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entertainment · 4 years

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Entertainment Spotlight: Brandon Kyle Goodman

Brandon Kyle Goodman can currently be seen playing Deco in Netflix’s Feel the Beat, which follows a failed actress returning to her small hometown, who is roped into training a misfit group of young dancers for a big competition. Other acting credits include eager father-to-be Andy in Amazon’s Modern Love, as well as roles in People Just Do Nothing, Alive in Denver, Plus One, and Papi Chulo. Aside from acting, Brandon has found success as a writer for Netflix’s animated comedy series Big Mouth, which is set to return to Netflix in 2020 after an unprecedented three-season renewal. As a proud gay Black person, Brandon has recently emerged as a staunch advocate for the #BlackLivesMatter movement, actively speaking out against the injustices plaguing the African American community. He encourages his followers to donate to The Innocence Project, The Bail Project, NAACP, and Black Lives Matter.

What drew you to the role of brave, outspokenly queer Deco in Feel the Beat?

What drew me to the role was Deco’s fearlessness, as well as the movie’s choice to not center Deco’s story around his identity. He was allowed to be unapologetically queer without taking on an oppression-based narrative.

You are in the writing team for Netflix’s hugely successful Big Mouth. Can you tell us about how you got there and what it’s like writing for an animated series?

I was fortunate that the creators of Big Mouth considered reading a script of mine. We met a couple of times and discussed my experiences to determine if the writers’ room was the right fit. Thankfully it was and continues to be. Writing on an animated series like Big Mouth is truly a dream. It forces me to expand my imagination in a way live action doesn’t, while also strengthening my ability to tell impactful stories in new and exciting ways.

What inspired you to enter into the creative industries, and which came first for you—acting or writing?

I grew up with a minster for a grandmother and an actress for a mother, so creativity was ever-present in our household. More specifically, I watched two very talented women write for themselves. They blessed me with that tool. Even though I professionally started as an actor, as a middle schooler, my first love was writing. Acting soon followed. I’ve been fortunate to have many moments where they get to be linked together, and honestly, there’s nothing better.

You use your platforms to speak up and share your experiences as a Black person in America. Can you tell us a bit about how the response has been?

The response has been overwhelming and bittersweet. On the one hand, as a human being, there’s nothing better than feeling heard and seen. On the other hand, as a Black human being, it’s painful that it’s taken this long to be heard and seen, and quite honestly, there are a lot of people pretending they hear and see us. I choose to keep my focus and attention on the ones that really do—the people really doing the work and striving to do better, be better, and fix this abhorrent mess of a system.

In what ways does your activism influence your creative work?

My sheer presence on stage or on camera is activism. I’m Black and openly queer in an industry that doesn’t value Blackness or queerness, and especially not Black queerness. I pick my roles based not just on what I want to do but also on whether the role will be a portrayal that will amplify, elevate, and expand representation, or whether it’s a caricature. More times than not, it’s the latter, and those roles I turn down. Whenever I write, I write for myself and people like me. I write Black characters, POC characters, and, more specifically, Black queer characters, and I do it as fully as possible. I want to be seen as a full person, not just an accessory to the white lead. My activism is my creative work.

Which activists currently inspire you, and why?

There are so many, and they all inspire me for the same reason. They’re bold, they’re vulnerable, they’re smart, and they are committed to the amplification, elevation, protection, and equity of Black people: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, Sonya Renee Taylor, Tamika D. Mallory, Ashlee Marie Preston, Brittany Packnett Cunningham, Mila Jam, Tiffany Dena Loftin, Yves, and Kendrick Sampson, to name a few.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to get involved with advocacy but doesn’t know where to start?

Start in your community. Start at your place of work, your apartment building, your local businesses. Take it day by day. This is a lifelong commitment to life long change. It’s not going to get done in a day, a month, a summer, or a year. So, if you feel like you have to do everything, you’ll find yourself stuck and not making any change. But start with the three things you can commit to working on this month. If you’re feeling ambitious, maybe it’s this week. Remember, in addition to the protests, donations, petitions, phone calls, there are internal things you need to do. What are you reading? What are you watching? What POVs are you exposing yourself to? It all counts.

On the subject of advice, do you have any for young queer Black folx who want to get into acting/writing in America today?

My first bit of advice is to get into it! We need you. We need your voice, we need your experience, we need you to take up space in these creative spaces. My second bit of advice is to be yourself. Work towards showing up fully wherever you go. Obviously, depending on where you are, there are things you have to do to maintain your safety. Your safety is important. But how do you show up in your mind? Are you free in your mind, in your soul? Are you fully yourself in your spirit? Get to know yourself every day, it will make you a stronger actor and writer. It will bring an unmatched authenticity to your work.

What would you change about the industry if you could?

I would change the white supremacist system of doing things. I would change the value we place in whiteness as the ideal. I would change the lack of inclusion on screen and behind the scenes. I would change the all-white executive suites that think they’re diverse because they have a singular person of color on their team. I would eradicate the violent grip on the keys to “the gate”. I would create systems that mentored and shepherded new talent, especially Black, POC, and queer talent—especially from places outside of LA and NY. I would find ways to empower more artists having the ability to create and share their work in a global way. I would ensure that Blackness was valued and treated with the respect, reverence, and honor that it deserves.

Describe each of the following in one word: Who you are, what you value the most, and what you’d be if you were a food item.

Brandon. Spirit. Mac & cheese.

Thanks for taking the time, Brandon! Feel the Beat is now streaming on Netflix.

Photos: Leslie Alejandro

#entertainment spotlight #blackexcellence365 #brandon kyle goodman #feel the beat #big mouth

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abigailnussbaum · 4 years

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The Boys 5x06, “The Bloody Doors Off”

I’m generally quite positive about this episode, but before I get to that, this really needs to be said: the trope of “doors open at the asylum, murder and mayhem ensue” is really poisonous to the mentally ill, and should have been discarded a long time ago. It’s particularly common in superhero stories, which are, after all, very fond of the setting of a superhero asylum. Off the top of my head, both The Gifted and Batwoman have employed it in the last two years. Which means that even as it’s patting itself on the back for skewering the tropes of superhero stories, The Boys is indulging in a particularly vile one. And while we’re on the subject of things this episode should have been above: that joke about transgender strippers. It’s not as bad as it could have been, because the gag isn’t “she’s got a penis!” (and MM’s response is immediately “I don’t care for strippers regardless of their genitalia”). But it’s still fetishizing the trans body - which, I suppose, is hardly surprising given the show’s generally judgmental attitude towards kink.

That being said, this is probably the best episode of the season, largely because it plays to the show’s strengths: tight thematic and plot coherence (finally justifying the decision to move the show to a weekly format after weeks of shapeless installments), strong characterization, and a willingness to complicate seemingly black and white situations that belies the show’s reputation as an outrage machine. So yes, this is an episode that features Homelander crushing a man’s skull while in the throes of passion (apparently we need to have at least one of those per season), not to mention a man with a giant, prehensile penis. But it’s also an episode that deepens our understanding of Frenchie, introduces us to a new character who is almost instantly compelling (while also complicating that reaction significantly), and forces us to reexamine our feelings towards Maeve without telling us anything new about her.

The common theme running through the episode is the things you’ll do for the people you love, how you live with the consequences of those choices, and what they make of you. We finally get to meet Lamplighter, the boogeyman whose murder of Mallory’s grandchildren broke the Boys apart years ago and has hung over Frenchie in particular. And we find out why that is - Frenchie was supposed to be keeping an eye on Lamplighter, whom Mallory had just recruited to her investigation of Homelander, and left his post to tend to a friend who was ODing.

Shawn Ashmore is inspired casting for Lamplighter. He’s got the sort of look that can just as easily convey sympathetic concern as selfish entitlement, and slide between the two with ease. Which makes Lamplighter both less hatable than we might have expected, given what we know of him, but also hard to trust. (To be fair, I’m reading a lot of Johnny Jaqobis into the performance, and that was Aaron, not Shawn; but honestly, those two are surprisingly similar for how solid both of their careers have turned out.) But the episode really belongs to Frenchie, who not only takes on Lamplighter’s admission that he didn’t know Mallory’s grandchildren were in the room he set on fire, but finds enough common ground with the man to confess his own part in that night’s disaster. When Lamplighter asks “did [your friend] live?”, it’s a moment of human connection that we don’t often see between the Boys and their quarry (and leads to Frenchie’s heartbreaking revelation that Jay lived, only to die of another overdose shortly after). The episode ends with Frenchie begging for Lamplighter’s life from Mallory (and also trying to make peace with Kimiko, who is otherwise sorely underused).

At the same time, the episode doesn’t encourage us to feel uncomplicated sympathy towards Lamplighter. As MM points out “I meant to murder an innocent woman, not her grandchildren” is hardly a defense. And even more disturbing is Lamplighter’s repeated refrain to Frenchie, “why didn’t you stop me?” Whereas Frenchie doesn’t want to be let off the hook even though he had a good reason for abandoning his assignment, Lamplighter is looking for someone else to blame for his own actions, even to the perverse extreme of blaming an opponent for not fighting back. And, as we see in the present, he’s still killing innocents, burning experiment subjects who don’t pan out or refuse to play along, while claiming that he’s being forced.

Which ties into Maeve, who for the first time is called to account for her part in the plane crash last season. Maeve sees the video of the crash as indicting Homelander, which is also how we’ve been trained to think about it. But when Elena watches it, she sees a woman she’s been taught to think of as heroic abandoning others to save her own life, begging fruitlessly for mercy but finally just saving her own skin. Like Lamplighter - and more importantly, like Annie earlier in this season, when she was about to kill Hughie at Homelander’s command - Maeve might reasonably say that she didn’t have a choice. But she still did those things, and hid them. Her final line to Elena - “why are you looking at me that way?” - sums up the episode’s core message.

It’s a message that is also echoed in the Annie-Billy-Hughie storyline, though it’s a bit more wobbly in that context. The idea of having Annie and Billy bond over their shared love of Hughie is a solid storytelling beat, but I’m not quite sure what to make of Annie’s “he’s too good for either of us”. Annie kills the driver to save Hughie, and the show doesn’t let her off the hook for that (her long look at the baby seat in the car once she gets in). But it’s still a choice she made in order to save someone. Hughie killed Translucent for no reason at all - or really, because he wanted to feel strong and powerful after weeks of stewing in grief and rage over Robin’s death (and Annie, though she knows the Boys were responsible for Translucent’s death, still doesn’t know that Hughie is the one who pushed the button). I’m not sure he’s too good for anyone.

(Meanwhile, the fact that Annie was on the verge of killing Hughie to save her own life just a few episode ago seems to have been memory-holed, even though it would have been a really obvious thing for Billy to throw in her face during their fight early in the episode.)

The other big thing that happens in this episode is that we find out Stormfront’s background, and between what she says to Homelander and what Lamplighter reveals to the Boys, it seems clear that her plan is to create a superpowered neo-Nazi army and use it to take over the world. It’s good to finally have some answers (and I admit that this is a more interesting turn of plot than the one I anticipated last week, a false flag terrorist attack). But I also feel that the show is in danger of outthinking itself. Having Vought be a company with roots in Nazi Germany was a clever touch earlier this season, but making Stormfront a German Nazi herself - and making the entire genesis of superheroes a Nazi project - undercuts a lot of what the show has been saying about American racism and how much its superheroes are rooted in it. Suddenly we’re back to that familiar trope, invasion by an army of foreign and foreign-inspired Nazis. It’s not unlike the way that Winter Soldier whiffed its central revelation, choosing to focus on a fifth column of hidden traitors instead of admitting the more terrifying truth, that after seventy years there’s really no way to disentangle “good” SHIELD from “evil” Hydra, because the former has been hopelessly corrupted by the latter.

When I wrote about last week’s episode, I praised it for skewering rainbow capitalism in its depiction of Vought’s plans to “sell” Maeve’s queerness and her relationship with Elena. Since then, several people have pointed out that The Boys was speeding well ahead of the actual industry it’s lampooning - in a blockbuster market dominated by superhero movies, there are currently no queer superhero characters (though there are several on TV). Which means that the show’s satire can end up missing its mark - instead of pointing out how capitalism squeezes everything good into an easily-digested, marketable form, one can easily read this subplot as saying that a gay superhero would be bad, full stop.

I think a similar dynamic is at play when it comes to Stormfront’s secret plot. An army of superpowered neo-Nazis is scary, but is it really scarier than the President of the United States not only refusing to condemn white supremacists on stage at a national debate, but addressing them directly in terms that can only be taken as an instruction to riot if he loses the election? Is it scarier than videos of police that repeatedly show their sympathy towards white supremacist, to the point of standing by when one of them fires into a crowd of people? It doesn’t take superpowers for fascism to take hold - it didn’t in Nazi Germany, and it doesn’t today. By pretending otherwise, The Boys is neutering its social commentary exactly where it should be most trenchant.

#the boys

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thatmalmal · 4 years

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what really happened: a memoir from the apocalypse: part 1

Chapter 1: A Turtle and a Gun

June 2013:

As we sat in the dark living room, the light that shone from the tv strained my eyes. I counted the bricks on the fireplace over and over again, going back to the first one whenever I finished. The oddly shaped ones, or the ones that were half-filled, frustrated me. I stroked my baby doll's curly blonde hair. Phoebe was silent as she stared at the tv. She held onto the dark green blanket that hugged her knees.

"Once again, you're tuning in to ABC 11 Eyewitness News. Brian let us know before the break that five-hundred-thousand people have gotten sick from the virus that is still being investigated. Numbers are increasing, but I'd like to assure you that the government will get this under control as soon as possible. However, it is crucial, for both you and your family's safety, to stay inside your houses unless absolutely necessary. This is a high-risk situation."

Phoebe sucked her tears back into her head. Mom held her hand against her back and reminded her to breathe.

"They're saying it's safe in DC. How are we going to get there?" I asked.

"We can't get there. We're staying here. Everything will be fine," Mom said.

Dad swung in the rocking chair and looked up from his phone. "We wouldn't get there even if we tried. Military vehicles are how people get to DC. One's not coming here."

"Can't we call some place to pick us up?" I asked.

"It's not a taxi. They're more concerned with their own city than anyplace else," he said.

My foot fiddled with the notebook on the coffee table. Inside of it were the pros and cons of each of my middle school options. Mom gave it to me, and acted like the choice was mine, even though it never was. As my toes flipped through the pages, it started to feel useless.

...................................................................

I've always hated Sunday mornings. The day was filled with its own type of sorrow, almost as if it was its own emotion. The sun shined through the ugly striped curtains in the kitchen. Mom made pancakes, which became our weekend ritual. I asked her to spread peanut butter on mine.

Dad stormed down the stairs. "North Carolina's a danger zone," he said.

Mom flipped the pancakes on the griddle. "We know that, Chris."

My fork clashed against my plate as I laid it down. "We really need to go to DC."

"We can't!" they yelled in unison, waving their hands.

"But we can't stay here! It's not safe!" I normally froze whenever they'd yell, but I stood my ground.

Phoebe whimpered like a dying kitten.

"I'm sorry for yelling. But with a seven-year-old and an eleven-year-old, we can't make it there," Dad said.

I rolled my eyes, annoyed that we were the ones made out to be the problem.

"Mama and Papa have generators. We'll go there at around 4:00," Mom said.

"How long are we going to stay there?" Phoebe asked in between her tears.

A moment of silence passed and my parents looked at the floor.

"Probably a while," Mom said.

...................................................................

I laid stomach-first on the pink flower comforter on my bed. I scrolled through Mom's IPad that she loaned to me and researched the virus. A part of me was afraid to look; but a bigger part of me wanted to make sure that there wasn't a scarier truth out there that our parents were hiding from us. That they weren't sugar-coating anything. I clicked on a website that ranked every state in the US from safest to least safest. They listed North Carolina as the twenty-third safest state. That was about half. It wasn't safe enough.

"Girls, lets go!" Mom yelled from outside my door.

...................................................................

We sat in the backseat of Mom's red Pontiac. Phoebe crouched under her purple, polka-dotted blanket, encasing herself from any outside force. I scrunched a piece of the dirty yellow blanket, and held it in the palm of my hand, pulling it close to my face.

Tens of cars were backed up, one behind another, in the middle of the neighborhood. It took us minutes to even pull out of the driveway. It was as if we were molasses moving through the road.

As we reached the end of the neighborhood, Mom gasped. Dad turned to her, and placed one of his hands on her shoulder. My heart raced. My legs shook, and my face turned clammy and cold. For the first time in my life, I saw one in person. It wore jogger clothes, like it was going for a run. It was lean and tall. But it wasn't human. Blood spewed from it. Its face was ripped apart into different pieces, unleashing the layers of its existence. A lady knelt on the ground and begged to it. It was her son. Other neighbors had their eyes glued to the scene; but none of them took action.

The major roads were empty. The construction workers cleared the dead from them, similar to how they dealt with snow and ice.

As we got closer to the house, it got worse. Two were in the driveways, leading up the hill in the middle of the woods. They slowly headed towards the road. Mom pressed on the gas, even though they were far enough away from us. I stared out my window, pressing my head on the glass, and looking as far down as I could. As we turned a corner, a body laid flat on the grass; but it wasn't dead yet. They looked like a normal person, with specks of blood on the corners of their face. They stared straight at the sky, in a state of shock.

...................................................................

Mom parked the car in front of the house and turned to the backseat. "Stay here for a minute. We'll be right back for you."

Phoebe kept herself under the blanket the whole time, and wouldn't release it from her face; not even for air. Mom and Dad entered through the garage door.

A minute passed. A high-pitched scream ensued, coming from Mom.

My heart dropped and my throat tightened, like I was going to suffocate. "Where are they?"

"Mallory, what if they're dead?" Phoebe asked in a loud whisper.

Mom and Dad walked through the door and stared at the ground. They had their arms wrapped around each other, and tears were painted on their eyes. I stared at Dad and waited for his expression to turn to something readable.

I banged on the glass in an attempt to grab their attention. "What happened?"

Phoebe's hysterical cry hurt my ears. Mom stood in front of Dad and talked to him. I could only make one thing out.

"We need to go back in there."

As an immediate response, I opened the car door.

"No!" Mom yelled.

I ran towards them. "I need to see it!"

I grabbed Mom's hands, and tears filled my eyes. My heart rate exhausted me.

"Mama! Papa!" Phoebe cried from inside the car.

Mom let go of my hands and walked towards the car. "I have to get the hammer."

Dad stared at the ground, irresponsive and silent. I stared at him, but he didn't make eye contact with me. Mom grabbed the hammer from the trunk and circled back through the garage. I followed her.

Mom ducked behind the side-view mirror of the white Mustang. I headed towards the house. I reached the fridge near the brick steps. I yelled and covered my head; and Mom jumped from the other side and attacked the growling shadow with her hammer. I blacked out.

...................................................................

When I regained consciousness, I was inside the house. My aunt sat on the floor in front of the kitchen table and held a gun in her lap. Mom stood behind the counter and hid her face in her hands.

My aunt looked up at me with her eyes half-open and smiled. "Hey, sweetie. Where's Phoebe and your dad?"

I walked over to her. Blood ran down her leg. "Where's Mama? What happened to your leg?"

"She's in her room," she said.

I headed towards the bedroom.

She grabbed my hand. "Don't go in there."

"Mimi, what happened to your leg?" I asked again.

"Sit and listen. Do you know how to use one of these?" She handed me the gun.

I crossed my legs on the floor. "No."

"You pull this part back when you need to use it." She demonstrated with her finger, leaving a far enough distance. "It's going to feel tough. Pull hard."

I stared at her intently. "What do I have to shoot?"

"You see how you and me both look like humans? That we look real? Well, whenever you see someone who doesn't look like that, who has an almost grey complexion, and who can't walk like a normal person can --"

"Like the people I saw in the street?" I interrupted her.

She smiled in relief. "Yeah. When you see someone like that, you have to shoot them. I know it's hard. I never wanted to kill people —"

I bowed my head to my chest. I squeezed my eyes shut as tears streamed out of them.

"But that's why I'm not going to make it. And that's okay. But you have to make it." She poked me, signaling me to look at her. "The people who look like that, they're dangerous. They'll hurt you, your mom and dad, and Phoebe. They'll try to kill you. And you can't let that happen. So you have to do what's hard, and you have to kill them."

My gaze went past her, towards the sun that shone through the window. "Is Papa dead?"

"Mallory, listen. Listen to me. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"

I nodded.

"Ok, so show me." She scooted to the side. "Aim at that white railing outside the window and shoot it."

My hands shook as I held the gun. My finger hurt as I pulled the trigger back. A bullet shot out and a loud boom followed.

She smiled, almost laughing. "There you go. You're going to have to go out there, okay? It's not safe here. Take the gun. You give it to your parents to keep; but you know how to use it."

I looked at her through my blurry eyes. "You have to come with me."

"I can't. Listen, I know you can do this. Protect your sister, okay? Be careful. You're brave." She looked at Mom and smiled at her. "Right? Isn't she brave?"

Mom stared at her in shock, and her tears fell onto her hands.

Mimi grabbed my hand and opened it, and placed a small green turtle charm with silver markings inside of it. "Take this. It'll keep you safe. It's for good luck."

"Good luck?" I asked.

"Yeah. There has to be. You're the one in charge now. You're the only one who knows how to use a gun. You're going to need to show your sister. Show them how to survive."

I turned to Mom. "Can we get a doctor? Nothing's happened yet."

"No... this takes a while," Mimi said.

I stared at her leg. "Am I going to die too?"

"No. When I get to Heaven, with Mama and Papa, we're gonna be watching over you. Protecting you. Making sure you make it through this." She closed her eyes. "Be careful. Be kind, but be strong too. I love you."

Mom knelt beside me and held her hand on my back. "We've gotta get back home."

...................................................................

I laid on my bed and opened the Contacts app on the IPad. I searched for my aunt's number, my grandma's sister. She lived pretty close to us. I opened a new message.

"It's Mallory. Mama, Papa, and Mimi are all dead. They've become the sick things, or they will soon. We're stuck in our house and we don't know where else to go. I think we should go to DC, but Mom and Dad said we can't. But I want to go. If you're going, will you take me? Can you take all of us? It's the only safe thing. What if our house gets dangerous like theirs did?"

I hit send.

#the walking dead

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dyns33 · 5 years

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She that is without sin (13/13)

Another fic that ends. It was not the favorite of readers, but I had a lot of fun writing it. I also benefit that it is the first day of Pride to write asexual characters. I like to read smut (although I have trouble writing it), but I always prefer long discussions and hugs (even if it’s a bit boring sometimes I guess).

Without omitting the slightest details, (Y / N) told everything. Constance's suicide, the Murder House, the satanists, the warlocks, the witches, the death of Mead, the Cooperative, the nuclear bomb, the Outposts and, finally, the moment Michael lost against Cordelia and Mallory, who was returning in the past to kill him before he did all that. Frowning, still holding her hand, Michael listened quietly, asking no questions, until she finished. She looked at him apprehensively, unable to guess what he was thinking.

"Do you want me to leave you alone for a moment ?" she asked. "So that you can digest all this ?"

(Y / N) did not want to leave him, but she also understood that all this information was difficult to understand and accept, in such a short time, and in such a brutal way. She hoped that Michael was going to ask her to stay, but his hand released hers, while he nodded, staring at the floor with a blank stare. The shock, without a doubt. Before going out, (Y / N) caressed his shoulder, to show him support, even if it was probably not enough. While sitting on the terrace of her house, she watched her neighbors, the passing cars, the blue sky, trying to imagine this peaceful place turned into a field of ruin, inhabited by cannibals covered with tumors. Everything had to end one day, the sun would explode in millions of years, destroying all the surrounding planets, but that would be an entirely natural phenomenon, which could not be blamed on anyone. When, on the contrary, something disappeared forever because of human action, it was a different story, because there was a person responsible, who could have avoided this disaster. And, at that moment, that person was Michael. Or rather, it might be Michael, if he decided to embrace his evil nature, thinking that he had no choice, since in any case he was the Antichrist, it had been proven, and aside the Satanists, everyone would hate him without even knowing him, wishing his death. (Y / N) had not told him that Mallory would kill him if he chose that path, it did not seem necessary. She had not told him how she would react either.

"It's his decision." she whispered to herself. "Do not intervene, leave him. I know it's a good person, so there's no reason to panic or try to influence him with fear or love."

Her body trembled anyway, the wait becoming interminable, because even if she really believed in him, even if she wished with all her heart that he took the right decision, there was no reason to say that it would be the case. (Y / N) had to prepare for this eventuality, to find out what she was going to do. As she had told, it would be impossible for her to stop Mallory, future Supreme. And if she tried to protect Michael, taking him away from here, she was helping to set up the end of the world. A life, against billions. At least he would not be totally innocent, since he knew the consequences of his actions now, he could not pretend to be surprised.

"Stop, he's not going to do that... Michael is the nicest boy I've ever met, he..."

Despite all her efforts, her faith in humanity was wavering dangerously, because the data of the problem had been changed after Mallory's revelations. There was not only men and free will, there was God, and there was Satan, and so there were sometimes manipulations that made things unjust and incomprehensible. Even if Michael wanted to be good with all his strength, with all his soul, could he get rid of his darkness ? Or would it still be there, hidden, waiting for a moment of weakness to take control? It would not be his fault, but nobody could do anything against it. Michael was like a time bomb : maybe he would never explode, maybe it would take a long time, maybe he had already started the detonator while she was thinking. Impossible to foresee it, and even he could not possibly say it.

"One hour." she sighed, looked at her watch before getting up. "The moment of truth."

The living room was still quiet when she entered, only to discover that Michael was no longer on the couch. He was not in the kitchen either. She called him, ashamed because of the sadness that could be heard in her voice, but she got no answer. (Y / N) sat painfully on the couch, where Michael had been an hour earlier and had been thinking about it all this time. Should she call Mallory ? The witch must have known that Michael was gone. At least she would not see him when he... A sob escaped him. (Y / N) had not cried since the death of her grandfather, who had taught her almost everything she knew, in turn she had done everything to offer this to Michael, and despite all her efforts, despite all the goodwill Michael had shown, she had failed. She was not crying because of remorse, because she had done everything, she gave him everything, but because she really thought he understood. She wanted him to understand, more than anything in the world, because since he had arrived, she had become attached to this boy, to his eyes full of curiosity, to his quick wit, to his tender smile. He had so many beautiful things to give and get from the world, and he finally decided to destroy it.

"Miss (Y / N)... are you crying ?"

Remaining half hidden behind the wall, Michael looked at her with a lot of concern. He was there, he was not gone. Very timidly, he approached her, a small pout on his face, handing him a leaf.

"It's for you."

(Y / N) then discovered a drawing, similar to what a five-year-old would have produced, with a sun, a tree, a square house and two smiling fellows. The colors were very bright and spilled in many places, the proportions were not respected, the characters were virtually the same size as the rest... It was the most beautiful drawing she had ever seen.

"Michael, it's beautiful." she said, full of sincere admiration.

A smile finally appeared on his face and he sat down next to her, pointing at the characters.

"It's you, and here it's me, and that's our house, with the tree under which I read when the weather is nice. It's sunny, but we are holding hands. My hand is too big, right ?"

"Not at all."

"Why are you crying Miss (Y / N) ?"

After receiving this beautiful gift, her tears were due to joy, and relief after seeing Michael appear. But how would he react when he learned that she had believed that he had chosen to follow Satan ? Mallory had told her what had happened when those close to him had stopped trusting him. Mallory was one of those people. This doubt, which she had felt for a few minutes, was going to destroy everything ?

"You did not answer, so I thought you were gone and I was sad."

"I was finishing coloring... I tried to apply myself but I went too fast."

"I'm sorry Michael."

"It's not your fault, at first I wanted to write, then I changed my mind and so I had less time."

"I should not have doubted you, I knew you'd make the right decision, but I..."

Michael almost jumped on her to take her in his arms to silence her. Usually he was a little too shy to touch her without permission, except when he slept close to her and the time he kissed her. Most of the time, he claimed hugs when he was afraid or wanted attention, when (Y / N) was congratulating him verbally or by simply touching his hand, because even if the physical contact was very important for human beings, and despite the fact that he was clearly touch starved, which was a heartbreak for (Y / N), he had to grow up and beg for less hugs. But this time, (Y / N) did not regret this "bad" habit, pressing him against her.

"Sometimes I'm scared of waking up and you're not there anymore, or you're screaming at me and asking me to leave, like Grandma. But you're always there, every day. You cry because you thought I was gone. I will always be there, promised. I love you. Sorry to scare you, I will not do it again. "

Well, new rule, (Y / N) was not going to try to make him stop the hugs. He deserved all the hugs he wanted, after what he had lived.

"So... what do you think about what I told you about the future ?"

"I do not know those people. Ben, Mead, Cordelia... I just know they do not look nice and I do not want to meet them. I want to stay with you. That's all."

As for the animals, and many other things, he chose the good only because he knew it was what she wanted, even if she had never threatened to love him less or ask him to leave if he does not do it. It was not enough to keep the world safe... but maybe it was the best Michael could do. The important thing was the result : he had chosen alone, he was happy, and the humanity was saved. Still shyly, he raised his head to kiss her. A simple kiss, always respectful and childish. But, unlike (Y / N), who was very happy after the turn of events, Michael pouted.

"Miss (Y / N)..." he murmured. "I love you but I do not want to do like in movies. Are you angry ?"

"Why would I be angry ?" she asked, stroking his cheek.

"You have to do certain things when you love someone, everyone says it, in books, in movies. Grandma did it with men sometimes..."

"Michael, if you only want to be hugged before bedtime, that suits me perfectly. It's the most beautiful form of love that exists, the purest. And above all, never force yourself to do something that make you feel uncomfortable or unwilling, be proud of your difference."

Satan, the end of the world, all that had already disappeared, in a snap. No doubt he still had some things to learn, so she would ask Mallory to come back to make sure he had mastered his powers, without making him dangerous. As long as (Y / N) was with him, would believe in him, support him and like him, Michael would be the nicest and happiest boy in the world.

"I have the best example at home." he laughed.

"Do not read my thoughts."

"Why ? It's always nice and positive, not like the others... Without... I do not know how to say..."

"Without vice, nor sin ?"

An antichrist without sin. Normally, (Y / N) did not like oxymorons, but she would make an exception for this one, because it was a nice one. But forbidden to read her thoughts anyway.

Tag : @allyadarth @kahhlo @sloppy-little-witch-bitch26 @gold-dragon-slayer @moonagecordelia @two-unbeatable-beaters @isoldedax @roxytheimmortal

#american horror story apocalyspe #michael langdon #michael langdon imagine #michael langdon fanfiction #michael langdon x reader #justice for michael langdon #philosophy #She that is without sin #series #ace #asexuality

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basicshadowhuntersstuff · 5 years

Photo

This super-sized roundup covers the last two weeks in news, updates, sneak peeks, and behind the scenes. All the stuff you need to stay up to date.

Official Promotion

Harry (Magnus) accepting his People’s Choice Award.

Behind-the-scenes photos of Matt (Alec) playing piano of seasons 2 and 3.

Kat (Clary) accepting her People’s Choice Award.

Worth staring at in traffic. #Shadowhunters

Happiest of birthdays to shining star @Kat_McNamara. #Shadowhunters

Cheers to each and every one of you. Happy Thanksgiving, #Shadowhunters family.

ShadowhuntersTV shared a special message from Freeform Santa.

TFW you realize the long weekend is almost over. #Shadowhunters // @Kat_McNamara, @DavidLCastro_ @arosende

Reunited. Maia & Simon behind the scenes of #Shadowhunters Season 3B.

What are these two up to? Behind the scenes of #ShadowhuntersSeason3.

We'd know those shoulders anywhere. #Shadowhunters

Some Maia to brighten your day. #Shadowhunters

Our first gift of the holiday season is a 4 second behind-the-scenes video of Kat (Clary) and the announcement of #25DaysOfTeasers: And welcome to December! Now through December 25th, we're celebrating #25DaysOfTeasers in which we'll be sharing new content from #Shadowhunters every day. Starting with this gorgeous snow angel. Thanks for being the best fandom, #ShadowFam.

Shadowhunters In The News

MEAWW (interviews, articles, and fan features): Matthew Daddario and Dominic Sherwood interview; The cast of ‘Shadowhunters’ commend fans; three features on Katherine McNamara; fan features from Tasha Adamski and Amelia Gormley; #SaveShadowhunters; Malec; and Harry Shum Jr.

Pop Hearts TV (video interview): Katherine McNamara talks Shadowhunters coming to an end, what the finale might have in store for fans.

Conventions France (video interview): Are Katherine and Will true fan of Shadowhunters ? You’ll have the answer in this interview!

Cosmopolitan (article): The Definitive Ranking of the Best TV Ships of 2018.

E! News (article): Harry Shum Jr. Pays Tribute to Touching Shadownhunters Fanmail After Winning People's Choice Award.

Zarata Events (Convention): Pandemonium Con announces Kat (Clary) as their final guest.

Cosmopolitan (article): Everything to Know About ‘Shadowhunters' Season 3B and Finale Event.

Film Daily (article): #SaveShadowhunters: Here’s why the #PCA’s were a huge victory for the #Shadowfam

Matt Carter Media (article): Shadowhunters Season 3 Finale Update.

ShumdarioNews shares their exclusive Friday photo of Matt (Alec).

Esquire (article): Harry (Magnus) is featured in The Best-Dressed Men Of The Week

Grumpy Magazine features Kat (Clary) in their Fall 2018 issue.

E!News (article): Celebrate Katherine McNamara's Birthday With All Her BTS Pics From the Shadowhunters Set

WatchMojo.com (video): Top 10 TV Cancellations That Upset Us in 2018

Matt Carter (article): Shadowhunters season 3 episode 11 preview: What should be next?

Just Jared Jr. (poll): What Is the Best TV Show of 2018? Vote Now!

Film Daily (article): #SaveMalec: Why Harry Shum, Jr. is our renaissance man

Teen Vogue (article): "Riverdale" and "Supernatural" Are the Top Live-Action TV Shows of 2018 on Tumblr

Tumblr released 2018′s Top Ships and Top Live-Action TV Shows.

Shine On Media (video interview): Katherine McNamara Teases ARROW, "Twisted" SHADOWHUNTERS Finale & Dream Role

TV Insider (article): 'Shadowhunters': Go Behind the Scenes of the Final Episodes (PHOTOS)

You’re So Beautiful Now (video interview): EXCLUSIVE VID: Katherine McNamara Gives Emotional "Shadowhunters" Interview

Red Carpet Report (video interview): Katherine McNamara interviewed at Netflix premiere of Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle #Netflix #Mowgli

Miami Living Magazine (interview): Katherine McNamara is on Fire

Brief Take (interview): Interview: Arrow’s Katherine McNamara

SyFy Wire (article): Ranking the sexiest werewolves on television

Basic Stuff Magazine (photos): Shares photos from the Italian Institute Shadowhunters convention from back in July

Basic Stuff Magazine (article and photos): MCM Comic Con London Shadowhunters panel recap (SATURDAY), and photos (SATURDAY/SUNDAY)

Social Media Stuff

Harry (Magnus) selects the winner of his #MassiveMagnusFan contest.

Kat (Clary) tweeted: Vulnerability is uncertain, its strange and scary, but share it with the right person and it becomes an unexpected gift. Open up. Be fearless. It’s never too late to take that chance to live and love. #MondayMotivation.

Isaiah (Luke) shared a throwback photo with Matt (Alec) from New York Comic Con 2017.

Kat (Clary) will be on the cover of Avante Magazine in December 2018

Will Tudor (Johnathan Morganstern/Sebastian Verlac) will be on the cover of Man About Town Magazine’s Winter 2018/Spring 2019 edition.

Folks VFX (VFX team) tweeted: Philippe, our VP and VFX Supervisor for @ShadowhuntersTV geared up for the show's last VFX deliveries #vfx #shadowhunters #WednesdayMotivation

Todd (showrunner) shared a photo from the viewing party for the season 3 finale event with the caption: The last mix. The last day in the shadow world for ⁦me and @DSwim⁩ and it was a glorious day. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts #castlikenoother #crewlikenoother #fanslikenoother #shadowhunters #ShadowhuntersLegacy

Darren (showrunner) tweeted a response to Todd’s viewing party tweet: It was amazing to watch the completed finale movie along with the members of cast who were in town. A perfect way to go into Thanksgiving. So much to be thankful for.

Bryan Q. Miller (writer) tweeted his feelings about 3B: It's a ride, gang #ShadowhuntersLegacy

Lindsay Wolfington (music mupervisor) tweeted: #Shadowhunters music team ready to mix the finale!!! @jackwallmusic

Luke Baines (Johnathan Morganstern) tweeted: Saw the finale today, and wow. Start sending love letters to @toddzer1 + @DSwim because they have done you so proud - it’s better than anything I could have imagined. I cried three times. And twice, it was out of happiness

Kat (Clary) tweeted: Beautiful, bittersweet, and bloody good - final mix of the @shadowhunterstv series finale #TheFinalHunt. Angels, start stockpiling tissues now - you’re gonna need em. Thank you to @toddzer1 and @DSwim for this gift to the #ShadowhuntersLegacy.

Isaiah (Luke) celebrated Thanksgiving as Freeform Santa.

Arianna (Madzie) tweeted a birthday message to Kat (Clary).

Luke Baines (Johnathan Morganstern) replies to fan questions about crying during the 3B finale.

Kat (Clary) responds to birthday messages from Zelda Williams and Lisa Berry (Sister Cleophas).

Lola Flannery (Young Seelie Queen) tweeted a birthday message to Kat (Clary).

Harry (Magnus) celebrated his sixth anniversary with wife Shelby Rabara.

Luke (Johnathan) tweeted Thankful to the #Shadowhunters’ fans who have welcomed me so wholeheartedly, and specifically to those who donated and posted about Pasha - his operation was a success and he’s on the mend. Thank you today and every day.

Kat (Clary) tweeted Cheers to you, angels! I am eternally grateful for this amazing, warm, accepting, loving, passionate fandom. Forever yours, Fray

Kat (Clary) shared a photo of herself taken by Will Tudor (Johnathan Morganstern/Sebastian Verlac).

Luke Baines (Johnathan Morganstern) answered fan questions on Twitter.

Kat (Clary) tweeted a hiking photo: Not sure if it’s the sunshine or time well spent with this lady, but today’s hike sure put a smile on my face... #regram @arden_cho

MCM Comic Con tweeted a video: What was your first fandom? @ch8i of @ShadowhuntersTV tells us his live from #mcmcomiccon Birmingham! Come join us! #WeAreTheFans

Kat (Clary) shared a photo from her Grumpy Magazine cover feature.

Chai Hansen (Jordan Kyle) shared a photo from MCM Comic Con on Instagram: Can’t remember what the joke was... but we were both in stitches lol

Brian Hui (makeup artist) tried to clear up a rune mystery: Hiya! I only joined S3 so I was aware of the mystery of the double Angelic runes! Now our man Jace has a Flexibility, NYX and Stamina on his chest. The double Angelic...only the Angels know the reason!

Kat (Clary) tweeted about Pandemonium Con: LONDON BABY! Here I come! #PandemoniumCon @ZarataEvents! Can’t wait to see you all there! #ShadowhuntersLegacy

Alberto (Simon) shared a photo on Instagram: Hard saying goodbye, I’ll see you at Christmas! #BellaRosende

Kat (Clary) tweeted: I see it now! The Adventures of Papa Wolf and Kiddo! @isaiahmustafa #ShadowhuntersLegacy

Isaiah (Luke) shared a behind the scenes photo with Alexandra Ordolis (Ollie) on Instagram.

Sydney Meyer (Helen Blackthorn) gave us a sneak peek of her runes and hinted at one very special rune.

Joshua Butler (director) let fans know where they can find the outside of the Institute in Toronto.

ShadowhuntersTV tweeted: The beautiful @Kat_McNamara has arrived at the World Premiere of @FreeformTV’s #LifeSize2.

Harry (Magnus) did some picturesque (and mildly dangerous) one-wheeling.

Kat (Clary) tweeted photos from the Mowgli premiere: Sometimes all that glitters is gold... @YSL for @MowgliMovie @netflix

Kat (Clary) tweeted a sneak peek of her new role on Arrow, Maya.

ShadowhuntersTV tweeted: .@Kat_McNamara making some new friends at the world premiere of #MaryPoppinsReturns.

Sweety High shared a video of Kat (Clary) at the Mary Poppins Returns premiere on Instagram.

Hollywood and Highland shared a video on Instagram of Kat (Clary) at the Mary Poppins Returns premiere discussing why Mary Poppins is her favorite character in the movie.

Kat (Clary) tweeted: A spoonful of sparkle for #MaryPoppinsReturns in @YSL. @DisneyStudios

TechWithTolentino shared some photos of Harry (Magnus) meeting video students at the Hawaii International Film Festival.

Darren Swimmer (showrunner) tweeted: Keep an eye on @ShadowhuntersTV during the month of December for #25DaysOfTeasers. #Shadowhunters

Brian Hui (makeup) shared a behind the scenes photo of Kat (Clary): “Oh the weather outside is frightful but ⁦@Kat_McNamara⁩ , you’re so delightful!”

Taylor Mallory (writer) tweeted: Fun fact: I wrote this, and originally it was “student body president.” But it was too autobiographical so I changed it. (Also Simon’s such a VP.) #charm

Other News

TV Line (article): Arrow First Look: Katherine McNamara Gets Punchy as Street Fighter Maya

Just Jared Jr. (article): Laura Marano Celebrated Her 23rd Birthday at the 'Mary Poppins Returns' Premiere with Katherine McNamara!

#shadowhunters #bss news roundup #save shadowhunters

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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How Cruel Summer Recontextualizes Our Understanding of Teenage Trauma

https://ift.tt/2Vnau39

This article contains spoilers for Cruel Summer.

The Freeform drama Cruel Summer is undoubtedly one of the best TV series of 2021, an addictive teen thriller with a story spread across three distinct timelines and an ending that manages to feel both completely inevitable and deeply shocking. (Plus, there’s the amazing 1990s soundtrack – truly a gift!)

Set in the aftermath of a kidnapping in a small Texas town, Cruel Summer follows the story of Kate Wallis (Olivia Holt), the high school queen bee held captive in her vice principal’s home, and Jeannette Turner (Chiara Aurelia), the former dorky nerd who remakes herself in her frenemy’s image in the wake of her disappearance (and is accused of failing to report her abduction). The show uses its split timeline format and a series of unreliable narrators to explore what really happened to Kate and what, if anything, Jeannette knew about her disappearance.

Although the series is full of the sort of jaw-dropping narrative twists that make for endlessly compulsive binge viewing, at its heart Cruel Summer is a story that subverts our expectations about what teen television can do. From the deft way that the series plays with our preconceived assumptions about who these girls are – and should be – to the way it uses its mystery framework to tell a complex story about trauma, grooming, and sexual assault, this is a show that consistently surprises in all the best ways.

And nowhere is that complexity more evident than when it comes to the character of Kate Wallis. On a less nuanced show, Kate would likely have been little more than a mean girl stereotype. She almost certainly would have been positioned as the villain of the series and viewers would have been urged to sympathize with the much more familiar teen drama protagonist Jeanette – an awkward girl with a secret dream of becoming popular. But that’s not what happens here at all.

Because while the surprising cliffhangers and time-jump-related twists of its central mystery may have driven internet buzz about the show – and a not insignificant number of truly bizarre fan theories – the question of whether Jeanette knew about Kate’s imprisonment was never the most important story that Cruel Summer was telling.

Instead, the show fearlessly digs into a much more complex topic: The often traumatic experience of teen girlhood, exploring issues that go well beyond the horrifying kidnapping at the show’s center. Through Kate and Jeanette, Cruel Summer deftly deconstructs how the unrealistic expectations placed on young girls damage their lives in unexpected and often unforeseen ways, encouraging them to chase elusive ideals of perfection, compete with one another for things like boys and popularity, and pretend to be people they aren’t.

How Cruel Summer’s Ending Changes Everything For Season 2

By Lacy Baugher

On the surface, Kate Wallis is the teen idol of Skylin, Texas. Beautiful, rich, and popular, she’s dating a handsome football player and looking forward to a bright future. But beneath her seemingly charmed life, Kate is devastatingly lonely, trapped in a family and a social position that values her appearance more than her interiority. Everyone around her treats her like an object, happily projecting their preconceived notions of who she should be – a perfect daughter, an ideal student, a popular friend – onto her, without ever asking her what she really wants.

It makes perfect sense that Kate would be an easy target for a man like Martin Harris (Blake Lee), someone who makes sure that she feels seen on her own terms. While his motives are clearly nefarious – not to mention classic grooming techniques – Harris is also one of the few people that actually listen to Kate, encouraging her to share her feelings and fears in a way that no one else in her life really bothers to do.

Unlike some other popular teen dramas, Cruel Summer never glamorizes the relationship between Kate and Martin, working overtime to remind viewers that their connection is one born of abuse and manipulation. Their romance isn’t depicted as a dreamy fairytale or a rebellious act against a judgmental society, it’s a metaphorical prison that eventually turns into a literal cage. And in a world where shows like the mega-popular Pretty Little Liars not only depicts Aria dating one of her teachers for several years but marrying him at the series’ conclusion, well, suddenly Cruel Summer feels pretty revolutionary.

The series is part of a growing swath of mainstream television programs that seek to wrestle with and push back against these sorts of damaging assumptions. From the miniseries A Teacher to the reboot of Gossip Girl, the medium is purposefully deconstructing the formerly romanticized ideal of the teacher-student relationship and the complex power dynamics between young women and the people charged with educating or protecting them.

One of the biggest shows of the upcoming Fall television season is Impeachment: American Crime Story, a series that puts these dynamics front and center in its reevaluation of the Monica Lewinsky scandal of the early 1990s. The real-life events saw the world’s most powerful man take advantage of a young woman in his employ and then allow her to essentially be blamed for his (disgusting) actions. Its past time for us, as a society, to not only reckon with this specific case – and our collective lionization of Bill Clinton in spite of it – but with our need to put exploited young women into one of two boxes: A virginal damsel whose purity means she’s not responsible for anything that happens to her or a messy (read: normal) girl whose choices make her at least somewhat culpable for the things that did.

But one of Cruel Summer’s most crucial aspects is that Kate is not required to be perfect to earn the show or the audience’s sympathy. Our culture loves to blame young women for the bad things that happen to them, so the revelation that Kate first entered Martin’s house willingly is the sort of shock twist that all too often precipitates a problematic backlash. It’s her fault she went there in the first place. She deserved what happened to her. Here’s the thing she should have done differently. Why should we believe her now if she lied before? These are all the things that survivors often hear in the aftermath of their traumas.

Cruel Summer determinedly subverts typical TV storylines about sexual assault, never once entertaining the idea that Kate is anything other than a victim. Olivia Holt’s performance is a revelation, heartbreaking and furious by turns, as Kate wrestles with multiple forms of guilt and struggles to figure out who she is in the aftermath of what happened to her. And the show itself displays such consistent empathy toward her character, from the inclusion of the therapy sessions that feature her doctor explicitly explaining the concept and signs of grooming to the desperate chat logs that show her seeking any sort of community that might understand her messy emotions.

By the end of Cruel Summer’s first season, it seems as though Kate has reached at least a baseline level of peace, thanks to a boatload of therapy and allowing herself to remember what really happened during her last night at the Harris house. (She shot and killed Martin.) Though she’s still unaware of the fact that her initial suspicion of Jeannette was actually correct – if not precisely in the way she first assumed – it seems as though she’s finally ready to move on with her life. (Particularly if her kiss with Mallory is anything to go by.) But with the series renewed for a second season – where does Kate’s journey go from here?

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Though there’s certainly a valid argument to be made that Cruel Summer should return as an anthology series and tell an entirely different story in its second season, there’s an equally compelling one that says truly showing us Kate’s journey back to herself is just as important. (There are also probably a fair number of fans who want to see Jeanette exposed, as well.) This show has been so thoughtful about the way it has depicted the effects of trauma and the lingering impact it can have on those whose lives it touches, surely Cruel Summer season 2 would handle the next stage of Kate’s story with the same nuance. And that certainly feels like a story worth telling – if only because it’s precisely the kind of teen story we rarely get to see.

The post How Cruel Summer Recontextualizes Our Understanding of Teenage Trauma appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3yXoluO

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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theodorebennas · 7 years

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Fading to Dust-Summy

CONTENT WARNING! Suicide, death, trauma and the like

So! A long time ago I did Fading to Dust prompts to find another character dying or dead. I did this at the request of @summysparklesprocket a while ago and sent it to them privately. But now they want everyone to see it. Also, it's really super dark. So if you don't like that sorta thing, don't read it please. Otherwise! ENJOY!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx6KpdolfEY

Knock, knock, knock. Came the sound of Colonel Bennas’ fist rapping against Summy’s door, “Major. You were late for morning formation.”

There was no response from inside the gnome’s room. The door was locked and no one had seen the gnome leave or enter the room that day. No one had even seen her about the Fort on her daily rounds that morning.

Theodore knew he was not scheduled for any missions until the next week nor had she requested any time off. He was beginning to worry, “Summy? Are you in there? You had better let me in, soldier!” He knocked once more upon the door with a renewed urgency but once again to no response, “Soldier. Open this fucking door right now! That is an order!” But no one came. “I -will- bust this door down, Sums!” He paused, hoping beyond hope that the little gnome major had overslept or was playing some sort of trick on him. A panic seized the great Gnommander as he braced himself against the door, “Alright. I warned you! I’m coming in!” He bellowed as the fully armored paladin raised his plated boot and smashed it against the door.

The kick struck home right beside the lock where the keyhole was mounted. He drove his heel into the blow and send the door flying open.

The sight that greeted the lawyer-knight would haunt him forever. The scene was not one of gore and blood but of horrid normalcy. Every inch of the gnomish mage’s room was as immaculately keep as it would be on any other day. “Summy? You missed morning formation. I am glad you are sleeping again but the is still no excuse to miss….” The paladin’s voice trailed off out as he approached the gnomish trooper who appeared to simply be lying in bed. Summy Sparklesprocket lay on her back. Her face bore a pale green tint and her icy blue eyes remained halfway open, looking aimlessly up at the ceiling. “Light, no…” The paladin whispered, “Oh dear Light no.” Theodore’s hand immediately went to her neck to take the gnome’s pulse and found nothing.

A quick glance about the room confirmed the paladin’s suspicions. A now empty bottle of sleeping pills lay on the nightstand beside Summy’s bed. Alongside the bottle rested a nearly empty vial of a green liquid, a half-empty cup of green tea that had long since grown cold, and a neatly penned letter. The Colonel glanced about the room once more. There were no signs of forced entry.

Theodore fell to his knees as he leaned over the gnome’s body. He took a deep breath as he desperately fought back tears and attempted to determine the best course of action. Immediately his hands glowed bright with Holy Light as he tried to purify the gnome’s body of the taint that had settled into her body but to no avail. He called upon the Light to mend her wounds but nothing happened. With gritted teeth, Theodore raised his hands to the sky, calling upon the Light in a manner he had seen the Field Marshal do in only rare occasions and pleaded for the power to restore the mage to life with an agonized shout. A golden aura shot forth from his hands enveloping the little gnome for a moment but there was no change in her condition.

The knight was truly defeated. Tears flowed from Theodore’s eyes as he turned his gaze to the deadly mixture that ended the life of his soldier and one of his best friends. We prescribed that medicine so that she could actually get sleep at night. He thought to himself as he took the empty pill bottle into his hand. She had mentioned a few days ago that she had recently refilled her prescription. His attention next shifted to the vial. It was a foul green in color and smelled rancid and foul. After a moment, Theodore’s eyes widened as he realized what he had discovered. “The fel poison!” He exclaimed aloud as he nearly dropped the vial. Gingerly he set it down and then reached for the note.

Dear Vanguard,

If you are reading this letter, then I am dead. You probably have a lot of questions right now. So, I am going to answer them.

First, why?

Since I left the Kirin Tor, I tried my best to put the work I did there behind me. I worked as part of their special investigations unit and as such dealt with some of the most dangerous spellcasters, demons, undead monsters, and Burning Legion defectors that Azeroth will never know. I tried to convince myself that everything I did there was for the greater good. That I was protecting people by taking down the bad guys.

I wish things were just that simple.

At my job, I was responsible for identifying possible traitors to the Kirin Tor and extracting any information from them and confirmed enemies through any means necessary. And I was good at it. I would be lying if I didn’t say I was a bit proud of myself for it at some times. But I never let myself think that I enjoyed it. After all, I was doing what I knew was best for Azeroth. I was keeping people safe. Or so I thought and so I kept telling myself.

I ran people up on charges of treason. Of conspiring with the Burning Legion or the Scourge. A lot of the time, the evidence was pretty good. We had a case to argue and I was pretty sure that the guy was an actual evil agent who needed to be stopped. Other times though, I wasn’t. But I had a job to do. I had quotas to make and bosses to please. It was for the greater good. But I lied to myself. But even at its worse, the things I did…I knew they were wrong then. No matter how I tried to justify it. No matter what excuse, deep in my heart, I knew what I was doing was wrong. Yruma Thal’shor, Mallory Pyke. Shiny Firerocket. Those names and many others haunted me for the rest of my life.

One day, I couldn’t take it anymore. I quit the Kirin Tor and then I joined the Vanguard. I hoped that being in the military and far away from the Kirin Tor would help me clear my head and come to terms with what I did. It didn’t. You’ve all seen me. I could hardly sleep. Most of the time, I just played it off as me being a workaholic but the truth was that even when I was able to sleep, I would just see these horrible nightmares of the things I did to people who didn’t deserve it.

The late summer of last year though, I reached my breaking point. I really saw the effect of my actions. I saw things that made my nightmares look pathetic. I died over and over and over again. Then I felt my spirit descend into the Shadowlands. I felt the people I hurt tear at my very soul. Do you want to know the worst part? I felt like I deserved it.

I tried to tough it out. I tried to become a better person to atone for what I did. But I just couldn’t. Nothing I did felt good enough. No amount of dead demons or saved orphans could erase what I did. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t handle all of this. I just wanted to be done with it all. It wasn’t for me to martyr myself or atone or seek penance or anything that the Light would say. It was me giving justice to everyone I hurt. It wasn’t for me. It was for Shiny…and so many others.

How did I do it? Well, that was pretty simple actually. I just sort of took too many of the pills. Then I took a few sips of the poison to make sure it finished the job. Then I washed it all down with tea. Don’t bother trying to bring me back. The fel poison will prevent that. It will sever my soul’s connection with my body. Or so the theory goes. I just can’t take the chance.

Well, this is the part where I say goodbyes, I guess.

Dear Inte, you have always been a great leader, friend, and healer. It was really an honor to serve under you.

Dear Beans, you’ll always be my favorite Gnommander. Especially since you were the only one that survived for more than a year which honestly, I didn’t expect.

Dear Bermont: Thank you.

Dear Pimmy: It’s been an honor and a pri I’ve really enjoyed wor You’ve been one of my best friends and I don’t think I would have rather worked with anyone else. I’m going to miss you.

With the Vanguard, I’ve met so many incredible people and seen incredible places. Even if you guys make bad life choices sometimes, I’ll miss you guys. Good bye.

Love,

Summy

As the paladin set down the note, he kneeled before his dear friend’s bedside and wept. The tears flowed without ceasing from the paladin as he closed Summy’s eyes and placed the sheet over her.

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spidergwenistrans · 5 years

Text

The Really Shitty Email

CW: religious crap, hommphobia, transphobia, sexual abuse

From: Papa Ted (my mum’s stepdad)

To: [email protected]

Subject: Transgender

Dear Deadname,

Since receiving your letter a few months ago, I have thought and prayed and talked to others about your decision which, because I love you as does God and many others do and because I am deeply concerned about your salvation, I write this.

At every assembly I have with my students I begin the same way: Life is hard, please don’t make it harder than it is. God gave us free will but with that freedom comes responsibility for the consequences of our actions.

My actions of the past have had serious consequences not just for myself but for many others. I am a Christian, which colours everything in my life. It is the lens through which I see. C.S. Lewis described it this way: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.”

I met Jesus during a time of great hardship when I was going to grad school. I was married to Beverly, your grandmother, and we had three small children: your mother, Robbin, and Erika. Life was unbelievably hard for us, harder than anything I’d every experienced. Growing up I had enough because my father worked hard to provide for us. He was only a corporal in the air force and didn’t make much money. He always had a second job. When my sister and I went to middle school, my mother got a job to help with things and get out of the house. That and other things ultimately led to her divorce from my dad, but that’s another story. At home we always had enough. I had new clothes but a second hand bike. We went on camping holidays every summer for two weeks. When I was in grad school, my family had none of those benefits. The only new clothes my kids got came from their loving, caring grandparents. I wore socks on my hands in the winter because I couldn’t afford mitts. I sold my blood twice a week for plasmapheresis to buy groceries. I couldn’t afford to buy heating oil for the furnace, so I cut down trees and collected broken skids from behind warehouses to burn in the fireplace in the old house we lived in without insulation. Your mother and I would scour the ditches on Saturday for cans and bottles to take to the store to buy popcorn seeds and candy if we had enough. Beverly was a great cook and made meals out of nearly nothing. We bought a lot of veggies from the going-bad cart in the grocery store. We drank only powdered juice and milk because it was cheap and even then I diluted it so much that still the kids don’t trust me to make juice! My uncle drove a truck for a wholesale food company and he would bring us broken bags of oatmeal or dented tins of food that could not be sold. Although I had scholarships and student loans, that was not enough money for a family to live on. We were desperately poor even though the kids didn’t know it because it was their environment and they didn’t suffer. Beverly and I suffered, though, because we had led different lives before and we knew the difference. My father bought us an old car from his work for a dollar and then paid for new brakes so it could pass a safety check. He paid for the insurance too. But we could only drive it a couple of times a week because we couldn’t afford the gas. I wanted to run away, Beverly wanted to run away—and did increasingly through alcohol—because life was unbearably hard. What was the point, why were we doing it? The answer? Because of a fantasy dream that I would write children’s stories and get my PhD and become a professor even though there were no jobs at that time or on the horizon. None of the doc students in my cohort got professorships. Most of us dropped out or didn’t finish. God in his mercy opened a temporary teaching job at Ashbury which against all odds I got.

It was in the midst of my suffering that Jesus called me. The call was classic as many converts attest to, only the details differ. Read Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven” if you’re interested. How did mine occur? Briefly, I unaccountably found that the Lord’s Prayer was often in my head as was Psalm 23, which I didn’t realize I knew. So too Sunday School lessons. As with most of us, most of the thoughts that come and go in our heads are not from conscious, but where were these specifically Christian thoughts coming from? I had stopped going to church when I was 15, about the same time that my mother stopped. My father continued to the end of his life, God bless him. I always believed in God because his existence makes more sense, fits the pieces of life far better than atheism. Jesus, however, was a different matter. Jesus makes very clear demands on your attitude and your actions. I was not ready to believe in Jesus as my personal savior and redeemer, the god who forgave my sins if I repented and promised eternal life with him and countless other believers. I resisted his call as long as I could and then said Yes. My life changed from misery to joy although I was still desperately poor and struggling to survive with my wife and three kids. On my conversion I took them to church where they were all baptized and grew up going to church every Sunday. Then they, like me, stopped their worship. Recently, your mother has recovered her worship. Sadly, your father never has. More sadly, your parents never created the habit of worship in you or Katie. I don’t know if you believe in God, Peter, or have welcomed Jesus into your heart and life. Are you Christian? Do you believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit? Do you believe you are a sinner and believe that Jesus has paid the price of those sins by dying on the Cross and then rising from the dead to break the power of death?

The world we live in is a spiritual battleground between good and evil, between God and Satan. By the very books you have read growing up, you know the truth of that war going around us and in us. Harry Potter knows, Edmund and Eustace in Narnia know, and so do the other heroes of the books you read. St. Paul talks knowingly about that war in his letters, a war which Christ has won through his death and resurrection but which many battle skirmishes great and small continue. Satan does not give up easily and his minions continue their assaults on us with all manner of temptation. Read C.S. Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters” for an entertaining and insightful description of what’s going on. The struggles will all be finished, however, on the Day of Judgement at the end of time when Christ will rule supreme. C.S. Lewis’s “Last Battle”, the last book of Narnia, describes it marvelously, echoing much of the Bible in his descriptions. The material world we live in is not the final reality or even though many people say it is. We are spiritual creatures, not just physical ones. To deny that is, I believe, to deny reality. And once you acknowledge the spiritual reality of life itself and of your own life, then the choice of good or evil must be made continually. One of the arguments for the existence of God is the universal knowledge of good and bad in everyone’s heart and conscience. This is not some random accident of a spurious psychological evolution; it is the act of a creative God who made us in his image, part of which is to know good from evil.

I am a sinner. That’s why I’m a Christian. I need Jesus to forgive me my sins and free me to live truly and glorify my creator and redeemer. I can’t save myself on my own. I believe Jesus’ actions have rescued me from my sins and damnation. By faith I live. My outstanding sin is adultery. I committed adultery with your grandmother Beverly. The result of that was her pregnancy and her divorce from Bruce, Susan’s father. It doesn’t matter that their marriage was in tatters, it was still a marriage and my adultery broke it, which had many consequences, some good, some not. I committed adultery again, this time against Beverly when she was dying of her alcoholism. The great irony of our long marriage was that it began and ended in adultery, hardly some time to crow about. I had to face those sins and repent before I could be forgiven. The consequence of my last adultery was an unmarried relationship with Mallory, Tess’s mother. For her own reasons, Mallory refused to marry me, and Tess was born out of wedlock, a stigma that will never go away and will affect her future relationships. That is just one consequence of my sin. That too I have repented and continue to do so as the results of it march on. All sin has ramifications beyond the immediacy of the sinner himself. During Mallory’s pregnancy, I walked El Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route, praying that Mallory would not abort our child, and simply praying for my splintering soul.

A direct consequence of my adultery was to lose my job in the US. The school I worked at decided that a teacher who did not properly mourn his dead wife but engaged in an affaire and produced an illegitimate child was clearly not a teacher they wanted on staff. When I lost my job I also lost my work visa, which meant that staying in the US made me an illegal alien. Marriage to Mallory would have given me a visa, but she rejected me and I had to leave. In Canada I found a job in Kelowna as a substitute professor for professors on sabbatical. That lasted two years after which I was unemployed and able to get a small unemployment cheque, just enough to afford a room in the YMCA in Vancouver where I stayed for a year, blaming God for my troubles. But for those three years I held on to Psalm 23, repeating it a dozen times a day. It’s burned into my brain. I held onto that psalm which God gave me to keep hope alive. It has become my story.

I had been angry at God since Beverly’s death and the spiraling down of my life. Every year things seemed to get worse and my desire for happiness thwarted. I blamed circumstances, people, and God for the troubles of my life. Not once did I look at myself, at my attitude and my actions. I could not see myself with any objectivity at all. No one had the courage to confront me. I went to church every morning in Vancouver but confessed nothing to the priest or to anyone else. I felt utterly alone even from God but I kept talking to him. He let me stew in the consequences of my sin but protected me from the worst, keeping me off the street as a bum by giving me just enough money to live in the YMCA and eat two small meals a day.

As the limits of my unemployment insurance time approached, the Lord arranged for me to go to Korea to teach English through what I initially saw as a series of accidents but in hindsight was a clear plan of his grace. In Korea I met Kyeong, my new wife. I didn’t like her at first nor she me because each of us saw the heavy emotional baggage we were carrying, making neither of us fit for a sustaining and loving relationship, which involves a lot of sacrifice based on an objective view of yourself and your sins which keep you in the corral of selfishness. But, for only the second time in my life, I heard God’s voice telling me to love Kyeong. The first time I heard him was his call to faith. As with the first call, I didn’t want to obey. Eventually I did because I began to see how small I was shrinking my heart by not loving anyone but being angry instead. I was surprised that Kyeong resisted my love.

Soon after I had declared myself to Kyeong, I went to India to teach at an international school with a contract that had been set months beforehand. From there I courted Kyeong through emails and phone calls. Because she had just started going to Wooridle Church, we began sharing our lives, interpreting events through the daily Bible passage that Wooridle was using. Because I was reading Rick Warren’s A Purpose Driven Life, Kyeong got a copy and we used the insights and teachings in it to further explore ourselves and God’s will for us. On one of my visits to her in Korea, we married. I attended Wooridle Church with her and became a member.

When I returned to Korea, we did not have much money and Kyeong had a great deal of debt. Our first years were hard. We focused on our relationship with God and paying off debts. We lived frugally because there was really no true choice. We attended church on Sundays and Wednesday nights. We went to our small group meetings on Friday. We shared our sins and our life’s hurts in the small group meetings and listened to others sharing theirs. God’s mercy has no bounds. Slowly, by God’s grace, our small, hard life became a happy one. I joined the cleaning team at church and helped clean the buildings we rented every Sunday and Wednesday. I couldn’t speak Korean and the other people couldn’t speak English, but we came to understand one another. For years I would sit through sermons and testimonies with no translation until God blessed my patience with a budding translation service. I came to see my time of cleaning, worship attendance, small group sharing, and frugal living as badly needed training by God. It all helped keep my eyes on Jesus. Although the hardship is the blessing, God gave me many others.

I got a small paying job writing my stories, a wonderful experience for a year! Every week day I’d get on the subway with a paper notebook and write a story. When I’d drafted the story I would come back on the subway, illustrating the story. The subway was my office. Although the stories are not a runaway success, they led to my current job as principal. My school was the third one offering me a job, the first two in India that, with the prayerful help of my spiritual community, I turned down. I accepted the principalship of my school because I and my community recognized the will of God in the direction he wanted in my life. The blessing of a spiritual community to help keep you honest is one of God’s greatest gifts because to trust only yourself is to cut yourself off from objective examination and correction. In my new job, I quickly discovered that the training I’d received in my church was essential for how I was to create relationships, who to fire, who to hire, and how to direct the school according to God’s will. Continual prayer was and is essential. It took many years to transform the school, but by God’s grace it has been and is now internationally recognized as a great small school. God’s doing, not mine.

Despite my sinful lapses into arrogance, judgmentalism, and selfishness, God has continued to bless me. My school keeps extending my contract, we own a house and an apartment, our debts are paid, we have nice clothes and furniture, we are in reasonably good health, and I am finishing my PhD after a 40 year hiatus. And through this worldly blessing, God continues to love us by allowing us troubles in our small groups and in our families that we cannot handle on our own. It’s all training to keep us focused on our Lord and the love he has for us. This leads me back to you, Deadname.

Far and away the majority of homosexuals experienced sexual abuse as a child, discoloring their development because when they go through puberty that memory deeply confuses them and they scarcely understand their feelings, hard enough in adolescents without them being muddied by a history of sexual abuse. My question to you, Deadname, is did you have a pre-pubescent sexual experience with a man, perhaps at a camp? If not, what emotional lack in your environment led you make such a gesture?

I assume that, since you say you are transgender, you have had or are having homosexual relationships. If so, from a Christian perspective, that is a sin. You went to a Catholic school and read the Old and New Testament passages that categorically declare it as a sin. You would also have read in the first chapter of Genesis that God created us male and female. If you are Christian, then what you are doing sexually is a sin and needs to be repented. It is a great mercy that we have a loving God who has interceded on our behalf and will forgive us. God loves the sinner but not the sin. Unrepentant sin jeopardizes your salvation.

Please keep in mind that at the end of your life you will stand before God, the creator of the universe and your creator. Looking into the face of God, how will you be able to say that he made a mistake in your gender? The mistake is yours, Deadname, not God’s.

God loves you, Deadname, your parents love you, and your family loves you including me. But you are committing a sin that will have serious consequences not only for you but also for others, just as my sins had unhappy consequences for many others. In the name of Jesus Christ, I beg you to see yourself with more objectivity and see the sin you are committing because your salvation is at risk. The Father loved the world so much that he sent Jesus to redeem us from the results of our sins. He instilled in our hearts the knowledge of right and wrong and reinforced that with Scripture. He sent his Holy Spirit to guide us into all righteousness. Look to Jesus, Deadname, and come home to God. All us prodigal sons are welcomed back when we return.

Love,

Papa Ted

From: [email protected]

To: Papa Ted

Subject: Your Email

Hi Papa Ted,

I got your email, I want to make something explicitly clear, nothing you, or anyone else says will change the fact that I am a woman, and always have been.

My identity is not up for debate.

I didn't know how to express what I was feeling for most of my life before June of 2018, but that doesn't make the feeling any different. I had an epiphany where I finally put the concepts I had learned in my Queer Theory and Feminist Theory classes into practice, when assessing my own internal feelings.

I also want to make it clear to you that the choice I'm making is not to feel this way, but rather to do something about it, so that I can lead a more fulfilling life, because the alternative leaves me in a dark place, one that has claimed the lives of far too many trans, gender non-conforming, and other queer folks already. My choice is to transition, and become more comfortable with my body, and myself, and be more emotionally in touch with myself, and those I choose to have any sort of relationship with.

Going into a career already known for putting mental health at risk, I know that it's my responsibility to make sure I am emotionally healthy before I try to be a support for any of my patients in the future, so not transitioning would actually be professionally irresponsible.

You mentioned that we shouldn't make life any harder than it already is, but you also referred to struggles and hardship as blessings from god (presumably because they can teach us something). Is struggling with my gender identity somehow not a struggle that could qualify as a blessing? I know a number of trans folks, and they are all the kindest, most compassionate, and caring people I've ever met, they are important role models to me because they have figured themselves out, and achieved a level of inner piece that most people can only dream of. And all that despite the horrible, transphobic tirades, commentary, and articles that exist in our world, not to mention being regularly dehumanised by politicians determined to see us exterminated.

Is the Book of Job not explicitly about God allowing torment to be visited upon a man as a test of his faith? To prove a point to Satan? I would argue that, from a Christian perspective, queer folk exist to teach us all compassion, and to test our grasp of the golden rule. There is no group I can think of from more diverse backgrounds, who have consistently turned the other cheek. The Stonewall riots, which are commemorated by Pride every year, were the release of frustrations that had been building up since the creation of police in America. I would argue that the Stonewall riots have led to the world becoming a safer place for us all, but especially those who are visibly in the queer community.

I also think I should point out that the bible actually calls shellfish equally abominable as homosexuality, in the same passage, along with mixed fibres. Now, if you don't take the rest of the passage literally, why would we take any of it literally? Is the bible not supposed to be somewhat metaphorical?

And if we're going to take lessons from the bible, should we not focus on the ones that Jesus taught, like loving each other? Is that not the Whole Point of religion? to encourage love?

I won't be addressing your unfounded opinion that "homosexuals" (by the way, please never use that term to describe any member of the Queer Community again) other than to say that there is no evidence to support that, however, there is evidence that many queer folk are abused because of their non-conformity in hyper-conservative environments. These abuses, as with all abuses, are solely the responsibility of the abusers, and not the abused. This is non-negotiable, you will not bring this up again.

I'd also like to remind you that sex, gender, gender expression, and sexual orientation are all separate, and discrete.

Sex: usually used to refer to a biological state, most often used for reproductive discussions. biological sex is determined though a combination of chromosomal status, gonadal status, and hormonal status (see the videos I linked to in my original email if you would like a more in depth exploration of this topic).

Gender: a social construct, nothing more, often linked to sex in western society, for the last 1,000 years, but outside of that, is significantly more fluid. Western society favours a binary construction, but many other cultures have 3rd or more genders, both linguistically and culturally.

Gender expression: the way one expresses their gender identity, you do it through traditionally masculine clothing, for example.

Sexual orientation: who you are attracted to, certainly not a binary, since gender is not a binary.

You say the bible states that we were created man and woman, but I'd counter that the bible was written, translated, and re-translated by men, who probably had some kind of agenda. If all of us are sinners, then those that wrote the bible onto paper certainly are not exempt.

For me personally, I don't put a lot of stock in the absolutes that the bible lists, because there are so many possible ways to translate ancient languages, but that doesn't mean I don't appreciate the fact that it has helped so many people see the light in our world, I'm happy for you that you find peace through your worship.

Now, there' a bit of a paradox in what you've accused me of, because I am a trans lesbian. That means that either you have to accept my gender, and with that the fact that I am "a homosexual" or, I'm doing nothing wrong at all, but I cannot be both homosexual, and "not actually a woman" at the same time.

Frankly, you're going to have to accept, or at least bite your tongue on all counts if you want to continue to have me in your life.

As for serious consequences, if you think I haven't weighed all of the downsides of coming out against the downsides of staying in the closet, then you're a fool. I am well aware of the transphobia, and homophobia I'm going to face, and frankly, I've been lucky so far, you're the first person who has said anything so shitty to me.

I want to make it clear what I'm asking of you, and what I was asking of everyone who received my coming out email. I have a new name I am using, use it, and I have new pronouns, use them. I don't expect you to understand, truly you can't, unless you've been through a similar experience with gender, I don't even need you to accept it, all I'm asking, is you grant me some basic human decency and use my correct name and pronouns. You may hold your reservations about my "lifestyle" in your heart and let them fester if you wish, but I do not wish to know. we never need to talk about my transness again if that topic makes you so uncomfortable, but in exchange, I ask that you not criticize my choice to live a fuller life.

If you cannot do this, then it will sadden me deeply, you've been a role model my whole life, I've always looked up to you, but if you cannot respect my name and pronouns, then I cannot interact with you, for my own well being. If you choose not to respect my name and pronouns, you will never see or hear from me again. Both of my parents have my back on this, because they want me to be able to live a full and happy life, and people not respecting my name and pronouns have no place in it.

On the topic of my parents, and their relationship with religion, as well as my own. My mum is a member of an Anglican church, a church that has joined the 21st century, and openly supports the queer community, especially trans folks. My father attended Catholic school, as Katie and I did, and all Catholic school has ever succeeded in creating are people who leave the church, if they ever joined, and religious zealots who would see me dead before granting me rights or healthcare, is that what you want? because it certainly seems like it's what you're advocating.

If I ever find that the church is the right place for me, then I may choose to discuss faith with you, assuming you've managed to respect my name and pronouns, but until that day, I don't really want to discuss theology with you. I do not wish to have you treat my father, my sister, or I with such disdain. Nor Tess, for that matter, this is the 21st century, not Victorian England. While it may not sit well with your conscience that Tess was born "out of wedlock" (excuse me while I clutch at my pearls), this reflects nothing on her character, she is strong, kind, independent, and is already growing into a wonderful human being. And frankly, if your respect for my mother is conditional upon her church attendance, you can bite your tongue about that too.

I almost decided not to read your original email, or even acknowledge it with any kind of response, because reading your email, and working on this response has taken a toll on me. I decided that I couldn't live with myself if I didn't give you at least one more chance to be a better person. In writing this response, I'm not expecting, or wanting any kind of reply from you, unless it's a message of support. I'm not asking for much, name and pronouns. You don't have to understand, just accept. -- With love, compassion, and hope,

Paislee

#mine #personal #text #Paislee talks about trans stuff #cisheteronormativity

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exultationetoile · 5 years

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📋 Following his cousin Roman's request, Niko Bellic, an Eastern European, comes to Liberty City to pursue the American Dream, and to search for the man who betrayed his unit in a war fifteen years prior. Upon arrival, however, Niko discovers that Roman's tales of riches and luxury were lies concealing struggles with gambling debts and loan sharks, and that Roman lives in a dirty apartment rather than a mansion.

Niko defends Roman from his loan sharks several times, eventually killing Vlad Glebov, Roman's Russian loan shark. Niko was forced to work for Vlad to settle Roman's debts but ended up killing him after learning that he had slept with Roman's girlfriend, Mallorie. After Vlad's murder, Niko and Roman are kidnapped by members of the Liberty City Bratva on order of Mikhail Faustin and his associate, Dimitri Rascalov. Faustin, not bothered by the murder of Vlad, hires Niko. Niko quickly learns that Faustin is a psychopath when he orders him to kill the son of Kenny Petrović, the most powerful man in the Liberty City Bratva. After the Petrović family threatens retaliation, Dimitri orders Niko to assassinate Faustin in order to prevent a gang war. When Niko meets with Dimitri to collect on the assassination, Dimitri brings Niko's former employer Ray Bulgarin instead, the latter accusing Niko of stealing from him a few years earlier. When Niko truthfully denies the allegation, a firefight ensues, allowing Dimitri and Bulgarin to escape.

Immediately afterwards, Niko and Roman are forced to escape to Bohan when their apartment and taxi company are destroyed in arson attacks by Dimitri's men. However, things go poorly as well in Bohan: Dimitri's men kidnap Roman in a failed bid to ambush and kill Niko, who rescues Roman. Furthermore, Niko's girlfriend Michelle reveals that she works for a government agency and entraps Niko into working for her agency, known only by its cover: United Liberty Paper. Niko kills several known or suspected terrorists for the agency in exchange for the file of the numerous crimes the police have on him and the promise of assistance in finding the traitor of his unit.

Eventually, United Liberty Paper tracks down the man responsible for Niko's unit's betrayal, Darko Brevic, and brings him into Liberty City. Niko confronts Darko and decides his fate. Having dealt with his past, Niko is summoned by one of his employers, Jimmy Pegorino, who demands one final favour: to help with an extremely lucrative deal on heroin in collusion with Dimitri Rascalov.

At this point, Niko is faced with two choices: strike a deal with Dimitri, or exact revenge on him. Should Niko go through with the deal, Dimitri sets up Niko by taking the heroin for himself. At Roman's wedding, an assassin sent by Dimitri kills Roman with a stray bullet as Niko disarms and kills him. A devastated and vengeful Niko later tracks down, chases, and kills Dimitri, but not before witnessing Dimitri executing Pegorino. Should Niko choose to exact revenge, Niko ambushes and executes Dimitri. At Roman's wedding, Pegorino, furious after Niko's betrayal, commits a drive-by shooting. He targets Niko, but ends up killing Niko's girlfriend, Kate. Niko soon tracks down, chases, and kills Pegorino, who had become hated and targeted by the entire Liberty City underworld.

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kansascityhappenings · 5 years

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Critics of Missouri abortion law sue after failing to secure a public vote

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Abortion-rights advocates on Thursday sued Missouri’s top election official, alleging his actions and state laws denied them the right to put one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws to a public vote.

No Bans on Choice Committee and the American Civil Liberties Union sought to put the law on the 2020 ballot in hopes that voters would overturn it. The measure bans abortions at or after eight weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for medical emergencies but not for rape or incest.

But they dropped the vote push when ran out of time to gather enough signatures to put the law on holding pending a public vote. It’s slated to take effect on Aug. 28, although a federal judge on Monday will weigh whether to pause the law as another lawsuit against it plays out in court.

Attorneys for those who sued put the blame on Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft. They claim Ashcroft dragged his feet in processing the referendum petition, leaving them with only two weeks to gather 100,000 signatures.

ACLU of Missouri Acting Director Tony Rothert said at this point, there’s nothing to do to salvage the referendum effort. Instead, critics of the law want a Cole County judge to rule that petitioners should be allowed to collect signatures earlier in the referendum process, possibly preventing a similar issue from happening again.

Photo via Jay Ashcroft Facebook page

“We want to make sure that Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and any future politician is never able to deny Missourians the right to put laws like this abortion ban to a vote,” No Bans on Choice Treasurer Robin Utz said.

A spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office, which defends state laws against court challenges, said state attorneys are currently reviewing the lawsuit.

Ashcroft spokeswoman Maura Browning didn’t immediately comment on the lawsuit, saying the office needs to read it first. But she’s previously said the Secretary of State’s Office “followed the same process we use for every initiative petition and referendum, and has taken an amount of time comparable to any other petition or referendum.”

Critics point out that Ashcroft on June 6 rejected the ACLU’s petition, along with a similar petition backed by wealthy Republican donor David Humphreys, another critic of the law.

He had cited a provision in the Missouri Constitution that prohibits referendums on legislation that has already taken effect. Although most of the law is set to take effect Aug. 28, the Republican-led Legislature voted to make a section of the bill that changed parental consent laws for minors seeking abortions take effect immediately.

But the ACLU sued against Ashcroft’s decision, and ultimately won.

Browning has said the ACLU could have saved time by filing the petition 11 days earlier, after the Legislature passed the bill. The ACLU waited until Republican Gov. Mike Parson signed it May 24.

“It’s now been adjudicated that he broke the law,” Acting ACLU of Missouri Director Tony Rothert said of Ashcroft’s action, “and he’s trying to weasel out of responsibility for that.”

In the lawsuit, attorneys for those who sued also alleged that Missouri laws impede citizens’ right to referendum. That’s because for referendums, state law prohibits petitioners from collecting signatures until a ballot title is certified.

“State officials can prevent a referendum on a favored piece of legislation simply by using all of their statutorily allotted time to complete their administrative tasks and thereby delaying certification of a ballot title for 51 days after a proposed referendum petition is submitted,” the lawsuit alleged.

Karisa Gilman-Hernandez told reporters Thursday that she and thousands of other volunteers for No Bans on Choice spent money on training to collect voter signatures and had planned to be ready at a moment’s notice to begin the effort.

NARAL Pro-Choice Missouri Executive Director Mallory Schwarz said abortion-rights advocates are now redirecting resources toward registering voters in advance of the 2020 elections. Both Parson and Ashcroft are up for re-election.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2019/08/23/critics-of-missouri-abortion-law-sue-after-failing-to-secure-a-public-vote/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2019/08/23/critics-of-missouri-abortion-law-sue-after-failing-to-secure-a-public-vote/

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movietvtechgeeks · 7 years

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Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/agents-shields-explosive-episode-goes-boom/

'Agents of SHIELD's' explosive episode goes Boom

A lot is happening in Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD lately as I keep saying in these recaps, making it seem that they’re not dragging the whole season up by keeping things interesting. There’s a full recap below so if you’re not caught up yet, here’s the obligatory SPOILER ALERT. If you still want to know, read on and enjoy. We start the episode with Coulson sitting outside a restaurant in Spain, seemingly talking to himself, but turns out to be Mack. They’re actually after a woman named Agnes who surprisingly looks like AIDA and could actually be her model. They think that this woman could lead them to Radcliffe and later to Agent May. Next, we see Radcliffe waking up from one of his simulations with the help of AIDA herself. Radcliffe marvels whatever they’re working on and checks on Agent May who, in their terms is quite ‘satisfied.' Radcliffe then talks to The Superior who tells him that he’s already read the Darkhold so that they can find the solution to the Inhuman problem. Radcliffe takes the book from him showing signs of obsession and surprisingly, The Superior did not object. Radcliffe then shows The Superior his cache of pure Terrigen crystals given to him by Hive. Unlike previous incarnations, which killed those who came in contact with them, pure Terrigen is harmless to humans. These can be used then to transform suspected of having Inhuman genes. We then turn to SHIELD HQ where Fitz is testing an LMD detector which is not quite perfected yet as it detects humans with metal on them while Simmons is working with Mace on his ‘super soldier serum.’ Simmons, however, tells him that the serum has the potential to cause cardiac arrest at any time and the danger rises the more it’s used. The reason for it is that Mace sincerely wants to matter and wants to be part of the team. He wants to continue using the serum as he’s not that skilled in hand-to-hand combat. Simmons is not so optimistic on him, but Fitz lifts his spirits up by bringing him his modified suit that can automatically inject him with the serum. Simmons again shoots his hopes down until Mace’s huge bodyguard ushers him back to is schedule. To handle bureaucracy and keep Nadeer in check. Phil calls in that they found Agnes Kitsworth, the woman Radcliffe modeled AIDA after. Phil and Mack confront her about Radcliffe, but she doesn’t want anything to do with him until they show her AIDA. We see here that Ms. Mallory Jensen has more to offer than just act robotic. But acting like such does take some skill as she’s supposed to act as robotic as possible but not alert humans to such. Next, we see The Superior’s aide Shockley visit Senator Nadeer. His purpose is to test the Terrigen crystal on her since her brother is an Inhuman, she could be also. In a surprising twist, she doesn’t turn, but Shockley does. They might not be blood siblings which could explain why she found it easy to dispose of her own brother or that she’s really psychopathic. We won’t find out because she gets killed in an explosion shown from the outside of the building as Shockley was undergoing terrigenesis. It’s a shame though that she’s killed immediately rendering that whole thing with her brother rather moot. If her purpose was to introduce the Superior, she’s a clever attempt to drag the story a bit. After SHIELD finds out what happened, Mace orders them to investigate while Phil is out elsewhere. Mace and team arrive to investigate the scene but again, Mace is delegated to answer the press instead of actually working which continues to annoy him. The team fails to detect any evidence of bomb material and takes their chances of Shockley still being at large. In Spain, Agnes wasn’t so surprised at what she saw given her knowledge of Radcliffe’s work. She tells Phil that she’s Radcliffe’s dead end because she has a terminal illness Radcliffe can’t fix. He abandoned her and disappeared while she is spending her last days in Spain. Phil insists that she help to find Agent May, but she brushes them off. Mack disagrees with Phil in forcing Agnes to help as Phil appears to be taking things too personally for May at the cost of Agnes’ peace and ends up sitting it out. We next see Shockley alive making his way back to a Watchdog base. Anton questions how he’s still alive and lies that it was Nadeer who turned and exploded because the terrigen was defective. Anton leaves, and later, the base gets attacked by SHIELD led by Daisy and captures Shockley. Meanwhile, Coulson takes another shot at persuading Agnes to help by telling her his feelings for May and how Radcliffe kidnapped her and replaced her with an LMD. Agnes explains that Radcliffe has a good nature, but Coulson tells her how the Darkhold corrupted him. Agnes decides to help. Radcliffe later gets a message from Agnes and reveals to AIDA how she got her likeness. Radcliffe leaves and tells AIDA to finish the ‘framework’ but leaving her to ponder on her origin. Daisy interrogates Shockley on the Zephyr while Fitz and Simmons try to detect any explosives from the evidence. They then deduce that Shockley was an exploding Inhuman just in time to prevent him from exploding in the Zephyr upon meeting Mace and Daisy. Mace, still trying to be relevant recklessly forces Shockley into a containment chamber with the help of Fitz. Shockley survives and later reconstitutes reminiscent of the Sandman in Spider-Man 3. The team deduces Shockley to be still alive and that only Daisy can counter his power. Mace tells them that Shockley has become the ultimate suicide bomber. He could be this universe’s version of the villain Nitro who was responsible for the Marvel Comics’ first Civil War event. Shockley later makes his way to a desert motel and confesses to the Superior what he’s become but remains true to their cause and that whatever they’re planning hasn’t changed. He then blows himself up again to gain SHIELD’s attention. Agnes sets Radcliffe p to meet in a restaurant but gets a phone handed to her instead. Radcliffe explains that his new breakthrough can finally save her life. Agnes finds Radcliffe who persuades her that she can have another chance, not as an android but by living happily in another world. Radcliffe describes that he already has a thriving subject in that world. With such a promise, she chooses to go with Radcliffe leaving behind Coulson. Meanwhile, SHIELD goes to confront Shockley in order to capture him. Daisy could not control his explosions but instead, decide to explode him instead in order to wear him out. However, they find out that Shockley isn’t alone. Anton is closing in on the team. Shockley’s real goal is to deliver Daisy and Mace to Anton. Mace decides to use the serum and confront Anton’s men. Daisy and team manage to capture Shockley but with Daisy weakened, they had to escape. Mace ends up getting captured by Anton. In Radcliffe’s base, they upload Agnes’ mind into the ‘framework’ and then her body dies. Coulson understood Agnes’ choice but is actually relieved that May is still alive inside Radcliffe’s framework. Agnes is alive within the framework, and Radcliffe is satisfied with that but hints that the real body attached to it will eventually succumb which means curtains for May if she’s not rescued in time. AIDA meanwhile continues to exhibit some creepy emotion akin to jealousy and takes Agnes’ necklace for her own. Overall, the episode is great and action packed. Almost everyone’s role here is well-balanced. Phil, Mack, Fitz, Simmons, AIDA and Radcliffe. Mace is the star of the show sincerely trying to help and stay relevant after he was discovered as not being inhuman. Unfortunately, he gets captured by The Superior leaving Coulson with two hands short and more to rescue. We could be in for a more interesting and exciting episode as the stakes are now much higher with SHIELD’s director held hostage and May’s life on the line. Meanwhile, Radcliffe is out to upload everyone into his Matrix-like world with the help of the Darkhold. AIDA is becoming more human, and The Superior has already read into the Darkhold and is a step closer to wiping out Inhumans. If you’re not into AOS yet, now’s the time.

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