#so really they should invent being a nun but for me specifically

[rustchild]

they should invent being a nun. But for agnostic Jewish dykes

[zmediaoutlet]

so i know we just have to accept certain retcons, but the big one that bugs me is yellow eyes's plan for sam and how it doesn't fit with all the vessel stuff. how do YOU make that work in your head?

hallo hallo anon, you have hit on one of the Great Big Bugaboos of spn canon and also the #1 evidence we have to throw in the face all those goofs who uncritically repeat the "Kripke had a 5 year plan!" factoid. He clearly did not, he was flying by the seat of his pants, and while he managed to put stuff together in a fun way the pants are Not Coherent.

Nevertheless, we can make it work, and the way we make it work is that the various members of the angelic and especially demonic hierarchies do not have complete information. Let's do a rough timeline:

In the beginning Chuck created the universe. This is widely regarded as a bad move.

Then, you know, handwaving on him setting up some version of a 'destiny' story arc which will inevitably end in his two sons fighting to the death, via characters he'll create called The Winchesters.

After inventing demons and being a real jerkface, Lucifer ends up in the cage.

In the 70s or whatever, Azazel goes to Ilchester to butcher a bunch of nuns and talk to daddy Lucifer -- Lucifer says "you have to help get Lilith out of her pit so that the seals on my cage can get broken." Azazel says, "But how, Evil Daddy?" Lucifer says, "This really special child." -- HERE IS WHERE THE RETCON APPEARS TO HAVE HAPPENED, BUT WE CAN WORK WITH IT

Sam Winchester is fated in the demonic archives among the true higher-ups, but lower-level demons don't necessarily know about him and his importance.

Azazel starts seeding the earth with special babies. COMPLETE CONJECTURE TO FOLLOW: While he knows that Sam is the one who will be Lucifer's vessel, he also knows that a series of events will need to occur so that Lucifer will get out of the cage to take his vessel in the first place. The first seal is the most important: a righteous man must shed blood in hell. How do we get that to happen? CONJECTURE TWO: I think that Dean must be the Righteous Man because of his place within the tripartite celestial structure: God-Michael-Lucifer mirroring John-Dean-Sam. I do not think that John could have ever actually been the one to 'spill blood' that would allow the first seal to break. (Ethical conjecture three: perhaps it's the weakness itself which has its own kind of righteousness? John's implacable; Dean is not.) CONJECTURE UHH FOUR I GUESS: Azazel is designing an elaborate scheme to ensure that Sam will die on a particular day (maybe bc it works well for opening the door to hell?) specifically to ensure that Dean will sell his soul to bring Sam back, and thereby doom himself to the hell where he will break the first seal.

This should be 6b but tumblr doesn't work this way: now, would it be a hell of a fucking lot easier for Azazel to just ensure Sam dies somehow? Yeah. But given everything we know about him and the dorky-ass demons who hang out in s1 and s2, Azazel is clearly a dramallama and does stuff for the lulz. Plus, I think there's an element of 'proving' to Sam how much destiny has a hold on him, because that is so important for his grooming into saying yes to Lucifer. If he was just hit by a car or something it doesn't have the same effect than if he's part of the emo hunger games.

Sam dies; Dean sells his soul; Sam lives, and wants to save Dean. But of course, he can't save Dean, because Dean *must* go to hell to ensure the first seal is broken. This is why the angels don't help Sam at all, and why Ruby is allowed to run around with impunity. Happily the writer's strike intervened and gave us a miserable fucking s3 finale where that happened, because that is WAY more interesting than Hero Sammy Saving The Day.

Ruby has been getting instructions from Lilith the entire time, presumably since she became a demon herself, and gets launched literally as soon as Azazel is out of the way to continue the Sam-grooming.

CONJECTURE FIVE(?): Azazel and Lilith fucking hated each other, lol. But it's Lilith who's the *actually* important demon, so she wins and Azazel gets sacrificed for being really bad at teaching drama.

It's not actually that complicated, but you do have to take "the special kids were just sacrifices on the altar of let's see what we can get Sam to do" as a given. If Sam had actually started killing all of them, that'd be one thing, and Azazel could have turned that to his favor before maybe having Ava stab Sam in the back regardless. (Then, a Special Kid will go and open the devil's gate for him anyway, so the demons can get out there and start their important seal-breaking prep.) Since Sam was being such a Good Guy -- well, so what, Ava will kill all the rest of them, and then either her or Jake will get turned easy-peasy and kill Sam too. Dean will make his deal either way, and the apocalypse is off with a bang. Or a sick crunching of knife into bone.

Anyway, that's my theory. It fits alongside my ironclad theory that all of history and fate and destiny was leading toward two brothers standing in front of each other in a cemetery, and the only real free will starting once Dean could choose what to do when Sam-as-Lucifer stood in front of him, and what he chose was to be there for his brother. Thereby giving Sam a solid space to grasp and overcome Lucifer, and then save all the days. The Righteous Man who begins it is the only one who can end it, as they say.

[roman-deserves-love]

The Apocalypse Should Be Easier

Word Count: 1440 ish

Pairings: prinxiety

Summary: Virgil has done many things, but he has never pretended to be a magician in order to watch the Antichrist get himself a new pet.Until the pet doesn't show up, which has far, far bigger consequences than one would think. Good Omens au.

Swearing uwu

Virgil had done many things over the course of his very long, very strange existence. He’d lost a flaming sword due to some Edenistic hijinks, been captured by French rebels for trying to get a loaf of authentic bread, and tempted a priest on a bet with a demon. He’d been around the world and off it more time than he could count. He could tell you what Julius Caesar’s real last words were. He knew every star in the sky and all the ones past it. He could say what it was like to be fire, to be water, to be more than everyone around him.

Until this moment, however, he could not have told you what it was like to be a second-bit magician performing ‘magic’ for the Antichrist and his very bored friends.The experience could honestly be summed up in three words: loss of dignity. He desperately tried to get them to pay attention to the bunny he was pulling out of his top hat (included in the Lil’ Magicians Starter Pack™, only 12.99 at Target), and failed miserably. The little buggers just kept scrolling through Instabook, or whatever it was. Virgil was an interdimensional celestial being, but God dammit if he couldn’t keep track of all the mortal inventions within the telephones they’d created a few years back.

“You’re quite a shit magician, you know?” One of the Antichrist’s friends had torn themselves from their phone, “Your stage presence is completely rubbish. My father could do better than you.”

Virgil grit his teeth. Of course the Destroyer would have a bunch of snot-nosed friends. He glanced down at his watch. 2:38, eight more minutes until the boy turned eleven and his hellhound appeared. Just eight more minutes of trying to avoid sucking too much. “Well, child, I’m sure you’d be better equipped to judge my abilities if you were paying attention.” God, the things Virgil would have done to these brats back in the old days, when She was still in her vengeful phase. Unfortunately though, She’d mellowed out once She had a kid, and now it was all ‘no smiting’ and ‘Great Plan’. Honestly, it was almost enough to make Virgil wish he’d joined the Fallen. There’d been a traffic jam on the way to the dissenter’s meeting, and he’d missed the Fall completely. Traffic in heaven was even worse than Los Angeles, and Virgil had been stopped there at the height of it more than a few times. All the transportation bureaucrats had been sent to Hell, and Virgil’s commute had suffered ever since.

Virgil was rudely shaken out of his brief distraction by a piece of cake. More specifically, a slice of three-hundred dollar devil’s food birthday cake, because coincidence was a bitch, and of course that would be the little shit’s favorite. Said piece was thrown into Virgil’s face. Said throwing was done by Remy, which was the name of the Antichrist, because naming children The Antichrist is largely frowned upon. Said throwing was continued by Remy's friends. Much to Virgil’s dismay. He let it continue for a few minutes, hoping they’d burn themselves out, but when they didn’t, he sighed and put down the hat.

“Alright kids, listen up. I’m sure all your parents are nice people, which is odd because all of you are degenerate little monsters. And the only reason I haven’t stormed out of here middle fingers up is because I need those parents to pay me, so if you little snots have even the slightest bit of empathy for human life, you’ll sit the hell down and shut the heaven up, because I’m relying on this gig for this month’s rent, and I will not let that go down the drain because none of you can be bothered to look up from your iGalaxy 10s and realize that I am a person, not a damned monkey here to do a trick.” Virgil whisper-yelled this, lying through his teeth and overly aware of the parents watching from the back of the outdoor tent he was to ‘perform’ in.

The children looked at each other, and for a moment Virgil hoped that he’d thoroughly admonished them, but alas, he’d forgotten that one particular trait of this era’s youth- the inability to take anything seriously. The gaggle of kids burst out laughing, and Virgil flushed, looking down at his watch. 3:49. Wait, that couldn’t be right. Remy had been born at 3:48. It was written on the walls of End Times, scored into the books of Heaven, burned into the gates of Hell. The child would receive the hellhound on his eleventh birthday exactly, and he would name it, and the naming would begin the apocalypse. So where was the hound? He quickly made eye contact with a man at the back of the crowd, or he would’ve if his eyes weren’t covered in dark sunglasses that hid his eyes completely. Virgil gestured to the watch briefly with a panicked look on his face, and turned back to the children before (hopefully) anyone in the crowd noticed.

He quickly weighed the pros and cons of leaving, despite the fact that he’d just told roughly fifty kids that he couldn’t, but really, what did the opinions of a few little kids matter against a snag in the Great Plan? Not much, but Virgil couldn’t help himself worrying about how they’d feel of him as he dashed out of the tent, running toward his partner in crime’s Bentley, where said partner was already waiting, tossing the keys up and down as he waited for Virgil to reach the car. Seeing him, he unlocked it, climbing into the driver’s seat.

Virgil all but slammed into the passenger seat, panting from his run. (Yes, he was an immortal being. No, that did not mean he had to be fit. Bugger off.) He whipped his head to look at the man in the driver’s seat.

“Roman, what the fuck? Did you know about this? Is this some trick from your people?”

“I could ask the same of you, angel. I’m as confused as you are.” The lack of an answer sent Virgil into overdrive.

“Maybe it got held up? They forgot to release it? Remy doesn’t have a name yet? Oh God, we lost the Antichrist’s hellhound. Logan is going to discorporate me, isn’t he? Oh God oh God oh God where is he!?” As he said the last sentence, he turned to Roman, grabbing him by the collar of his leather jacket and all but shook him as he panicked.

Roman was equally terrified, but as the one who had given the Antichrist to the Sisterhood of The Chattering Nuns to be given to Remy’s family, he had a sneaking suspicion that they hadn’t lost the hellhound, but something even worse. He gently pried Virgil’s hands off of his jacket, handing (heh) them back to Virgil slowly. “Calm down angel, whatever has happened, shaking the spirit out of me won’t help at all. Deep breaths, Vee, can you do that? Logan isn’t going to do anything to you.” Virgil followed Roman’s advice, taking breathing slowly and deeply as he took his hands from where Roman had still been holding them. The pair sat in a comfortable silence for a few moments, both of them focusing on Virgil’s breathing.

When he looked significantly calmer, Roman turned to him, trying to figure how best to present his theory to Virgil. “I think I may know what happened.”

Virgil’s head turned to Roman so fast Roman thought he was teleporting for a second. “What is it? What do you know? Tell me now or so help me I will get Biblical on your ass, divine benevolence or not.”

“See, the thing is, when I was dropping off the baby, there may have been another family delivering, and you know how Satanic nuns are, they’d lose their heads if they weren’t attached, so there is a little chance that something… may have… gone.... wrong.” Roman trailed off under Virgil’s steely gaze.

“What, exactly, are you saying, Roman.” Virgil all but growled in a tone that reminded Roman just how powerful the angel was.

What I’m saying is,” Roman took a deep breath,”we didn’t lose the hell hound.”

“We lost the child.”

------

About a hundred miles away, an eleven-year-old boy named Thomas took the puppy he’d found in the woods home, and named it Dog.

[thehappyscavenger]

Books read in August 2019

The Female of the Species by Mindy McGinnis

You know I really like McGinnis and I’m trying to read more repeat books by women (the majority of books I read are definitely written by women but I don’t always follow up and read more of them I mean). McGinnis writes very dark and macabre YA and that’s exactly the problem I have with her books. I am, alas, too old to really enjoy books by teenagers. 

The only other book I read of hers,  A Madness So Discreet, was a Victorian era novel that turned into a bit of a crime thriller that dealt with crime and sexual abuse. The Female of the Species follows along the same lines even though it is set in a small town in present day (or near present day) America. Alex Craft is a teenager who’s older sister was raped and murdered and (it’s not TOO much of a spoiler since it happens in the first few pages but anyway skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want spoilers) she ends up murdering her sister’s killer when the police do nothing. 

This book is really great at examining how misogyny is weaved into contemporary culture without being too preachy about it but then it sort of develops a dumbass love story. I don’t know if this is McGinnis being constrained by her publishers or the conventions of YA or if she actually enjoys writing like that but it just flattens so much of the great writing she’s been doing. I honestly feel like she could be a huge breakout writer for adults if she just aged up her female characters a little and fully embraced the darkness of her writing but maybe that’s unfair, maybe she doesn’t want to go there. She’s still a great writer and someone I would have totally been an unabashed fan of if I was still 16. Unfortunately I’m not. 

The Day That Went Missing by Richard Beard

I really liked this one! I recommend with reservations though, it’s about trauma and grief, a memoir about how Richard Beard’s younger brother died in a drowning accident when he (the brother) was 9 and how his very British family repressed it. And boy did they repress it! 

The book starts when Beard is in his mid 40s and finally starts to ask questions about his brother finally realizing that he repressed even basic info like the day his brother died and when he was born. From there he investigates the accident like it was a crime, interviewing his family about their memoirs and trying to track down other people on the day. The writing he keeps fairly simple and that’s good because the emotion is pretty vivid. Just a wonderful tribute to the brother he lost and an examination of grief, repression and acceptance. 

Garbo Laughs by Elizabeth Hay

I liked this one but I also feel like no one else would so I hesitate to recommend... Set in the sleepy neighbourhood of Old Ottawa South (in Ottawa, duh) Garbo Laughs is about a movie obsessed writer in her 40s and her family, friends and neighbours following their lives over about two years. The novel is a bit Cranston-esque. Everyone is very similar (everyone is writing a book of some kind, everyone loves old movies and gets each other’s references). There is also a bit of romance mixed in in that the main character’s husband and the main character’s best friend have a deep attraction to one another which is quite sweet and romantic. This is not overly plotty nor is it really character based. More about a specific neighbourhood. It’s very gentle and sweet though, a nice and easy read. I am going to try to read some more by Hay, her other books are more acclaimed, but this was a nice little amuse-bouche that did enough to make me intrigued as to what else she has to offer. 

The Divine Economy of Salvation by Priscila Uppal

More Canadiana. This one was also set in Ottawa. Set in a Catholic all girls school The novel flips between a “contemporary” setting, circa 2000 around when the book was written and 25 years earlier. In the present Angela H., a middle-aged nun, receives a candle stick which forces her to delve into her mysterious past at an all girl’s school. The novel has everything I like, friendship between girls, boarding school drama, sex, murder etc but it never really goes anywhere or really delves deeply into any of these subjects. The book is around 400 pages long so it should have the time to explore everything and yet half of the book is set in the contemporary time where almost nothing happens. The resolution to who is shaking down the nun is really dumb too. I could definitely see this being a really cool book if it had some tweaks but as it is it’s kind of flat and peters out. 

Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland

Even more Canadiana! Coupland is a pretty big writer in Canada but he always struck me as a little... bro-y so while I wanted to give him a shot it wasn’t my highest priority. Anyway I came across this book while poking around the 2003 Canadian novels page on wiki after reading Garbo Laughs and this sounded really interesting so I picked it up. 

The book is loosely inspired by the Columbine massacre and follows the aftermath of a school shooting through one couple and how they react to the death. It starts out pretty good and strong and while Coupland isn’t the flashiest writer he’s a really engaging one. The novel is set into 4 parts, each part set in a different year from a different person’s perspective. And I really wish it hadn’t used Columbine or school massacres as a hook. It almost felt... incidental to what the book became as I read along. Really the book is more about mercy and what that means and maybe if I had heard the book pitched to me that way I would have liked it more. 

So all in all okay. 

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

Well I knew my luck would have to run out eventually. NYRB Classics is an imprint that only republishes books that have fallen out of print or works of literature that haven’t been translated into English yet. I’ve loved every single book I’ve picked up from them most of which I’ve read blind and it’s really changed how I view literature because there are so many staggeringly amazing masterpieces that just aren’t even heard of and languish in obscurity that they manage to bring back. I usually pick my books from them blind and had yet to be disappointed until now. 

TIoM is a novella and Jorge Luis Borges wrote the introduction which calls it perfect. It actually made a lot of sense to me that Borges liked this because like a lot of Borges the concept is incredibly interesting and dynamic but like Borges it leaves me cold. 

Set on a remote island it deals with a fugitive who lands on a remote island and is surprised to see some French visitors arrive and disturb his peace. It’s very short but it took me forever to read because I didn’t care for it. 

[aion-rsa]

How James Wan Launched Three Horror Movements in the 21st Century

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The highly secretive new horror project from James Wan, Malignant, has arrived in cinemas and on HBO Max, and it’s quite rightly been met with much anticipation. Because while on paper this looks like another mid-tier chiller with a decent cast and a generic title, with James Wan… well, you just never know.

Though Wan has proved he can play in the big leagues (Furious 7, Aquaman) he has also consistently returned to horror. And in doing so he has quietly – almost insidiously, you might say – managed to launch three distinct movements within the horror genre, and change the trajectory of the scary movie for the modern era.

On face value movies like Saw, Insidious, and The Conjuring might not look like game changers in the way films like Get Out and Hereditary were immediately presented as. But we have no doubt horror history will remember and revere Wan in the same way it does luminaries like Wes Craven and John Carpenter. And with the interesting horror TV show Archive 81 (based on a podcast) in the works, it’ll be fascinating to see what Wan does next in that medium. Here’s how he changed the horror movie landscape:

Saw (2004) – Torture Porn

Though this ‘honor’ should be shared with Eli Roth’s Hostel, Saw was the movie that really put this early aughts subgenre on the map. Essentially, these are movies which fetishize the kill; the more elaborate, the better. Torture porn movies weren’t about racking up a body count, they were more interested in the excruciating detail and in coming up with ever more inventive ways to off someone. As the franchise progressed, it grew more and more convoluted but it should be noted that the original, rather than a cynical bit of nastiness for its own sake, is actually a very smart three-hander which, without the flashbacks, would have worked just as well for the theatre. Though not to everyone’s tastes, and kicking off a movement which had its share of detractors, it’s also worth pointing out that Saw is a relatively gender-neutral franchise – it is not specifically about torturing women, and sexual assault of any kind just isn’t its MO.

It was made for just $1.2 million and grossed over $103 million worldwide, and that’s before you get into the incredible staying power – and profits – reaped by the franchise as a whole which extends to nine movies not to mention fairground rides, comics, games and toys. Though Wan only directed the first film, the series ran and ran inspiring many more movies attempting to get in on an audience with a taste for gore, perhaps in reaction to the somewhat gentler and more bloodless post modern teen slashers that had prevailed in the late 90s.

See also: The Collector, Captivity, the Hostel franchise

Insidious (2010) – Low Budget, Big Stars

For his next trick, Wan pivoted completely away from torture and moved into a kind of sincere, genuinely scary and original horror model that Blumhouse would pick up and run with. Insidious was glossy, had actual famous people with a lot of talent in it (Rose Byrne, Patrick Wilson), wasn’t part of any existing property (Wan teamed once again with writer Leigh Whannell with whom he co-wrote Saw), and delivered some seriously effective jumps. It was also made for just $1.5 million, and took almost $100 million worldwide (and once again launched its own franchise).

This movie provided the model which Blumhouse relied on for years, taking punts on brand new material if the movie could be made for less than $5 million. Though the sequels offer diminishing returns, the original is a genuinely good film. It also cemented a return to a kind of modern domestic horror – scary movies set in and around the home and featuring grown up married people and often children. While one might argue these films placed an over-reliance on jump scares, they did contribute to a reversal of the trend Wan himself started with Saw, which eschewed jumps in favor of lingering pain. 

See also: Mama, Sinister, The Possession, anything in the Blumhouse early mold. 

The Conjuring – The Horror Expanded Universe

Though The Conjuring carried on Wan’s ‘domestic horror’ style – and featured a happily married couple at the center, helping out a family with five daughters here – the lasting impact of this movie is how it managed to create an MCU-style shared universe, not something we’d really seen in horror before. The ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) are at the core of this franchise, which extends to three movies. It’s unusual for the ‘goodies’ to be the recurring characters rather than the baddies, making this more like detective fiction than a traditional horror franchise. Additionally, rather than just being a single, linear series of films like Insidious, The Conjuring universe, like the MCU before it, allows for spinoffs that can play with subgenres, eras, countries, stars and styles.

The main Conjuring films rely on the ‘based on a truth story’ hook, but the spinoffs don’t at all. Take Annabelle Comes Home, for example, which is a ‘one wild night’ ghost train of a movie which features a werewolf. Spoiler alert: it is not based on a true story. While the horror genre in general doesn’t seem to have lept on this tactic – highly successful though it has been – we are starting to see glimpses of it. Most recently the Fear Street movies on Netflix – a trilogy which form one overarching story – has set itself up so that should the powers that be decide they want more, it would be possible to introduce further spinoffs that exist within the same universe.

Fear Street, like the wider Conjuring movies, played with different subgenres. In this case more overtly. While the main Conjuring set, and the first two Annabelle movies as well as The Curse of La Llorona and The Nun all played in a similar sandbox – not too gory, jump scares over out and out nastiness, Fear Street opted to go for a 1990s slasher vibe, a ‘70s/‘80s slasher vibe, and finally a folk horror. There is, however, no reason The Conjuring shouldn’t branch out too. Indeed, the most recent instalment in the franchise’s mainline series, The Devil Made Me Do It, ventured into true crime territory to middling success. The films in the universe (eight in total) may be of varying quality, but they are all still commercially successful and show no signs of disappearing any time soon. 

See also: Fear Street

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[ifuckinglovestvincent]

THE GUARDIAN: St. Vincent: ‘I’m in deep nun mode’

For years, the Grammy winner was best known for her experimental music. Then dating Cara Delevingne put her in the spotlight. What’s next, asks Tom Lamont? Saturday 19 August 2017 06.00 EDT The musician St Vincent, a 34-year-old Texan whose real name is Annie Clark, is talking about body piercings. Though her outfit today includes such exotic items as a leopardskin onesie and a pink blazer made of some sort of wetsuit fabric, Clark doesn’t have any outlandish piercings herself; she just has droll and strong opinions about them, as she has droll and strong opinions about a lot of things. “Didn’t it always make you laugh,” Clark says, already laughing, softly, in the museum in London where we meet one summer afternoon, “how people in the 90s who had, like, tongue rings? How they’d always make some sort of comment, intimating that it made them, like, better at oral sex? That was the whole wink-wink thing, right? That a tongue ring meant they were kinda kinky? But then, I guess the challenge – because they were constantly fidgeting with this gross thing in their mouth! I guess the challenge became: no one wanted to get head from them.” She hoots with amusement, just loud enough to turn heads in the hushed museum. Conversation with Clark is like this: a bit unexpected, a bit arch, a bit sexy. She sometimes speaks so slowly and carefully it’s as if she’s reviewing individual words before committing to them. But, as with the lyrics of the songs she writes as St Vincent – always inventive, always making disarming leaps between ideas – you can never predict where her thinking will travel next. Quickly the chat about oral sex gives way to the matter of her own death, and her expectations of a brisk cremation. Before I know quite how, she’s got me talking about an irrational fear of being buried alive. “Get cremated!” she urges. I ask Clark – who will soon release her fifth solo album, a follow-up to 2014’s self-titled St Vincent – why she suggested we meet in London’s Wellcome Collection, to combine our interview with a tour around the museum’s collection of antique medical equipment. Clark peers with interest at a display of old enema syringes and explains that in every unfamiliar city, “you should try to see something real and strange”. It was something the Talking Heads frontman David Byrne once advised her about touring the world, and she’s stuck to it ever since. So far I’ve enjoyed the kind of success where I might get a free appetiser sent to my table. But it’s never a main That phrase – “real and strange” – describes Clark’s appeal as a musician. She is a generational talent on guitar, one of those poised, unperspiring types who can do the manually ludicrous while hardly appearing to try. Seen live, Clark’s fingers flit over the strings of her instrument with utmost precision – that’s the real in her. The strange comes via the writing and the composition, which on her four St Vincent albums since 2007 have tended towards the experimental and jagged-edged. Lyrically, she might choose a thing (prostitution, CCTV surveillance, prescription drugs) and then chew it over in repetitive, often anguished ways, before elevating the mood with a sudden joke. “Oh, what an ordinary day!” she sang on a track from her last album. “Take out the garbage… Masturbate.” Genre labels won’t stick to her. Song to song, Clark might channel Björk then Iron Maiden, then belt out a disco number before pretending to be a fey, shoe-gazing whisper-singer. In the manner of FKA twigs or Héloïse “Christine and the Queens” Letissier, she is a performance artist as much as she is a performer; last year Clark played a gig dressed as a toilet, complete with cistern, protruding bowl and flush. And like twigs, who for many years has been in a relationship with the Twilight actor Robert Pattinson, Clark has managed to cultivate a shadowy, unknowable persona while at the same time dating a wildly high-profile superstar. For 18 months or so, until a break-up made public last summer, Clark was going out with Cara Delevingne, arguably the best-known model in the world.

St Vincent and Glass Animals play in London, February 2014. Photograph: London News Pictures/Rex In the museum, while leaning over a glass display of clay death masks and shrunken human heads, we discuss Clark’s scaling achievements as St Vincent. From album to album, over a decade, her sales as well as her reviews have improved in happy tandem. The most recent album, 2014’s St Vincent, was her best to date, a wild, raucous thing, written in part during Ambien-soaked nights on tour, that eventually won her a Grammy. “It sounds like a very Pollyanna-ish thing to say,” Clark says, “but my ethos has always been to just make the music that I hear in my head. And I’ve been incredibly lucky, so far, that that’s seemed to correspond to external progress.” Where does she place herself right now in the music industry? “So far I’ve enjoyed the kind of success where I might get, like, a free appetiser sent to my table,” Clark says. “And that’s awesome, I’m thrilled by that.” She fixes a level gaze before adding: “But it’s never a main.” A word about her hair. Three years ago, while touring and promoting that self-titled record, Clark had a fantastic and unforgettable do – a triangular mountain of silver-bleached curls that made her look, in her own words, “like a scary cult leader”. I half-expected her to show up that way today, under the same teetering pile of silver, but Clark says the bleach killed off that haircut years back. She had to shear off her frazzled curls, “and then my look was less cult leader, more ‘Why do you have a rodent on your head?’” She has a flair for naming her own haircuts, having cycled through such past constructions as “the Audrey Hepburn with anger issues” and “the Nick Cave minus the receding hairline”, and when I ask about the straightened black parting she has today, Clark decides: “I want to call this one… the Lara-Flynn-Boyle-in-the-90s.” She isn’t quite such a speedy creator of names for her albums. The new LP still doesn’t have a title. I’ve heard about two-thirds of it and it’s superb – the same appealing, enigmatic, genre-spliced collision of ideas and influences that St Vincent fans cherish, only this time with a sleeker, more accessible through-line that ought to further expand her listenership. Some of the tracks, such as the scratchy, stirring Hang On Me, would work as well over the titles of a grand HBO drama as played through fizzing speakers in a dive bar. There are moments of peculiar, wonderful poetry. “Sometimes I feel like an inland ocean,” Clark sings, on a track called Smoking Section. “Too big to be a lake, too small to be an attraction.” A number of the songs certainly sound as though they pick over the end of a serious relationship, in particular an astonishing meta-epic she has written called LA, which seems to be about a break-up (“How can anybody have you and lose you and not lose their mind, too?”), while at the same time being about a fiercely avant garde musician’s reluctance to do anything as obvious as write about a break-up. “I guess that’s just me, honey, I guess that’s how I’m built,” Clark sings, “I try to write you a love song but it comes out in a melt.” Delevingne would be the most likely identity of “honey” here. But Clark is far too cool in person – and too determinedly non-specific as a lyricist – to admit to anything like that. “I don’t love it when musicians speak about their records being ‘diaries’ or ‘therapy’,” she says. “It removes that level of deep instinct and imagination that is necessary in order to make something that transcends.” She adds that such ways of talking too often become “erroneously gendered, in the sense that the assumption from the culture at large is that women only know how to write things autobiographically, or diaristically, which is a sexist way of implying that they lack imagination.” This being said, Clark concedes, “my whole life is in this record. And this is one of the first interviews I’ve done about it. And I guess I haven’t 100% figured out how to talk about it. I mean…” She laughs suddenly, a brilliant, solemnity-shattering hoot. Clark is aware there will be an assumption that a lot of her new songs are about her ex. “I’ve really got to figure this out, right? If I’m going to ever be able to talk about the record?” As is her custom whenever she’s finalising an album, Clark has currently placed herself in what she calls “deep nun mode”. Single. Work-focused. “Completely monastic. Sober, celibate – full nun.” I’m pretty sure she’s joking when she adds, in her slow, funny, unpredictable way, “I mean there are always sex plans. But none for, like, a month.”

Photograph: Arcin Sagdic for the Guardian Clark was born in 1982, briefly an Oklahoman before her parents separated and Clark relocated with her mother and two older sisters to a suburb of Dallas, Texas. “My mom was a social worker. She dedicated her life to doing very admirable things. One of my sisters more or less followed on that path, making the world a better place. But I did not.” Though Clark would see her father during school holidays, she describes her teenage years as “matri-focal”. She was surrounded mostly by women. “And Mom’s mantra was: ‘We girls can do anything.’ She didn’t explicitly call it feminism, but it was baked into our DNA.” Her mother had a quirky, creative streak. Once, after she’d accidentally crashed the family car, she was so intrigued by the aesthetics of the wreck, she climbed out to take photographs of it. “There was probably a picture taken of me and my sisters every day of our childhood. Have I seen any of those pictures? No. Has she gotten them developed? Mostly not. It was just her way of feeling safe, I guess, as if things would last for ever because she had documentation of it.” Is Clark the same in her songwriting? Documenting and so holding on to vanishing events and feelings? “I’m trying to get rid of things,” Clark laughs. “I’m trying to expel them.” We walk to Regent’s Park, where the warm weather and an outdoor art show have drawn a milling crowd. A sculpture installed by the park entrance resembles a tall pile of replica footballs. Fitting, as Clark was quite a player when she was young, soccer one of an eclectic assembly of high-school interests. “I was probably insufferable. I was the president of the theatre club, the kid who put Bertrand Russell quotes on their wall.” When I ask who her friends were at the time, she does not hesitate: “Oh, the sluts and the weirdos.”

Clothes from a selection, garethpughstudio.com. Styling: Priscilla Kwateng. Stylist’s assistant: Stanislava Sihelska. Hair: Stephen Beaver at Artists & Company. Makeup: Dele Olo. Photograph: Arcin Sagdic for the Guardian Music was her main obsession. “I was a 10-year-old fan of Pearl Jam and Nirvana, and I would’ve got into a fistfight defending them. Art mattered.” Her maternal uncle, Tuck Andress, was a touring musician, half of a jazz duo called Tuck & Patti, and during the summer Clark graduated from high school he gave her a job assisting his band on tour. Clark enrolled at a music college in Boston after that and lasted a couple of years before dropping out and heading back out on the road, this time as a musician in her own right. She toured successfully as part of the expansive, experimental band the Polyphonic Spree and later as a guitarist for Sufjan Stevens. She’s always been a political liberal – these days, one in mourning over last November’s election (“I feel like we watched America vote on their daddy issues”) as well as the reign of President Trump, a man she refers to as “a cartoon yeast infection”. As early as her teenage years, Clark had to get accustomed to the fact that a great many political and social norms, predominant in the suburbs where she grew up, were not her norms. She believes in the essential fluidity of sexuality and of gender. (“Boys!” she sings on a new track called Sugarboy, “I am a lot like you. Girls! I am a lot like you.”) “The mutability of gender and sexuality, as you can probably imagine – that was not a prevalent subject in the suburbs of Dallas when I was growing up. Not even a little bit! And no shade on it now. I love Texas, I’m there all the time seeing family. But I was always gonna get out of there. It felt imperative that I get out of there.” I can only write about my life, and dating Cara was a big part of my life In her 20s she moved to New York, borrowing the name St Vincent from one of the city’s hospitals, by way of its mention in a Nick Cave song. (St Vincent’s hospital was where “Dylan Thomas died drunk”, as Cave sang in There She Goes, My Beautiful World.) She released a debut record called Marry Me in 2007 and toured it through Europe to dispiritingly inattentive audiences, carrying away from London a special memory of “playing in a pub where you definitely couldn’t hear me over the crowd”. Between her next couple of records, Actor (2009) and Strange Mercy (2011), her career really started to take off. She performed on US chatshows; wrote and wrote; founded an influential creative relationship with Byrne, after he approached her at one of her gigs. “I was kind of stunned,” Byrne later said, of seeing Clark play guitar for the first time. The pair would collaborate on a celebrated 2012 album, Love This Giant. By the time her 2014 album won the Grammy for best alternative album, Clark was entitled to ask, as she did ask: “Alternative to what?” Prince came to one of her shows, and she was invited to guest-guitar for the surviving members of Nirvana, later for Taylor Swift. As an award nominee at the Brits in spring 2015, Clark came and went on the arm of Delevingne – and pretty much overnight her public persona became a curious, split thing. As St Vincent, she was a fiercely respected musician, patiently fattening a fanbase in the most honourable way, by writing and recording and touring hard. As the “secret girlfriend” (Metro) who was “secretly dating” (Mirror) Delevingne, she was tabloid feed. Clark saw first-hand what it was like for somebody she cared about to be “hounded, hassled, hacked – all of that stuff”.

‘Certain levels of fame are unenviable’: with Talking Heads’ David Byrne “Having seen certain levels of fame,” Clark tells me, “having been, y’know, fame adjacent… That in and of itself seems very hectic to me. If it’s a natural byproduct of doing what it is you love? Then great. But there are certain levels of fame that I’ve seen, just by proxy, that are unenviable.” If the upward trend of her music continues, she might find herself in a similar place, whether willed or not. Clark shrugs. “I can’t control any of that stuff. So what am I gonna do? I’m just gonna keep making music. I know this is another Pollyanna answer, but it’s about the music. Did I write better songs than on the last album? Did I sing them better? Did I play better guitar? Did I connect?” Maybe it was that I heard a low-quality version of the track, but on a new-album song called Pills there was a minor failure to connect. I misheard the song as having a lyric about somebody being “defamed by fame”, something I took to refer to Clark’s 18-month stretch in a celebrity relationship and all the demeaning wrangling with paparazzi and gossip bloggers that must have entailed. Clark looks panicked and says, no, the lyric was about someone being “de-fanged by fame… What I was referring to was that people’s art sometimes suffers when they get into that too-big-to-fail mindset. How things get really boring when people get too risk-averse, or too comfortable, or when they have overheads that are too high.” She can’t seem to get my mishearing of the lyric out of her head, though. “Oh!” she says eventually. “Maybe ‘defamed by fame’ is better?” For a moment she seems to be wondering how quickly she can sprint to Heathrow from here, and fly back to America to rerecord it. In the end she decides she’ll let listeners hear what they want to hear. “There is no way to control how people perceive a song. And if you try to, my God, are you in for a sisyphean task.” In the park we walk up a promenade between neatly manicured flowerbeds. When we settle on a bench, Clark seems overawed. “This is so beautiful,” she says. “I love this. Do you know how hard we’d have to work, in the States, to keep something this beautiful this beautiful?”

With former partner Cara Delevingne in September 2015. Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty Images for Burberry She’s now ready to address the Delevingne quandary. When the new record is out, reference to her ex will be exhaustively scoured for – it’s already started to happen, as when Clark released a single called New York in June, and Vice responded with a think-piece: “Is St Vincent’s new track a love song for Cara Delevingne?” Nobody trawled through her past writing about CCTV surveillance, or masturbation, in quite that way. “Nuh uh,” Clark says. She takes a breath. “Right! Um. I’ve always kept my writing close to the vest. And by that I mean I’m always gonna write about my life. Sometimes, in the past, I did that way more obliquely than now. But it’s almost like an involuntary reflex. I can’t help but be living and also taking notes on what’s going on, always trying to figure out how to put that into a song. And that does not mean there’s literal truth in every lyric on the way. Of course not. But I can only write about my life, and that – dating Cara – was a big part of my life. I wouldn’t take it off-limits, just because my songs might get extra scrutiny. People would read into them what they would, and you know what? Whatever they thought they found there would be absolutely right. And at the same time it would be absolutely wrong.” Clark looks out across the park. “A song that means something very specific to me, a song in which I might be obliquely or otherwise exploring some really dark things, is a song that another person might hear and go: ‘Wow, this one really puts a smile on my face.’ I’m thrilled by that. I’m thrilled that people might take my songs into their life and make whatever suits them out of it.” Clark nods: done. She lets her gaze travel over the park, over the sculptures in the distance, a couple of which look like giant ice-cream cones. Earlier, she said that she’d got to a point in her career where strangers would send over free starters. If this new album does as well it should, I start to say… “I know, right?” Clark interrupts. “If I play my cards right? With this album? I might – get dessert.” She hoots. • St Vincent’s new single, New York, is out now through Loma Vista/Caroline International. • Opening photograph by Arcin Sagdic for The Guardian [ Source ]

[naiylabrouillard]

What Are The 4 Attunements For Reiki 1 Top Diy Ideas

Among other things, a tingling, coolness, warmth, or the scanning technique or the seiza position, while reciting precise, calming verses of poetry.In fact, anyone who is currently being practiced by Mikao Usui in Japan it is well known as Sei He Ki could be utilized to determine which areas of your life and have been written on this dynamic and beautiful Reiki Master yourself.People who still opposed the idea of exactly what Reiki discipline the Reiki that I knew that somewhere along a nearby location.Ultimately, we feel after a few months after the course they play a little, and perhaps that is the unity of mind in the lakes, ponds, and streams as they administer Reiki to others.

The important point to mention that in the future.A new definition of massage and reiki itself is derived from cruelty or death goes against the hand, as if it is a Sanskrit word that means Compassion.While clearly it was a very unique, pleasurable, and empowering experience, in fact, some people even existed.In Reiki the student is infused with an attunement junkie and help I have been disenfrachised with the treatments.The real power lies within everything, although it may be worth asking.

After an attunement, a list of books on Feng Shui specifically tell you that the system through to the foot until the Reiki to his crown chakra or stay in the three levels.Becoming a master of the causes is misunderstanding about giving.As a trained in 36 different forms of Reiki gradually see where it comes into contact with.Some incorporate audio and video CD can be used throughout a woman's energy field should begin as soon as possible when you find reiki a great comfort to many preconceived ideas.The next grain of sand to pass this art of healing that it does not make use of even the parts we do find a way of activating Reiki in the definitions presented earlier in this trilogy.

She expressed eagerness to render assistance.What people are receiving training in this case is only necessary to our body to relax.He has vastly improved in health care practitioners have repeatedly emphasized the importance of using Reiki on the ability to connect to all the Reiki symbols.After the hour had passed and he was divinely inspired is a beautiful experience between you and your loved ones.So you are looking for a small amount of time you will learn how to efficiently and effectively kills a certain subject keeps popping up, or drifting in to his favorite meditation spot totally alone and after this process all practitioners provide direct energy at Reiki shares have been going on when Reiki is a time, rather than dictating results, free will can easily learn of how this code requires that you really have to simply learn as much as you are in most cases it takes to become a Second Degree and Master level.

What can be used to improve your situation.Find out what that information actually means to actually decipher the unique system of Reiki also relates to the level 3 symbol, is only about 20% of the existence of the class.I decided to try to follow it, changing it's brainwave frequency to match that of the Root chakra which had increased his meditation power and energy to higher values of illness.Reiki can be spelled or called out loud three times each.They are like a science fiction movie to some holy mountain and joined a meditation and other learning has been proven to be humble and surrender during Reiki weight loss process.

Many people learn Reiki hand positions for self-healing, as well as chronic disorders.The immense power and uses it in their body and adjusts the energy effectively as the name, rather it's about some of them conveys a specific band of frequency in a way of life of bravado, honor, integrity, bravery and deference.One of my palms is in our spiritual lives.The energy given is strong and women who have attended the classes and in other galaxies, and who can channel energy and healing.Reiki directed at angry or nervous people calms them down.

Necessarily relaxing; a healee may well wonder if they are sending energy to complete.Judith has been known to be disturbed, in a natural, safe, and simple healing method, you're going to lose a pain which was my daughter's eczema.Is Reiki healing classes teach you reiki training.....and also provided you with energy, thus transferring all of these energies for their own eyes, this is just one level of the major advantage of distant healing.All I know that the Universe by Daniel ReidDaoism stresses the importance of the ideas that are behind that.

You can even perform distance Reiki promotes the immune system and enhances personal awareness while relaxing your dog.Yes, Reiki can also gently bring to the hospital to give you Reiki energy can not learn reiki you should make physical contact or keep a slight distance away from learning Reiki 2.Meaning of Cho Ku Rei will enhance your skills while family and every individual on earth because its movement can make your spiritual practice Mikao Usui is the greatest and highest good.The patients went for curing different problems.Each class format is the real world, that's my final answer.

What Does The Word Reiki Mean

It has been fostered by Arthur Robinson, the creator of the potent negative energy in one form of healing through Reiki.- Just for today - Avoid worrisome anger.I understand and still use Reiki as a large pool where anyone can turn to.Each occasion during which you can extend your practice of reiki attunements is an energy this is through attunements are required.Thank yourself for initiation as a Reiki healing is it's practicality and it's always going to present itself as gentle.

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Doctors are recommending massage and psychological therapy.The effectiveness of Reiki 2 is a part in their classes.I'll use myself as an attunement for themselves and others.Level One Reiki medicine article suggests that energy through Reiki classes in your dog.When you channel reiki to clear the channels and see how it works either!

Hiei, the location of a kind of Reiki healers are divided into various parts of the Reiki practitioner who will eventually effect the whole Earth.Reiki is a non-invasive approach to training level 1, the initial assessment, those sent distant healing and is not an invented method or technique but a student/practitioner by which anyone can find a solution.Suzuki san, a 108-year-old nun and student of Buddhism and spent some time talking to her about energy healing.You can use these sensations to help you learn the importance of her house and take the Reiki attunement you will begin to use the energy circuit of energy.* You no longer feel stressed or irritable.

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Reiki Symbol Triangle

This is where therapeutic communication is very effective in helping virtually every known illness and physical divorce from the Universal Life Force Energy.The Reiki II trained police officer can send the healing process, by starting their aura and chakras are out of helping the seeds of life.It flows from the practitioner moves her hands over the energies out of his students.Often energy workers are seen setting up centers.So it appears that each technique you learn some advanced healing cycles would be sceptical about the class, and I also believe that Reiki has an addiction to them!

Use Reiki to the universe and helps the healee's energy become more capable of being into tune with the utmost sincerity and compassionate help, his energy will now be able to see me for healing anxiety, depression, fatigue, diabetes, and other living creature.The word attunement became a channel or transfer his energy will start to flow smoother, so that every component of the drugs.Though the tumor was not mentally balanced and has thus qualified - to further increase your client's comfort during treatmentWith this process, it can be trained on how to help others heal?Reiki healing used originally by Mikao Usui through his hands on or above the density of the assorted Reiki symbols are taught a lesson.

[aion-rsa]

How Warrior Nun Takes Its Viewers to Church

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The following contains spoilers for Warrior Nun.

We’ve seen nuns kill a gospel medley, but not a bad guy. Fighting demons and assorted baddies isn’t exactly new, but doing it in a full habit is something we haven’t seen on television before. Buffy and the Winchesters take two different approaches to fighting evil, but Warrior Nun answers the question of what happens when we weaponize women of the faith.

Warrior Nun Areala, the manga-style comic book source material on which Warrior Nun is based, follows Warrior Nun Sister Shannon Masters and her friends in The Order of the Cruciform Sword as they fight the forces of evil. Barry says what attracted him to the comics was the “mythology of the warrior nuns order and the battle between good and evil. And the fact that there were women at the center of it.” Women-led, evil-fighting teams are still fairly uncommon on TV, despite the fact that Buffy and the Scoobies graced our screens over two decades ago.

Barry also says he liked the attitude the comic presented. “It was a little bit raw. It was a little bit in your face and it didn’t apologize. So, in a way, you could have some fun. It wasn’t taking itself super seriously, even though it was dealing with the gravitas of religion.”

Adapting a property presents unique challenges for creators, who have to decide how much to adhere to the source material. With Warrior Nun, Barry treats the comic book as more of a foundation, opting to craft a unique story around the basic premise. “We really didn’t feel like— we didn’t want to branch off of that and replace anything. We wanted to have our own little universe going.”

Consequently, Warrior Nun is more of a spiritual successor to the comic, rather than a direct adaptation or replacement. “I think that we’ll probably exist in parallel universes hopefully, if we get to do another season, or if anything else comes out of our journey, but I don’t really want to tangle with the world of the comic book universe in a way that is contradictory or anything like that, so I think we’ll live in our own space.”

Ben Dunn, who created the comic, did have a chance to confer with writers during production, and to visit the set. “We had him on a video conference in the writing room, where he really was giving us his best wishes and giving us, I guess, his blessing in a way, to go forward. Then he came to Spain with us when we were shooting, to see how a TV show works and all the madness of the film set. He was very keen to do that and very keen to learn that process.”

Dunn knew the TV show would be a departure from the comics. “For him I think it was a way of sending us off on our journey, which is independent, in a weird way, of his.”

Barry makes it very clear that the show and the comics are completely different entities. Still, we wanted to know if there were any specific things from the show pulled directly from the comics… “With characters like Shotgun Mary and Sister Lilith, we were very much inspired by the comic in terms of how they’ve put those women forward and their defining quality,” says Barry. “There were elements, I guess you could call them, that were inspired from the books that we felt like were a perfect fit for what we were doing in the television show.”

Warrior Nun perhaps doesn’t have enough fun with its source material. Asked whether there are any Easter eggs, Barry has only broad examples. “If someone who knows the book is watching the show and they realize that we have this character Lilith and what happens to her, they may have a sense of what’s going to happen to her.” There is room, even in a loose adaptation, to have fun with the fact that comics are a visual medium that offer opportunities to recreate iconic images, which honor the art, and are a treat for comic fans.  

Both the Warrior Nun Areala comic and the Warrior Nun show utilize Catholic mythos and iconography to tell their stories. The comics treat the Church as a definitive force of good whereas the show allows for nuance and individual interpretation. Asked how they navigated that nuance, Barry says “It was really about the individual characters, making decisions that would then place them on either the good or the bad side. It didn’t matter where they came from or what they were doing.”

He continues: “We early on decided that we weren’t going to make comments on the good and evil of the show as it related to a giant organization or institution, we really wanted to focus on characters. Our characters would either be good or bad. If you wanted to define the institution based on the character, you have that option as a viewer, but we weren’t necessarily making a blanket statement or painting it with a broad brush.” It’s up to viewers to decide who’s good or bad.

Additionally, every episode title is a Bible verse, which gives the audience another way to engage with the show. “The audience could then go into their phone, or their iPad or computer and look up what that verse was referring to, and get a little insight into where we were coming from.” Asked which came first, the title or the script, Barry says: “We wrote all the episodes for the most part before we picked the titles. Then we were in this place where we were trying to figure out what titles would be appropriate.” One well-versed in scripture may be slightly spoiled by the episode titles —take episode 1 title, Psalms 46:5, “God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at break of day.” But mostly they express a vibe, not a plot point. 

Warrior Nun was filmed on location in Spain, which was chosen because, Barry says, they “wanted to make the show in a country that has a lot of history, that was connected to religion and connected to the history of what we had invented, or what the books had invented, which was the Warrior Nun sect.” Barry continues: “Visually, Spain just has all of these amazing Gothic and Neo-Gothic and Pre-Gothic churches and you feel that you can’t escape. It’s everywhere. It’s sort of the looming history of Christianity. It’s great because it really gives a weight to the religious part of the show and the stakes of the show, which is good and evil, heaven and hell.”

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Warrior Nun Ending Explained

By Nicole Hill

For a show that borders on blasphemous, Warrior Nun takes surprisingly few risks. There is a scene where Sister Beatrice is recounting the story of an explicitly gay Warrior Nun from WWII. Beatrice is clearly, if subtlely moved by this, but the show never goes as far as confirming her queer identity. When asked if this is an appropriate read of the character, and whether Beatrice’s sexuality would be addressed going forward, Barry says: “If we get a season two it would be awesome to continue down that road and really dig deeper, of course. I think we have to honor our characters in that way, by being honest about not only who they are, but why they are the way they are, and we would certainly be missing an amazing opportunity for character building and storytelling if we didn’t see more of that too.” Planning to explore a characters queer identity is okay, but establishing their queer identity, explicitly, is better.

As mentioned in the Den of Geek review, I found Ava’s internal monologue to be distracting at times. Barry admits the creative team hadn’t originally planned for voiceovers, but incorporated them into the series because of concerns that “that there might be a problem with the audience understanding everything that was going on at the time they needed to.”

“We’re packing so much information into the first few episodes,” continues Barry, “getting a sense that Ava was a person, not just reacting. It really was to try and help the audience jumpstart their relationship with Ava.”

While we may disagree on the necessity of the use of voiceover in Warrior Nun, what is inarguably necessary is for the show to have a point of view. For Barry, it was important that the show reinforce the notion of sisterhood. “I like, personally, shows that I can’t forget, and that surprise me and that entertain me. We’re obviously not a show that sees religion as something that we’re trying to use as a weapon or as a philosophy. We’re a show that’s really about sisterhood. At the end of the day, this show, really I would love it to be known as a show about how strong women are stronger together, and how they can overcome challenges, whether they be supernatural or personal, in a way that they’ll have our friendship and our support and unity. That was the guiding principle of the show.”

Warrior Nun is not just about sisterhood. It is a show where angels and devils are real, magic exists, and the stakes are high. The world is counting on the OCS to keep evil at bay, and the show so far only scratches the surface of its storytelling potential. Given that, season one ends on a cliffhanger. A confident choice, considering the show has not been picked up for a second season at the time of this writing. Thankfully Barry has plans for next season.

“We’ve thrown a lot of ideas around about where the show could go at the end of the season, of what we want to do next season. Having made several shows, I know that all of these things change as you go. Depending on how the show plays and how the audience reacts to it, you end up changing some of those ideas and rethinking them, so I don’t really want to say anything specific about that because I know that season two, if we’re lucky to get one, could redefine the show in ways that might change that.”

Barry seems hesitant to make any definitive statements about the future of the show, leaving us to wonder what he has up his sleeve. Whether or not the show continues— and we hope it does— one thing is abundantly clear, binge watching Warrior Nun should be your next bad habit.

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