these people are being manipulated with safety and security but don’t know the cost they have to pay,” you pried your gaze away from the hypnotizing lights and settled on his eyes, another thing to get hypnotized by, “Not to mention how scared I am for myself,” you whimpered.

   “(Y/N),” Dr. Skirth softly spoke, placing her hand on your shoulder, causing you to look down in shame.

   “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” you felt a trail of water trickle down your face and you fought against the urge to sniffle, “I didn’t want to leave you alone there, not with Carlton threatening your kids,” 

   You glued your sight to your shoes and how they traded your weight between each other, From this angle, you could see Eddie’s hand twitch slightly upwards towards you before his opening hand closed and lowered back down to his side. 

   Embarrassed with your vulnerability, you scurried away from the both of them back towards Dora’s car and waited for the conversation to wrap itself up. 

   Minutes later, Dora crawled into the driver’s seat of the car and sighed before turning on the ignition.

   “What’d he say?” you asked.

   She remained quiet for a second then put the car in reverse, “We’ll have to wait and see,” 

-

   The rest of the night guilt racked you and kept you from another night of, let’s be honest, unpleasant sleep. Although you truthfully were scared for yourself, you felt bad for bringing yet another victim into this business and the fact that you depended on him for some sort of false safety made you almost as gullible as Carlton’s blissfully ignorant test subjects. 

   You almost regretted getting Mr. Brock involved when your phone vibrated in your hand. You pulled your gaze from the ceiling and looked at the unknown number sprawled across the screen.

   You slowly brought the phone up to your ear after answering the call and let out a chest achingly slow breath, “Hello?” 

   “It’s Eddie, um, Eddie Brock,” he sounded uncertain, like he wasn’t sure why he called you, “Listen . . . I’ll help,” 

[migleefulmoments]

Holy shit that abbyism you just posted... I can't. Maybe let's ask Darren then? Would Abby be ok with that? Since she's so sure he wants them to be saying he's gay and closeted and that he reads their blogs for support. (Why all the secrecy and /ing then?? Why not @ him and tag him and use his full name????)

Makes you wonder doesn’t it? I also just ran across a post about “DON’T TAG THE PLAYERS”. Obviously they know that letting Darren in on how much they “love and support” him won’t go down well. Abby has to squelch uprisings every so often -usually whenever new meet&greets are announced and ccers think they should whisper cc tropes in Darren’s ear. And I mean why wouldn’t they think that it’s a good idea to offer support and encouragement- a little “we got your back”? Abby goes on and on about how Darren reads every word that is written about him on Tumblr, followers her blog-in fact she has claimed he reads it every day, blah blah blah Yabba Dabba Doo. Listening to her go on and on about the inhumanity of Darren’s life, the loneliness and the manipulation by everyone in his inner circle- including his brother- the only compassionate thing to do is to whisper “We know, we hate PBB as much as you do. We love you and we’ve got your back....Wakanda CC forever”. if for no other reason than to let him knowhe isn’t alone. Darren has pushed back in no uncertain terms against ccers who were rude to Mia and Abby knows he will do it again. The cc house of card will go tumbling after. 

Anonymous asked:

Two things- first, I appreciate you commenting about the negative TSG tweets. I've been avoiding negative commentary on this relationshit in general on my socials because I'm aware enough to realize that D is not in control right now. Publicly dragging him on Twitter and Instagram does nothing. At least in this space it's confined to a specific group of like-minded people. Second- it REALLY irks me that these 2 are out every night. D looks on the verge of collapsing. They NEED to give him rest.

ajw720 answered:

Anon, the FIRST rule of fandom. DO NOT TAG OR CONTACT the players. I get it, people are upset, angry, confused, But frankly it is an asshole move to tag him or the organization on tweeter because you don’t like the bar or that he “married” his beard.  They have a license for entertainment, they can do what they want. I will scream about it regularly here but D should not be known as the proprietor of a sex club and they are slandering his character. But he is clearly not in control.  as I said, NO ONE WOULD CHOOSE THIS NIGHTMARE.  They are making him look so bad, but JFC his team does not need our help in making him look worse. They are doing a stand up job on their own.

Every picture is worse.  I feel like my heart is being ripped out of my chest every time i see him. This is supposed to be some of the greatest days one one’s life, the afterglow of being newly married and totally indulging in your partner before real life starts to take precedence again.  That man looks like the living dead and fucking exhausted.  

Every person who is responsible for this is guilty of a crime, every damn one of them.  And why they are thinking ruining a person that has worked his ass off for a career for that selfish brat is beyond me. I keep thinking whatever she has threatened is bigger than D, because seriously, who cares if he did drugs or slept with someone to get ahead?  It is NOTHING and would be talked about for one day (please know, I am not saying he has done any of these things, i am just trying to think of what she has on him). A sex tape?  he is consenting adult, release it and get it over with.  Not worth his life (yes i know his partner is a children’s author, but this is D’s LIFE). I could be wrong, but i think it involves someone more powerful than D and something precious was threatened.

I am so damn frustrated and so angry and it is breaking my heart.  I just want to see him get out of this and I want to scream at every person who thinks she is cute or their love is goals. Open your fucking eyes, there is nothing to admire about this horror show and i don’t care whose mother’s daughter’s friend knows him.  She is a BEARD and a malicious one at that who is grievously hurting him.  And not one photo or video made for public consumption is going to change that fact. Look at him, he is dying inside.

cassie1022

I can’t even begin to express how angry I am at the person that thought it was okay to tweet someone in the industry about D owning that bar and thereby sanctioning what happens there. First, he’s made it quite clear when he’s allowed to speak for himself that he doesn’t own it, he’s just the piano man and he didn’t invest his money (smart boy). And, as you said, you NEVER tweet the players directly.

Please God, that this be her last entitlement. He deserves to be free. I hope that he has something work related that will keep him busy for a long while soon. The sad excuse for a team needs to open their eyes and recognize that he’s on the verge of collapse. He’s no good to them if they push him to the breaking point and then tip him over. If famous is what her goal is, let them pick something they want to make her famous for and push it. I’ll support it so long as it’s not fame for being his beard wifey.

flowersintheattic254

Hear hear!! I dislike the tagging and I’m not comfortable with it. I understand the anger. Tbh I’ve gone through it myself, but I don’t condone constantly tagging him. I’m sure he sees it all anyway.

Problem is D is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Forced to promote that place without the control of the direction it took. So he’s stuck with being associated with it. Fake married. I’m not surprised he’s tired and stressed.

I feel like his team spent a year taking his professional reputation and ruining it. They were always pretty bad, but this year has been wrecking ball proportions. They congratulate themselves when he wins awards and then create an inarticulate frat boycaricature of a frat boi and limit the roles he can take.

I don’t understand why people can’t see his team’s mismanagement and M’s selfishness here. He’s being paraded like a trophy. Nothing about this is loving.

God I’m this close to a full on rant.

chrisdarebashfulsmiles

I swear people should totally stop using internet…or at least thinking before acting.

[approximately12screamingcats]

the hunger games re-read part 1

so the first time i read the hunger games i was...10? 11? somewhere in there. the last time i read them (before now) i was probably 13. i decided about a week or two ago i wanted to read them again, because it had been awhile and i knew i would get more and different things out of them now than then. 

i just finished the first book, and i wanna share some of my thoughts, contrasting them to old ones and giving new ones 

under the cut because it’s gonna be real long 

katniss 

i’d say the biggest difference in my last times reading these and now is my opinion on katniss. when i was younger i had the easy opinion that she was boring and annoyingly emotionless. but honestly that’s really not true, and i think it was in part influenced by her portrayal in the movies, which i always thought was good enough but could’ve been better, and i’d go so far to say now that her casting wasn’t great. but also, a movie in third person is very different from a book in first. 

but really what i found, katniss is not emotionless, and she’s not boring. no, she’s still not what i would consider a favorite character of mine, i don’t love her, she’s not exactly my type of character that i love. but she’s interesting, and already a fascinating example of what hardship can do to a person. emotionless was such a wild impression to have of her, but i know i wasn’t the only one that thought that. i can say i definitely do not think that now. 

she clearly says near the beginning of the book that she’s learned and taught herself to appear emotionless, so that she doesn’t betray her true feelings about the capitol and endanger herself or her family. but she isn’t emotionless at all. she feels very deeply, whether it’s ones she can identify like her love for prim, or ones she can’t, like her (growing) love for peeta. 

the most marked thing about katniss is how her entire life has been driven by this need to survive. it encompasses everything she does, everything she has always done, and overshadows almost everything else. since she was eleven years old, she’s had to provide daily for her family, constantly watching out for starvation and arrest and death by wild animals. it’s no surprise she has no idea how to feel about things outside of that. she even says after the games she doesn’t know who she is when she doesn’t have to fight for food every day anymore. i haven’t gotten there yet, but i think that same theme comes back in the beginning of catching fire. her identity has been wrapped in this survival mode, and it’s twisted her into this person that has had to suppress any and all wants of things that could interfere with surviving. she’s not emotionless, she just quite literally has not had the time or energy to think about anything else and how to process it. 

the romance 

there’s a lot of opinions surrounding this romance. frankly, at the simplest levels, it’s part of the plot. the star crossed lovers of district 12. but yeah, of course there’s more than that. this is a little hard for me to evaluate without bringing up the other books, but tbh i’ll say what i think now with this one fresh in my mind and the others more distant, and see if it changes after catching fire and mockingjay. 

anyway, since addressing the love triangle is unavoidable, i have always liked peeta and katniss as a couple more than gale and katniss. originally, i think at least 50% of why was simply because i liked peeta and i didn’t like gale. interestingly, that opinion still holds solid, but that’s not really why i like katniss and peeta better anymore. 

katniss, already in book one, is not ambivalent to peeta and she certainly does not dislike him. honestly, i used to think it wasn’t until someway through catching fire that she began to really love him (romantically). but this read through made me realize she is already starting to in this book. it’s under the surface, and definitely doesn’t take hold until catching fire, but it’s there. their connection is emphasized and shown multiple times even before they get into the games. so many times it’s made apparent that she at least cares about him, but i’d say there’s beginnings for more than that. 

the unfortunate thing is that being pushed into the whole love story thing for survival, and in front of everyone, is a really terrible environment for someone who barely understands her own emotions to be processing new ones. she’s worried about him dying, she’s incredibly hurt when she thinks he betrayed her for the careers (betrayal is a very strong word for her to choose here too, when she’s been pondering this whole time how one of them has to die). she very evidently wants him to live when she finds him by the stream. frankly, he was already dying, if she really didn’t care about him, she could have easily let him die without it even looking suspect to the audience. she’s not great at medical, which is shown a lot. 

and i mean, how many times does she say she can’t bear the idea of being without him? of him dying? yes, usually these are either quick thoughts in a tense moment, or fraught with confusion or other musings, or paired in direct contrast with gale, but they’re there. she worries about it a lot. at the very end, when peeta realizes “it was all a sham for the audience” she even says she’s not sure if it was only fake, and that she misses him already. 

to an extent, there’s bonding from trauma here, but i don’t think that’s an invalid manner of bonding? and it’s not just in and after the games that this shows either. it’s there a little bit from the start. she just has to get to know him. 

i need to restrain myself from diving too deep into what’s coming here, but i’ll say this: as the books go on, obviously a lot more happens, but i really think one massive block in the way of katniss admitting to falling in love with peeta is the fact that it’s so blatant and open in front of the capitol. katniss hates the capitol, as does most everyone in the districts. but having her whole life on display like that, forcing her out of a decision, doesn’t mean she doesn’t love him, but it is very easy to see how that would make someone (especially a private person) want to withdraw away from that relationship. and katniss, having such a difficult time with her own emotions anyway since her live has been all about survival, doesn’t need that extra barrier on everything to muddle up her emotions and make it harder for her to tell what’s real or not real (lmao). 

as for gale, cause i know some people think she clearly loves him, i can get into that more as i get back into the other two books. but from this one so far, and what i remember, a lot of the gale vs peeta stuff isn’t so much about a straight up romance love triangle, but more about what katniss’ life is vs what she wishes it could be. katniss presents herself as a cold and hard person, but she really isn’t like that. she loves soft things, she wants to live in peace, she loves rue and prim and got excited about giving a goat to her sister that she splurged on a ribbon for it. she sang with her father and only stopped when he died. she says she could never admit to her mother how much she needs her gentle touch. the life katniss is living, silent and stoic and always fighting in the woods, is not what she wants. gale, her friend that she definitely genuinely loves (platonically), is parallel to her life. the hunter, full of rage against the capitol, symbol to everything she’s known out of necessity, not want. peeta is calmer, gentler, a symbol to the life she wishes she could have. that’s why they eventually settle down in the epilogue. gale was never the romantic partner katniss needed. 

but ive gone far past book one and i’ll get back into these analysis later when catching fire and mockingjay and the epilogue are fresher in my mind. 

the rebellion 

when i first read these books, my favorite parts were the action and peeta. but man. reading this through now, the story of this rebellion and the rising of people for their justice just screams through the page. and im not even to catching fire yet. it hit me when district 12 raised the salute to katniss, but it hit me even harder when rue died and when cato died. i mean...rue’s death. how katniss covers her in flowers. sings for the first time. drawing to light the utter inhumanity of what the capitol puts children through. but this part got to me specifically: 

“I can’t stop looking at Rue, smaller than ever, a baby animal curled up in a nest of netting. I can’t bring myself to leave her like this. Past harm, but seeming utterly defenseless. To hate the boy from District 1, who also appears so vulnerable in death, seems inadequate. It’s the Capitol I hate, for doing this to all of us.” 

i can almost hear the lament in that line, “it’s the capitol i hate, for doing this to all of us.” because that’s the truth. they throw up this show, driving them to competition, to hatred, but in the end, even the careers are victims of the capitol. 

cato’s death too, for so many of the same reasons. i mean, it’s hard to read this and not feel outright repulsion at what hell the capitol is putting on these people. making the mutts, making them look like the tributes, and then the sheer agony of cato being eaten alive. when katniss and peeta decide to kill him, to relieve him of his misery, it again reveals the truth of things, behind the fancy gold curtain the capitol tries to put up in front of the games. 

“It takes a few moments to find Cato in the dim light, in the blood. Then the raw hunk of meat that used to be my enemy makes a sound, and I know where his mouth is. And I think the word he’s trying to say is please. 

Pity, not vengeance, sends my arrow flying into his skull.” 

these parts are the first set up we get for what happens later. the games are awful enough, but seeing them so raw and unhindered, from the first hand account, you can’t look away. 

i don’t know. i can’t put it into words yet, but it moves me immensely. just the story of a people oppressed for so long, revealing the horror and setting themselves free. 

other small observations

i kinda wish i had read these books again when i was 16. because 16 sounded so old when i was 10-13, but now it seems young. i would have liked to read it knowing i was the same age as katniss, picturing how that really would be. 

i also forgot cinna was not literally lenny kravitz. 

i have not read a book this fast for recreation in years, and im LIVING. 

[paladin-andric]

Blackheart Masterpost

It’s finally here! I’m putting down a comprehensive list of my work thus far. Bits of lore and short stories are up top, if you want to read the WIP itself the chapters are at the bottom!

About The World:

A map of Deaco and the kingdoms in it, with information of each race

The Kingdom of Geralthin: Humanity’s Home

The Animals, Economy and Food of Geralthin

Everything Else: The Races Without Borders

Deaco’s Magic: Power, Secrecy, Life and Death

The Magic of Deaco: More Spells

A Rainbow of Fury: Dragons’ Colors and Their Meaning

Nature of the Gods: God and His Children

Nature of the Gods: The Old Gods

Outcasts, Misfits, and Wanderers: Life as an Outsider

Ancient and Antiquated History: The Human Empire

On Bards and Music

Faces of History: Geralthin Monarchs

The New Continent: The Republic of Salisca

Legends of Deaco

The Creation Legend: Pseudodragons

The Creation Legend: Kobolds

Character Bios:

Alexander, Knight of Geralthin

Senci, the Kobold of Lannis

Leianna, Cleric of The Order

Tourthun, the Red Dragon

Andric, Paladin of Lannis

Lexius, Priest of The Order

Wurie, Captain of the Guard

Paul, Bounty Hunter

Razorwing, Wandering Hero

Charles the Half-Dragon

Moments In History (Short stories set in the world of Blackheart):

Gira Series: Featuring Gira, the Black Dragon with a tender heart and a kindly love for humanity!

Gira and the Blue Dragon

Desc: Now the guardian of Pasir, Gira is snoozing outside the city when a challenger threatens the people under her protection...

A Dragon’s Recompense

Desc: Against all odds, Gira stumbles across the dragon that threatened Pasir while out relaxing! He’s acting strange, so she probes...

Gira’s Secret

Desc: The black dragon has become an advisor for Godfrey, the first King of Geralthin. He catches her doing something strange...

The First King’s Passing

Desc: After dozens and dozens of years dutifully serving the king, Gira discovers her healing powers have their limits...and she must stand by and watch as her greatest friend says goodbye.

The Ball

Desc: Half a millennium after the events of Blackheart, a Great War has enveloped Deaco. At a royal ball, a descendant of House Angelus comes across some colorful characters and a purpose to push towards...

One offs and two-parters:

The Last Stand of the Ashishani

Desc: The sacred guardians of the Grove of the Prophet fight to the bitter end against rampaging wolfman hordes.

Kinship

Desc: A wolfwoman comes across a shellback slave captured by her tribe...and realizes they’re not the enemies she thought they were.)

A Past Life: Part 1 | Part 2

Desc: Two soldiers are captured and brainwashed by an evil dragon, and transformed into monstrous slaves. One night, one of them remembers bits of his past, and rushes to escape and find help before the dragon’s influence breaks his will...

Readjustment

Desc: Bartholomew and Cornelius have found themselves in an odd position. Though they successfully reached Cay City and purged themselves of the dragon’s mental hold, their bodies remain inhuman...even Cornelius, who’s kobold form should have been dispelled along with the mind control. With the bodies of beasts but the minds of humans, the pair begin the arduous process of readjusting to life as it once was after months of living in squalor, and looking for clues as to what sorcery can resist purging magic. At the same time, Bartholomew realizes his draconic form has its upsides...

An Unlikely Savior

Desc: A dragonslayer and a wizard are commissioned to slay a dragon...only to realize their mark isn’t all it appears to be.

Hearts of Gold: Part 1 | Part 2

Desc: A dragon makes the ultimate sacrifice, giving up his honor and sanity to demonic corruption while his friend rushes to rescue him before he’s lost forever...

Guardian Angels

Desc: Two sea dragons come across a drowning man, who is certain he is about to be eaten alive...though this turns out to be far from what they’re planning.

A Bard’s Tale: Part 1 | Part 2

Desc: A bard stops an evil black dragon from slaughtering a village by playing magic-infused music for him, the beast struggling with the concept of feeling emotions for the first time. Constantly battling the beast for control of his mind, she must keep the dragon under control long enough to help him understand the emotions confusing and conflicting him.

Rise of the High King

Desc: Seigot Ironheart, newly named chieftain of the Oakwall Tribe, finds himself surrounded by a coalition of several rival tribes, each one larger and more powerful than his on their own. Together, it seems they are about to destroy the Oakwall Tribe once and for all...but Seigot is an inspiring commander, skilled leader, and cunning tactician. The enemy moves into the forests, and Seigot lies in wait...

Beachside Memories

Desc: A group of unusual friends enjoy their day off by traveling to the beach, ready for a day full of relaxation and fun...and while they are given an experience they’ll never forget, it isn’t for the reasons one would hope for.

A God in Exile

Desc: Cuan, the trickster god of the koutu pantheon, is punished for turning his uncle Cabrus into a griffin. He is forced into the form of a lowly serpent, and exiled to the mortal realm for a century. Cabrus feels some remorse and offers Cuan a second chance...but one should never trust the god of trickery to behave.

The Way of the Dragon

Desc: Theo, a man hopelessly lost in a world full of mythical creatures, gains access to the emperor’s court and discovers a possible way to get home...but the road ahead is long and perilous.

The Plan

Desc: A dragon’s soul, stuck inside a kobold’s body, puts into motion his plan to find his old lair, bringing his new friend Iki along to discover what secrets his past has in store...

A Matter of Perspective

Desc: A dragon finds another one of his kind locked up in a tower, rolling around on his back and begging for food from humans like an animal. Filled with righteous fury, he breaks in to free the dragon the humans have obviously brainwashed...only things don’t progress as he expected.

An Even Game

Desc: A mercenary company with little to do play a game of pen and paper! Inspired by games like Crusader Kings and Medieval: Total War!

Darkest Hour

Desc: In an alternate timeline, a horrid villain’s scheme succeeds. The entire continent is covered in a fog that turns all within it into monsters utterly loyal to the cruel tyrant, who becomes master of the known world. In this dark future, in a world without a sky, only a small underground base full of humans remain. When they must leave, they do so in sealed suits with gasmasks, so that they will not become one of them. Is there any hope left?

A Heist Awry

Desc: A master thief takes on an extremely dangerous heist for the chance at enough gold to retire for the rest of his life...but things take an unexpected turn as his target is an unexpected source, and a rogue element threatens everything!

Emergency Hearing

Desc: Hundreds of years in the future, at the dawn of the industrial era, the power of dragons begins to wane. Artillery pieces, modern combat tactics and more widespread magic has allowed humanity to impose their will on the land with wild abandon. Seeing the writing on the wall, the elder dragons call a meeting with the rest of dragonkind to discuss the fate of their kind, and humanity...

An Enemy Within

Desc: In the “Darkest Hour” timeline, the story continues. It turns out one of those soldiers did in fact survive, at a cost. A friend of his comes to discuss things with him...

Sorcerer Series:

A Snake in the Grass

The Long Con

The Unwitting Volunteer

The United Front

Justice and Spite

Desc: An upstart sorcerer obsessed with the might of dragons unleashes cruel and cunning plots against everyone he meets in an ultimate bid to steal the form of a dragon for himself...no matter how many must suffer and die in the process.

Chronicles of Logan:

Something Better

Public Enemy

The Sting

A New Beginning

Desc: Originally a human magician, Logan seeks out the blood of a dragon, to turn himself into one of the powerful and illusive half-dragons. Thus, his lengthy and accomplished career of sorcery began...

Zaphontilku’s Tale:

Joy and Ashes

Breaking Point

Desc: Zaphontilku is but a child when the war between dragonkind and humanity begins. For his own safety, his father traps him deep underground for centuries, where no humans can hurt him. The dragon toils and suffers in darkness for hundreds of years, his sanity waning, until a mysterious soldier somehow slips past the barrier...

Jotober 2018

Desc: During October, I made a short story every day. A collection of 31 short stories themed around a single word, assigned every day.

Story Time (Mini-stories about the characters of Blackheart):

Senci and the Blacksmith

Andric: Against the Demons

Alexander on the Battlefield

Alexander and the Knight

Leianna and the Fugitive Hunt

Razorwing and the Party Crasher

Senci and the Pseudodragon

Leianna: Spiteful Justice

Andric and Senci: Breakable

Andric and Senci: A New Homestead

Charles: Gift

Charles: Day One

Wurie: The Swords of Justice

Senci & Andric: Southern Secrets

Alexander & Tourthun: Hunted

Leianna: Survivor

BEST BOYS (Shorts of Eignach and Razorwing)

A Chance Meeting

Razorwing and the Party Crasher

Respite

Flowing

The Marathon

Day of the Roses

Hope in These Dark Times

Together

The Tourthun Sadness Saga™

Bliss

The Promise

An Innocent Query

Heartache

Tranquility

Come Fly With Me

Tragedy Breeds Bias

Cold Skies, Warm Hearts

Bonus: Redemption (Indirectly includes Tourthun)

Desc: Tourthun, a young dragon who lives by a strict set of morals dictating peace and kindness towards others, is stricken by misfortune time and again...

Miscellaneous Stuff:

Picture of Alexander by the wonderful @paper-shield-and-wooden-sword

Moodboard of Tourthun courtesy of the great @theguildedtypewriter

Moodboard of Paul

Moodboard of Senci

Moodboard of Razorwing

Moodboard of Charles

Moodboard of Alexander

Moodboard of Andric

The Characters of Blackheart in Dark Souls 3

Picture of Andric by a very good friend of mine

Dark Souls Inspired Item Descriptions

High Quality Wurie Shitpost by @paper-shield-and-wooden-sword

Story about two London kids secretly raising a baby dragon, requested by @kainablue (Yeah never titled it sorry. Technically Deaco related since the dragon came from Deaco into our universe)

The National Flag of Geralthin

Blackheart - The Story So Far:

Chapter 1, Into the Abyss: Introduction

Chapter 2, The Citadel: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Chapter 3, The Dragon: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Chapter 4, The Return: Part 1 | Part 2

Chapter 5, A Test of Mettle: Part 1 | Part 2

Chapter 6, A Change of Plans: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Chapter 7, Lowly Times: Part 1 | Part 2

Chapter 8, Winged Angel

Chapter 9, Birds of a Feather

Chapter 10, In Calamity, Hope

Chapter 11, A Bow, A Blade, and A Mind

Chapter 12, Come Together

Chapter 13, Enemy Within

Chapter 14, Back From the Brink

Chapter 15, A Light in the Dark

Chapter 16, The Insurmountable

Chapter 17, Melancholy

Chapter 18, Field of Dreams

Chapter 19, Reunion

Chapter 20, Discontent

Chapter 21, Second Wind

Chapter 22, Revelations

Chapter 23, Sins of the Father

Chapter 24, Shattered Memories

Chapter 25, Farewell

Chapter 26, Tourthun’s Legacy

Chapter 27, In Grief, Conviction

Chapter 28, Hope

Chapter 29, Awakening

Chapter 30, The Black Dragon

Chapter 31, A Final Respite

Chapter 32, Tarnished Legacy

Chapter 33, Heart of Darkness

Epilogue: Sunrise

That’s all he wrote! This post will be updated whenever something new is posted! I must stress how much I need feedback, if you haven’t read Blackheart over, please do, and let me know what you think! I really hope you all like this collection of information on the world thus far!

Want to be tagged whenever I post about Blackheart? Just ask and I’ll add you to the list! 

[beinglibertarian]

Freedom Dividend & Ditching The GDP?

Ten days after the midterm election, Andrew Yang gathered a group of about forty people, mostly college students and active community members, in Iowa City, Iowa, to discuss the 2020 presidential election. Yang one of six Democrats already declared, and maybe the most active one so far. He’s spent the second most money, behind John Delaney, who announced last year, and he’s appeared at Iowa state Democrat functions and held rallies across the country. I had the chance to sit down with him after his rally and discuss his lengthy platform.

One thing that was clear about Yang is that he is intelligent, articulate, and has done his homework. His website has his views on 73 different issues and policy proposals. He could talk in depth on just about all of them. The biggest piece of his platform is his idea for a Universal Basic Income, which he calls a “freedom dividend,” but it isn’t the only idea he’s trying to bring to the forefront of political discussion. He also wants to modernize the metric for national success, which is currently the Gross Domestic Product, and provide an alternate currency for community involvement. Make no mistakes, he’s not a libertarian. But he has interesting ideas that merit discussion.

If I was a Democrat and could only have five candidates to choose from, I’d want Yang to be one. His ideas are new and different, and still boldly progressive. He’s a genuine, intelligent, and well-spoken man. And if I was a Trump supporter and wanted a sure victory, I would not want Andrew Yang to be nominated. That is not to say that Trump couldn’t defeat Yang (his ideas are fringe, and UBI is largely untested anywhere, let alone in the US), but it wouldn’t be as sure as facing Elizabeth Warren or Cory Booker, polarizing politicians with a wealth of public exposure to pick at. Instead, Yang is the opposite of Trump, without picking up the incredible baggage of a career politician. He also is focusing on solutions for the swing-state voters who handed Trump the 2016 victories, who were largely blue collar.

The following is a transcript of an interview between Andrew Yang and myself. It has been edited for length and clarity.

  Bartholomew: So to start off, for those who are unfamiliar, who are you, and why are you running for President?

Yang: I’m Andrew Yang, and I’m running for president in 2020 because I’m convinced that we’re going through the greatest economic and technological shift in human history, and our government and leaders are asleep at the switch. So, I’m running to modernize our economy, which includes a “freedom dividend” of $1,000 per American citizen, adult, per month.

B: And, I guess, what’s more of your background? What did you do for a living?

Y: Sure, so I’m a serial entrepreneur, I’ve started several companies, I was the CEO of an education company that grew to become #1 in the United States and was acquired by a public company in 2009, and then after that I started an organization called Venture for America to help train hundreds of entrepreneurs around the country to create thousands of jobs. And so I spent seven years doing that, and during that time, I realized that we’re automating away the most common jobs in the economy. We started with 4 million manufacturing jobs, around the country, over the last 15 years, and we’re about to do the same thing to retail workers, call center workers, truck drivers, and so that’s why I’m running for president: to wake us up to the reality of what’s happening around us, and also to implement meaningful solutions that would strengthen our society.

B: Why are you the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump?

Y: Well, the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math, and I’m running to solve the problem that got Donald Trump elected, which unfortunately most politicians do not seem to understand or be focused on. So, that’s why I’m the best candidate to defeat Donald Trump. He actually said at a rally last month that he’s excited to run against all of the people that are primed to run as Democrats against him and his one worry is that some new figure would come out of nowhere, that people had not heard of, to run against him, and I am his kryptonite. I am Donald Trump’s nemesis.

B: We are only 10 days out from an election, why start so early?

Y: I’m relatively new, most people haven’t heard of me, so I need the time to introduce myself to people and get them excited about what we can do as a society and an economy if we get our acts together.

B: To shift gears a little bit, back to the basis of your platform, do you have a philosophy, and who are some people who have influenced you?

Y: I certainly studied many of the thinkers during my education, because I studied economics and political science, with a dash of philosophy in college, and I did go to law school so there is a little bit of that sprinkled. So some of the thinkers that influenced me: I think Mill’s idea of utilitarianism really stuck with me, I think Hobbes’s ideas of the state of nature were really powerful and influential. Milton Friedman has been a big influence on me, he’s influenced all of Western economic thought, so he’s someone that I’ve internalized a lot of his thinking. Yeah, so there are a lot of ideas I think I have in common with many libertarians, I believe.

B: Could you put a label on that?

Y: Well, part of is that, is just the reality, and I’m a serial entrepreneur and this is true of many entrepreneurs, is that I think the enemy of humanity is now bureaucracy. I think that the larger an organization gets the more inhuman and irrational it tends to get. And so, I’ve as an entrepreneur started businesses, and when you start, it’s just you, and you’re completely integrated because, you know, you’re incentives are aligned with yourself, and then you start hiring people and you can still maintain alignment and integrity through three, five, ten people, but then when it gets to ten thousand people, it becomes this giant machine where you have tons of processes and staff and departments and everything else, so in terms of my philosophies about this, it’s that we have to try to make it so that we’re all more human, and bureaucracy is really the enemy of that.

B: On the note of philosophy, would you consider yourself a capitalist, or perhaps more fairly, what would you describe as your brand of capitalism?

Y: Yeah, so I think capitalism is responsible for a ton of the progress that we’ve experienced over the last number of decades, but at this point, to quote Eric Weinstein, we did not know that capitalism was going to get eaten by its son, technology, and at this point we need to become both radically capitalist and radically socialist in different arenas, and that in many ways that capitalism and socialism dichotomy is now out-of-date and unproductive and not very useful. So I consider myself a capitalist, but I’m framing it as a human capitalist, and I think that we need to start moving our market towards things that actually benefit us, and that right now, capital efficiency benefits fewer and fewer of us.

B: Would you ascribe yourself more to the Nordic model, where you allow capitalism to grow, and then social democracy to sort of reap the rewards, or more of the East Asian model where capitalism is more confined to certain areas?

Y: Yeah, I think both of those models are very useful and powerful, I think there are a lot of things we can learn from the Nordic countries. Their retraining is actually genuine, they have significant family leave, which I think makes perfect sense as someone who has had children, and in the East Asian model, also, I think has some lessons for us, so I would be for a hybrid of those two.

B: Back to Universal Basic Income, you talked about the Freedom Dividend, a thousand dollars to every American every month, my thought here is that we are going through a technological change but we’ve gone through two major ones in the last half-millennium. We had people, like the Luddites, who did have a great deal of fear there. What makes this different, what makes this fear more realized, because obviously then we saw population booms but we also saw employment booms and we saw new fields emerge. What makes this different?

Y: We just have to look at the numbers, where according to Bain, we’re looking at three to four the times the level of displacement as the last industrial revolution by 2030. And if you look at our labor force participation rate right now, it’s down to 62.9%, in large part because many people have already been displaced in various fields and they did not find new work. They went on disability, they left the workforce, they took drugs, they killed themself. So, if you look at the numbers, there’s no reason to think that this is going to magically align itself, and when people talk about the last industrial revolution, what they tend to forget is that the last industrial revolution brought about the formation of labor unions, brought about mass riots and protests that killed dozens of people and caused billions of dollars worth of damage, inauguration of labor day, implementation of universal high school, this was all the last industrial revolution, so if you think that it’s going to be three to four times faster than that, then you would expect massive unrest, even based upon historical precedent. So there’s no reason to think like, hey, we went through this before. If you look it, yeah, we did go through this before, and it was hellacious, and this is going to be several times more hellacious.

B: As we move back to the libertarian perspective on universal basic income, do you see this replacing welfare programs and the bureaucracy that runs them, or do you see this running largely supplementary?

Y: I see it as largely replacing welfare programs, and the bureaucracy that administers them, and I think that there are many perverse incentives to the current systems. I think that it is infantilizing to many Americans, and I think that it’s even debilitating, because the disability programs, for example, have the perfect incentives to keep you disabled, because if you feel better, then your benefits got to zero. So right now there is a zero percent churn rate from long-term disability, where no one ever feels better. So I’d want to replace a lot of those programs, we have 126 programs right now, it’s like a patchwork, and no one thinks that it’s working well. So the freedom dividend would replace, hopefully, a lot of that, maybe most of it.

B: Could you name specifics?

Y: So the way I’m modeling the freedom dividend is that it’s opt-in, but if you opt in, then you lose any other benefits that you’re getting. So the issue is that because people rely upon different programs for different things, you don’t want to step in and say I’m gonna take it all away from you, because some people are receiving more, some are receiving less, and if they’re relying upon it to that level you could rely destroy someone’s survival mechanism if you were to replace or eliminate programs, so what you do is you say, look, you can make a determination, if you opt in to the freedom dividend, then you lose everything else you’re getting. And you end up substituting for many of those programs because someone would look at it and say, I’m getting $700 worth of food stamps and housing assistance, I’d much prefer a thousand dollars cash. And so then you would end up eliminating many of these programs.

B: We’ve got an $800 billion deficit, the freedom dividend would cost about $2.5 trillion a year, how do we manage that, where’s that money coming from?

Y: So the big change we have to make, is that the big winners of artificial intelligence and big data and autonomous vehicles are going to be the mammoth tech companies, and the mammoth tech companies are great at not paying a lot of taxes, because they will just move it through Ireland or their favorite tax shelter, so we have to join every other advanced economy and have a value-added tax, which would then get the public a sliver of every Amazon transaction or Google search. Because our economy is so massive at $19 trillion now, a value-added tax at even half the European level(1) would generate about $800 billion in new revenue. So that, plus our existing welfare spending(2) which is about $800 billion, which substitutes in for part of the freedom dividend, plus the new tax revenue from growing the consumer economy by 12%, which is about $500 billion, plus cost-savings in our healthcare, incarceration, and homelessness services, and the value gains from having a stronger, healthier, more educated, more mentally-well population ends up balancing out the $2.4 trillion so that it’s deficit neutral.

B: What is the biggest piece of your platform if you had to take UBI out of it?

Y: It’s evolving our economic measurements to include things that are, right now, not included in GDP that are core to the human experience and human well-being, so that’s health, mental health, affordability, like median income, and updating our measurements for the twenty-first century, because we’re in the midst of the biggest measurement problem in the history of the world, and it threatens to destroy us if we don’t get it right.

B: You did mention the digital social credit, you talked about that rewarding things like community activities, like volunteering at a food bank, but also things like this. What difference can the government see between a political rally with somebody with good intentions and new ideas, and a Klan rally? Where does the government ethically have the room to make that decision?

Y: In my opinion, it would not. So the digital social credit would probably be based upon convening people for almost any purpose, and then having people spend a certain amount of time. We’re really just trying to re-integrate the fabric of community, and so we’re not going to judge the reasons for getting together. You could be knitting, you could be reading campfire stories, you could be having a music festival, we’re not gonna judge the quality of the offering.

B: This would certainly require a constitutional amendment, would you include in that amendment that you cannot discriminate on the basis of activity?

Y: I don’t think it would require a constitutional amendment, because all you’re doing is you’re just putting up, like, community incentives for various things, so I don’t see any constitutional obstacle, but I would favor that there is no judgment of the nature of the activity.

B: Do you have an unrestricted view of the first amendment, of freedom of speech, to include hate speech?

Y: I think that our culture has definitely gone too far in trying to police various statements and terms in a way that’s very unproductive, that said I do think that there are limitations to the first amendment that involve, you know, yelling fire in a theatre or directly inciting violence, so there are limitations. To me, some of the more interesting first amendment issues actually revolve around pornography, because I think that, at this point, child access to pornography is a major issue, particularly with the internet, and so I’m less worried about hate speech and more concerned about desensitizing children to various sexual images.

B: One last question, if it comes down to it, and it’s you and Donald Trump, why should a libertarian pick you?

Y: Because I want to genuinely put economic power and freedom into the hands of every American, and as far as I can tell, Donald Trump does not.

  (1)The average European rate is nearer 20%, which would mean one can double the projections made by the CBO, linked. Of course, that can’t be done exactly, and actual numbers would shift for a 10% tax rate projection.

(2)Because the opt-in nature of his UBI program, people can choose to remain on their welfare. This means that while the cost will go down slightly, the savings will be less from our welfare programs. Thus, his system would benefit from higher enrollment.

The post Freedom Dividend & Ditching The GDP? appeared first on Being Libertarian.

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[aion-rsa]

What DC’s Infinite Frontier Means for Batman and Joker

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James Tynion IV has been writing Batman in some form or another for his entire career. He began his time at DC Comics by writing backup stories for Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman during the New 52 era, fleshing out the history of the villainous Court of Owls before landing his first owl-centric series titled Talon. Tynion was one of the lead writers on Batman Eternal and Batman & Robin Eternal, two weekly series that mainlined years of Batman continuity back into the New 52. And following the Rebirth reset, he got a long run with the Bat family on Detective Comics. 

With all that time on the Bat-books, it’s a little surprising to see the deluge of ideas still pouring out of the writer now that he’s got the flagship title all to himself. Tynion took over after Tom King’s 85-issue mega run, and proceeded to pit Batman against an entire city of clowns in “Joker War” after stripping the Dark Knight of his greatest superpower: his money. Tynion returns to the Dark Knight for the Infinite Frontier era, the post-Dark Nights: Death Metal status quo that has an energy to match Tynion’s voluminous idea output.

We had a chance to talk with him about a new year of Batman stories, his next big arc, and the surprising Joker solo book spinning out of “Joker War.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Den of Geek: When we last talked to you, you were just getting Punchline into the wind and just getting cracking on Joker War. Now we’ve got Joker getting his own series, you’ve got Batman past the big 100th issue milestone. You’re the boss now, right? 

James Tynion IV: :laughs: Right. And to be honest, when I came onto the title, the company had certain things that they were looking to accomplish with the Batman title. So I had a list of things that I needed to accomplish in the book, which is honestly part of why I leaned into creating so many new characters, especially once I got [artist] Jorge Jimenez as a creative partner. It was because those were the elements that I had the most control over. And in doing it because the company had where they wanted Batman to end at, where they wanted Joker then. 

But then as things started to change and it started to look like I was going to be staying on the title for the long haul, they started asking me “totally blue sky, what would you do next year if you had total carte blanche to do whatever you want?” And I said “I want to do a Scarecrow story.” 

There’s a Scarecrow story that has been in my head since I was working on the [Batman] Eternals, since I was working on Detective Comics. It’s changed a lot since then, but there there are some core pieces that I’ve wanted to explore in a big Batman story for years. And now taking everything I’ve learned from my first year on Batman, taking everything I’ve learned from working with Jorge Jimenez, and also just looking at the state of the industry and the state of DC Comics in particular, I wanted to try some new stuff. I wanted to see what was possible and sort of test the limits of how far we can push the Batman mythology and still have it feel like a Batman book. And that is what we’re up to next year, and I’m really really excited about it.

Scarecrow as a character has always been a great, classic Batman villain. But he’s also got some mission overlap. He’s creepy and scary like the Joker is. He’s a brilliant scientist like Hugo Strange. What makes Jonathan Crane stand out as different and important and worth examining to you?

Well, I think there’s a really interesting parallel between Dr. Crane and Batman, which is the fact that Batman, by putting on the costume, is trying to instill fear in people. That is part of the core mission of him trying to put on that costume. It’s the belief that criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot and if he makes himself into something that seems inhuman and frightening, criminals are going to be scared out of their mind. In a weird way, it’s a psychological experiment on criminals that Batman is waging war with. 

With Jonathan Crane, with Scarecrow, he is someone whose entire modus operandi is trying to unlock all of the secrets of fear and doing it with the amorality of a classic mad scientist. He doesn’t care how many people get hurt around him, but he’s genuinely fascinated in scientific terms. He thinks he is unlocking some of the truths of human nature and he’s willing to use the entire city as the testing grounds for that. But in a weird way, so is Batman. And that’s why the name of the big arc is “Cowardly Lot.” 

Post-Joker War, you’re taking [the Joker] outside of Gotham, right? Where are you most excited to send him and why?

Honestly, there are a bunch of exciting places. I like showing him in places where it’s tonally incongruous for him to be. Like, I like Joker in the sun. It’s just the most bizarre thing possible with his pasty white skin, just him out on a beach laying with some sunglasses is really, really wild. 

But tonally, what I was really excited to explore is the idea of what is the whole secret criminal underworld that spans across the globe? How do people like the Joker stay off of Batman’s radar for years at a time sometimes before they reemerge to cause their latest havoc? And what are the support systems that hide these people away and all of that. 

One thing that I tapped into was a little bit of real life history, with the ratlines out of Europe at the end of the second World War, where a bunch of Nazis basically snuck into South America and changed their names and identities. And a lot of those similar systems are how organized crime evade the authorities and set down roots in places where you can’t be extradited. 

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Joker, in particular, he is someone who appears to be a part of that world, because he is part of organized crime. He is the Clown Prince of Crime. But at the same time, he is such a chaotic element that he cannot…he walks into those systems, and those systems think they can control and contain him, but they can’t. And so a lot of those players who have been burned by him before are just as eager to take the Joker down as the heroes of the world. So that’s some of the core pieces that we’re trying to unpack here. 

The element of the Joker that I’m most excited about is the fact that Joker does not necessarily make a great protagonist, because he’s someone you can’t really get into the internal life of. So emotionally the real protagonist of the Joker series is going to be Jim Gordon, who is one of my all time favorite characters, and the character I’ve been missing writing the most while getting to make my mark on the Batman mythology. So getting to put him up front and center with all of his very personal enmity towards the Joker, that is really exciting. And it also gives the book its tone. I keep referring to Joker as a horror noir book. This is this is me trying to do something that feels a bit more like a work of crime fiction, with the horror knob dialed up to 11. I honestly think the first issue is one of the best things I’ve written for DC.

Joker is going to function more like a kind of Jason Voorhees, right? He’s a horror movie villain rather than the focus of the story?

He is. Everything in the book happens because of the Joker, and the Joker is in every single issue of the book. But it is about the people who are pursuing the Joker, and the Joker playing with the people who are pursuing. He is both the Hannibal Lecter and the Buffalo Bill of the book. There is still a Will Graham, Jim Gordon is the Will Graham/Clarice that he’s playing with along the way.

You are obviously a very well established horror guy, but the artists on your horror books generally have a certain art style to them. Something Is Killing The Children [Tynion and Werther Dell’Edera’s horror comic about exactly what it says on the label] and Department of Truth [Tynion’s book with Martin Simmonds about conspiracy theories that become real], they don’t look like your typical superhero books. Guillem March has a vastly different art style to what Martin Simmonds and Werther Dell’Edera are doing on the other books. Has Guillem’s art style changed your approach to the horror in Joker at all? Or has your horror brought something different out of Guillem’s art?

One of my first books for DC comic was a title called Talon back in 2014, and Guillem March was the artist. I had been a fan of Guillem’s work, but I started realizing how good he was at the horror moments. Because he has this style that, I think you can see a lot of Joe Kubert. In his line work, it has a kind of Gothic edge to it. I’ve always loved writing some really scary moments for him. And I tried to tap into that, again with Batman…I think that his work on [Joker] so far is my favorite stuff he’s done in all the time that we’ve worked together, which has been pretty much my entire career. 

Who’s your definitive Joker? When you’re dragging in a script, what Joker stories do you go back to to try and catch his voice again?

Oh, boy, that’s a really good question. One of the north stars just because of how closely I’ve worked with him, and for how long, is the Scott Snyder Joker. I think Scott got into the Joker’s head more than almost any other writer in the modern era. There’s a certain element of the Joker as the devil who just knows how to hit every single emotional pressure point on your body to make you afraid and to pick you apart. And the idea of him being almost ever present and in this solitary, terrifying way. So there’s an element of that, that I always bring in. 

But I’m never going to be able to shake the Mark Hamill voice from my head. There is an element of Joker when he’s at his most performative and he’s always performing to an audience, [but] it depends who the audience is. Sometimes the audience is Batman, but his voice changes a little when he’s talking to other villains and those are the stories that I’ve always loved. When I was doing my Legion of Doom one shots during Scott Snyder’s Justice League run, writing him as a foil for Lex Luthor was incredibly fun. Even going all the way back when I was doing the backup stories in the New 52, writing a Joker up against Two Face or up against Penguin or up against Riddler. He has a very different dynamic with all of them that is a little more playful because he’s not trying to kill them. He’s just trying to mess with them. So that Joker gets a little more Mark Hamill where he is a bit more of the clown. 

But honestly, my favorite Joker story ever is Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. I think it captures all of the sides of him. It’s him at his most performative, but you also see the deep hatred and also the incredible intelligence of the character, which is the thing that makes him so dangerous. The Joker would not be effective if he wasn’t as smart as Batman. The scary thing is he’s always playing a larger game. And it’s a larger game that does not necessarily follow a logic, but he can follow every step of it.

So we’ve got Jim [Gordon] in the Joker book. I’ve also read Barbara [Gordon], Bluebird, Punchline, [canonical best Batgirl] Cass [Cain], and Stephanie Brown are all showing up there.

Yeah, in the Joker book, there are also going to be backup stories continuing from the Punchline one-shot that I co-wrote back in November of last year, and continuing the story of Leslie Tompkins and Bluebird investigating Punchline’s past while she’s on trial for her crimes committed during the Joker War event. That story is going to continue there. 

Barbara Gordon is going to play a key role in that book, especially her relationship with Jim Gordon. Joker looms large in both of their pasts but also in both of their recent pasts. In the Joker War tie-in issues, we saw the death of James Gordon Jr. and that’s going to be one of the key things that sets the story in motion here. So, there is both a loss in their family instigated by the Joker that sets the Gordon family on this journey. 

The Gordon family is a very central force in the book, and tied very closely into that is the new arrangement in which we have Barbara Gordon working a bit more [behind the scenes, but] has not fully given up the Batgirl costume. But she is working more and more as Oracle again. And because she’s behind the computer, she is using Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown as her agents in the field, as her Batgirls. And so we are playing and building out that whole dynamic. 

A lot of people are very happy with that.

I’m very happy about it. :laughs: And we have big plans for all of the Batgirl characters in the line that will become more and more clear as the year goes on.

Is everything pointing back towards each other? You’ve got the big Scarecrow story in Batman, you’ve got all of the toys that you’ve brought into the Bat-family hanging around with Clownhunter and with Ghostmaker. But it sounds like they’re kind of eventually going to converge again.

Oh, absolutely. You can’t have two parallel threads going if you don’t plan to have them intersect. And honestly, one of the big things that I am most excited about this next era is how closely together all of the writers are working. There are certain things you can only pull off in a connected superhero universe. And especially like in the era right now, there is an incredible opportunity at DC which is, we have Black Label and books in the YA space and all of that. There are more straight up the middle, back to basics Batman stories being told that are more in the classic mold. And then there is stuff written for all ages audiences with the Bat family characters. So it frees the main line books to go a little further, where we don’t need to reset everything to the status quo, we can kind of push the status quo a little bit and change it 

The guiding idea that I’ve been going back to over and over is we’re further down the timeline than we’ve ever been before. If you look at Batman The Animated Series as a kind of core archetypal peak Batman moment where you have Batman, you have Bat Signal in the sky, you have Jim Gordon on the roof of the GCPD, you have a Tobin at his side, he’s in Wayne Manor, and Alfred’s in the Batcave. That is the era of peak Batman. And then you see at the end of the spectrum, you have stories like The Dark Knight Returns and Batman Beyond. We’re now at the midpoint of those two points. And that’s really exciting to me. Because you get to play with a Batman who’s a little worried that he used to be more effective than he is. Because when he first came on the scene, he cleaned up crime, he was all that, he made it for a better city, but then everything started pushing back even harder. And the city started becoming a more dangerous thing. 

And now Bruce Wayne is no longer a billionaire. He’s still wealthy, still a millionaire, but now he can’t just buy up all of Gotham City and try to fix it. He’s having to re-approach what he’s doing, build his methods back from the ground up. He’s doing it with the Bat family. But this is not an all powerful Bat God who can solve any problem that’s put in front of him in 30 seconds. This is someone who has to do the grunt work, the detective work, and touch up on his training and push himself to new limits, despite the fact that he’s not as young as he used to be. And I think that that makes for exciting storytelling. 

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I’m really excited. And seeing how the other writers in the line are tapping into the new elements of the status quo. The hope is creating an era of Batman comics that people come back to long into the future. I want people to look at this era and be like, “that’s my favorite era of Batman.”

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