#philosophers love him! history hates him!

[shiningstages]

Okay I lied to myself yesterday; got rid of Haruhi, Mokou, and Lilia as muses ( for now ). But that's all of the muse cleanup I have in me rn ghjfhgdhfgxhcf I'm gonna try and queue up stuff before I go to work.

[napakmahal]

Good Looking Boy (Pt 2 to Normal Girl)

Hey, so let’s pretend I didn’t fly off the face of a Earth on not update for like a month but part two is finally here. Enjoy

Tadashi was not doing well. He felt like shit and looked like it too. Ever since your argument, Tadashi had started going through a medium-grade depression. You two didn’t break up, and you still took him out after his hearing but something was off and he hated it. For the first time in history, Tadashi’s clothes were blocking the door to the boys’ bathroom. Hiro pulled on the door handle but the clothes and other crap were making it difficult to open.

“When are you gonna clean your side of the room?” He asked out of breath with a cramped hand.

Tadashi didn’t respond and just pulled his comforter closer to him indulging in shitty reality T.V. When Tadashi goes through seasonal depression, he doesn’t want to watch anything that feels like he’s working. He doesn’t want to watch a murder mystery that requires him to remember tiny nuanced details from the first episode or anything philosophical that would make him think. Enter reality television, it’s dumb, effortless, entertaining, and has in-depth recaps of what happened in case he missed something in the episode before. Hiro hadn’t realized how bad it was until he got home one day from school.

Tadashi was staring at his laptop while chewing on a piece of anti-headache mint gum. (mint helps with headaches)

“What are you watching?” Hiro untied his shoes and threw them into an unidentified corner.

“Vanderpump rules.”

It was like Hiro could hear horror movie music start playing in his ears behind someone screaming “I WASN’T YOUR BEST FRIEND HOE!” It was then he finally decided to call all of Tadashi’s friends, he needed assistance. He already had to watch his older brother self-destructively indulge in The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Love Island every winter and he wasn’t sure either of them could take anymore.

That afternoon, Wasabi pulled up in his yellow Volkswagen with the rest of their friends. Hiro had asked them to drive around the back to the garage and meet him inside the garage. Once they were all inside, Hiro made sure to shut the door and gave everyone a small can of iced tea so they’d have something to spit out at the news.

“Okay, so why have we been summoned?” Fred cracked his can open.

Hiro took a deep breath, “Tadashi’s been watching reality shows, and it’s not December.”

“Shit, is he okay?” Gogo ran her hands through her short layered hair.

Honey urged, “Yeah what happened?”

“Have you guys ever met y/n?” Hiro brought his voice levels down. The entire group nodded, referring to meeting you at a karaoke bar where you were Tadashi’s plus one. “Alright well, I haven’t and neither has my aunt.”

“So?” Wasabi shrugged like it was no big deal because it really didn’t sound like a big deal.

“Sooo, she came by like last week and we had no clue who she was. I don’t know what happened but I know Tadashi and her got into some kind of fight and things are weird now.”

“Did they break up!?” Honey gasped.

“No, they still talk but it’s mad weird.”

Gogo pushed, “Weird, how?”

“Like they talk like strangers. ‘Hey, how are you?’ ‘Good, you?’ ‘Good, what are you doing?’ ‘Nothing, just bored. ‘Me too” over and over again.” Hiro wasn’t exactly a relationship therapist but he knew that was not normal for a girlfriend and a boyfriend that has been together as long as they had to talk to each other like that.

“Did you call her?” Fred leaned forward in his chair.

“Psh, no.” Hiro scoffed.

Wasabi asked, “Why not?”

“Because I don’t know her like that!”

Fair enough response. They knew something was going down with Tadashi when he stopped joining their group calls claiming to always be ‘tired’ and when he started leaving the lab hours earlier so he could go straight home and rot in his room. They tried, but nothing seemed to work, and he wouldn’t tell them the problem. He just didn’t want to depress anybody.

“Honestly,” Honey sighed. “I think we have to call her because I’m not so sure there’s anything we can do about it. It’s a problem between them.”

“But they do talk and it’s not going anywhere.” Hiro countered.

Wasabi backed up Honey’s point by saying, “That’s more like conversing, actually talking would be totally different.”

That night, Hiro snuck to the side of Tadashi’s room and typed in his passcode (Tadashi’s phone passcode is Hiro’s birthday and his wallpaper is an old picture of 5-year-old him sitting between his parents in the hospital bed holding onto baby Hiro with the help of his dad.) But his home screen is a picture of you two brushing your teeth in the mirror making faces with toothpaste foam all over your mouths. Hiro clicked on the messages app and sent a text.

——————————————————————————

This was so depressing. You'd been listening to a playlist with 800 different moods to it while you did your makeup to go absolutely nowhere. You hadn’t been exactly normal since the whole ‘my boyfriend didn’t tell your family about me’ thing. He’d reiterated to you that talking about boyfriends and girlfriends in the Hamada house is odd and uncalled for. You understood but still, something was off. This was the longest time you two hadn’t slept over, or just sat in your car talking for hours. You missed your boyfriend so much. But every time you talked to him it was so awkward like he was still feeling guilty over what happened. Sure it hurt but you’d accepted it and they knew you now. You’re grown, learning to accept things with peace is part of growing up. Plus it was just a familial thing and Tadashi loved his family so much. He makes fun of Hiro endlessly but he would rather die than have anything happen to him, he paid his aunt’s light bill without her knowing because he felt bad after seeing her on the phone with a tax collector, and he misses his parents so much. Once he was having a hard time picking out a suit he could wear to an internship he felt overwhelmed and he said “If my dad was here he’d help me.” Still, it still seemed Tadashi was holding back in all of your conversations.

You finished up your double-winged eyeliner and just as you were about to change Hit em up to Something Stupid, your phone dinged. Both your wallpaper and home screen was the picture a stranger took of you, your mom, and Tadashi at your mom’s graduation.

T

Hey, can we talk?

You texted back: Like rn?

T

No, in person.

Fuck. That’s never a good sign. But yet you just said: Ok, when?”

T

Tomorrow, my place. There's an opening on the side where the garage is. Knock.

These tiny sentences were starting to confuse you. Tadashi didn’t text in small sentences. He was the person who wrote grammatically correct paragraphs in text. Usually when he planned things he would tell where what time, when, where, and why he wanted to meet up. So this was starting to scare you. Regardless, you agreed to meet in person. You took off your makeup and tried to get as much sleep as possible.

——————————————————————————

Tadashi wasn’t looking much better the next day. He came down from their room hours after Hiro did. It wasn’t uncommon for Tadashi to sleep in his boxers, especially in the warmer months. But he usually puts on shorts or sweatpants before coming down. Not this time.Hiro was mid-sip of his daily emergen-c (he suffers from low vitamin C) when he saw his older brother looking like he got hit by a cable car walking down the stairs. Hair a mess, wearing a plain white shirt, his blue and white boxers, and eyes like bruised shopping bags. He looked like something Mochi coughed up.

“Good morning.” Hiro said warily.

Tadashi just groaned in response and leaned past him to get to the vitamin cabinet. When he reached to grab the large container of calcium vitamins, Hiro backed the hell up.

“Bro,” Hiro nearly whispered in disbelief. “When’s the last time you showered?”

Tadashi still said nothing and just shot his brother a dirty look. He took his calcium pill and went back upstairs to their room. It wasn’t until he sat down on his bed and stared off into space for a moment that he’d come to the realization.

“Fuck, I need to shower.” He whispered to himself.

He grabbed somewhat presentable clothes and his designated towel and went into the bathroom. Now, for those who don’t really understand depression, this may seem gross. But for a moment, Tadashi just leaned on the door and took a tired breath. Just the thought of exerting roughly 600 muscles to step into a shower, turn on the water, and scrub his entire body for roughly fifteen minutes just to scrub off bodily-secreted toxins made him feel really fucking exhausted. But he did it in the same way he did it when he wasn’t going through a depressive episode. Warm water for skin and cold water for hair. He remembered how appalled you were at seeing him just step into lukewarm water to shower and laughed when he hissed at how hot your average water temperature was.

He missed his girlfriend so much.

Tadashi just let the water run over his head without doing anything at all for like 2 minutes.

“This is so depressing.” He muttered to himself.

Some may think, ‘Dude just take a shower and quit being gross. You’re too old for this shit’ and the truth is, he’s thinking the exact same thing. So he reached for his green tea hair wash and instead of taking a normal shower, he took an everything one. It was tiring and he felt like toppling over and just rotting on the cold porcelain of the shower floor every second he was in there. But by the end at least he felt clean and smelled like classic male body wash.

Meanwhile, the time you were supposed to arrive was getting closer. Hiro was watching the clock profusely as he looked at his aunt who was just watching the Food Network and petting Mochi in her lap.

“Can we go to the mall?” He improvised.

“The mall? For what?” She looked back at him.

Shit. He needed to say something that would actually urge her to take him. “I want to look at new shoes!”

It was like a weight was lifted off her shoulders. Hiro had been wearing the same shoes for years and the soles were detaching from the actual shoe part. The old laces were so messed up he was using the laces from a pair that didn’t fit Tadashi anymore. Why did he have to be one of the only teenage boys not obsessed with shoes?

So when he asked to look at new shoes to get, she jumped at the chance. Screaming at the top of the stairs that she was taking Hiro to the store while Tadashi finished showering.

Once they left, a feeling of satisfaction filled Hiro’s chest as he saw your car stop at the red light closest to the cafe. They drove off and you got closer to the cafe. Usually when someone texts you ‘Hey can we talk’ they’re usually about to drop an absolute bomb on them. Was he planning on breaking up with you? Shit. Maybe you could give him as many reasons you could think of and he’d change his mind? Or maybe he didn’t want to break up at all. Maybe he just wanted to see you in person. Regardless of the reason you were sweating bullets.

You walked over to the garage and started knocking on the door for him to open. You could hear him rushing towards the side door.

“What did you forget-” He opened the door expecting to see Hiro. Instead there you were with a look of concern and slight discomfort on your face. He stared at you as little droplets of water from his hair dribbled down his neck and soaked into his shirt. “H-Hey, what are you doing here?”

“Umm, you texted me.” Your eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

Tadashi reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. Had the days blended together so badly that he couldn’t even remember making plans to meet up with you? When he opened his messages with you, he knew exactly what happened. He didn’t text like that but you know who did? Hiro.

“Fucking Hiro.” He ran his fingers through his wet hair.

“That makes more sense.” You let out a breathy laugh. “S-so do you like want me to go home, orrrr?”

Tadashi yelped a little too loudly, “No!- um, no. I don’t want you to leave, unless you want to go home.”

“No I’ll stay.”

Tadashi invited you inside and sat down at the kitchen island to just sit, silently thanking divine intervention for him taking a shower before you got there . A few beats and declined beverage offers later he spoke up. “So how are you?”

“Okay,” You nearly slapped your hand over your forehead. The two of you could not live like this anymore. “Tadashi, what are we doing?”

“What do you mean?” He froze.

“Just we aren’t on the same page. And that’s not us, we’re always on the same page. It’s like we’re strangers to each other. I don’t want to feel like a stranger to my boyfriend.”

Tadashi immediately went into panic mode and started reassuring you. “You’re not a stranger to me and I’m so sorry I’m making you feel that way I just-”

He stopped. You knew about his winter bouts of depression but you didn’t know the extent of how often they could happen. Nobody did. Tadashi wasn’t one to burden people and if he thought he could handle it he wouldn’t bother ask for help. He never asked for help doing projects, never asked for a ride to school, never asked Aunt Cass to turn in a library book for him. He probably should have told you about his new episode, you’d understand he knows you would and thinking about it he can’t really come up with a good reason for not telling you. Because the phrase “I just didn’t want to bother you” is horseshit no matter how true it is.

Your voice got softer as you leaned forward and touched your hand to his. “What’s wrong.”

“It’s back,” He whispered so quietly you could barely hear him. “Since our fight it’s been back and it’s getting worse.”

He didn’t need to say what “it” was. If it was seasonal depression he would call it that but it wasn’t. It was the kind of thing he got whenever his parents death anniverys came or when he just woke up randomly and couldn’t even muster up enough every to roll out of bed and onto the floor.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” You cooed at him gently.

I just didn’t want to bother you. But he didn’t say that out loud, instead he just shrugged his shoulders and felt his eyes start to sting with tears. “I-I’m sorry.”

You were going to cry. You leaned forward and gave him a hug, his head resting in the nook of your neck. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. Are you doing okay?”

He answered honestly. “Not really, but I’m feeling better.”

You two sat there engluphed together in silence as he listened to your pulse and you ran your fingertips up and down his spine.

Oh my good looking boy.

“Oh no, you know what I just realized.” You said still holding him close to you.

He muttered into your skin, “What?”

“We just had a communication fight.”

Fuck, you’d never had one of those before. Sure you’d get into arguments but you’d never had a problem because of a lack of communication until now. Even though you swore you would never be one of those couples. Shit just happens.

Maybe it was because he thought it was funny, or because you were the one to say it, or it was both but Tadashi started laughing. Truly laughing for the first time in weeks. His back heaved up and down as he laughed until he lifted his head from your neck and pressed his forehead to yours.

“I love you, so much.” He whispered, loud enough just for you. Only for you.

You ran your thumbs over the skin on his face. “I love you too, okay? Always will, remember that.”

You’ll fight again eventually over whatever. But something had changed since then. Whatever it was you doubted that you would ever run into a communication problem again.

Hours later when Hiro and Aunt Cass came home they found you and Tadashi laying on the floor next to piles of folded clothes. You’d been working to help him clean his side of the room, and a three part murder mystery playing in the background.

[respectthepetty]

Interesting to have you thoughts on WHY we love the pain and angst in the Unknown series? and we are not getting the ick instead?

I’m trying to explain it to people without just saying “because they do it so well” you know?

Anon, I can't tell you why YOU like Unknown or why anyone else likes it, but I can tell you why I like it since therapy has shown me the beauty of introspection.

I'm a kinky queer who trusts Taiwan.

And just like kink, this show isn't ONLY about the pain and the angst.

Note that I'm not writing about this in a sexual way nor am I writing that this show is kinky. No. I'm writing that I like it because it resonates with me, a queer kinkster.

And by "ick," I think you mean the brothers-not-brothers plot since that ties into the pain and angst aspect.

Not to get too psychological or philosophical, but the pain of the show gives me pleasure. Especially because I know the pain won't last. There is an end point; therefore, there is a release. And once the show is over, I won't be left with this horrible scar of unhappiness but I might be left with some bruises that remind me the pain was worth it for the happy ending.

Also, much like being queer and kinky, this plot is a taboo subject.

And I like that!

The show is treating the subject with respect. The show has established that Yuan and Qian ARE brothers. They call each other "brother," they have their little sister, and the world sees them as brothers.

Yet they aren't blood-related, which is a point that San Pang mentioned when he told Lili not to get too close to Yuan, and people were upset that he said it, but it is the same argument people use to excuse Yuan's feelings for his brother.

And just like kink, the show makes me think about that grey area of life between consenting adults because nothing is ever black and white. Yuan asked San Pang what was wrong with him loving Qian, and we will see the fallout from San Pang dating Lili when he has openly considered Qian family. People have questioned what is different between the two relationships, and the show will question it as well.

This show is asking the audience to reflect, so I feel safe with this show punishing me with so much pain which is a big aspect of kink. I wouldn't tolerate pain from a show I don't feel safe with (Game of Thrones, I'm looking at your ass!). I trust the show to deal with this taboo subject with respect because Taiwanese BLs have consistently dealt with this subject with respect. As much as people hated HIStory 4: Close to You, it didn't shy away from the brothers plot or the sexual assault. Both were treated seriously within the show.

And it did the same with Kiseki: Dear to Me.

And the other Taiwanese BLs it's been used in.

So I've never had the ick factor that others have regarding this particular subject or been bothered by the level of pain it brings, but perhaps Addicted toughened me up because the way China dishes out sad "bromances" due to censorship, I suspect there is a connection there between the "brothers" to lovers plot that transfers into Taiwanese dramas.

Because if you have to hide love behind a wall of being "bros," it makes sense that it would 1) be painful, and 2) be queer-coded since a happy ending wouldn't be realistic.

And yet Taiwan continues to deliver a happy ending with this type of plot.

So yeah, I like the pleasure that will come with all this pain. I like that it leans into historical and cultural queer coding while being explicitly queer. And I like that it's Taiwanese handling it.

That's why I like it.

But, once again, I have no idea why others do.

[mariacallous]

“Don’t mention the word ‘liberalism,’ ” the talk-show host says to the guy who’s written a book on it. “Liberalism,” he explains, might mean Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to his suspicious audience, alienating more people than it invites. Talk instead about “liberal democracy,” a more expansive term that includes John McCain and Ronald Reagan. When you cross the border to Canada, you are allowed to say “liberalism” but are asked never to praise “liberals,” since that means implicitly endorsing the ruling Trudeau government and the long-dominant Liberal Party. In England, you are warned off both words, since “liberals” suggests the membership of a quaintly failed political party and “liberalism” its dated program. In France, of course, the vagaries of language have made “liberalism” mean free-market fervor, doomed from the start in that country, while what we call liberalism is more hygienically referred to as “republicanism.” Say that.

Liberalism is, truly, the love that dare not speak its name. Liberal thinkers hardly improve matters, since the first thing they will say is that the thing called “liberalism” is not actually a thing. This discouraging reflection is, to be sure, usually followed by an explanation: liberalism is a practice, a set of institutions, a tradition, a temperament, even. A clear contrast can be made with its ideological competitors: both Marxism and Catholicism, for instance, have more or less explicable rules—call them, nonpejoratively, dogmas. You can’t really be a Marxist without believing that a revolution against the existing capitalist order would be a good thing, and that parliamentary government is something of a bourgeois trick played on the working class. You can’t really be a Catholic without believing that a crisis point in cosmic history came two millennia ago in the Middle East, when a dissident rabbi was crucified and mysteriously revived. You can push either of these beliefs to the edge of metaphor—maybe the rabbi was only believed to be resurrected, and the inner experience of that epiphany is what counts; maybe the revolution will take place peacefully within a parliament and without Molotov cocktails—but you can’t really discard them. Liberalism, on the other hand, can include both faith in free markets and skepticism of free markets, an embrace of social democracy and a rejection of its statism. Its greatest figure, the nineteenth-century British philosopher and parliamentarian John Stuart Mill, was a socialist but also the author of “On Liberty,” which is (to the leftist imagination, at least) a suspiciously libertarian manifesto.

Whatever liberalism is, we’re regularly assured that it’s dying—in need of those shock paddles they regularly take out in TV medical dramas. (“C’mon! Breathe, damn it! Breathe! ”) As on television, this is not guaranteed to work. (“We’ve lost him, Holly. Damn it, we’ve lost him.”) Later this year, a certain demagogue who hates all these terms—liberals, liberalism, liberal democracy—might be lifted to power again. So what is to be done? New books on the liberal crisis tend to divide into three kinds: the professional, the professorial, and the polemical—books by those with practical experience; books by academics, outlining, sometimes in dreamily abstract form, a reformed liberal democracy; and then a few wishing the whole damn thing over, and well rid of it.

The professional books tend to come from people whose lives have been spent as pundits and as advisers to politicians. Robert Kagan, a Brookings fellow and a former State Department maven who has made the brave journey from neoconservatism to resolute anti-Trumpism, has a new book on the subject, “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again” (Knopf). Kagan’s is a particular type of book—I have written one myself—that makes the case for liberalism mostly to other liberals, by trying to remind readers of what they have and what they stand to lose. For Kagan, that “again” in the title is the crucial word; instead of seeing Trumpism as a new danger, he recapitulates the long history of anti-liberalism in the U.S., characterizing the current crisis as an especially foul wave rising from otherwise predictable currents. Since the founding of the secular-liberal Republic—secular at least in declining to pick one faith over another as official, liberal at least in its faith in individualism—anti-liberal elements have been at war with it. Kagan details, mordantly, the anti-liberalism that emerged during and after the Civil War, a strain that, just as much as today’s version, insisted on a “Christian commonwealth” founded essentially on wounded white working-class pride.

The relevance of such books may be manifest, but their contemplative depth is, of necessity, limited. Not to worry. Two welcomely ambitious and professorial books are joining them: “Liberalism as a Way of Life” (Princeton), by Alexandre Lefebvre, who teaches politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney, and “Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society” (Knopf), by Daniel Chandler, an economist and a philosopher at the London School of Economics.

The two take slightly different tacks. Chandler emphasizes programs of reform, and toys with the many bells and whistles on the liberal busy box: he’s inclined to try more random advancements, like elevating ordinary people into temporary power, on an Athenian model that’s now restricted to jury service. But, on the whole, his is a sanely conventional vision of a state reformed in the direction of ever greater fairness and equity, one able to curb the excesses of capitalism and to accommodate the demands of diversity.

The program that Chandler recommends to save liberalism essentially represents the politics of the leftier edge of the British Labour Party—which historically has been unpopular with the very people he wants to appeal to, gaining power only after exhaustion with Tory governments. In the classic Fabian manner, though, Chandler tends to breeze past some formidable practical problems. While advocating for more aggressive government intervention in the market, he admits equably that there may be problems with state ownership of industry and infrastructure. Yet the problem with state ownership is not a theoretical one: Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister because of the widely felt failures of state ownership in the nineteen-seventies. The overreaction to those failures may have been destructive, but it was certainly democratic, and Tony Blair’s much criticized temporizing began in this recognition. Chandler is essentially arguing for an updated version of the social-democratic status quo—no bad place to be but not exactly a new place, either.

Lefebvre, on the other hand, wants to write about liberalism chiefly as a cultural phenomenon—as the water we swim in without knowing that it’s wet—and his book is packed, in the tradition of William James, with racy anecdotes and pop-culture references. He finds more truths about contemporary liberals in the earnest figures of the comedy series “Parks and Recreation” than in the words of any professional pundit. A lot of this is fun, and none of it is frivolous.

Yet, given that we may be months away from the greatest crisis the liberal state has known since the Civil War, both books seem curiously calm. Lefebvre suggests that liberalism may be passing away, but he doesn’t seem especially perturbed by the prospect, and at his book’s climax he recommends a permanent stance of “reflective equilibrium” as an antidote to all anxiety, a stance that seems not unlike Richard Rorty’s idea of irony—cultivating an ability both to hold to a position and to recognize its provisionality. “Reflective equilibrium trains us to see weakness and difference in ourselves,” Lefebvre writes, and to see “how singular each of us is in that any equilibrium we reach will be specific to us as individuals and our constellation of considered judgments.” However excellent as a spiritual exercise, a posture of reflective equilibrium seems scarcely more likely to get us through 2024 than smoking weed all day, though that, too, can certainly be calming in a crisis.

Both professors, significantly, are passionate evangelists for the great American philosopher John Rawls, and both books use Rawls as their fount of wisdom about the ideal liberal arrangement. Indeed, the dust-jacket sell line of Chandler’s book is a distillation of Rawls: “Imagine: You are designing a society, but you don’t know who you’ll be within it—rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like?” Lefebvre’s “reflective equilibrium” is borrowed from Rawls, too. Rawls’s classic “A Theory of Justice” (1971) was a theory about fairness, which revolved around the “liberty principle” (you’re entitled to the basic liberties you’d get from a scheme in which everyone got those same liberties) and the “difference principle” (any inequalities must benefit the worst off). The emphasis on “justice as fairness” presses both professors to stress equality; it’s not “A Theory of Liberty,” after all. “Free and equal” is not the same as “free and fair,” and the difference is where most of the arguing happens among people committed to a liberal society.

Indeed, readers may feel that the work of reconciling Rawls’s very abstract consideration of ideal justice and community with actual experience is more daunting than these books, written by professional philosophers who swim in this water, make it out to be. A confidence that our problems can be managed with the right adjustments to the right model helps explain why the tone of both books—richly erudite and thoughtful—is, for all their implication of crisis, so contemplative and even-humored. No doubt it is a good idea to tell people to keep cool in a fire, but that does not make the fire cooler.

Rawls devised one of the most powerful of all thought experiments: the idea of the “veil of ignorance,” behind which we must imagine the society we would want to live in without knowing which role in that society’s hierarchy we would occupy. Simple as it is, it has ever-arresting force, making it clear that, behind this veil, rational and self-interested people would never design a society like that of, say, the slave states of the American South, given that, dropped into it at random, they could very well be enslaved. It also suggests that Norway might be a fairly just place, because a person would almost certainly land in a comfortable and secure middle-class life, however boringly Norwegian.

Still, thought experiments may not translate well to the real world. Einstein’s similarly epoch-altering account of what it would be like to travel on a beam of light, and how it would affect the hands on one’s watch, is profound for what it reveals about the nature of time. Yet it isn’t much of a guide to setting the timer on the coffeemaker in the kitchen so that the pot will fill in time for breakfast. Actual politics is much more like setting the timer on the coffeemaker than like riding on a beam of light. Breakfast is part of the cosmos, but studying the cosmos won’t cook breakfast. It’s telling that in neither of these Rawlsian books is there any real study of the life and the working method of an actual, functioning liberal politician. No F.D.R. or Clement Attlee, Pierre Mendès France or François Mitterrand (a socialist who was such a master of coalition politics that he effectively killed off the French Communist Party). Not to mention Tony Blair or Joe Biden or Barack Obama. Biden’s name appears once in Chandler’s index; Obama’s, though he gets a passing mention, not at all.

The reason is that theirs are not ideal stories about the unimpeded pursuit of freedom and fairness but necessarily contingent tales of adjustments and amendments—compromised stories, in every sense. Both philosophers would, I think, accept this truth in principle, yet neither is drawn to it from the heart. Still, this is how the good work of governing gets done, by those who accept the weight of the world as they act to lighten it. Obama’s history—including the feints back and forth on national health insurance, which ended, amid all the compromises, with the closest thing America has had to a just health-care system—is uninspiring to the idealizing mind. But these compromises were not a result of neglecting to analyze the idea of justice adequately; they were the result of the pluralism of an open society marked by disagreement on fundamental values. The troubles of current American politics do not arise from a failure on the part of people in Ohio to have read Rawls; they are the consequence of the truth that, even if everybody in Ohio read Rawls, not everybody would agree with him.

Ideals can shape the real world. In some ultimate sense, Biden, like F.D.R. before him, has tried to build the sort of society we might design from behind the veil of ignorance—but, also like F.D.R., he has had to do so empirically, and often through tactics overloaded with contradictions. If your thought experiment is premised on a group of free and equal planners, it may not tell you what you need to know about a society marred by entrenched hierarchies. Ask Biden if he wants a free and fair society and he would say that he does. But Thatcher would have said so, too, and just as passionately. Oscillation of power and points of view within that common framework are what makes liberal democracies liberal. It has less to do with the ideally just plan than with the guarantee of the right to talk back to the planner. That is the great breakthrough in human affairs, as much as the far older search for social justice. Plato’s rulers wanted social justice, of a kind; what they didn’t want was back talk.

Both philosophers also seem to accept, at least by implication, the familiar idea that there is a natural tension between two aspects of the liberal project. One is the desire for social justice, the other the practice of individual freedom. Wanting to speak our minds is very different from wanting to feed our neighbors. An egalitarian society might seem inherently limited in liberty, while one that emphasizes individual rights might seem limited in its capacity for social fairness.

Yet the evidence suggests the opposite. Show me a society in which people are able to curse the king and I will show you a society more broadly equal than the one next door, if only because the ability to curse the king will make the king more likely to spread the royal wealth, for fear of the cursing. The rights of sexual minorities are uniquely protected in Western liberal democracies, but this gain in social equality is the result of a history of protected expression that allowed gay experience to be articulated and “normalized,” in high and popular culture. We want to live on common streets, not in fortified castles. It isn’t a paradox that John Stuart Mill and his partner, Harriet Taylor, threw themselves into both “On Liberty,” a testament to individual freedom, and “The Subjection of Women,” a program for social justice and mass emancipation through group action. The habit of seeking happiness for one through the fulfillment of many others was part of the habit of their liberalism. Mill wanted to be happy, and he couldn’t be if Taylor wasn’t.

Liberals are at a disadvantage when it comes to authoritarians, because liberals are committed to procedures and institutions, and persist in that commitment even when those things falter and let them down. The asymmetry between the Trumpite assault on the judiciary and Biden’s reluctance even to consider enlarging the Supreme Court is typical. Trumpites can and will say anything on earth about judges; liberals are far more reticent, since they don’t want to undermine the institutions that give reality to their ideals.

Where Kagan, Lefebvre, and Chandler are all more or less sympathetic to the liberal “project,” the British political philosopher John Gray deplores it, and his recent book, “The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is one long complaint. Gray is one of those leftists so repelled by the follies of the progressive party of the moment—to borrow a phrase of Orwell’s about Jonathan Swift—that, in a familiar horseshoe pattern, he has become hard to distinguish from a reactionary. He insists that liberalism is a product of Christianity (being in thrall to the notion of the world’s perfectibility) and that it has culminated in what he calls “hyper-liberalism,” which would emancipate individuals from history and historically shaped identities. Gray hates all things “woke”—a word that he seems to know secondhand from news reports about American universities. If “woke” points to anything except the rage of those who use it, however, it is a discourse directed against liberalism—Ibram X. Kendi is no ally of Bayard Rustin, nor Judith Butler of John Stuart Mill. So it is hard to see it as an expression of the same trends, any more than Trump is a product of Burke’s conservative philosophy, despite strenuous efforts on the progressive side to make it seem so.

Gray’s views are learned, and his targets are many and often deserved: he has sharp things to say about how certain left liberals have reclaimed the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and his thesis that politics is a battle to the death between friends and foes. In the end, Gray turns to Dostoyevsky’s warning that (as Gray reads him) “the logic of limitless freedom is unlimited despotism.” Hyper-liberals, Gray tells us, think that we can compete with the authority of God, and what they leave behind is wild disorder and crazed egotism.

As for Dostoyevsky’s positive doctrines—authoritarian and mystical in nature—Gray waves them away as being “of no interest.” But they are of interest, exactly because they raise the central pragmatic issue: If you believe all this about liberal modernity, what do you propose to do about it? Given that the announced alternatives are obviously worse or just crazy (as is the idea of a Christian commonwealth, something that could be achieved only by a degree of social coercion that makes the worst of “woke” culture look benign), perhaps the evil might better be ameliorated than abolished.

Between authority and anarchy lies argument. The trick is not to have unified societies that “share values”—those societies have never existed or have existed only at the edge of a headsman’s axe—but to have societies that can get along nonviolently without shared values, aside from the shared value of trying to settle disputes nonviolently. Certainly, Americans were far more polarized in the nineteen-sixties than they are today—many favored permanent apartheid (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”)—and what happened was not that values changed on their own but that a form of rights-based liberalism of protest and free speech convinced just enough people that the old order wouldn’t work and that it wasn’t worth fighting for a clearly lost cause.

What’s curious about anti-liberal critics such as Gray is their evident belief that, after the institutions and the practices on which their working lives and welfare depend are destroyed, the features of the liberal state they like will somehow survive. After liberalism is over, the neat bits will be easily reassembled, and the nasty bits will be gone. Gray can revile what he perceives to be a ruling élite and call to burn it all down, and nothing impedes the dissemination of his views. Without the institutions and the practices that he despises, fear would prevent oppositional books from being published. Try publishing an anti-Communist book in China or a critique of theocracy in Iran. Liberal institutions are the reason that he is allowed to publish his views and to have the career that he and all the other authors here rightly have. Liberal values and practices allow their most fervent critics a livelihood and a life—which they believe will somehow magically be reconstituted “after liberalism.” They won’t be.

The vociferous critics of liberalism are like passengers on the Titanic who root for the iceberg. After all, an iceberg is thrilling, and anyway the White Star Line has classes, and the music the band plays is second-rate, and why is the food French instead of honestly English? “Just as I told you, the age of the steamship is over!” they cry as the water slips over their shoes. They imagine that another boat will miraculously appear—where all will be in first class, the food will be authentic, and the band will perform only Mozart or Motown, depending on your wishes. Meanwhile, the ship goes down. At least the band will be playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which they will take as some vindication. The rest of us may drown.

One turns back to Helena Rosenblatt’s 2018 book, “The Lost History of Liberalism,” which makes the case that liberalism is not a recent ideology but an age-old series of intuitions about existence. When the book appeared, it may have seemed unduly overgeneralized—depicting liberalism as a humane generosity that flared up at moments and then died down again. But, as the world picture darkens, her dark picture illuminates. There surely are a set of identifiable values that connect men and women of different times along a single golden thread: an aversion to fanaticism, a will toward the coexistence of different kinds and creeds, a readiness for reform, a belief in the public criticism of power without penalty, and perhaps, above all, a knowledge that institutions of civic peace are much harder to build than to destroy, being immeasurably more fragile than their complacent inheritors imagine. These values will persist no matter how evil the moment may become, and by whatever name we choose to whisper in the dark.

[crumblinggothicarchitecture]

Hi, I absolutely love the way you breakdown tswift songs, and I just wanted to clarify something, that's been bothering me. In 7 she mentions this part "we'll move to India forever" at first I was just like yeah, but the more I listened to it, the more I was like what kind of fucking colonist/white mindset is that? You'll never tour to India but you want to move here?? LIKE??? NO!!!! Don't!!! We've had enough of you white people exploiting us without ever actually ever caring for our country.

Feel free to vent about whatever Taylor Swift lyric you hate. I literally love it. :)

Because you're right, I always saw the line "we'll move to India forever" in the most charitable light. I remember thinking to myself, when I first heard it, that maybe she just loves India.

It made sense to me- because during the pandemic I fell into reading a BUNCH about India's culture, religion, food, anything. (My interest was mostly a result of linguistic interest into how India has shaped the English Language over time). Despite English only being present in the region due to colonialism, India has had a remarkable impact on shaping the Language itself! I emphasize post-colonial theory in my real job- and while I don't write much on India's relation to English Linguistics, I enjoy reading on the subject. So that's why I find it so interesting- because it really speaks to human ingenuity and perseverance. You know? The linguistic diversity present in India alone is so cool- and I really could talk about it forever.

So, I heard the line, and my first thought was like "yeah, okay maybe she just loves India?"

I think I was being too kind with that initial response.

But dude- she's never even toured in India? Like she just refused to go? She's never once talked about India in a positive light at all. So then why would she write that line? Like she will go to any random country in Europe, go to any random state in the USA, and go to couple of select places in Latin America, but it seems like she outright ignores Southern parts of Asia? Except Singapore- because they gave her a boatload of money, I guess. So, why write that line? Why write all of "Karma" is she has no genuine interest or respect for the people from which that philosophy comes?

In combination with her obvious pro-colonialist imagery in her other work, like the "Wildest Dreams" music video, the line in "Bejeweled" about reclaiming the land, and the latest line in "But Daddy I Love Him" about how she wants to win the West, I now believe her line about moving to India to be pure Orientalism.

Plus, the whole issue with the "Karma" song in which she is denigrating the philosophical concept of Karma and making it seem like nothing more than a shallow idiomatic ideal on revenge.

I think she's just an idiot who wants to mention "India" like it's some fantastical realm far away from "reality" (Eg), to her, the USA, as if India is not a real place with a real history and real culture. This is what I mean when I say she offers India no respect or appreciation- you can't liken a place to a mystical realm removed from reality without removing it from its history, culture, and people.

If the whole line is "Pack your dolls in a sweater/ We'll move to India forever/ Passed down like Folksongs" ("Seven" 2020).

She is intuitively linking the concept of moving to India with that of a childhood fantasy- with the word "dolls"- one childhood fantasy which will be ultimately unfulfilled. Thus, I support the argument that her line about moving to India is only in reference to the fact that it's like an unreal fantasy- worlds away from reality.

In literary theory, we call this process of subjective reality removal, and fetishization of the East as a fantasy realm, Orientalism. Orientalism is the act of creating a fantasy of the East, in this case India, that is often full of stereotypes or predicated solely on the myopic lens of western perspective.

Naturally, this facet of literature was mainly popular during the height of British Colonialism in India- in the 19th century. So why is Taylor Swift negotiating Orientalist attitudes in a song in the year of 2020? WHY! Uh- (because she's a fucking Racist with no respect for anyone who's not White and from USA). I've been blind- I fear.

It's such a rude oversimplification of such a diverse and interesting place- and all of her many nods towards Colonialism are so disgusting - I'm actually pissed off about it.

Anyway- That was my long-winded way of completely agreeing with you. You're right it's a shitty colonialist attitude and she should not be getting away with it.

[punkeropercyjackson]

DC Palentines(Tim Drake and Summer Kent)lore dump.This is a familial/platonic selfship!

They met during Superpunk 1990/Robin 1993 and are 3 years apart

Summer beefed with Tim for 'replacing' Jason and Tim hated Summer out of still not unlearned self-righteousness

But thanks to Tim's girlfriend and Summer's little brother i.e Stephanie and Kon being Summer's best friend and Tim's best friend,they're in the same place or connected so often they have no choice but to interact often

So that leads to them actually getting to know eachother and working together in superheroics.And least to say,they couldn't believe they ever hated eachother out of their own Pride & Prejudice(I'm sorry i had to lmao)

........The Pride & Prejudice they hated eachother over is Jason actually.LMFAO

Tim sees Summer as yet another cool older sister figure he can rely on(Babs,Cass AND Helena damn okay go off king)and Summer sees Tim as an add-on to his younger siblings collection(ALL the Superkids that have appeared in the comics are canon to this verse,plus Match getting adopted by Clois and @mayameanderings ' s/i Cindy.Summer has major Eldest Daughter Syndrome and Troubled But Good Kid Trauma so that includes taking in every kid he meets that needs it)

Summer radicalized Tim and provided him shelter when Jack died and he couldn't bear to stay with Bruce at the time due to the extreme turbalance of their relathionship.Afterwards Tim was constantly insistant on paying Summer back to the point it borderlined on self-destructive but Summer had enough experience with that situation to put a stop to it before he could hurt himself irreversably

Tim got Summer into tagging and graffiti/street art and they go around to throw some tags up or do some analysis of street art they take interest in.Summer uses his kryptonian/human hybrid superheight and kryptofang(kryptonian dragon,his specific species)wings to help Tim throw up pieces in hard to reach places

He also introduces him to his favorite books/texts he normally can't nerd out with other people.The philosophical stuff like Art of War,Diogenes and Camus(Jason is also into that but Tim refuses to spend enough time with him solo to find that out)

And shows him his favorite super niche nerd stuff too-Like architecture in Gotham and how it interacts with and changes the ways the newer Bats traverse with the city,or the history of the undercity and how it affects the actual crime and even everyday life of Gothamites!They have a lot of fun discussing it and for strategy for Summer's hero work as well

Summer is afrolatina squared(black biracial with dominican birth parents and adopted by Clark and Lois,who are black mexican and black dominican and both monoracial).He's literally kryptonian Starfire and not just because he was mentored by her and Dick as a sidekick but as Sparks,he was a rowdy and loud goth tomboy with a huge mean and bitter streak as trauma coping and a defense mechanism in addition to a hodgepodge neurodivergent disorders.All the other Robins had Batgirl but Jason had Sparks

Tim is cherokee on Janet's side and Jack wasn't malicious but he was extremely white and rich so he had a strong cultural disconnect.Tim was a trans freakish kid that ran around on the street for the majority of his Gotham nightlife out of audhd.The running around alleys and on rooftops sparked a natural love and fascination for the art that covers the city's landscape

They love sitting on ledges together that Summer lifts them up to in Gotham and Metropolis equally,discussing the things they've discovered and how to traverse them and the differences yet similarities between them(the cities and themselves too)

Summer is a huge gastronomer so he taught Tim the culinary arts and focused on african and latino cuisine and their historical significance and meaning which leads to uncovering Tim's cherokee roots together with deep dive research and doing cultural fusion.This includes but is not nearly limited to them taking care of eachother's hair and being allowed to touch it whenever and wherever they want(Standard hairstyles are natural i.e Big floof and straight for Summer and Tim respectively but Summer loves braiding Tim's hair in all kinds of looks and running his hands through it and massaging his scalp as a pressure stim and Tim is fascinated and awed by Summer's kinky hair and thinks it's the best kind of hair and their favorite styles are sisterlocks,pufftails and goddess braids and he makes haircare products for him since he wants to keep improving his diy skills as long as he can)

They also both dye their hair.Summer has his baby pink bangs and Tim has red dip tips.Summer started his as part of his start as a solo hero,Ember,and Tim did his job on his own in manic panic until Summer showed up and helped him do it right and since he was in-need of a redye himself,he let him do his and they watched movies as the bleach and dye dry process happened

They're both huge energy drink enjoyers as true alts and can be found hanging out at marts and at food trucks owned by poc too obvs.They order eachother's cultural foods as a tradition for platonic soul sharing

Summer is solarpunk so Tim had to be too.He dragged himself along and was equally dragged along into it.Summer teaches Tim all about decolonization and activism and Tim obviously feels a connection to it as a cherokee person as a Summer does a black person.They have beach days that double as fun times like ice cream and swimming and sandplaying and eco-cleansing kryptonianly and humanly by hand as a team and Tim uses his voice as the son of Bruce Wayne to speak out and Summer is Metropolis' anarchy poster child and the face of black/latina Metropolitan women.Tim adopts the fashion and includes diy taught to him by Summ and they look like a walking goth x pastel meme but with brown and black slay instead of white gentrification of the punk aesthetic.Gorgeous long pure black straight hair and homemade hunting boots and edgy ahh tops with either meme refs or pro native messages for Tim and unreastrained huge natural blackity black hair with handmade fancy beads and showy pastel tops and long ass self-designed skirts and they're both covered in piercings

Summer is a huge nerd himself so he got Tim into animanga and nintendo games and girlypop media and black/latino cult classics and Tim returned the favor by getting him to participate in the appropriate for non-natives cherokee traditions and norms.Tim taught Summer normie teen speak before he freaked it and Summer taught Tim kryptonian techniques.They even have matching Tamagotchis-Summer has Angel Uni and Tim has Monster Uni,Summer offered to share with Jason but he said no to look cool so Summer shrugged it off and asked Tim so Jason tried to take it back and Summer told him to he should've manned up and not played on his nonexistent coolness.Tim burst out laughing at that but was touched anway and accepted.Jason and Tim are the only non-Supers(Lois is an honorary one)who know how to do Summer's makeup perfectly for him with no critisism

Summer convinced Tim to physically transition because his internalized trans.phobia was stopping him out of fear of 'ruining' his body but Summer told him it's not his body if he dosen't love as much as Summer loves him and as much as Tim loves Tim.He shared his own experiences with harrasment to transition and degendering against his will to reassure him and got him his surgeries done by Taliacorp doctors so he could have hawk wing shaped top surgeries scars and took him to Dairy Super afterwards in a sports bra and his baggiest cargo pants to show solidarity as a no t or op genderfluid and bigender transmasc

They play Animal Crossing and Time Management games together religiously,Tim turned Summer into a Skater Girl and Summer saved Tim from poser punk.Sunflower4Rose.Summer is a tank at 7' and a beefcake(fat AND muscle but itty bitty tiddies)and Tim is an average height twink.They are best friends,siblings,mom friend and problem child and a secret fourth thing(platonic soulmates against faith)

Summer became half Kryptofang because Lex injected him with the dna of the last surviving one and the ghost of it he shares a headspace with is named Fantasma.This gives Summer DID symptoms the way Speedforce gives Flashes audhd symptoms and Tim has narcolepsy and chronic pain so disabled solidarity

Summer is summer,sunshine and optimism and the sea and sugary sweetness and bubblicity and open boisterous femininity.Tim is autumn,mellow and melancholic and the earth and sour flavoring and a hardcore but welcoming kind of darkness

SORRY THEY MAKE ME SO SAPPY Tim makes it known how much he hates Jason but dosen't hold it against Summer and blames him entierly for corrupting him into joining The Outlaws and never liked him beforehand.They're on good terms now but it's more for Summer's sake than any progression and it makes Summer sad sometimes but he's accepted it,especially since at least they like eachother now.Jason loves using it against Tim he's dating Summer to piss him off but Summer never let him get away with actual cruelty to him back when he wanted to do it.He encourages Tim to be mean to Jason though

"Summ is LITERALLY the cooler Jason.On every level including the bonus'.I'd say i can't wait until he dumps his ass but they're mated for life or some dragon shit so that's never happening" "NIGGA I'M RIGHT HERE" "I know.I was talking to your wife.And you needed to hear it." "I actually already tell him stuff like this daily but he needs to hear it more." "See?" "This is elder abuse," "I'm older than you by 5 months and technically an ancient kryptonian being because of Fantasma.No,it's not."

[shelovesaesthetics]

Headcanon: Holiday Gifts for Keanu's characters.

𝐻𝐸𝐴𝐷𝐶𝐴𝑁𝑂𝑁 ス ˚ ₊ ‧꒰ ꒱ ‧ ₊˚

ℎ𝑜𝑙𝑖𝑑𝑎𝑦 𝑔𝑖𝑓𝑡𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑘𝑒𝑎𝑛𝑢 𝑟𝑒𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑠 𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑠:

𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑙𝑜𝑔𝑎𝑛

the *stoner accent* murst happy cheery boy on xmas!

he loves, LOVES gifts

christmas is one of his most favourite holidays, or in fact, IS his favourite holiday; halloween just being a close second

not just cause of the food

or the snow

the bodacious music or jolly vibes

or the free school holidays so he won't need to do stupid bogus history homework

but because of the presents!

ted would absolutely love if you gifted him something for christmas

it doesn't have to be elaborate or big, but something that a neurodivergent (/j) rock-enthusiast weird kid like him would like

custom guitar picks, comic books, a bucket of tutti-fruity bubblegum & cheese puffs, cute little stickers, fruit-flavoured candy (not too much though as they hurt his teefies), a nintendo gameboy, drawing books....

he'd also like makeup, like black eyeliner & eyeshadow and a couple of nail polish so him and bill can use for their wyld stallyns performances

gift him some eddie van halen posters, cds, keyrings, trinkets, or any of that paranphelia and he'll worship you for life

oh yeah, he don't play around with his eddie van halen

less you forget that

he'll also love tapes and cds and merch of other rock bands he adores

RUBIX CUBE! he'll love a mean rubix cube as his personal fidget toy 🥺

ted's very easy to please, just don't buy him an air supply or beatles vinyl album

𝑗𝑜ℎ𝑛 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑒

antithesis of ted

this man is the grunge adaptation of scrooge, but with less hate and more indifference

doesn't really care about xmas

mostly thinks it's for kids

giving gifts to this guy will be a little bit hard because this man is such a depressed little nihilist sometimes

he'll scoff and bluff, but deep down his emotions speaks otherwise

he never really states what he like or anything personal about him - he's a very private man with only one thing on his mind (lyke idk saving the world from satan and the apocalypse ???)

but what you do know about him is that this man is a chronic smoker

john would definitely fw a silver plated lighter

like the vivienne westwood ones

or a custom black one with his initials on it

he also drinks a lot of whiskey

jack daniel's? jim beam bourbon? jameson?

pair that up with a leather hip flask and he's good to go

silver jewellery type of guy? mhm!

he'd love a cross chain necklace

like deep-silver cross/crucifix pendant ones

would look so fucking cool on him

silver accessories always look so hot on daddy constantine

other than that, nothing much

he's not invested in xmas but he doesn't hate it

his mind will be more occupied on demon hunting and existential brainrots than that

yet he still has a soft spot (secretly) so xmas with him won't be so bleeping bad

𝑗𝑜ℎ𝑛 𝑤𝑖𝑐𝑘

pretty normal about xmas

celebrating with him would be so freaking wholesome though

you're so used to seeing john as his stoic dilf self that him being all lovely with you during this jolly season would be a fever dream

giving him gifts would be, again, pretty normal

he's a simple guy, and already rich enough to buy himself whatever, after all, so your xmas shopping spend will be looking pretty alright

john is a traditional manly man so his gifts would be of that orient

he's also a bit old so keep that in mind...

brown leather-strapped watch, woody oak cologne, men's grooming set, a brand new dog that won't randomly disappear after a few months

john is a bookworm, he'd love some good ol' classic fiction novels and philosophical/critical/mindfuck books to open up and out his mind

he's a handy man so a brand-new toolbox would be nice

he's also a lover of whiskey and wine, so again, some jack daniel's or bourbon and malboc or pinot noir

this would be the funniest shit ever but please gift this man a pencil as a joke

i swear he'll be so oblivious at first but when he clocks, this mf will death stare you like hell whilst you try so hard to not burst into laughter

but on a wholesome note, a ring will put a smile right back onto that man's face

like cute couple rings you and him can wear, like he'll smile so hard

a heart locket necklace with a picture of you and him inside

oh he'll absolutely die inside

john's such a sucker for classic romance, you don't understand

he'll love vinyl records of 70s and 80s vintage classics, taking him back to his younger days

john will cherish these well... 💌

𝑗𝑜ℎ𝑛𝑛𝑦 𝑠𝑖𝑙𝑣𝑒𝑟ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑑

the very antithesis of ted

this man is scrooge

does not not care about xmas and probably never will

"mindless fucking consumerism"

he definitely thinks that shit is for kids

gifts for this guy will be as hard as an harvard acceptance letter

90% of the time this man is never really happy

he's either miserable or annoying or insulting or all at the same time

he would, however, accept it, if it's from you

but johnny never tells personal information

he's a very egotistical individual so the most personal you'll get from him is the edge of how big his c*ck is (*facepalms.png*)

𝑟𝑢𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑡 𝑚𝑎𝑟𝑠ℎ𝑒𝑡𝑡𝑎

another happy cheery boy on xmas

and another favourite himbo of mine 💘

he obviously loves xmas

it's the only time he won't have to be digging under trash heaps for diamonds

he's a very weird and random kid so you know he'll like anything

finding a xmas present for him would be easy cause as long as the shit's entertaining, he's pretty much on board

and it's the 80s, so what really can a broke teenage runaway enjoy back then?

but anyways, that's whatever

rupert would definitely like these as gifts: comic books, candy, shakespeare novels, an eight ball, rubix cube, wristbands, money, a crown (???)-

SLIME! give the boy some green slime to play with! (helps with his stims)

*murmuring* why can i imagine him in a skir- yeah give this boy a skirt

and a skateboard

gnarly combination

𝑠ℎ𝑎𝑛𝑒 𝑓𝑎𝑙𝑐𝑜/𝑗𝑢𝑙𝑖𝑎𝑛 𝑚𝑒𝑟𝑐𝑒𝑟

basic as fuck

these dudes are like the hallmarks of xmas

both are different genres of white men in hallmark-esque movies

standard white guy, 30-something year old millennial who's into sports and having a beer with the boys vs twink stock image standard white man who's a doctor and every old karen white woman's dream come true

one, however, is more generic and conventionally attractive hallmark white male than the other (julian)

shane's a manly man so he'd probably like some fishing equipment or men's grooming kit or some kind of sports team merch

he'd also like those beer keg stands or mini fridges where he can put his infinite supply of heineken or guiness inside

a handy man also so a nice new toolbox too

julian...... yeah julian i don't actually know about

he's probably just bisexual or something, idk-

that's about it.

[sneakystorms]

Thoughts about the Banshees of Inisherin in no particular order because I'm insane and I spent at least a third of the screening with tears streaming down my face

Padraic starting out the film happy and one by one realising how few things he was relying on to stay that way, just the dreadful hit after hit as he loses his friend, his sister, his donkey and even the village idiot he couldn't get to leave him alone

Something which reminds me of the most painful moments of catcher in the rye or lord of the rings - having a protagonist who does not suffer stoically, does not repress his emotions until a breaking point, but laments and begs for help and reaches out again and again and is broken by the pain inflicted upon him and is not strong enough to survive through it

The most horrible sight to behold in our culture - a grown man crying

In general that whole scene. Padraic standing up to the shithole cop, getting assaulted, Colm wordlessly helping him up but refusing to comfort him once he broke down or stay with him past the crossing

Jenny being buried in padraic's blanket

The hooked stick.

The second confession scene containing both "kind of weird, but strictly speaking not a sin" and "you got me there"

"and what about the despair?" "It's back a bit" "but you're not going to do anything about it, are you?" "No, I'm not"

I wish I knew enough about Irish or English history to say something more about the civil war's significance to the story but I can at least say the faraway conflict gives an eerily absurd tone to Padraic and Colm's feud, like they are simultaneously squabbling over nothing and waging some great existential battle

Speaking of which I was absolutely astounded to see a genuine discussion about the meaning of life in like the first ten minutes of this film. Padraic represents my own belief that a life spent enjoying yourself and making others happy is well lived and valuable, while Colm is obsessed with being remembered and believes his life will only have been worthwhile if he does something remarkable, if he leaves something behind. I kind of wanted Padraic to ask him what it matters to him how someone will feel about him long after he's dead in the ground, but regardless this was a genuinely compelling and shockingly well laid out philosophical conflict

In general I'm stunned by how seamlessly and plainly the themes are interwoven with the story. It's hard to put into words exactly but it's some damn good scriptwriting

I called this movie a masterpiece of small scale tragedy on letterboxd and I fully stand by this. This microscopic in the grand scale of things drama - made to look even smaller by the fact that it's two grown men having it - is simultaneously shown very clearly to encompass padraic's entire world. The tiny island setting is used wonderfully to emphasise this

Speaking of which, I have a massive soft spot for stories where the location is a character unto itself, or in any case has a huge role to play. This is a perfect example of a story like that

And speaking of the tragedy genre, this is maybe the best example I have ever seen of comedy and tragedy/drama woven together completely seamlessly? I can't think of a single moment where the tone shift felt jarring or the mood felt inappropriate. One of the moments I remember most clearly as integrating humour with drama is when Siobhan sees the first finger and padraic's comically stunned reaction combines with her comically realistic one to create a genuine air of tragedy somehow. It's also a good example of the similarly seamless weaving together of naturalistic and stylised storytelling

Not only the horror of loving someone who hates you, but of having that person leverage your love for them in order to keep you away

In general, most heartbreaking film I think I've literally ever watched. 10/10 masterpiece probably will not watch again all the way through because it's too painful

[inlovewithregencyera]

transcript under cut : )

July 8th, 1818

*Louisa humming waltz*

Louisa: *making voice deeper* Lady

Aurelia, will you dance with me?

Bridget: But I thought you had already asked m-

Louisa: *whispering* No Birdie, I asked you when I was Louisa, now I am Frederick and you are Aurelia.

Bridget: Oh! *making voice higher* Yes, Frederick I'd love to!

Louisa: *faintly* Lord Worthington..

Bridget: *squeakily* Yes Lord Worthington, I'd love to!

Aurelia: *chuckling* Bridget your voice is much higher than mine!

Bridget: Is it really?

*Aurelia nods*

Louisa: *loudly whispering* Birdie for the last time you are Lady Aurelia, you do not answer to Bridget or Birdie, and we pretend that impostor over on the bed isn't there, alright?

Bridget: whispering Sorry!

Aurelia: Oh you both look so silly!

Louisa: *voice cracking* My goodness. what fine brown eyes you have my lady..

Bridget: But my eyes are blue?

Louisa: *loudly whispering* BIRDIE, AURELIA HAS BROWN EYES!

Bridget: Oh, yes. Thank you Lord Worthington, you also have very fine...*whispering* Aurelia, what color are his eyes...?

Louisa: BIRDIE!

Aurelia: Louie, please don't yell at her, she doesn't like it. His eyes are hazel, Birdie.

Bridget: *whispering* Thank you..-What fine hazel eyes you have Lord Worthington!

*Louisa humming off key*

*Bridget steps on Louisa’s foot*

Bridget: My goodness Lady Aurelia, have you two left feet..?

Aurelia: Louisa, please.

Bridget: Sorry...

Louisa: *loudly whispering* Best you dance with no one but Papa tonight.

Aurelia: Stop being mean to her!

Bridget: I don't think I want to play anymore...

Louisa: You’re so sensitive sometimes!

Bridget: You’re rude sometimes!

Aurelia: *extending arms* Come here B, ignore her.

*Bridget plops on bed*

Louisa: *rolling eyes* You are both ridiculous, I was joking.

Aurelia: I know, but you forget she is still a child.

Louisa: So am I!

Aurelia: *rubbing Bridget's back* Yes, but she's three years your junior and she's not even out yet.

Louisa: *exasperated sigh* Whatever. *flops on bed*

Aurelia: Maybe a little apology wouldn't hurt?

Louisa: That might ACTUALLY kill me.

Aurelia: Louisa!

Bridget: *giggling* Your love for history already kills me I'm tired of hearing about philosophers!

Louisa: *rolling eyes* Oh, but if I critiqued one of your silly interests or better yet, any of your flaws I'm mean.

Bridget: But your interests are masculine!

Louisa: Turning into Aunt Amelia are we?

Bridget: STOP IT NO I’M NOT!

Aurelia: *trying not to laugh* Louie, please just apologize to the poor thing.

Louisa: Fine. Birdie, I'm sorry I've hurt your feelings, could you find it in your heart to forgive me?

Bridget: NO!

Aurelia: *giggling* Birdie!

Louisa: *giggling* So much for your peace making efforts.

Bridget: I forgive you for being mean while dancing but NOT for comparing me to Aunt Amelia!

Louisa: Fair enough.

Aurelia: I too would be upset if I was compared to her. I can't tell which one is worse, her or her husband!

Bridget: I think poor Papa just puts up with them for the sake of our cousins getting away once in a while...he hates them I'm sure.

Louisa: No, I don't think he hates his own sister. Just who she chose for a husband.

*Aurelia chuckles*

Bridget: Why anyone would choose that THING for a husband I do not know.

Louisa: He looks like a blister!

Aurelia: I don't like him either but that's not very nic-

Louisa: HE'S not very nice. He made you cry last Christmas!

Aurelia: Oh but I was already crying I believe.

Bridget: He made you cry more. I HATE him and I mean it.

Louisa: *snickering* Since Aunt Amelia gave up dancing, perhaps you may dance with him tonight, Birdie?

Bridget: I'd rather expose my pantaloons for all to see!

Louisa: Well someone has to dance with him. We shouldn't make poor Aurelia dance with him, so SOMEONE should...

Bridget: And it won't be me! As you said, I shouldn't dance with anyone but Papa tonight.

Aurelia: Well I think-

Louisa: I'll not speak to that fool after he called my hair wooly last October. After Papa put him in his place he tried to play it off as a joke.

Aurelia: What? You never told me he-

Louisa: Yes, well you weren't yourself that much then. I didn't want to burden you with more stuff that could upset you..

Aurelia: *frowning* Oh.

Louisa: Oh, please take no offense Aurelia, I would've told you, believe me.

Aurelia: I know. I just wish I wasn't like this. Or rather, how I was last year. *sniffling* I'm sorry I hurt you both, please forg-

Bridget: NO! No tears today Aurelia, it's your big day and you will be happy and smiley if it's the last thing we have to make you do! You're almost truly of age!

Louisa: Yes, you will be very happy tonight! Why shouldn't you be, you'll be dancing with your whispering secret, not so secret lover again!

Bridget: Yes! Then he will propose by next week and all is forgotten, and then you'll have plenty of babies and be happy and Louisa and I will be their governesses as no man shall have either of us for we are both silly and ridiculous!

Aurelia: *wiping eyes* Do you think so?

Bridget: YES! We KNOW so!

Louisa: Yes, we do!

*Bridget and Louisa start frantically kissing Aurelia*

Louisa: inmitating Frederick* My dearest Aurelia!

Bridget: *imitating* Frederick* My dear darling!

Aurelia: cackling* STOP!

Louisa: My sweetheart!

Bridget: My pretty lady!

[cosmic--dandelion]

So how did we get from this

Dedicated to his Worshippers, George Frederic Watt (1817-1904)

To this?

A brief history of Mammon

Addendum Because We Can't Have Nice Things: this essay is in no way meant to be a "critique", criticism, or personal attack against Helluva Boss/Hazbin Hotel/Vivziepop as I am, in fact, a big fan of all three! I actually loved the newest episode and Mammon as a character. Seeing him in motion, I think he looks damned near perfect as a modern take on the King of Greed. I wrote this ONLY for educational purposes.

Mammon is a Chaldee (the Semantic language of ancient Chaldeans, the people of a small Mesopotamian country who were later absorbed by the Babylonians) or Syriac word meaning "wealth" or "riches".

The Worship of Mammon, Evelyn De Morgan (1909)

He is best remembered from the Sermon on the Mount from Mathew 6: 24 (King James version): “No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”

Some scholars believe Mammon might have been loosely based on Dīs Pater, originally a Roman God of mineral wealth and fertile lands who was later merged with the chthonic deities of the underworld Pluto and Orcus (because minerals come from underground). Pluto was depicted in the Divine Comedy as "wolflike demon of wealth"; wolves in the medieval times were symbols of greed. Others think he might have been an ancient Syrian god, though no trace of his cult or temples exists.

Mammon transformed over time from an abstract concept to major demon. This is thanks to later philosophers and theologians such as Saint Gregory of Nyssa, a third century Byzantine scholar, Archbishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom, and Peter Lombard, bishop of Paris from 1159 to 1160. His book of Four Books of Sentences (Sententiarum libri IV) was the standard theological text of the Middle Ages.

Mammon was assigned the sin of greed according to the Peter Binsfield classification of demons.

John Milton of Paradise Lost fame imaged him as a fallen angel. He is described as being stooped over (literally the "least erected" of Lucifer's demonic host) because he always has his eyes downward looking for gold and would rather use Hell's resources to finance his lavish lifestyle than wage war against Heaven.

In Edmund Spenser's 16th long poem, The Faerie Queene, Mammon is a “uncouth, salvage, and uncivile wight” who sets up his cave of riches right next to the entrance to the underworld. Subtle, huh? He tries to tempt Sir Guyon, the protagonist of Book II, with all his fabulous wealth, arguing that he could use it for good. (This is a religious-moral-political allegory about temperance, so you can guess how well that went.) He shows up again in Jacques de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal as Hell's ambassador to England. Yes, really.

Just like in Biblical times, reformists used Mammon as a symbol of exploitation and unfettered capitalism during the industrial age.

Fun fact: Mr. Burns lives at the corner of Croesus and Mammon street.

So how does Vivziepop's version compare to the historical Mammon? I dunno, he hasn't appeared in the show yet. It's not my favorite design, but I like the fact that half the fandom was expecting him to be the Big Bad of Helluva Boss, and he's a just big heckin' chonk who sort of looks like a demented Dr. Suess character crossed with a demonic air freshener. It's a silly design for a silly dude, but he could be more dangerous than he looks...

[brainrotdotorg]

Thinking very hard about how enjoyable the swap AU Is on its own when we switch around Harry and Kim. Like it could just be left at that. Or. We go deeper. We get silly with it. We swap more than just the main two.

Why don’t we switch Soona with Plaisance and Tiago with Neha, so the bookish believer in the supra-natural thinks the crab-woman living in the rafters of a church and making dice as a tribute to the father of silence is actually some kind of ghost. She tasks Annette to help her with rituals and whatnot to contact the spirit. Soona runs a dying business selling radiocomputers and assorted technology, constantly pestered by the construction worker upstairs.

And what if we get even more silly with it? What if we switched Klaasje and Garte? The blonde bombshell working the bar hates if you call her a bartender, she is a woman who manages THREE cafeterias, and she deserves respect, god damn it. She tried to ask out her coworker, a butch redhead who normally mans the bar, but the timing was inappropriate and she scared her away. Now, she has to deal with attempting to play off the failure while managing the cafeteria on her own. The kind of schlubby guy is actually… weirdly charming, in that purple jumpsuit, smoking a cigarette. He’s used his wiles for corporate espionage, and is on the run, he’s got new passports in a buoy just off the coast, and he is very experienced at becoming a new person. No one pays attention to someone who looks like him. His natural appearance is the perfect disguise.

Let’s get more ridiculous. The Hardies and the Speedfreaks. Acele is a young woman studying to be a lawyer, her history with her father’s crimes has made her intimately familiar with the law. Which is perfect, because the group of three anti-authority vigilantes that have taken over the now-defunct union box need someone to watch their asses. A group of downtrodden men in a church seek new life through music (that's their cover story- in reality, they just want to sell speed, but through intimidation tactics, theyve kept people out of their business.)

Switch Pissfaggot and Fuck The World with Steban and Ulixes. PF and FTW run an “exclusive gang” (that they formed because the couldn’t make it as SKULLS) and basically just spout philosophical bullshit back and forth at one another, trying to bring back true punk. The Student Communist and Echo Maker have jackets that have their names on the back of them, and you can find them talking about jacking Kim’s car— you know, for communist reasons. Giving back to the proletariat.

Gaston and Rene swapping with Tommy and Call me Manana. The jolly older man sitting on the railing is part of the Union, he’s seen jams like this come and go, he’s more than used to it. The lorry driver is an ornery old guy, just wants to do his job and do it with dignity and honor— even though that job is just transporting FALN goods. Tommy and Manana are two old friends, guys who grew up together, young during the war. There’s a girl they both like, they’re passing her back and forth. Tommy wonders why Manana doesn’t just settle down with her, she clearly loves him. Manana says he can’t, he’s living the boiadero lifestyle. Or maybe there's something else that's keeping him from tying the knot...

What if we got sad with it. Lillienne and Uuno swap. And with them come their kids. Uuno is a fisherman who lost his wife, and now has to care for his rowdy son and a runaway child all on his own. You don’t learn much about Lillienne except that she’s a passed out drunk, her apartment is a mess, and her twin boys, too young to be in such a situation, are milling around behind the fence, looking at a corpse.

Who is that corpse they're looking at? His field nickname was "Idiot Doom Spiral". Across the water lock, a drunk named Lely ferments with his associates, slurring about how they used to be big shit.

More notable swaps- Goracy Kubek and the FRITTTE teen swap places, Sylvie takes Ruby's spot, I don't know how it would work, but Measurehead and the smoker swapping while the babes and sunday friend swap places as well... that one's just funny. cant do anything with it though lmfao

[voxofthevoid]

Posting Schedule: April & May 2024

I'm merging the months since the April anniversary project has outgrown April rather egregiously. It is funny how I said just last month that I'm cutting down my updates to four a month, and now we have eight each for these two months. But to be fair, the word count is pretty much the same because these are shorter fics (...mostly).

April:

2. Chapter 1/1 of the history book on the shelf is always repeating itself

JJK; goyuu; When Yuuji’s fifteen, Gojou Satoru dies; when Yuuji’s seventeen, Gojou Satoru is born.

6. Chapter 1/1 of (it wasn't hard to realize) love's the death of peace of mind

JJK; goyuu; When a blip in time lands sixteen-year-old Satoru in the future, he finds himself in possession of a cursed object sporting his own eyes and a grieving boy who can’t look away from those eyes.

12. Chapter 1/2 of because the negative sex was born into a bloodline

JJK; kenita; Yuuji makes reasonable assumptions about the handsome man stalking him. Kenjaku gets to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

14. Chapter 1/1 of caught the teacher giving his eyes to a student

JJK; goyuu; Megumi finds out that Gojou’s been giving Yuuji some hands-on sex education.

19. Chapter 1/1 of will we remain stuck in the throat of gods

JJK; sukuita with past!goyuu; A bad breakup isn’t a good excuse to fuck the monster rotting your soul, but Yuuji’s made worse decisions—probably.

23. Chapter 1/1 of this was something you incited, you opened up and invited

JJK; goyuu; Satoru learns why most alphas don’t fuck other alphas.

26. Chapter 1/1 of we can be anything we want to be (make shit up and live it completely)

JJK; goyuu; An offhand comment leads to Yuuji discovering the dubious joys of pet ownership.

30. Chapter 1/1 of this is the wrong story

JJK; goyuu; In a faraway forest enclosed in Brahmic barriers, there’s a boy who loves and hates the world in equal measure.

May

3. Chapter 1/1 of vulgarity (the glory and the virtue died so long ago)

JJK; goyuu; Yuuji’s hormones battle his morals while his half-naked teacher sleeps on his lap.

8. Chapter 1/1 of somebody ought to corrupt you on the dance floor and take you home

JJK; hiita; A wardrobe malfunction drastically alters the aftermath of Yuuji’s fight with Higuruma.

10. Chapter 1/1 of never seen such a pretty wicked thing

JJK; goyuu; Satoru has a late-night philosophical discussion with the King of Curses.

15. Chapter 2/2 of because the negative sex was born into a bloodline

JJK; kenita; Yuuji makes reasonable assumptions about the handsome man stalking him. Kenjaku gets to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

19. Chapter 1/1 of i'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies

JJK; goyuu; Satoru’s ward is in that peculiar purgatory between puberty and presentation. He tries to help.

23. Chapter 1/1 of you're like a goddess in disguise (i'm drowning slowly in your eyes)

JJK; fem!goyuu; Yuuji finds religion in her teacher’s tits, violently.

26. Chapter 1/1 of but lover, you're the one to blame

JJK; goyuu; Yuuji acquires a doll that’s sympathetically connected to Satoru. It’s innocent until it isn’t.

31. Chapter 1/7 of i can offer you a black-lit paradise

JJK; itagofushi; Satoru plays favorites with his students in the worst way possible. Megumi suffers, while Yuuji’s oblivious—and horny.

The dates are tentative, the order isn't set in stone, and I am about to become void soup.

If anything's repeated or mismatched, ignore for now. I'll look over this again when these fic titles/dates aren't at risk of setting my eyes on fire.

[speedygal]

This post accepts the original ending of the conquest of the planet of the apes

Conquest of the planet of the apes is a powerful film displaying what humanity is like after having lost their best friends and a huge chunk of their soul to a plague. No, I am not kidding. Humanity's souls did die arguably. It just took a long time, an awfully long time, for their shell to catch up with that.

They wouldn't treat apes that way if cats and dogs were still around. They wouldn't be in black. They wouldn't look like they're in a state of mourning. Their fashion has sci-fi fascism, or, whatever have you, more precisely, the bad guys vibe.

All the love, fun, tenderness, kindness? It went with the pets. It died in the bonfires. The only slice of that left behind was in those who had strong hearts. Suffered immeasurable loss before in their heart that made living without the ones they love seem tame in comparison. MacDonald, Armando, and the apes.

I'll admit I paid somewhat attention but I still got the story that was being conveyed with remarkable acting and story telling.

Armando was in many ways Ceaser's loved one. His father figure. His guardian. The one who protected him. His death is what sent him down a reckoning. Protecting someone. Protecting something. That he loved so dearly.

Something that shook the entire world. Doomed the entire world. Doomed humanity.

A lone circus man is what stood between the end of the world for years. or a riot. or a ape fighting a human. this man was the most important man in the entire world. in humanity's history. his death was the cataclyst that sent Caeser over the edge.

Breck didn't realize it until the apes raised the butt of their rifles and accepted it.

Or perhaps, it was when Caeser was making his Shakespeare speech.

Dark, moody, Shakespearen, philosophical, ethical, two men in two different positions of power discussing change and time and the pace of change and time and climbing up into position. Willing to try to make a change, stop a horrible outcome, the downfall of a entire civilization---. It's the stuff of epics!

it's the kind of story that is incredible watching the hero become the villain to humanity who views him as the villain but really is still the protagonist and the hero because we're rooting for him. a arc well deserved. breaking. snapping. under a lifetime of opression and loss. the twig that finally snapped.

What little trace there was left of the little bit of humanity, kindness, compassion, patience, it was gone. instead, Caeser became the very thing he hated. an oppressor. just as human as the humans themselves that set up a series of dominos leading to the very first movie in a stable time loop, albeit it heavily modified, interrupted, changed. yet the same.

[ao3sbatfamily]

I need a fic where Tim acts like the adult to Bruce bc of how he was Robin and whatnot ASAP.

(My spouse is threatening divorce if I don’t find one)

I went down the ANGST path

'Philosopher's Stone (But this ain’t abt Rowling)' by StarryKitty013

Author: @starrykitty013

Anyway, his theory is that Batman allows Tim to have this childish token because it is teaching Cass. Which might be flimsy because Cass is smart she just can’t speak well or write or read quite yet. But Cass learns quick. And the information was a bit useless anyway. Cass had no interest in history, besides the gargoyles, so Tim doesn’t even know why she keeps asking.

But that’s not the point, the point is that Bruce perceives this is helping her education in a fun way that he allows to his kids, so even though it was Tim’s system, and Tim wasn’t allowed to be a kid, Cass needed to be so Tim’s system served to help Cass.

He kind of hated it, because this was his thing and now that people know about it, he can’t enjoy it the way he was supposed to be. Well he can but it was now serving a useful function which the whole point was for it to be useless and childish and-

But then Cass smiles and asks “Homer?” And Tim is in love with his system because his sister is smiling and so eager to learn anything that isn’t combat.

“Yeah, he spoke the Iliad and Odyssey.” He told her and didn’t say much more because Batman didn’t like him rambling but then Cass asked.

[flowerandblood]

My Best Friend (23)

[modern! club owner • Aemond x fem!reader]    

[warnings: kissing, fluff, none?]

[description: Aemond has his own club and often does business at the home of one of his business associates. There he often meets his younger sister, with whom he develops a deeper relationship through shared secrets. This is slow burn love story.]

* English is not my first language. Please, do not repost. Enjoy! *

Previous and next chapters: Masterlist

_____

Aemond and Y/N ate sandwiches in silence, watching the history program that was on TV. It concerned new discoveries in ancient Egypt, specialists commented on burial chambers in pyramids previously unknown. It turned out that both he and she were interested in such things. 

Aemond admitted to her that most of the books he had in his apartment were about historical and philosophical topics from different periods. As it turned out, reading these types of books was his hobby, often consuming them on lonely evenings.

Aemond was pleased to see that Y/N was as engrossed in the subject as he was. She listened to the lectures of the Cairo professors with such interest as she devoured her sandwich that he felt as if she had forgotten him. He smiled to himself at that thought.

He liked her for not cornering him. When he needed it, she showed him her unlimited interest, tenderness and attention. But when they just sat together, she was able to find other things to do, allowing him some time to himself as well.

They spent the morning pleasantly and peacefully. They didn't rush anything. The thought of spending a few days together made them both feel calmer - they felt that they would have enough time to themselves. Y/N was secretly surprised at how suddenly he opened up to her. 

Even though she knew how he had distanced himself from women so far, she was happy that he really got involved in their relationship. It's as if he's come to terms with the fact that he can be with someone and not feel like a prisoner at the same time.

As promised, Aemond drove her to class. They talked about antiquity on the way. Y/N told him about the uniqueness of Greek sculptures, their perfection, and how, over the centuries, artists returned to their achievements and drew from them during the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Although he knew this theoretically, he was pleased to find that her knowledge impressed him and extended his own in some areas.

Y/N looked at him as she unbuckled her seatbelts.

"Do you want to come in with me?" She asked suddenly. He looked at her in surprise, wondering if he had misheard.

"Where?" He asked, not really understanding what she was proposing.

“Now I have practical classes in the workshop. I'm going to print my linocuts. The workshop is open practically all day, even though we have assigned hours, everyone comes there as they want. Often students bring friends from other faculties who just sit with us and watch us work. It doesn't look like a normal lecture hall." She said calmly, smiling smugly at her own idea. She wanted him to see her at work.

Aemond blinked at her proposal. He was silent for a moment, thinking deeply. It was still early, he wasn't due to arrive at the club for several hours, and there was no one there anyway. He was supposed to pick her up too, so he'd have to come back here anyway. Her proposal was very tempting for him, on the other hand, he was afraid of other people's reaction to him.

"I don't want other students to gossip about you." He said uncertainly. He knew what he looked like, he always drew attention to himself - although he hated it. Y/N blinked and laughed.

“What is there to gossip about if everything is clear?” She asked, shrugging. “Believe me, in these classes you will see people who look much more interesting than you. From rainbow hair to tattooed faces to exquisite outfits. To be honest, I and some of the other students look like sad hens among beautiful roosters.” She laughed happily.

Aemond felt defeated. Her words somehow convinced him.

"Fine."

 ***

The workshop that Y/N was talking about consisted of several rooms, from one to the other. The first, the most crowded, consisted of many tables around which students walked and sat. The walls were lined with large, pull-out cabinets for large-format sheets of paper. Students sat at tables, poking their chisels in their wooden and linocut stencils.

He was pleased to say that after saying hello, practically no one paid attention to him anymore. He relaxed and let her show him around, intrigued. Y/N explained to Aemond that they were cutting out what was supposed to be white on the print, and what they left would be black.

Y/N opened a locker with her name on it. She took out a black apron that hung around her neck and tied at the back above her hips, so that it covered the entire front of her clothes. She tied her hair with a rubber band in a tight bun, so that her hair wouldn't get in the way. She took out her stencil from another cupboard. It was definitely smaller than the big ones other students were working on.

"I make miniatures." She explained, walking over to him and showing him what she was going to deflect. The stencil showed a scene called the "Dance Macabre", or in other words, dance of death. Devils, witches, kings, simpletons and skeletons danced together in a circle. "It's a mirror image. In the print, everything will look the other way around. I deal with projects referring to old woodcuts, I create a whole series of such works. Come."

She said, and Aemond dutifully followed her into the next room. There were several printing presses, smaller and larger, some of which were already being worked by other students. In the center was a large table where students were rolling paint onto their stencils. Most smiled at her and greeted her. 

Aemond was surprised that it seemed like most people here liked, knew, and respected her. Y/N moved around the room with complete confidence, as if she were at home. Once in a while she exchanged a few words with someone else or helped someone who was clearly a year below.

It was nice to see her in her natural habitat. Aemond felt as if he had stepped into Leonardo da Vinci's painting workshop. Everything he saw fascinated him. Y/N usually showed him her poster designs and illustrations, but he didn't know that as part of her studies, she was working on more classic techniques that he had read about in his books.

After Y/N applied paint to her stencil and pressed it on the press, she brought it to him.

"Peel off the paper and see how it turned out. You have clean hands." She said encouragingly. He nodded his head and hesitantly, gently began to peel the sheet from the stencil. He turned it over and was surprised to see that, indeed, the image was a mirror image of the matrix. It really looked like old woodcuts. Aemond watched the work curiously, but Y/N sighed.

“I put too much paint on the stencil and it spilled too much. Nevermind.” She muttered, she wipe her hands on the apron, taking the stencil, and repeated the whole process. Aemond didn't quite understand what that meant, but as she made more prints, he saw that indeed, the next ones were clearer and more detailed.

"Do you want some coffee?" She asked him suddenly. "We have an express here. You can sit at the table, you don't have to stand." She said calmly, smiling. An hour ago he would have refused, but he was surprised to find that he liked it there. He watched with interest as the other students worked as well. 

A few even approached them with their work, asking everyone in the room what they thought. He was surprised at how relaxed the atmosphere was, even though everyone was working all the time. So he sat on one of the stools, and after a while Y/N brought tea for herself and coffee for him.

From time to time professors appeared in the room. They proofread and voiced their thoughts on their work, had a little laugh, and then went back to their tiny rooms, where they sat in seclusion. It ended up with Y/N taking off her apron, washing her hands, and looking at him with a smile.

"Its enough for today. We can go now." He looked at her surprised. He didn't even feel how fast time flew by. He finished his coffee and they washed their cups. He helped her clean up her work station. Y/N said goodbye to everyone and they left the room.

"Did you like it? I'm sorry, you didn't have to stay until the end." She said in a slightly apologetic tone, looking at him uncertainly. He looked at her calmly.

"It was fun there. You do very interesting things." He admitted. Y/N smiled happily at his words, delighted that he got to know a significant part of her life.

***

Aemond and Y/N went to her house to get some of her things. Klaus wasn't happy to hear that he was staying with Aemond for a few days, but he waved them off, stating that he had plenty of work to do in the coming days anyway. 

On the way back, Aemond said he needed to stop by the club for a while, sign some papers and run some errands with the manager. He suggested that she wait for him inside and have a drink, then they go out to eat together. She smiled gratefully at the offer.

Aemond followed his manager to his office while Y/N sat at the bar. Aemond said she could take whatever she wanted to drink at his expense. She looked through the menu curiously, wondering what to choose. She felt someone sit down next to her, but she didn't pay any attention to it, lost in thought.

"Take vodka with lemon juice and sprite. Very refreshing.” She heard a female voice, she glanced to the side. The woman she was looking at was about 10 years older than she was, but she looked very good. Her make-up and tight dress well emphasized her qualities and great figure. Y/N smiled warmly at her.

"You say? Indeed, I haven't tried this drink yet." She said calmly, resting her chin on her hand on the bar counter.

"Twice vodka with lemon juice and sprite." The woman said to the bartender, and the bartender nodded, looking at her with a frown. Y/N noticed the look and swung around in her seat. 

"Nice to finally meet you. I've heard a lot of good things about you." She said with a warm looking smile. Y/N felt hot. She looked at her surprised. "Alys." The woman held out her hand in greeting. Y/N felt her throat go dry. 

She hesitated for a moment, but reached out her hand to her and took her hand with a firm grip, not allowing herself to show any weakness or fear.

"Y/N."

She fell silent, looking at her, trying to keep her face calm even though her heart was pounding like crazy. She decided not to say anything more. She wasn't going to admit that Aemond had told her about her. Alys took a sip of her drink, not bothered by the silence.

“That Albert is quite a bastard. It was fun with him at first, but when I heard he pressed you against that restroom, I didn't like it anymore." She said as she took a sip of her drink, looking her up and down. "He's crazy about you, huh?" She asked, smiling from the corner of her mouth.

"Albert?" Y/N asked uncertainly and raised her eyebrows.

"Aemond."

Y/N pursed her lips as she looked into her eyes. What was she supposed to say? If she answered yes, it would only show that she hoped Aemond was crazy about her, that he was desperate - which he wasn't - even though she wanted him to love her and want her. If she answered no, it would appear that she was trying to diminish his feelings for herself by equating them with those he felt for other women—and she didn't believe that either.

"I don't know if crazy is the right word." She finally said, looking away. She could end the conversation at any time, get up and just go to Aemond, let him do the job. She had seen him talk to Kate and believed he would do the same this time, setting clear boundaries. But she felt that she didn’t want to show her any weakness. Her last days with him had given her courage and confidence.

"What else do you call sex on a park bench?" She asked amused, and Y/N turned to her quickly, her eyes filled with terror, her cheeks turning scarlet. Alys laughed.

"Don't worry. You have a good friend. Marcus, right? His men gave the photographer a good whack before he could get in the car. They destroyed his equipment. Albert was furious. The opportunity passed him by." She murmured, taking a sip of her drink, looking at her with satisfaction that she had managed to get any reaction out of her.

Y/N swallowed silently, despite her relief, still feeling the enormous tension caused by the whole situation, the fact that Albert had them followed, and that she knew about it. She thought they both owed Marcus a debt of gratitude. She lowered her hands to her knees, trying to control their tremors and pulled herself together.

"Why are you interested in me?" She finally asked, her voice more confident than before. Alys was silent for a moment, looking at her intently.

"Actually, you don't interest me. I'm just trying to figure out the situation." She smiled slightly. Y/N laughed. She was surprised by her own confidence. She decided that no one could be blackmailed or intimidated her.

"Better find out quickly, because if Aemond sees you talking to me, he won't be pleased." She said, raising her eyebrows. Alys looked at her, her words surprised her. "You know very well that he doesn't like to share what's his."

_____

If you want to be tagged, just leave a comment. ~

@chainsawsangel​​  @yentroucnagol​ @cardi-bre91​ @melsunshine​ @bellaisasleep​ @candypurplebutterfly​ @malfoytargaryen​ @serrhaewin​ @svtansdaddyx​  @iiamthehybrid​  @beiigegalx​ @sarahkimtae​ @fangirlninja67​ @namoreno​ @thetrueblackheart​

[eri-pl]

Eol:Maeglin ?=? Morgoth:people

or: the inherent guilt of existing (?!?)

Warnings: this post works better if we assume the nastier version of how Eol and Aredhel met. I won't be discussing it directly, but it is there in the context. Also, discussion of difficult emotions and of situations with which I don't have much personal experience.

Also, long and I can't fully make my mind about parts of it.

So the Legendarium has in some places this emotional background of "if everything went all right, I would not exist". (I wanted to write that I disagree with it, but actually I disagree with the "having toxic feelings of guilt and shame about it" part, not strictly with the situation being there, because it's kind of real, see later for explanation.)

Feanor is a mild case, more like "if everything went right, I would be less awesome". The sons of Feanor, maybe, because if he was less awesome, he wouldn't have that many, but they don't seem to angst over it.

But Maeglin. Maeglin, who wouldn't be born if Eol did not trick Aredhel into visiting him and manipulated her into staying (at least, possibly more). Maeglin who knows that fact. Who knows that in the perfect world he would not be. Ever.

But (and I really want to see a fic where someone explains this to Maeglin) such is the condition of all Eruhini. Unless again Pengolodh messed up (HC!). But assuming Pengolodh knows his theology: Men and Elves become a concept only after Melkor did his discord, and were a reply to it. Men and Elves were not planned.

In a perfect world --- in a world of perfect harmony --- they would not be there. We would not be there, to say it more in-setting.

It's not only Feanor's private feeling of guilt, not only Maeglin's, it is universal. Not the "we did something", not the "I would be messed up if not for". But the very "we would not exist, ever, as a species". (If you know the game Nobilis: this philosophical opinion gives me some Strategist vibes.)

Does Maeglin hate Eol? Does Maeglin love Eol? Both? None? Should he love him? Should he hate him? Can he hate him without hating himself? Can he not hate himself?

How about people hating Morgoth? Can they not hate themselves also?

(I believe that they can, that Maeglin can.

A shift from "I was not meant to be" to "I am here and I am accepted, so let's all roll with what is and not what could be" is possible, but may be difficult and need a lot of support.)

Also, I want to acknowledge that this is a thing irl, that some of you have a similar situation to Maeglin (minus the talking swords). Some do not. I do not, to be honest.

But still in a perfect world a lot of family history would probably go otherwise, and with how old humanity is, statistically it is certain that each of us has some kind of wrongdoing in their family tree, so in an ideal would, it could be argued, none of us would exist. Probably. Statistically.

Some people have it much more direct. I'm sorry. I love you. Somehow it will work. Somehow "what is" is good, and "what could be" is not a living thing. Still, I'm talking about things largely outside of my experience, so I will better stop.

Anyway it angers me in the Legendarium, because there it is much more cosmological, on a much larger scale. It's a species thing, not an individual thing. But maybe it shouldn't anger me. I'm not sure.

(And please, don't play the "it is because Tolkien was Catholic" card. The concept: maybe. I can see how this would connect. The toxic feelings around it and large-scale vibe it gives me: No. Very much not. It is either a thing that Tolkien did despite of his religion, and not because of it; or a thing Tolkien did not do, and I am just projecting something on the text. Anyway the part I have a problem with is very anti-Catholic. "I should not exist" is not a Catholic thing to ever say. It is a feeling, sure, we all have it sometimes, feelings are valid. But philosophically to agree with this... nope.) (But is this true that "Maeglin should not exist?" I would assume Maeglin has this feeling, but this doesn't make it true. Probably I'm projecting things on Jirt again.)

Sorry if I failed some philosophy / theology / Tolkien lore there. I probably did.