#its been ages since i drew them ...... i am forgetting my roots........

[cubedmango]

klapolly ive heard of em

[kumeko]

A/N: For the once in a lifetime zine! I just wanted to write all the siblings.

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1.      Past

 “Gure-san!” Ayame crooned into the phone, delight spreading to his toes at the sound of his friend’s voice. It had been ages since they’d last called, since they’d last played this game of lovers and midnight escapades. He pouted. “You took too long to call me.”

 “Aaya, you know I could never leave you for long,” Shigure breathed on the other end of the phone, his tone perfectly serious. It was the thing that freaked out their teachers’ the most: the absolute lack of a teasing lilt or mocking smirk. The inability to determine if he was serious or not. “There’s no one who could replace you.”

 Really, it had been too long. Ayame closed his eyes, his finger twirling on his antique phone’s cord. It was too bad there was no audience for this performance, no Hatori to give them a dry look, no Mayu tossing a table. He would have even taken his mother’s disgusted expression. Glancing around his empty shop, Ayame noted the light escaping under the sewing room’s door. Mine was still here then.

 Mine was here. His lips tugged up into an involuntary smile as he sat down on an empty couch. “So you weren’t cheating on me, Gure-san?”

 “Never.” Shigure chuckled. There was a short pause, the breath between actions, and while his tone was still light, Ayame could almost see his slow smirk. “Though that might change. Yuki’ll be staying with me.”

“Yuki?” Ayame blinked, confused. Yuki. Yuki. A familiar name. An old classmate? A younger cousin?

“You still don’t remember your brother’s name?” Shigure let out a short, bark-like laugh. After a long pause, he added incredulously, “Or did you forget that you have a brother entirely?”

 Both. Ayame didn’t respond, his grip tightening on the phone. Yuki. His brother. Faintly, just faintly, he remembered small fingers reaching for him, a tiny voice and teary eyes. A black room and Akito’s smirk. A hazy image with a hazy name. “He’s moving in with you?”

 Shigure didn’t press the matter, to Ayame’s relief. “Haru asked. Haru. Can you believe that? The cow helping the rat? I guess your brother actually has friends outside of Akito.”

 A cruel comment. Ayame couldn’t refute it; he had thought the same thing, on those rare instances he thought of his brother at all. “Akito let him leave?”

 “I know! Amazing. And he’s even going to our high school.” Nonchalantly, Shigure changed topics. “Well, they managed the three of us, I think they can handle one well-behaved kid. It’ll be like having a second Hatori. He’s a quiet kid.”

“He’s in our high school,” Ayame muttered, his brow furrowed. Yuki was in high school. His tiny fingers were bigger now, his voice deeper. There must have been a time—at the new year’s banquet, at any of the million times he’d visited the main house—that he’d seen this Yuki, an almost grown-up Yuki.

 But his memory was still that of a child and a heavy feeling settled in his belly.

 “Don’t tell me you forgot high school too!” Shigure teased playfully.

 “No…I just…” Ayame struggled to find the words to describe this feeling, this aching, gnawing feeling. “I didn’t know.” That his brother was in high school. That his brother was leaving the compound. That his brother had friends, had at least one friend. Even the facts he barely remembered, favourite foods and toys, were all circumspect. “Does he know that we went there?”

 “I don’t think so. He’s never brought it up.” Shigure paused and Ayame could tell before he even took a breath, before the first syllable was uttered, that this would hurt. “He hasn’t mentioned you either.”

 It was like the twist of a knife. A punch in the stomach. Ayame was left winded and he didn’t even know why.

 “It’s not like you two talk.” There was a pounding sound on the other side of the line and Shigure sighed. “Well, I suppose I have to let her in eventually. Or she might actually hang herself. See you in my dreams, Aaya.”

 “Not if I see you first,” he responded automatically. On the other end, the phone went dead, a dial tone echoing in his ears.

 “Ayame?” Mine poked her head out of the door. Spotting him, she cocked her head. “Is something wrong?”

 “Yes. No.” He stared down at his shirt, at the edges of his right sleeve. Tiny fingers had reached for it once, tiny fingers that he had never considered once. “I…I don’t know.”

2.      Present

 “Heya, squirt.” Arisa ruffled Megumi’s hair as she walked past him to the kitchen. Yanking open the fridge, she rifled through its contents for drinks. “Didn’t realize you were home.”

 “I just came back.” Calmly, he ran his fingers through his locks, brushing any stray hair back in place. There. Much better. While he liked the attention, there were times when Megumi wished Arisa would be less physical about it. Noting her cotton shorts and white tank top, he cocked his head. “A slumber party?”

 “Yep.” Grabbing four cans of pop, Arisa closed the fridge with her shoulder. She held out one can to him with a grin. “Come on, you can join us. We’re playing some card games and I’m tired of Saki winning all the time.”

 “She’ll beat me too,” he pointed out, still accepting the cold can.

 “Then at least we can change who’s losing.” Arisa shifted the cans from one hand to the other, rubbing the cold appendage against her leg to warm it up. “I feel like Tohru should be doing worse than she is, and Saki’s screwing me over.”

 The chances of that happening were almost a hundred percent. Megumi didn’t even need to ask his sister to know. Trailing after Arisa as they headed upstairs, he asked, “So all three of you today?”

 “Mmmm, yeah. It’s been so long since it’s been just the three of us.” Arisa practically bounced up the steps. Looking over her shoulder, she winked. “I kidnapped her from the prince and the pauper. Just because they live with her, the Sohmas think they can hog all of her attention.”

 “The prince and the pauper?” Megumi raised a brow. That was a new nickname. “I thought he was an orange-haired bastard?”

 “He can be both.” Arisa shrugged, reaching the top landing. She spun around, a mischievous smirk on her face. “He’s a pauper because he almost always loses at Rich Man, Poor Man.”

 “That would make you one too.” Saki suddenly appeared behind Arisa, grabbing a pop can. Ignoring Arisa’s surprised jump, she stared at the can. “It’s cold.”

 “Warn me a little, would ya?” Arisa leaned against the wall, calming down. She shot Saki a disgruntled glare. “At the very least, I beat Kyo. And sometimes Tohru.”

 “A grievance I shall never forgive,” Saki remarked, rolling the can in her hands. “This feels good.”

 “It is hot today.” Megumi pressed his can against his cheek. The cool aluminum sent a shiver down his spine. Ah, that was much better.

 “…I can never tell if either of you are serious or not.” Arisa rubbed her forehead, torn between exasperation and annoyance. She glanced at Megumi, and then at Saki. “At least you’re wearing short sleeves today.”

 “I am not completely immune to the heat,” Saki replied, fanning herself lightly. “Ah. It truly is hot.”

 “Now you’re making fun of me.” Straightening up, Arisa barged into Saki’s bedroom. “Alright, time to kick everyone’s asses.”

 “K-kick?” Out of sight, a surprised Tohru squeaked. “It’s a card game!”

 Still standing in the hallway, Saki leaned against a wall, closing her eyes with a pleased smile. Quietly, Megumi stood next to her, his shoulder bumping into her arm, listening as Arisa crowed excitedly, as Tohru stuttered and panicked. His sister chuckled softly and he could feel the vibrations through her skin.

 A laugh. A smile. Megumi watched her, transfixed.

 “Yes?” Saki cracked open an eye. Even the aura around her felt light and teasing.

 “You’re happy,” he said, more a statement than question.

 “Hmm.” Saki considered it before nodding. “I am.” She opened both her eyes and smiled fondly at him. “Your prayer came true.”

 3.      Future

 “She’s here!” Momo peeked out the living room curtain, into the main garden. She quickly let go of the cloth, letting it fall back into place as she stumbled back. “And so is everyone else.”

 “Ahhhh…” Momiji’s smile dropped a notch as he tried to figure out just how did his cousins know about this concert. There was Tohru, of course, but while she was a terrible liar, she wouldn’t actually tell anyone. Standing behind his sister, he drew back the window curtains just enough to get a glimpse of everyone. Haru. Yuki. Kyo. Shigure—

 Shigure. Momiji rubbed his forehead. Yep. That was the root cause. It would have been hard for Tohru to hide it from him, her face gave everything away. From there, it was a single call to invite all of the ex-zodiac members. Add in their friends and a performance for three became a performance for a crowd. Frowning, he shot a glare at his older cousin. “It’s always him.”

 “That’s a lot of people,” Momo muttered, clutching her violin tightly. She glanced at him in askance. “Are we really going to perform?”

 “Yep!” Smiling at her encouragingly, Momiji pointed at the few cousins that she’d met. “There’s Kisa and Haru and Hiro—actually, never mind Hiro.”

 Despite the things that had changed since the curse was broken, Hiro’s tongue was not one of them. Even Kisa couldn’t sweeten his barbed words by much. Still, he was at least moderately kinder to others and Momo hadn’t come back in tears whenever she played with the pair.

 “Kisa.” Momo brightened. “And…there’s Yuki. And Mine and…” She stumbled, trying to remember the names of all their friends. “And…and Uotani and Hanajima…”

 “Yep.” Momiji grinned, counting them off himself. There were far more outsiders in the Sohma compound these days, the doors open to all now. High school friends, coworkers, that guy from the bakery—wait. Momiji cocked his head. It was good and all that anyone could come and go, but why were all of these random strangers here for a single violin recital?

 Momiji’s eyes landed on silver hair. Of course. He should have known. Ayame. Who else could it have been? As though sensing his thoughts, Ayame spotted him and shot him a thumbs up. He winked, mouthing, Good luck.

 It was hard to decide between Shigure and Ayame which one deserved more punishment. Maybe he could sick Hatori on both of them later. Turning back to his sister, he wrapped an arm around her and hugged her to his side. “We have so many friends! I think they’ll be happy to hear us play.”

 “Right.” Momo swallowed, peeking back through the curtain once more. She took a deep breath, stood up straight, and then moved back into the center of the room. Staring at her violin for a long moment, she squared her shoulders and raised it. “We have to tune up.”

 Part of Momiji missed the baby chick, the little girl who was always peering around her mother’s skirts. As a teenager, the only part of that left was the tremble of her hands as she raised her violin, the slight shake of her bow as she tried to settle herself. Yet this girl was able to talk to him, was able to be with him, and he would take that over the baby chick any day. “Right.”

 Momiji raised his violin. Finally, after all those years, they were playing together. Like real siblings. Like a real family.

[afterourhearts]

Eyeliner Tears

Why are Asian eyes so ugly? I thought to myself as I outlined their shape with the blackest liner I could dig out from the free Lancôme makeup samples Mom never used. This was my daily routine since I first discovered the beautiful black pencil when I was 12 alongside lip gloss, mascara, and blush. But eyeliner was my favorite – changing most dramatically what I hated most passionately. • Monolids are ugly because they make eyes look like slits. • Double lids are ‘mutant’ because, as my white medical professor once so aptly described, “Epicanthic folds are a prominent feature of Down Syndrome. If you don’t know what they are, Asians commonly have this feature.” Let’s face it: we can’t win, at least not in the beauty arena. But with my eyeliner adding the illusion of a larger eye, I felt halfway there. Not everyone, however, appreciated my foray into adolescent self-transformation. The Chinese beauty culture operates very differently than American beauty culture: pale skin, small mouths, soft bodies, and youthful innocence are prized over glowing tans, wide smiles, athletic frames, and sultry seductiveness. To achieve the Chinese beauty ideal of youthful innocence, heavy makeup such as eyeliner is unacceptable, and makeup at all is frowned upon for younger girls. Mom called them “raccoon eyes” and told me I looked uglier with it on but I never heeded her advice. She also said respectable girls did not waste their time on vanities like makeup, but rather immersed themselves in their studies. She especially hated when I wore makeup to church, a place where teenage girls are supposed to look extra pure. I rolled my raccoon eyes. One year, I met a new girl at our Chinese Christian Church. She was talkative, witty, similarly loved makeup and rebellion, and we became fast friends. This same year, a new youth pastor arrived at our church. He was funny, fluent, and finally our first youth pastor who wasn’t middle-aged. So how do they tie back to eyeliner? Prior to their arrival, I dreaded attending church, paranoid that the judgmental eyes of multitudes of Chinese parents hated my appearance and shared the Chinese cultural views held by my mother. Was it paranoia, or was I just observant? Adults would enthusiastically praise my younger brother’s handsome features and say nothing about my appearance other than, “She is tall!” Their smiles seemed disingenuous and their attitudes towards me distant. Or maybe I was just overly sensitive. Regardless, much of that paranoia melted away with the arrival of a new friend and youth pastor – two characters who seemed more attuned than the other members to the Asian-American dichotomy that was my life. I began to loosen up at church, smile more, and even happily greet the adults. I felt … safe. Maybe not enthusiastically accepted, but also not frowned upon with disdain. One might wonder why I was so concerned for approval from within my Chinese church. When you live in a country spearheaded by people who don’t view you as truly American, you cling onto the safe spaces that still might take you in and consider you a member. I wasn’t aware of how shaky my walls of comfort had been built, though, until one sentence caused them to tumble back down again. “He said he doesn’t like you because you wear so much eyeliner.” She told me. She being my new best friend and he being the cool and young youth pastor we both adored. “How do you know this?” I asked, disbelief and doubt at each other’s throats in the battleground that was now my mind. “Because he told my mom. And my mom told me that it’s not just him who thinks this way, but a lot of other parents. They tell their kids to stay away from you because you are a bad influence.” Bad influence. Me, the introvert who rarely speaks, a bad influence? I let that sink in. That night, I considered giving up my eyeliner. I thought all my fears about being hated by my friends’ parents were unfounded and paranoid. I thought my youth pastor would especially not judge me by something so exterior – actually, why would he judge me at all? Why would a grown ass man concern himself so heavily with whether a teenage girl wears eyeliner? Anger and sadness bubbled up around me. How did one of my greatest fears, one I thought had been pushed away and laid to rest for good, one which only my new friend knew so intimately, suddenly come to surface all over again? And that’s when it hit me: maybe she lied. The seed of thought that this supposed best friend might not actually like me at all was planted. And over the next few months, it thirstily drank up water and sunlight. I befriended other girls and began to uncover bits and pieces of the horrifying truth: she did hate me, and they had evidence. Screen captures and chat conversations were forwarded to my inbox. Not only did she tell others about how terrible I supposedly was, she also told them I disliked all of them and fabricated statements I had never uttered nor so much as thought. I could not believe it – why did she want to destroy my life and capitalize on my insecurities? What did I ever do but consider her my friend? Sometimes, you never get answers. Not too many months after, she moved again. We stumbled across each other’s Instagram accounts a few years later. She had dyed hair, tattoos, piercings all over, eyeliner wings bolder than I had ever applied, false lashes nearly reaching her thickly painted eyebrows, the same deceptively sweet smile as when we first met, and was surrounded by other Asian girls. I once burned with the anger of her betrayal, but all I could think about now was her new embodiment of the criticisms she claimed were the reasons for my rejection from our community and how ironic our appearances were now – me being the studious medical student who sometimes forgets to wear eyeliner and she being the girl who refuses to be seen in public without it - the pictorial epitome of the bad influence she once used to mark me for social abandonment from our only remaining community. Irony, Karma, or Hypocrisy? Today, I won’t know if sprinkled between her lies were grains of truth, and if her comment about my reputation was one of them. I won’t know if my eventual submission to certain Asian cultural values drew its main roots from my teenage experience of potential two-fold community rejection. I won’t know if she ever realized the extent to which she hurt me or if she continues to hurt in similarly sneaky ways our other Asian sisters struggling to find acceptance and self-love in a land which has subjected them to unwarranted rejection. What I do know is this: We All Cry The Same Eyeliner Tears Yes, we do. They trickle down from our unmistakably Asian eyes, glide along our sunscreen laden faces, and leave smudgy black streaks to remind us of both our perceived physical imperfections as well as our efforts to conceal the ugliness we feel inside. 

Feeling ugly is not just some manifestation of low self-esteem as these American schools/media/counselors might tell us in order to erase from our mutual history and from their responsibility the ‘chink’ comments that we heard or the fingers-pulling-eyes-upward-to-mimic-us that we saw.

Our damaged self-esteem is not some personal mental and emotional disorder or a reflection of our weakness but a collective experience caused largely in part by the pervasive belief that some belong here but we don’t and that some are beautiful but we aren’t. Don’t think that just because dating apps are now asserting, “Asian girls are the most desired race!” that the girls who come after us are protected from the less-than we endured. The American dating scene did not just become more “accepting” of us – we changed to look more like them. But underneath the beautifully and extravagantly drawn eyeliner wings, the perfectly filled in eyebrows, the time-consuming application of fake lashes, the hours spent at the gym to avoid ‘Asian flat butt’ stereotypes, and the sharp cut of the surgery knife on our eyelids, we still cannot help but wonder: is this beautiful yet? And when he says, “Yes”, we still worry, was I not beautiful before? Do we really want to be with the ones who only want what is made-to-order, and overlook the ones who saw the original, in all its imperfections, as worth discovering? So while I have every right to be mad at my Asian sister for the hurtful actions she made against me as a result of her wanting to be more accepted by our community than I was, I cannot lose sight of the more formidable barrier to our collective inability to self-love: not the lies she told before, but the lies they still tell today. Why are my Asian eyes so ugly? I used to think to myself constantly. And if you’ve read this until the end, I think you know the answer.

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Comments: Friends who have read this far or read my shared thoughts at all, I know my experiences are not isolated. My past shared posts related to familial pressures and relationships have shown me just how overlapping our experiences can be. The feelings of low self-esteem and self-image at some time or another in your life is probably a universal one. Experiences of betrayal are sadly quite common. Hopefully you enjoyed this short piece - it’s a bit different from the other posts I’ve written (a little more cleaned up and narrative when compared to my usual frenetic ranting) ... anyways, I wanted to share that I’ve been working on putting together some more shorts + poems in my free time (this is how I destress from school haha) and something I hope to achieve through writing with this project (and since day one) is unfiltered and unapologetic storytelling highlighting the Asian voice that is so often completely ignored in discussions of race and discrimination. I’m not saying our experiences are to be equated to the experiences of other minorities because noo, but I am saying we should at least be included in the discussion. 

This brings me to my next point: I want to continue to share your stories too. If you have experiences you want to share related in any way to your identity as an Asian-American female, I want to hear them and with your permission, try to make prose or poetry of it. Text me, message me, or call me and let’s get in touch :) Thank you for being a part of this whether as a reader or direct contributor. Let’s shape our collective voice!!!

[merusthedivineangel]

Visiting The Garden 1

@ask-whitepearl-and-steven) Using their version of Steven for this story. This takes place around the time of the movie, so I presume all the Pink Diamond stuff will be out of the way and explained like in the movie.

In the cosmos, there was a small asteroid decorated in faded pink temples. Everything was worn away with due time, forgotten and  lost to time. The life had long since faded, the structures cracked and old. The simple touch could cause certain parts to crumble like sand. The whole place was lifeless and abandoned. Well almost.

In the middle of the lifeless garden stood a short petite gem with thin arms. Her eyes once vibrant and filled with joy were drained of the color that once occupied them. Her expression was one of melancholy and despair.  Her outfit was torn, her eyes had dark circles under them. Her foot had been rooted to the ground, shoes messy as can be. Her hair was a unkempt, her left heart now falling apart. It had been six thousand years. Six thousand miserable, unending, worthless, years. Pink had left her in the garden, under the pretense of a game of some kind. Of what, she wasn’t sure, given all she remembered were the Diamond’s words.

“Here in the garden, lets play a game. I’ll show how its done. Here in the garden, stand very still.” She remembered her enthusiasm at the request of her diamond.”This will be so much fun!” She visited her sweet smile, her diamond’s laughter was her most beautiful feature. Though now that she thought about it, something was off with her smile when she remembered it. She couldn’t place it, but it was like Pink was satisfied with herself about something.

When her diamond turned her back and left, the last thing that remained was her figure before the teleporter caused her to drift away. That was the last sight of Pink she had before she was gone.

As the years painfully drew by, she wondered what type of game she was playing. Standing still, not moving a muscle as she did so. Life began to fade away around her, her happiness as well. She wondered if this was how her game worked, if she was doing it right.

Spinel sighed.’Maybe Pink will come back eventually.’

 Though her hopes were dulled and faded. The enthusiastic chant in her head that once asserted that Pink would come back one day had fallen silent a few millennia’s ago.

Suddenly, a sound was made. It was the sound of the warp pad. She hadn’t heard that in years....Could it be? Her Diamond had finally returned!  Her eyes however, were once again filled with disappointment and confusion. What’s this? An organic lifeform with ashy skin and silver hair appeared, wearing a strange jacket and pants. Another was a taller gem, adorning pink curly hair and a strange white dress.

That wasn’t her Diamond. Nobody should have access to this place.

“Rose...What is this place? We must’ve mixed up warp pads or something." “Hmm....Its a garden....I recognize this place...Its been so long.” The smaller lifeform noticed Spinel,”Hey...What the heck? Rose, why is there a gem here? Earlier, you said there is no one here.”

Rose immediately stiffened, seeing Spinel standing there.”Oh no...” “Oh no? Rose...why is she here? Shouldn’t be on homeworld? Do you know her or something? Something I haven’t been informed of?” He knew Rose well enough that she had a lot of skeletons in the closest. Though this was a bit unexpected.

“Steven, we should leave. Now.” “What? We are not leaving. This gem needs help. Let me try talking to her.” Steven walked over to Spinel, who remained still as he approached.”Hey. What’s your name?” “......”  “Hey. I know you can talk. Mind saying something?” “You’re not my Diamond.” “What?” “You’re not my Diamond.” “Uh....Hey ‘You're not my Diamond, pleasure to meet you.” Spinel stared at him, her eyes void of any emotion. The attempt to add humor dissipated as soon as it came.

Steven cringed.”Ooh boy. Alright. Listen, we kinda just found this random warp pad and we ended up in this creepy...abandoned, weird, garden thing. Do you know anything about this place? You look like you’ve been here for some time.” “I’ve been here for 6000 years, counting every second that goes by. This garden is not mine however.” “Then whose is it?” “Pink’s. Pink Diamond used to play in this garden on a regular basis. I was...her best friend. We were happy, I made her smile, she gave me laughter. Everything was just peachy, until one day, Blue and Yellow Diamond informed her of a new colony they gifted her. Pink was so happy, I’ve never saw her so overjoyed in my life. I wanted to go with her, so we could play, but instead, she told to stand in the garden for a game. And I waited....and I’m still waiting. I wonder when she’ll come back, because a part of me believes that she never planned on returning. Though I hope I’m simply being wrong, even after all these years.” Steven’s expression hardened.”Oh my god. Please tell me youre lying.” “I would never lie about this.” Steven sighed,“Rose. Come here, now.” “Steven, I-” “Rose. Explain.” Rose didn’t say anything. She looked at Spinel, the old toy she discarded had aged and lacked her enthusiasm. This wasn’t how she remembered Spinel. The Spinel she remembered was happy and smiling, clingy and possessive. Hardly like the lifeless gem before her. It was rather scary seeing someone so positive look like this.

“Rose. Did you hear me? Explain. Come on, she deserves an answer.” “Spinel...I...”

“I don’t even know you...I’ve never heard of a Rose before.”Spinel narrowed her eyes. She never heard of any Rose. 

“Well I um...I...” “Rose. Say it. It’ll be smoother if you do.” “Spinel, its me.” “Its who? I don’t know you.” “Its me. Pink.” “What.” Spinel replied in disbelief.”Is this supposed to be some type of cruel joke? You’re not Pink. I refuse to believe that you are my Diamond. There’s no proof.” “Spinel, I understand this is a lot to take in. But you have to believe me. I’m Pink Diamond.” “No you’re not.” “I am.” “Not.” “I am.” Rose said, slightly irritated by Spinel’s stubbornness.

“Rose, this is not going anywhere. Show her physically.” Rose paused. She wasn’t used to going in her old form. It had been a while since she had. She lowered her head.”Oh....Alright.” She shapeshifted, now pretending herself in her original form, dress and all.

Spinel’s eyes widened.”Pink....You...You came back.You finally came back!” After all these years! “Erm...Well...about that..” “What do you mean, about that? You finally came back! 6000 years and I thought it was all for nothing! Here I thought you abandoned me on this decaying asteroid! Now we can finally be friends! I knew you didn’t forget about me!” “Spinel...” “What?” The half gem cringed,“We had no idea you were here. We just happened to stumble on a warp pad that lead us here. No one knew you were here. Nobody even mentioned at any point.” Her face fell,”What?” “Spinel, I’m afraid that...everyone just forgot about you. Pink never mentioned you back on Earth.” Spinel’s expression became dark.”That can’t be true! Pink, you can’t tell me you forgot about me! I was your best friend, there was no way you could’ve just abandoned me right? Right!?” Pink’s silence filled the void for what her words didn’t offer.

Spinel began twitching. For the first time in 6000 years, her foot finally began to move. She ripped the rooted branch from her foot and began stumbling towards Pink.  Pink’s expression was one of shock. Never before had she seen Spinel look at someone with seething hate and rage. Spinel wasn’t designed to experience those emotions, she wasn’t meant to be serious.

Steven looked terrified. He knew when gem’s got angry, it would get ugly soon after. “Spinel, I didn’t mean t-” “Yes you did. Pink, don’t mistake my naivate for stupidity. I’m not an idiot. I can think for myself. And its pretty clear from this fleshy Steven guy, what you did. You left me on this asteroid to rot, duping me into a stupid game, just so you could run off to that NOWHERE planet with a bunch of NOBODIES! Gee, that sure worked out didn’t it! Not only did you lose little old me, but you got to have fun and play games on that stupid ROCK! And I bet you made plenty of OTHER FRIENDS, guess it wasn’t that hard to replace me now was it?” Pink didn’t reply. There was no proper response to what Spinel said.  “You can’t even answer for yourself. Because you know I’m right. Well that’s just swell! Here I was thinking you actually cared! Well clearly you’re undeserving of such a thought!” “Spinel, please. Listen to me, I know what I did wasn’t the best but I had a reas-” “Wasn’t the best!? You left on this stupid asteroid for 6000 years and all you have to say is that it wasn’t your best call of action!? You can’t even must up an apology!?” “....” Pink was never good at apologizing. Steven knew that first hand how bad she was at carrying them out.

“Don’t have anything to say do you? I should expect as much.” She seemed ready to hit Pink, but Steven intervened.”Spinel, don’t attack her. It won’t solve anything.” “Oh, so now the flesh suit is talking to me. What? Are you gonna say how I’m being irrational or something?” “No. Your anger is completely justified. What Pink did was inexcusable, but harming her wouldn’t solve the issue. What need now, is friends who can help you.” “Friends? And where am I going to get those?” “You can come with us to Earth. We’ll take you there. Heck, maybe we can sort this thing. So that maybe, you and Pink can be-” “No.” “Huh?” “....I......DON’T....WANT....TO....BE......HER......FRIEND.”  Spinel’s voice was dripping with malice and hatred.

His face softened.”Oh. Well, I can’t blame you. I’d probably react the same way honestly. I understand you not trusting Pink anymore and not wanting to be her friend, but try giving Earth a chance.” She darkly chuckled,“Earth? You that rock that she was quick to abandon me for? That she didn’t even colognize?”

Pink didn’t say anything.

“Yes. Earth is much better uncolonized and it has....other gems that you can be friends with. I’m certain you can make friends with people like Bismuth or Lapis. What do you say?” Spinel growled.”Fine. I’ll go, not because I want to, but because I’m tired of being in this garden.” “Good. We’ll show around and we’ll try cleaning you up too.” Steven grabbed Spinel by the hand. She noticed the large horn coming out of his head.”Hey, is that a gem on your head?” “Yeah.” “Where’d that come from?” “I’m White Diamond’s son. Long story, I’ll explain later.” Spinel blanked. White Diamond had a  son? How was that....nevermind. She’ll ask later. Though Pink had since shapeshifted into her Rose persona, the glare Spinel gave did not waver. Rose looked away from her former playmate, ignoring the guilt in her stomach.

Done! Hope you enjoy.

Before you ask, the message never comes up here. Spinel had no idea about the whole Rose Quartz war thing so yeah. 

[angelofberlin2000]

Photo: Emily Denniston/Vulture and photos courtesy of the studios 

Keanu Reeves has been a movie star for more than 30 years, but it seems like only recently that journalists and critics have come to acknowledge the significance of his onscreen achievements. He’s had hits throughout his career, ranging from teen comedies (Bill & Ted’s) to action franchises (The Matrix, John Wick), yet a large part of the press has always treated these successes as bizarre anomalies. And that’s because we as a society have never  been able to understand fully what Reeves does that makes his films so special.

In part, this disconnect is the lingering cultural memory of Reeves as Theodore Logan. No matter if he’s in Speed or Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Something’s Gotta Give, he still possesses the fresh-faced openness that was forever personified by Ted’s favorite expression: “Whoa!” That wide-eyed exclamation has been Reeves’s official trademark ever since, and its eternal adolescent naïveté has kept him from being properly judged on the merits of his work.

Some of that critical reassessment has been provided, quite eloquently, by Vulture’s own Angelica Jade Bastién, who has argued for Reeves’s greatness as an action star and his importance to The Matrix (and 21st-century blockbusters in general). Two of her observations are worth quoting in full, and they both have to do with how he has reshaped big-screen machismo. In 2017, she wrote, “What makes Reeves different from other action stars is this vulnerable, open relationship with the camera — it adds a through-line of loneliness that shapes all his greatest action-movie characters, from naïve hotshots like Johnny Utah to exuberant ‘chosen ones’ like Neo to weathered professionals like John Wick.” In the same piece, Bastién noted: “By and large, Hollywood action heroes revere a troubling brand of American masculinity that leaves no room for displays of authentic emotion. Throughout Reeves’s career, he has shied away from this. His characters are often led into new worlds by women of far greater skill and experience … There is a sincerity he brings to his characters that make them human, even when their prowess makes them seem nearly supernatural.”

In other words, the femininity of his beauty — not to mention his slightly odd cadence when delivering dialogue, as if he’s an alien still learning how Earthlings speak — has made him seem bizarre to audiences who have come to expect their leading men to act and carry themselves in a particular way. Critics have had a difficult time taking him seriously because it was never quite clear if what he was doing — or what was seemingly “missing” from his acting approach — was intentional or a failing.

This is not to say that Reeves hasn’t made mistakes. While putting together this ranking of his every film role, we noticed that there was an alarmingly copious number of duds — either because he chose bad material or the filmmakers didn’t quite know what to do with him. But as we prepare for the release of the third John Wick installment, it’s clear that his many memorable performances weren’t all just flukes. From Dangerous Liaisons to Man of Tai Chi — or River’s Edge to Knock Knock — he’s been on a journey to grow as an actor while not losing that elemental intimacy he has with the viewer. Below, we revisit those performances, from worst to best.

   45. Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

The nadir of the ’90s cyberpunk genre, and a movie so bad, with Reeves so stranded, that it’s actually a bit of a surprise the Wachowskis were able to forget about it and still cast him as Neo. Dumber than a box of rocks, it’s a movie about technology and the internet — based on a William Gibson story! — that seems to have been made by people who had never turned on a computer before. Seriously, watch this shit:

44. The Watcher (2000) This movie exists in many ways because of its stunt casting: James Spader as a dogged detective and Keanu as the serial killer obsessed with him. Wait, shouldn’t those roles be switched? Get it? There would come a time in his career when Keanu could have maybe handled this character, but here, still with his floppy Ted Logan hair, he just looks ridiculous. The hackneyed screenplay does him no favors, either. Disturbingly, Reeves claims that he was forced to do this movie because his assistant forged his signature on a contract. He received the fifth of his seven Razzie nominations for this film. (He has yet to win and hasn’t been nominated in 17 years. In fact, it’s another sign of how lame the Razzies are that he got a “Redeemer” award in 2015, as if he needed to “redeem” anything to those people.)

43. Sweet November (2001) It’s a testament to how cloying and clunky Sweet November is that its two leads (Reeves and Charlize Theron) are, today, the pinnacle of action-movie cool — thanks to the same filmmaker, Atomic Blonde and John Wick’s David Leitch — yet so inert and waxen here. This is a career low point for both actors, preying on their weak spots. Watching it now, you can see there’s an undeniable discomfort on their faces: If being a movie star means doing junk like this, what’s the point? They’d eventually figure it all out.

42. Chain Reaction (1996) As far as premises for thrillers go, this isn’t the worst idea: A team of scientists are wiped out — with their murder pinned on poor Keanu — because they’ve figured out how to transform water into fuel. (Hey, Science, it has been 23 years. Why haven’t you solved this yet?) Sadly, this turns into a by-the-numbers chase flick with Reeves as Richard Kimble, trying to prove his innocence while on the run. He hadn’t quite figured out how to give a project like this much oomph yet, so it just mostly lies around, making you wish you were watching The Fugitive instead.

41. 47 Ronin (2013) In 2013, Reeves made his directorial debut with a Hong Kong–style action film. We’ll get into that one later, because it’s a ton better than this jumbled mess, a mishmash of fantasy and swordplay that mostly just gives viewers a headache. Also: This has to be the worst wig of Keanu’s career, yes?

40. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993)

Gus Van Sant’s famously terrible adaptation of Tom Robbins’s novel never gets the tone even close to right, and all sorts of amazing actors are stranded and flailing around. Reeves gets some of the worst of it: Why cast one of the most famously chill actors on the planet and have him keep hyperventilating?

39. Replicas (2019) In the wake of John Wick’s success, Keanu has had the opportunity to sleepwalk through some lesser sci-fi actioners, and this one is particularly sleepy. The idea of a neuroscientist (Reeves) who tries to clone his family after they die in an accident could have been a Pet Sematary update, but the movie insists on an Evil Corporation plot that we’ve seen a million times before. John Wick has allowed Reeves to cash more random checks than he might have ten years ago. Here’s one of them.

38. Feeling Minnesota (1996) As far as we know, the only movie taken directly from a Soundgarden lyric — unless we’re missing a superhero named “Spoonman” — is this pseudo-romantic comedy that attempts to be cut from the Tarantino cloth but ends up making you think everyone onscreen desperately needs a haircut and a shave. Reeves can tap into that slacker vibe if asked to, but he requires much better material than this.

37. Little Buddha (1994)

To state the obvious, it would not fly today for Keanu Reeves to play Prince Siddhartha, a monk who would become the Buddha. But questions of cultural appropriation aside, you can understand what drew The Last Emperor director Bernardo Bertolucci to cast this supremely placid man as an iconic noble figure. Unfortunately, Little Buddha never rises above a well-meaning, simplistic depiction of the roots of a worldwide religion, and the effects have aged even more poorly. Nonetheless, Reeves is quite accomplished at being very still.

36. Much Ado About Nothing (1993) Quick anecdote: We saw this Kenneth Branagh adaptation of the Bard during its original theatrical run, and when Reeves’s villainous Don John came onscreen and declared, “I am not of many words,” the audience clapped sarcastically. That memory stuck because it encapsulates viewers’ inability in the early ’90s to see him as anything other than a dim SoCal kid. Unfortunately, his performance in Much Ado About Nothing doesn’t do much to prove his haters wrong. As an actor, he simply didn’t have the gravitas yet to pull off this fiendish role, and so this version is more radiant and alive when he’s not onscreen. It is probably just as well his character doesn’t have many words.

35. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) GIFs are a cheap way to critique a performance. After all, acting is a complicated, arduous discipline that shouldn’t be reduced to easy laughs drawn from a few seconds of film played on a loop. Then again …

This really does sum up Reeves’s unsubstantial performance as Jonathan Harker, whose new client is definitely up to no good. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a wonder of old-school special effects and operatic passion — and it is also a movie in which Reeves seems wholly ill at ease, never quite latching onto the story’s macabre period vibe. We suspect if he could revisit this role now, he’d be far more commanding and engaged. But in 1992, he was still too much Ted and not enough anything else. And Reeves knew it: A couple years later, when asked to name his most difficult role to that point, he said, “My failure in Dracula. Totally. Completely. The accent wasn’t that bad, though.” Well …

34. The Neon Demon (2016)

One of the perks of being a superstar is that you can sometimes just phone in an amusing cameo in some bizarro art-house offering. How else to explain Reeves’s appearance in this stylish, empty, increasingly surreal psychological thriller from Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn? He plays Hank, a scumbag motel manager whose main job is to add some local color to this portrait of the cutthroat L.A. fashion scene. If you’ve been waiting to hear Keanu deliver skeezy lines like “Why, did she send you out for tampons, too?!” and “Real Lolita shit … real Lolita shit,” The Neon Demon is the film for you. He’s barely in it, and we wouldn’t blame him if he doesn’t even remember it.

33. The Lake House (2006) Reeves reunites with his Speed co-star for a movie that features a lot fewer out-of-control buses. In The Lake House, Sandra Bullock plays a doctor who owns a lake house with the strangest magical power: She can send and receive letters from the house’s owner from two years prior, a dashing architect (Reeves). This American remake of the South Korean drama Il Mare is romantic goo that’s relatively easy to resist, and its ruminations on fate, love, destiny, and luck are all pretty standard for the genre. As for those hoping to enjoy the actors’ rekindled chemistry, spoiler alert: They’re not onscreen that much together.

32. Henry’s Crime (2011) You have to be careful not to cast Reeves as too passive a character; he’s so naturally calm that if he just sits and reacts to everything, and never steps up, your movie never really gets going. That’s the case in this heist movie about an innocent man (Reeves) who goes to jail for a crime he didn’t commit and then plans a scam with an inmate he meets there (James Caan). The movie wants to be a little quirkier than it is, and Reeves never quite snaps to. The film just idles on the runway.

31. The Bad Batch (2017) Following her acclaimed A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour plops us in the middle of a desert hellscape in which a young woman (Suki Waterhouse) must battle to stay alive. The Bad Batch is less accomplished than A Girl, in large part because style outpaces substance — it’s a movie in which clever flourishes and indulgent choices rule all. Look no further than Reeves’s performance as the Dream, a cult leader who oversees the only semblance of civilization in this post-apocalyptic world. It’s less a character than an attitude, and Reeves struggles to make the shtick fly. He’s too goofy a villain for us to really feel the full measure of his monstrousness.

30. Hardball (2001)

Reeves isn’t the first guy you’d think of to head up a Bad News Bears–style inspirational sports movie, and he doesn’t pull it off, playing a gambler who becomes the coach of an inner-city baseball team and learns to love, or something. It’s as straightforward and predictable an underdog sports movie as you’ll find, and it serves as a reminder that Reeves’s specific set of skills can’t be applied to just any old generic leading-man role. The best part about the film? A 14-year-old Michael B. Jordan.

29. Street Kings (2008) Filmmaker David Ayer has made smart, tough L.A. thrillers like Training Day (which he wrote) and End of Watch (which he wrote and directed). Unfortunately, this effort with Reeves never stops being a mélange of cop-drama clichés, casting the actor as Ludlow, an LAPD detective who’s starting to lose his moral compass. This requires Reeves to be a hard-ass, which never feels particularly convincing. Street Kings is bland, forgettable pulp — Reeves doesn’t enliven it, getting buried along with the rest of a fine ensemble that includes Forest Whitaker, Hugh Laurie, and a pre-Captain America Chris Evans.

28. Constantine (2005) In post-Matrix mode, Reeves tries to launch another franchise in a DC Comics adaptation about a man who can see spirits on Earth and is doomed to atone for a suicide attempt by straddling the divide twixt Heaven and Hell. That’s not the worst idea, and at times Constantine looks terrific, but the movie doesn’t have enough wit or charm to play with Reeves’s persona the way the Wachowskis did.

27. The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) Reeves’s alienlike beauty and off-kilter line readings made him an obvious choice to play Klaatu, an extraterrestrial who assumes human form when he arrives on our planet. This remake of the 1950s sci-fi classic doesn’t have a particularly urgent reason to exist — its pro-environment message is timely but awkwardly fashioned atop an action-blockbuster template — and the actor alone can’t make this Day particularly memorable. Still, there are signs of the confident post-Matrix star he had become, which would be rewarded in a few years with John Wick.

26. Knock Knock (2015) Reeves flirts with Michael Douglas territory in this Eli Roth erotic thriller that’s not especially good but is interesting as an acting exercise. He plays Evan, a contented family man with the house to himself while his wife and kids are out of town. Conveniently, two beautiful young strangers (Ana de Armas, Lorenza Izzo) come by late one stormy night, inviting themselves in and quickly seducing him. Is this his wildest sexual fantasy come to life? Or something far more ominous? It’s fun to watch Reeves be a basic married suburban dude who slowly realizes that he’s entered Hell, but Knock Knock’s knowing trashiness only takes this cautionary tale so far.

25. The Devil’s Advocate (1997)

Very few people bought tickets in 1997 for The Devil’s Advocate to see Keanu Reeves: Hotshot Attorney. Obviously, this horror thriller’s chief appeal was witnessing Al Pacino go over the top as Satan himself, who just so happens to be a New York lawyer. Nonetheless, it’s Reeves’s Kevin Lomax who’s actually the film’s main character; recently moved to Manhattan with his wife (Reeves’s future Sweet November co-star, Charlize Theron), he’s the new hire at a prestigious law firm who only later learns what nefarious motives have brought him there. Reeves is forced to play the wunderkind who gets in over his head, and it’s not entirely convincing — and that goes double for his southern accent.

24. The Prince of Pennsylvania (1988) “You are like some stray dog I never should have fed.” That’s how Rupert’s older hippie pal, Carla (Amy Madigan), affectionately refers to him, and because this teen dropout is played by Keanu Reeves, you understand what she means. In this forgotten early chapter in Reeves’s career, Rupert and Carla decide to ditch their going-nowhere Rust Belt existence by taking his dad (Fred Ward) hostage and collecting a handsome ransom. The Prince of Pennsylvania is a thoroughly contrived and mediocre comedy, featuring Reeves with an incredibly unfortunate haircut. (Squint and he looks like the front man for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.) Still, you can see signs of the soulfulness and vulnerability he’d later harness in better projects. He’s very much a big puppy looking for a home.

23. The Last Time I Committed Suicide (1997) Every hip young ’90s actor had to get his Jack Kerouac on at some point, so it would seem churlish to deny Reeves his opportunity. He plays the best pal/drinking buddy of Thomas Jane’s Neal Cassady, and he looks like he’s enjoying doing the Kerouac pose. Other actors have done so more indulgently. And even though he’s heavier than he’s ever been in a movie, he looks great.

22. A Walk in the Clouds (1995) Keanu isn’t quite as bad in this as it seemed at the time. He’s miscast as a tortured war veteran who finds love by posing as the husband of a pregnant woman, but he doesn’t overdo it either: If someone’s not right for a part, you’d rather them not push it, and Keanu doesn’t. Plus, come on, this movie looks fantastic: Who doesn’t want to hang around these vineyards? Not necessarily worth a rewatch, but not the disaster many consider it.

21. The Replacements (2000) The other movie where Keanu Reeves plays a former quarterback, The Replacements is an adequate Sunday-afternoon-on-cable sports comedy. He plays Shane, the stereotypical next-big-thing whose career capsized after a disastrous bowl game — but fear not, because he’s going to get a second chance at gridiron glory once the pros go on strike and the greedy owners decide to hire scabs to replace them. Reeves has never been particularly great at playing regular guys — his talent is that he seems different, more special, than you or me — but he ably portrays a good man who’s had to live with disappointment. The Replacements pushes all the predictable buttons, but Reeves makes it a little more enjoyable than it would be otherwise.

20. Tune in Tomorrow (1990) A very minor but sporadically charming bauble about a radio soap-opera scriptwriter (Peter Falk) who begins chronicling an affair between a woman (Barbara Hershey) and her not-related-by-blood nephew on his show — and ultimately begins manipulating it. Tune in Tomorrow is light and silly and harmless, and Reeves shows up on time to set and looks extremely eager to impress. He blends into the background quietly, which is probably enough.

19. I Love You to Death (1990)

This Lawrence Kasdan comedy — the first film after an incredible four-picture run of Body Heat, The Big Chill, Silverado, and The Accidental Tourist — is mostly forgotten today, and for good reason: It’s a farce that mostly features actors screaming at each other and calling it “comedy.” But Reeves hits the right notes as a stoned hit man, and it’s amusing just to watch him share the screen with partner William Hurt. This could have been the world’s strangest comedy team!

18. Youngblood (1986)

This Rob Lowe hockey comedy is … well, a Rob Lowe hockey comedy, but we had to include it because a 21-year-old Reeves plays a dim-bulb, good-hearted hockey player with a French Canadian accent that’s so incredible that you really just have to see it. Imagine if this were the only role Keanu Reeves ever had? It’s sort of amazing. “AH-NEE-MAL!”

17. Destination Wedding (2018) An oddly curdled comedy about two wedding guests (Reeves and Winona Ryder) who have terrible attitudes about everything but end up bonding over their universal disdain for the planet and everyone on it. That sounds like a chore to watch, and at times it is, but the pairing of Reeves and Ryder has enough nostalgic Gen-X spark to it that you go along with them anyway. With almost any other actors you might run screaming away, but somehow, in spite of everything, you find them both likable.

16. Thumbsucker (2005)

The first film from 20th Century Women and Beginners’ Mike Mills, this mild but clever coming-of-age comedy adaptation of a Walter Kirn novel has Mills’s trademark good cheer and emotional honesty. Reeves plays the eponymous thumbsucker’s dentist — it’s funny to see Keanu play someone named “Dr. Perry Lyman” — who has the exact right attitude about both orthodontics and life. It’s a lived-in, funny performance, and a sign that Keanu, with the right director, could be a more than capable supporting character actor.

15. Something’s Gotta Give (2003) This Nancy Meyers romantic comedy was well timed in Reeves’s career. A month after the final Matrix film hit theaters, Something’s Gotta Give arrived, offering us a very different Keanu — not the intense, sci-fi action hero but rather a charming, low-key love interest who’s just the supporting player. He plays Julian Mercer, a doctor administering to shameless womanizer Harry Sanborn (Jack Nicholson), who’s dating a much younger woman (Amanda Peet), who just so happens to be the daughter of a celebrated playwright, Erica (Diane Keaton). We know who will eventually end up with whom in Something’s Gotta Give, but Reeves proves to be a great romantic foil, wooing Erica with a grown-up sexiness the actor didn’t possess in his younger years. We’re still not sure Meyers got the ending right: Erica should have stuck with him instead of Harry.

14. Man of Tai Chi (2013) This is the only movie that Reeves has directed, and what does it tell us about him? Well, it tells us he has watched a ton of Hong Kong action movies and always wanted to make one himself. And it’s pretty good! It’s technically proficient, it has a straightforward narrative, it has some excellent long-take action sequences (as we see in John Wick, Keanu isn’t a quick-cut guy; he likes to show his work), and it has a perfectly decent Keanu performance. We wouldn’t call him a visionary director by any stretch of the imagination. But we’d watch another one of these, definitely.

13. Dangerous Liaisons (1988)

Le Chevalier Raphael Danceny is merely a pawn in a cruel game being played by Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, and so it makes some sense that the young man who played him, Keanu Reeves, is himself a little outclassed by the actors around him. This Oscar-winning drama is led by Glenn Close and John Malkovich, who have the wit and bite to give this 18th-century tale of thwarted love and bruised pride some real zest. By comparison, Danceny is practically a boy, unschooled in the art of manipulation, and Reeves provides the character with the appropriate youthful naïveté. He’s not a standout in Dangerous Liaisons, but he acquits himself well — especially near the end, when his blade fells Valmont, leaving him as one of the unlikely survivors in the film’s ruthless battle.

12. The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009) In this incredible showcase for Robin Wright, who plays a woman navigating a constrictive, difficult life with more grace and intelligence than anyone realizes, Reeves shows up late in a role that he’s played before: the younger guy who’s the perfect fit for an older woman figuring herself out. He hits the right notes and never overstays his welcome. As a romantic lead, less is more for Reeves.

11. Parenthood (1989) If you were an uptight suburban dad, like Steve Martin is in Ron Howard’s ensemble comedy, your nightmare would be that your beloved daughter gets involved with a doofus like Tod. Nicely played by Keanu Reeves, the character is the embodiment of every slacker screwup who’s going to just stumble through life, knocking over everything and everyone in his path. But as it turns out, he’s a lot kinder and mature than at first glance. Released six months after Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Parenthood showed mainstream audiences a more grown-up Reeves, and he’s enormously appealing — never more so than when advising a young kid that it’s okay to masturbate: “I told him that’s what little dudes do.”

10. Permanent Record (1988) A very lovely and sad movie that’s nearly forgotten today, Permanent Record, directed by novelist Marisa Silver, features Reeves as the best friend of a teenager who commits suicide and, along with the rest of their friends, has to pick up the pieces. For all of Reeves’s trademark reserve, there is very little restraint here: His character is devastated, and Reeves, impressively, hits every note of that grief convincingly. You see this guy and you understand why everyone wanted to make him a star. This is a very different Reeves from now, but it’s not necessarily a worse one.

9. Point Break (1991)

Just as Reeves’s reputation has grown over time, so too has the reputation of this loopy, philosophical crime thriller. Do people love Point Break ironically now, enjoying its over-the-top depiction of men seeking a spiritual connection with the world around them? Or do they genuinely appreciate the seriousness that director Kathryn Bigelow brought to her study of lonely souls looking for that next big rush — whether through surfing or robbing banks? The power of Reeves’s performance is that it works both ways. If you want to snicker at his melodramatic turn, fine — but if you want to marvel at the rapport his Johnny Utah forms with Patrick Swayze (Bodhi), who only feels alive when he’s living life to the extreme, then Point Break has room for you on the bandwagon.

8. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) Before there was Beavis and Butt-Head, before there was Wayne and Garth, there were these guys: two Valley bozos who loved to shred and goof off. As Theodore Logan, Keanu Reeves found the perfect vessel for his serene silliness, playing well off Alex Winter’s equally clueless Bill. But note that Bill and Ted aren’t jerks — watch Excellent Adventure now and you’ll be struck by how incredibly sunny its humor is. Later in his career, Reeves would show off a darker, more brooding side, but here in Excellent Adventure (and its less-great sequel Bogus Journey) he makes blissful stupidity endearing.

7. The Gift (2000) This Sam Raimi film, with a Billy Bob Thornton script inspired by his mother, fizzled at the box office, despite a top-shelf cast: It’s probably not even the first film called The Gift you think of when we bring it up. But, gotta say, Reeves is outstanding in it, playing an abusive husband and all-around sonuvabitch who, nevertheless, might be unfairly accused of murder, a fact only a psychic (Cate Blanchett) understands. Reeves is full-on trailer trash here, but he brings something new and unexpected to it: a sort of bewildered malevolence, as if he’s moved by forces outside of his control. More of this, please.

6. My Own Private Idaho (1991)

Gus Van Sant’s landmark drama is chiefly remembered for River Phoenix’s nakedly anguished performance as Mike, a spiritually adrift gay hustler. (Phoenix’s death two years after My Own Private Idaho’s release only makes the portrayal more heartbreaking.) But his performance doesn’t work without a doubles partner, which is where Reeves comes in. Playing Scott, a fellow hustler and Mike’s best friend, Reeves adeptly encapsulates the mind-set of a young man content to just float through life. Unlike Mike, he knows he has a fat inheritance in his future — and also unlike Mike, he’s not gay, unable to share his buddy’s romantic feelings. Phoenix deservedly earned most of the accolades, but Reeves is terrific as an unobtainable object of affection — inviting, enticing, but also unknowable.

5. Speed (1994)

Years later, we still contend that Speed is a stupid idea for a movie that, despite all logic (or maybe because of the utter insanity of its premise), ended up being a total hoot. What’s clear is that the film simply couldn’t have worked if Reeves hadn’t approached the story with straight-faced sincerity: His L.A. cop Jack Traven is a ramrod-serious lawman who is going to do whatever it takes to save those bus passengers. Part of the pleasure of Speed is how it constantly juxtaposes the life-or-death stakes with the high-concept inanity — Stay above 50 mph or the bus will explode! — and that internal tension is expressed wonderfully by Reeves, who invests so intently in the ludicrousness that the movie is equally thrilling and knowingly goofy. And it goes without saying that he has dynamite chemistry with Sandra Bullock. Strictly speaking, you probably shouldn’t flirt this much when you’re sitting on top of a bomb — but it’s awfully appealing when they get their happy ending.

4. River’s Edge (1987) This film’s casting director said she cast Reeves as one of the dead-end kids who learn about a murder and do nothing “because of the way he held his body … his shoes were untied, and what he was wearing looked like a young person growing into being a man.” This was very much who the early Reeves was, and River’s Edge might be his darkest film. His vacancy here is not Zen cool … it’s just vacant, intellectually, ethically, morally, emotionally. Only in that void could Reeves be this terrifying. This is definitely a performance, but it never feels like acting. His magnetism was almost mystical.

3. John Wick (2014), John Wick: Chapter Two (2017), and John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum (2019)

If they hadn’t killed his dog, none of this would have happened. Firmly part of the “middle-aged movie stars playing mournful badasses” subgenre that’s sprung up since Taken, the John Wick saga provides Reeves with an opportunity to be stripped-down but not serene. He’s a lethal assassin who swore to his dead wife that he’d put down his arms — but, lucky for us, he reneges on that promise after he’s pushed too far. Whereas in his previous hits there was something detached about Reeves, here’s he locked in in such a way that it’s both delightful and a little unnerving. The 2014 original was gleefully over-the-top already, and the sequels have only amped up the spectacle, but his genuine fury and weariness felt new, exciting, a revelation. Turns out Keanu Reeves is frighteningly convincing as a guy who can kill many, many people.

2. A Scanner Darkly (2006)

In hindsight, it seems odd that Keanu Reeves and Richard Linklater have only worked together once — their laid-back vibes would seemingly make them well suited for one another. But it makes sense that the one film they’ve made together is this Philip K. Dick adaptation, which utilizes interpolated rotoscoping to tell the story of a drug cop (Reeves) who’s hiding his own addiction while living in a nightmarish police state. That wavy, floating style of animation nicely complements A Scanner Darkly’s sense of jittery paranoia, but it also deftly mimics Reeves’s performance, which seems to be drifting along on its own wavelength. If in the Matrix films, he manages to defeat the dark forces, in this film they’re too powerful, leading to a pretty mournful finale.

1. The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and The Matrix Revolutions (2003)

“They had written something that I had never seen, but in a way, something that I’d always hoped for — as an actor, as a fan of science fiction.” That’s how Reeves described the sensation of reading the screenplay for The Matrix, which had been dreamed up by two up-and-coming filmmakers, Lana and Lilly Wachowski. Five years after Speed, he found his next great project, which would become the defining role of his career. Neo is the missing link between Ted’s Zen-like stillness and John Wick’s lethal efficiency, giving us a hero’s journey for the 21st century that took from Luke Skywalker and anime with equal aplomb. Never before had the actor been such a formidable onscreen presence — deadly serious but still loose and limber. Even when the sequels succumbed to philosophical ramblings and overblown CGI, Reeves commanded the frame. We always knew that he seemed like a cool, left-of-center guy. The Matrix films gave him an opportunity to flex those muscles in a true blockbuster.

[farplane]

to the horizon, part four

novembre 2019: morgana and sairsel arroway, freedom, and the future; a direct continuation of to the horizon, part three. ffxiv:stormblood (4.1) spoilers. 3,639 words (part four) 

“I’m not sure about this, Morgana,” said Sairsel.

“I can’t tell which is stranger,” Morgana said, content to ignore his concerns as she bent down to pick up a training sword. Her left arm still felt on fire if she so much as held a kitchen knife, but she had no intention of letting it make any sort of difference in her life. She’d had enough of staying still for the sake of allowing something to heal that would never return to what it had been before. “You calling me ‘mother,’ or addressing me by my name.”

Sairsel frowned and let his tone fall flat, the way Morgana liked. She was growing rather fond of what character he allowed himself to show her; a little more every day. “If you can tolerate neither, I’m afraid our only recourse is to not speak to each other at all.”

“Wouldn’t that please you,” Morgana snorted.

“I don’t like talking.”

“Or fighting, by the looks of it.” With the end of her training sword, Morgana nudged Sairsel’s crossed arms, trying to dislodge his stiff posture. “Come, now, boy. If you’re going to be roaming the highlands on your own, you had better know how to keep yourself alive.”

Sairsel scrunched up his nose and swatted at the sword. “I can fight just fine.”

“So show me, then. Put some peace in your poor mother’s heart.”

“You don’t want to fight me because you’re concerned,” Sairsel said. He had keener eyes than he let on, and their sight was beginning to break through the naïve veil of his youth. “You just want to fight someone. And you know the reason I won’t fight you has nothing to do with my own skill.”

“You think I’m afraid of some green boy who’s been fighting for, what, a year? I was on the bloodsands while you were still in swaddling clothes.”

At first, her goading only served to make Sairsel roll his eyes again. “And now you’re old and injured,” he said with all the sharp edges he’d learned from her, turning away to swipe up a staff from the ground. “If the healers ask, tell them you’ve brought this on yourself.”

Morgana found herself grinning; when he turned back towards her and saw her expression, Sairsel paused, almost drawing back. His surprise gave him the look of a deer about to bound away, but he stayed firm, and gave the staff a tentative twirl as though it were a spear. Seeing how easily he fell into his battle stance, Morgana matched his focus. The smile fell away as quickly as it had come.

“I haven’t seen you with a spear in your hands since the Reach,” she said.

“I’m not talking about this.”

Sairsel’s grip shifted on the staff, his fingers tightening; halfway between moving to strike and staying still as a statue, his limbs bound by doubt. Of course he wouldn’t try for the first move; Morgana didn’t know what he was afraid of, but his hesitation was familiar. If his initial discomfort with violence had been his foremost enemy in learning sword-skill back in Little Ala Mhigo, what now remained was his nature—as simple as holding back.

Waiting for him to finally strike first would have delighted Morgana, had she the patience for it—but she was too restless, too hot-headed even when tempered, and Sairsel needed the impetus.

So she opened with a feint. Her foot stomped down heavy on the ground, the shock of it running up her ankle and wrapping around her shin—almost delightfully so. Reactive, Sairsel stepped back and raised his staff with both hands to block a blow that didn’t come. It almost made Morgana click her tongue. She pushed forward; he stepped back.

Someone whistled from behind her; a few Resistance fighters had gathered to watch. “Come on, Sairsel!” shouted Leofric Snakesbane.

Morgana laid the point of her sword against Sairsel’s chest before it could distract him. She heard Brida’s voice, too, cheering her on—the voice that had bellowed rallying cries through the royal palace when Morgana fought with the Ala Mhigan Brigade. Her neck pricked at the sound of some of Brida’s words: the Griffin’s Talons.

“You are in your head, boy,” Morgana said sharply before the words could become true for her, feinting again: striking wide, stopping her own momentum. Sweeping up an underhanded blow.

Sairsel saw her eyes. He bent forward, stepping away, and jabbed his staff into her ribs. A hiss slipped past Morgana’s lips. Sairsel said nothing of the blow, his focus as sharp as his gaze. Good. Pain hitched where he’d struck, but it was welcome: pain in her right side, the pain of the slightest bruise.

Better pain than what burned through her left arm like a memory. She wanted it, wanted the breathlessness of a fight. And Sairsel made a fine opponent—even if he fought like someone else. Morgana dodged an upward thrust, saw him unbalanced: his lunge was too wide, as though it belonged to legs longer than his. Even the way he held his staff was not him; not his shoulders, not his arms.

He fought like he couldn’t dare to make anything that wasn’t the bow into his own. His feet scraped against the ground with a weight that didn’t belong to an archer, but he spun away from her next blow like a gust of wind, and for a moment she thought she saw herself at his age. 

And Sairsel was smart. One second’s hesitation, and he cracked his staff across Morgana’s knuckles. Her grip faltered; the sword fell. Instinct brought her left hand down to catch it.

A practice sword, and she couldn’t even lift it. Sairsel saw this, too: he faltered, both hands tight around the staff, and Morgana shoved him away. When he stumbled back and down to the ground with a huff, she didn’t press her advantage; she stopped her own momentum dead in its tracks.

“Sairsel,” she said, just as Raubahn stepped forward.

She hadn’t even noticed him.

“Mind if I cut in, lad?” he asked, offering Sairsel his hand.

For a moment, the boy had that startled animal look about him again; his gaze flicked to Morgana, who simply gave a shrug, and he finally gripped Raubahn’s wrist and swung back onto his feet.

“I’d be glad to end the thrashing there,” Sairsel said with a nervous smile, looking back to Morgana again as he rubbed a hand to his lower back.

“Come here,” Morgana said, beckoning him. She laid the point of her sword against the ground, resting her left hand on the pommel as though it were a cane, and ignored her throbbing skin as Sairsel walked over to her. When he was close enough to reach—always keeping his distance—she raised her hand to rest against the back of his neck. “You did better than you think. Just don’t hesitate so much. Who taught you spear-skill?”

Sairsel scratched the stubble at his jaw. “A pirate.”

“Your Elezen friend?” she asked, and Sairsel nodded stiffly. “She’s taller than you, isn’t she? Longer limbs.”

“I—what?”

“You fight with her body, not yours.” Morgana clapped Sairsel’s back, and rose her voice that it might carry further than her son’s keen ears. “Think about it some. I have a war hero to humble.”

Raubahn chuckled. “Full glad am I to see you’re as cocksure as you used to be.”

“Cocksure, or simply self-aware?” Morgana said. It was too easy to match the smile dancing on Raubahn’s lips, to forget her fear of the ache in her left arm as she took up the practice sword again. She rolled her wrist, twirling the sword once in her hand, and slowly circled him.

“That remains to be seen.”

Morgana smirked. “Wonder what’s changed since the last time we did this.”

“I’ve lost near a stone of my own flesh.”

“And I spent the better part of twenty years starving while that arse got fat sitting on the Syndicate,” Morgana said, thumping the flat of her sword against Raubahn’s backside, “so don’t make me cry.”

“So I might just hold my own against you, then?” he said, narrowing his eyes with a shadow of a smile. He faced her, widened his stance, and hoisted his practice sword onto his shoulder as though it were far heavier than it truly was—inviting her to make the first move.

She smirked. “Might.”

Much had changed in the last twenty years: Raubahn had spent far longer on the bloodsands, for one, and commanded forces at Carteneau and beyond; they had both suffered injuries, small and grave, that irreparably changed their bodies; they were older, and they had learned to survive in ways that their youth could never have foreseen. But, most of all, they knew each other—beyond everything they might have learned even by the very end of the time they had shared at the Coliseum.

In the breathless, thrumming anticipation of the last moments before battle, Morgana wondered if she would even need to read him.

She inhaled, drew her ribs in, and charged. And she did not need to read him: she realized that it was rather more like hearing a melody, following each familiar rise and fall; knowing the notes before they even came. She knew Raubahn did not intend to dodge even before her sword connected.

The shock of his block reverberated through her whole arm, dug the hilt of the practice sword deeper into his hand. He threw the brunt of his strength at her to push her back: Morgana’s boots rasped against the ground, almost like stumbling. But she was firm even on the back foot. Rooted down. Anchored in Raubahn’s eyes, in the sound of his breath, in the way his body moved.

Her muscles burned like the breath in her lungs, and she welcomed the flames. Every time her skin touched Raubahn’s in a parry, she felt that familiar spark, the heat—and it only made her battle-fierceness grow. 

They traded blows, quick and relentless; quicker than anyone watching might have expected, she knew. The breath of the small crowd gathered around them floated around her like a fading dream of the bloodsands, a chorus of quiet gasps and hisses brought on by the brutality that was to them a second nature. Still, she could hardly hear them—not over the sound of her own panting, of Raubahn’s sharp breaths, of their grunts and groans. 

A bruise blossomed at the center of Morgana’s chest where her breastbone had caught the pommel of Raubahn’s sword, backhanded but sharp enough to last; she stepped hard enough on his foot that his bones would remember on the morrow. His kicks were stiffer, now, and the way he bore his weight different, but not unfamiliar. Morgana had held him enough since breaching the Wall to know it by heart.

And she no longer ducked and dodged with the same speed. Raubahn saw it: he caught her on clever backstrokes when she was recovering, sent her stumbling back more than once. A reach like his and only one arm, and he still kept close, kept his blows sharp rather than sweeping wide. Not the best way to stay alive in a real fight, but he knew how to guard his left far better than Morgana did her own, and this wasn’t about staying alive.

It was finally a dance: a brutal, graceless dance, but one that knew to join their hearts and guide their feet better than anything else could.

On instinct, Morgana deflected a backhand with her left palm: her hand shot down, pulling at the taut scars, sending pain clawing down the length of her arm. She cried out through gritted teeth, and Raubahn faltered—but she shook her head, charged once more, crouched low in her momentum to trip him and send him crashing down on his back. He rolled away, leveraged his sword against the ground, pushed himself up. Blocked her cleave while still down on one knee.

“Old tricks,” Raubahn said with a smirk, and smashed the flat of his sword into her right side. 

For a mere few heartbeats, the flow of battle broke while Morgana found her breath again among the pain flashing up her side and Raubahn bounded to his feet.

“Can’t fault me for trying.”

Raubahn saw the stiffness begin to settle over her shoulders and down her arms, an emptiness bleeding through her muscles; likely he felt the same. “Tired?” he asked.

It was all he could do to dodge the wide sweep of her sword, pushed back by her desperate advance. One foot in front of the other, heavy on the ground.

“Aye,” Morgana said. But she did not stop.

She brought her sword down to bear, and he raised his, the dull blades caught in a crossing that became a contest of will as much as it was strength. With her fingers tight around the hilt of her sword, Morgana pushed until it ached, until she shook—the sensation sweet and terrible and like life itself being poured into her lungs as she breathed sharp and burning. She threw all her weight into her front, leaned in close.

When she looked into Raubahn’s eyes, it was as though she were looking at herself. She saw him; she saw the way forward. 

It was the strangest thing, how badly she wanted to kiss him. If not for the pointed awareness of their humble audience, she might have—but she was as competitive as she valued her privacy.

All at once, she let go: let his strike fall free, pushing back against nothing. By the time the sword might have struck her, she had already danced away. She threw up a backhanded parry, struck a new bruise onto his arm. Raubahn grunted, but didn’t drop his sword; his riposte lacked in strength, but not in speed.

Morgana sidestepped to his left. She felt his vulnerability like the crack of a whip, watched him snap into the familiar gamble—and her feet were too heavy to escape his charge, this time. His shoulder struck her chest, sent her tumbling down.

Instinct before sense. As soon as she touched the ground, it was her left arm that tried to recover, and pain tore through skin and muscle both. Sharp, like the strangled cry that left her throat. She rolled to the other side, all her weight leveraged on her good arm, and brandished her middle and forefinger with a shaking hand as though they were a weapon.

“Missio,” she rasped. Raubahn was already dropping down to one knee by the time she had finished uttering the word.

And Sairsel was on the other side of her quickly enough, too. “Are you all right?” he said, more alarmed than he ought to be.

“I’m—fine. Bloody hells, that hurts,” Morgana said, trying to steady her breathing as she curled her left arm against her torso. Her fingers went to the scars, sweeping quickly over the expanse of skin she could still hardly bring herself to touch on a normal day. Thankfully, they didn’t come away bloody. “I’m all right, boy. Go on.”

Sairsel threw Raubahn a glance before looking back to her.

“Are you sure?”

“Sairsel,” Morgana said, her voice low. Sairsel raised both palms, surrendering.

“Fine. I’ll get you some herbs for the pain.”

“I’ve got her, lad,” said Raubahn reassuringly. He watched as Sairsel gave Morgana some unreadable expression and left, then added a pointed look of his own.

“He was going to fuss,” Morgana said flatly. “Son shouldn’t be fussing over his mother. Should be the other way around.”

Wordlessly, she nudged Raubahn's arm; he understood, rose to his feet, and offered his hand. Morgana gripped his forearm and hoisted herself back up, still gritting her teeth as chattering Resistance fighters wandered away.

“That was some hells of a fight, Morgana,” said Brida in passing, before nodding at Raubahn, “Commander. Felt like the bloodsands again. Shame about that arm.”

Morgana waited until she was out of earshot to speak. “Do you think she meant my arm, or yours?”

Raubahn snorted. He steered her towards some weapon stores adjacent to the training grounds, closing the door behind them. Morgana leaned against a table with a sigh, and allowed herself to cradle her left arm in her right. Pain still coursed through her, morphing with the passing seconds: now it was pins and needles, halfway between pain and an itch that burrowed under her skin, and a chorus of aching muscles and weary bones.

That, at least, she could appreciate. But not her arm.

“Bloody useless,” she stormed under her breath.

Raubahn slipped his hand under her elbow to inspect the scars, and Morgana opted to let him. His touch was warm, soothing. 

“The pain?”

“Bearable,” Morgana sighed, her jaw tight with the admission that came: “My pride hurts worse.”

“No shame in surrender,” Raubahn said—Raubahn, who had given her the first surrender, so long ago it seemed like half a dream. For a moment, his eyes were distant as he raised his hand and ran fingers under his pauldron, scratching idly at what remained of his left arm. “One of my first commanders in the army—she drilled us like she loathed us, but she had wisdom. ‘Every hurt is a lesson,’ she said. I had to accept a great many lessons from the day Ilberd took my arm.”

Morgana sighed slowly through her nose. “And?”

“From experience, I would advise against shame. You will adapt.”

She knew he had the right of it; he was as infuriating in that way as Saskia had been. But Morgana had never been one for easy wisdom. Her very nature seemed to know only how to push back.

“I didn’t think it would be so bad,” she confessed, keeping her voice low and her gaze distant. “It’s only burns, isn’t it? I still have an arm. I can still use it. It’s stopped hurting every time I moved, so I thought I might still be able to fight.”

“You can still fight.”

Morgana glanced up at Raubahn. He regarded her with unyielding conviction—the sort that did not allow even the slightest contradiction. It was the kindest thing he could do for her, to set aside even the mere possibility of pity. She sighed again.

“Of all the people to complain to; I know.”

Raubahn almost smiled. “Who better?” he said, then laid his hand against her shoulder. “You lost a spar, Morgana, and barely. I have no concerns for your future.”

Unthinking, Morgana raised her hand to lay over his, slipping her thumb under his palm. Her own fondness shocked her.

“It was a good fight,” she said, dropping her hand. Raubahn removed his own.

“Aye.”

It was a fight she couldn’t have had with anyone else, but Morgana could only hope that he grasped that meaning without the words to express it. Because they were equals, because they were the same; because he knew her and she knew him.

Morgana’s heart hammered in her chest hard enough to make her believe she was still fighting. “I’m tired, Raubahn,” she said, surrendering.

“After all the years of fighting—”

“No. It’s not that. I’m tired of fucking and pretending that’s all there is.”

Raubahn’s silence, weighed down by his steely gaze, was nigh unbearable. He glanced down at the old scars on her throat, keeping his distance. “I never pretended.”

“You mean that’s all there is? Just two old comrades having some convenient arrangement?” Morgana asked, frowning. She could almost taste her own poison again.

“No, Morgana,” he said slowly. “I mean I never could pretend. Not twenty years ago, and not now.”

The floor might have spun away under her feet, then, and Morgana might not even have noticed. Her own ribs seemed to want to pierce her heart, and she could hardly make sense of his meaning as it was.

She understood the words. She understood, but she couldn't.

“Have I made a complete arse of myself?” she asked, her voice rasping in its near-silence.

“Utterly,” Raubahn said. A smile pulled at his lips. “But it comes with the territory, I suppose. You always have been a bit of a bastard.”

Morgana realized that she was laughing. Aching and weary from the fight and half a lifetime, but laughing. She curled the fingers of her right hand in the fabric of Raubahn’s cloak and brought him close, looking up into his eyes before pressing her lips against his. Her hand slid up to anchor at the side of his neck; she could feel his heartbeat underneath her fingertips. And she felt it like a tether.

When he pulled back and touched his brow to hers, she closed her eyes and simply breathed; simply lived, taking the quiet seconds as hers. His voice filled the spaces in the silence, threaded into that peace.

“Would you let me be yours? Call you mine?”

“You have me,” Morgana said—words she thought would never again leave her lips. “For as long as you’ll want me.”

Raubahn sighed; his shoulders dropped, falling with his breath. And Morgana unraveled, too, so that she could weave herself back together with him. Gently, he pressed a kiss to her forehead.

For that moment, the aches no longer mattered. The bruise forming on her chest, the burning memory burrowing through her left arm—all she heard them scream as she moved was that she was alive, and for once, living did not feel like a burden. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, held him close, buried her face in his neck as he wound his arm around her. Steady and sure.

Her surrender had taken much too long to come, but she felt lighter without the weight of carrying it than she had in years.

[proheromidoriyashouto]

Inksignia, Beyond Alteo - Tattoo artist!Inko x Flower Shop Owner!Rei AU with pre-IzuShou Part 1

Canon is mostly the same with a few exceptions. Izuku immediately tells the teachers what Shouto said during the Sports Festival. Trust is broken but Izuku would rather have him alive and safe than continue to leave him in that house. The teachers - Eraserhead, All Might and Nighteye mostly- investigate and Endeavor is taken down, goes to jail, blah, blah, blah he’s not important. After careful consideration, the authorities tentatively release Todoroki Rei from the mental hospital as an out-patient.

In order to gain independence from his estate, she decides to start up a flower shop for income. So much time spent in that drab, stale hospital has fostered a desire for bright colors and the scents of nature. She uses some of her monetary award to pay off the rent for a space wedged between a smaller convenience store and a tattoo shop. The tattoo shop has dark-tinted windows with intricate, black detailing that creates a black-on-black appearance Rei recalls seeing on pottery in the States a lifetime ago. The tattoo shop opens and closes later than her own flower shop so she goes a few weeks before she makes contact with the owner.

Business starts off slowly as there are more renowned shops a short drive away but Rei creates a niche for herself by exclusively offering carnivorous plants, and freeze-drying flowers. She had a lot of time to read and explore her tastes with a decade apart from Enji and she developed a fascination with carnivorous plants. Beautiful, deadly, and deceptively delicate, they require the utmost care. Preserving flowers by freezing them was a past-time of hers prior to her marriage and she is delighting to pick it up again. It was an uncommon practice then and continues to be so now. She uses her quirk to frost the vases and keep that part of the shop cool without altering the temperature necessary by the tropical plants. Soon enough she has moderate, steady business and she’s finally beginning to turn over a profit.

She’s returning from lunch when she spots Shouto shuffling about outside. He visits her here since her release or at her apartment above the shop so being outside must mean he was waiting for her. He looks despondent when she guides him inside and he spends nearly an hour simply walking through the shop, familiarizing himself with her wares. Even after all this time she call tell something has upset him, though he undoubtedly has a lot on his mind after the Hosu Incident. Though when he came to visit after the Sports Festival and again since the investigation into her ex-husband he had been angry about something then too. He’ll speak when he’s ready so she helps a few patrons with their orders in the meantime and when he does he seems... lost.

Mama?

Yes, dear?

Are you... happy... with all of this?

...How do you mean?

I... He visibly swallowed around a lump in his throat. H-his arrest. The court proceedings, the media attention, public opinion. Doesn’t it... bother you? Make you uncomfortable? I passed by people on the way here who were whispering about you and all of us, how we’re ungrateful and-! Validating the things people like Stain say about heroes and society. Is this, he kept his eyes firmly downcast, all even worth reliving that pain? Wouldn’t you rather forget it?

S-shouto?

I’m not saying this isn’t a good thing, now, but wouldn’t have been better to let sleeping dogs lie? I... I was going to save you from that place. When I made it and he couldn’t control me or you anymore, I-I had a plan, but...

But? She approached him slowly, letting him gather his thoughts. Something changed that? She could see the tips of his ears flush though she couldn’t see his face for his hair.

I told someone. He almost growled at that taking her by surprise. He told the teachers. That’s when they started looking into it. His fists were clenched at his sides in his hurt. I just needed him to understand what- I didn’t think he’d say anything. I didn’t know him. We’d never spoken before but he was always butting his nose into things... I didn’t think he’d hang us out to dry. But he did and now. He lifted his head to look her in the eye. His expression was imploring, desperate maybe. Being dragged through court and forced to relive all those horrible things and having people think less of you for it.You- you can’t tell me it’s made you happy.

She considered his words carefully. No. No, that certainly wasn’t. Having to testify, being in the same room as your father. That was... never something I wanted to experience again.

He adopted a look that was equal parts relief and... vindication? But she continued.

But I would do it again in a heartbeat.

His expression became clear shock then. Why?

Shouto, where do you live now? She asked instead of answering.

...with Fuyumi?

Are you happy with her?

Yes.

Do you feel safe there?

He tilted his head to the side, reminiscent of an inquisitive puppy. So cute her son. ...Yes.

And you know that your father will never come near you again, right?

...Yeah.

So, my sweet boy, who I know is so so smart, She gently cupped his face in her hands and kept his eyes on her own, why wouldn’t I repeat this fight if it meant getting you and your siblings here, to this safe, happy place every time?

His eyes shined with tears.

For the record, she said, I am. Happy- that is- here. And however unintentional, I’m grateful that you told that boy. Her son’s eyes widened. He set us on this path. It was painful, yes. She tucked an errant lock of crimson hair behind is ear. It was also the road to freedom. For all of us.

Tears wet her fingers and Shouto looked away in shame. Oh. He said so softly. You- it- it doesn’t... you mean that?

She nodded fervently. Absolutely. I would thank him if I saw him.

Shouto drew his shoulders up tensely and gently pulled her hands away from his face. That... I’m not sure that’ll ever happen.

She hummed curiously. Has he requested to remain anonymous?

No, I-I thought you were hurt by all of this. I, um. He curled in on himself a bit. I was angry. I... told him off after they started looking into our lives. ...we aren’t talking.

Oh. Shouto. You were worried about my feelings? She would remain amazed by his capacity to love her after what she’d done to him.

He nodded.

Could you make up? I’d hate for him to think he didn’t do the right thing. He might not come forward for someone else if the situation arises. I’d hate to think that someone else if left in suffering over this.

He seemed to shrink in on himself even more. The- the things I said to him were, um, pretty personal. His face twisted in obvious shame. Someone else told me- a bully of his told me that he was... I said a lot of horrible things to him and he won’t even look at me anymore. Before, I was glad. But you’re- you’re happy. He said the last word as though it a ludicrous notion.

She nodded.

Now, I- I don’t know. I should apologize. Looking back it was going too far. He didn’t mean to hurt you by it. Or me. Or any of us. He’s just... I think he’s just like that. So helpful.

She smiled. He sounds nice.

Yeah. His voice cracked as he blinked away more tears. His right hand reached over to cover the knife wounds on his left arm. They were weeks old, maybe they were still causing him pain? Too nice. ...I don’t think he’ll want to talk to me. His voice dropped to a nearly inaudible whisper, a few more silent tears slipping down his face unbidden. ...I made him cry.

Would it hurt to try?

They spent the rest of the day discussing how to go about making amends, and ended up staying well-past the typical closing time. It’s dark out by the time they head out to pick up dinner. She finally has enough money to take the children out for food and Fuyumi and Natsuo said they would meet up at the restaurant. It’s been such a long time since she had a warm meal with her babies. She’s excited. They can finally get to being a real family.

They’re surprised by the door to Inksignia suddenly swinging open, bathing the street in light. A woman stepped out and she blinked large eyes at them. She was short and chubby with green hair and eyes, wearing a black dress with sheer lace revealing colorful patterns on her shoulders, chest, and back without appearing risque. Her arms, neck, and legs were conspicuously bare of tattoos. She carried herself like someone comfortable in their own skin. Surreal.

Oh! Hello! She offered them a smile. Didn’t see you there. Her green eyes drifted over Rei’s apron. She’s forgotten to take it off. You work right here at Beyond Alteo?

No worries. Yes, I’m the owner actually. I’m, uh, Rei. Just Rei.

Ah, how rude of me, I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Midoriya Inko, nice to meet you. Her round face was soft and welcoming. This is my parlor. She said proudly.

Midoriya? Shouto blurted out suddenly, eyes wide.

Hm? Yes. Inko turned to him. Do I- oh. You’re him. She narrowed her eyes in recognition. Todoroki Shouto-kun. You fought my son during the Sports Festival.

Y-yeah, I did. Shouto looked nervous. Understandable. Rei had watched the fight after all. A seed of suspicion before to take root in her chest. If it had been her son injured in their match...

Are you alright? Inko asked to their surprise.

I- I’m okay.

I heard about Hosu. Are you healed properly? Have you been eating enough? My son said you eat very little- he eats me out of house and home so his idea about what constitutes regular portions is a bit skewed but he seems really worried about you so I thought I’d ask. Ah, if that’s okay?

It’s... fine. My wounds are healed. I’m eating, uh, everyday?

We’re going out for dinner right now. Rei said. Hm, she would have to see if he was in fact eating enough for a boy his age. She’d compare to Natsuo for reference.

Midoriya-san, your son... talks about me? Shouto asked.

Oh, all the time. Everyday it’s Todoroki-kun this, Todoroki-kun that. He’s been so worried about you! Especially since the, well, the news. And Hosu. He said you’ve been busy with family matters- and I won’t pry- so he hasn’t had the chance to talk to you in a while. So you mind if I tell him you’re doing okay?

Everyday? He seemed to whisper to himself. No, t-that’s okay. Yeah. Um, has he said anything else?

Ah... Just that he’s worried about where you’re staying and if you feel comfortable there. We have a spare bedroom and he wants you to know you’re welcome to it if you need it. It’s alright with me of course.

Shouto’s jaw dropped as his cheeks pinked again, and he dropped his face to hide behind his bangs. He clutched his hands to his chest. O-oh.

Shouto is staying with his sister for the time being. He was telling me how much he likes it. Rei replied when it was clear Shouto wasn’t going to. Thank you for the concern. Please thank your son for his thoughts. I’m glad that someone outside of the family is looking out for him.

Shouto flinched from behind his mother.

Inko smiled. I will. He’ll be so relieved. She spared a look to her watch and gasped. Oh gosh, I just meant to get some fresh air but I’ve kept you from your plans! Sorry! She opened the door to return to her business. It’s been wonderful talking to you. I know the hours are a bit unusual but feel free to stop by anytime with your boy! It’ll be nice to have a friend in the neighborhood.

Rei felt a flutter of something soft and fuzzy from her hairline to her toes. A friend? ...when was the last time she had one of those? Before Enji. After, most of her friends had gone on to actually make use of their hero certification and were too cowed by his political and social capital to heed her plight. None of them had reached out to her in years. The children were great comfort but they had their own lives. Maybe... should she? Oh it’s been a bit, should probably respond sometime this year- Yes!

Inko blinked at her loud answer.

Erm, Rei flushed, y-yes, I’d like that.

Inko’s smile widened into a 1000-megawatt grin that almost seemed to dull the lights from the within the parlor in comparison. We’re open earlier on the weekends. You could come by then if it’s better for you.

I will, I think. Yeah.

(This was supposed to be a short headcannon and now the animal is loose. I’ll expand from here and post link to AO3 when it’s done. Does anyone want to read more??? Let me know!!

Shouto felt betrayed and protective over his mama so he raged a bit. Izuku can understand why but it definitely hurt and he’s been avoiding Shouto- which Shouto now feels regret about. They’ll make up don’t worry.

Rei and Inko are gonna be nearly as dumb as their sons and I think it’ll be fun.

TLDR: tattoo artist!Inko x flower shop owner!Rei get together AU, still quirks and hero-sons. the name of Rei’s shop has meaning. inko’s almost as cool as she seems yo)

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/23 & 10/25/2018: HALLOWEEN (2007) & HALLOWEEN II (2009)

By the time Rob Zombie made the bold move of remaking John Carpenter’s name-making classic HALLOWEEN, the horror rock-star’s directorial career had already proved to be incredibly divisive. His 2003 film debut, HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES drew a cult from among diehard fans of his music, but was largely panned by critics who identified it as a ramshackle, self-indulgent disaster. The movie was little more than a Frankensteining-together of Zombie’s favorite things, but he managed to follow it up swiftly with 2005′s semi-sequel, THE DEVIL’S REJECTS. With this project, he appropriated three of the principle characters from his cartoony, ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW-like first feature, and reimagined them as the redneck antiheroes of a story that plays like a cross between THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE and THE WILD BUNCH. While DEVIL’S REJECTS showed major improvements in terms of drive and focus, it still felt unsettled. It is an emotionally confused movie that has trouble deciding whether its tale is more tragic for the innocent victims of its psychopathic protagonists, or more triumphant, for the Rejects’ anti-establishment swagger and charisma. Rob Zombie displays a refined aesthetic sense, and seems sincere in his storytelling, but he didn’t have much time to let these things ferment into a more potent cinematic brew before he stepped up to bat again with his controversial remake of the beloved HALLOWEEN in 2007. 

Reviled even by the likes of John Carpenter himself, Zombie’s dour, ponderous retelling of the archetypal slasher story was baffling to critics and genre buffs alike. Loaded up with clunky psychoanalysis that flies in the face of Carpenter’s original intention--Michael Myers is PURE NO-REASON EVIL, FULL STOP--this iteration of HALLOWEEN worked for few people besides Zombie’s hardcore stans. In spite of that very large and general problem, the writer-director was back again in 2009 with a sequel to his own remake. With HALLOWEEN II, he took two major creative risks: Bringing the ubiquitous Sheri Moon Zombie back even though her character died early in the first film, and centering the narrative on Laurie Strode’s psychological recovery, or lack thereof, from her original ordeal. It is easy to see how this setup would draw more complex and ambivalent responses. Mrs. Zombie’s appearance as the ghost of Myers’ mother, whose character is plagued by a lot of Jungian nonsense, was identified fairly as ludicrous by many viewers. On the other hand, Scout Taylor-Compton’s return as Laurie Strode takes a character who was little more than a cardboard cutout in the first film, and turns her into a convincing mass of trauma who undergoes a profound transformation over the course of this sequel. As with THE DEVIL’S REJECTS, HALLOWEEN II suggests that even while Rob Zombie can be an incredibly frustrating filmmaker, he still seems to be on to something. Even in my most stuck-up moments, when his smug use of slow motion and arias of unshocking cuss words make me want to forget everything I just watched, his movies nag at me in a way that I have a hard time describing.  I’m just now starting to formulate an understanding of why.

Often, I find myself asking: Who is Rob Zombie? First and foremost, he is a professional nerd. His music, art, videos, and feature films are strung together by his scholarship in all things genre, whether he’s invoking Tobe Hooper’s snuff-like realism, or the innocent sitcom pleasures of the Munsters. Zombie is vastly erudite about horror, and really anything remotely culty. This is actually to the detriment of HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES, which is so bloated with pop culture references that it almost chokes out the movie’s dubious originality. But while he has that irritating nerdy compulsion to competitively show off what he knows, he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who buys and bags comics without even cracking them open. Rob Zombie is clearly, legitimately passionate; it’s heartwarming, and enough to make you want to root for him even when you don’t totally love what he’s doing. His craftsmanship is on point, too, as a multimedia artist whose talent has been abundantly evident since the early band flyer days. It comes as no surprise that he attended Parsons School of Design, and he occasionally shows his hand as an amateur film historian with a love for golden age Hollywood. So, whatever he wants you to think about his hellbilly stage presence, he’s clearly no hick, and no basement-dwelling dweeb either. He’s an educated artist with a background in New York City’s brainy ‘80s noise rock scene. It’s because of this that I find the worshipful attitude his films take toward their sociopathic murderers to be, well...kind of annoying. Why am I supposed to think it’s so cool, as the movies’ punk rock tone suggests, that the Firefly family tortures random bystanders to death for no apparent reason? Why doesn’t Rob Zombie know how tired the whole “scary clown” thing is, and has been for a long time already, even when it’s someone as magical as Sid Haig under the greasepaint? Why do I feel like Zombie’s interest in pimps and ho’s is deeper than just exploitation pastiche, which makes it potentially worse than if it were just a shallow affectation? The thought of this Massachusetts-born college boy fantasizing obsessively about being so crude and violent and salt-of-the-earth is kind of lame. So, instead of just, you know, being a hater as usual, I looked it up--and discovered that Rob Zombie’s roots are actually in the fairway. As Wikipedia aggregates from various interviews: 

While raising their sons, Rob's parents worked in a carnival, but they chose to leave after a riot broke out and tents were set on fire. Zombie recalled the experience in an interview, stating, "Everybody's pulling out guns, and you could hear guns going off. I remember this one guy we knew, he was telling us where to go, and some guy just ran up to him and hit him in the face with a hammer – just busted his face wide open. My parents packed up real quick, and we took off."

Suddenly, it all started to make sense. Sure, the costumed popstar isn’t an undead cross between Jerry Lee Lewis and Charles Starkweather in real life, but he isn’t a complete poseur either. It isn’t immediately clear, from underneath his mountain of collectory movie references, that he is, more or less, writing what he knows. He isn’t just emulating his cultural heroes, he’s mythologizing his own childhood. 

In view of this, the key to Rob Zombie’s movies is not an awareness of horror history and semiology; it’s actually all about outlaw culture. So, back to 2007′s deeply flawed HALLOWEEN. It’s a heavily bro-y movie, in its outsidery way, that breaks up the Dr. Loomis-Michael Myers-Laurie Strode love triangle, and focuses almost entirely on building a Myers biography. The fascinatingly sullen Daeg Neergaard Faerch plays young Michael, a fatherless boy on the verge of snapping from the relentless torment coming at him from all directions: his slutty sister, school bullies who fixate on his stripper mom (Sheri Moon Zombie), and his mother’s latest violent, depraved boyfriend. Michael follows the serial killer script perfectly, graduating rapidly from torturing animals to brutalizing other kids to annihilating his sister, her boyfriend, and his mother’s beau one Halloween night when his sibling chooses sex over taking her little brother trick-or-treating. He soon finds himself installed in a mental institution where he moves on to slaughtering the staff. Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) spends years evaluating the boy, though he is ultimately stymied by Michael’s profound lack of humanity. As Michael increasingly retreats behind the folksy homemade masks he spends all day crafting, the opportunistic Loomis gives up on him, instead committing his energy to a money-making true crime/pop psychology book about Myers. Flashing forward, we find the hulking adult Michael Myers (played by the 6′8″ wrestler Tyler Mane) getting ready to bust out of the asylum and wage war on his home town of Haddonfield. There we finally meet teen dream Laurie Strode, a spunky babysitter with a gaggle of gal pals who are perfect grist for the slasher mill. In the final leg of the film, Myers carves his way through Laurie’s social circle, in an apparent attempt to reunite with his sister: Laurie herself. Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) reveals that when Michael’s despairing mother committed suicide years ago, he took her infant daughter and had her adopted out anonymously to insulate her from her family’s tragic history. Laurie, for her part, is unaware of anything other than her need to survive, which she only barely accomplishes.

Naturally, Laurie’s story is the weakest part of a movie that is otherwise so focused on male experience. That is, the experience of needing a father, the ambivalent and ambiguous craving for maternal intimacy, the trauma of having your masculinity impugned by your (fag-obsessed) peers, and perhaps even the undermining influence of academia and capitalism on a man’s natural-born strength and worth. When the newly-freed Michael Myers storms through a truck stop to begin his pilgrimage to Haddonfield, and Rob Zombie chooses to accompany this scene with Rush’s regal outlaw anthem “Tom Sawyer”, it tells you everything you need to know about this take on HALLOWEEN. Like the rampaging Firefly family in DEVIL’S REJECTS, Michael is certainly evil, but he also represents something essential about the formation of and reinforcement of one’s individuality in the face of castrating societal norms--something the carnies among whom Rob Zombie grew up would have found very relatable.

It’s worth noting here that, while the sexuality of the women in Michael’s life plays a role in his distorted development, he is not reacting to their sexuality in and of itself. Michael Myers is not driven by the kind of covetousness that we associate with the archetypal slasher, who gives sexually frustrated male viewers a vicarious thrill by punishing sluts and teases. Michael’s problem is that his mother and sister’s sexuality contributes to his isolation. His classmates use his mother’s profession against him, and that profession keeps her from being able to tuck him in at night. Similarly, Michael doesn’t get to enjoy Halloween with his family and the other neighborhood kids, because his sister is too busy getting laid. Michael is abandoned, even while he still has a home to return to, an outsider even in his own house. 

This leads me to an important point about why the portion of the movie that is devoted to Laurie's struggle is so ineffective. It is a flaw in the film, but a virtue of the director: Normal, attractive teenagers are not Rob Zombie’s people. He doesn’t even participate in traditional slasher movie misogyny, he’s so far away from thinking about them. His movies are full of badass women who are fully possessed of their sexuality, and who wield it like a weapon against hypocrites and assholes, and this is always shone in a heroic light. Moreover, he delights in casting women of all shapes and ages, often assigning them immense personal power, as in LORDS OF SALEM, an enormously satisfying movie about society’s original persecuted outcasts: witches. Rob Zombie is deeply committed to outsiders, and his definition of them isn’t limited to banal lawbreaking--he also rejects conventional beauty and our cultural obsession with youth. His films are populated by all manner of human beings, and the farther away they are from looking like model material, the more likely it is that they’re meant to be the heroes. On that note, whatever you think of his movies, you have to acknowledge that they are almost never dehumanizing. Zombie is an accomplished actor’s director who gets a full spectrum of emotion out of his performers, and who excels at creating a feeling of camaraderie within his ensemble casts. It is this surprising sweetness, and compassion even for the victims of the villains he lionizes, that makes HALLOWEEN II so peculiarly effective.

If 2007′s HALLOWEEN was a remake on which Rob Zombie couldn’t resist draping some of his personal hangups, HALLOWEEN II is almost a completely original and separate entity from what one thinks of as the franchise started by John Carpenter. In it, Michael Myers is presumed dead but his body is missing--and indeed, his character is missing for much of the movie. We find a disturbed, scarred-up Laurie Strode living with her surviving friend Annie, and Annie’s father, Sheriff Bracket. Laurie is dealing, poorly, with a heavy dose of PTSD. Along with nightmares and flashbacks, she also has trouble just being nice to people, or accepting affection. Annie and her father’s attempts to be charitable with their adoptive family member are no match for Laurie’s increasing surliness and mistrust of the world. Once a good-natured and optimistic young woman, her appearance becomes vagrant-like (curiously similar to Rob Zombie’s own casual look), her attitude is more and more nihilistic, and she develops a drinking problem. I’ve always wanted to see a movie with a slasher-like narrative foundation, but that focuses on aftermath and recovery, and recent gimmicky efforts like FINAL GIRL and LAST GIRL STANDING did absolutely nothing for me. HALLOWEEN II--at least, the superbly-acted Strode part of it--is the movie I’ve been asking for.

The other part of the movie is also interesting--or more specifically, it’s as ballsy as it is flawed. The movie gets off on kind of a bad foot when a title card quotes an obscure psychology text book called The Subconscious Psychosis of Dreams: 

WHITE HORSE - instinct, purity, and the drive of the physical body to release powerful and emotional forces, like rage with ensuing chaos and destruction.

This is the excuse we have for the fact that the ghost of Deborah Myers arrives with a white horse to compel her son to find his sister Laurie Strode, aka Angel Myers, to reunite their family, presumably in the afterlife. Deborah Myers is kind of a spectral cross between Glenda the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch of the West, at once welcoming and sinister, drifting in and out of Michael’s consciousness in the company of a sort of ghost of his childhood (Chase White Vaneck, who is no Daeg Faerch honestly). It might be easy to dismiss this anomaly as an expression of Michael’s mental illness, and his desire to experience an idealized version of his youth in which his mother still looks after him--except that later in the movie, during the final standoff, Laurie is shown to be physically affected by these spirits. Maybe the implication is that she and Michael suffer the same psychological ailments, but for them to share such specific hallucinations without speaking is borderline supernatural in and of itself. So, while Sheri Moon Zombie does her best with her impressive force of personality and compelling physical presence, it’s hard to say what this part of the movie serves. When I first saw the film, I was completely outraged by this, not only because it made no sense to me, but because it felt like a cheap ripoff of Sarah Palmer’s similar prophetic visions of a white horse in Twin Peaks. That was all I managed to make of it. 

Today, I still don’t love it, but I have more trouble faulting Rob Zombie for trying to make HALLOWEEN his own, something more than a remake. He also does this by truly letting go of the Shape. The famous William Shatner mask was blown in half by Laurie at the end of the 2007 HALLOWEEN, and scarcely makes much of an appearance in this movie. Michael Myers is a disheveled drifter, literally haunted by his past, whose only real aim is to find a place to belong. It’s sort of funny, in retrospect: When John Carpenter made the first HALLOWEEN, he-by-way-of-Dr. Loomis declared Michael an empty shell of a person, someone who was simply born evil, as reflected by the empty-eyed mask he wears. For some reason, though, a whole legacy of directors just couldn’t resist trying to explain Myers away. The original HALLOWEEN II then says, “Well...what if Michael Myers is on a rampage because LAURIE STRODE IS HIS SISTER? What’s that you say? Why is that a reason to rampage? Ummmm...” And then HALLOWEEN 4 sees him pursuing other young female relations of his, and then in subsequent movies there’s an accursed rune, and druids, and immortality rites, and by the time you get to HALLOWEEN 6 you have this absurd stone soup of bad ideas. It’s a miracle that this franchise became such a thing. Rob Zombie makes the same fundamental mistake, but at least he tries it in the simplest possible way, asserting plainly that Nurture, not Nature, made Michael into a killer. Now, terminally lonely, he’s like a clown waking up in his trailer to find that the carnival left without him. Exiled from mainstream society, he seeks out what remains of his family, who, due to his own violent actions, has grown up more like him than he may have imagined.

I’m not saying I think this was the best thing to do with HALLOWEEN 2. Personally, what I crave in horror movies is something that is farther beyond explanation than this--something that gesturally resembles my life experience, but that plunges past the veil of mundanity into a deeper, darker world of primordial fears and urges, addressing things that unsettle me because I cannot rationalize them. For me, horror is definitionally incomprehensible, and Rob Zombie’s HALLOWEEN diptych is fundamentally sane. But, I think what I’ve discovered is that these movies are not proper horror movies, in spite of their relentless sadistic violence. They are outlaw fables, with more DNA in common with something like EASY RIDER, than with FRIDAY THE 13TH. It’s funny to watch myself coming to a compassionate understanding of these movies that are themselves about outsiders and rejects who are specifically deprived of understanding. My goal in all this was not so much to convince people of the value of these movies, which one might reject on any number of reasonable counts, but to explain to myself why I keep coming back to them. It isn’t to condescendingly heckle them, and it isn’t just because they’re often handsome-looking, or because they’re so emotionally authentic even when the narrative is less than compelling. It must be because, even when I’ve found him challenging, I can’t help seeing Rob Zombie as a person with vision, someone who heroically eschews common consensus on taste and sense-making--the consensus even among horror fans and his own cinematic heroes--in order to say what makes sense to him personally. Finally, he has begun to make sense to me, too.

[survivormontenegro]

Episode 1: "I'll either flop hard or finally fucking win so let's see how this game plays." - Ian

season starts in t minus eleven minutes and I'm SO READY TO FLOP WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

give me an idol thanks

Hi!!! Im back on tumblr survivor omg I thought I would never return cuz I am so inactive on skype but here I am with the best hosts ever seamus and drew even tho seamus bullies me... This time now that I actually have some experience I hopefully wont be first boot and can play better rather than be a sheep LOL

So far I like my tribe, Ali and mitch are prob my favs so far both kings

The only people I have ever heard of before is willow one of my bffs from FB orgs and jones bc shes jones but both on the other tribe so hope I can meet them at swap or merge!

But apart from that no clue who these ppl are, kinda nice tho and refreshing since on fb its always the same people so this should be fun

Bro we got 2 sandwich artists. And a sandwich related challenge. If we don’t win I’ll be mad

Okay so right now I don’t know anyone or anything what the fuck. This is so different from zwooper everyone is here to play. Right now I’m getting good vibes from Caleb and I think I’m gonna make him my go to. I know Noah on the other tribe but I know he doesn’t like me and I really don’t like the way he plays games. I heard Jamarcus was in this game but I guess not :(. But yeah so this is gonna be one wild ride!

submitting this before i forget/decide not to do a video on it: 

http://bit.ly/2ZoKSiK <- Jason’s First Impressions

Hie Montenegro,,, im here,,, and full of existential fear!! I wanted to do a full video cast assessment but my phone storage truly sucks on this night at 3:00 am and I have shit to do tomorrow so :) gotta write!! Myfeelings!!!! David - has said Hewwo when we were revealed and vanished. Hopefully he can deliver in a comp Bc rn he’s kinda irrelevant :( holding out hope tho Willow - queen of being busy,,, we talked in pms but for like a minute,, she knows some of my friends from an FB game I watched her play tho! So that’s SOMETHing, but not a lot. I’ve heard not the greatest things about her social game in the past tho, so I’m not shocked rn Evan - I think I’ve actuallh played w him before assuming this is the same Evan from  erinsborough? Big shrug, he was inactive that game tho and would’ve striked out if we didn’t vote him,,, hopefully things are different tho? His picture is Gavin from DP and I appreciate it greatly,, Tom - I just got off of a 5 hour call w him and he seems really chill!? Haven’t talked in pms yet or anything so hopefully we can do that soon? But he seems like a great dude!! His dog is super fucking cute too. JJ - I think of my entire tribe, he’s the epitome of extra. He has 50 fucking sugar gliders like??????? Ma’am?????????? Also he’s from tengaged and MORE IMPORTANTLY he knows keaton apparently!! So,,, probably a crackhead knowing my luck w Keaton. He’s very outgoing and friendly tho and definitely seems like someone i COULD work with,,, but I wanna see how everything plays out, Caeleb - adopted him as my grandson. Bc he called me his grandma. He seems like a sweetie pie it’s his first org ever though so go him!! Hopefully grandma can take him under her wing hehe Mo - literally one of my first close friends in the community,, an angel whom owns my heart, I feel like he’d wanna work w me but I’d never know fully until we prove our loyalties yk? So I’m also holding out hope for him,,, king. Alex - I love him!!!? So much???? He said he stans me I love him sm Bc I remember stanning  him when I first started playing Bc he’s all I’d heard about art in the community lolol but I’m v excited to actuallh play with him I fucking called him being here :) Jules - my love my light we just clicked real quick, she’s legitimately an angel whom I adore??? It’s her first survivor game I’m rooting for her. But ya I’m exhausted so that’s it for now UwU gn bois

okie I feel like I should do a cast assessment of my tribe, just as a starter. my opinions will like 1000% change so this is by no means final but woo I'll go with this! 

In general... this cast is... pretty good? Like I was very very worried since I'm so annoying that everyone that hates me would reappear for this season, but I think(?) only like... one person in the cast would dislike me/gun for me for preseason stuff. Anywho:

Benj: Okay he seems super super nice! Like he seems really friendly, we have a lot in common already and I think since we are both in weird timezones we could work really well as allies! He seems super like chill and would work with just people he seems to get along with, so I feel like... that could be a real potential alliance in the future ahhh!

Ian: Ian I haven't spoken to all that much yet (he was towards the end of the cast reveal) but he seems really really chill! He has also come 2nd twice which is something I can relate to, so maybe we will be on a similar page as players? 

Jared: Okay first fellow newbie. We haven't spoken much or had the chance to really like have a good conversation so far! I feel like since its 12-8 for newbies, maybe its a good idea for us to group up tho, idk if it can happen since at least for me, I haven't really connected to the newbies as much?

Jason: He is so so fun! Like I've really liked talking with him so far, he was on the CAH call yesterday and was getting along with Julia which is really good too, since I defo wanna work with them both!

Julia: A QUEEN. okay I was very worried seeing her on the cast reveal since both times I've played with her, I've voted her out very very early.... BUT, she seems interested in wanting to work with me and I'd love to because such a wild time, and I feel like... me and her strengths/weaknesses can kind of counterbalance in a way that'll work really well! She could always be playing me, but tbh... its what I deserve anyway, and I'd LOVE to see her do really well this season.

Madeline: I really like her! I've spoken to her probs the most of the newbies and she seems really nice and social which is super good! I feel like she'll fit in for a while and have quite smooth sailing

Michael: I'm sure he is great, but we haven't really.. been able to talk all that much? I feel like if I had to predict who would go if our tribe lost, I'd... probably say him?

Mitch: omg this cast is so big I'm not even through my tribe AHH. anyway mitch was on the first cast reveal like I was. I get ok vibes from him, he seems like... he is here to play the game hard which makes me nervy, but hopefully I can like fudge that to my advantage?

Noah: okay he is super fun, I feel like... our conversations have been very dry, but also that its 100% my fault. idk the ability to be interesting just kind of _dropped_ out of me but I'll try and redeem that today

okay the other tribe I'll just skim through and do the ones I know:

Alex C.: he seems like a king! I've been in VLs for seasons he has been in, I feel like he will not like me but I'd love to meet him!

David R.: okay he will 10000% not remember me, but he was in my first season ever! he was very inactive and his only like... confessional was about me being annoying KJSLDAD which is maybe a.. bad sign! lets see how it goes this time

Jones: She seems SO nice! I have been in VLs with her before, and she seems so so so nice! I'd love to play with her down the line, but I think she is also probs here to WIN which is scary.

Jules: A LEGEND! I love Jules, would love to work with them if possible! They're probably the person I am closest to pregame but can hopefully keep that hush hush...

Mo: a king! I hosted him for his first season, and he was SO much fun. I feel like he has gone off me, but I'm super excited to see how he does!

Tom: he is... probably the biggest problem for me in the cast? Like he was in the only season I won, and saw me play a snake game which I do not intend to play like this time? But I feel like if he still dislikes me (which he might), he could like... tell people how snakey I was! I would love to like work with him if he wants, but I feel like he wouldn't trust me at all KASDLF

Willow: A queen! I haven't spoken to her in ages but used to around her first season a lot! so so nice.

Yeah so overall thoughts on each tribe:

Durmitor: Almost everyone I knew preseason was on this tribe, which is probably to my advantage, that'll hopefully help out in like... a swap situation? Worried about Tom but am cautiously optimistic about Willow/Mo/Jules! I feel like this tribe is gonna do very very good on challlenges which... AHHHH i don't wanna go to tribal

Budva: Okay I really like my tribe! I get the best vibes from Benj, Julia & Jason who are all people I'd love to work with! I think(?) I could be okay for now, like I feel like I've already got some good ties, and that there are other people that would go... before me... maybe? Its probably only like 2 rounds on these tribes so I maybe don't even need to last that long aksfda

Ugh honestly why am I back and like... I DON’T ANYBODY HERE? Nicole G is my spirit animal.

Well except for Jason and Julia. I do know them as well as Alex and Rob. Basically I don’t know anyone post chamonix and I feel like a fish out of water. I’ll either flop hard or finally fucking win so let’s see how this game plays.

My tribe is idk, quiet? But like we called and played cards against humanity which was fun but like idk Anau and Monte Rosa were just more active and fun and all.

Julia - fellow oldie, I might work with her since she’s quite social and all. Witchcraft and all.

Jason - I wanna work with him because 1) oldie 2) fellow runner-up and 3) he knows josh. And if my TS career hasn’t proven me wrong, people who I play with who know josh are a huge BOON to my game so yeahhH

Benj - he seems nice. He lives New Zealand so we will probably be the only ones awake at our respective time zones so that can be grounds for something :D

Ali - seems nice as well. We talked about the weather and all so that was fun.

Mitch - we had a short convo so idk him very well to get a good read on him.

Jared - We only started talking now so we will see hmmm

Michael - I’m 50% sure he’s a robot. Just because he sends messages like a robot but I could be wrong. Idk it’s hard to get a read on him but we talked some and I hope he is good at challenges

Madeline - She told me she was a returnee but the wiki says she ain’t? What is the truth. Seems nice?? Idk

Noah - we haven’t talked

Tbh this is probably the most quiet starting tribe I’ve been on. Nicole G is my sprit animal btw 

(hi plss add this to the first confessionals i sent) Asya - haven’t talked to her as well. But she did briefly joined the tribe call

Here's a Video Confessional that details what’s on my mind:

America I think I fucked myself over on this one. I told JJ and Tom last night that I got 155k in sandwich stacker the last time I played it and now I think they’re expecting me to recreate that score?? And like,,, do better?????? But it turns out I’m unexpectedly very busy today and I can’t even do it when I get home Bc I’m not gonna have a laptop to play it on,, so I fucked myself over on this one chief. Not only am I most likely not doing this challenge, but I set myself up to look like a challenge threat!! When I can’t even back it up???? Love that for me :)

okay so I've now had a chance to talk to pretty much my whole tribe more which is fun. I LOVE THEM ALL AND REFUSE TO EVER. GO. TO. TRIBAL.

So my favourites atm are defo Julia, she is SUCH a legend, and her hex powers will carry us to success. I'm also really liking Benj & Jason on a personal level, they are super fun, and like chill on a game level which I really like!

Of the rest, Jared approached me to work with me which AHH exciting! But it was kind of unprompted and outta nowhere, so I'm worried he could play a bit too hard too fast, so will try and keep an eye on him. Madeline is super fun, I'm really liking talking to her, and I'm more reassured about working with my fellow newbies now, since Jared/Madeline I'm really liking! Michael is super sweet, he sent me this long nice message about how to pronounce my name which was super sweet, I haven't spoken to him too much yet! Noah I've spoken to the least, he is my biggest ??? so far, which ahh but I'll figure that one out. Mitch is quite quiet but I really like him! Ian is a king!

AHH I LOVE EVERYONE THIS IS A PROBLEM. I always do this where I make friends with everyone and then have to betray someone every round. I'm determined to pace myself this time. Julia is my Number #1 rn, she approached me first and I think we are a great balancing pair. I also really like Benj/Jason, would love to maybe be in a bigger alliance with them? Jared I'm like... apprehensive that he is gonna play really hard, but also wanna work with him. Those are probably my top four rn? I'd then put Madeline/Ian on the next level, Mitch the level below and Noah/Michael on the bottom level as my biggest unknowns!

otherwise this challenge is so demonic, and one day I will get revenge on seamus for making us endure this. I think I'm doing pretty good, and like... can't face the bread anymore, so will probs stick with my score. I really don't wanna go to tribal so hope my tribe can pull this out wooo!

Hi it’s Mo, I’m the dumb bitch who thinks he needs a Gatorade after walking up a flight of stairs. At the moment I’m feeling very distressed because I sat outside for a good hour or so and some mosquitos decided to take it upon themselves to go to town on my legs. But game-wise I’m feeling very comfortable on my tribe. I think I made some good connections on the tribe call last night and I got to know everyone really well and literally I have no complaints about anyone at the moment. They’re all super chill. My biggest fear is letting them down so I’m doing my best to get a good score on sandwich stacker.

Wow It's great to be back and not know like a single soul! I will kms because of that! Also wow my boss sprung a double on me today so I didnt get to talk to anyone! In the first 24 hours! I love this for me! Im on call right now so hopefully I can do SOMETHING and get good with people!!

So I have yet to do a formal confessional but let me just tell you my tribe is so cracked and I love it. I'm gonna give y'all my thoughts on the players of my tribe because why not. Ok so first off we have Julia. Julia is so cracked but I LOVE HER. She is the good luck charm of the tribe because she is involved in witchcraft and honestly I find that hilarious. Then we got Ali. He seems super sweet but I have yet to get to know him well. I think he has been in the tumblr community for a while but I'm not sure because im not in that community (whoops). Jason and I have meshed pretty well together over the love for the cowboy emoji, Madeleine seems like an easy number for me, and same for Jared. I think if we ever go to tribal I might try to connect us three with Benji who I also think I can trust really well. Then we have Ian and Noah. Honestly my conversations with them have been pretty awkward??? Idk if that is just because they are busy but like I don't rly mesh well with either of them. Then there is Michael who literally talks like his username: A Big Blue Robot

someone literally said they were worried that me being so into astrology would influence how i viewed other people and i told them that it wouldn't but the tea is it will, try to stop me

Heya its me. Rookie here on survivor Montenegro. Never played before. Kinda nervous. I'm trying to keep it light and airy with my chats with all the tribe members, because I don't want them thinking I'm trying to create drama too early. They seeeeem to like me and I think I really like them too. Evan kinda has latched on to me, and I like having an easy go to for talking shoppe, but he's super paranoid and thinks he has no shot at this. Even said that everyone else is fully bonding without him. And thats fine of course, I can handle supporting him especially if it seems like a surprise friendship, but his scaredyness might be rubbing off because its making me a little afraid that people are talking shoppe much more than they're letting on with me. Alsooo, low key a tiny bit annoyed with how much we love to call. Like y'all are nice but it seems to be the same person (eyooop) every time and the same person talking in the tribe chat. hehe peace out

hi okie i would've filmed a video confessional, but i look DISGUSTING so you will have to settle with type type typing!

so lots is happening REAL fast and my head hurts so i need to talk it out. We won reward which WOO, and the reuben sandwich also gave me 3 free checks for bridge steps for the idol so GOOD NEWS. I also used it to build trust with Benj & Julia, and told Jared who kind of put me on the spot and asked me about it (more on Jared later).

So I now have my chart to map idol progress titled 'Bridge to Terebeth-idol' and I'm using all the info I get to slowly get an idea of idol progress, the idol is MINE and I'm determined to play it WRONG. otherwise, I'd love to see Benj or Julia get it, love 'em both.

Anywhomst back to Jared. he is VERY forward with game stuff and is like... going 0 to 100 waay too quick, and its making me and Benj nervous. We are both going to keep an eye, I could see Jared burning out quite quick akdlfas. For the rest of the tribe, I really really like Jason he is such a king, Madeline is super nice but I think quite quiet so could potentially go if we lose. Michael is great at challenges, but his social game is a bit ahh (he like.. told Julia she would be a target for making a mistake in the challenge akjsdfaslfladfjla). Noah I really like, but we are kinda out of sync with timezones which is no good. Mitch filled in for me in teh challenge so I owe him bigtime.

ANYWAYS. this is already waay too long, the summary is WOO JULIA AND BENJ, woo (at a slightly lower volume) for Jason and Jared. Love the hosts, loving this game so far, only thing I'm not loving is sandwiches (unless they are reuben sandwiches asjdklfa).

Okay so little recap of the first night on Montenegro Durmitor Beach.... I really felt worried! Like from the first impressions and the intro's I thought okay i have nothing in common with any of these people, this is going to be so hard to get in a safe spot and go far in this game!

After jumping on call with the likes of Jules, Jones, JJ and Mo I felt a little bit safe as they were laughing at some of my jokes and i felt like i could contribute to the conversation which is nice. I really tried my best in this sandwich stacker challenge to show the tribe that i can perform in flash games and help win immunities for future rounds so it gave them a reason to keep me and potentially the stronger players on the tribe would want to add me to an alliance...well i mean that didnt happen but hey who knows its only day 2

So i recognised that JJ was from Tengaged and i had played with him a little bit whilst on that site so i tried to connect with him and make conversation with him and that dramatic little boy decided to drop his vocabulary and use his silly little boy one word responses which wasnt very uhm reassuring. HOWEVER I feel like over the past 2 days JJ and I have formed some sort of bond and i believe its mutual that we want to work together and help each other out in this game. MY ONLY CONCERN about working with JJ is that I dont want to be seen as in a duo with him so him and me need to stop bullying each other on calls and staying on tribe calls when no one else is on them. He helped me out in the idol hunt as well so he is already giving me some information showing he is down to work with me

Okay so overall i feel like my tribe is full of very big personalities and thats concerning a fight will be had for majority i reckon.

Jules: She is so nice, and we connect pretty good, i know she is one bad ass game player though and definitely a threat down the line so keeping her on my side is beneficial for now and hopefully if she does become seen as a target i can use that to my advantage and she can be a meat shield.

Mo: Mo is cool and chill to talk to, we dont really speak that much on pms however i want that to change i get a very loyal vibe from him so yeah something i am willing to explore

Willow & Evan: They both have similar standings with me in this tribe, i feel like they both want to work with me, Evan has said he does and that he gets a good vibe and wants to work with me which is good and i feel like willow is also leaning towards that as well. The only issue with working with these two is they arent very big personalities so i will be targeted before them however i feel like they could be very loyal. Its going to be hard to integrate them into a large alliance unless one of them start because others will be closer to people that isnt them.

Alex: So Alex is a weird one for me, he seems super emotional and honestly someone i just cant really relate to or connect with. I may be wrong but thats my first impression of him, he seems to be all up in Jules/Jones grill which is something i will have to keep an eye out for.

Jones: Jones is a big big big big threat i think everyone on this tribe can already tell this woman will be hard to get out, socially she is impressive and she said she is pretty good at challenges as well so........i'm just going to try and act really dumb around her and make her believe that im willing to work with her till the end as a loyal sheep. However for now i would like to work with her (even though probably everyone does)

David: Well i mean he is like not active very much, he came on call and i have a fear of drag people and he is a drag people so i hope he doesnt rock up to tribal in drag because it is a serious phobia..... wouldnt mind if he went first just because we dont really talk!

JJ: already spoke about him

Caeleb: Everyone is very nice in this cast but i feel like caeleb is a little bit uhh reserved, i feel like hes a little shy at the moment but i think he can be a gem to work and play with. Idk what type of player any of these people are so just gotta test the waters.

All i know is that this tribe is ready to play....and play hard so survivors ready: game on bitches! #STAYLOWANDGOGOGO

Oh wow this twisty twist twist, hate it!! So anyway now that we have to go to tribal Idk who the heckie to choose to vote! The only people I feel like I have absolutely no connection with so far are Evan and Caeleb, everyone else ive at least talked to a bit?? Jules is cool (also havent talked to her that much) Mo and Jones are the people ive talked to the most so far and I really wanna work with them I think, we will see DREW YOU HAVE MESSED ME UP

This twist is very fiendish and I love and hate it!! More stress ensuing the more fun for drew hmmm

Anyway, right now I want Madeline gone. I feel she’s not putting her all into this game and in the challenges. Plus she told me she was a returnee but the wiki says otherwise grrrr

For now I think I’m gonna work with Julia and Jason. Might also wanna work with Benji and Ali. Ali is very intuitive because he noticed that it’s important to keep any voting plans under wraps because if word got out of the plan and we’re not actually going to trial, oh hell will be loose!!

So far Julia and Jared are eyeing Madeline as a target and I am here for it! She may have sealed her fate by like going to sleep at this hour but let’s see! She might be faking it lol

Okay fuck you guys for this twist my anxiety is running RAMPANT I know everyone is gonna wanna Vote me for being the youngest I hope you all die and literally choke on your own liver. Anyways my day has been GREAT, thanks for asking!! I feel confident with my comp performance, so hopefully they choose to keep me in?? If not it was nice knowing you guys except Johnny

Oh this- this is terrible. I did so bad on my sandwich tray thing even though at the time I was like IM FUCKIN SPEEDY GONZALEZ WERE GONNA WIN and I scored like 48 but then I find out that everyone else scored somewhere in the 90’s and now it’s just kinda... fuck.

Blind Tribals? What kind of tomfoolery is this. Im surprised my tribe came up with a consensus of voting off someone this early even though we still have a full 24 hours. I was fully prepared to take charge but I guess I don't have to anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cax7k6-mA-A

^ Video confessional not letting me post tho

So everything has been like a legit clusterfuck and I see this tribes dynamic starting to play out. I think socially I have done my job and excelled. I would say I feel as if I have established a good personal relationship with most of my tribe members except two of them- Madeleine and Michael. Both of them talk very little and it's honestly very frustrating for myself. Not to mention Michael last night sketched me out very bad after we had finished playing the role call part of the immunity. So I had found an error that I had made, and it scared me and I thought I could talk to him about it. I was like, well I hope this doesn't put a target on my back. He responds with this: we can make sure you won't be. will just take some work. Hold the damn phone. It will take some work? Why would it take work period? It just freaked me out so I went to Jason and I told him about it. Jason made me feel more comfortable and I decided to tell him that I trusted him and I was on board with him. So after immunity is done, and the whole blind round twist is revealed I decided to go and talk to basically everyone on the tribe. But Jared stuck out the most to me. He is playing the most aggressive game at this point which I respect. Also, forgot to mention, I trust Ali the most. 100% Ali will be my ride or die person this game. So nothing will come in between the bond we share. Jared decided to throw out Madeleines name out. And I am totally okay with this. He also subtly hinted that Michael would be a good option. But lets be real, I am not a fool and I will not make a big move this first round. This is a tribe of 10 people, not 6 like I'm used too in my prior TS I have played. It is more difficult to rally all the numbers. So this would be the exact reasoning behind my social game I am playing at the moment. I have Jared than tell me he wants to work with Ali, Benj, Himself, and I. This, I can enjoy. I don't have to struggle to protect from this alliance I knew Jared was bound to create, and I didn't have to suggest to include Ali, possibly exposing my relationship with Ali to Jared. On the other hand, I have Ian and Jason who I feel like I can trust in this game. I proposed to Ian I would not vote him out this round, and he said he would do the same for me. I tell Ian that I trusted Jared and we could possibly work with him, and that Madeleines name is being thrown out as the vote. Ian was vague with answering me about working with Jared which sussed me out. But Ian later tells me he wants to work with Jason, Himself and I. So this puts me in TWO potential alliances already in this game. Literally fuck this twist. I am glad my social skills have finally paid off and I am seriously learning from prior mistakes I have made in my orgs from being too abrasive, being too loud, being rude. I had such little self awareness of the way I communicated with people. I would talk and be this extremely social girl but I always left a bitter taste in people's mouth because of how I said things and I had no clue. So I am playing this better game and it is totally opening up new opportunities and all these people I can work with but on the other hand, puts me at a serious disadvantage. If this tribe will be an ultimate flop tribe which I am seriously hoping is NOT the case, I am going to disappoint someone. And that is how you become a target and lose all the hard work you have built up. So even though socially I am totally preforming beautifully compared to my prior three tries at TS, and strategically I wouldn't say anything about that I mean.... it's the first few days of this game. I would say competition wise, or the more physical part of the game I need to get it together. I'm hoping I can motivate this tribe into playing extremely hard for the immunity wins because who freaking knows what could happen? In the best case scenario, I would love for immunity to be brought to my tribe. This would mean that for the next round the target would probably remain the same, and I don't have to get so worked up about who is the new target of the tribe.

https://youtu.be/qsjQtYfiCec <- Video Confessional; Not letting me post

Editors note - I think I’m 80% sure my name’s not going around Bc I think everyone’s under the impression I got us the win for the flag making? Big shrug

Damn this twist has really screwed things. At this point in the game I have some strong (I think) alliances. I'm worried that I have put a target on my back for playing too hard though, and it might be all for not if we find out we won immunity.

https://youtu.be/RR4BRMFKjDU <- Another video confessional that won’t embed lol

What the fuck is this twist like okay sure, tumblr survivor is generally fucking stressful like a pig getting choked im always trying to gasp for air.....this season i am the pig on the spit roast just deceased. I'm a nocturnal pig throughout this game i guess because tribal planning starts like 6 hours ish before tribal and the last 2 hours is the most important and that would be from 4-10am so no sleep for the weak i came to win

https://youtu.be/sarbjplslHk <- Another video confessional that won’t embed

SO I think at the moment my closest allies are Tom & JJ which is a relief because I was intimidated by the two of them at first. The plan for now is to vote for David due to him being the most antisocial out of the bunch. He’s talked to me quite a bit actually but apparently he hasn’t talked to some of the others that much.

The first few days of this game has been really fun. I'm enjoying to get to know everybody, and just dicking off on tribe calls all the time. So far I've really enjoyed looking at Tom & Alex, they're definitely the tribal eye candy.

It seems as though I've gotten myself into a really cute alliance consisting of Alex, Jones, and Jules. A group I've definitely enjoyed talking to the most. I think it'll really work in my favor.

Tom is really fun to talk to, he's giving me truthful information on what planks have been good and bad in the idol search. Which is nice, but it might be a cultural thing, but I can't tell if he likes me or not!?? There's too much sarcasm in his voice.

Mo & Caeleb are really nice, they've both talked to me on a pretty shallow level so far, but I'm enjoying them a lot.

Evan, David, and Willow have been fairly MIA. Evan is on a vacation, so I'm impressed by how much he truly has been able to contribute to the tribe.

As far as the vote goes, I'm debating between Willow, and David. Alex, who I'd really like to work with, really is pushing for David to go home, but David is better at comps, and a less dangerous social player, he hasn't talked to anyone. Whereas Willow is being a social butterfly in everyone's PMs. Seeing that she made runner up in one of her seasons is also a little bit scary.

This twist is scary, but considering my last ORG, its exciting. I felt like my downfall was not being able to forge game relationships with people because I was the last person to attend tribal. Winning every tribal immunity all the way up to the final 13 / 21. Once the merge hit, every time I tried to talk strategy, the person I was talking with would run, and tattle to the person I was trying to target instead of listening to what I was saying, because they had forged game relationships at prior tribal. Being forced to go to tribal regardless of the outcome of immunity should help me solidify game relationships much easier.

I have one question for the twist. WTF DREW???

Right as we found out that both tribes had to go to tribal, Evan was immediately concerned that his name was being thrown out. The boy needs to calm, but I think our connection is really strong and honestly he's fun to talk to. Today though, most people I have been talking to have said David which is perfectly fine, he barely had talked to me at all so I am happy to be a tribe player and vote him tonight if nothing changes. I think people are starting to make connections all around. I really like Willow and have like an on and off thing with Mo and Jules. Tom is the first person to let me in on the vote, and JJ said he'd work with me and not vote me tonight, BUT Tom and JJ and Jones are always in the calls and that's making me nervous they'll have a longterm close bond that could be disastrous if it turns into a Monica, Jervase, Tyson type thing. Also I don't fully trust JJ he's good at talking to everyone. I have my eyes and ears open and I'm just trying to get as much information as I can at this point in the game.

okay I have thoughts and they are 100% NEGATIVE.

so dua lipa cave can CHOKE, i hate this twist so muchhhhh, its gonna give me an aneurysm. I just feel bad, I don't like voting people out and this makes the process so weird and awkward.

Okay like tonight, Madeline is... seemingly going home? And I'm so so sad, she is super sweet, but I think everyone was reluctant to throw out names except Jared who was super, super gung ho about Madeline leaving? Jared is stressing me out akjsldfaf, he is so forward and aggressive as a player, and I can kind of see him burning out and dragging me down with him asdfklaf.

Otherwise, I'm really liking working with Julia, she is super fun and a really savvy player, I hope our alliance can do super good long term! Otherwise, Benj is SUCH A KING, he is so friendly and fun, and we are like really on the same page for game stuff? Those are the only two who its not negotiable, on my watch they are going NOWHERE.

for the rest? I really like Jason, he is just super mellow, like I think if I had to make a winner pick for the season, I'd probably say him? I vibe with him on a personal level woo, could be an ally down the line. Michael I tbh expected to maybe be first boot, but he seems to have unexpected connections! I really like him tho, he is super sweet, its no biggie that he is staying? Mitch/Ian kind of fall into the same category, I really like them but I've not spoken to them... all that much, but I really like them!! Noah I really haven't spoken to too much, and if we do go to tribal tonight, I'd probs want him to go next (Mitch also threw his name out for this round, so it seems I'm not alone on that?).

I feel REALLY REALLY bad about Madeline JKLSADFLSAJFA, like already our tribe is being meninist we do not stan, but also she is so nice. I feel bad and kind of blame Jared for her going grrrr.

Okay I'm gonna wrap this up, hope we don't go to tribal tonight, Madeline stays and we WIN till merge WOO WOO WOOOOOO!

omg also julia is already at #46 for the idol her MIND! i hope she gets it, that'd be iconic. I feel like she must be working with someone to get that far already, maybe Jason? like the host, i need to (nancy) drew and investigate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRd_z6-ycno <- another non embeded video confessional uwu

Lol idk where this girl came from but Madeline’s a mess.

She vanished after the twist reveal because her “WiFi getting shit down” then suddenly she’s strong arming me to vote Mitch

Sweaty, compared to you I’ve actually interacted with Mitch over the course of this 4 days unlike you.

She claims she’s got Julia, Jason and Noah but I know where they’re really at. If we are going to tribal Madeline’s gone!!

okay tribal is (maybe?) in 6 minutes and I have THOUGHTS:

1. Madeline is make me so nervous, she like says things in the tribe chat and its like AHH idk how to respond, I'm being so obviously shady and its INCREDIBLY clear I voted for her, but idk what to do or say asdkjflsafafjdaf

2. Benj is a king, we are like... on the same page a lot, and someone I wanna go super far with!

3. Madeline gunning for Mitch is weird because... she is targetting him for past placements, when... Ian literally made FTC twice akjsdfslafsa like wut? Also I am screaming at her like saying Mitch isn't denying that she is going home in the tribechat, when she is voting him? I'MMMMMM

4. If I go home, it's been super super fun, and first boot is a cute placement! Benj  & Jason have both been first boot before, and I love 'em both, so am joining a great club!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgF_VAczF2g <- Another non embeded video confessional

[arbitrarypoetry]

Ignored

           The day I first met him, he was sitting on top of a display of radishes at the grocery store. The bright florescent lights shone off his dark brown hair, and he tapped his feet, looking around as if surveying a kingdom instead of just the produce section. Nobody else paid him any mind. I was about eight.

           I stopped in front of him. He was wearing shiny leather shoes, which seemed a bit old-fashioned for a boy his age. “Hello,” I said uncertainly.

           “Hello,” he responded. He kept tapping his feet, and he drummed his fingers on his knees. I wondered if he was listening to music in his head, the way I often did. I wanted to be a musician; to feel the notes under my fingers, let them flow out in the air, to create music so beautiful that when I stood up and played, everyone would stop what they were doing just to listen. To me, that sounded like the most wonderful thing in the world.

           I tilted my head, examining the pile of radishes. “Those don’t look very comfortable,” I observed.

           “They aren’t.” He didn’t sound particularly concerned.

           I frowned, considering this a moment.  “Well, why are you sitting there, then?”

           He shrugged, still tapping his fingers. “It’s more comfortable than the pineapples.”

           “Oh,” I said. I couldn’t think of a more suitable reply.

           A long moment passed in which neither of us spoke. The boy went back to looking around the store as if I wasn’t there, humming something under his breath, then broke off and abruptly addressed me. “Did you know you’re the first person to notice me here today?”

           “Really?” I was interested, but only mildly surprised; people didn’t tend to notice me much either, even when I tried to get their attention. I’d decided that adults were simply unobservant people. “Not even ones who wanted to buy radishes?”

           “They just take the ones I’m not sitting on.” He shifted a little to the side, somehow managing not to dislodge any of the reddish root vegetables as he did so. He gestured to the pile in invitation. “Want to come up?”

           I hesitated, looking behind me for my mom. She hadn’t noticed when I’d left her side, and had already drifted past the dairy section. “I’d better not,” I said, not without some regret. “I should catch up with my mom.”  I didn’t want her to forget I was there and leave the store without me. That had happened once. The employees were all too busy to listen to my predicament, and I soon gave up trying to get their attention; I waited in the seafood section, watching the lobsters in their tank. I had to wait a long time before Mom came back for me.

           “All right,” the boy said. “I’ll see you around.”

           I smiled at that. “See you around,” I said back, and then, remembering the schoolyard etiquette I so rarely got a chance to use, asked him “What’s your name?”

           “I’m not sure I have one,” he said. “I’ve been looking for one that feels right, but I haven’t found it yet.” His gaze lit on a stack of vegetables by my left shoulder, and a funny grin spread across his face. “You can call me Rutabaga, if you like.”

           I giggled. “Goodbye, Rutabaga!” I gave him a quick wave before turning to go find my mom. He waved back. It wasn’t until later that I realized I’d forgotten to tell him my name; but when I went back to the radishes while Mom was at the checkout, he was gone.

I saw him a lot after that, though we didn’t always talk. He was always in a different place. Walking down the street with a goldfish bowl balanced on his head. Sitting on a rooftop, arms clasped around his knees. Dancing at the bus stop in a thunderstorm. Sometimes weeks would pass between each sighting, sometimes only days. It was odd, but I always seemed to see him whenever I was feeling the loneliest. As I got older, instead of me finding him, he started coming more and more to me.

           It was the first truly warm day of spring, and I sat in the grass at the park, playing my violin. I was sixteen. I had been playing for six years then, and I loved it, even if my old dream of everybody stopping to listen hadn’t yet come true. I was sure that was just because I hadn’t improved enough yet; someday I would be good enough to perform, and then people would hear me, really hear me. And even if that day didn’t come, the music itself was its own reward. I believed that. Still, as I moved my calloused fingers and drew out the final notes of my song, I couldn’t help but wish that there had been someone there to listen.

           The voice came from behind me. “That was good. You should put out a hat for money.”

           Jumping a little, I turned around. There he sat, cross-legged, older than he was in the grocery store yet somehow looking just the same as ever. I smiled. It had been over a week since I last saw him, and I’d missed him. “Nobody really pays attention,” I said, lowering my violin to rest on my lap. “And I’m just practicing anyway.” He’d rolled up the sleeves of his collared white shirt, but other than that, his outfit was just the same as it had always been; leather shoes, brown corduroy pants, suspenders. That was one thing that didn’t change, at least. “Are you still going by Wind-chime?” I asked him.

           “No, that one doesn’t fit anymore.” He stretched his legs out in front of him and leaned back on his hands. Every time I saw him, he was trying out a new name—Seagull, Shoelace, Listerine, Twig. I couldn’t tell if he put any thought into them at all or if he just made them up on the spot whenever I asked. “I think I’m going to go nameless for a while,” he said. “Maybe the right one will come to me.”

           “All right,” I said. We settled into comfortable silence. I fiddled around with my violin, teasing out bits of different tunes, while he tilted his head way back, looking at the clouds. A group of laughing people walked by, stepping right over him and his outstretched legs as if he wasn’t there. One of them tossed a soda can behind them, narrowly missing my friend’s head. Normally I wouldn’t pay any attention; that sort of thing happened a lot when we were together, and I’d never really thought of it as strange. That day, though, it reminded me of something I’d been thinking about recently.

“Hey,” I said, lowering my violin. After a moment of indecision, wondering how to best put this, I decided to just ask him point-blank. “Why can I see you?”

He looked up. His eyes had no real color to them. “What do you mean?”

“I was just wondering,” I said. “I mean, I don’t think I’ve imagined you.” My fingers began shaping themselves on the neck of the violin, silent suggestions of music. “I’m sure I haven’t. But nobody else ever notices you; they all act like you don’t exist.” I thought for a moment. “Am I mad?”

           He considered this, twisting his mouth to one side. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe a little. Either that or you’re more sane than other people. I couldn’t tell you which.”

           “But why?” I asked. The sun was warm on my shoulders, and it reflected off the metal clips on his suspenders. “Why don’t they see you? It doesn’t make sense.”

           He shrugged. “If people treat you for long enough like you don’t exist, sooner or later it comes true.” He spotted a ladybug on his trousers and brought one hand forward to let it crawl over his fingers. “I don’t really mind. I’m used to it now.”

           I frowned. “But you do exist,” I said. This was strangely important to me all of a sudden. “You do! You’re just as real as I am. People just don’t pay enough attention.”

           He smiled at me. His face was just as bright as ever, but there was something cloudy in his colorless eyes. “You’re absolutely right,” he said softly.

           We didn’t say anything else after that. I went back to playing the violin, and at some point when I looked back up, he was gone.

           I kept playing. A cloud had dimmed the sun, and a slight breeze rose goosebumps on my arms, but I stood up, letting the music be as loud and full and real as I could make it. I stood in the middle of the path. I got in people’s way. I played the music I always imagined I would, music that demanded to be listened to, called for people to turn around and see.

They all just kept on walking like I wasn’t there at all.

[notanathleteslungs]

So my roommates convinced me to get a TikTok and I came across this guy yesterday morning. I said Thanks for the Attack and went to shower and get ready for work. Then someone played Heathens by 21 Pilots at work. Pop goes the video and won’t leave my head!! So since I had nothing to do at work today I spent basically two and a half hours writing this. I have not done much editing so it’s basically as I wrote it. Tear me apart. Also please don’t say if you know who this is based on, I beg you.

———————————

Her mother always met their patron in private. Because he wasn’t technically their patron. At that point, he was only her mother’s patron. It was from him that they gained the majority of their power. The power for human control, for example, was beyond them normally. Without their patron, an unmarried woman and her bastard child would be destitute. With him, they had a comfortable house in the center of town, beautiful gowns, and plenty of fear from the other people. You could do a lot with fear, after all.

The day she consciously realized what they were, she helped her mother set up a tucked away sitting room for a ritual. They pushed the furniture against the walls, drew a pentagram on the floor, placed offerings at each point. Then her mother shooed her from the room.

“He doesn’t like speaking to anyone but me,” she explained, in somewhat of a rush. “He will be very angry if he sees you since he isn’t your patron. Go study the spells from yesterday, I will test you on them later.” Then the door slammed behind her.

Curiosity rooted her in place. All she could do was turn and press her ear against the wooden door.

Chanting. Her mother had already begun the ritual. It seemed like the spell went on forever, the power of the ceremony bending time around the sitting room. She felt her lungs catch and stall, unable to expand or deflate. Then the chanting stopped. Air rushed back into her lungs and a low voice traveled through the wood.

“Good morning, darling,” it spoke. It was so soft, almost seductive. But how else would a patron make a deal except by honeyed words. They didn’t give their patronage just to witches, after all.

“My lord,” her mother acknowledged. She imagined her mother giving him a deep curtsy; she always said to respect those with more power than you, and this was their patron.

“What can I do for you today?” he asked. She heard muffled clops, like hooves. But why…?

“My daughter. She turns 18 soon. I would like to introduce her to you.”

“Now why would you want a thing like that, darling? I’ve been watching her since she was born. I know her almost as well as you do.”

Her mother was silent for a moment. “I want to travel,” she finally said. Her voice shook. It didn’t seem to be from fear. “I want to learn other kinds of magic. I want to visit other witches and covens, shamans and gurus. But my daughter would not be allowed to go with me while she is still untrained. She will be 18 and I want you to train her.”

Now their patron was silent. More clops echoed through the door.

“You are saying,” he mused slowly, “that you do not want me as your patron anymore.”

“No! That is not what I’m saying!” Her mother sounded frantic. “I am saying—”

“Very well,” he interrupted. His voice took on a brusque note, as though he were suddenly in a rush to leave. “I will allow you to travel and I will train your daughter. But don’t forget that you are breaking our deal.”

Deal? she thought. What deal? Maybe her mother’s spellbooks could tell her. They held much more than simple incantations and rituals.

Voices still echoed through the door as she turned and ran upstairs.

*************

The day came when her mother left for her travels.

“Remember,” she said, gloved hands holding her daughter’s shoulders as she bent to look in her eyes. “You must do the ritual before the sun rises tomorrow. I can’t help you this time. You are on. Your. Own.” A shiver of trepidation ran down her spine, but she nodded resolutely.

“I will, mama,” she promised. Her mother pulled her into a tight hug and pressed a kiss to her hair.

“I love you, so much, sweetheart,” her mother said, tears thickening her voice. “I’ll be back. Someday.” She nodded like she was trying to convince herself. She squeezed her mother’s arms and kissed her cheek before pushing her gently to the carriage.

“I’ll see you someday, mama,” she called as the carriage pulled away. “I love you!” A gloved hand waved back at her, and then her mama was gone. A shaky breath escaped her. She straightened her back, pulled back her shoulders, and raised her chin in haughty confidence. She was the daughter of a witch. She could survive on her own. So she went back inside and began gathering the materials for the ritual. Late tonight would be better. Once everything was set in its place, she went to her room and slept, preparing for the ritual to summon her patron.

************

It was nothing like she expected. She thought the candles would flare as the ritual took hold; she thought the magic would make the room whirl around her; she thought she’d feel tension build. Instead, the candles along the walls maintained a steady flame. The room did whirl but only because her nerves caused her to panic and her head to spin. The only tension came as she continued chanting for hours, terrified that she would be rejected by her patron and lose everything she had.

It seemed like all the air left her body and she slumped onto the floor.

“Just as I thought,” a man said. “I told your mother you may not be ready, and here you are, drained and exhausted.” Arms curled under her head and knees and lifted her. All she could do was stare straight ahead of her. Even moving her eyes seemed beyond her. Simply breathing was exhausting. He placed her on the couch, head on one arm. “Lay there,” he said. His voice was strange. It was soft and gentle, but steel hid beneath the surface. Even if he had phrased it as an opinion on what she should do, it was an order. She had never taken kindly to orders. So she pushed back.

“Who are you?” she rasped. She tried pushing herself up. One hand stopped her.

“Didn’t I just tell you to stay still?” Exasperation mixed with something else—something dangerous—colored his voice. “If you will not obey, I will not be your patron.” She lay back down.

“You’re…my mother’s patron?” She couldn’t believe it. This man, who couldn’t be much older than she was, was her mother’s all-mighty patron?

He was slim. His voice matched his build. His hair was blond, nearly white. Dark eyes in a...she hated to admit it but he was almost painfully attractive. His suit made his shoulders seem much broader than they really were, though it wasn’t quite a suit. A crisp white shirt under a black vest with a neat black tie and black trousers. Black gloves accentuated slim fingers.

“Enjoying yourself?” he teased. He turned his head and lifted his chin, showing off his noble profile. Then he examined her. His eyes flitting over her made her self conscious. He grabbed her hands before she could fold her arms over her chest and pinned them by her sides. “No no no, I’m not done yet.” He didn’t seem to realize how close he was. After a few minutes, he seemed satisfied with her. “At least you didn’t hurt yourself.” He stood up and strolled around the room, trailing fingers over the books on the shelves. “You and your mother seem to always choose the same room to summon me. It’s the smallest sitting room in the house and yet you seem to think it is enough. I expected more for the one who gave you what you have.”

“You are our patron?” she repeated. He rolled his eyes.

“Yes,” he sighed. “I thought you were supposed to be this amazingly intelligent woman, not an idiot.” Anger tore through her like a flood.

“Excuse you, but my mother wanted me to wait until I was of age to summon you, she said I could have done it at twelve years old! I am incredibly intelligent, I just never expected our patron to be a sham!” He stopped. His fingers curled against the books. Suddenly, she wondered how much danger she was in. Her mother said it was never wise to anger your patron.

“What did you say?” It sounded like a light question, but, just like before, steel hid beneath the surface.

Against her better judgement, she repeated, “You’re a sham. A fake. A charlatan.”

“Yes, yes, I know what sham means,” he stopped her. “I was giving you a chance to correct your most grievous mistake.” Once again she acted against her better judgement. She strode over to him and stood in front of him.

“Why would I correct myself when it’s true? Mother told me our patron was an all-powerful demon, one of the strongest there was. All I see before me is a spoiled noble’s son playing at being a creature of magic.” She scoffed and crossed her arms. “You’re ridiculous.”

He moved his eyes away from the books. Her breath caught in her throat when he met her eyes; she couldn’t quite breathe anymore, and it wasn’t the corset.

When she first saw him, his eyes were a deep chocolate brown. Now they glowed a bright amber, irises shot through with a bloody red. Even as he reached a hand for her, his nails grew long and pointed. Horns grew from his forehead, curling around like a ram. He gently held her chin between thumb and forefinger, used it to push her back against the bookshelves. He pressed his own body against hers, the clopping sounds from her mother’s meeting drawing her attention to furry legs and hooved feet. A tsking sound brought her back to his face, still so handsome. He smirked.

“A demon?” He huffed a little laugh. “Darling, I am no minor demon.” He extended a finger along her jaw, digging the tip into her pulse point while the claw on his thumb pressed on her parted lips. He turned her head and came close, nose nearly brushing her neck. Her heart pounded. Her chest heaved. And she knew he could feel it. When he whispered, she could hear the grin in his voice. He delighted in her reaction to him, both from how close he was and his breath brushing her ear. “I’m the devil.” He pulled back and met her eyes again. “And now, you belong to me. So let’s make that deal, hm?”

[dailyofficereadings]

Daily Office Readings September 17, 2020

Psalm 70-71

Psalm 70

Prayer for Deliverance from Enemies

To the leader. Of David, for the memorial offering.

1 Be pleased, O God, to deliver me. O Lord, make haste to help me! 2 Let those be put to shame and confusion who seek my life. Let those be turned back and brought to dishonor who desire to hurt me. 3 Let those who say, “Aha, Aha!” turn back because of their shame.

4 Let all who seek you rejoice and be glad in you. Let those who love your salvation say evermore, “God is great!” 5 But I am poor and needy; hasten to me, O God! You are my help and my deliverer; O Lord, do not delay!

Psalm 71

Prayer for Lifelong Protection and Help

1 In you, O Lord, I take refuge; let me never be put to shame. 2 In your righteousness deliver me and rescue me; incline your ear to me and save me. 3 Be to me a rock of refuge, a strong fortress,[a] to save me, for you are my rock and my fortress.

4 Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of the unjust and cruel. 5 For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth. 6 Upon you I have leaned from my birth; it was you who took me from my mother’s womb. My praise is continually of you.

7 I have been like a portent to many, but you are my strong refuge. 8 My mouth is filled with your praise, and with your glory all day long. 9 Do not cast me off in the time of old age; do not forsake me when my strength is spent. 10 For my enemies speak concerning me, and those who watch for my life consult together. 11 They say, “Pursue and seize that person whom God has forsaken, for there is no one to deliver.”

12 O God, do not be far from me; O my God, make haste to help me! 13 Let my accusers be put to shame and consumed; let those who seek to hurt me be covered with scorn and disgrace. 14 But I will hope continually, and will praise you yet more and more. 15 My mouth will tell of your righteous acts, of your deeds of salvation all day long, though their number is past my knowledge. 16 I will come praising the mighty deeds of the Lord God, I will praise your righteousness, yours alone.

17 O God, from my youth you have taught me, and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds. 18 So even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me, until I proclaim your might to all the generations to come.[b] Your power 19 and your righteousness, O God, reach the high heavens.

You who have done great things, O God, who is like you? 20 You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again; from the depths of the earth you will bring me up again. 21 You will increase my honor, and comfort me once again.

22 I will also praise you with the harp for your faithfulness, O my God; I will sing praises to you with the lyre, O Holy One of Israel. 23 My lips will shout for joy when I sing praises to you; my soul also, which you have rescued. 24 All day long my tongue will talk of your righteous help, for those who tried to do me harm have been put to shame, and disgraced.

Footnotes:

Psalm 71:3 Gk Compare 31.3: Heb to come continually you have commanded

Psalm 71:18 Gk Compare Syr: Heb to a generation, to all that come

New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE)

New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Psalm 74

Psalm 74

Plea for Help in Time of National Humiliation

A Maskil of Asaph.

1 O God, why do you cast us off forever? Why does your anger smoke against the sheep of your pasture? 2 Remember your congregation, which you acquired long ago, which you redeemed to be the tribe of your heritage. Remember Mount Zion, where you came to dwell. 3 Direct your steps to the perpetual ruins; the enemy has destroyed everything in the sanctuary.

4 Your foes have roared within your holy place; they set up their emblems there. 5 At the upper entrance they hacked the wooden trellis with axes.[a] 6 And then, with hatchets and hammers, they smashed all its carved work. 7 They set your sanctuary on fire; they desecrated the dwelling place of your name, bringing it to the ground. 8 They said to themselves, “We will utterly subdue them”; they burned all the meeting places of God in the land.

9 We do not see our emblems; there is no longer any prophet, and there is no one among us who knows how long. 10 How long, O God, is the foe to scoff? Is the enemy to revile your name forever? 11 Why do you hold back your hand; why do you keep your hand in[b] your bosom?

12 Yet God my King is from of old, working salvation in the earth. 13 You divided the sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. 14 You crushed the heads of Leviathan; you gave him as food[c] for the creatures of the wilderness. 15 You cut openings for springs and torrents; you dried up ever-flowing streams. 16 Yours is the day, yours also the night; you established the luminaries[d] and the sun. 17 You have fixed all the bounds of the earth; you made summer and winter.

18 Remember this, O Lord, how the enemy scoffs, and an impious people reviles your name. 19 Do not deliver the soul of your dove to the wild animals; do not forget the life of your poor forever.

20 Have regard for your[e] covenant, for the dark places of the land are full of the haunts of violence. 21 Do not let the downtrodden be put to shame; let the poor and needy praise your name. 22 Rise up, O God, plead your cause; remember how the impious scoff at you all day long. 23 Do not forget the clamor of your foes, the uproar of your adversaries that goes up continually.

Footnotes:

Psalm 74:5 Cn Compare Gk Syr: Meaning of Heb uncertain

Psalm 74:11 Cn: Heb do you consume your right hand from

Psalm 74:14 Heb food for the people

Psalm 74:16 Or moon; Heb light

Psalm 74:20 Gk Syr: Heb the

New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE)

New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Job 28

Interlude: Where Wisdom Is Found

28 “Surely there is a mine for silver, and a place for gold to be refined. 2 Iron is taken out of the earth, and copper is smelted from ore. 3 Miners put[a] an end to darkness, and search out to the farthest bound the ore in gloom and deep darkness. 4 They open shafts in a valley away from human habitation; they are forgotten by travelers, they sway suspended, remote from people. 5 As for the earth, out of it comes bread; but underneath it is turned up as by fire. 6 Its stones are the place of sapphires,[b] and its dust contains gold.

7 “That path no bird of prey knows, and the falcon’s eye has not seen it. 8 The proud wild animals have not trodden it; the lion has not passed over it.

9 “They put their hand to the flinty rock, and overturn mountains by the roots. 10 They cut out channels in the rocks, and their eyes see every precious thing. 11 The sources of the rivers they probe;[c] hidden things they bring to light.

12 “But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? 13 Mortals do not know the way to it,[d] and it is not found in the land of the living. 14 The deep says, ‘It is not in me,’ and the sea says, ‘It is not with me.’ 15 It cannot be gotten for gold, and silver cannot be weighed out as its price. 16 It cannot be valued in the gold of Ophir, in precious onyx or sapphire.[e] 17 Gold and glass cannot equal it, nor can it be exchanged for jewels of fine gold. 18 No mention shall be made of coral or of crystal; the price of wisdom is above pearls. 19 The chrysolite of Ethiopia[f] cannot compare with it, nor can it be valued in pure gold.

20 “Where then does wisdom come from? And where is the place of understanding? 21 It is hidden from the eyes of all living, and concealed from the birds of the air. 22 Abaddon and Death say, ‘We have heard a rumor of it with our ears.’

23 “God understands the way to it, and he knows its place. 24 For he looks to the ends of the earth, and sees everything under the heavens. 25 When he gave to the wind its weight, and apportioned out the waters by measure; 26 when he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the thunderbolt; 27 then he saw it and declared it; he established it, and searched it out. 28 And he said to humankind, ‘Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.’”

Footnotes:

Job 28:3 Heb He puts

Job 28:6 Or lapis lazuli

Job 28:11 Gk Vg: Heb bind

Job 28:13 Gk: Heb its price

Job 28:16 Or lapis lazuli

Job 28:19 Or Nubia; Heb Cush

New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE)

New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Acts 16:25-40

25 About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. 26 Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened. 27 When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped. 28 But Paul shouted in a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” 29 The jailer[a] called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. 30 Then he brought them outside and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” 31 They answered, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” 32 They spoke the word of the Lord[b] to him and to all who were in his house. 33 At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. 34 He brought them up into the house and set food before them; and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a believer in God.

35 When morning came, the magistrates sent the police, saying, “Let those men go.” 36 And the jailer reported the message to Paul, saying, “The magistrates sent word to let you go; therefore come out now and go in peace.” 37 But Paul replied, “They have beaten us in public, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens, and have thrown us into prison; and now are they going to discharge us in secret? Certainly not! Let them come and take us out themselves.” 38 The police reported these words to the magistrates, and they were afraid when they heard that they were Roman citizens; 39 so they came and apologized to them. And they took them out and asked them to leave the city. 40 After leaving the prison they went to Lydia’s home; and when they had seen and encouraged the brothers and sisters[c] there, they departed.

Footnotes:

Acts 16:29 Gk He

Acts 16:32 Other ancient authorities read word of God

Acts 16:40 Gk brothers

New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE)

New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

John 12:27-36

Jesus Speaks about His Death

27 “Now my soul is troubled. And what should I say—‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour. 28 Father, glorify your name.�� Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” 29 The crowd standing there heard it and said that it was thunder. Others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” 30 Jesus answered, “This voice has come for your sake, not for mine. 31 Now is the judgment of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. 32 And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people[a] to myself.” 33 He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die. 34 The crowd answered him, “We have heard from the law that the Messiah[b] remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up? Who is this Son of Man?” 35 Jesus said to them, “The light is with you for a little longer. Walk while you have the light, so that the darkness may not overtake you. If you walk in the darkness, you do not know where you are going. 36 While you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light.”

The Unbelief of the People

After Jesus had said this, he departed and hid from them.

Footnotes:

John 12:32 Other ancient authorities read all things

John 12:34 Or the Christ

New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (NRSVCE)

New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright © 1989, 1993 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

[renaramblesaboutcomics]

Wednesday Roundup 4.10.2017

This week ended up being a relatively light reading week for yours truly, but that doesn’t lessen the quality of my enjoyment whatsoever. In fact, I had enough love to share that I wanted to go over all of the available Marvel Legacy Primers for this week as well, even if they’re just short blurbs!

So without further ado let’s jump into it.

Marvel’s America, Marvel’s Black Panther, Marvel’s Incredible Hulk, Marvel’s Invincible Iron Man, Marvel’s Jean Grey, Marvel’s Monsters Unleashed, Dark Horse’s Usagi Yojimbo, Lion Forge’s Voltron Legendary Defender, Viz’s Yona of the Dawn

Marvel’s America - Marvel Legacy Primer Pages (2017-present) Robbie Thompson, David Lopez

As interested as I am in America, I haven’t had the opportunity to really follow her outside of the Young Avengers run she is in. So I think, oddly enough, for me this is one of the most necessary “Primers” of any of the ones I’ve read so far, and the information was very good to have. It really helped to frame her history, her relationship with her mothers, and her confidence in herself in a new light that is really appreciated. And the art from David Lopez is as beautiful as any of his issues on All-New Wolverine.

Marvel’s Black Panther - Marvel Legacy Primer Pages (2016-present)  Robbie Thompson, Wilfredo Torres

There’s honestly not going to be that much more to say on most of these Primer pages. They’re fun, quick run throughs of relevant histories of the characters and teams that they showcase and depending on your interest and engagement may influence whether or not you want to hop in on the next storyline that they’re promoting. 

I do like the sense of unity and legacy that is built into the Black Panther title already, having it be a responsibility tied to kingship that T’Challa knows and the all-important bond it has between him and the memory of his father. 

It really puts a spin on the importance of Legacy that this event seems intent on hammering home.

Marvel’s Captain Marvel - Marvel Legacy Primer Pages (2016-present)  Robbie Thompson, Brent Schoonover

Carol Danvers is one of those characters I desperately want to lie on every feasible surface level, but whose books have never quite got me on board and whose guest appearances always leave me a bit more confused about her than I had been before her said appearance. And yet there was still not a whole lot added here. I appreciate it, and young Carol is adorable, but there was nothing here that didn’t make me feel like... well, like she’s Hal Jordan. And ‘m not a fan of Hal Jordan.

Marvel’s Incredible Hulk - Marvel Legacy Primer Pages (2017-present) Robbie Thompson, Joe Bennett

Everything I have read so far with Amadeus Cho, both in Totally Awesome Hulk and in his guest appearances or team-ups in Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur to Champions has  really connected to me on a level that Bruce Banner hadn’t exactly managed over the years. So it was nice to see a little blurb that went over their mutual histories and explored what was there.

It almost makes people forget that Marvel unnecessarily killed Bruce Banner for... no reason. Almost. Not quite. Though he might be alive by now. I am obviously not current.

Marvel’s Invincible Iron Man - Marvel Legacy Primer Pages (2016-present) Robbie Thompson, Valerio Schiti

Gah, reading this overview of Tony and Riri’s history really reminded me how much I really loved reading Invincible Iron Man when it first came out and just how much I positively adored Riri’s character and her banter with Tony. You know. Before they completely undid the relationship within the first storyline and then Bendis went all Bendis on us and it became obvious that Tony was coming back sooner than later and then Secret Empire destroyed the world... somewhat literally. 

I’d love to read a Riri-centric book in better circumstances. Or at least once the next trade is out. We’ll see.

Marvel’s Jean Grey - Marvel Legacy Primer Pages (2017-present) Robbie Thompson, Mark Bagley

I was actually just recently talking to my good friend @shobogan about how much more interested I would be in Young Jean Grey if only Marvel had the guts to either give us a romantic relationship with her and Laura (or her, Laura, and Scott OT3 hullo) or have Older Jean Grey return to mentor her younger self and others at the school since she’s the only X-Man kept dead for this long who was considered a Top Tier X-Man. And since we’re finally getting the latter, it seems, now I have to look at what we know of Young Jean and consider my feelings all over again. And this primer gave me the opportunity to do just that!

While I’m not following Jean’s book at the moment, I’m obviously a pretty big X-fan so I have a general sense of where all the moving pieces are at the moment. And I have to say, with Older Jean returning it’s going to be a pretty awesome time for comparing and contrasting their characters and relationships. After all, this younger Jean is far, far less experienced than her counterpart, but has a peripheral knowledge of her own fate, and as much as she tries to not be defined by it, it’s been defining her in the opposite direction in a sense. And more than that, she’s a Jean who sees the Phoenix Force not as an asset or a tool, but sees it as an honest to god enemy, which I’m not sure how that will work. And I’m even more interested in Jean’s return now because of the possibilities of their interactions with the Force together. 

Guess we’ll wait and see!

Marvel’s Monsters Unleashed - Marvel Legacy Primer Pages (2017-present)  Robbie Thompson, David Baldeón

I have actually been planning for a little while now to pick up the trade of Monsters Unleashed because I had fun with the miniseries earlier this year and I have been craving more Elsa Bloodstone (as well as the entirety of the Nextwave crew) and this seems like one of the more interesting powers to come from the Inhuman collision.

.... Actually it’s completely stolen from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic and later adapted TV episode dedicated to Jack Kirby who had the power of creativity to draw and create anything he drew and also had a a penchant for creating monsters and different worlds and so on. So I mean. There’s that unavoidable fact. But Kei’s cute so I’d be willing to overlook it for the sake of seeing what Marvel plans on doing with this very wild and unruly power. 

Dark Horse’s Usagi Yojimbo (1984-present) #162 Stan Sakai, Tom Luth

The conclusion of Usagi and Inspector Ishida’s investigation about the doctors’ murders has come and the hilarity of Kitsune and Kiyoko bumbling along with them and incidentally becoming crucial to the entire investigation does not lose its edge either.

Story: The conclusion of this particular caper is interesting mostly in how the framing by coincidence is not ultimately a linchpin to the story, having been solved almost immediately in the story’s first issue. The inventiveness of Sakai’s work, overall, is simple subterfuge which continues to make each new adventure feel unique and uncertain. In this instance, it would be in the assistance that Kitsune and Kiyoko end up providing by revealing the true murderer almost by accident. 

That being said, as simple as individual stories are for Usagi Yojimbo, the complexity really rests in the margins for long time fans, and that shows most clearly in the way a quiet buildup of several arcs seem to flow together for coming to a head. Perhaps the most famous and arguably best all around example of this would be in “Grasscutter” and how years of storytelling and slow vignettes linking together culminated in one of the greatest comic storylines of all time. We seem to be getting something similar in the backgrounds of more recent adventures with this guild of assassins which Usagi has unknowingly crossed the path of and caused ire to several times at this point. 

I’m excited to see where that story is taking us, and likewise interested in how little details, like Kiyoko successfully pickpocketing Inspector Ishida, will pay off down the road. 

Lion Forge’s Voltron Legendary Defender Vol. 2 (2017) #1 Tim Hendrick, Mitch Iverson, Jung Gwan Yoo, Ji-in Choi

Egghhhhh. Are you ever really rooting for something against your own common sense and get bit in the butt regardless? I feel like that happens to me on an inconceivably high average and almost all of it can be blamed on the fact that for some reason I am still expecting comics to play fairly with me. If anything my standards should be lower by now. But, well, let’s see if I’m being a bit too harsh on Lion Forge’s second effort in making a Voltron comic. 

Story: I would argue that one of the reasons that I had unreasonably high expectations for this comic is in part because the first comic produced by Lion Forge had actuallymanaged to not only be a fairly solid effort as a comic but managed to capture the spirit of the current Dreamworks Netflix series in a wa that was welcoming to fans new and old, and importantly of all ages. So I was hoping for more of the same with this comic project.

In more or less words... I did not exactly receive that. Where there was a solid read of the characterizations in the last comic, this issue showed a severely flattened to the point of parody version of the paladins, especially poor Hunk here who had the already obnoxious and unnecessary fat jokes and food jokes from the series amped up to the point of being his only characteristic in this comic. To the point that at one point he doesn’t even form a full sentence, just grabs a pie successfully from a training maze and says “Hunk win”. Which... I guess is somewhat better faring than the other paladins who didn’t even have dialogue that really fit them. Save for Pidge who was likewise flattened to “the smart one.” 

The storyline itself of a new planet where Voltron is needed but the species they end up helping... they actually fail initially, I won’t lie, is a pretty solid premise for Voltron overall, and would be something I’d love to see the show tackle similarly, but the fairly generic wolf-furry aliens didn’t receive a whole lot of depth in this first issue. 

Depth trended on being the biggest problem for this issue overall. There wasn’t an examination of the characters and their interactions, how they treated each other and how they tackled problems differently. The sort of things you’d want from an ensemble cast like Voltron. Which is surprising since again the first series by Lion Forge managed all that and was written on a much younger reading level at the same time. Each issue tackled exactly those very things -- individual characters, how they functioned in the group, and how they tackled obstacles differently to find a solution together. I would expect the same here but it didn’t seem to be on the menu. 

Hopefully all of this will be addressed and fixed as the comic progresses, but as for now I’m apprehensively putting this series on my three issue trial run. 

Art: The art was not a great improvement on the previous comic but it also wasn’t bad in the least. In fact I think the art popped very well, adjusting colors and textures about as well as you’d expect from a television show adaptation for kids. I do wish that the face models for the paladins would keep more consistent and overall there was a rushed feeling to the comic that seemed fairly unnecessary considering it’s the first issue. 

Viz’s Yona of the Dawn (2009-present) Vol. 8 Mizuho Kusanagi

You know, I keep hearing over and over again from friends and trusted sources that Yona of the Dawn is a series that will continuously subvert my every expectation and make me continue guessing and yet every volume I really do manage to be caught off guard by something which the story chooses to do which is shockingly poignant and new even to its fairy tale epic adventure structure. 

Story: So the Yellow Dragon joining the group was hilariously and purposefully anti-climactic but what we got as a result of that choice is the new direction for the series that ties directly into Yona’s own self-realization. She doesn’t simply want to rule and she doesn’t simply want to conquer. What she wants is to know her people and to save them from the crises that were overlooked by her father before her and by Su-Won now. She wants to take up arms to protect the entire country not just with the power of the loyal followers she has gained but with her own hands. She is something that neither of the kings -- her father or her cousin -- could have ever dreamed of being.

And then my expectations were really taken for a loop by us then in turn following Su-Won as he travels to the Earth Tribe and earns the respect and allegiance of the chieftan general there through a series of manipulations, tactical conceits, and ultimately quiet and subtle intimidation mostly by the fleeting moments in which he dropped his ditzy and well-meaning act to show his true intentions. But as fascinating as it was and as surprising as it was, for me at least, that this complete shift of POV for a few chapters actually managed to keep me on board when I’m not one to often fully appreciate the “villain’s side of things”, probably the most interesting part of any and all of this is actually how much tension is underlying Su-Won’s leadership. HIs appeal to the Fire and Earth Tribes is less in the leadership that he promotes and more in this current of possible warmongering that appeases the more warlike fractions of Kohka. 

It’s all fascinating and offers a sense of danger in Yona’s new quest to help the people of fher country feel a new sense of danger, knowing that our group is ultimately pretty unprepared for helping parts of the country which would not be as receptive to their quest or the offer of Yona’s leadership.

That being said... the final chapter driving home Yona’s relationship with Hak and everyone’s strange obsession with protecting Yona but rejecting her attempts to grow her own strength and independence. Lik eI guess we’re just all going to overlook the way she killed the slave trader mob boss in teh previous volume. But beyond all of that, my real concern is just... I cannot stand the way Hak’s character is portrayed in his “over protectiveness” of Yona. It’s far from romantic to me to continuously have a character obsess over someone to the point of “jokingly” considering locking them away for the world to see. 

It’s not the best issue of the series by far, but it has some great moments, especially for Yona.

Art: I actually do think that the further we’ve come in this comic, the more consistent and confident the at has gotten. There are still lots of soft tones and all the markings of a usual shoujo, but the real stand out this time around is that we’re beginning to see more and more the variation in ethnicities in the people of the country, which is honestly relieving even if for now the Earth Tribe, which drives that point home, consists mostly of Su-Won’s supporters and may carry with them some more unfortunate stereotypes being fed that I might not be aware of as a non-native to Japan.

So far as single issues this week are concerned there’s really no competition for Usagi Yojimbo in a regular week but especially not in a fairly light week. Yona is still a fantastic book and if there were other trades to compare it to I’d probably lavish on it more, but since we’re on singles I have to give this one to the unending quality that is Stan Sakai’s anthromorphic feudal epic.

And, once more, I am in a bit of a financial crunch for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which being the medical bills I’m paying for my dog, Eve, who experienced a catastrophic dog fight and underwent surgery recently. On top of that, I have exactly a month and a half to pack up everything I own and move halfway across the country again which is not helping those financial crunches I mentioned before either.

As such, I really would appreciate if you enjoy my content or are interested in helping me out, please check out either my Patreon or PayPal. Every bit helps and I couldn’t thank you enough for enjoying and supporting my content.

You could also support me by going to my main blog, @renaroo, where I’ll soon be listing prices and more for art and writing commissions.

RenaRoo Ko-Fi

RenaRoo Patreon

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[mysteryunfold]

The Present Paradise (Asra x MC)

(A/N: Can also be read on Wattpad)

As the humdrum hours passed, the minutes seemed to get longer for Channah.  Only the clatter of the doorbell announcing the arrival of a customer stirred the musty stillness.  Elbows supporting her, Channah leaned over the counter engrossed in an open book.  The page contained a diagram of the human body.  "Illness, including hysteria, is caused by an unbalance of blood, phlegm and bile."  She read the explanation, her brow scrunching in a thoughtful disagreement.  

Picking up charcoal, she wrote in the margin, "Illness can be rooted in emotional pain from the past.  The origins are not just physiological."  She looked at her note and snorted in disapproval.  Her sloppy letter smudged the charcoal into illegible lines.  At a rapid pace, Channah had regained her language and her grasp on concepts of magic, but her kinetic abilities came back slower.

"Perhaps physical motion is more concrete so it is linked more to the memory."  Her mentor explained after a headache formed due to a frustrating bought with crystals.  "Trying common physical patterns that were a part of your life is scratching at your memories.  And we know that doing that causes you headaches."  His voice remained soft and comforting, but his facial expression hardened in contemplative thought.

Channah drummed her fingers as her mind drifted to her frequent headaches.  She knew her headaches did not come from an imbalance of liquids in her body.  "I always considered mine rooted in some magic blocking me from accessing my memories, but," Channah muttered to herself, eyes widening to the thought, "what if headaches are caused by my current emotional distress over that void or even some past pain?"  

Picking up the small bag beside her, Channah pulled out a leather journal.  She turned to an empty page and wrote, "I always thought that magic was the root of my headaches, but what if they were caused from my emotional pain?  Talk to Asra about this.  If my hunch is true, we could have a lead in how to regain my memories back.  When my headaches are gone, then I can work on remembering again."

She flipped her journal closed and placed it back into her knapsack.  Turning back to her book, she heard the low hum of voices from the backroom.  She tuned her ears to their words, but she could not recognize who spoke.  As she tried to listen, she imagined her master sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading maybe tea leaves, or crystals or even his trusted cards.  Across from him, she pictured the newly wedded client, trying to catch Asra's eyes, her wedding ring hidden in her coin purse.

Channah sniggered at the image.  "Oh Asra," she mocked, "always catching the town's eye, young, old, male or female.  It doesn't matter."

"He certainly caught your eye."  Channah's smirk fell at the invasive thought.  Blushing, she focused her attention back on her reading.  The low of hum of voices brought the persistent image of Asra, bent over the table, looking at the cards with a concerned intent.  In Channah's imagination, he turned and looked at her.

She shut her book before she could complete her vision, a furious blush on her cheeks.  "I better check the time." She hissed to the stillness.  "Asra shouldn't be late for his next appointment." 

As she stepped out from the shop, the force of the sun pushed against her skin. The pressing heat heightened the bitter scent of mulch, manure and sewage.   A splatter impacted the ground behind her, and Channah tensed at the smell of new urine.  

"I am so sorry!" A female voice called out from above.  "I didn't see you walking there."

Channah looked upwards to see a middle-aged woman holding an empty bedpan.  The magician's apprentice forced a smile.  "It's alright," she called up.  "How is your father doing, by the way?"

"He's not doing better and he is not doing worse."  The woman said.  "His sickness still keeps me at his bedside, most days.  I can hardly tell the hours apart."

Channah gives a curt wave to head off.  "I am next door if you need anything.  I think we have some poppy seeds for his pain."

"Yes, thank you, Channah."  The apprentice started to leave, but the women continued talking.  "You know, it's been a long time since you have given readings.  Years, in fact.  I almost forgot that you used to do them, until my father told me of the wedding reading you gave him and mother."

Channah's heart twist at the mention of the past, but she did not stop her pace.  "You know sometimes I just forget things."  Still walking, Channah turned around. "Should I put the seeds on hold for you?  Are you coming around tomorrow?"

"Yes, thank you."  The woman waved.  "I am sure that will help my father.  Can I set up a reading with you as well?"

"Well, with Asra.  But, I am sure he has a free slot tomorrow."  Without another word, Channah turned into the privacy of the garden patio.

Although green plants brushed against her legs, the smells of the city did not disappear, nor did its fading ascetic. Houses and shops, once well manicured, faded as the economy struggled.  Strolling to the sundial in the middle, Channah plucked a mint leaf.  She grinded the leaf between her teeth as she read the sundial's shadow.  "It's only three o'clock." She muttered as she crossed her arms.  "There's two hours before Asra has to go out."   Channah sighed as her mind felt clouded.  

Her eyes wandered the garden as she plucked another mint leaf.  In a shaded corner, next to the ladder going up to the rooftop garden, she spotted her master's pillow nest.  She saw the outline of dirt on them; they needed to be washed soon.  Despite finding a new chore, a smile played upon Channah's lips.

"How does Asra relax out here?" She thought to herself.  "Coming out here suffocates me, but him, he sometimes sleeps out here for hours."  As a new thought swirled her head, Channah felt clarity and contentment.  "He can relax because he finds a paradise no matter where he is."  Channah nodded as she reminded herself to write down her thoughts later that night.

As her mind drifted, Channah also drifted away from the shop.  The town's alley ways crumbled underneath her scuffle, pebbles spraying in front of her.  As she walked, her shadow crossed over the peeling paint of houses.  The shadow's dark form caught her attention.  Each house it touched, Channah longed for her memory.  "Maybe, this could have been the house I grew up in."  Her shadow grew taller on another one.  "Or this, the color of the shingles looks somewhat familiar."  The dark figure than skipped over to the ruins of another.  Channah chased after her shadow, never able to hold a concrete form.

Her pursuit stopped when she saw children playing in the ally way.  Their laughter and fun drew Channah's attention.  "What was my childhood like?  Did I play on streets like this?" Her thoughts wondered.  "Or was I from a different part of the city?  Was I even born here?"  Almost in response to her questions, Channah felt the twisting of a headache.  She brushed her fingers against her temple.  It was time to go home.

As she turned to leave, she heard a small voice call out.  "Look it's the magician!"  At the declaration, whispers rose as the children gathered around Channah.   Before Channah could escape, little bodies surrounded her.

"Will you show us some magic?"  One boy with dark owlish eyes asked.  Affirmative cries rang out from the other children.

"Ah, she can't." A girl, taller than the rest of them, said.  "My dad tells me that she hasn't practiced in years."  The children's cheers turned into harsh whispers as the argued among themselves.  Their shouts pounded on Channah's head.

"Well, I think she can do it!"  the boy with the owl-like eyes yelled.  "My mother told me that she helped her heal her ankle one time.  Give her a chance!  I want to see magic!"

A fog rolled through the magician's mind.  Around eight pairs of eyes looked up at her, some pleading and eager, some skeptical.  Pushing the pain away, Channah knelt before the boy with owlish eyes.  She focused on the boy, but tried to see past his physical reality, seeing instead his memories and soul.

"If I amaze you with some magic, will you promise to let me go?"  She asked.  The boy and his friends nodded at her request.  As she spoke with him, Channah could feel her insight getting stronger.  Closing her eyes and leaning backwards, she reached out and touched his forehead.  At first, his inner being was obscured. Panic rising to her throat, Channah reached back to find her mentor's words.

"Don't panic.  Panic and fear strains and unfocuses your magic."  The sunlight was streaming down the back room, dancing in Asra's violet eyes.  Channah sat across from him, facing away from the sun.  "Just take some deep breathes.   Here, let's see if you can use your magic to see my day."  He touched Channah's wrist and guided it to his head.  "Just breathe your magic out, loosely now.  Take a deep breath, close your eyes and then you will see."  Asra's face morphed into the boy's inner spirit, and Channah felt her magic strengthening around the boy.

"Your name is Darius.   You live two houses down from here in an upper back bedroom.  You like maths at school but abhor reading.  You want to be a doctor when you grow older."  Channah then opened her eyes to see an astonished face.   "How did I do?" She said with a grin.

The boy's face lit up and so did the murmurs from his friends.  "Wow.  That was so cool.  Could you do another one?"

Channah then pointed two fingers from each hand to her head.  "Hmm, I am sensing something."   She said.  "I am sensing that your mother wants you and your sister home to help prepare dinner."

"Oh, come on."  Darius said.  "She never asks us to help-"

Right before he could finish his sentence, a woman's voice called his name.  "Darius and Patricia!" The call echoed through alley.  "Come right now.  Your grandfather is coming over, and I need your help peeling the apples."

The boy's astonishment brightened further.  Before he followed his sister home, he turned back to Channah.  "You're good."  He said with a smirk, and then he trotted back home.  

The other children chatted among themselves, arguing what they should ask the magician.   When they finally decided, they looked up to see she had gone.  The question where she had went lingered in their conversation for a few minutes, before they returned to their games.

Stumbling back onto the patio, Channah gripped onto the sundial.  She groaned under the weight of her headache.  Glancing up the sundial's shadow, she noted, "four o'clock." Eyes half-lidded, she stumbled over to Asra's pillow fort.   She sat down in shade; its coolness tempting her with relief but never fully offering it.  

With tears streaming down her eyes, she focused on her breathing.  She crafted her breath deeper and longer.  Although the pain remained, a distance grew between it and Channah.  She focused her attention on the flow of her body.  She heard Asra's faint voice guiding her.

"Where are you feeling anxiety?" His voice asked.

"Where I am feeling anxiety?"  She felt her intuition point out her upper back, her neck and her chest.  She heaved out a long breath.  "I release the anxiety."   The tension from those areas disappeared as they weaved out on her breath.

"Where am I feeling grief?"  As tears twisted out, Channah sensed a heaviness in her heart, her shoulders and her stomach.  She breathed out again.  "I release the grief."  A sense of relief washed over her.

"Are there any curses attached to you?  Have you cursed yourself today?"  Asra's faint voice pressed her to ask.

"Have I cursed myself today?"  As the question left her lips, images from the day entered her imagination.  Channah saw herself in the shop, blushing as she eavesdropped on Asra.  "I was ashamed because I thought I was shallow." When Channah confessed, she saw the image of her next-door neighbor above.  "I felt useless because I lack the abilities I once had."  As the tears grew longer on Channah's cheeks, she saw the circle of children around her.  "I was scared that I was going to under-performed or that I was not prepared enough."  

As she spoke out her last confession, a rush of energy sparked through her body. She shook. "Let the energy flow next." Asra's past teaching told her.  "Some experience it like a fire, some like a river.  Listen and experience.   Do not rush to the next step."

Feeling the flow of energy, Channah pictured an avalanche coursing through her.  She had never seen one in her life, or at least did not remember one, but the power they had in they had in adventurer's stories enthralled her.  She saw her energy moving through her like snow moved through the mountains, strong, determined, covering and changing everything in its path.  As her avalanche slowed to a stop, Channah felt in union with her body and spirit.  The headache still hovered, but it was dimmed.  

Before she could move onto the next step, Channah sensed a presence standing before her.  She peeled her eyes open with a groggy smile.  "Asra." She said with a contended sigh.

Her mentor smiled above her, but his eyes still shone concern.  "Another headache?"

Channah nodded.

"I see that you are on your last step.  I'm sorry for interrupting."  Asra blushed and shifted his gaze away.  "You don't need me to help you anymore."

Leaning over, Channah took his hand.  "You are right.  I don't need your help.  Dealing with this is almost second nature.  But-" She paused, and her smile grew wider.  "It would make me happy if you did the last part with me."

Asra's eyes widened as his smile became genuine.  Taking both Channah's hands, he sat down across from her.  "You were on the affirmations, right?"

With a nod from Channah, Asra relaxed.  As he breathed in, Channah closed her eyes.  "When I speak a truth about you, agree with it by claiming it for yourself."  He stated.  He paused to take in her restful profile.  

Softening his voice, he continued.  "You are capable."

Channah's nose scrunched.  "I am capable." She repeated with effort.

Asra moved closer to her.  "You are smart."

"I am smart." Channah stuttered over her words as she felt a tear fall from her eyes.

Asra wiped the tear away, his fingers drifting across her cheek.  "The past does not define me."

Channah straightened her back and hummed.  "The past does not define me."

"The present is enough."

"The present is enough."

"Your future is promising."

Channah sighed.  "My future is promising."

"You are healthy."

"I am healthy."

"You are whole."

"I am whole."

"You are safe."

"I am safe."  A faint smile rose above her discomfort.

"You are comforted."

"I am comforted."

"You are loved."  Asra squeezed both Channah's hands.  Laughing, Channah shifted her position so her leg stretched out past Asra.

"I am loved.

"And last but not least," Asra said with a smile.  "You belong."

Channah gave a contented sigh.  "I belong."  She opened her eyes to see Asra looking at her.   She blushed under his stare but felt joy lighting her heart. Pushing her feelings aside, she hugged him.  "Thank you, master."

Pressing closer to her, Asra laid his nose against her skin.  "For what, Channah?  I am only helping you do something that you can do yourself."  Channah felt his breath down her neck, and she relaxed at its warmth.

She pulled away from the embrace, but kept her arms around his neck.  "For everything.  You took care of me when I had no one else.  My first memory is with you.  You retaught me how to walk, talk, all the basic things that babes know.   You are teaching me how to heal.  You are reteaching me my livelihood.   You are helping me restore my life."

Playing with a loose strand of her silver hair, a pained look moved across his face.  "You shouldn't be thanking me for doing what you deserve.  Besides-" His features soften. "I am grateful that I am able to walk with you on this journey."  Channah kept smiling as she searched for words.  She stared in his eyes, but his expression distracted her more.  Right when she was about to open her mouth to speak, Asra broke the silence.  "Umm, would you mind if I gave you another hug?"

Channah laughed.  "Of course not.  Please, go right ahead."

At her permission, Asra gathered the apprentice into his arms.  Joy filled blushes colored both pairs of cheeks.  Feeling the warmth of his heart, Channah hummed in pleasure at its comfort.

When he pulled away, Channah leaned back against the shop.  The cool wall sent shivers down her spin.  "Well, the good news is that my headache is gone."  She said with a smirk.

Asra moved to sit beside her.  "As you get stronger they should attack you less.  You have made progress though.  You are healing faster than before."

Channah closed her eyes, enjoying the presence of the man beside her.  As they sat together in the quiet, a thought arrested Channah, and her eyes shot open.

"Asra!" She yelled, grabbing his arm.  "You have an appointment soon!"

Asra laughed as he touched her hand.  "There's no need to yell.  I am right here."

"But, but, don't you have to go soon?" Channah eyes were wide, and Asra moved closer to her.

"Perhaps."  He said in a whisper.  "But I am here with you now.  I may not be in the future, but I am here now.  I want to focus on this moment, the moment when we are together."

Channah fell back against the shop's wall.  Her swirling thoughts slowed down to a rest.   "Well, then, since we are together and have time.  Can you tell me a story of your travels?"  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Faust slithering down the ladder.  

"Of course.  I know someday you will be strong enough to travel but-"

"In the present, I am healing.  In the future, I will have my own experience, but in the present, here with you, I want to know your story."

Asra blushed as his eyes shone on Channah.  As he began his story, a gentle rhythm in his voice, Faust moved up his arm and around one of his shoulders.  She did not stop her travel until she passed by Channah's neck and hung there, her body coiled around both magicians.

Ears perked to Asra describing a pond that reflected one's true desires, Channah moved her gaze away from Asra and to the snake by her cheek.  She scratched underneath's Faust's chin, the snake's eyes narrowing in appreciation.   "So this is how Asra found his paradise." She thought to herself in between her mentor's words.  "He made his home where he was and worked with the circumstances given him."  For the first time that day, Channah felt happy.  Maybe she also found her paradise.    

[cilyhairstylist]

😭😍😱 episode 1 - SNOW GIRL | SECRETs OF A RESPECTABLE TOWN | ORIGINAL YOUBOOKY|

WARNING: this is a story about domestic violence, secrets, incest and crazy love. Romantic and disturbing. It's a reading for adult and guys from sixteen years old.

https://booky-italia.blogspot.it/

A story written by Ryan Shepherd

SNOW GIRL

Secrets of a respectable town

Preface:  Your start with your end.

“Close your eyes, my friend, and breathe very deeply. Imagine a different world from these days, so clouded by the cynical human grudge. Imagine being free and being able to fly across the pure simplicity of words and feelings. Imagine living passionately each moment of our survival. When you'll open your eyes again, promise not to forget the place where your mind has brought you... because if you did, it would mean you're not able to dream any more. And you know, dreaming is the most beautiful and tangible thing we can do.”

In that freezing winter morning, I understood deep-down that I had lost you forever. I remember snow dancing silently around you,

while falling gently. I remember everything being slowly covered by a pure and icy-cold white. Blurry and far images fluctuating in my mind as solitary ships in an icy-cold morning. It's been so many years since that day; maybe that's the reason why I can't remember it completely. I feel it vanishing little by little; I feel it dissolving just like the snow around you. You were so beautiful, so lively... And then him, the one who carried you away from your loved ones, away from me. I still miss you and I still wonder where are you now. If I ever knew it, I swear I'd run so fast that I'd tear apart violently the winds: I still miss your bright smile, your hands, the pieces of sky which replace your eyes. If only I hadn't hurt you so bad... I remember you were shattered, when you ran away from my house. I was the only one you ever trusted and I betrayed you, turning myself into a pathetic beast. You slammed the door impetuously, while I was sitting on the bed, staring desperately into space. In that moment, I couldn't realize that you were moving your latest steps on the snowy path away from my house. When I opted for running after you and apologizing, it was already too late.

That's it: the gentle dance of the snow. There it was, the pleasant dye which was covering everything with white. While your footsteps were covered and deleted little by little, you got in front of the one you really loved unconditionally, the only one for whom you could ever feel something of pure and authentic. Long since he needed just a gaze to succeed in enchanting you. You said you liked the sinister air you could breathe only around him and his stunning, inexpressive, blue eyes. I've loved you so much that I spent each moment of my existence bleeding for you, although I knew I could never have you. Idyllic love is a double-edged weapon: it falsifies reality, it compromises souls, it sets fire to your bowels with suffering feelings. I remember your disappointed look getting relieved when you met the man you loved. Not even all the pain I had caused you could discourage the love you felt for him. Then, there I stood, hidden in secret, while observing you and drowning in my grim love. The wind was interrupting your talk; I could only hear a few words he said: «Come with me. Leave any white thing is chasing

us... And love me forever» Come with me... You hinted me at his idea, before running away from me. You were running out of breath because of a stroke you did, when you told me he asked you to go away from our village with him. He even proposed to you. If only you had managed to keep yourself from telling me, from rejoicing... But our paths catastrophically interlaced, so that my dark and insane side overwhelmed you and just like a wave of incandescent lava it burned all the love you could feel for me, leaving you empty and lonely. If only I hadn't betrayed you, If only I hadn't hurt you so bad, you would have been still here. Your existence moved out of our snowy heaven for ever, and all you left me is a bitter awareness. Now, lying on this bare hospital bed, five years later your leaving, I recall all the beautiful things I've done in my life. Obviously, I still recall the moments we spent together, you and your charming ability to overwhelm anyone beside you. I get lost in the dark and abstract oblivion created by my closed eyes. I get far from reality, recalling our first meeting and each moment of our enchanted and miserable story. We were happy,

until I hadn't soiled in vermilion the deepest part of my frail and anxious soul for you.

Carry me away with you

September 20th, 2005

Time flows gently and silently over my beloved village, riding upon the cold wind in this Tuesday morning of September. Lightdark. That's the village's name. Legend has it a foreign bishop gave the town this name, during the darkest Middle Ages. Inhabitants of Lightdark, indeed, are characterized by this perpetual interior struggle between darkness and light: often these two sides of men blend so as to create a colourful shades of gray. Whether someone lives in Lightdark or not, inside of each of us there's not just good or evil, light or darkness: they both coexist in an odd balance inside everyone. The village where I live stands on a hill enclosed by thick forests. It faces mighty and huge mountains which hostilely and arrogantly obstruct the rosy dusk. Therefore, Lightdark is a never-never land: it actually exists, but nobody can see it; not even maps  show it. Also, this is the reason why many truck drivers get continually lost when they have to carry here necessaries. We don't regret the solitude, which characterizes our life in this village, encircled by majestic and imposing firs: thanks to this each of us can experience a natural life-style. People don't need anything more than what this place offers to its inhabitants, who can dream a different existence every time they want to.

The alarm rings in a sudden haste, waking me up from a long and full of content images night. I rub my sleepy eyes, then I turn to watch the clock: it's 8.30 am. so I close my eyes again just for a few moments, before opening them back soon after. I stare at the boards supporting the ceiling. It's just the beginning of a new high-school day. It would have been a day in the life, if I hadn't been turning 20 years old. Just now I'm able to realize how time is passing by so quickly. I'm getting older every day, without realizing it properly and, what's more, soon I'm becoming an adult. Today I'm leaving behind my teen-years, turning twenty...

I'd like to rest a little more in bed, letting myself go through these apparently rambling thoughts, but as soon as I hear my mom's voice – as respectable as an opera singer – I decide it's really time to get out of my bed, covered with cobalt blue. I sit on my bed, placing my feet on the bright and shiny hardwood floor, while looking for my soft and yellow slippers. After wearing them and stretching my back, I go to the cheerful kitchen downstairs, where I find my little brother sitting down on his favourite chair, as always, while eating star-shaped cocoa cookies with milk and egg yolk. My mother says it's an energizing and helpful mixture to get through the cold weather. Unluckily, cold winter is coming up again. Lightdark is covered with snow for most part of the year. While summer is leaving and is making room for the cold autumn, pure white clouds bringing snow will cover again this village and I'll cheer up thanks to their usual work. That's true: I adore everything around me. I'm similar to an old tree which got rooted in his birthplace.

I briefly look out of the streamed up window and I notice old houses' roofs and green gardens

covered by drew points, under the bright grey sky. «Happy birthday, my boy» my mother says, drawing my attention. «You're becoming a man». She nods towards my cup of hot barley coffee. As soon as I'm about to sit down, she kisses my cheek warmly. I smile. «Thanks, mum» I say, then, looking at her. «I just hope to become a sensible man». «My boy, no one ever is» she replies, unexpectedly apprehensive. «Being judicious is something hardly anybody knows what really means. That's why it's hard to become truly sensible. Getting old doesn't mean becoming mature, intelligent or right-thinking. You'll make mistakes, my son, and you'll have to pay for it. Everyone at your age has got through it» I listen to her words which seem to be a little bitter, while drinking my hot barley coffee. «Really? Then, why you and dad seem to be so sensible?» I ask her, with curiosity. She starts cutting the soft home-made bread to prepare my snack for school, while she answers: «Well, maybe we seem to be so right-thinking because we've already made our mistakes...» I hope she's not talking about the fact she got

pregnant of me when she was eighteen. She had to run away from her parents' house, because of her pregnancy. Her parents live in the south of the country and she always describes them as a typical narrow-minded couple. I've never known them and, probably, it's better this way. Thinking about it, my parents didn't have an easy life: they made their mistakes, probably because of their lack of sensibility. Despite this, they found here in Lightdark the needed peacefulness and tranquillity. Snow acted like a cure for their wounded hearts.

My dad fell in love with my mother when he went living in the south of the country, during the years in which he did military service. They had to escape because of her unexpected pregnancy, but once they got here, my dad's parents welcomed them with open arms. They live a few houses down from our home, and I usually spend enough time with both of them: I admire their wisdom and their empathy. I find it really helpful to dialogue with them: they're able to calm my rebelliousness. I finish my barley coffee and put the empty cup on the ovoid table. I look briefly at my little

brother, who's still eating his star-shaped cookies. I smile toward him, stimulated by his tender and amusing face. He's got curly and blonde hair, similar to an arid bush; his eyes are dark brown: he totally looks like daddy, no doubt about it. He's only five years old, but he's quite intelligent for his age: he can perfectly deal with our computer and can perfectly access to everything through passwords. «Hey, Michael» I tell him, while ruffling softly his hair. «Make sure you'll be careful with my computer» He nods, smiling and looking at me. The cookie he's eating now stained his lips with chocolate. I stretch my arms, before going back to my room and getting ready to go to the haughty highschool. It would be nice if today something of unexpected prevented me from studying. Who knows, maybe something or someone will show up – or, at least, I hope so...

By the way, as every single day I take my roving rattletrap to go to Leto's railway station. Leto is a village slightly bigger than Lightdark and to get to school I usually need to get the train there.

I park Mr. Rattletrap, an old Fiat Uno which most of the times breaks up and leaves me on my feet. I lock the car and run into the little station, before discovering that the train is delayed as always. Great. I'll be late at school also today. The same school where I've already failed two times... I can only wait in silence, in front of the empty rail. I start walking back and forth to avoid further freezing. I've learned how to partly defeat cold thanks to the weather of the hill where Lightdark is placed. All of a sudden, I stop and my eyes set on the rails free from the snow as I realize there's something strange wavering around here. My gaze becomes consciously suspicious. I must admit that until now my intuition has always been infallible: indeed, everything around me seems like it's following an intriguing and arcane symphony. Suddenly, wind starts blowing heavily, hitting my face and shaking my long and curly hair. I'm forced to close my eyes because of the violence of the cold wind, but when I open them again that's it: I see you for the first time. You are the one who I'll have learned to love more than myself, thereafter.

You're just arrived to the railway station and you look around confused and insecure. Your bobbed hair, dyed in firecracker red, stands out in the station covered by the white snow. Though we're far enough, I can notice your big blue eyes: both beautiful and lost. You're that sort of new attraction which draws the attention of my soul. I'm sure you had never been here, because otherwise I would have noticed you at first sight. You're one of the most precious darlings I could have ever found, just like a ruby. For a few minutes you keep staying where you are, still, without moving nor narrowing the gap between us. You don't seem to be bothered by the cold, even though you wear just a jeans jacket and summer trousers. Damn, compared to you, I look like a roll, in my scarf, cotton gloves, a sweatshirt and a double-bedded jacket to hold as much heat as possible. And finally, you move, after having been so still for a while: the cold temperature forces you to rub your hands very quickly, while letting mist out of your mouth. Then, all of a sudden you stop and turn, looking at me with a strange frown. No doubt about it: you have something to ask me. You turn the other way, while outside it's snowing

again. You put your hands in your pockets and at last you move towards me, biting your lips delicately. As you get closer, I turn back to you and crack a smile, while looking at you carefully. You look so sweetly frail and insecure; it's clear you're trying to be brave to talk to me. «Excuse me». That's it. I can read the uncertainty in your eyes. «I'm looking for a place... but... well, I don't know how to get there.» Your voice is so delicate and fine, your pure white skin flawless. The blue in your eyes seems to be stolen from a faraway sea. Oh boy, I'm adoring your good features, your high cheekbones. Also, I'm quite pleased you're shorter than me – therefore, at first sight you must be five feet six. «Which place?» I ask, both kindly and firmly self-confident. You look away from me for a moment, because it clearly makes you uncomfortable talking to me. Godness, you look so lovely when you blush. «It's a small village...» you murmur and it's like you don't want to say anything else. «Which village?» I ask, then. «Lightdark, the snowy hill's village» I crack another smile, as I think that this must be

a fate's trick. Then, I look at you, pleased. «What a coincidence: I live just there. I got to Leto because I've to take the train... You know, school» What an idiot! At first, your face suddenly lights up, when you got that I live in Lightdark, but when I went on talking you grow sad, faking a smile and asking with kindness: «Well, do you know how to get there, by chance?» and then, looking around quickly: «I can't see any bus or taxi, you know...» «I'm sorry, but the only bus who gets to Lightdark stops to this station at eleven in the morning» I can see your sorrow because of that news. Despite the roof of the station can protect us from the snow falling down, cold rules the air unperturbedly and stings violently our bodies. You look at your watch. It's nine o'clock and you should wait two ours here, before taking the bus to Lightdark. Then, after biting again your lips, you move back, saying: «Thank you so much for the information, I'll wait till then» While I answer politely and sadly «you're welcome» you turn your back on me and go to the gloomy lounge, sitting on the only one bench and regretting the absence of any radiator. People, who are not used to this, can be upset by

discovering the poverty of godforsaken places. Time goes by, and after thirty minutes I start not feeling my legs any more because of the furious cold. By the time it's too late and the train is not likely to arrive any more: at last, I've found an excuse to play truant. So, I decide to join you in the lounge, saying: «It's cold... Really cold» Maybe, this isn't the best I could say; your eyes are on me, making me feel nervous, therefore I stutter: «You know, it's cold and late, and probably the train is not going to arrive this morning» You crack a smile in silence, before staring into space. «I'm going back home, in Lightdark.» Hearing this, your attention is completely focused on me. I enthusiastically recognize you're wishing I offer you a lift. «But, how are you getting there if there's no public transport?» you ask impatiently. It's clear curiosity has tied up your heart. «I have a car, in the park» «Oh, and... Could you-» «Could I give you a lift? Yeah. Sure. Do you trust me?»

You nod, standing up quickly. All of a sudden, you're in front of me and you look lighted up by happiness. «Yeah. I think I trust you...» you say in the end, making me already cheerful. I nod you to follow me, adding a joyful: «Let's go, then» Meeting you this way is probably the best present Fate could ever give me.

TO BE CONTINUED....

Do you want to buy the book? Click here⛆⛄⛄

[archivesdiveronarpg]

Congratulations, LOLA! You’ve been accepted for the role of ROSALIND. I have waited for my small, fighty daughter for so long -- and now you have absolutely blessed Diverona with her. Lola, I am completely and utterly over the moon with this all; from the interview, to the future plots, to the para sample, and the headcanons that detail her facets and characteristics perfectly. Ramona is, perhaps, one of my absolute favorite characters with her tongue-in-cheek humor and her need to fight with every breath that she takes. Bless you for bringing Ramona to the dash! I can’t wait to see what trouble she stirs up and what trouble she is bound to get into! Please read over the checklist and send in your blog within 24 hours.

Out of Character

Alias | Nicola / Lola (’ello, it’s me, i’m weak af)

Age | 21

Preferred Pronouns | she/her

Activity Level | I go to university three times a week and am currently looking into getting a part time job plus my own rp project is soon to open but I always try to check in at least once a day unless I am not physically capable of it whatsoever — and, in all honesty, if I really vibe with a group, I become embarrassingly obsessed and will just be around during all my waking hours pretty much.

Timezone | GMT+1

Triggers | none, actually c:

Permission | Sure, I don’t mind!

Current/Past RP Accounts | oh god I have so many that I’ll just go with the most recent ones, this smol son of mine & this fierce daughter of mine whom I only got to play briefly but there’s a nice lengthy writing sample under the diary tab of her navigation!

In Character

Character | Rosalind — also known as Ramona Marlena Aguilar

What drew you to this character? | The first thing about her that caught my eye was her attitude — seizing the day, fighting back even when the odds aren’t in your favour, never caving in because the very act of living has so much left to offer you. I love that she hasn’t allowed her grief to define her but has clung to her rebellious mindset despite (or perhaps because of) the obstacles thrown in her path, even in times when she might have been better off becoming the submissive little girl she could never stomach being. To me, she feels like a free spirit but not the spacey, reckless kind without a care in the world. Instead, she perfectly combines this aspect of her personality with ambition, determination and endurance which could one day get her far should she stick to them.

What is a future plot idea you have in mind for the character? | I would hope for Ramona to keep her spirits and carry on fighting her way through the tragedy of her life with her focus set solely on a positive outcome, never risking a glance back at the dilemmas of the past. In terms of plots, I hope she can have, in correspondence to my earlier elaborations, mostly — but not only —positive development. (I’ve honestly been dreading this part a little and procrastinating it until I ended up kind of researching past events and kindly getting fed some inside info on recent happenings so I’m really sorry if it’s a total mess but I had very honourable intentions??)

1. Increased ambition. With the sudden collaboration between Capulets and Spades, I can see Ramona’s will to fight being at an all-time high, her eagerness exemplary and dedication to the Montagues’ cause admirable, verging on (perhaps) ever so slightly obsessive. In times like this, she will be looking to prove herself both to herself and to her superiors in hopes of her efforts paying off and there being a higher rank within the organisation she now views as a substitute family but would like to have a little more say in in her future  — unsurprisingly, considering Rosalind famously happens to be Shakespeare’s female character with the most lines.

2. Increased concern. After the fiasco at The Dark Lady earlier in the month, Ramona can’t seem to shake a certain feeling of discomfort looming in the pit of her stomach when she isn’t sure about Valentina’s whereabouts, her friend’s life having as much value to her as her cousin’s at this point, both of them much more valuable than her own about which she rarely worries — after all, she has always pulled through so far. With the enemy growing stronger, I could see her concern for her closest friends growing larger, eventually spanning the grand majority of the mob. While the role of the mother hen may or may not suit her, she surely shouldn’t forget to keep looking out for herself for no one has any use for a dead protector.

3. Increased sense of self. Albeit lacking blood relation, Ramona has always viewed herself, first and foremost, as an Aguilar, and deemed the family as good as holy, their cause and intent always, without exception, matching her own, transforming her into merely a puzzle piece needed to complete the bigger picture. In interplay with her carpe diem mantra, I would love for her to put more thoughts into her individuality, which she does claim to value greatly but nevertheless pushes aside with ease in hopes of it being beneficial for the others. Perhaps she could come in touch with her roots or simply take a little time to ponder what she wants out of life for herself and not just the mob, to find a goal other than staying alive and to actually live every day to its fullest which I don’t think she has fully achieved quite yet for it is certainly a task much easier said than done.

In Depth

What is your favorite place in Verona? | A coy grin took a hold of her lips, orbs formerly described as doe eyes by her late father exhibiting a fiery glimmer, unmistakable proof of wildness untamed beneath the surface. Countless options shot through an alert mind at the speed of light, some of which turned the corners of plump lips further skywards; strange concepts of a past long behind her. Quiet places, the right location for a nobody to morph seamlessly into the crowd, often recommended to her when the city was still as foreign to her as she was a stranger to it. The Capital Library of Verona, the silent façade a cover for the organisation that should turn out to be her destiny, bearing the possibility of premature membership had she taken this well-intended advice. The elegantly educational confines of the Twelfth Night Museum, strictly honourable by day to make up for the debauchery unfolding in its upper realms night after night. The Castelvecchio Bridge she loved to cross consciously in the company of mindless pedestals, fur-clad paws of her tiny companion slowing their pace as they sensed the danger in the air she thrived on. Countless options, only one would be revealed. “Since I first heard of it, I was fascinated by the concept of a nightclub in a museum. In fact, I used to take it for a wild fabrication of someone trying to screw me over when I was first told about it.” Soft laughter scattering in varying directions with every shake of her head. “The initial bewitchment of the Tempest Lounge has faded, of course, but I still like going there just the same. It’s the kind of place where you can truly lose yourself for a bit and we all deserve a break from our woes and worries every once in a while.”

What does your typical day look like? | Briefly pursed lips, accentuating a tentative expression, soon opened again with delight, some of her daily rituals evidently close to her heart. “First of all, I wake up. Obviously. Before I do anything else, I take a few minutes to meditate; align myself with the universe or whatever you want to call it. Tell myself it’s going to be a day worth living, you know? Then I have a quick breakfast — I’m not really the type to lounge around for hours before I do anything productive — and make myself look just presentable enough to walk Persephone. After that, I usually pop in at our headquarters, or wherever else I’m supposed to meet with someone, to see what needs to be taken care of. I’m not very fond of always having a perfectly thought out plan when there isn’t any need for one so I just take it as it comes, hence once there’s nothing to do for me anymore I just try to make plans with Valentina or Castora or stroll around for a while or have a nice evening in with the dog.” A nonchalant shrug. “Whatever the day ends up having in store for me, I take it — unless it’s a shitty offer, of course.”

What are your thoughts on the war between the Capulets and the Montagues?

“I consider it a necessary evil,” Ramona noted matter-of-factly, features hardened to an extent they bordered on neutral unreadability. “There’s always going to be bloodshed in this world, especially in this city. Someone is always looking to screw someone else over, even if it’s just two cockroaches. There’s no such thing as peace and harmony in a place like this and conflict is inevitable, no matter what the motives. It’s either the Capulets or the Spades or the two of them combined or some other leech trying to creep up our leg and suck on as much of our blood as they can before they’re being squished. That’s just the way this wicked game called life is played. As long as you keep fighting,” she shrugged, “you’re doing it right. And none of us should ever cease to fight. They asked for it.”

In-Character Para Sample:

“For fuck’s sake, where the hell are they?!”

Aggravated stomps carried a petite frame through the living room straight to the bedroom, prompting a tiny ball of white and grey fur to hop onto the bed in agony, shelter found on top of the covers. It’s a rare occasion in which one can witness Ramona losing her temper to this extent over something of so little significance but when the time has come, she is set off by even the smallest inconvenience that stands between her and a good time. In this particular scenario, the pair of earrings she was set on wearing tonight was the insufferable offender, whereabouts currently unknown, no sign of life provided. Behind her laid a trail of doom, chaos lining the lingering shadow of her steps, a freshly cleaned up flat transformed into a war zone within ten minutes or less. Thus far untouched, the bedroom was soon to follow the example set by its neighbouring localities, the first step to uncleanliness being the rummaging through drawers of her vanity the woman would have loved to simply pull out, their contents to be carelessly scattered on the floor — but her chance was missed the moment her fingertips brushed against the silk surface of a small pouch stored at the back of the first drawer, leaving her frozen mid-motion. Slowly, with extraordinary care, the unexpected meaningful discovery was retrieved with trembling hands, widened pupils settling on the fabric as though they were focusing on a dreamlike vision, her grip on reality lost once and for all.

Dumbstruck, the brunette plopped down on the chair strategically placed behind her, nails dug deeply into a token of her past she had believed to have vanished, a keepsake nearly forgotten. Deep breaths. In and out. Inhale. Exhale. Lids fluttered as she concentrated on her breathing, her increased heart rate only slowing down reluctantly. What shocked her the most, more than stumbling upon this little memento, is the shock itself. Wasn’t she supposed to be over it, the girl who lived, the girl who left her past behind along with the pain it caused her? Then why did a tied up pouch clasp her throat so tightly she feared she might choke any second now? Because she knew all too well what treasures it bore, stored within its hidden confines in a haste without a second look or thought, to be dug up nevermore.

Yet nevermore had come upon her, not the most unlikely guest considering the languid measures she had taken to prevent it from returning to her doorstep; measures she had taken because deep inside, the notion locked within her heart’s chambers, she knew all too well that one day, she would want them back in her line of sight: items she could no longer refrain from revealing if she was ever to regain her peace of mind. A gentle tug on the woven string, the innocent prisoners practically breaking out without further ado, gathering atop the vanity’s stark white surface.

A pendant sans its chain, shaped like an owl, its wise eyes staring back at her uneasy expression caught her attention first, pointer tracing its outline. This one she was given by her father, his pupils clouded with paternal concern. “Now, you’re a wise girl, Ramona. As wise as an owl, aren’t you? So please,” he had implored her, “please do me a favour and act like it.” A statement that could have easily triggered offence and, alas, it did for a few fleeting moments long since lost in time, but the addressed could only still hold onto it fondly, the memory of the encounter blurrier than she had hoped it would be. These should be the last words directed at her to drip from the man’s lips, his passing inevitable and to set in merely two days later. Pursed lips gathered at the corner of her lips in a soft frown. At least she hadn’t completely let him down. Granted, her way vastly differed from his but, in her eyes, she has been wise. A wise girl making wise decisions, finding herself a new home and purpose in a world of exaggerated cruelty.

Next came a marble seemingly made of its name twin so delicately painted, once her brother’s most prized possession in days of infantile innocence far away from this city’s shameful alleys he had given to her with a heavy heart full of love, the final seal of approval ending a rite of initiation as his sister. Oh, how she craved to regain the lightness of being they both possessed then, irrevocably lost the instant their soles touched Italian ground. “Relax,” he had sneered down the line, the connection wavering along with his voice. “You’re taking things way too seriously. If you go on like this, you’ll end up just like dad.” Only that he would be the one to end up like their father, finding eternal rest beneath the soil within the same month, she had begun to fear while he hadn’t anticipated it in the slightest.

Last but not least, an almost cruelly ironic jest. A pair of hoop earrings, worn by her mother when she was nothing more than a toddler wrapped up in her arms, in such impeccable condition they looked unworn, as had all of the woman’s possessions. “You’ll be good, won’t you, baby?” She had crooned, exhaustion oozing from every widened pore of her poisoned body, a layer of cold sweat glistening on dull skin. “You’ll live a good life full of happiness. Don’t you ever let sadness pull on your heartstrings for too long.” Advice given to a girl so young she lacked the capacity to follow it immediately but she had remembered it, word for word, clung onto it in desperation and embraced it with a slight delay, just in time for it to become her saving grace.

The electronic ‘ping’ of her phone, urging to be taken out of her pocket, broke the eerie silence that had been threatening to swallow her whole, chasing away the tears she was forbidden from shedding, the faint hint of a smile taking ahold of her lips as she spied Castora’s name on the screen.

“Still coming?! Valentina says to tell you she’s freezing her ass off in an accusing tone.”

A soft sigh, a newly found warmth triggered by relief flooding her body within moments. Her fingers typed at the speed of light, features softening at long last. “Five minutes. I got held up.” For there was no chance in hell she would allow for this to be what had last been directed at her by either of the women who gave her a reason to willingly get up in the morning. Two of the three tokens were gently replaced where they belonged — the third was to adorn their heiress tonight, once more possing as the solution to a problem at hand.

“Never, mama.” A quiet whisper drowned out by the nightly breeze. “Not as long as I can fight it.”

Extras: I’ve made her a little mock blog right here c:

HEADCANONS

CLOSE TO THE HEART:

• There’s a certain silver necklace Ramona is not likely to be caught not wearing, an amethyst pendant the star of the show, one of the few heirlooms passed onto her by her late mother she managed to hold onto after the move to Verona. In fact, she wears it with such routine that she feels uneasy without it either being around her neck or at least in her bag.

• Her dog Persephone joined her minimalistic family set up about a year and a half ago, a malnourished stray running into her near Castelvecchio by sheer luck or twist of fate. Knowing all too well how helpless and hopeless the little furball, presumably a Maltese mixed with some breed or other, had to feel, Ramona didn’t have the heart to leave her behind. Her name is her new owner’s way to make final amends and peace with death, in this case the underworld, after her frequent encounters with it.

• Although she has long given up on Christianity, if anything considering herself Wiccan, she regularly visits her father’s and brother’s grave, never without a token of her affection in tow. Usually, she spends thoroughly silent moments there, her form of communication with the deceased mutely mental unless she is extraordinarily distressed — then the emotional rants may very well unfold.

INTERIOR AND EXTERIOR:

• Staying in shape has always been important to her, her first regular workout being daily yoga sessions which she originally gave a try in hopes of it helping her become the quiet, calm woman who will under no circumstances stand out from the crowd her father hoped for her to transform herself into. While it failed to magically change her personality, it has helped her calm herself down and leaves her feeling centred and grounded, hence she still pursues it whenever she can. Once she realised that yoga didn’t have all desired effects on her, however, Ramona attempted kickboxing, hoping to achieve her goal with a rather clashing approach, which she immediately found herself enjoying. She has dabbled in various martial arts disciplines since but always finds herself in boxing gloves again sooner or later.

• It didn’t take long for Ramona to figure out that she was pansexual — in fact, she never had a true moment of realisation in that regard but accepted every form of attraction she has ever felt as factual and pleasant, meant to be if you will. Due to her lack of care for the concept of sexuality in itself, she never defines herself in any way, accidentally leaving even her friends in the dark about it only because she doesn’t consider it worth mentioning.

• If asked, Ramona would describe her clothing style as ‘functional 21st century Stevie Nicks’. Flowy, bohemian fabrics as light as Verona’s summer breeze are her wardrobe stable and what she is most likely to be seen wearing on a daily basis but she cleans up well and happily so, never underdressed for any occasion. Her hair she likes to keep in braids for the majority of the time but isn’t one to shy away from bolder moves, bleaching strands to douse in semi-permanent colourful dye or weaving in little accessories that best convey her current mood from time to time. In terms of makeup, she aims for a dewy, fresh-faced and rejuvenating look, her skin well moisturised and glowy, an artificial flush of life reviving her even after long nights and her eyes being the most accentuated feature, her mascara use heavy and her eyeliner look never being precisely the same the following day, if she uses it that day in the first place.