#not because I don’t think it’s a profoundly brilliant thing because I do

[mightymizora]

I have so many feelings about the big Netflix show blowing up that are complex and knotty and nuanced but really the top level is I don’t think society as a whole is empathetic enough for a story like this now.

[hitlikehammers]

intimately entwined

rating: e (but not how you think) ♥️ cw: the deepest intimacies in the most unexpected places knocking someone on their ass  ♥️ tags: established relationship, care-taking, casual intimacy, fluff, relationship development, slice of life, idiots in love

for @steddielovemonth day three: Love is wanting to do everything with someone, even if its nothing special

and yes, again: these boys probably grow up to star in the rockstar-husbands-with-the-sex-toys fic je ne regrette rien which will have a sequel flavoured revival via @subeddieweek in April whaaaaaatttt

“Another.”

And the way it’s said: it’s almost fucking expectant too, Jesus Christ, this man.

“You’re sure this is okay?”

Because, like, Eddie needs to know it is. He needs to check, then double check, then triple check because…because this feels like a wholly different step, y’know? This feels like crossing a kind of line they haven’t even dared to tiptoe near just yet, wholly different from all the other lines they’ve navigated, both reckless and careless but together, always, and that helps, in theory. It helps to know that no matter how they’ve fumbled or triumphed in this, between them: it’s been hand in hand. Before, and during, and after.

Still, though. This is…this just feels very fucking different. The kind of boundary with implications that feel heavy and expansive under Eddie’s ribs. Maybe it should seem less monumental compared to other shit they’ve done, and most of that with far less deliberation and hesitation for them, at that. But this does, it…Eddie genuinely believes this pumps weird and novel through his veins, because it is different; and incredible for it, no question. Terrifying. Wholly beggars belief, honestly, and Eddie never really understood that phrase meant but.

He thinks this thing fits it, to a T.

“I said it was, didn’t I?”

Eddie blinks, recenters: was it okay?

And this, this…brilliant perfect little shit: Eddie can hear the smirk in his voice without even looking. He can hear the amusement as much as the loose-ends of frustration. Like Eddie is being absurd here.

Which: what the actual fuck; seriously.

Like, like: goddamn seriously.

“Yeah,” Eddie answers, a little hesitant, a lot fucking dazed; “yeah you did,” because…he did. From the beginning, from even before they settled int to start this: Steve had been…vocally enthusiastic. Not that Eddie hadn’t been! He’d mostly just, he’d just been—

“You think I’m fucking with you?”

Again: without having to see Eddie clocks the eye roll, the not-even-subtle challenge in it.

Alongside the nugget of genuine hurt held for if it turns out true and that: no.

No, Eddie will not fucking have that, so.

Okay, he won’t have that, but also first:

“I mean, yeah—“ because umm…their sex life is a little undeniable.

Steve snorts; how. How

“Here and now, jackass,” he snipes back and Eddie…Eddie really and truly doesn’t fucking know what to do with this. How cal, Steve is. How focused and dedicated to the task. How monumentally and profoundly, just…

How this is sitting in his chest as so much more than the rest of it somehow in a way Eddie cannot wrap his mind around to understand and it’s frightening. Not understanding something so clearly and intimately important; so clearly fucking intimate.

“Not exactly,” Eddie ultimately settles on speaking rather than continuing to gape, continuing to stew in his terror as his heartbeat picks up but speed, it comes out more choked than he’d been hoping; less convincing by a mile as a result. “I don’t think you’re fucking with me like, like it’s something intentional,” and Eddie seeks out Steve’s gaze directly then because that’s it, that’s the hurt part he needs to root out and not crush to bits because he doesn’t crush any part of the man he loves, ever; no.

No, Eddie needs to root that out so he can draw it into the pounding in his chest warm and safe to be cradled and adored until it snuffs itself out in contented fucking joy, for being loved right. Like it deserves.

Which might be part of the problem in the present case just: this time it’s a problem for Eddie.

“Like not mean or anything,” he reiterates, to make absolute sure of this part too; “I just…”

Steve watches him as he struggles to put any part of it into words, can’t even move, or fidget like this: caught, and kinda giddily so underneath everything else, and maybe he needs to lean into that base sensation, see if he can chart his way out from the center versus stumbling around the sides:

“It can’t be, like, enjoyable,” is what he ultimately settles on saying as clear as he came because honestly, that sums up the bulk of it.

Plus he’s learned by now to trust Steve to reach around his rougher edges and find the heart of his meaning, or else, and probably more often: hold his hand as the send out a search party between them for the right words.

Because that’s still it, isn’t it: together.

And of everything else, Eddie doesn’t have to even pysch himself up to trust in that; it just it. It comes natural like breathing.

“Umm,” Steve draws out, a little incredulous; “why not?”

Why not? Why isn’t this exchange clearly one-sided?

“Because,” Eddie tries to find his words, or at least some of them: “I guess, what do you get out of it?”

Steve’s the one glancing to lock their gazes and Eddie…Eddie doesn’t feel ashamed where he might have early on. But he recognises the similar dive where it still lives in his stomach for the gentle warmth that Steve stares into him. Like he sees Eddie’s question, and loves Eddie enough that he won’t dismiss it.

“One more,” Steve instructs confidently, just-shy-of-demands.

“Steve—“

“If you hate it we never have to do it again,” Steve counters; a compromise; “promise.”

“That’s not—“ because fucking hell, as if Eddie could ever hate it.

“One more,” Steve reminds him with the patience of a saint and…Eddie’s moving almost without any thought for it at all, like his body runs the way of his heart and moves for Steve be rote, which.

Kinda, yeah.

“Blow,” Steve’s instructing and Eddie’s doing the moving-by-instinct-because-Steve-says thing again; knows he’s blinking owlishly as he purses his lips and does as he’s asked.

Blows. Ever-so-gentle.

“Okay,” Steve assesses and then grins: “okay, that’s it. Perfect.”

Eddie won’t fucking argue. Not least because it’s true.

Though he’s more invested in the perfection looking up at him like this.

“Verdict?”

And okay, Eddie thinks maybe he has words now, at least inside his head: intimacy wasn’t something he’d ever had before Steve, and frankly was never something he was hanging hopes on ever getting, again—before Steve.

But it wasn’t just because he didn’t have other options that Eddie banked on intimacy equalling sex, either. Because once he did have Steve, it just shifted to the idea of sex as a way of showing love. The more of himself he could give to Steve, the more intimate they’d become: the more of him that was Steve’s for the taking, the more of Steve he look reverent into himself, body to body: that was intimate. That was a relationship, how it looked as it grew. First time Steve came inside him. First time Eddie licked him open. First time he fucked Steve’s gorgeous goddamn thighs.

That kind of thing.

But Eddie’s not sure even the heaviest, headiest sex has ever left his heart as much of a thumping, fluttery mess as just this, which doesn’t feel like just anything: Steve. Sitting in front of him. With a bottle he drove out to Indy to get just for Eddie. Because Eddie wanted it. Because Eddie would like it. Because it might make Eddie happy and it did, it really really did, and—

Steve’s just painted his fucking nails the most gorgeous shiny black, only the slightest bit straying off on the skin, too, and it’s somehow hitting Eddie deeper than the first time they fucked, the first time they stretched each other open, the first time they 69’d in the sheets.

This is apparently what knocks Eddie on his ass for just how deep the love goddamn goes.

“That.”

“Hmm,” Eddie hums, blinking back to the moment where he was busy getting caught up in the new revelation of what intimacy looked like, not to mention caught up in admiring his nails: “what’s ‘that’?”

And Steve’s smiling beatific, incandescent, as he pokes Eddie’s cheek, no, more specifically: as he pokes Eddie’s dimple.

“What I get out of it.”

And Eddie flushes hot under Steve’s touch, then, as it all adds up and seeps in strong enough to shake his core before reshaping him from the inside out as Steve taps the little divot in his skin playfully:

“That.”

Which is how Eddie realizes full on and forever, probably something he already knew, just somewhere under the surface: the intimacy was the sharing of the joy. And in love, especially a love like this one: joy itself is the payoff.

Joy, like everything, is shared by default.

Eddie lifts his eyes, meets Steve’s smile so wide, and relishes the color on his nails as a sign of it for seeing; relishes the dizzy cadence pumping in his chest as proof for the rest of him, to feed and nurture this depth of loving for all the simple things, undimmed and forever until his heart stops doing anything at all. Because there is no pay off, even if there is always something to get out of it. Out of all of it.

Because love is them; together.

Intimately entwined to the goddamn cells.

tag list (comment to be added): @pearynice @hbyrde36 @slashify @finntheehumaneater @wxrmland

♥️

divider credit here

[gojonanami]

https://www.tumblr.com/gojonanami/758172854003138560/yall-really-love-to-get-angry-about-fictional?source=share

Honestly, I love the story of ‘Jujutsu Kaisen’ and I truly adore some of the characters. I really do think it’s a sign of brilliant storytelling if my heart has been captured wholeheartedly by these characters almost a year after I had encountered this story.

However, I must admit that this fandom is really turning me off indulging in fics surrounding these characters. I haven’t really ever participated in many fandoms before, but in the ones that I had, I’ve never experienced such… rage-fuelled vitriol and insult-filled discourses before?

I don’t really understand what’s the point of it all. Like even just now, I saw a profoundly hateful anonymous ask on another blog which denounced the Q&A because Satoru is ‘obviously a gay twink’ who would never be ‘into geriatric older women’. (NB: I don’t want to repeat the derogatory insults used in that ask in this ask.)

I know exactly how you feel. The fandom feels super toxic as of late and I know I’m not the only one feeling it lately 😭

it really sucks honestly — people are just arguing over dumb things that don’t even matter — especially since it’s just a manga / show.

I’ve truly never experienced the level of hate I’ve gotten on this blog before on the internet (and all over being a stsg shipper (and literally I like almost every ship) or just writing my fics lol). I truly don’t get it.

oof I can totally imagine it — it’s so sad because it’s not even one subset of the fandom — it’s just everywhere and there’s no way to escape it 😭

[yuzukahibiscus]

Cosmos Troupe TOP Makaze Suzuho graduates, she smiles and says “I’ve been fully concentrated in Takarazuka, I will start to take things slowly from tomorrow”.

(Source taken from Nikkan Sports, where you can find the original articles here and here)

Takarazuka Revue Cosmos Troupe TOP Makaze Suzuho embraced the closing day performance (Senshuuraku) of “Casino Royale~My Name is Bond~” in the Tokyo Takarazuka Theatre on the 11th, graduating from the Takarazuka Revue after being here for 17 years. 

For her last time walking down the grand staircase, she chose to wear the black tails that carries an otokoyaku significance. She spoke in her speech, “The 8th Cosmos Troupe Top Star Makaze Suzuho finishes her mission today. Thank you so much for these 17 years!” In the same performance, her partner Jun Hana and others also graduated.

▼ Summary of her [graduation] speech

In this glamorous, beautiful stage; in this wonderful world of dreams, I have been in a time where I didn’t know fully what I could achieve, but in these days when I allowed my heart to roam free, I started to admire this world, to be guided by this world, to wander lost in this world, but also fall in love for this world and that was how I kept on walking forward.

I was still that immature person, and I don’t like meaningless things. I have the personality and tendency to even doubt logic and because of that I may have caused trouble to many. I could not be here alone, but it was from the one to ten to many people that guided me; it was because of the encounters with different people that I was able to grow and progress. This is something that I couldn’t embrace with just my hands – it was from this great love I received from everyone, that I was able to become greater and stronger. It is difficult for people to be completely compatible to each other, but we could work hard to understand and work well with each other. We could learn to trust each other. For those that have been trusting and supporting me, I am full of gratitude. The 8th Cosmos Troupe Top Star Makaze Suzuho finishes her mission today. Thank you so much for these 17 years!

She attended the press conference after finishing the performance and said, “Since I have been fully concentrated in living the fullest in Takarazuka, I will start to take things slowly tomorrow, and think one at a time and what I would be doing.”

She spoke of the reason she chose the black tails, “I was frustrated to think about that in the Takarazuka Grand Theare, but I thought since I’ve worn the hakama at that time, so I thought about wearing the black tails and walk down the staircase in Tokyo. This time it felt different from last time when I was wearing the hakama.”

As for Takarazuka Revue, she recalled that “it was a presence like a treasure, where I devoted my everything”. “No matter which performance it was, I have many memories of the scenery, the circumstances and the expressions from the audience. Any moment in time were all unforgettable memories.

Makaze entered the revue in 2006 and bestowed with a brilliant height of 175cm, she caught the audience’s attention during her lowerclassman days in Star Troupe. She transferred to Cosmos Troupe in May 2015, and became the TOP in November 2017. Speaking of “ultimate otokoyaku”, she has continued to pursue for this profoundly in her career.

[daisychainsandbowties]

avatrice & books

// turning this into a whole post bc it got LONG. ty anon who asked these questions

who prefers audio and/or digital books over physical?

out of necessity they have a LOT of digital books. Cam actually dumps her whole contraband collection in Bea’s inbox while she & Ava are still en-route to Switzerland, so that Bea’s new phone lights up on the seat beside her & it’s the first thing that relaunches her brain like a crashed excel document, because Ava’s drooling onto the leg of her pants with her body curled up across two seats. all the lights in the train are down low, & she gets an email from Cam (on the OCS extranet) with the subject line “don’t tell Mom :)))”.

headcanon is that Cam has been selling literary contraband in cat’s cradle for years (in true Camila style with a barter system where she gives people pages she printed off on the admin office’s old printer & they give her things like ‘interestingly-shaped bullet fragments’ and ‘bags of Haribo starmix with a preferential ratio of love hearts and cola bottles to bears & rings’)

so yeah, Cam has a little online archive hidden away on the OCS servers, & Bea spends the journey to Switzerland reading a digitally dog-eared file of miscellaneous philosophy papers, which Cam has been grabbing for her because it’s like Beatrice catnip. and it becomes a little habit for Cam to walk into Bea’s room at cat’s cradle to find her doing crunches with the lights off. Cam doing the sibling thing where she flicks the light switch on and off five times until Beatrice stops and just lies on the floor with arms akimbo, scowling:

‘leave me alone Camila.’

‘okay, broody bones, guess you don’t want this paper i found called ‘do holes exist?’

cue Bea coming down to breakfast the next morning STILL furious, squinting angrily at the straw in Mary’s smoothie until Mary asks if she needs to put it into protective custody.

she reads it again on the train because she wants to be angry over something stupid. she reads the essay that made Cam spend a week hiding in the apse and saying ‘i’m batman’ whenever Beatrice went inside - Nagel’s ‘what is it like to be a bat?’ and she reads a bit of Beckett because she really does find ‘Waiting for Godot’ funny, & then she reads her old favourites which she has printed and folded in her drawer in cat’s cradle

she LOVES Kepler’s astronomica nova because he has all these asides in it, and Bea chuckles aloud in the train carriage as she always does when she remembers reading first about Kepler writing “ah, what a foolish bird i have been!” & when her head hurts from reading the original Latin she switches to Carl Sagan’s cosmos, reading about Kepler again, feeling it in her chest:

“Kepler was a brilliant thinker and a lucid writer, but he was a disaster as a classroom teacher. He mumbled. He digressed. He was at times utterly incomprehensible… He was distracted by an incessant interior clamor of associations and speculations vying for his attention.”

beatrice & kepler &

“Geometry provided God with a model for the Creation… Geometry is God Himself.”

when Ava wakes up, Bea is reading the Lewis & Lewis holes article for the third time, & Ava jolts a bit because she looks real mad, and kind of devastated, but then Bea smiles at her & Ava says:

“what’s wrong?”

“nothing, nothing.” a pause, “i just… holes are full of the substance they create an absence in.”

“i think i need a croissant before you explain that to me”

Bea prefers physical books. she likes the smell of them, and the feeling of holding the words in her hands, and how you can leave a bookmark inside of a book and feel suddenly and profoundly like you are alive, putting an ellipses straight into the world ‘…. to be continued’.

it’s why she likes Cam’s dumb print-offs even if Camila has long-since convinced the ink cartridge that it is not, in fact empty but it definitely is getting there. even though sometimes the words are shaved off and she has to infer the full shape of sentences - and if she does, well, it’s kind of like sudoku & it’s a bit like learning song lyrics off the radio where, very occasionally, the words you mishear are better than the real ones.

but she does appreciate the search functions on the digital books & papers & the fact that she can screen reader things when her eyes are tired but her brain is not, (& Cam is very good at making sure that the PDFs she sends are screen reader accessible)

she doesn’t like audiobooks because she wants to put the emphasis where her brain thinks it should go, and even with the speed turned up there’s just a difference between her reading speed and the narration. & yeah, the auditory processing sometimes is not cooperating, never mind that her ears ring sometimes from hearing too many gunshots. there’s a reason the OCS has a deal with a hearing specialist bc if you retire, you’re going to have damage to your eardrums. a ringing aftershock of violence.

they both love dog-earing books and leaving little notes in the margins of, underlining things with intention so that the pen breaks through the paper; with mass-market paperbacks there’s no reason not to, though it takes a while for it to happen.

Ava is at first very tender with every object they own. she bawls her eyes out when she drops a glass in the kitchen one night because her fingers are tired and sore from doing finger strikes all day. Bea finds her there sort of curled up on her haunches, and quietly sweeps up the glass from around her, gently leads her around it because she’s in bare feet.

later, on the sofa, Ava tells her through tears that she has never had stuff that she picked out herself, and the glasses with the little bumblebees on them were hers, and now there are three of them instead of four. & Bea is a bit overcome by how sacredly Ava holds everything, for all that she doesn’t believe in any god.

Ava i think really likes audiobooks because you can do other things while you listen to them! so like, i imagine in the Switzerland era Ava is doing a thing where she’s trying to figure out what stuff she likes doing. so she gets painting supplies & some sheets of A3 paper & she puts on audiobooks while she experiments with colours.

she listens to books at night because Beatrice goes to sleep kind of early & she’s always like ‘oh no, you can leave the light on’ but actually she needs the light off and Ava knows it so instead she lies in the dark with one earphone in listening, on the one hand, to Beatrice mumbling in her sleep and also to whatever book she has & sometimes she takes out the fold-up ruler that she found in a charity shop & folds it and unfolds it and folds it again just to keep her hands busy.

but she also likes physical books because (once Beatrice assures her that it’s okay to write in them & damage them because they’re things and they’re hers and they’re meant to be loved in the way that feels best) she likes writing silly little notes in the margins, or things she wants to look up even though her phone is right there because if she google searches she’ll spend an hour not reading her book.

it makes her feel present & good to leave marks on the books even if it’s ‘ava silva was here’ because she thought she would leave only the smallest impression on the world for so long but now she has her own dirty plates to clean up and she has to pick her clothes off the floor and they have a small stack of very carefully-chosen paperbacks with dog ears and yellow highlighter marks and blue pen in the margins.

what do you think their weird book opinions & peeves would be?

Beatrice will go on a ten-minute tirade about how long it takes for mass-market paperbacks to come out these days. she HATES the fact that all books seem to get released in 25 euro hardcovers, because she spent her teenage years getting books from the second-hand store when the students were allowed to visit the nearby village & she kept an ever-expanding stack of old yellowing paperbacks on top of her chest of drawers, and she adores the feeling of the wafer-thin pages, the smell of them, even gross stuff like spots of blood on the pages from where people accidentally pressed an open cut down over a sentence.

the too-white pages of many modern books, and their thick, almost laminate feeling drives her up the wall. she loves second-hand bookstores and the way the books are stacked all haphazardly, to the ceiling, and they are 1 or 2 euros so you can get a stupid stack of them & pay with a crumply note and take them home and feel full for days.

Ava gets impatient with fiction that doesn’t feel real to her. overly-constructed stuff & characters who could never be real people. she likes messy narratives and non-linearity and she wants to know about the characters more than anything, because people fascinate her.

she likes books with plenty of dialogue, but also really appreciates introspective narratives & beautiful language & writers who can make her really feel like she’s there, and communicate alien experiences.

what are genres and/or tropes they absolutely will not read and/or are very picky about? what are genres & tropes they love?

well, obviously Beatrice loves non-fiction. she reads textbooks, she reads academic papers, she reads very old foundational texts in science & biology & philosophy because Beatrice really really likes understanding things.

one of the first books Cam sends her, which gets dumped right into the “broody bones’ library <3” subsection of the server, which Bea has a login for and everything, is Biology of Spiders by Foelix Rainer, & another file that just has about 3000 images of different spiders pulled from an internet search, so that Beatrice can swipe through them at her leisure (she can name-drop a terrifying number of them just by looking at the pic)

she adores Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (& even gets Ava to watch the TV series, which is not hard because Ava gets fully 0 _ 0 when Bea goes on sleepy rants about space). & ofc she has A Brief History of Time, but she gravitates too towards modern books on astronomy, and likes especially The Disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein because it is doing a lot of things & it makes her cry a few times. she reads a lot of very old astronomy papers too. again drawn to that line from Monsignor Lemaître:

“the believer has perhaps the advantage of knowing that the enigma has a solution, that the underlying writing is, when all is said and done, the work of an intelligent being, therefore that the problem raised by nature has been raised in order to be solved.”

she likes that. the world as a puzzle god put in her hands, though before it felt more like He had put a shovel there & told her to dig a grave (but not who the grave might be for).

with Ava, reading under the awning of the bar on her break, she feels like the puzzle has come back again and it is intricate; that maybe something as simple as a body might unlock it.

on that note, Beatrice also loves loves loves science-fiction. she grew up reading second-hand stuff. very weird, but very thoughtful. Dune and  Solaris and Flowers for Algernon and The Dispossessed. when Cam sends her the more modern stuff she devours things like The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin and Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer and also the Murderbot Diaries.

many others, but as a genre she’s drawn to it because it is often very profoundly human. & she still remembers reading the Star Wars Jedi Apprentice books in her room at boarding school, & how fun they were, and how even in the strangest places with the premise that everything is so, so different, there is a humanity that reasserts itself.

it suits the gentle texture of the faith that Beatrice actually has, which is not the faith of hard church benches and prayers before bed and holding her hand too close overtop of a votive candle. her faith is very soft, and it is about marvelling at the world, worrying about it, being tender towards it.

sci-fi does that for her. it says much in the way of ‘even if everything were different, the best and worst parts of us would remain the same. there will never be a point in history where we do not have to deal with what we are.’

i think she also likes poetry, and just weird good books that make you feel things. i think at some point in those two months she reads Autobiography of Red, remembering herself on the train and staring staring staring at the line “sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.”  

looking back and thinking that sometimes a girl makes a journey necessary, thinking of being shipped off to boarding school because of a girl and now shipped off to Switzerland again but with a girl. thinking of necessity, and the small ways in which she has managed to alter the meaning of that word.

other lines that strike her

“This would be hard

for you if you were weak

but you’re not weak”

“Well Goodnight Then they said and drove him up/ Those hemorrhaging stairs…Don’t want to go want to stay Downstairs and read.”

she likes Anne Sexton, too

reading “Sylvia’s Death” & knowing that it’s about something else but also thinking about her sisters. about lilith, especially.

“Thief —

how did you crawl into,

crawl down alone

into the death I wanted so badly and for so long”

the only genre she’s not going to read ever probably is crime/ thrillers, because not only does she just constantly have a little voice in her head going

wrong, wrong, wrong.

no it doesn’t work like that.

wrong.

you just broke both your legs.

that is not how you fire a gun

some of it just sits too close to the bone for her & it’s bad enough that she has her own memories of real-world bad things happening without reading about it. possessed people ripping each other to pieces, bodies in the streets.

the OCS visited enough murder scenes on the trail of demons to make Beatrice capable of smelling, all over again, what happens to a room after a person has been dead in it for several hours.

so she just doesn’t want to read any crime or really most mystery novels (she’s too smart for them, sees things choreographed or else dislikes when things aren’t choreographed at all). she has attended too many autopsies to want to read about them either.

i think Ava reads VERY widely. she loves reading plays & acting them out in the apartment. she has her own little library on the OCS extranet too, & she downloads all of Shakespeare’s stuff & puzzles through it and googles stuff but the pentameter makes sense to her & she loves sometimes how initially inaccessible it is to her because it feels good to unearth the meaning.

her favourite plays are Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and sadly Beatrice does persuade her to read Waiting for Godot and she does kind of think it’s good.

Ava is the one who likes reading fantasy books. she adores The Hobbit & this somehow leads to her finding the ‘legless lego legolas’ post & she spends a whole afternoon laughing randomly until Beatrice finally gives in to her curiosity and she is just ‘…. oh, Ava’ when she reads the crappy screenshot version of it that Ava shows her.

my girl Ava obviously loses it a bit over the Frodo/Sam dynamic in lotr (she likes to perform the travelling songs ofc. Ava is like repressed theatre kid energy fr) & Beatrice (happily) listens to her talk about Frodo and Sam for a whole half hour one evening while she chops vegetables.

Ava just really likes adventure stories & stories where characters are thrown together on a quest and become friends.

she’s obviously embarrassingly a sucker for the friends-to-lovers trope in fiction, but she also just enjoys stories about friendship because she’s had so few experiences of that in her life. she has  Beatrice and she kind of has Cam & everyone else doesn’t feel like a friend, exactly. Ava reads the Red Sister trilogy by Mark Lawrence and vibes so much with Nona Grey because of her wild and speechless loyalty to her friends (& yeah, the Sister Apple & Sister Kettle romance and the start of book 2 made her extremely giggly).

she also loves The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin bc the thing at the start of the book that goes “for all those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question” - Ava FELT that. & just the parallels for her in that book were very powerful. plus plate tectonics magic slaps.

& yeah, Ava is really interested in magic systems. she likes what they reveal about the worlds they exist in, and how they shape the narrative, and also just the rlly cool ones & the weird cheeky thrill of being like ‘….welp, i can do that too actually.’

Ava also really loves fiction with interesting characters and great dialogue and she loves description and colour and everything that pours life into art.

i’d say there isn’t much that Ava doesn’t like, but she isn’t huge into non-fiction because she MUCH prefers to just pester Beatrice about it, & have her voice explain things, and add her own little corrections and opinions with her cute smart smirk. and Ava thinks it is good for Beatrice to express her opinions on things.

she likes how Bea looks when she is Thinking and Processing, and also the excitement in her hands when she explains astrophysics or shows Ava a picture of a spider or tells her about obscure bits of architectural history, the banking system in Florence under the Medici, and all the knowledge she has been muffling with prayer.

Ava thinks that it is H O T but also important and Beatrice looks so free to her, and so good, when she is speaking on some subject with her eyes drifting freely around the room, always coming back to Ava, to her eyes, making sure she is still interested because Beatrice has been ignored so often, and stifled so often, but when she looks back Ava is always watching, and always listening.

so yeah! the girlies like to read & are very smart & i love them every day.

[dorkofclanlavellan]

Klaus’ Twin HC

Warnings: Canon typical violence, abuse mention (aka Mikael being the dick he is) 

You are about 6 minutes younger than him. 

You two are close and very protective of each other.

They would go out of their way to turn Mikael’s ire away from Klaus and towards them growing up.

They are Niklaus’ biggest defender. And his biggest bully. 

“Klaus is the stupid twin and the ugly twin.”

But if anyone else says anything remotely rude about Klaus, you will rip their throat out. 

Don’t worry the picking and protectiveness is mutual. 

Like Klaus, you have a temper. You just don’t express it the same way he does. Usually. 

You are terrifyingly calm. And when you do lose control of your temper and get violent it’s possibly even more terrifying than Klaus.

Almost constantly plotting. And you’re brilliant at it. You’re always ten steps ahead of everyone.

While you can easily kill just about anyone, you prefer to rip people to shreds with your words.

When the Mystic Falls crew brought Esther back. You did not trust your mother at all. And refused her ‘forgiveness’ and you refused to call her mother. You also refused to apologize to her.

“I have nothing to apologize for. Neither does Niklaus. Actually that’s not true. There is one thing. I’m so profoundly sorry...that you didn’t die slower.” This was followed by you threatening her if she harmed Niklaus or any of your other siblings.

When Elijah accused Klaus of knowing his unborn child could sire hybrids, you didn’t hesitate to verbally eviscerate your older brother.

“Some pretty little thing fed some bullshit into your ear and because you think with your dick and are eager to believe anything that paints Niklaus in a negative light you went right along with it. Niklaus didn't even know he could have children! So how could he possibly have known that the baby could sire hybrids? Also wouldn't you think for a second that he wouldn't want to put his child through the hell that Mikael put us through?”

You are so fiercely loyal to Niklaus that you’re the only person he truly trusts. No one and nothing could break your bond. 

Sure your relationship as twins borders and even goes right into codependency half the time. 

But it’s always seemed like it was just the two of you against the world. And more often than not, that truly was the case.

[daughterofdarkness777]

poem for nobody

RUN / Don’t call me your muse I might be amused don’t you know a muse dies tragically in a poetic way since she is a broken femme fatale that inspires artists well  look at me what do you see? Exactly. You thought my eyes were blue. You thought I looked like you . You thought I’m empathetic but wow you are beyond pathetic anyway this isn’t about YOU, because you are nobody’s muse . Gifts and trips all around the globe Santa Claus always brought me more more more .  Silver spoon I spat it out immediately  i bit the hand that actually never fed me , I’ve been starving since 1995. But I’ll change the paradigm Fuck it I’ll turn it all around . I’ve lost it all already so now I’m free free from any fear being fearless is a gift it’s my superpower now and throw it all at me you’ll see disagree I don’t care I know nobody would go near a bee for me this isn’t my girl anymore since I stand alone . You know what ? I am a muse. Just not yours . My own muse. Redefining the weight that word carries imma muse who is immortal you can’t touch me abuse me or hurt me in any way just try me you can not defy me I’m fucking magic call  me Hermione. Resilient brilliant both my traits .  I’m happy I’m sad where is the difference! I’m in my feelings no drake. This is the part where you start crying … can you hear me crying ? I hate to be to break this to you but you’ve got em all fooled they think you’re the shit but I can see right through you death becomes me not you . Immortality eternal beauty cmon look at yourself or better don’t cause if you take a good look and see through this image you so profoundly worked on for years the mirror might crack and you’ll see a toddler in an adults body pathetic as Fuck no ounce of confidence nor self image.Whoa this shit Is wack. I actually thought I was the one the one who was to blame for all your selfish games and every time I spoke my truth you made me feel insane you were clearly winning at your own game well now the tables are turned and I have switched ,  I’ll never be your bitch, those 4 Years i can’t have them  back you robbed me even of that time , my time , it’s not something I regret now I can spot monsters like you from a far and one last thing if you’re a superstar dude then I am an introvert very shy invisible to everyone around me . You’re so funny although you lack a sense of humour all the yarn you spin daily the fabrications you have to make up  so you can live with yourself . Someone should be honest with you . You’re nobody a zero boring to a degree that could be lethal so stop inflicting pain onto others who do you think you are babes ? You’re not a special snowflake you’re talentless beyond belief how could I have missed your kiss   ? Stupid me stupid you stupid world stupid people around us , that’s the past tho the future will come for you and when it does you’re not gonna make it through . Weak as hell lying  is the only thing you know how to do . Now enough about you I’m happy you shaped me into who I am today I’m glad about everything I’ve been through they  say once you’re in hell start running I am racing. And I’ll be dancing in fire dressed in my crying boy attire a trip to Venus all I desire . I’m non conforming to anyone any longer yup I’m a million times stronger .  Beg you run . Go ahead you’ll soon be dead dont waste your time with a vampire incapable of love /don’t  touch me no you can’t hold my hand I’ve been burnt before that’s why my love is deficit surely ain’t affectionate all I wanna do is spend time with her just her so go run you don’t compare you’ll never be anything like her . Run away . It’ll be okay . I don’t want to know if you reep what you sew. 

[yeslikethewizard]

I've been considering why I like the Magnus Archives—besides the characters that is. So, I thought I'd address it in a freestyle sort of essay kind of way, because I'm typing this up at work and therefore would not be able to really look up sources in the text/show itself for this. Bear with me because this is all off the top of my head.

To start I'll talk about a trope that I don't care for in horror media; humanity was the monster all along.

At first glance, the Magnus Archives is a monster of the week story. At second glance it is the above, that humanity was the monster all along. Neither of these are quite true, though you could feasibly shoehorn them into those categories and certainly still enjoy your experience. What I think though is that Sims took the tired trope of "humanity the monster all along" and put the best spin on it that I have seen before... that the monsters were human all along.

Now this isn't true for all of the Magnus Archives ghouls or ghosties, but it is true for many of the recurring characters. The thing that hits you, over and over again, is that the characters are people. Even the worst of them, even the most monstrous of them, continue to be human in little messy ways. There is no all-encompassing "this is a monster" moment for the characters. Not even really for the main character, Jon.

So what does that mean and how is it different from the trope that I said I don't like? That's the brilliant thing about it, really and truly. It's the kind of thing where you think "isn't that just saying the same exact thing in a different way" and true, at a glance it could be. But I'd argue that it is profoundly different in the most important way possible.

See the core message of the first trope is that human beings are monsters. That there is something about humans that is prone to evil. This is categorically untrue, and in fact there are studies that refute this. One fascinating one (again, sorry I cannot source this right now writing this at work) is this one where a man tried to prove that humans are prone to evil. That, when pushed to the brink and forced to claw their way out of survival humans will turn into creatures only willing to care for themselves, and willing to kill for it.

  So that man put a large group of people on some rafts and pushed it out to see and waited for them to crack under the pressure. He put all kinds of people on this raft, people that would probably clash. Different psychological viewpoints and variety and he wrote in his little book about how it was a matter of time before everyone was at each other's throats.

Except they never were. In fact, they banded together. Extraordinarily, against everything that man tried to do (and even tried to heckle them to do) they worked together. They found roles for themselves; they took care of one another. When someone had a hard day they showed compassion, when mistakes were made, they were understanding. It drove the guy running the experience into a sulky kind of anger and the things the people in the experiment seemed to all agree on was that the only person that was really a pain at all was the scientist. The one who was meant to be the impartial party angry that his theory had been well and truly to rest.

Even then they were mostly in good spirits, and after the experiment many of them kept in touch with one another. They'd bonded over their experience on a tiny raft made to survive closely with strangers of all kinds. Human beings aren't monsters, they're incredible people. They have, historically, proven time and again that they care more about the people around them. There is no inherent evil in humanity—some people do evil things, some people are evil, but humanity as a whole? They can be pretty cool.

What The Magnus Archives does is the opposite of that. It reminds us that there are sides to monsters that, like it or not, are human. So what does it mean to be human? I'm not looking at this in a biological sense, but in the metaphorical—the emotional sense. What are the core things that are undeniably human? The best way to answer that question is Jon himself. The protagonist, titular Head Archivist and absolute mess of a person. Because that's what humans are. They're messy! Being human is putting on a front to try and keep it together, even if it pushes some people away. Being human is being petty, making the wrong decision sometimes (a lot of times), accidentally (or intentionally) hurting people. It's cuddling with a cat, realizing you love the people you've pushed away—and knowing that sometimes you'll never get those people back. It's caring about what happens, thinking some things are your fault when they're not and not realizing what things are your fault in a really clear way. It's apologizing for the wrong things and not apologizing for the right things. It's loving someone enough to follow them into a place made to make you feel alone, reaching out and saying to that person that you see them and that they're hurting. It's trying to clean up a mess you feel responsible for and struggling to accept the guilt that comes with that.

Okay, I hear you. What about characters like Jude Perry? Like Jonah Magnus or Simon Fairchilde or-or-or—look. They're all human too. Sometimes you get the human in the fun ways, like Michael Crew serving tea to the Archivist, trying to be polite about this new acquaintance and reminding us that despite the power he has he also can be offended. Get upset about something poking and prodding at the wrong thing. Jude Perry loved Agnes Montague—Jonah Magnus wanted power, feared death—Simon Fairchilde enjoyed exploring the world.

 They were human! Even at their most monstrous they were human! The Magnus Archives is a reminder that awful people can still just be people. They love and laugh and enjoy things and experience life. They are human and that is incredible! And the best part? I don't think that excuses them. It makes them interesting, sure. Daisy Tonner is interesting, but she was still a bastard who did terrible (and inexcusable) shit. It's absolutely incredible to look at these utterly monstrous characters and still find nuggets of sympathy in them. Little pieces of connection that remind you, "Huh, this is a person."

Anyway, I don't really have a closing statement. I just think that's a really neat way to play with a trope I otherwise don't like very much. All humans are monsters? No, bad, not good. All monsters are human though—good shit. Complicated, profound. Deeply enjoy. 10/10.

[ekoilemartinwrite]

Journal January 28, 2023

I feel angry. I feel frustrated. I partially feel wrathful, and very hurt. It's-told that I that they didn't want to date me because of their own issues. This is not the first time I've been told that by someone I wanted to date!

This one at least is more aware of their own issues. Different issues this time, sorta.

It's so strange, that I have literally been through an abusive relationship. I have been the abused girlfriend, I had the abuser boyfriend. I'm at least fairly certain he was a narcissist.

This time, this is someone I want to date. This is someone I want to marry, and someone who wants to marry me. We both agree on that. – I am trying so hard to love as Christ loved the church as Christ loves the church. And I am learning that that means – I do not bow to every whim, I do not avoid her rage, or hurt anger, or her lashing out. That's my own abuse and my own trauma. To placate and make calm. To just go for the ride.

She is so brilliant, and I am so inarticulate. She is so willing to work with me, and I realize that makes it sounds so strangely capitulatory. I don't think she fully recognizes all of her issues, or at least not all the extent of it. I see behind her mask and she sees behind mine. We both like what we see. We are both occasionally deeply frustrated, she occasionally says she wants to murder me mostly playfully I think. I don't think she would actually do it, she has problems killing a spider or a bug in the house.

I don't think she fully realizes how long it sometimes takes me and my mind to process an idea and emotion and to fully articulate something. And in order to have a conversation, there has to be a back and forth. And it is much more difficult for me to process things when I am stationary. And it is much more difficult for her to be articulate when we are moving. She thinks in words, my mind doesn't. Words are, for me, translation. It's partially why I'm very precise with my wording. Because I don't think in words, words are for into my mind, the way I understand and process things. Words are, for her, her native language.

Uncle Iro’s bubble tea mochi. She had not gotten her paycheck yet, I had money. She wanted to get it up, and I didn't. We were at one of the local malls, after getting dinner. I've been having difficulty with food, and her current approach to food sets me off, especially when I don't have premade food to fall back on. The way I handled not wanting to get the mochi, was to bring up her dog who she has decided she wants to save up money in order to help our dog get surgery. Saving money partially requires not spending it. That was a bit of mood emotional manipulation on my part, which was not okay. Said I could have just said I don't want to spend the money on that. Which I did eventually say, but that was after the emotional manipulation. This sparked a calm rational argument, I'm not even sure precisely about what. We broached several different topics. It eventually ended, partially in us intentionally trying to list each other's flaws. The worst thing she good list about me was that I am hot unhygienic – she felt that my list was mostly kind things about her. Which technically it was.

She has been profoundly hurt, and has a lot of anger. And I don't think she knows how to, or has hardly any tools, to process that. In some ways it would be easier if she were stupid. Because then she could just blame the immediate people who hurt her. But she understands that it wasn't done maliciously. Fallible humans who made the best decisions they could with the resources they had at the time is what she sees. I don't think you really understands or appreciates how brilliant, or instinctively compassionate, she is.

She's also a bit of an emotional bulldozer. And I need to learn how to not be plowed over. I don't want to continue to be a battered wife. And she hasn't done that to me, she's actively tried not to do that. But I feel that, in the last several weeks, or maybe month and a half or so, I've maybe been shutting down. And I don't know why. I thought maybe, it's the intensity of the emotions that I feel for her. I know I love her. I know, at this moment, she is still on semi equal footing with my priorities between her and God. I don't think she really understands that for a long time she was a higher priority for me than God. That she had a bigger place than God in my life. And I've been working with God to fix that. She is an idol to me. And God deserves better than that.

God deserves better than that in my life. I deserve better than that in my life. Ashley, also, deserves better than that. We both see each other, and maybe I make her work more than she should to read me. As I don't talk as much as I use to. I don't think she fully understands how much I need space to fully articulate things. Or at least how much I need movement in order to process things. During this conversation I was playing with my hands, and she got stressed out and distracted by me moving my thumbs in a weird way that would normally give her, in her hands pain.

I told her she has a shopping addiction, which I thought she had articulated to me but I was wrong. That is not a thing that she said. I do not think that I was correct about that, not precisely. I was thinking it, but it is not a thing that she said. I interpreted that she had one based on certain actions of how she wants to save money, because it is a complete – planning for lack of control by allowing someone else complete control, does not speak well.

I keep coming back to feeling like a battered wife. I remember Ajay, and going out to get him cigarettes and beer. I remember him waiting in my apartment, coming back from getting those things and thinking “if we dated, this would be an abusive relationship." I still consider doing it. We wound up not dating, because he was not honest with me about something which he had said. Thank you God! And he would've been too. He would've utterly taken advantage of me. In multiple ways. Jay was not an abuser, he had been on the receiving end of that too often. But he did want to not date me, specifically because of his own issues, and wanting to spare me: he made the comparison like Spider-Man choosing not to date Mary Jane in order to keep her safe. I loathe that argument. Then there is my most recent ex-boyfriend, who I am very certain was a narcissist, who is not actually interested in dating me and only wanted the sex. Which he was horrifically bad at. He also made all of my addictions much worse.

I realize that both my roommate and J talked a lot. I have been much more quiet of the past month or more, I think because I feel as though I have not enough room to think in my own head, to process what I want to say if anything. Multiple times she's told me to stop moving because it's distracting to her, and I am currently realizing I need to move in order to have my mind processed things. That makes me feel like I'm being shut down.

[robininthelabyrinth]

The Yunmeng Jiang clan is as much a part of Lotus Pier as Lotus Pier is to them. The connection can be strengthened using cultivation, but it is more a matter of blood than golden cores. When the Wens come to burn it down, Jiang Cheng tries to take as much of the damage onto his own body as he can in order to minimize the damage to the Pier and the people. Even during the war and rebuilding, JC never really lets go of the increased burden he took on. It (inevitably, eventually) takes its toll on him.

Bonus?: Jiang Yanli also feels the burning as though she is there with it, although to a lesser extent due to her core. She and JC might be the last ones left to share the connection to the Pier (until Jin Ling).

-🌸💜

ao3

There is a price to pay for every power.

This was a phrase most often used when talking about historical figures that had burned out like fireworks, brilliant for a brief period before a tragic end – the most recent of which was the Yiling Patriarch, who Jin Ling had once hated more than anyone and for good reason, too, but who he now felt profoundly mixed feelings about – but Jin Ling had always thought that the best example was probably his uncle.

His uncle loved his sect and his Lotus Pier. He’d rebuilt it from nothing when it’d been burned away, had poured his sweat and his blood and will into every part of it. There wasn’t a single part he didn’t know, a single place he hadn’t touch, a single piece of rebuilding he hadn’t supervised – all of it was his, and he, in turn, was it’s.

“This place is our blood, A-Ling,” his uncle told him, late on one of the moonlit nights when they walked through the streets together, Jin Ling yawning but unwilling to sleep because he’d taken too long a nap in the middle of the day and his uncle stalking through the streets, kept awake by his nightmares as always. “Our ancestors made it just the way I’m remaking it now. Their blood, our blood, in every aspect of it. We made it, we know it, we love it, and it protects us.”

Jin Ling knew this lecture nearly as well the one where his uncle threatened to break his legs, and that one came out any time…well, any time anything happened.

For once, though, he didn’t feel inclined to just listen.

“All right,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “If the Lotus Pier protects us, then why don’t you want me to be part of it?”

“Your surname –”

“Is Jin, not Jiang, I know; I’m the heir of Jinlin Tower, not the Lotus Pier, I know,” Jin Ling said impatiently. “But you said the Pier is in our blood – and it’s my blood, too, through my mother. You can’t tell me on one hand that it’s all about blood, and on the other that the surname is the only thing that’s important, that it doesn’t matter to me because I’m a Jin. You have to pick one!”

His uncle was silent for a long while.

“All right,” he said. “Blood, then. If I have to pick.”

“So I can be part of the Lotus Pier,” Jin Ling said with satisfaction. He’d hoped that would be his uncle’s choice. “When will –”

“Never, if I can help it,” his uncle interrupted. “Or not until you’re much older. Much older.”

Jin Ling frowned. “But uncle –”

“Why do you want to be part of the Lotus Pier, anyway?” his uncle demanded, snappy as always. “You don’t even know what that means!”

“Don’t I?” Jin Ling asked. “I’m not a child anymore, jiujiu. I know that you don’t just mean what you say as a metaphor. I know you don’t just mean that the Jiang know the ins and outs of the alleyways and buildings. You said our blood is in the land, in the Lotus Pier, and you mean it. I don’t know exactly what it means, no, but I know there’s something more there…and I want to know the rest. I want to be part of it.”

“You’re going to be Sect Leader Jin soon enough.”

“I know,” Jin Ling said. “Why do you think I’m bringing it up now? I want to be part of the Lotus Pier first.”

“A-Ling…”

“I want to be your nephew more than all the gold in Jinlin Tower,” Jin Ling said, and his uncle faltered. “I want to be my mother’s son. As far as I’ve been able to learn, there’s nothing in Jinlin Tower that requires any sort of binding commitment the way that the Lotus Pier does, the way you make it sound; it’s all dead and lifeless, just a pile of metal. So if I’m going to give myself to something, I want it to be something that matters. I want it to be the Lotus Pier!”

His scowl faltered, and finally he admitted what he’d always secretly worried about, ever since he first realized that his uncle was deliberately keeping him out of the innermost aspects of the Lotus Pier.

“Unless you think I’m not worthy of it…?”

“It’s the Lotus Pier that’s not worth of you,” his uncle said. His voice was rough with feeling, uneven, harsh. “I want you to live well, A-Ling. The Lotus Pier asks for so much – you don’t have to give it.”

Jin Ling paused.

“Jiujiu…?”

“I’ll show you,” his uncle said. “Close your eyes.”

Jin Ling closed his eyes and felt his uncle’s arms settle around him.

“Open them.”

Jin Ling tried. For some reason, his eyelids felt unbelievably heavy, horribly weighted down, like he’d been tied down by anchors but he struggled and struggle and after a little while – he opened them.

He opened them.

He opened –

He could see everything.

The Lotus Pier was his, and he was the Lotus Pier’s.

The walls were his spine, the windows his eyes, the roof his head, the threshold his jaw. His body stretched from the north gate to the south, his arms reaching from east to west. He knew everything within it, he was everything within it. Every person or beast, filled with spiritual energy, every sword and every shield, every piece of clothing, every manufactured item, everything was him. The power was all-consuming, the power was glorious…

A man, drunk and angry, turned to the wall in his room and threw a punch.

The wall cracked.

Jin Ling’s back twinged, a sudden pain, and he cried out.

“Enough.”

And suddenly Jin Ling was small, smaller than he’d ever been – as small as his own body, and nothing more.

“Do you understand?” his uncle asked. His uncle, who never slept too long because of his nightmares, who stood as straight as anyone but who preferred to sit whenever he could, even when it was rude. Like some sort of old man, with pains beyond his years, barely held back by his cultivation. “Do you understand, A-Ling?”

“…it hurts.”

“It always hurts,” his uncle agrees.

Jin Ling understood. “Did it hurt when it burned?”

“More than anything.”

“Did it hurt my mother, too?”

“Yes. It nearly killed her.”

Jin Ling bit his lip and looked down at his clenched fists. “…does it hurt more because you’re alone?”

His uncle faltered.

“It does, doesn’t it? It should be our blood, our burden, and instead you’ve been bearing it all on your own…it’ll hurt less if I take it on, won’t it?”

“I don’t want you to be hurt, A-Ling,” his uncle said, and it wasn’t no. His uncle, who’d been doing it all by himself for so long…

“I want to help,” Jin Ling said, straightening his back and bracing himself for pain. He’d already forgiven his father’s murderer – beyond that, nothing was painful any longer. “Let me in, jiujiu. Let me be my mother’s son. Let me be your nephew, and make the Lotus Pier proud. Let me make you proud.”

His uncle smiled. “I’m always proud of you.”

[smirk47]

Re-listened to Pasithea s1e2 a few days ago but didn’t have time to write up reactions until now.

Listening to this episode, knowing everything I now know based on all of s1 and s2, something I was thinking about as I started the episode was: what is really drawing Jane and Sophie together at this point?

(spoilers plus rambly thoughts and run-on sentences ahead!)

Like – at the most basic, surface level of everything, they both have so much to be angry at each other about and so little reason to trust each other at this point. And they definitely have not really talked to each other enough yet by this point or been through enough together recently to have truly started to build a new understanding of each other – a lot of what they have to go on is their memories of the other from when they were younger, and their knowledge of some of the WORST things the other has done during the war. They haven’t really had much of a chance to see how the other person has changed in that time, or how those experiences have affected them. (I mean ... this is more true of Sophie than Jane, I suppose, but I do think it’s still essentially accurate for both of them.)

So why – at this early point in the story - are they still so drawn to each other already despite all this?

Listening to the episode what I came away with is that the reasons are complicated but also, ultimately, devastatingly simple: they are both SO lonely.

They’re 10 million other things also -- at least a third of which are actively contradictory and messy -- but I think the heart of why they keep calling each other and talking about so much more than just what would actually be absolutely necessary to deal with their immediate problems (which are: (a) what is Alegros up to? And (b) What the heck is happening with Carla?) and slipping up and failing to keep their walls up as high as they mean to is really just that: they’re lonely.

And like, that’s not necessarily any great revelation or brilliant observation, I suppose. But still. For all the complexity of everything else going on in the story, and all the secrets and betrayals and love yet to be revealed and discovered – I think it’s just such an effective, affecting emotional baseline to build this story and relationship out of.

They’re lonely, and lost, and traumatized and it’s so easy to become isolated and lose your sense of self under circumstances like that.

But there on the other end of these messages is someone who shares and understands at least a little of the same pain of love and loss that has changed the shape of your life and identity in the past several years. And not only that, this person has known you for a long time, and can’t help but still react to you sometimes as if you were still the person you believed yourself to be before the war.

Just… so much of our sense of self is shaped by how people react to us, and by the parts of our selves they reflect back at us. (It’s why culture shock can be so profoundly alienating and disorienting, right? When you find yourself far from the familiar and land in a place where your behavior does not necessarily MEAN the same thing to you as it does to the people around you – when people interpret your actions in a way you didn’t intend because they don’t have the same shared cultural background or experiences, then all of a sudden, all the things that reinforced your own idea of Who You Are are just totally stripped away. It can be freeing, but also deeply terrifying.)

And I have to imagine that talking to someone who knew them so well before the war – even as fraught and frustrating and full of misunderstanding as their relationship was before the war – must be a comfort when everything else makes you feel adrift, and when your name and reputation has taken on a life of its own that feels so totally outsized and separate from who you feel like you are on a day-to-day basis.

Add on to ALL of this the fact that (even though they have been through hell and see themselves as mature and jaded) they are actually SO YOUNG (25!? They are BABIES!), and then add on the truly UNTHINKABLE amount of Unresolved Sexual Tension they are still carrying from their pre-war days!?!?! and like: good. GOD. no wonder they cannot let go of this connection.

Even as they lash out at each other for reasons both petty and DEEPLY justified, and get mad at themselves for not being able to keep their distance the way they think they should, there’s this relief. This palpable sense of: ‘oh thank god - here’s an anchor to hold onto. A tether to keep me from drifting further into a version of myself that I no longer recognize or understand.’ It’s certainly not always a pleasant or emotionally healthy anchor to cling to for either of them, but dear god I can see why they would both end up clinging to it anyway.

... Well. That was a longer ramble than I thought I was gonna do! Oops? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ohter random thoughts and line shout outs:

Oh man, I always forget about Sophie’s angry little deleted message in reaction to Jane’s shreds of lettuce explanation. It’s so delightful and juicy and righteously angry and understandable but also SO FUCKING MISGUIDED AND UNJUSTIFIED because of the things she doesn’t know right now – I love it SO MUCH. Also, I’m frankly kinda impressed by the restraint she shows by deleting it instead of sending it tbh.

Just: the entire baking soda story. Especially: “So. They probably went home thinking they’re an accessory to murder, but at least a poor, down at heel war hero winked at them.” A delight. A++.

Jane having the realization of how limited her safety and privacy really are and fighting back a panic attack in real time while leaving a message: :(((. OOF.

Agent Blanc calling her Janie pisses me off SO. MUCH. Such a patronizing creep, right off the bat.

“I am being held. It’s very romantic.” Hee.

Everything about the fight with Alegros. Especially the ornamental tree.

The journey in Sophie’s message from “War Hero Attacks Innocent Man With Artificial Tree” – which made me laugh out loud – to the deeply sincere conclusion of “I can’t handle this anymore, Jane. I can’t watch this woman drown in front of me and do nothing but whisper about it.” is so good, and shows some of the pain, and fear, and compassion that Sophie hides under all that charm and bluster and bravado. She’s hard not to love in that moment.

And Jane’s response! Blunt, somewhat clinical, keeping that professional emotional distance – you can absolutely see some of her Pasithea experience poking through there (and also perhaps the fact that she has already been through several rounds of feeling drawn to and worried about and hurt or let down by Sophie even if the audience has not?) – but also ultimately legitimately good, clear-headed advice that does help Sophie find a path forward.

… After which Jane mercilessly teases Sophie for everything about her fight with Alegros. Which: fair! And also: AMAZING.

“In case you’re as clueless as he was, people from the sky are exactly the same color as they are on the ground until they get hit by whatever’s raining down on them and then they aren’t anymore.” OOF.

God, I feel like I could just copy-paste all of Sophie’s last message in this episode from “What am I going to do about it?” onward. It’s such a hard thing that she does, talking to Carla, and such a good thing, and all the little details - the training, the black bean burgers, Carla’s relief, Sophie’s response to learning what Carla was taking hypnos for, ALL OF IT – just paints such a picture of how deeply, mundanely horrible the war and its aftermath have been. It’s so effective and heartbreaking and does such a good job of fleshing out Sophie as a deeply sympathetic and even legitimately heroic and admirable character, without negating how much of a fuck-up she is sometimes too.

It also sets up such an interesting dynamic of audience empathy and understanding where it’s hard not to sort of adopt Sophie as your POV character at this point, since Sophie is more overtly emotionally accessible and understandable by this point in the narrative while Jane is still comparatively very distant and (understandably) emotionally opaque (is that even a real phrase? IDK.).

What I’m saying is: it’s a real good monologue that accomplishes a bunch of things all at once and I like it and it’s good? Yeah. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

[ssson-of-sparda]

Fathers Do Cry (DMC Vergil one shot)

Summary: Vergil remembers his last Father's Day with Sparda and doesn't really realise how similar to him he has become.

Tags: Father's Day special / DADGIL! / Vergil acting like a dad to Nero

Author’s note: I woke up this morning suddenly inspired. Doesn't happen very often so enjoy ;) ps: I just love Dadgil!

***

His big blue eyes staring without blinking, the child was observing his father sitting by the fireplace in the parlour. Full of admiration, he was detailing all the features of his serious face, all the details of his confident posture and all the different luxurious fabrics that made his purple finery and as he did, he repeated to himself, wished, prayed, that someday, one day, he would grow up to be just like him.          “Aren’t you going to speak, Vergil?” The father’s powerful voice asked as he finally acknowledged the boy’s presence with a small amused smile, wondering what brilliant thoughts were occupying his eldest son’s sharp mind this time.            “I made this for you, father.” With a solemnity that didn’t suit a five-years-old but that somehow fitted Vergil’s young yet wise spirit and his will to be perfect son in the eyes of Sparda, the boy handed a paper sheet to his father.         “ And what would that be?” The man said as he took his son’s gift. “It’s father’s day so … I made you a poem… or tried to.” The adorable embarrassment tensing the child’s traits in funny grimaces made the father's smile wider but Vergil, suddenly too preoccupied with the blue paint stuck under his fingernails, didn’t notice it as he didn’t notice the paternal pride and the love shining in his eyes.               “I thought your mother wanted you and your brother to make a gift together this year.” “ You know Dante” Vergil sighed. “He has no artistic talent whatsoever. He wanted to make you a wooden sword to play with us.”    “ That’s actually a very good idea.”  Vergil frowned; suddenly worried that Sparda would not like his gift and preferred Dante’s – if he had made one of course. “Except when the sword looks like two twigs glued together. You should have seen this, father. It looked ri.di.cu.lous.” Sparda laughed at his son’s attitude, finding amusement in this sibling rivalry. “Why don’t you read me your poem then?”              “ I learnt it by heart actually. The paper is for you to remember this day by … and also because I wanted to illustrate it. Look.” Vergil approached his father, seized the poem from his big hands and climbed on his lap to show him the delicate aquarelle he had painted around the lines. “Impressive. Did your mother help you with this?” Vergil shook his head. “No, I did it on my own. I used a book I saw in that old man’s house I often go to as a reference.”       “ The old academic that lives down the hill? I thought you found him boring.” Vergil shook his head again, furiously this time and with a serious frown. “That’s Dante. Me, I really like him. He teaches me a lot of things. And he has lots of books. It’s incredible.”

Sparda ruffled his son’s silver hair whose hairdo was always made in order to somehow mimic his, thinking what a promising young boy Vergil was. Maybe more promising than Dante to be honest – though he knew he shouldn’t think that.   But there was something that Vergil had that Dante lacked. Perhaps rationality beyond his age … or some kind of maturity … wisdom maybe? He couldn’t really pinpoint what it was exactly. All he knew is that it was something unique and special, just like his son, something that made Sparda certain that one day his eldest would grow up to be a great man, a man greater than him, a man worthy of the Yamato and capable of handling its burdening power.

“Can I recite my poem now?” Sparda smiled at the sparkle in Vergil’s eyes. “Sure.” The boy quickly took back his previous position in front his father, cleared his throat, put his hands behind his back and stuck out his chest.

Sparda listened to every word, fascinated and amazed by his little one’s talent and profoundly moved by all the love, all the meticulousness and the time he put in each line and in each word. “Oh Vergil. The world is not yet ready for someone like you.” The father said as he let a tear roll down his cheek. “Why are you crying, father?” Vergil worried. “Because fathers cry, my son.”

That day was the last time Vergil truly celebrated Father’s day for a few weeks later he had no father, no one to make poems to, no one to admire by the fireplace. Just a memory that he feared would sooner or later fade but that he would cling to dearly for as long as he could.

“Why don’t we bring flowers to Daddy’s statue in the park today?” Eva asked when Vergil was six, when Vergil was seven, when Vergil was eight only to be welcome by a heavy silence that was no longer hiding brilliant thoughts but a painful sadness. But each time he did as Eva suggested, maybe more for her than for him, maybe because he still loved and admired Sparda even if he had left him, maybe because he thought that his father might see him and smile from wherever he was now, the same way he had smiled when he had read him his poem on his last father’s day.

And that’s certainly why, more than three decades later, he was back in this park, on this very special day with a bouquet of purple peonies he had bought on his way here and a memory that never faded. A memory he could still recite.

"Whether the sun shines or the sky cries,                 Whether the day breaks or the night wakes,       My father always as a rampart stands Protecting my house with his bare hands.

He is strong, he is brave                 And the day he always saves.     A knight in cockroach armor     To scare my terror away."

Vergil scoffed at the lines, at the way they rolled off his tongue, finding them funny and childish and not worthy of a Blake or a Fielding at all unlike what he thought when he wrote them as a child. The over-confidence of youth probably.

“Did you just come up with that?” Vergil turned around to see Nero walking towards him with a smirk. A surprise but not a bad one. “Cause the rhyming sucks a little. I expected more of you.”                “ And I suppose you’re an expert in poetry now?”         “ I may read have read one of your books.” He said as he tapped the pocket of his marine blue coat hiding Vergil's most sacred book with pride. “You still have it I see.”     “Hey! It’s a real page turner! Can’t get my nose out of it.” Vergil had a crooked smile, understanding perfectly what his son meant.

Son? Even a year after this reveal he still couldn’t believe this boy before him, the one he had lived such a terrifying yet incredible adventure with, was his own flesh and blood.

A sigh almost escaped Vergil’s lips. How did he make such a fine young man? Someone so selfless, so generous, so loving when he was nothing like that.              “ What are you doing here, Nero?” He asked, trying not to think more about this.      “ Well it’s father’s day, no? So … I made you something… or tried to.” The embarrassed grimace Nero suddenly made made Vergil’s smile grew larger but Nero, too worried to keep the gift covered with the pieces of newspapers he had taped together, didn’t see it as he didn’t see the paternal pride and the love shining in his father’s blue eyes. The same paternal pride Sparda had displayed when Vergil was a little child with a small paper in his hands.  “Thank you Nero.” The man said as he gently took the present from his son's hands, wondering what it was even though the long shape didn’t leave much place for imagination.

He cautiously unwrapped the thing, already feeling a happiness he hadn’t felt in years warming his heart. And when he saw a katana-like wooden sword that purposely looked like Yamato he couldn’t help but smile and let a tiny drop of water blur his blue eyes. “It was Dante’s idea. Though he might have suggested gluing two sticks together.” Nero said as he scratched his head. “It looks amazing.” Vergil’s honesty was like a knife in Nero’s chest but in a good way. It was as if all the stress and all the stupid fear he had felt while making this toy sword had been stabbed away. He felt relieved, joyful even that his always so stern father was genuinely grateful and seemed to appreciate his gift. “That way, you won’t have to tear my arm apart again cause look, you have two now.” Nero tried to joke but his words just erased the smile on Vergil’s face.

“There is not a single day I don't regret what I did to you.” This was Vergil’s way to say he was sorry. Nero was certain of it. He didn’t need to know his father that well to know it. After all, he was somewhat the same. “Hey, it’s in the past. Plus it grew back, so no harm done.” He winked, trying to ease the atmosphere with a bad pun worthy of Dante even though there was a time he would have ripped Vergil’s chest open for what he had done. And a part of him knew he would never forget and maybe never fully forgive what happened.               But right now he was just happy to have a family, to have a father and to finally be able to celebrate a day he has so long hated.  “ This world doesn’t deserve you, son.” Vergil solemnly declared. He had never called Nero that way and that name felt strange yet beautiful to both of them. It made the son and the father smile in ways they never thought they would smile at each other. “ Damn, are you crying old man? I thought devils never cry.” Nero suddenly harrumphed when he finally noticed the water growing in his father's eyes.                   “ Well, fathers do cry." Vergil declared as he allowed a tear of joy and pride to fall along his pale cheek. The first in a very very long time but one he will never regret or brush away. "Father do cry.” He repeated with a glance at the statue of his father behind him.

[artigas]

yesterday, i was talking to my therapist about where i am in my life and how mutually exciting and frightening it is to have the opportunity to get a PhD. This all started because of what happened last week, as I laid in bed and stared at the ceiling. For the first time ever, I thought: my god, have i just made a horrible mistake?

i keep seeing folks online say a phd was the worst thing that ever happened to them- that it cost them their relationships, their mental health, everything. on tiktok, a professor came up on my timeline(?) saying that getting a phd is a waste of time for most people because the fact of the matter is, even the most capable and brilliant phd students are just never going to get a job. that the market is worse than it’s ever been and it’s a pipedream to think you’ll make it.

that scares me. it always has. i’ve had so many people tell me that i’m never going to make it. being an adjunct feels like proof that i’ve overcome some hurdles and worked my ass off to make it happen - but what next? am i making a mistake, getting a phd? am i truly never, ever going to get a tenure track position or be able to teach more than entry-level literature? 

when i spoke to my therapist, i started crying as i told her that books saved me. i told her that i knew since i was sixteen that i wanted to teach literature, but i also knew that i saw nobody like me: the literature i read did not center or acknowledge queer latinas. the teachers i saw were nothing like me - no immigrant parents, no english as a second language, nothing but straight white men and occasionally straight white women. in all my years of schooling, i’ve only had a single black professor. i’ve never had a latina professor at all.

more importantly, i told my therapist that i know what it’s like to feel and be told by a teacher that you don’t belong, you’re not cut out, this world isn’t meant for you. and i think about my students, especially the ones who need a lot of help learning how to read critically or write effectively. i think about how i want to affirm them. i think about how i want to make them feel seen and cared for and profoundly respected. i think about how ... it would just break my heart to not fucking try to be a professor because, god, if there is a position out there with my name on it but i don’t answer the call, what if someone else does? someone who wont love my students, someone who won’t honor their dignity, their value, the honor it is to teach them? 

i’ve got to try. there is no other choice but that. i want to do right by these kids, by all the kids who walk into my classroom, and i’ve seen too many assholes in academia to gamble on letting someone else treat them with anything less than loving kindness. if i dont take this opportunity to get a phd and if i dont try, it’ll be the biggest regret of my life.

that doesn’t mean i’m not scared, though. 

[mywingsareonwheels]

Oh no, a bodyswap!

Fred Thursday and Douglas Richardson have suddenly swapped places. Thankfully Douglas wasn’t flying GERTI at the time, and Fred wasn’t in the middle of a chase or anything, nor in the middle of a pint.

Also fortunate is the fact that there’s been a fair amount of this sort of thing around lately, so MJN Air, the Thursday family, and the CID take it all pretty calmly. The important thing now is to keep what’s happened under wraps, so the two men have to temporarily fit into each other’s lives for a while...

[cut for length, extreme nerdery, and spoilers for a reveal in the final episode of “Cabin Pressure”, though it’s set rather earlier...]

Martin spits out a few things about regulations and how dangerous it is to have a co-pilot who CANNOT ACTUALLY FLY A PLANE, Carolyn, really this isn’t acceptable, can’t we have Herc for a bit? But actually he and Fred get on rather well. Fred is, shall we say, rather used to awkward young men with passionate interests in what they do and no self-preservation to speak of. He’s not too bad at picking up word games either. He also is utterly unfazed by Carolyn, and very gentle and lovely with Arthur.

He doesn’t like Herc much, mind.

Douglas is delighted to be pretending to be a police detective in the late 60s for a while, and says so at great length. They don’t send him out on cases, obviously, and Bright and Jakes between them take charge of everything, but he’s intelligent and astute and no harm in using what resources they have so he chips in from time to time. Bright frankly finds him rather confounding. Morse misses Thursday desperately, and he instinctively distrusts Douglas’s easy charisma, but he can’t deny it’s great to have someone to chat about opera and crosswords and etymology and books with at work for a while. And Morse’s tenor blends rather well with Douglas’s baritone, so they even duet a little when they think no one’s listening.

“Oh Christ,” says Jakes to Strange and Trewlove (because they all very much were), “now there’s two of them”. No one’s forcing him to stay listening and actually rather enjoying it, mind...

Douglas is happily ensconced in what was Joan’s room, but his attempts to charm Win fall extremely flat. His cooking, however, is another matter.

(Douglas would absolutely deny that part of him, seeing Win and Sam, and Joan when she’s over, and the solid loyalty that all of the station have for Chief Inspector Thursday, is most profoundly, gut-wrenchingly jealous of this working-class doppleganger of his.)

Martin gives Fred a flying lesson on a quiet day, and is both utterly delighted (he can’t wait to tell Sam!), and suddenly struck with how much he misses his home. And Morse. He ought to tell Morse more often how much he values him. As he can’t right now, he tells Martin how proud he deserves to be of himself. How much he hopes that his Sam turns out to have even half of Martin’s grit and determination. Martin is absolutely not getting misty-eyed, shut up.

“Fred is brilliant, isn’t he, Mum!” “Yes, Arthur,” replies Carolyn, “for once I think that statement you make about every human you meet seems to actually have truth in it.” Carolyn has not started carrying a tiny miniscule flicker of a torch for their guest. She doesn’t. Herc can stop fussing, honestly.  “I do miss Douglas though,” Arthur confesses. “And I bet Fred’s family and friends are missing him lots.” There are three things that Douglas does for his new friends in Oxfordshire before he finally manages to get back. The first is that he teaches Morse, Max, and a number of Morse’s colleagues how to make several delightful non-alcoholic cocktails, and has a quiet and (for him) very gentle word with Morse about the drink and what it can do, and how much he would like his new young friend to profit by his own sad example.

The results of the second were many and various, but if Bright never hears the phrase “the lemon is in play!” go past his office again it will be far too soon.

Third? Well, let’s just say that there are a few corrupt, wealthy powers-that-be in Oxfordshire who won’t be messing with Morse or Jakes or anyone else any time soon. It’s possible that Douglas didn’t keep precisely within the law, but he’s not actually a detective inspector, and it’s not like he used any violence. Some things are just so much more effective, after all... Fred only did one thing before he got back, unlesss you count the pep talks to each of Martin and Arthur, a chivalrous tip of the hat to Carolyn, and leaving an appreciative note for Douglas on the latter’s kitchen tablet (along with hearty apologies for the burned bit at the bottom of the Le Creuset dish). But Gordon would insist on descending yet again to make life difficult for Carolyn and Arthur. Douglas doubtless would have handled things differently, with more aplomb and cunning and the like. But Fred’s still a detective, even if he’s not a genius like Morse, and it wasn’t that hard to find that gold wiring in the end really. Nor to make damn sure that Gordon will not be coming back... They catch a glimpse of each other, crossing somewhere in the ether as they return home. A polite nod (Fred) and a wink (Douglas). And a few words exchanged, one posh and drawling, the other a soft cockney. “You look after that red-headed boy of yours. He needs a few good meals and someone to tell him he’s proud of him. He looks up to you more than he’d ever admit.” They stare at each other. “Well,” says Fred, “we’d better both do that then.”

[theteej]

On Black Autonomy and Responding to Abstract, Genteel Contempt

I originally wrote this as a series of tweets, and I'm going to try my best to clean it up slightly and put it here. ----- What really HURTS about the James Sweet AHA piece is the profoundly casual way he dehumanizes black people. We aren't full actors or agents, we are people he studies, and informants to be corrected for our too emotional responses.  I feel invisibilized, dismissed--politely. Of course, in moments like this, I think of people I admire.  I try to channel the almost uncomprehending unbothererdt-ness of Keguro Macharia.  Part of me wants to emulate the cool, collected response of indifference to white American certainty I see in Keguro's words. I think of how Osiame Molefe would respond cleverly, incisively, and yet with a slight frisson of anxiety.  I think of his polite contempt for the arrogance and entitlement that would happen in his finely turned phrase, the rage delicately interwoven with erudition. I can picture how Xavier Livermon would just raise an eyebrow and give me one of those nearly imperceptible head shakes with a half-smile before reminding me that these ofays have been here before and we'll still be here, living beyond their nonsense. I can see the momentary grimace flash across Michelle Moyd's features before she straightens it behind a tired smile, adjusts her glasses, and reminds me that this is the space they take up, every day, and how we gracefully, invisibly write past and beyond and through them. I imagine the way that Kwame Otu would flash the most brilliant of smiles, wave a hand away, laugh loudly, and say in the most dulcet of high society tones, "what trash is this that they are bringing to us?"  I imagine just a brilliant, dismissive disdainful smirk afterward. I imagine these things with these beautiful black scholars, because they remind me that we are humans, that we are real, and have always been. Foolish men like Sweet and Lawrance erase us, see us only extensions of their noble projects.  They don't SEE black people.  They see objects of study. They see informants. They see things to be spoken over or for or abstracted.  They dismiss the 'presentism' of history because they cannot, will not, shall not see what it means to be autonomous black people. Their autonomy has always been reassured. Their sense of self has always been known. Their ease and composure and entitlement to our lands and bodies and art and space is regular; and the sense in which we are erased, background people in their stories, is so total. When Sweet decries the historical 'presentism' creeping into 'his' discipline, what he's doing is advocating for a 'pure' history, that is abstract and intellectual, one that doesn't 'do' things--doesn't unpack or attempt to liberate or declare autonomy of freedom. What he is offering, loves, is a dead thing. A masturbatory exercise of drone like figures in hermetic archival spaces.  It presumes the work is holy by itself, and blithely ignores that to have a black body in this space is to ALWAYS FEEL YOU DO NOT BELONG. Because articles like Sweet's are tiresome salvos, not unlike Conrad's infamous steamer firing uselessly into the Congolese bush. They are attempts to claim they own the narrative, that they own history, and that we cannot declare them irrelevant. But girl, you are. You are irrelevant with your papier-mâché constructions, your tiresome analysis pretending to be objective, your confusion at black liberation or queer thought or feminist analysis challenging your claim to centeredness. I will always return to Keletso Atkins when I think this. As I said, ironically to the AHA, Keletso's 1993 book on Zulu labor practices transformed me as a person. Because she openly spoke that her work was designed to emphasize black humanity and autonomy to OTHER BLACK FOLK who long felt erased.  It was not the tiresome pantomime of intellectual curiosity in stuffy seminar rooms filled with overeager white man flexing their intellectual acumen over dusky bodies and exotic lands.  It was a declaration that we were real, that we mattered, and that we existed. I read her the same week one of my future committee members told me he studied Tanzania but for him it was the same as if he'd studied Sweden, just a place.   What breathtaking white arrogance. What astonishing legerdemain, the vanishing of coloniality under a cape of objectivity. What white scholars of Africa like Sweet forget, wish to not think, can never fully grasp, is that all of us black folk writing about these places? They are declarations of who we are in a field and a world that told us we did not matter, belong, or deserve to be printed. And so for Sweet to denigrate (intentional choice) Ghanaian guides or African-American history making (like the 1619 project) to emphasize his objectivity, under the guise of disciplinary concern? That's a colonial swipe at us as certain as the ASR's cowardly editorial letter that excoriated African scholars who dared to critique the overwhelming whiteness of their autoethnography piece published earlier this year.  And lest we forget, James Sweet is none other than the former advisor of the pinnacle of white entitlement and appropriation, now disgraced scholar Jessica Krug. And if the best the AHA can do to include African history is that of insufferable patriarchal white boors like Jim Sweet? We don't need to be there.

If the best the ASA can do is its ever present white navel-gazing, a motion only occasionally given energy when Jean Allman reminds them that everything in that organization is about continuing colonial power relations, only for them to not actually make any changes? Fine.  I'm well and truly tired of the same masturbatory facebook posts from senior white scholars wringing their hands about their complicity while not doing anything, not even really taking to task fellow members of their academy like Sweet or Lawrance or others. I'll leave, yet again. Because what *I* do? My work? It's modeled after people like Keletso, and shaped by people like Kwame, Xavier, Keguro, Michelle, Osiame. Like Marius Kothor--folk who are interested first and foremost in their own humanity and *know* what it's like to be erased everyday in the disciplines they have to work in. And that? That's history for me. And history that isn't 'presentist'? Concerned with the abstract study for intellectual gratification? That's just glorified antiquarianism, and I'm glad that the original Victorian hobbyists who made the 'rules' of studying us are dead, even if their work lives on with Sweet.  

[bondsmagii]

omg you read we need to talk about kevin? what did you think? i went through a whole range of emotions, most of them bitter & negative, bc i saw too much of my mum & brother in eva & kevin, something i’m still working through. i started off hating eva bc i projected my resentment towards my mum onto her, but i found myself sympathising with her a bit more towards the end. it’s helped me sympathise a bit with my mum too. this book has probably had the most lasting effect on me than any other!

man, I love that book. I first read it years ago and liked it then, but I recently reread it and I loved it even more. it's such a brilliant book -- profoundly uncomfortable and incredibly bleak, but I think it asks so many important questions that, face it, most people are too scared to even acknowledge. it simultaneously asks the huge taboo of a question -- what if you regret having your child? what if a child is just born bad? -- and also combines it with that other big question: why do kids shoot up their schools? the nature vs nurture debate has been absolutely raging for years regarding children who commit violence at school; as someone with an academic interest in this particular crime, it's one I've banged my head up against multiple times. people seem to always be firmly in one camp: the parents are to blame, or the kid is just evil. nobody seems to consider the interaction between these two things, and how it's always ultimately a choice.

the book is a pretty intense read for me, as I'm sure you can relate. the difference is that while you can see your mother and brother in Eva and Kevin, I actually see myself and my mother in Eva and Kevin. I was an unwanted and a resented child. my parents did not want to have me. I was what my parents referred to as "a surprise", said in the same tone as you would describe a sudden house fire as a surprise, or bad news at work as a surprise. the major difference between my parents and Eva and Franklin was that they had me very young (they would have been 19 and barely 20 when they found out, and 20 and barely 21 when I was born) and this most certainly added to the resentment. my father was always away for work, often getting to go to some pretty interesting destinations; my mother wanted to be the kind of woman who wanted to be a stay-at-home mother, but she hated it. like Eva and Kevin, my mother and I were very, very alike in personality and what we did and did not want out of life, and we were engaged in some level of warfare for my entire childhood. while I wasn't quite on the level of Kevin in terms of blinding my siblings and whatnot, I was quite the terror as a child. by the time I reached my teenage years I was uncontrollable and my parents had given up trying. I could not be punished. I did not care. any punishment they did hand out, I was maliciously compliant to the point of infuriation. I'm sure my parents could argue that I was born evil, and indeed that's what they told the extended family. I admit I was not an easy child. however -- I was a child.

I did not ask to be born, and when my parents made the choice to have me and then resent my existence, that was on them. a child knows. a child can tell when he's not wanted, when he's an inconvenience. I knew it very well, from an early age. my parents' resentment of me resulted in them abusing me right up until I left home. I was like an unwanted pet, except they couldn't dump me off at a shelter. no, they never laid a finger on me physically, so they can claim they didn't abuse me -- but emotionally and psychologically they were abusive, and especially in my teenage years, they neglected me severely. (think along the lines of being left at home alone for extended periods with no food, no money, and no way to get supplies as we lived in rural Ireland and the closest supermarket was 30 minutes away. this was not something they did out of malice, but rather something they did because they did not consider me at all. they forgot my existence, most of the time, or they deemed me so inconsequential that making provisions for me was a task that could be forever put off.) understandably this made me hate them in return, and I took great pleasure in being a little shit. it was all I had. nature vs nurture, which is it? my parents weren't exactly nurturing, and they taught me very bad behaviour -- but at the same time from the moment I was born I had my mother's personality, predisposing me to being a little shit. even now, grown up and after many years of working on myself, I still find myself fighting the urge to be as cruel and as judgemental as she could be; likewise I see those positive qualities she had, that she could have shown more of if she had put the work in like I had. we went from being furious carbon copies of one another to an example of the best and the worst case scenario.

basically what it comes down to is choice. Kevin and I had a similar situation going on, but Kevin chose to try and find what he was looking for in mass murder, and I chose to try and find it by getting out of my house and never returning. I mentioned earlier that I have an academic interest in the kind of crime that Kevin committed; since the age of 17 I have been researching these things, and now have expertise in several specific incidents. I bring this up to illustrate that this crime was on my radar when I was around Kevin's age, when I was suffering from the same problems as he was. thousands of kids find themselves in this position, yet so relatively few commit the act. why? it's choice. nature, nurture -- it doesn't matter. there comes a point where you have to make the choice, and honestly? it's chaos theory, baby.

as well as researching this kind of thing I'm also an amateur meteorologist. I love weather. I love trying to work out what makes it tick. and weather is a good example of what I'm trying to say here. weather cannot be predicted. we can get decent ideas, but at the same time we never really know for sure and also weather acts differently every time. there are too many variables. it's the entirety of the earth's atmosphere we're talking about here. identical weather conditions can arise time and time again, and each time the weather is different. a sunny afternoon one day is a washout the next. this is because -- and I broadly sum it up here -- there are so many tiny variables that we cannot possibly predict how they will change the weather. and I mean it's tiny variables. I'm sure you've heard of the butterfly effect -- this comes from the idea that a butterfly somewhere on the coast of Africa can flap its wings, and this tiny reverberation can spread through the atmosphere, creating a bigger and bigger ripple, until a hurricane smashes into the Gulf of Mexico. tiny atmospheric changes all interacting in ways we cannot imagine. this is why some kids shoot up schools. it's easy to look at psychology broadly, but no two people are ever the same. siblings growing up in the exact same house are not the same. identical twins, genetically identical to their very DNA, are not the same. tiny, tiny events, microdoses of chemicals in the brain, exposures -- they all change us in subtle ways. two people -- Kevin and I -- can grow up with almost identical familial issues and outlooks, but Kevin shoots up his school and I study my ass off and get myself to university to escape my parents. why? I don't know. I don't know what tiny little things might influence me one way and another kid in the other. personality, brain chemistry, waking up that morning and having enough or not -- I don't know. it's chaos theory. the variables are too small to say. nature vs nurture are only two variables out of millions. it's an oversimplification.

so to go back to the book -- who do I blame? neither of them. it was a perfect storm. we could say Eva didn't help, but I know of plenty of kids with decent parents who still committed such a crime. we could say that Kevin was just born bad, but there are plenty of people with his resentful outlook on life who don't commit mass murder, or any harm against anyone whatsoever. it's like how every tornado comes from a supercell, but not every supercell will spawn a tornado -- that final genesis point is unknown to us. we just can't predict it. there are no easy answers. there is no simple formula. we just don't know, and that's what makes Kevin's story -- and its real-life counterparts -- so terrifying.