#so i might be a bit traumatized by my thesis so what

[rapha-reads]

After sending the summer dissecting A Curse So Dark And Lonely (amongst a corpus of other novels) to study contemporary rewritings of Beauty and the Beast, now that the thesis is done, I went and read the sequel, A Heart So Fierce And Broken.

I think I love A Heart more than A Curse.

Grey and Lia Mara have something so agonizing that Harper and Rhen lacked. Or, to say it otherwise, Harper and Rhen, for all that they are very modern versions of Belle et la Bête, are still constricted by the role they must play. The story, their story, has already been written, and they must play their part until the end, no matter the side quests on the way.

Of course, because A Curse is a play on B&tB, it's a variant, a critical adaptation, so reducing Rhen and Harper to just their motif is a bit mean. I honestly really love A Curse. I might be biased against it after months of learning about the og tale inside and out.

Meanwhile, Grey and Lia Mara occupy spaces of their own. Academic deformation or thesis post-trauma stress, I'm trying to think but I can't find the tale-type they'd belong too. They're not fairy tale archetypes developped into Fantasy characters, they are Fantasy characters exploring their own as-of-yet-unwritten story (all the stories have been told, but also, all the stories are still waiting to be told).

They are honestly fascinating, the guard turned long lost heir and the princess discarded who turns out to be the real power. There's so much anguish in them. So much self-sacrificing, self-effacing. Gods I should have included the book in my thesis, I could have drawn parallels between Rhen stuck in his role of Beast and Lia Mara in her role as the spare, Harper as the Beauty and Grey as the unwilling Prince... Dammit I'm having ideas now. Oh, well, let's keep them for when I'll give the PhD a try. Some years down the line.

Quote, because that passage made me weep a little. The weapon boy and the quiet reading girl. Oof. If that's not exactly my kind of favorite dynamic!

Also I'm a sucker for messy yet intense sibling relations and I'm soooo here for Harper and Jake, Lia Mara and Nolla Verin and especially Rhen and Grey. That's totally my jam.

[delta-orionis]

i wanna hear about the simon aroace beam pls

(Tumblr is apparently trying to silence me because this is the second time I'm writing out this answer. Anyway.)

I already made a post about my aroace Simon headcanons several years ago, but I'm more than happy to talk about it again. (Also I'm not sure if you specifically ever beat SOMA, so you're probably unfamiliar with some of the points I made in the aforementioned post. I'll do my best to explain.)

(Continued under the cut)

Simon is an interesting character because he's an everyman. I often joke about how he's Just Some Guy who's having the worst day ever. He's had a pretty average life (aside from the recent loss of his friend and traumatic brain injury), and it doesn't come up often in the text of the game. He brings it up sometimes, but it isn't the focus of his dialogue. He was thrust from an unremarkable life in 2015 into Undersea Robot Hell and is forced to make some serious decisions about the fate of the human race, so he has other priorities.

His characterization as an everyman combined with the fact that we don't actually know a lot about his life before the events of SOMA make Simon a very easy character to project your own experiences onto. This makes him a good fit for a video game protagonist because it makes it easy for the player to relate to him. It also means that it's easy to fill in the blanks of his characterization with your own ideas. I've personally seen lots of different interpretations of his gender and sexuality; I've seen people headcanon him as straight, gay, bisexual, etc etc. His gender is also an entire can of worms; I've seen people make compelling arguments that he's a trans man, a trans woman, and even nonbinary and agender.

Anyway... this was all preface for my thesis that Simon is aroace. The easy explanation is that I, an aroace person, find it easy to project my own experiences on to him in a way that makes sense to me. I've talked to a few other aroace SOMA fans about this, and they've agreed. (This is what I mean by the aroace beam. I simply enjoy headcanoning characters I like as aroace, because I, too, am aroace. I'm hitting them with my beam attack. Metaphorically. I've now rendered the joke unfunny by explaining it.)

(Side note- there's a running joke in the SOMA server I run that many SOMA fans are asexual. There certainly are a number of them in that specific server, however this also might be confirmation bias, because I haven't done a fandom-wide survey or anything like that. It also might be because I promote the server heavily on my blog, and as an openly aroace person, I probably have a statistically significant amount of aspec followers who are then compelled to join the server I help run. More research is required, I guess.)

The longer explanation for this headcanon is that, within the text of the game, Simon doesnt' appear to be very concerned with sex or romance.

In the dream sequence at the beginning of the game, Simon tells Ashley he wants to tell her something, and she responds with "please don't make this weird". A lot of people tend to interpret this as Simon working up the courage to tell Ashley he has a crush on her. The scene ends abruptly before this can be confirmed. However, there are a few unused voice lines in the game files that extend the scene a bit. Simon was originally supposed to say "I'm sorry" to Ashley before the dream ended. This implies that he wanted to apologize to her for involving her in the car accident that ended her life, not confess a crush.

There is another dream sequence later in the game, the context being that Simon is under the influence of the WAU and is being shown an idealized version of his life. He sees Ashley, alive and standing in his apartment, where she declares that the two of them are in love. Simon seems confused about this and wakes up shortly after.

I will admit that this scene implies he has romantic feelings for her. However, in the post I made a few years ago, I talked about how a common experience for a lot of aroace people is not being able to distinguish between different types of attraction and how this can lead to aces convincing themselves that they have a crush on someone when what they really desire is a platonic relationship:

I think what sells it the most for me is that, during the dream sequence with Ashley, when Ashley tells him that they’re a couple, he sounds confused. You could interpret this as general confusion (he doesn’t know how Ashley is suddenly alive again or why they’re suddenly in a relationship), but I like to think that he’s conflicted about his feelings for her. He knows he wants to be close to her, but he’s not sure if being a romantic couple is exactly what he wants. If the dream sequence is supposed to be an idealized scenario, then why is he conflicted about the thing he supposedly wants?

Simon strikes me as the type of guy who isn’t super informed about LGBT stuff. He probably knows a little bit about general LGBT stuff, but maybe hasn’t learned about asexuality, or he doubts that it could apply to him. He might think that, because he wants to be close with Ashley, that the next logical step would be a romantic relationship, even if his feelings are actually just platonic. (I know from personal experience growing up asexual that I would sometimes invent crushes on people, when in reality my feelings were just platonic and I actually just wanted to be their friend. From what I’ve heard, this is a common experience for a lot of aro and ace people from before they learned about asexuality/aromanticism.)

I recognize that this interpretation might be bending canon a bit. Occam's razor would imply that he simply has a romantic crush on Ashley, but that's no fun.

SOMA is a game that is, overall, pretty uninterested in exploring romantic or sexual relationships. It also features two main characters of different genders (Simon and Catherine) who develop a strong platonic relationship over the course of the game. I, personally, find it a breath of fresh air, especially when a lot of science fiction and cyberpunk stories have a heavy emphasis on sex. (I'm definitely not bitter about all the weird sexism present in cyberpunk novels like Neuromancer, for example...)

I suppose it makes sense, then, that the game would have a sizeable amount of aroace fans. I personally think there is something inherently queer about the game- although not explicit in the text, transhumanist stories like SOMA can be read as metaphors for queer experiences. Questioning one's identity and humanity is something that a lot of LGBT people do on a regular basis, so it makes perfect sense that they would relate to a character from a game exploring those topics, albeit through a science fiction lens.

Anyway. Very, very long story short, I hit Simon with my aroace beam attack because I think it's fun. He means a lot to me and I like thinking about him.

(Don't get me started on what I think about his gender. He's got so much going on in that department and absolutely no time to come to terms with it all. That's a post for another day.)

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk, I hope you enjoyed reading, etc etc. I'm going to go back to rotating Simon in my brain now.

[vacuouslyfalse]

hey! i saw a short comment you made about it, and i’m curious about your thoughts on complete/absolute prison abolition & anarchism.

Sure. So, prison abolitionists are entirely correct about their basic thesis - prisons are state-run torture facilities that are a net drain on society. The prison system is a horror that needs to be changed.

I don't really think the immediate, absolute abolitionist position makes any sense, though. I have yet to receive a satisfying answer on how to replace the prison system.

My own approach looks something like this:

Put fewer people in prisons.

The most obvious example that gets cited is drug users, and I tend to agree that all drug use should be decriminalized. People should only be sent to prison if they are actively hurting the people around them.

2. Don't put people in prison for as long as we currently do.

Mandatory minimum sentences are evil, maximum sentences should be lowered. Old people should not be in prison for things they did as teenagers.

3. Make prisons themselves nicer.

Going to gesture vaguely at the Scandinavian model for this one, but: having your freedom massively restricted is bad enough. Getting beaten, raped, and everything else that happens in most prisons traumatizes people to the point where they are incapable of having normal lives if they get out. It is also a moral atrocity.

4. Address the socioeconomic causes of crime.

Without getting too deep into it, the link between poverty and crime is obvious and well-established and there's a fair amount of evidence that suggests we can drastically reduce certain types of crime via a better social safety net.

In addition, any sane society that wanted to reduce recidivism instead of virtually incentivizing it would put a lot more effort into reintegrating ex-prisoners into society and getting them jobs.

Anarchism is a bit of a catch-all word for a lot of different ideologies and tendencies. Getting it out of the way at the start, there's a lot of intersection between primitivism and anarchism, and I have very little patience for this. I think primitivism is a mixture of stupid and evil, and it is basically never worth engaging with.

I tend to agree with non-primitivist anarchists about most subjects. Authority is not to be trusted, states are pretty much always doing fucked up things, etc etc. I also can't help but notice that a lot of very effective groups that focus on immediately trying to help people are anarchist-aligned, which I respect a lot.

I think I don't really respect it as an ideology, though. The bits of anarchist theory I've read are... honestly worse than the communist theory I've read, and I don't even like communist theory. There's a lot of vague gesturing at stateless organizing without any real idea of what that might look like in a world with 8 billion people, in a concrete sense.

[ianthe-is-a-bitch-and-i-love-her]

So I finished The Faithless a bit ago and I've been putting off writing about it because, to my great disappointment, I didn't like it very much. I don't think it's necessarily bad by it's own merits (mostly), but as a sequel to The Unbroken, it was deeply disappointing. Spoilers to follow.

So there were a couple of things that I didn't love back when I first read the Unbroken. I thought the use of Unremarkable Queerness was a disappointing missed opportunity, that an exploration of the differences in cultural attitudes towards sex and gender would've enriched the book's thesis as well as Touraine's own journey as a queer woman raised under one culture reconnecting with the one she was stolen from. I also thought that, while using magic to represent culture - and specifically to use Luca's hunger for Shal magic as a critique of "well-intentioned" cultural appropriation, and Balladaire's lack of magic to represent the way culture is flattened by Empire - was a strong choice, choosing to make magic the exclusive domain of religion created the implication, deliberate or otherwise, that what was really wrong with Balladaire was that they'd turned their back on their traditional faith, which was not a message I cared for. All that being said, I found these issues pretty easy to ignore, because the book had a much more powerful central idea to explore, and its examination of a stolen, abused, indoctrinated victim of colonialism reconnecting with her homeland, as well as its exploration of the ways even genuinely kind-hearted and well-meaning colonialists inflict monumental atrocities, were extremely compelling. The Unbroken had ideas to share, question to pose and answer, and a message powerful enough to render my critiques inconsequential.

The same cannot be said for The Faithless. Based on the framing of the book, I expected to get an exploration of the political relationship between a colonizing nation and it's newly independent ex-colony. I thought we might get some examination of the difficulty of establishing international credibility for a new nation, of arranging favorable partnerships and trade deals in a world where you are seen as not just potentially unstable and with little of value economically, but as literal lesser people. I expected whatever approach it took to this framing device, it would be sharp, incisive, and timely. But it wasn't. Ultimately, the framing device was just a framing device, and the majority of the page count was spent on trying to learn the truth about Balladairen magic and Luca's bid to keep the throne, with the question of economic and political relations hung entirely on whether she or her uncle ended up in charge.

There were some details which gestured at the kind of themes that I'd been looking forward to, but the key words there are "details" and "gestured". Touraine's uncomfortable socializing with Balladairen nobles; cool, we already knew that! How does that discomfort affect her ability as an ambassador to make favorable connections and advance the interests of the people she represents? Don't know, she doesn't really try, beyond reminding Luca occasionally that her interest in getting Luca on the throne isn't altruistic. There's a Balladairen revolutionary movement born of economic disenfranchisement and the fear of free Shalans "stealing" resources. Okay that's interesting! What does their organizational structure look like? How many people can they mobilize? What are their economic and political aims, what's their plan for enacting it? How does Touraine feel about a bunch of people who share many of the same grievances as her people, but that unjustly blame her people for their problems? Don't know, none of that comes up. Their only plot function is to try to kill Luca and make her paranoid about her uncle. There's the Droitist school system that traumatized and conditioned Touraine! They take down one school, but acknowledge that it's a problem that can't be solved on an individual level. What kind of systemic changes need to be made? What obstacles are there? How can they be overcome or subverted? All of that gets pushed firmly onto the "once I'm queen" plate. I could go on. Ultimately, the elements that should have been the core of the story and themes become backdrop to a personal drama between Luca, Nicholas, Touraine, and Sabine. And it's functional enough, but it doesn't have anywhere near the originality or emotional resonance or drive that the plot of the previous book did.

Also, without a strong plot to take center stage, my nitpicks took up more of my attention, and the continuation of the story exacerbated some of the problems I had with them. With regards to unremarkable queerness: the central struggle of this book is over who is going to take over the throne of a hereditary monarchy. Am I supposed to believe that the fact that Luca regularly has sex with different partners, has no interest in getting a consort, and has no blood heir, compared to her uncle, who has a recognized blood heir, is of no consequence in a power struggle over a hereditary monarchy? And if there are cultural values or structure that make that a non issue, I would love to see them explored! I'd be fascinated to know where they come from and how they impact the rest of society! The conflation of magic, culture, and religion didn't end up going the direction I was concerned about, but it also became extremely muddy about what exactly it was trying to say. We learn that Balladairen magic still exists amongst the commons, but we also learn that the large scale type of magic that ensured good harvests was powered by human sacrifice, which is something that no one, including our antagonists, want to resume. So if Balladaire killed its religion for good, justifiable reasons, how does that square with the previous book's presentation as magic being a deeply integral part of culture, with its theft or suppression being an act of near genocide? It muddies the waters, and it ends up feeling like the author wanted to just treat this book as more conventional speculative fantasy fiction rather than a continuation of the themes explored in the first book. Ultimately, I think, that's what I'm really disappointed about. I came to The Faithless excited for a continuation of the deep exploration of colonialism in The Unbroken, and I got a much less grounded piece of speculative fantasy fiction.

[longeyelashedtragedy]

Ask game, you get a ⭐️ but it has to be about Dangerous AU

dangerous AU! here we go--

so this exchange from the most recent chapter:

“I’ve got to tell you, Granit.”  Mikel feels a little more courageous with knives nearby.  “Some of the things you say sound a little crazy.”

“Hmmm, really?  Because you make me feel a bit normal, sweet Mikel.”

this is important! it says a lot about how i write this fic, and also kind of hints at the trajectory of the fic.

i know "show, don't tell" is something we all get taught if we take a writing class, or at least we've heard it said, and i think it's kind of reductive advice (as a lot of writing advice is? there's a lot of different ways to tell a story yknow), at least for a more advanced level of writing. Granit here is kind of idk...telling the exact point of the fic, or at least, the point of his character arc.

(idk if i've mentioned this on here, or just talked about it in private with its biggest fans, but the sort of Thesis of the fic is:

granit might have turned out pretty "normal" with a different life circumstance and his first flashback chapter is meant to indicate that shooting a guy in the head as a teenager was a life altering and traumatizing event for him, that was never handled healthily by anyone around him--instead he was rewarded for it (while ALSO being dehumanized for his tendencies even in his own violent community). in the 2nd flashback which isn't published yet, granit (now about 20 years old) thinks: Sure, money can’t buy love, but Granit knows he’ll never have that anyway, and money can buy all the rest of it. granit will always be...granit, unhinged and sadistic, but mikel's love and devotion and genuine respect for him are going to take the edge off, in a sense.

while mikel's Philosophy is to kill very sparingly, and only for a specific purpose, and the purpose is to help make him feel the power he could never feel as a sick, infantilized, and powerless kid. but, granit's love and devotion and genuine respect for him make him feel this surge of power and control and might just very well wind up the more violent of the two? I've written the last few paragraphs of the fic so i already know but i ain't telling!!!)

"You make me feel a bit normal, sweet Mikel," is sort of the entire point of the fic, then, and it was really cool to disregard any writing advice and just have granit bluntly state that in one of the earlier chapters.

and that's the thing about dangerous AU--idk if it reads differently than my other fics or what, but i call it my "playground," since i never intended to publish such a thing, but some people told me i should and i honestly feel like it has a bit of a cult following 😂 in it i just write however i want--if it's melodramatic or pulpy or choppy or the sex is too rushed or the dialogue is strange or ANYTHING...i'm just writing for fun with no stylistic filter or anything, which also means i can disregard any writing advice whenever i want!

[violasmirabiles]

@someguywriting tagged me to list five favorites out of my own fics, thanks for the tag <3

(First of all a disclaimer, all but one of these have only been posted in Finnish because my main fandoms -- The Unknown Soldier and Under the North Star -- are pretty exclusively Finnish, and idk if I will ever translate them to English. I might! Who knows! It pisses me off how much Google Translate hates Finnish (fucks up the pronouns every time which might be the single worst thing, like if you look up a sentence that has a pronoun in it the ONLY alternate translation for that sentence will be the exact same thing but with a different pronoun, occasionally translates people's names literally, badly, unnecessarily, and wrong, cannot handle dialects at all). Plus there are a few English-speaking people in the Unknown Soldier fandom, and I happen to own not one but TWO different English translations of the Unknown Soldier because I’m so incredibly normal (lie) about it!! but I seriously doubt it’ll happen any time soon. BUT ANYWAY)

1) Hauntings. This is the first fic I posted in English. It's about Dan Torrance (my dearest darling, Blorbo even), Abra Stone, and the hugely traumatic moment in Doctor Sleep's climax where Dan almost kills Abra with his bare hands thinking she's Rose the Hat. It's inspired by a seminar paper I wrote in 2022 that eventually turned into my master's thesis. I was ridiculously nervous about writing and posting this, which feels a bit silly, but I just didn't have the kind of routine to Writing Fic In English™ that I have now and idk my brain made it weirder than it needed to be. (It goes the other way around in Finnish -- I know I can write decent essays but ohhhhh my GODDDDD it always starts out so sticky and slow and awkward. But it always gets easier after the sticky part. And now that I've been writing more fics in English, that's gotten a lot more natural too.) ANYWAY I got so into writing that seminar paper that even after I turned it in (a week late, running on no sleep and two ADHD medications) I was just. Sitting there vibrating because for the first time it felt like I might actually complete my degree, and also because of Blorbo Thoughts. I wrote this a couple of days later when I was feeling a bit less insane and, you know, had slept, and I really really like how it turned out. Family of all time.

2) Runoilija. Okay here we go. This is an Under the North Star ficlet. This is also the first ever Finnish-language work on AO3 with the Nonbinary Character tag (there are four in total, all written by me). This is the most personal fic I've ever written, but even just textually I think this is one of my most beautiful works. As someone who is Not Neurotypical and Very Not Straight, there's no fucking way the character this fic is about wasn't intended to be neurodivergent and queer. Though, obviously, since the Under the North Star trilogy was published between 1959 and 1962, and the character lives in the early 1900s, that... is not how he’s described. More of a "yeah he's weird but he's harmless, that's just the way he is". Importantly, his attitude to girls™ is described as "genderless" and obviously that particular word choice was what made me go HMM WHAT IF. The theme is basically "having no vocabulary for your gender experience is something that can really be so personal" and to make it super extra personal to me I made the character have an "oh" moment while learning English and finding out about gender-specific pronouns, which are not a thing in Finnish (though gender binary certainly is. Languages are cool and these things are complicated).

3) Ateenalaiset. The whole entire verse, really, but the original fic especially. It's an Unknown Soldier fic about the universally hated but Very Competent officer and the young idealistic approval-seeking officer (and the idealistic officer's fiancée) that I first started planning soon after the 2017 film came out and the fandom as we know it started to appear. Like there are two scenes in the final product that I know I talked about in a group chat in twenty goddamn seventeen. Problem was, I wasn't sure what to do with the story, where to go with it, or how I wanted to go there. I started posting it on AO3 as a multichapter in 2019 but realized it wasn't what I wanted and deleted it after maybe two chapters. Those chapters are incorporated in the final product. When it finally clicked and I started writing it for real I was supposed to be working on... a seminar paper that became the basis of my master’s thesis theory section. Heh. That paper sucked ass. But this fic. Oh man this is some of my best writing.

4) Trio. Speaking of some of my best writing, there's this. You know those posts about combining your old and new hyperfixations to create an AU that 99% of the time makes sense to precisely no one? Well. This is one of those. The Unknown Soldier and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Three guys from an iconic scene in the Unknown Soldier enacting the ending of GBU, over and over and over and over again. I keep switching people's places so everyone gets to be everyone many, many times over. And like. One of these characters is real quiet but somehow still has great one-liners. One is described by the author (outside the actual book) as having blond hair (a golden-haired angel, one might say). One shoots an unarmed POW in the back. All are war criminals, one rather significantly less so than the others. One ran a brothel in an occupied city during the few weeks they stayed there. Two of them, independently of one another, think about how "the worst they can throw at me is death and I can handle that". One always keeps his distance from everyone around him and everyone senses that there’s something cold and cruel about him they can't quite name. We never find out their first names. One loots every corpse he comes across, and in the 2017 film, one of those corpses turns out to be alive and he, horrified, suffocates him with his bare hands. One kicks a plate of porridge in a dead man's face and laughs about it. One says he doubts even God can bring himself to harass him. One avoided the actual fighting part of the war as much as he could but once risked his life getting the whole squad some new boots. I love love love all the implications of having each of those guys play Blondie or Tuco or Angel Eyes. They all speak so differently, they all act so differently, but they all make it work. Also I like to stir it up, have the Angel Eyes character survive and make a surprise attack. Have the Tuco character realize something's up and reload in time. Have the Angel Eyes character be a faster draw and have Blondie get shot. There are versions where everyone dies. There are shovels to hit people with. Bare hands, even. There's the very rickety cross. Truly the possibilities are endless and I'm like foaming at the mouth IASIP Pepe Silvia level insane about this fic.

5) Kotkanlento. Man I was going to put something else here but turns out I’m feeling a lot of feelings about Under the North Star today. Much like with Ateenalaiset, I'm really talking about the whole verse, it's all one big tragic story. And horny. The porn is absolutely essential to the tragedy. I think it's safe to assume that when Mr. Väinö Linna wrote about that one character drunkenly and tearfully reminiscing about how he and his long-dead friend used to get drunk together and fuck the same girls he did not mean to imply that they fucked those girls together, much less that they fucked each other, but, hey. All I'm saying is it doesn't exactly crash the canon, either. And there we have the least responsible bisexual poly relationship this side of the Häme province. I thought I was done with this verse last summer but iiiiiii don't think I am, I think there's another 15-part ficlet series on its way, I just need to figure out what exactly I want to do and what goes where. I really like writing these often nonlinear, independent of each other snippets/ficlets that are all pieces of the same fucked-up puzzle.

wow hehe these are. long ANYWAY I'm gonna tag @radiant-sunlight-blueberry, @vulptilla, @sisiljan and @caixxa. If you don't feel like doing it you can just ignore this, it's fine <3

[castielsfeatheredballs]

the winchesters s01 e01 review

Hii! I just watched the pilot of The Winchesters and these are my initial thoughts. It’s not too spoilery, I don’t think, but if you want to go in completely blind you should be careful! 

tl; dr: so far I like how they are handling the connection between the two shows. I enjoyed this episode a lot. If I had to give it a grade, and I’m being very conservative here because I anticipate future episodes being even better, I would go with a solid 7.5 out of 10.

story and intertextuality

So far I like how they are handling the connection between the two shows. Whatever the in-story explanation is for Dean narrating, so far he sounds like he’s directing addressing the audience and our concerns which might not be to everyone’s taste but I personally loved it, it feels respectful and thoughtful, like there’s a continuing dialogue between the show and its spectators, which I think is appropriate given the relationship Supernatural has with its fanbase. 

Now for the story itself: I like the continuing theme of lost fathers, search for fathers etc. It sounds like they’re really going to set up the intergenerational trauma and the cycle of abuse/neglect that goes on with this family. I surprisingly love that Mary and her dad are just discovering the Men of Letters now because to me it feels like–monster hunting is so fraught with peril and trauma that there are big chunks of history that keep going missing, and even a hunting family like the Campbells doesn’t have the full picture. 

They’re being very careful with how it all ties into main Supernatural canon via Dean–not saying anything yet but they explicitly reassure the audience more than once that this is going to lead somewhere in regards to Dean, the apparent retcons etc. for now, this is enough for me. 

Something that jumped out at me, and I think I enjoyed it all the more because it was such a subtle call back I honestly can’t tell if it was even intentional, was Millie telling John to ‘come home’ in the end, which echoed the iconic Woman in White catchphrase in the Supernatural pilot: ‘you can never go home’, which in hindsight was a thesis statement of the whole show. The fact that they parallelled it in the Winchesters pilot? Makes me go absolutely feral.

the core characters

John

He looks like young Sam!

I do not love that he monologues his feelings all the time. Feels like a tell, don’t show. His best moment was probably when he dug the silver shard out of his arm (insane. Loved it.) and threw himself in front of the Rugarou to buy Mary time. Feels like a hint of the self-sacrificial, violent bastard we all love to hate. That one sequence also leaned into a Supernatural tried and true staple–pretty men covered in blood, which he wears well. 

I like that they made him pathetic, although the ‘stop helping’ scene was a bit too much for my taste.

This is probably too much to hope for but I kinda wish they’d expand on his reasons for joining the Marines–specifically, his political worldview. Like, beside the fact that Vietnam was a horrific and traumatic experience for him obviously, what are his actual thoughts on the war? 

Mary

At first she came across to me as a bit too cool, too aloof, too quippy, too ‘not like other girls’. Her dynamic with Carlos and Latika was really what made her come alive: I enjoyed seeing her being so mean to her friends and pushing everyone away and them pushing back. It’s kind of reminiscent of Dean that way, without being too on the nose. It also speaks to a deeper issue than just skin deep action-hero. 

Latika

Before I watched the pilot I predicted that this show was going to owe a lot to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it shows a lot in Latika, she’s clearly the Willow of this series: brainy, babbly, shy, scared but wanting to fight anyway. She wears it well though and her reluctance does balance out the other characters, and she is charming. 

Carlos

I LOVE him. Yeah yeah basic bitch behavior, I know. He is a bit stereotypical, but I think his dynamic with Mary is especially good–he brings up that hidden side of her, the genuinely mean one, which is interesting to see. I’m also loving the rapport he’s building with John, both because they’re a classic odd couple–flamboyant Carlos and square-jawed, all American boi John? We love to see it. I am also very much hoping that he’ll try to hit on John at some point because that would be HILARIOUS. 

the ship

I am on the fence about the fact that they’re obviously immediately captivated by each other. On one hand, I prefer slow burns and chemistry developing slowly and naturally; on the other, I get that this is the John/Mary show so the focus is on their relationship from the start and also, they’re both young and hot and have a connection, so I can see them acting like that from the very start. Also, it’s fun to watch Mary’s reluctance and her inevitable thawing to John’s relentless charm. Watching this I realized that we got very little John/Mary interaction in main Supernatural, comparatively, and that made it a bit difficult to reconcile Mary having fallen in love so strongly with John, known trash fire of a man. However, watching all this play out in The Winchesters, I get it. It’s like watching a car crash, you’re like girl, NO, but also yeah, I can see why you’re falling. 

acting

Best one was John’s mom (Bianca Kajlich). I was instantly captivated. When he came home from the war it seemed like they were setting up for a banter-y reunion then she crumbled and RAN to hug him and there was real, raw emotion there. 

I was extremely curious to watch Drake Rodger as John and I think that, while he was a little over-eager in some moments, he found his sea legs over the course of the episode. I feel like there’s potential there and I look forward to watching him grow into the character even more. 

I don’t have any specific notes about the others, they’re all generally good enough so it doesn’t register that they’re acting, Nida Khurshid is very charming as Latika and Jojo Fleites is a screen-piercer.

aesthetics

Love ‘em! They went for a defining look, which is nice–based on the trailer, I thought it was gonna be a bit too sleek and polished but they leaned into a specific visual vibe which gives character to the show.

miscellaneous

Shout out to the opening sequence! It was a delightfully on-the-nose Indiana Jones homage. Something I love about original Supernatural is how unapologetic it is in its loving and referencing other pop culture staples (mainly through Dean). I like that they are keeping up this in The Winchesters, the writer and director were clearly having a lot of fun there, and I’m always going to enjoy honest fun. 

closing thoughts

I enjoyed this episode a lot. If I had to give it a grade, and I’m being very conservative here because I anticipate future episodes being even better, I would go with a solid 7.5 out of 10. It was fun, it was interesting, it was clearly made with love and care and appreciation of the source material. My main issue with it is that it’s actually a little too careful: from John laying out all his issues in the text, to the way the final action sequence was shot trying to give each character space, to slot all the pieces together–that was a bit awkward to watch. While I greatly appreciate the thoughtfulness with which they’re handling this show, I think that eventually it’s gonna have to trust itself a bit more to really grow into its full potential.

[faithfromanewperspective]

so I was thinking about the ending to the last hours like many of us and I guess reading between the lines a little at how traumatic the london possession would've been, at how much james and cordelia need therapy and the way gracelet fiasco played into both their insecurities especially in their relationship, at how charlotte must've realised how much she didn't know and wasn't there for about both her sons, how when the shock of battle wore off for all of them there's going to be a lot of grief that will be very difficult and also new for all of them, how matthew is actually feeling things for the first time and in some ways so is james, and the way that in the 6 months between the coda and epilogue so much recovery must've gone on to get them to the place they can kind of go on with their lives, and also in some ways the 4 months between cog and coi, magnus being around also, would've helped prep them for this. some things stood out to me:

I've said it before but I don't think Christopher's unfinished business with Grace is realistically neatly wrapped up with him saying to believe in herself that one day in the lab--yes it allowed fire messages to succeed but one friend who was only in your life for a short amount of time doesn't undo the psychological impacts of a lifetime of abuse. I find the canon world of ghosts/afterlife so interesting as well and I can totally imagine Kit just being really curious to understand Tatiana with the way his mind works, then coming back 'a little bit' again and again to see Grace. He'd be having a great time learning things without the constraints of a human body and idk I want to write this so badly. We know his passion in life is helping others and I think he'd be thoughtful enough to give his friends some closure as well as meddling a bit to integrate Grace, check on Matthew and his siblings, etc. and I don't think this is outside the universe bounds as though Lucie couldn't reach him at first, ghosts take some time to rise whether they stay around or not (jessamine being a great example).

And another thing that really intrigues/concerns me is the possibility of Matthew living with rapid-cycling bipolar in an age and situation where the mental health services we have now are nonexistent and inaccessible. And we have in gotsm the way Jem and Tessa talk about him and remember the pain he went though when they talk with Mother Hawthorn in Buenos Aries--I think that just cements to me the obvious that his struggles don't just completely go away with being sober. But we know that he's brave and resourceful and has incredible people around him. I want to see how he does it, and what might be realistic there. We also have Tessa saying 'Fairchilds were always practical' after the bridge and yet Matthew is constantly described being 'ridiculous' and 'frivolous' with Tessa in The Midnight Heir saying James keeps him out of trouble. I think he's going to grow up and embrace his wild side (as we see him doing when he heads off on his travel year) but do so in a really practical way, because he needs wonder to regulate him: both to give inspiration and purpose to his energy and to ground him a little when he feels worthless. It's a lot for an 18-year-old to figure out but I think for many of us, he's a character that gives us hope and we see ourselves in him. We want and need and hope for him to succeed. Again, I would be honoured to write this, feed it off my experience and vice versa.

all I'm saying is do I feel a fic coming on? Maybe. I hope so. I think it could be a really healing thing to write as these characters I relate so much to have so much untapped potential that was possibly too heavy for a YA context but it sure was hinted at. so stay tuned, and feel free to nag me if you want to know if my head's still here in the future. time-pressed for my thesis rn but I've never been able to focus on what I'm supposed to, so anything is possible!

[kittykatinabag]

Some not-so-late musings from the me who is procrastinating on doing the work that's already late but she's also a little sick (not covid I took a test and was surprised at the negative result) so she's justifying not doing anything because of that because she never got a sick day off when she was a kid because her mother believed that if you're not actively throwing up or unable to stand you can go to school and achieve things.

So 9 years ago in the last four months of the year of 2013, I lived for the first time away from my family unit for my first semester of undergrad. I happened to be in a program that sent a bunch of freshmen to various places in the world for their first semester in exchange for a slightly higher tuition rate for the semester and admission to a school we wouldn't have gotten into otherwise. I chose to go to London.

It was probably the best decision of my life at that point. Sure, it led to a lot of bad decisions later down the line, but those 4 months were one of the greatest experiences I had, and I still look back at most of those times very fondly. London became a home for me, a place where I felt welcome, even if the British are a bit rough around the edges sometimes. Perhaps that was just my naivety speaking, considering the times I weren't in my bubble of school mates, I was usually alone and not really interacting beyond a brief moment. But I love it in that city, even when I went back in 2017 for a little less than a week, it felt like I was coming back to a place where I could settle my nerves after what was a very stressful 3 months at the job I had back in the latter part of 2017.

I've been here in Dublin for the same amount of time (give or take a week or two) as I was in London back all those years ago. But I don't feel as attached to this city. I haven't really even seen a lot of the city. Yes, I'm living a lot further from the city center than I was 9 years ago, but I'm also a much more capable person at 27 than I was at 18. And transport options beyond public transit are a lot better now than they were back in 2013 (or at least I have the money to use them now). But Dublin isn't really home for me.

I think its a variety of reasons. Being further from the city center and having to rely on buses to get most places rather than trains is definitely a factor. My school work is a lot harder due to it being a Master's degree rather than just one semester of a Bachelor. Not to mention for my Master's, once I finish these now late projects, I'm halfway done with class modules and then I'll have a summer to finish my thesis. (Its very quick and I am not really keeping up but that's okay.)

But I think the biggest factor is that my mental health is in a different state now than it was back then. In both better and worse ways. I'm more confident, more able to deal with things, and know a fair amount of what triggers me. But I'm also way more traumatized. More afraid of not being able to support myself here because it means I'd have to go back to places where I might be put in similar situations as I had been in the nearer past that drove me to some of my lowest points. More aware of the consequences and effects of the events in my past have had on me. Better at pattern recognition of things that hurt me in the past, but not being able to find a solution beyond 'Escape and Do Something Else.'

I'm happy I came here to Dublin. This graduate program is hard, but interesting and at least fulfilling some of what I've been searching for. But I can't say I'm not a little disappointed that I haven't been able to see Dublin as one of my homes the same way I see London as one of my homes. But I'm not 18 anymore and I've seen a lot more places and ways of living than she had. Perhaps if the UK doesn't explode due to the ever-rotating cast of prime ministers, I'll consider doing a PhD or trying to find a job that won't want to make me kill myself in London and fulfil one of those dreams that I had written down back then about living in London at least semi-permanently.

[deripmaver]

laurent is a good person - book 1 meta

one of the most amazing things about captive prince is how the reveals in book 3 recontextualize all of the scenes leading up to them, including about laurent himself. in book one, all we see is damen pov as he’s being abused and humiliated by this supposedly spoiled, vile ice prince. when the regent comes to damen and subtly (and not so subtly) insults laurent, calling him unfit to rule - well, why would he think anything different? laurent has insulted him, had him whipped within an inch of his life, and even attempted to (and later successfully lmfao) have him raped while drugged out of his mind. 

after book 3 we can reread most if not all of book 1 as a very traumatized boy who has finally been confronted with the man who killed his brother, leaving him alone with his abusive uncle, and who he clearly has made into a complete monster in his own mind. damen of course sees him as a complete bitch, but there’s textual/subtextual evidence that laurent is well liked, and that his behavior during book 1 was actually pretty out of character for him. i’d like to provide some examples of that now!!!!

“Laurent had stopped dead the moment he had seen Damen, his face turning white as though in reaction to a slap, or an insult. Damen’s view, half-truncated by the short chain at this neck, had been enough to see that. But Laurent’s expression had shuttered quickly.” Captive Prince, Chapter One

i couldn’t resist adding this one in hehe. laurent recognizes damen!! he’s come down, knowing his uncle has devised another truly horrendous and triggering “gift” and that he’ll lose support if he calls it our for what it truly is, only to find out that it’s fucking damianos of akielos sent to him as a sex slave. a jab at laurent’s trauma about auguste and also a jab at laurent’s frigid sexuality - which ofc is completely the regent’s fault. fuck that guy so much lmfao 

“‘It’s so rare to see you at these entertainments, Your Highness,’ said Vannes.” Captive Prince, Chapter Two.

this is right before the fight between govart and damen in the ring, of course. damen sees laurent as depraved and vile as the sexual sadism on display by the veretian court, and considers him to be a willing purveyor of it. this is wrong, of course, as said by vannes here. laurent has only shown up because he wants to humiliate damen lmfao.

“He did remember being supported by two of the guards, here, in this room, while Radel stared athis back in horror. ‘The Prince really . . . did this.’ ‘Who else?’ Damen said. Radel had stepped forward, and slapped Damen across the face; it was a hard slap, and the man wore three rings on each finger. ‘What did you do to him?’ Radel demanded.” Captive Prince, Chapter Four

this scene, to me, was the most telling lmfao. it’s right after damen is whipped. you could argue that radel is just a servant in the employ of the royal household, so is of course going to be loyal to the prince, but he seems genuinely surprised of the prince’s cruelty towards damen. not only that, but he slaps him and immediately assumes damen must have done something. which - i mean, technically he did lmao. not necessarily enough to deserve having the skin flayed from his back, but you know. if laurent was in the habit of torturing pets and slaves, why would the overseer react this way?

“The men guarding him were the Prince’s Guard, and had no affiliation with the Regent whatsoever. It surprised Damen how loyal they were to their Prince, and how diligent in his service, airing none of the grudges and complaints that he might have expected, considering Laurent’s noxious personality. Laurent’s feud with his uncle they took up wholeheartedly; there were deep schisms and rivalries between the Prince’s Guard and the Regent’s Guard, apparently.” Captive Prince, Chapter Four

laurents relationships with his guards are also some of the biggest indicators that he isn’t just a spoiled brat, but can insire a deep loyalty in his men. even if they do all want to fuck him. ah, sexual harassment. it’s also hilarious that damen immediately assumes they’re loyal to him because they want to fuck him - nice projection there, dude. we know a bit more about laurent and his guards thanks to green but for a season, but this little bit here is interesting.

“Laurent was indeed good at talking. He accepted sympathy gracefully. He put his position rationally. He stopped the flow of talk when it became dangerously critical of his uncle. He said nothing that could be taken as an open slight on the Regency. Yet no one who talked to him could have any doubt that his uncle was behaving at best misguidedly and at worst treasonously.”  Captive Prince, Chapter Five

idek what to say here. laurent my beloved <3333

“‘When someone doesn’t like you very much, it isn’t a good idea to let them know that you care about something,’ said Laurent. Damen felt himself turn ashen, as the threat sank in. ‘Would it hurt worse than a lashing for me to cut down someone you care for?’ said Laurent.” Captive Prince, Chapter Seven

this isn’t really relevant to my thesis lmfao i just love this exchange bc it gives SO MUCH information about laurent and his uncle in just three lines of dialogue. what has the regent done, who did he cut down just to hurt laurent? when and how did laurent learn that? p a i n 

“Laurent’s fussy horse began acting out again, and he leaned forward in the saddle, murmuring something as he stroked her neck in an uncharacteristically gentle gesture to quiet her.” Captive Prince, Chapter Nine. 

HORSEY NO- lmfao this scene just hurts so badly on the reread. especially later on, in book 3 i think, where laurent says something like “i provoked my uncle.” he’s really blaming himself for his uncle KILLING HIS HORSE, his horse that his murdered brother trained, one of the only living connections to auguste... all because his uncle could not let a single miniscule plan laurent had set go through without some kind of repercussion. literally all laurent did was do something to stop an innocent group of people from being abused, nothing to undermine his uncle’s rule, but because the regent is VILE he could not let laurent have even this. he’s so good with her, too. he must have known by this point and also known that there was no way to stop this. P A I N

“‘I know that you have somehow arranged this,’ said Erasmus. He was incapable of hiding what he felt, and just seemed to radiate embarrassed happiness. ‘You kept your promise. You and your master. I told you he was kind,’ Erasmus said. ‘You did,’ said Damen. He was pleased to see Erasmus happy. Whatever Erasmus believed about Laurent, Damen wasn’t going to dissuade him. ‘He’s even nicer in person. Did you know he came and talked to me?’ said Erasmus. ‘—He did?’ said Damen. It was something he couldn’t imagine. ‘He asked about . . . what happened in the gardens. Then he warned me. About last night.’ ‘He warned you,’ said Damen. ‘He said that Nicaise would make me perform before the court and it would be awful, but that if I was brave, something good might come at the end of it.’ Erasmus looked up at Damen curiously. ‘Why do you look surprised?’ ‘I don’t know. I shouldn’t be. He likes to plan things in advance,’ said Damen.” Captive Prince, Chapter 9.

this is the first in-text confirmation we have that laurent has a good heart beneath his layers and layers of trauma-induced lashing out. book one often skeeves people out because of its graphic and, honestly, yes, kind of sexualized depiction of rape, slavery, and depravity, but beneath it all you meet these two protagonists who are going to have all of their most deeply held views about each other challenged. laurent from very early on is shaken to his core when damen refuses to rape nicaise in the ring - it cracks the very foundations of the person he’d built up in his head as this horrible monster who killed his brother in cold blood. and damen keeps defying laurents expectations by being a good person through and through. on the other hand, laurent spends the first part of the book taking out years of anger on damen, but here for the first time we see him do something just because its the kind thing to do. yes, torveld is an ally against his uncle, but laurent has clearly been scheming with him for a while now, and he’s now overlooking his hatred of damen and working with him just because none of the slaves deserve whats happened to them. it’s such a sweet moment.

“One of the other men, eyeing them, approached a moment later. ‘Don’t mind Jean. He’s in a foul mood. He was the one had to stick a sword through the mare’s throat and put her down. The Prince tore strips off him for not doing it fast enough.’” Captive Prince, Chapter Nine.

HORSEY NO- pt 2. this is just another really sweet and sad detail - laurent being so upset that the horse’s death could have been more painless. it must have hurt so much to see her in pain, and to know that the only way for that pain to end was being put down as quickly as possible. i wuv him. im sad

that’s it, though there are still a few more chapters left in the book. this isn’t providing any new information, of course, the path of the three books is to show that laurent isnt the man we meet in book one, that he’s actually sweet, and earnest, and he’s been fighting his own battle practically alone against his abuser since he was fifteen years old. also, the reveal that laurent knew who damianos was from the start makes it clear imo that all of his violence in book 1 was supposed vengence, not... him being evil. he apologizes explicitly in-text, and also, all of the acts of violence he commits cause serious problems for him in terms of his future alliance which he then needs to fix. i just love how layered these books are, how there’s so much information in them that makes rereading almost more fun than reading them for the very first time!

[dulcetash]

In Which I Claw Off My Blinders So That I May Examine Them

So, I’ve been having a high old time with Dracula Daily, and I’m learning fascinating new things along the way.  A dear friend shared how formative Jonathan Harker’s May 16th entry in Dracula had been for her from earliest memory, in response to my reblog of this post, wherein I’d encountered an enlightening, new-to-me definition of “swoon.”

Her words led me to confront something about myself that has been creeping around the edges of my brain for awhile.  I’m truly bothered by my lack of awareness and lack of-, of impressionability, in my own youth, to this kind of formative influence.  To put it bluntly, I am a basic, basic bitch.

I started to respond on the original post, but my thoughts rapidly spun out in a way that would derail that post’s thesis, so I’m giving them their own space here.  I rarely share of myself in public this way, but it seems necessary tonight. So here is my reply:

... it’s a fantastic passage.  And the first time I read it, probably when I was in my 20s, it went right over my head.  So many things that I’m now finally learning to see as queer-coded, or even just sexually coded, were a gigantic blind spot for me until, well, pretty much my 40s (likewise, some of these meta posts on DD are teaching me to see anti-semitic coding that I had NO IDEA about: separate issue, same source).  And this “bit of well-known shorthand,” with regard to swooning?  It certainly wasn’t known by me, AND I WAS AN ENGLISH MAJOR.  

All those jokes you see today about those dense heteronormative scholars who say, “these women who wrote about the joys of undressing each other, you must understand it was merely a form of social bonding that indicated emotional closeness and the discomfort of corsetry, blah blah blah...” I have been that dense reader for most of my life.  My own formative coming-of-age literature went from Beverly Cleary and Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott and even friggin’ Sweet Valley High, directly to rapey 80’s bodice-rippers and Stephen King.  There was no transition or middle ground between tender/sweet/romantic/sexless and titillating/explicit/traumatic.  And for whatever reason, I never thought to imagine any.

In that Jane Eyre podcast I’ve been listening to, one of the hosts mentioned Rochester’s threat to rape Jane, and I was like, *record scratch* -wait WHAT?  She referred to this:

“Jane! will you hear reason?' (he stooped and approached his lips to my ear) 'because, if you won't, I'll try violence.”

And I… I never thought about what that meant.  I was raised without physical violence (thank god), but I was also raised to feel that a man being angry at me was the most terrifying possible circumstance.  I never once imagined what the anger might lead to; the anger itself was The Bad Thing to be avoided.  So if I HAD been asked to imagine what form Rochester’s violence might take, it would have been, like, hurling crockery or some similar tantrum.  Jane Eyre fell into the tender/sweet/romantic/sexless category for me, so anything else was literally unthinkable. 

Later, In the same scene, he gets more explicit:

"Never," said he, as he ground his teeth, "never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand!" (And he shook me with the force of his hold.) "I could bend her with my finger and thumb: and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage--with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it--the savage, beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want: not alone your brittle frame. Of yourself you could come with soft flight and nestle against my heart, if you would: seized against your will, you will elude the grasp like an essence--you will vanish ere I inhale your fragrance. Oh, Jane! come, Jane, come!"

And STILL.  I’m like, yeah, Rochester’s a drama-llama all right, he imagines that tearing her chest open to get at her spirit might just be a fresh alternative to locking her in his attic, what a character.  It never occurred to me that he was thinking, “I could sexually compromise her, and then she’d be ruined and have no choice but to stay with me.”  It’s not like you even have to squint to see it, I just… had these huge blinders.  

For fuck’s sake, I’m one of those sweet summer children who thought for way too long that “Netflix and Chill” literally meant to relax and watch movies together.  Thank god I was never really on the dating scene; I thought “inviting someone up for coffee” was literally an invitation to sit around and drink coffee and converse about life.  In a previous century I’d have been that ditz nerding out over the chance to see etchings.  I NEVER KNEW ABOUT THE SEX CODE.

I find that I am angry and disappointed in the culture that raised me not to see, much less analyze, various forms of physical desire.  This culture was also deeply homophobic, not in an openly hostile or aggressive sense, but in a true “fear of” sense that manifested as nobody talking about it.  Ever.  Sometimes there were hushed whispers, quickly shut down by firm denials.  It was just weird.  Not a reason to be MEAN to someone, oh no, but as a default, Don’t Think About It; it’s an embarrassing affliction, and it’s not polite to point.  So I didn’t.  And what you don’t think about, you don’t see.  

But I also find that I am angry and disappointed in myself, about my own lack of curiosity about all of those locked doors.  About my own complacency - complicity? - in Not Thinking About Things.  As I became an adult and started to encounter People On the Internet who avidly DID think about queer romance, I was perplexed by all of these folks who seemed so determined to see things in media that - *tsk* - just weren’t there.  “People can love and care about each other without it being SEXUAL,” I’d think, because for me, the sweetest, least-problematic examples of love in media had always culminated in a kiss. And apparently, I need things explicitly spelled out.  I mean, clearly, who I am today versus who I was 20 years ago means I can learn and evolve, but also, clearly, I am the walking cautionary tale on Why Representation Matters.

*sigh*  Without knowing the code, I’ve missed out on so much.  And my own self-concept has been stunted.  Once I’m done processing and mourning that, I can look forward to rediscovering old literary and cinematic favorites through a more enlightened lens.  No wonder Wizard of Oz and rainbows are queer touchstones.  It’s like seeing colors after a greyscaled lifetime of dismissing them as a vanishingly rare phenomenon.

[acrookedmouth]

hello, old friends

So, um, what's up? Been awhile since I used this blog. Or this website, even. You might not remember me. In some ways I hope you don't--it would save me the embarrassment of having to be compared to my younger self. Did you know I got my first Tumblr account in 2008? I was sixteen and in high school and worked part time at a mall HMV in downtown Ottawa. My url was chosen from a lyric in a Johnny Flynn song from his first album which I listened to almost every day that whole summer. A few summers after that I started watching Supernatural (2005-2020 god bless r.i.p. etc.) and everything kind of spiralled on from there.

You probably knew me under the name dirtyovercoats if you followed me back then, maybe even on that original blog before it got deleted by admin in 2014 for posting one too many Frightened Rabbit songs (r.i.p.). I was in a bad place mentally when that happened and still only freshly out in the world at 22, so I'm gonna be real with you when I say that whole ordeal kind of ruined my relationship with the site for a long time. When I first logged in the other day to revamp this blog space, I was amused and amazed to discover the last time I'd actually used it was in 2018.

(An excellent post to go out on though, I do say.)

I knew it had to be 2018, instinctually, by the declaration of my age alone, "26." In only a few weeks I'll be 30, which I have now discovered, nearly being there, only feels insane because of how young you still also feel when it happens. It's actually pretty exciting!

Don't get me wrong, a lot's happened in the interim to make me grow up a bit more. I went to grad school, and the first wave of covid hit. I went on mental health leave from grad school, and the second wave of covid hit. I started HRT, I returned to grad school, made a thesis about being queer and trans, and then the third wave of covid hit. I got a job at an art store, got vaccinated twice, quit said job at the art store after one too many crying breakdowns in the basement, graduated with a MFA, and fourth wave of covid hit. And I think that's about where we're at now, plus or minus a few waves and hits and, recently, plus a booster.

I think we've all been pretty traumatized by the world these last few years, but at the very pathetic, putrid least I can't say it hasn't pushed me to do a lot of... growing, shall we say, emotionally speaking. Spiritually, maybe, though I am an atheist. Certainly existentially. Most importantly, I discovered weed, and ifkyk, you know. Sherlock Holmes got it and understood.

And so here we are! I kinda thought I might be ready to step out into the world again. I wish I had been ready sooner, but what's done is done is done. Once I finished grad school I kind of realised that as gruelling the experience of having covid hit half way through your research project sometimes (often) was, it also made me far more confident in myself as an artist, writer, and general creative person, which, in the end, was what I had wanted for myself all along.

I'm sharing this here with you all here because I like honesty and because I wanted to re-introduce myself, regardless if you knew me then or are only knowing me for the first time reading this right now. My name's still Anna, despite being an AFAB trans person taking testosterone and using they/them pronouns, because I love that name and nothing else has ever felt so right for me or felt so much like it was the same colour as my soul. It's also a palindrome, which I've always really liked for pure aesthetic reasons, and I'm happily quite vain that way. I'm explaining this in very simple, straightforward terms because people sometimes get confused by the idea of a transmasc person still using a traditionally "feminine" name. But the thing is part of the wonder of being trans for me is not having to cater to heteronormative restrictions or categories anymore, which, like many trans people intimately know, is in practice actually a very difficult thing to do! I've given myself permission to be free of them, but it's a choice only I can make for myself, consciously, and sometimes with great effort. It's hard, and it shouldn't be this hard, but no matter how difficult it is it's also kind of wonderful, because it is absolutely worth it, in the end, to actually see in your future a way for you to be happy.

This is all to say! I think I'm getting there, or on the way there, sometimes. It's more than I've had in awhile. And it's new and good and I want to keep it going. Which is why I've come to face one of my last great fears: the big blue. It's been awhile, so I'm sure it'll take some time catching up. I kind of went crazy and razed the post archive of this account to the ground, to give myself a real chance to start fresh. Cowardly, maybe, but also it was 2AM and I'd had two edibles and was bored from literally waiting for some paint to dry in my studio (my bedroom floor).

Which brings me to the VERY LAST THING I promise: I kind of wanted to start posting art here again. And other stuff who knows; I've come to embrace the fact that I have little discipline or inclination for a real schedule. I'll see you again soon ❤️.

[thunderheadfred]

🤚The Second Worst (Pt. 1/?)🤚

Part 2 of my Shigaraki Thesis Headcanons. HC's // The Second Worst: 1 - 2

The half-mad ghost of Shimura Tenko is in love with you, and your life is about to become a tragic wreck. -- AKA here's when I gave up on bullet points and went off the fuckin rails

I'm self-conscious about writing so much, so uhhhh, please be kind, hahaaa. This is rather long and involved. Are these still even HCs or just a self-indulgent AU outline? There are some mysteries we may never solve.

This is on AO3 now, if you prefer reading there. Anyway. Minors do not interact.

- - - - -

You met Tenko before the League existed.

Believe it or not, there are a million ways it might have happened, but in the end: you were both bargain-binning in Akihabara.

You reached for a copy of a collectible bullet-hell cute-'em-up (near-mint! CIB!!!) and accidentally bonked hands with a complete stranger. He flinched about five million feet away from you. Ouch. You're just a nobody, quirkless and average, but you didn't think you were THAT repulsive.

(You're not. Hell, even if you were, this guy couldn't care less. He barely registers that you have a face.)

(Shigaraki is accustomed to getting in and out of this shop in seconds. He always comes in before anyone else and goes straight home. -- Is that really home? Is 'home' a real place? -- ANYWAY he's already pirated this shit, god, why does he even care? He doesn't need to be here. Father doesn't like it. Is that why he's here? Just to do something Father doesn't like? That's pathetic.)

He's had at least ten complete internal arguments with himself before he so much as looks at you.

You know in the tenth of a second he actually meets your eyes... this fucker is going to fight you to the death over this game.

- - - The death match ends in a draw. He was not expecting you to know the first fucking thing about this game. Nobody knows about it, even in Japan. Who the fuck do you even think you are? Oh, no, he's still taking it. But... maybe he can show you how to play it it. He'll give you a little taste, just to make you jealous. He's got his hoodie pulled down like he's going to commit an act of terrorism. What little you can see of his face looks twitchy and messed up. If you have any survival instincts at all, they're kicking in right about now. But... why not. You're not going anywhere with this dude unsupervised, so you suggest a crowded web cafe down the street. The cafe has the necessary console... but the retro gaming booth is laughably small. The TV is about four inches across and you end up having to practically sit in his lap. You were sure this guy was a nasty fucking creep, but he's................ only mostly terrible. Way too angry, for sure. Has no idea how to have a normal, friendly conversation. Inadvertently insults you every other sentence and seems to have a deep-seated persecution complex.

You'd prefer to be mad about the awful company, but... he's obviously deprived of human contact. When it's established that you two share a lot of media fixations, he calms down and starts treating you a little more like a human being. Or at least like a fellow elite.

Wherever he came from, he doesn't seem to want to go back. He keeps pushing you to play one more level, pretending he wants to beat your score. You feel kinda bad for him. You get the distinct feeling that his life is a disaster. He looks like he's never had a full night of sleep in his life. He trips your trigger hairs in that 'is he gonna follow me home?' kind of way, but... up close, he's a lot more depressing than scary. At the very least, you want to buy him a stupidly cute dessert. Just... as thanks. For letting you try out the game and stuff. It's not a big deal, so just pick a flavor, okay? The world isn't actually that awful, y'know.

It's not even that impressive... Definitely not a great cafe. But he takes practically a full hour to eat a single slice of strawberry cake.

When the hoodie comes down. He's all shriveled and dried out, like someone left him him in the desert to die. He chews on his peeling bottom lip and nervously scratches his neck. He doesn't thank you for the cake. Which is fine. It's not a big deal. Actually, you wish he would eat faster; you feel weirdly responsible for him now.

Under all that mess he's... gorgeous? His hair is stunning: a bright, gleaming silver that catches the light. His bone structure is flawless. If it weren't for all the scars and the misanthropic slouch, he'd look like a fairy fucking prince.

You were not prepared for that. In another life he could have been a model, the type of guy who would never even look at you. But something bad happened to him. Something... very bad. Do you even want to know? You have no idea how to ask. Has anyone ever been nice to him? It doesn't seem like it. Should YOU be nice to him? You sort of want to try. - - - This becomes a regular thing. This weird little secret. You should probably tell someone when you see him, just in case you don't come back one day, but you say nothing; how the hell would you explain why you want to see him so bad? You don't know his full name. Maybe he's on a watch list. When he gives you a long string of random numbers so you can schedule meet-ups (is THAT his e-mail, really?) he tells you to just... call him Tenko. Or whatever. It doesn't matter. (He sneaks out when Father is deep in his plots. As long as he comes home on time, it doesn't really matter where he goes, right?) He brings a different game every time. He has an insane collection. Where does he get the money for all this? You know he doesn't work. God, is it drugs? It's probably drugs. Wherever these hidden gems came from, he proudly shows them off to you, like he's never had an audience before. It's sort of cringe-inducing, the way he one-ups and rubs every little victory in your face, desperate for attention.

But at the same time, you are becoming too... something...to mind. Do you... like him? He's not funny, but he thinks you are. His mouth is huge when he laughs. He seems to hate everyone but you, and you've had to earn the distinction of being merely tolerable. Still, he gets really excited about random shit like the garage kit black market and haunted dolls and the price of weed on the dark web.

And... strawberry cake. The realization hits you both at the same time when the waitress brings one piece with two forks. God, what the fuck, are you... are you dating? Quick, think. You look forward to seeing him, and don't even mind sitting close to him anymore. Sometimes you push your leg up against him just to see if he'll still flinch away... and he doesn't.

You jealously notice the way he touches everything but you: with delicate precision, one finger at a time. His large, elegant hands always have a pinky up like he's aspiring for a fiefdom, and you wonder what his skin feels like. You go home and dwell on the way he plucks flowering weeds out of the pavement in front of the cafe. The way he stands rooted to the spot as you leave, just... looking at nothing, unsmiling.

You watch his lips too much, and not just because you want to buy him chapstick. You catch him gaping at you all the time. You thought he was just creepy like that, but maybe... Yeah. I guess you are dating him. Shit. - - - Okay, so, yeah. Bringing him back to your place was definitely a bad idea. You know you shouldn't trust him, even if he is... apparently... your boyfriend? Sort of? You still don't have his phone number. So. Um. What now? You order overpriced pizza and queue up a campy horror movie. What the fuck are you even doing. You don't really think he's going to murder you anymore, but... still. Is the suburban massacre scene gonna give him ideas? Turns out, no. He doesn't like gore, even when the blood is neon pink. He gets upset. Like, really upset. Shaky and green, like he might puke on you. He can't stop scratching that scaly spot on his neck.

Tenko, are you crying? Fucking hell, did you just trigger him? Of course he has a traumatic past, it's carved all over his face. You're so fucking stupid. You don't know how to make it right. You want to hug him, kiss him... anything. But he's never really touched you, and you're too afraid to push now. It ruins the whole night. He leaves without explaining anything. Doesn't even say goodbye. He just. Leaves. Maybe you'll never see him again. Maybe that's for the best. Your chest hurts. - - - He shows up at your door a few weeks later. You haven't heard from him since that disastrous movie night. You had pretty much accepted that you'd broken up with a boyfriend you never actually had. But no. Apparently not.

This time, he’s brought his own entertainment. He's holding a boxed set of some show you're not familiar with. You're distracted by these weird little half-gloves he's wearing, like a cyberpunk hacker. That's a new look, and even if it's a bit edgelord adjacent, he makes it look cool. You tell him as much. It's the first time you've let on how attractive you find him. He's wearing a tight black shirt with a deep, deep V-neck. That's distracting too.

He clears his slender throat and doesn't look at you.

You try to apologize for before, but he's acting like it never happened. What are you even talking about? Have you seen this OVA or not? Get out of the way and let him in already. You've watched three episodes now, but you still have no idea what this stupid anime is about. You can't pay attention to a single frame. All you can think about is how his arm has crept up behind your shoulders. A few inches more and he'll be holding you. Does he... want to hold you? You lean toward him so slowly your spine creaks. One molecule at a time. After a thousand years, your head slides nervously under his chin. His arm comes down, locking you in, fingers clutching your sleeve in a death grip. Even that snobby little pinky. His head tucks down into you hair. A sharp collarbone bites into your cheek. His heartbeat is hard, fast, and irregular. There's not a scrap of fat on him, and as you wrap your arm around his stomach, you think you see a twitch in his pants. Is that just you being desperate? Or... hopeful? This is really happening. --- Soon, you learn that Tenko is a clumsy kisser. It doesn't matter; the fact that he's kissing you at all is good enough for now. His lips are dry, but not half as dry as you expected. There's a slick of menthol helping things along; he's been using something medicated on his lips. Plus, his mouth tastes like he drank a gallon of mouthwash.

All this thrills you more than a little, because it means he came here wanting to impress you. Wanting you. Full stop. Underneath that minty sting is a strange, worrisome aftertaste, like something rotten. Your brain fires off an alarm. Stop kissing him. Right now. This thing will make you sick. But his hands nervously slide over your body... and you decide not to worry about it. Instead, you kiss him deeper. He makes a sweet, startled little noise. Your brain is a fucking liar. It occurs to you he's probably never done this before.

When you lace your fingers in his and try to pull one of his gloves off, he rips his hand away.

Don't. That’s the only explanation he gives.

No need to ask if it's a quirk thing or a trauma thing. Judging by how jittery he gets, it's probably both. You remember the way his hands almost float over objects without ever holding them. Maybe his touch is dangerous. Maybe that's why his face looks like that.

Maybe you should learn more about him before things go way too far...

No. It can't be that bad. Now that he's in your arms, everything frightening about him evaporates. He's vulnerable. He's alone. He's shaking a little. Has anyone else ever seen this side of him? You want to keep him all to yourself, just like this.

So what if he has to touch you with gloves on? You've heard of worse quirk-related inconveniences.

It's okay, Tenko. Do you want to keep going?

You put his hands back on you and wait for him to kiss you again. It doesn't take long.

---

You open his pants. He's long and thin, calloused even here. Every part of him feels untouched, unloved. You hold him tight and squeeze.

It doesn't seem to occur to him to please you in return. He looks afraid. Confused. You're sure you scared him earlier with the glove thing. Is this too much? No. He gasps and leans into you. The tiniest, broken please.

He cums in your hand right away, face buried in your shoulder, his eyes wet and hidden.

I have to go, he says. Over and over and over.

It's okay, Tenko.

You know he doesn't want to.

- - - - - (oops I wrote more)

[arrivisting]

I’d love author commentary on basically the whole scene at Ekkaia in all my war is done (or any individual part of that scene, if your prefer). Taken together, it’s one of the most beautiful and emotionally complex and heartrending things you’ve written, from the description of the sea itself, to the difficulties of Fingon and Alqualondë, to Gil and the ocean and his ‘mother’, to Fingon and Gil beginning to tackle the thorny subect of Maedhros.

I should admit something about all my war is done: it's the most fugue-like my writing has ever been. I jotted down a few notes on my commute into work - I was deeply underwater with my PhD at the time, three months away from submitting - and then the idea of writing a sequel to scion seized me so profoundly that I sat down in the Starbucks where my bus stops, took out my laptop, and wrote instead of just collecting my coffee and walking down to my office. I wrote 15k. In one day. In about five or six hours. I've never achieved anything like that before or since - I do have good days where I can knock 2-4k out easily, but not 15k. (You might note that the posted part of all my war is done is only 12k, but I wrote all the way up into the next bit with Fingon in Tirion that you've read, up until Turgon at the dinner table). I didn't sit down or plan events; I didn't actually know much about what would happen: but I knew they were going to Ekkaia and they'd have some kind of resolution there. These are my phone-notes, from that morning:

You can see, I think, something of the way an idea hits me. I note down a few snatches of plot, not necessarily in any order, some lines I think people should say at some point, although I might not use them, sketch out some things (Formenos's ruins were going to feature more heavily, but they're waiting for a later story).

(It makes me laugh, the words my phone doesn't accept - Gil-galad, for one - and the ones it automatically capitalises from where I've yelled enthusiastically about elf things at people. I never stop long enough to correct spelling etc when I'm trying to get something down).

I clearly knew from inception that I wanted Fingon's place to be called the hill of waiting, and had tried out the name in Sindarin; because my verbs are not good, I came up with Amon Dartha. It was when I was redrafting that I realised Amon Darthir had existed actually in Dor-lomin(!!!) and the name was even more perfect symbolically than I'd meant it to be! Did I know that, unconsciously? I don't know.

You can see, too, that the Sea of Ekkaia was almost the very first point to hit me, and that I knew it and the scene there would be important, and that I knew that the story was about Fingon finding a way to tell Gil-galad that he had been loved, and wanted, and that meant talking about Maedhros; and that at the end I wanted Gil-galad to be gently, impersonally, firmly clear that he would not, could not, be staying to wait with Fingon.

Okay, DVD commentary proper - I'm sorry, I remember awfully little about writing this, given the fugue state and my thesis and everything, so I'm not sure how useful this will be!

“Oh,” said Gil-galad when they broke out of the woods and began to ride down over the dune-lands to the rocky shore. “Oh!”

The Sea of Ekkaia was beautiful, in its own way, but that way that was like no other place in Arda, in either Aman or Middle Earth.

It was a dark-blue that was almost black, even in the late afternoon, and the shore was less sand than gravel, a strange inconsistent rubble of rock and broken sea-shells that had been dashed to pieces by the constant fury of the waves. Staring out to sea, one did not see the far-away horizon the way one did on the gentler coast of Belegaer: there was no gentle faraway blue haze through which one might, perhaps, on a clear day, imagine that Middle Earth could be glimpsed, or at least the Straight Path.

No: instead along the horizon there was a seam of silver light, and then a great blackness, where the Sea of Ekkaia met the Uttermost West that was not quite the Doors of Night, but was certainly the end of Aman itself. If you stood on the shore watching, the seam would ripple with a pulse of light, sometimes green and sometimes white.

It was so far from anywhere the Eldar of Valinor lived. While they clustered around the Belegaer like moths to flame, this shore seemed instead to repel them. Was it the sight of the world’s end itself? It might be; yet Fingon thought there was more to why this wilderness was so little visited, this howling black sea lashing itself against a grey shore. It was beautiful, but not in the way Elves liked things to be beautiful: it was too raw, too unfinished, too savage.

It was too close to where Mandos kept his Halls, which were not only a thing of spirit but also matter, at least in the way that things in Aman were both. Too close to where Nienna’s tower looked out into the Void and where she wept, and wept, and wept. It was too close to death and to rebirth, to judgment and to pity.

There's a little Dawn Treader, I think, in this idea of the uttermost West. I don't know why I thought the seam of the world should pulse with strange light, but it's an uncanny kind of geography, so near Mandos and Nienna, and I like the sense that this is the end of the world, but not the end of the universe.

A lot of this came together serendipitously. I knew some kind of memorialisation of the river that bore Gil-galad needed to be part of his story; that meant going to the sea; and it's clear from the notes that I had already decided that couldn't mean Alqualonde because of kinslaying reasons and memories. (And that that too would need to be confronted). Therefore: roadtrip to Ekkaia. Therefore, the question: what would Ekkaia be like? We don't really know anything about it - only the good qualities of Belegaer. This was really written by a process of inversion, a way of pulling what we know about Belegaer inside-out, and imagining a place at the world's edge, a place that was empty, a place that was uncannily close to difficult things, to Mandos and Nienna; a place that seemed to repel the Eldar as surely as Belegaer drew them like iron filings.

I was thinking visually about New Zealand, too. I spent my childhood summers on the beaches up north, mostly around Tūtūkākā, which are bright and lovely, with golden or white or tawny sand, with gnarled pohutukawa and blue-green water. Like this:

That's what beach and sea meant to me, and it was a shock the first time I went to one of the black sand beaches where the wind howled and the colours weren't blue, green, gold, but iron, grey, navy, black. I loved it, but it felt so other, so passionate, so strange. That shock and that wild beauty and desolation were things I wanted to get at, though Ekkaia would be far more wild and desolate still.

They left the horses in the thin sea-grass, and their shoes, too, and walked down to the water. “I missed it,” Gil-galad said, and closed his eyes, breathing in the brine. “I missed it badly, all the long years besieging Mordor before I died.”

I think Gil-galad would be very marked by his upbringing first in the Falas and then on Balar; you don't lose that, if you grew up by the sea.

The wind took up his long dark hair and made a banner of it as they walked along the rough crescent of rocky ground where the waves met the shore, and around their bare ankles small stones tumbled back and forth in the lace-edge of the water.

When I was young I used to stand in the water and let the waves bury me up to my ankles, watching the water move in, out, spreading skirts of lace overlapping as new waves came in. I could do it for hours. There's something very liminal about the water's edge, between the solid land and the sea, which is why I put this conversation in it, I think. They're in a liminal space and at a liminal moment. It's the scene the whole story has been inexorably building toward, the point where all Fingon's painful scraping-away of his barriers finally reaches his skin.

“Sometimes in Middle Earth it became very difficult to believe in the Valar,” Gil-galad said, his eyes still closed, “in the blood, and the mud, and the filth. There were so many great and small unfairnesses, day upon day, year upon year.” He opened his eyes and looked towards the Uttermost West where the world ended. “And here it is impossible not to. Look at it!"

This is a little more hopeful than the original version, which I don't have anymore, but went pretty much:

"Sometimes in Middle Earth it was very difficult to believe in the Valar,” Gil-galad said. "In the blood, and the mud, and the filth. There were so many great and small unfairnesses, day upon day, year upon year.”

It was a comment more about Gil-galad's rueful scepticism than wonder - because he fought the Dagorlad before he died, because he spent the last ten years of his life in mud and blood and filth and horror. I work on the First World War - its literary legacy and traces in the decades after, more than its immediate experience or actuality, because there was a ten-year period after 1918 where it was more latent than overt, a traumatic lacuna of silence, a Nachträglichkeit- and I thought in the blood, and the mud, and the filth was a little too on the nose.

I kept it, though, because Tolkien was drawing on his own memories of the trenches with the Dagorlad and the Dead Marshes, with those blurred lines of solid land and mud/bog, the living mixed up with the remains of with the dead, all the themes you see again and again in the war poetry and the officer war-books. (Santanu Das is very good on this, as is Eric Leed). Paul Fussell is a bit old-hat now, but his argument that WWI altered the sensibility of its survivors because of their close, consanguinous co-existence with the dead is something I still find valuable. I think there's a lot of WWI survivor in the way I think of Gil-galad, actually, I'm just realising - not that he survived the Last Alliance. He's detached in a different way from Fingon. Fingon's built himself a thick layer of repression/denial, a kind of callous to protect himself from confronting or thinking about what Maedhros did, and what that means for him and to him; Gil-galad is entirely present, but somewhat detached in some ways, the way people who came back from war could be. Not that Fingon and Finrod aren't also separated from the Amanyar by their time in Beleriand and experience of war and death, but Gil-galad lived there for millennia, and he fought a longer, harder, more total kind of war than they did.

But he's at the Sea of Ekkaia, as west as you can get. So much of Tolkien is about that endless longing glance west, that movement: why is this very westernmost edge so under-explored?

I wanted Gil-galad to be softened by this encounter with the sea, so I went back and let his wonder be as much at the spectacle itself as the sea, like the greater hand at work he had sometimes doubted being visible was something wonderful rather than something to be bitter about. I wanted to position him to be potentially open to, perhaps, the Valar; perhaps, to Fingon. I hope he doesn't come off as closed-minded: I think of him as having a fair mind, and good judgment, but - despite placing him here between the sea and the shore - very clear personal lines between what he thinks is just, and what is not. Certainly, it helps a lot, never having known the Feanorians when they had not fallen.

The seam of the universe pulsed with light, and beyond it was – what?

Unutterable nothingness, something worse than death.

Perhaps Maedhros.

This is an important line for Fingon. He hasn't though the name of his own accord for much of the story, flinching away from it; it's only come in when Finrod and then Gil-galad speak the name. This is the first time he's thought it clearly of his own free will, and this is I think the first signal that he's brought Gil-galad here to be as honest and earnest with him as he can be, however much it hurts, or however much it might drive him away. Because if he isn't, and doesn't, Gil-galad will be driven away anyway, and Fingon wants to be connected with him, the first time he's wanted that kind of bond with anyone since he returned.

(I think of Finrod as someone who just kept turning up, regularly, and forcing Fingon to associate with him; and then bringing Amarie; and then his children; and not taking no for an answer. It bothers Turgon rather terribly that they seem to be friends now, when they were never that close Before: that Fingon pushes him away, but allows Finrod to keep pushing; that Finrod does push. He doesn't know about Gil-galad, of course).

He's brought Gil-galad here to show him if possible that he was wanted, to conjure up lost Ringwil where she might be felt if not found; and to do the same for Maedhros. This is a signal that this journey to the sea is as much about Gil-galad's missing father as his missing mother.

The almost-forgotten tang of salt in the air always mingled with the smell of blood in Fingon’s worst memories, and he was not the only one who remembered. The waves were gentle around Gil-galad’s feet, but they boiled furiously around Fingon’s, delivering small spiteful slaps at his calves.

Spiteful was probably the wrong word here. I don't necessarily mean a dramatic boiling or bubbling; but the water is harsh where it touches him, the kind of slapping roughness you get when the tide is coming in rough.

It took Gil-galad longer to mark the difference, engrossed in the joy of the sea and spectacle as he was, and when he did, his face changed. There was something terribly sad in his eyes when he lifted them from the water to look at Fingon.

It wasn’t why he had brought Gil-galad here; but Fingon didn’t want to imagine the look he would receive if he brushed aside the silent question. “No,” he said. “I am not forgiven.”

“So I see.”

They could probably leave it there.

But Fingon won't, because he's trying. He's really trying to connect after all the time flinching away from it, and he's remembering what Gil-galad said about talking, and what Finrod said about mistakes and silences in their first life.

He said, “You said you loathed the thought of being the son of – a murderer. But my own hands have not been clean since Alqualondë, and death didn’t unstain them. All the time you thought I might be your father, you must have known I was a Kinslayer, too.”

I tried to signal this in their earlier tower conversation with Finrod, and Gil-galad's changing of the topic, but I feel like it's a little abrupt here.

“Yes,” Gil-galad said, and his expression didn’t change. “And when the knights that had served you came to me, they told me that you killed that day in ignorance, that you came upon a battle already being fought; that you took up your sword to save those you loved and didn’t question whether it was just. I heard that from others, too, those who had less reason to bend facts to a flattering pattern; survivors of Gondolin and of Nargothrond. I did ask."

“Ignorance wasn’t an excuse. I died ashamed of it, and I live again with the shame.”

"Good!” said Gil-galad, and there was no forgiveness in his voice, even when Fingon jerked his head up in shock. Instead there was the stern ring of a king used to weighing the ideals of justice against the world as it was, the king who had walked arm in arm with Eonwë the Maia, led his people through many full-fledged wars, and held court and meted justice to them for an Age. “That gives me a far better opinion of you than any of the stories did! I’m glad.”

I remember talking to you about this in the comments, about what it meant that Gil-galad wasn't forgiving him. I think I really meant condone, but I also don't think it's Gil-galad's place to absolve Fingon - he wasn't the one wronged! - and that it's important to me that, because Fingon does truly regret it, he doesn't wish to be absolved, to slide away from it. I don't mean he ought to wallow in it or flog himself with it daily, but I think it would be important to him to shoulder and own that guilt rather than ever allowing himself to put it behind him or have someone else tell him it’s quite all right.

I think this is a moment where I show that they're quite similar, too, because even if Fingon wasn't aware that a bracing, clear assessment was just what he wanted, it was what he needed, rather than people being kind (which he's had a lot of, since he returned; and which hasn't touched that central guilt he's hidden from them, that he loved Maedhros, who had done such terrible things. It's prevented him from accepting kindness made him block people reaching out to him. Gil-galad is not being kind, but just, and still reaching out).

It felt like Fingon had been struggling to take a full lungful of air for a long time, and now something constricting in his chest had loosened, as it hadn’t even after the Valar themselves had judged him. It was only now that he realised that he hadn’t wanted Gil-galad to forgive or absolve him. He had wanted – needed – Gil-galad to be better than him, to withhold forgiveness when it was unmerited; and Gil-galad had. He had become the shining legacy they had all hoped he would be, the thing they had all somehow done right.

The water slapped at his ankles again, in impatient reminder.

This is too brief a transition. I should have fleshed the join out more.

“I think Ulmo would come to you here, if you called. You were a king by the sea in Middle Earth, and you may not remember it, but it was a river who gave you life.”

Gil-galad looked at him as if he’d grown an extra head. “What?”

“I brought you here for a reason,” Fingon said. “Where did they go, the drowned and poisoned rivers of Beleriand? I don’t know; but Ulmo might.”

I've really personified the rivers, but I think it's a clear and easy extrapolation from the Withywindle and the River-daughter in The Fellowship of the Ring that I don't need to justify in order to argue that every river might have had its own attendant Maia-spirit. It does make what happened to the Rivers of Beleriand much worse, though, and I wanted to look at the way a character that was a throwaway mechanism in scion ended up being sickened and dying as horribly as Beleriand did; this story was really about following all those lighter bits in scion home, to the end of the line, and looking at the long-term impacts of something that began more lightly. In this verse, Ringwil was a river, but also a person; and I think of her and Finrod as sharing a strange human-river friendship and overlapping enthusiasms.

He clapped Gil-galad on the shoulder, hoping it said all the things he meant it to say. Affection had been so easy for him once, in the life that had been taken from him by the fiery flails of the Balrogs, but now it came hard, and the sea-smell was in his nose, the terrible memories too close to the surface.

He had surely outstayed Ulmo’s tolerance by now. Fingon left Gil-galad there in the water, and didn’t dare glance back until there was thin sandy soil under his feet again.

Only then did he look once more towards the sea.

Gil-galad was standing in the shallows. His broad shoulders were bunched tight, as if he was readying himself for something very difficult, a confrontation with one of the Valar he had long doubted.

Then he spread his arms out, empty-handed, and tipped his head back, and the light on the horizon grew unbearably bright, whiter than white, more silver than silver; and a face began to move upon the water.

I really like this, honestly. Which I can't/don't say often! The temptation to overwrite this was strong, to show this encounter, to describe the Vala: but I think it's often stronger not to show something numinous, to pull away, to let the mind fill it in.

Again, this is Gil-galad as I imagine him: still somewhat distanced from the Valar by the Dagorlad and the things that happened there (and I think perhaps doubly unhappy in that he lived through the end of an Age once before, and that time, at least, the Valar came: they did not come in the Second, nor send so much as a messenger, and such obscenities as the fall of Ost-in-Edhil and the drowning of Numenor had been allowed to happen, and Men and Elves were left alone to come together and break Sauron's grip). Doubting, but not angry; doubting, but still curious. Open to listening.

a face began to move upon the water is of course a deliberate sideways reference to

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

-

It took a very long time. Fingon could not watch; his eyes dazzled.

Can you tell I was teaching The Duchess of Malfi at this time? Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young. That sense of a light too bright and white to look upon; that sense of guilt; that faint reference to life lost untimely. This wasn't meant to be a direct intertextual reference, but that net of meaning was there, lightly. Again, I wanted to under-write rather than over-write. I know I have a tendency to over-write.

And of course - there's a sense here that Fingon is refusing the kind of close enoucnter with Ulmo he could/might have. There's water in his eyes. From the wind?

-

“Thank you,” Gil-galad said when he rejoined him at last. His eyes were glowing, and he whistled Ceredir to him from where he was tearing ropey roots of sea-grass from the dunes with great relish. “Thank you for bringing me here;” and he didn’t say it the way he’d thanked Fingon for the horse, or the armour, or the sword, or even the lance.

Because this is a real gift, something that means something to both of them, something more honest/painful. Fingon's been trying to connect through gifts but not serious conversation or sharing, like some estranged parents do, throwing money at the problem rather than giving of their time or their selves, and however well-meant, it hasn't worked.

“I didn’t truly do anything."

“You brought me to the Sea. I know – I could see – how difficult it was for you."

"Well,” Fingon said lamely. He cleared his throat. “What did Lord Ulmo say about – oh, I can’t call her your dam! – the Maia who bore you? Did she – was she there?”

The dam pun is Finrod's. Don't blame me.

A little of the light dimmed, but it didn’t quite fade away. “No, she’s gone. Back to the Timeless Halls, he says; but one with him again, Ulmo, at the same time.” Gil-galad made a noise. “I don’t pretend to understand any of it, all the metaphysical nonsense of the Ainur! But he was kind to me, and he told me something of her – that she delighted in the making of me.” The corner of his mouth turned up. “I left the flowers we gathered earlier in the waves for her and the sea didn’t dash them back onto the shore. I’m sure Ulmo broke a few laws of Arda there.”

I like this image of the flowers suspended in the water. I had it clearly in mind from before I began to write.

"You were wanted.”

“I’m beginning to believe it,” Gil-galad said.

“You should,” Fingon said. He took a breath. Talking is how you sort things out; and a long time ago, Fingon had been known for his valour. Gil-galad deserved to know how much he had been wanted, who had called himself a political compromise given birth. The truth of that had stung.

And it was less than the truth. Fingon could still remember the first time he had opened his mind to Maedhros over the leagues between them and let him see Gil’s small face through his own eyes, holding nothing back. He had shown Maedhros the dark long lashes and the squashed baby nose, the milk-blister on the bow of Gil’s upper lip, the way his whole head turned an alarming red when he wailed; shared with Maedhros Gil’s fondness for being tossed in the air, his splashing joy in his bath.

This is is me trying to describe a baby without being too sentimental about it, because Fingon wasn't all, oh look at the toesie-woesies, or my son, my son: his eye was more detached, and you see him in scion thinking of Gil-galad as it.

I've been thinking about why Fingon in no way allowed himself to consciously dote on the baby, why that streak of denial that's so strong in his second life was there in his first light, and really: it would have been dangerous to let himself love him, to see Gil as his son and Maedhros's. He was born at a time of terrible loss, after the Flame, when they all expected they could die themselves. He was moved around Beleriand like a game-piece. Fingon was always going to lose him: he wasn't going to get to raise him, after all, until and unless Morgoth was defeated. Maedhros wasn't going to meet him, until and unless &c. It was easier not to let oneself get attached than it was to confront those hard facts and let oneself be hurt by them. Easier to think of him as a baby Finwean prince, and that only: a political pawn, not a son.

Conversely, Maedhros maintains a physical distance, but not an emotional one. Here's a bit from Maedhros's perspective:

Finrod had told him that. They had written, back and forth, in the long months as Ringwil’s belly swelled, as the child formed, as it began to move and stretch and turn frog-like inside her. They had corresponded constantly during the first months of the child’s life in Nargothrond, and during the first months of his life, Finrod had sent long scrolls detailing every change in Artanaro’s weight, his length, his hair colour, his eye colour, how much milk he’d consumed each day: screeds winging forth to Himring until the child was old enough to survive the secret trip north.

Fingon’s letters had been infuriatingly spare of useful information while the child was fostered at Barad Eithel. Beloved, ineloquent Fingon: Fingon, who had nevertheless shown him the child as no reams of paper could.

Fingon had given him forever the rounded bloom of his full cheeks, and the pursed mouth, sullen in sleep: the feathery, rather cross-looking eyebrows, and the small hands with their deep dimples and smaller fingernails, curled into the edge of Fingon’s furred mantle.

Maedhros had felt the way Fingon hovered between wonder and confusion at what they’d wrought: the way he couldn’t quite manage to think of the child as his own, this thing spun out of air and calculation and freshwater into heavy, solid life. He could have loved him so desperately, Maedhros knew that. He was halfway there, hovering in terror on the edge, afraid of falling. If the baby had stayed in Barad Eithel longer; if Fingon had watched him begin to creep around on fat little knees, to pull himself up on the furniture and to take his first steps – to hear the baby babble turn into words and speech – his heart would have opened to him like a flower, and the child would have become the centre of his universe, the sun in his sky.

Fingon had never known what to do with Idril as an infant, either, but he’d easily become an adored uncle as she grew up. If they’d had more time – if the child had been permitted to stay with Fingon even a month longer before being sent for safety to Cirdan –

Well, they’d never had enough time.

There had been few walls between them then, so he had felt Maedhros’s bright joy, the painful love, in its moment of birth: swelling and swelling like a cloud with rain, as though his heart was growing and his blood was leaking out of him at the same time, transmuting into pure tenderness and iron purpose.

I like this because I think of the Ekkaia scene as a cloudburst, full of emotion that has been swelling and swelling and now released. This is one bit of the breaking-through.

He had never needed to ask whether Maedhros considered Gil-galad a son.

“I don’t want to talk about – him,” Fingon said with difficulty, and the salt breeze stung his face, his eyes. “I know you loathe him, and rightly; and I do, too. I do hate him; or I hate what he did. I do! But you should know – you deserve to – that he wanted you, badly, although he never met you; he never wanted the shadow on him to touch you or to taint you.

And this. You can see here where I spun off into cliffs of fall, which isn't a scion story, but sprung out of this speech. It was already there in those sketchy notes, too, a lot of what Fingon's saying here: this important line about hating Maedhros, or what he did (that movement from clear certainty to trying to separate the deeds from the loved one; to urgent reptition - I do! I mean it, I really do! - which means he doesn't, can't: this is the heart of Fingon's guilt, because he wants to hate Maedhros utterly, but he can't, and he is profoundly in denial about that).

“He always wanted children; I took that from him even before the Oath did, but I gave it back to him with you. I loved you first of all for that, but he loved you for yourself. Because you existed, against all hope and possibility and fate and chance; and because you were ours.”

Gil-galad said nothing. There was still a wildflower tucked behind his ear, but the brilliance had quite left his eyes.

“Well,” Fingon said at last. “I needed to tell you that. You should know that you were never – not only – you were wanted very much."

Beloved ineloquent Fingon, &c.

-

They were some miles from the beach when Gil-galad said, “‘Ours’?”

“Yes."

-

I was trying to let the gaps and breaks talk for me in the text. Under-writing.

The beginning was full of these little breaks, too, because they didn't yet know how to talk to each other; now at the end, that connection, and their conversations, are breaking down again. It's echoing that ride together at the beginning very strongly, but now it's not Gil-galad trying to become acquainted and Fingon giving light, unsatisfying answers. These are the real questions/answers at last, and the whole story has really been about getting to the point of Fingon and Gil-galad in Aman where they actually could have the kind of conversation Gil-galad was trying to have at the start.

-

Some miles further, Fingon said, “Did you ever meet him in Beleriand? After I died. I always wondered.”

“No,” Gil-galad said.

It didn’t seem like he was going to speak again, and Fingon had begun to assimilate that knowledge, that pain – that Maedhros had never seen him, had only ever known him through Fingon’s own eyes – when he added,

“But I saw what he did. Have you ever seen a whole city ruined, and known the ruiners to be Elves? It wasn’t even a city, poor Sirion! It was a refuge, a place for the desperate, as far to the West as they could get, as close to the safety of the Sea. They had so very little. No great stone palaces, no towers, no spires. Little enough fresh food. They were able to grow so little, and they lived on fish, and sea-weed, and what brave hunting parties would bring back; and hope. They lived on hope, and they thought Elwing wore it around her throat, but the Valar didn’t come for them: Maedhros Fëanorion and his brothers did instead, and they burned and killed and ravaged. I’d say they salted the earth, but it was salt already. To fall on any innocent Elven city would be a horror: on poor Sirion it was the greatest cruelty I ever saw, and entirely pointless."

They said nothing more.

I like this, too, actually. You see a little here of why Gil-galad might be healthily sceptical of the Valar - they didn't come for them: Maedhros Feanorion and his brothers did instead - and that very post-war experience of seeing a descrated, destroyed town. Worse when you had seen it when it was whole, when you knew the dead and fled.

Sirion is, I think, the worst thing the Feanorions did. I find it worse than even Doriath or Alqualonde (though they're all awful!). These were desperate survivors, huddled together at the edge of the sea for protection. So many of their leaders had been killed or lost. Idril and Tuor had disappeared; Earendil was away; Maedhros and the others struck while only Elwing was there, and she was so young, and so alone, and so damaged already by what they'd done in Doriath. And now they’d come again. There's something about the revictimisation that gets me. It's awful.

I wanted it to be weight and counter-weight - that soft, painful, remembered moment of Maedhros seeing baby Gil-galad through Fingon's eyes, something Fingon has clearly not deliberately thought about since he was reborn, but dredges up now for Gil-galad, because he should know: and which is echoed in the beginning by Fingon's question to Finrod. But Maedhros is still the person who did the things he did, and I wanted to set that soft moment of truth against his deeds at Sirion, another truth, to point out clearly why Gil-galad would recoil so hard from this offering, this honesty Fingon wants to be able to give him. This is the dichotomy at the heart of the story: reconciling Maedhros and how one felt for him with what he did, and how one feels about that. It is irresolvable, at least for Fingon, at least at the moment I've ended it at for now.

I don't know if this is quite what you wanted, @warrioreowynofrohan, especially because like I said, I wrote this story in a frantic fog, but I hope this in some way suffices!

[dreamties]

Slashers W/ a Soft Pastel S/O

A/n - So this one actually wasn’t requested, I just thought it would be super cute. And what I mean by “Soft Pastel”, I mean being into soft/pastel/kawaii fashion, I just didn’t know how to phrase it. Since there’s so many subcultures.

Trigger Warning: Slight Cursing (I say f*ck)

Also- these are gender neutral, but a few describe you in skirts/dresses, so if you’re not comfy with that, just skip that part or the whole thing?? :/

I might do more like this for other types of alternative fashion- like punk or something? Or a S/O who has a lot of body mods, I think it would be fun.

Characters: Billy/Stu, The Lost Boys, Helen Lyle, Daniel Robitaille/Candyman, Brahms Heelshire, and Amanda Young.

I didn’t add Michael Myers, but can do so if y’all want it. I just think he’d be very indifferent about it...didn’t think that would be very fun to read.

Billy Loomis + Stu Macher

Stu would be the most like into your outfits

Billy? Not so much. he just thinks you look cute in everything.

but if you did more guro-kawaii looks? they would both be all over that shit. 

it combines more of the grotesque in with the cute- which is just perfect for the boys. they get to see you dawned in all sorts of blood, guts/gore, bandage patterns/aesthetics.

and maybe even tying in different monster-ish elements. 

like wearing funky white or other unnatural colored contacts, really intense makeup(especially around the eyes), and fuck it, maybe you’re wearing faux demon horns.

I think they’d find it kinda hot. if we’re being perfectly honest here.

Now- would you able to get them into it as well?

Stu will ask you, with excitement reverberating throughout out his body and his voice. of course he want’s to at least try it!

so many clips in Stu’s hair. you haven’t even had that many in your hair before!

he may also wear rings sometimes. he thinks all the colors and designs are just so fun!

and on the other hand...

Billy, the guy that basically wore the same outfit for an entire movie? who’s closet only contains jeans and white t-shirts? trying out your style? i don’t think so lol

if you do- somehow- get him to try...

then you might have pressured him into it a bit? very jokingly, of course. 

“C’mon, humor me, babe. Stu’s already dressed and everything!” You try giving him puppy eyes to seal the deal.

“Fine!” Billy says, grabbing the garment and a few clips from your hands. He shuts the door too harshly behind him.

A short silence is shared, before you and Stu burst out laughing. “Do you think he’s mad at us?” You’re hardly able to get it out. Of course he was, but in his own odd way appreciated this adventure.

He comes back a moment later, his white t-shirt replaced with a pastel red one, an especially gory character printed on the front. and a red clip barely hanging on to one of the side pieces of hair in front of his face. You try to suppress a giggle at Billy’s messily put together look.

for the love of gosh- don’t actually laugh when he appears. he is very outside of his comfort zone, and he’s only doing this because he loves you and Stu, and just,, don’t add this to his list of reasons not to try new things.

whatever your reaction ends up being, you’re absolutely obligated to tell them how attractive they look in it(even Billy who looks hella dorky).

(my art)

The Lost Boys

the comparison between their dark, punk-ish style and then the sweet baby pinks and blues, and soft lavenders that adorned your form?? 

it’s just too sweet.

they are completely enamored by your style- even if certain vampires (and I’m not naming any names, but I definitely mean David) may not show his love for your look as openly

Marko- he’d get one cutesy patch for his jacket, so he has like a little piece of you everywhere he goes. also...he genuinely ended up really digging your style? but not enough to abandon his punk look completely. he is still totally dedicated to that.

the other boys will absolutely mess with him about the patch though

all in good fun!

David’s not letting you near his hair with any extra clips or accessories. 

Dwayne enjoys the quiet intimacy shared between the two of you. just sitting together, you might be styling his hair( super loose ponytail or braid- admit it, it would be so cute! and helpful so his hair isn’t always in his face!)...anyways, you’d use a colorful hair tie, and a few clips to help pin back his hair. 

he probably won’t go out with the clips in, but if it’s just the five of you at the cave? he’ll keep it in until it’s time to sleep. 

he loves seeing how happy and accomplished you look after finishing with his hair tho.

Paul is hands down the most likely to get into the whole look and go out in public with it on. 

makeup? hell yeah. it won’t be as intense as yours, and he probably only does the eyes and maybe some shine. sparkly vampire time

hair accessories? all of them

would try combining his look with yours, to have a perfect mess of it.

a light, light  blue mesh top, slightly darker blue jacket(with slight accents in pink, purple, white or black), and his usual sort of white jeans(?) would still look great with it. he’s absolutely rocking that look.

you are ecstatic to finally have someone else to share your passion with! (much harder to find similar folks when you’re a vampire,,)

Helen Lyle

she’s so used to the plain life around her, and she’d been living before you- you were such a breath of fresh air.

of course, you’re darling personality also drew her into you- but your fashion sense? it fascinated her.

she’s not trying it herself anytime soon, but she appreciates the fact that you enjoy it. 

the most she would ever try is a very natural makeup look. and a coat or two of a pastel color of her choice.

she would love watching you get ready. not so much help out though- she just likes seeing the way you approach things. how you choose to pair certain pieces with one another.

she’ll ask questions to better understand your interests! not that it’s weird or wrong that you’re into it, she’s just a very inquisitive person.

you’d wear a lot of blue though- because you know Helen likes that color.

imagine wearing coordinated looks for different events and such. so, when you go with Helen to help out with her Candyman thesis, you might wear candy-themed attire. (of course in this universe,, she wouldn’t die! so no worries of that! you get to keep you’re gf).

if you do gift her something, she keeps it on her bedside table(or dresser). so she can still admire it, and still serves a purpose. fun décor!

all around though- Helen would be very chill, but captivated, about you’re interests.

Daniel Robitaille - Candyman

 his life is so dark and gruesome, and he loves seeing you all dressed up. 

and while he’s dead- long dead- and isn’t really apart of the world in the same sense that you are- it gives him this happy sense of hope for the world.

because there’s this very small thing, that you hold close to your heart, that makes you smile.

Also!!

even if they’re apart of a super awful, traumatic, part of his past- the bees are just a part of the family now.  

so cute yellow/spring/bee themed outfits?? yes. ohh definitely, yes.

As for him dressing up? He’d feel hesitant.

he’s filled with immense joy around you, but is almost scared with someone altering part of his attire or self in any way(rooted back to, again, past stuff).

but part of loving is to take the person as a whole, bad parts, good parts- insecurities- the entire package. and trusting one another.

he has his whole faith in you not to do anything bad.

and so, it becomes a habit for the two of you to spend mornings together, chatting and getting ready. well, you’re getting ready, it’s more for the quality time together for him.

things are little different for Daniel. for many reasons. 

one, he has very short hair. so the clips don’t really work there..

two- he only has one hand, and he’s “working” a lot with the appendages he does have. rings won’t work out because they might fall off- and he’d hate to lose something of yours.

three- he’s not a big makeup fan. he’s happy enough watching you put it on.

and then for his actual attire- he needs the coat to cover his insides. it’s also, in a way, his uniform.

you’ve settled on two things.

making homemade necklaces that can easily hide under his big coat (either sweets or honey/bee themed).

and sewing little patterns on the inside of his coat. other’s wouldn’t be able to see it, but he would know it’s there.

Brahms Heelshire

imagine being super into sorta ‘sweet lolita’, pastel/soft colors, bows, the big skirts, all the sorta ruffles(?)

 and then especially if your shorter than Brahms(which is really,, not hard to do unless you’re insanely tall cause he’s,, 6 foot 3.)- and he thinks you look like such a doll? 

but like,, in a nice way. 

I think he’d get pretty excited if he got to help you set up your outfits!

especially if you praised him for picking out a good combo, or organizing correctly.

and some of Brahms movements are a bit awkward, he’s spent most of his life in the walls and the attic...but imagine turning on his music, and just dancing with him. having him twirl you in his arms a few times.

Brahms loves having your hands through his hair. and if hair accessories means he gets more of that love and attention? then yes,, yes he will wear them.

he just likes feeling taken care of, and along with your usual duties, you help him figure out the soft fashion styles, and how to make it more appealing and suitable for his own tastes.

because- as you insist- you want it to be something he enjoys just because he does, and not just for the closeness. though you can’t deny you love that aspect, too.

i can tell you one thing right here, though. you’re never getting makeup on him. he does not like taking off his mask, even if you’ve been in a relationship with him for a while, he still hides his face a lot.

you’d offered to do his makeup once, since he was staring so intently as you did yours. you’d made the mistake of reaching for his mask. you’d usually ask before doing so, but sometimes you’d slip up.

You apologize profusely, offering your arms out to him for a hug. “There, there, Brahms.” You smile, giving him a slight squeeze of affection. 

he does take your stuff sometimes. 

it’s a little annoying when you think you’ve lost your favorite accessory or dress or etc and then you just realize,, oh, it’s my favorite wall boy again. thank gosh you love him, so you’re not really upset or anything.

he just likes having little reminders of you, it gives him reassurance. upon other warm and fuzzy feelings.

if you’re able to find time in your day though, you’ll make cute little trinkets or bracelets for him. you’ll gift them or purposely leave them out for him-  so you’ll still have some of your stuff when it comes to getting ready the next day.

in short- he’d much rather look at you than partake on his own. 

Amanda Young

she’s never seen anything like this! :0

everyone she knows, herself included, tend to wear more dulled, plain clothes.

she’s immediately very intrigued by your attire...sort of want’s to try it, but is a bit self conscious and embarrassed to ask.

So!! you start out with small things, and fairly early on you both realize that she loves when you decorate her hair with accessories. 

gifting Amanda a pair of little pig clips!!

or little stud earrings- those would be fricking adorable on her!

and she’s just so happy,, wtf

you dress mostly for yourself, but the more you’re in a relationship with your gf- the more you want to dress for her as well. 

you can see this little sparkle in her eye when she sees you, and you want to keep seeing that look for as long as you can.

you slowly get her into it. your relationship and Amanda’s interest in your style just gives her so much light in an otherwise dim world.

if she did get into it, I think she’d do more creepy/cute. as a way to sort of cope with past trauma. that this sort of “bad” thing (the creepy) can still coexist with the good (the cute). she admires that quality.

just very sweet partners, who happen to love similar types of fashion 

[metalheadsforblacklivesmatter]

It’s February!!

Hi everyone!  It is Black History Month, LGBTQ+ History Month, and Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week falls in this month as well!  You can expect a lot of content from us here, so prepare for that!

I’ll try to focus on a particular subject whenever I post, but today is going to be a bit of a smorgasbord.

 1. The 1619 Project

You might have heard this project mentioned once or twice and you can be forgiven for not being aware of the controversy surrounding the project in 2020; between BLM Protests, the start of (and horrific mishandling of) the Panama Canal we find ourselves living in, and murder hornets a lot was going on.  

The entire goal of the 1619 project is to re-contextualize the understanding of American History, by accounting for the story of slavery.  Even if you are a casual student of American history, it won’t take long to realize that our history is often told through the lens of white men--specifically rich white men.  But, that’s not the only story of this country--America was built on the exploitation of Black men, women, non-binary and queer folks.  Black and Native American narratives are often ignored in the teaching of history and the ahistorical understanding of our country leads to an ahistorical present.  

It’s...how white people can hop on a private plane, fly to the Capitol, and attempt to overthrow our government “because they’re being oppressed”.  

Anyways, whether you like the project or not, I challenge everyone to read more about out country’s history.  If you haven’t dove into history at all outside of school, chances are that there is a lot that you need to learn--the way history is taught now does not invite American citizens to look at our country with a critical lens.  To quote James Baldwin,  “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”  Do not confuse patriotism with nationalism. 

2. Centering Black Women

Teen Vogue (yes, Teen Vogue, do not look at me like that) recently published an op-ed that discusses the need for centering Black Women economically moving forward.  

I’ll drop a link below, but one of my favorite quotes from the article really sums up the thesis quite well.

“Brittany Packnett Cunningham puts it best: “When Black people win, everybody benefits.” And she’s right. The agency of Black women, especially, is the cornerstone of American democracy, and failing to acknowledge that fact will ultimately stifle any economic growth and progress for the country, which hurts every single American, regardless of race and gender. With the recent appointments of Joelle Gamble, Cecilia Rouse, and Jones herself in key economic posts, there is reason to believe that the reality of Black Women Best is well underway with the Biden Administration.“

Read more here:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/black-women-best-economy/amp?__twitter_impression=true

3. The Future

A conversation about Black history would not be complete without a conversation about our present and future.  

Recent stories continue to not just display police violence against Black people, but specifically against Black children.  Below are some stories--trigger warning being police brutality...

Rochester police handcuffing and pepper-spraying a nine year old girl:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/31/nyregion/rochester-police-pepper-spray-child.html#click=https://t.co/8QHKTC4agx

Last week sixteen year old Taylor Bracey was horrifically body slammed by a school resource officer; the article does have video of the officer slamming Taylor, as a warning:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/florida-teen-body-slammed-school-resource-officer-traumatized/story?id=75582344

According to her mother she is suffering from memory loss, headaches, blurry vision, and sleep deprivation.  

The family is being represented by civil rights attorney Ben Crump who really sums it up well:

"He's supposed to be trained," he said. "It's foreseeable that children may get in altercations at school. You're not supposed to knock them unconscious. You're supposed to be the person who knows how to de-escalate the situation. It's just mind-boggling."

"This is the adultification of Black children -- that our children are seen as adults," he added. "No, no, this was a child."

Ben Crump has a petition that you can sign below:

https://act.bencrump.com/a/taylor-bracey?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=social_organic&utm_content=013121

And it’s never a bad time to remember Tamir Rice (twelve) and Trayvon Martin (seventeen) and even recent incidents like Miya Ponsetto (aka “SoHo Karen”) who attacked fourteen year old black child because she accused him of stealing her iphone (and, infamously, looked like a whole mess trying to defend herself during a Gayle King interview by claiming that she was “only twenty-two”--of course Gayle snatched her up gracefully).  I say all of this as a reminder that there has always been a pernicious “imagining” of the Black body and the adultification (seeing Black kids as older than what they are) of Black Youth is but one of the many very dangerous forms this form of racism takes shape today.  Protecting Black women, protecting Black trans-women, protecting Black youth is important--and seeing these folks victimized by the law in every form needs to be fought against. 

In short; defund the police (let’s have no resource officers in schools and more social workers/counselors!), challenge whatever prejudices and assumptions you may have, center Black women and Black female voices, and read up on your history kids.