#stop holding ancient characters by modern standards

[sonik-kun]

Reminder that WWX did use a homophobic slur (cutsleeve) before he found out he was, in fact, a "cutsleeve" himself.

I'd also argue that him taking advantage of MXY's body and the rumours associated with him by acting as a "stereotypical gay" to get out of situations was a form of homophobia in itself.

He assumed this was how crazy, gay people act - like sexual deviants. He used that stereotype on top of the rumours about MXY just to get out of sticky situations and avoid being captured.

Whilst this isn't aggressive homophobia, nor would I consider him a raging homophobe myself, he still took advantage of the world view he was raised in, which, in modern terms, was problematic in itself.

Think the harmful, stereotypical, predatory gay trope in anime that a lot of anime fans have taken issue with. That's the stereotype WWX was trying to perpetuate and brush off as a silly joke which is bordering that harmful stereotype territory mentioned above. And yet I don't see the moral "holier than thou" crowd talking about that in their analysis on "fictional characters in an ancient Chinese setting."

(Note before I get jumped on: I don't think WWX was being cruel or malicious when he did this. Nor do I think he purposely intended to sully poor MXY's image further. And I ofc don't think that WWX is a terrible person for doing so either. The guy was desperate and needed to pull tricks to avoid capture. But that still doesn't make things right by modern standards. Even if said stereotype was used to goad a load of "homophobes." Would also like to add that even after coming out, WWX didn't really challenge the societal standard or think ill of anyone who thought like that. It's not like he toured the CW with LWJ, promoting gay rights. He'd be very extraordinary for doing that and brave, too. But he didn't. Instead, he just got up to sexy times with his husband daily and lazed about living the good life. Which is valid of him, tbh, giving the shit he went through. But my point still stands. The social norm persists.)

Also, bare in mind, WWX was heavily in denial about his own sexuality at first and struggled to come to terms with it in the beginning due to the societal norms back then, anyway.

Homophobia was the norm. Stop denying that when you know most of the characters found it bizarre.

By their standards being gay was, unfortunate as it is, unusual and to them, perhaps even immoral in its own right.

By modern standards, we know now that it is wrong. And the moral consensus is that being gay is normal and should not be vilified (even then, not all cultures today have reached that consensus and LGBT rights still have a long way to go).

With this in mind and the notion of what morality meant to people back then, you mustn't hold the characters to modern standards because that was simply the world view. What was "right" back then.

You cannot say with certainty that you wouldn't be homophobic back then, in a world where people called it strange and immoral. As much as I'd like to believe that I would be one of the few who find it wrong to treat gay people poorly, most of us probably would find homosexuality strange because that was the moral consensus of that time. As such, it is unfair to hold characters like JC, JL, and JGY to modern standards for that reason. That's the point we've all been trying to make here.

(Even then, JC and JL both watched as WWX left with his hubby into the sunset and didn't speak illy of their relationship again, nor consider them social outcasts like the Jins and Mos treated MXY. It's almost as if people can change their world views entirely (or to some extent) after things become normalised. Hmm. 🧐

Furthermore, MXTX herself said that JC wasn't a bad person. She wouldn't say that if he's the "aggressive homophobe, incapable of change" like you all seem to imply he is.)

You all make this point about historical context when us JC fans criticise WWX for his clear breach of bodily autonomy with the core transfer and his own war crimes. You should apply that logic to the period typical homophobia too. Because as I have said before, you cannot say for certain that the characters would be homophobic had this taken place in a society where being gay was the norm whilst homophobia was frowned upon. Let's use some logic and context when talking about characters from an ancient time period, shall we?

[wallwriterstuff]

Chalk Lines || Alec Volturi x Reader ||

Summary: Alec has met his mate, but he isn’t quite sure he wants one. With a few revelations from Marcus and the discovery of a hidden talent, Alec finds that having a mate isn’t actually all that bad. 

Warnings: Implied homelessness, a brief mention of your standard Volturi violence 

Words: 3427 

The witch twins had quite the reputation and none of the adjectives used to describe them were necessarily pretty.

Deadly.

Cruel.

Sadistic.

Terrifying.

It was a useful reputation given their occupation, but it wasn’t necessarily a true reflection of either twin’s character. Though she may have been hot-headed and quick to torture her adversaries, Jane became far less terrifying when one knew about her penchant for collecting coins; she’d sworn both Demetri and Felix to secrecy when the pair had stumbled across the tiered briefcases in her room, specially designed to hold centuries worth of different coins in varying types and shapes. Alec on the other hand was considered less likely to explode with rage but seen as the quiet and calculating type, yet if anyone saw him squirreled away in Volterra’s library, nose glued to the pages of a book as it so often was, the jagged edges of his cold silence suddenly became a lot softer and he looked far less threatening.

Sadly, people rarely looked beyond the surface in this modern world. It was for that very reason that Alec had not seen his mate in the two weeks since you’d been brought to Volterra. It had been pure coincidence that as they tracked the abnormally large nomadic coven, they’d stumbled right through the alleyway the young human was huddled in. Alec had been locked in place the moment he set eyes on you, your tear stained cheeks turning his muscles rigid until the others had been forced to stop with him. You were about the same age as he had been when he was turned he thought, which only made it all the stranger that the young human would be alone in a filthy alleyway so late at night. He couldn’t just leave you, not when he could smell the oncoming storm and all you had was a flimsy looking jacket and a leather-bound book to your name. Of course, they also couldn’t have just left the hunt, not when those nomads had drawn too much attention already.

The human hadn’t particularly appreciated being forcibly removed from their alleyway to witness the execution of five vampires, or maybe it was the fact said vampires tried to kill you as Alec and the others flitted about tearing them limb from limb? Either way the violent spectacle had not been the best introduction to the supernatural world, and the fear in your eyes whenever you saw Alec, Demetri, Felix or Jane ever since that moment was something that irked Alec more than he let on. He didn’t even necessarily want a mate, so the instinctual upset he felt at your obvious distress had only made his irritation worse the longer the situation dragged on for. Caius was getting impatient to, insisting the little human be turned and the threat to their secrecy you represented eliminated. Aro was of a different opinion, wanting you to have some time to adjust to your new life in Italy and to start feeling comfortable amongst the Coven members, lest you be thrown into a heightened state of anxiety and terror when you were turned.

Alec hadn’t even seen the damn human he had being trying to avoid and track down in equal measure. If Caius’s ranting hadn’t been enough to drive him mad Jane had been giving him an earful about making himself miserable by ignoring you. He knew he was being a little petulant, but the truth was he was forever frozen at 13 (maybe 14, he wasn’t too sure since the date wasn’t kept as religiously in the medieval era and his human memory was blotchy at best) and didn’t want to be eternally bound to a lover. It was in the library, his eyes rereading the same page he’d been stuck on for the last twenty minutes, that Marcus found him. He greeted his master with a gentle inclination of his head, mildly surprised when the older man glided to the opposite end of the sofa he sat on and sank down into the leather.

“Haven’t you read that one before?” Marcus asked. His voice was no more than a breath of air, a sigh carried on a gentle breeze. He was not known for being loud or brash. Alec glanced at him, not surprised to find his master staring straight ahead with the same mournful expression he always held. Well, it was Didyme’s portrait that hung above the fireplace after all, she had loved reading to.

“I have read everything in here at least five times over.” Alec pointed out, bringing the ghost of a smile to Marcus’s lips. It wasn’t necessarily unusual for Marcus to join him in the library, though it was far more common for their evenings to spent in silence since he wasn’t the best conversationalist. That was okay though, since Alec wasn’t particular keen on conversation either, preferring the quiet and the calm it brought. The last moments of his life were spent full of screaming and shouting and he found himself rather adverse to loud noise now.

“I wonder, has your mate seen this library?” he mused. Alec frowned slightly, the familiar irritation bubbling within him at the mention of his mate. Maybe he didn’t want to share something with someone who clearly wasn’t keen on sharing even a sliver of their time with him, had no one though of that?

“I would not know.” He replied, though he couldn’t quite keep his voice even. Marcus hummed slightly under his breath, his eyes never once leaving the painting across from him. Alec felt the usual sympathy that bubbled within him when Marcus looked like this, when it was clear his coven and his duty were all he had left but all he wanted was to be ash on the wind, finally free. Marcus called his name softly, forcing Alec to turn his attention from his book (that he was no further through than he had been when he started reading almost two hours ago) and look back at the ancient one.

“I do not think they want a mate either.” He said, surprising him. Alec thought he had hidden it rather well, but he should have known that Marcus would see. He read relationships, he saw the bonds that formed between people and no doubt had acknowledge how weak the one Alec shared with his so called mate must have been. Hell, he was surprised it hadn’t withered and died yet.

“They…don’t?” he questioned. Marcus shook his head.

“Relationships look different, for everyone. Romantic threads tend to be a different colour, yours…yours resembles something more akin to friendship.” He informed him. Alec’s brows tugged down into a frown.

“Mates don’t have to be romantically involved?” he questioned. Marcus chuckled.

“No, platonic relationships between mates are more common than you think. Perhaps there ought to be another name for these kinds of mates, but I believe, what yours would like more than anything else, is a friend.” His voice was calming to the turbulent thoughts in his head, and Alec found himself nodding along as if part of him had known that all along. The problem was, Alec wasn’t exactly sure how to go about making friends either. He didn’t have all that many, and he supposed that you didn’t have all that many either given the state he’d found you in. Looking back on it, he couldn’t honestly say he found that he was as curious as a mate should be. The mates he knew were all romantically involved and completely devoted to everything about their other half, yet he’d never really felt that intense sort of pull towards them. There was a pull there for sure but…it wasn’t strong.

“I’m not sure how to be a good friend.” He admitted quietly, setting his book aside.

“Sometimes souls are joined together not because they are the missing other half, but simply because the halves that already exist compliment each other so well.” Marcus said, his eyes turning back towards Didyme’s portrait. Alec followed his gaze briefly, finding himself a lot calmer somehow when he thought of his mate as something other than a life partner. Now he wasn’t caught up in the worry of expectations, he felt guilt start to creep in. His mate had been left alone in an unfamiliar castle after a terrifying experience, and he had done little to soothe them since their arrival. He sighed quietly, pushed to his feet, and bid his master a quiet farewell before heading to Demetri’s room. What was he even supposed to do when he found you? What was he supposed to say? What could make up for a fortnight of ignorance on his part?

“Alec, are you planning on knocking or will you continue to dwindle away the evening hours by standing like an idiot at my door?” Demetri wondered, opening it just enough to lean his shoulder against the wooden frame. His face was smug, like he knew already what he was here for. Alec didn’t give him the satisfaction.

“Do not waste my time and less of it shall dwindle away, then.” He retorted, face unchanging. Demetri cocked his head, his smirk widening slightly as the silence settled between them. For those who knew Demetri well, it was easy to tell when he was using his gift. It was practically instinctual for him at this point but Alec saw the brief lapse of his attention, his eyes shifting from sharp and keen to vacant as he reached for your tenor, not seeing the hallway anymore but a variety of what he had described as colourful cords once.

“Same place they’ve been the past few weeks.” He said finally, his smile falling slightly, “One floor up right at the end of the corridor above us.” Alec frowned slightly. That corridor was abandoned, what was his mate doing there? With a slight nod of appreciation to Demetri, Alec turned on his heel and moved swiftly down the corridor towards the stairs leading upward. A lot of the upper floor had been destroyed in Marcus’s rage after he had lost Didyme. He had torn through most of the castle in his rage, rumour had it, but some of it had simply never been restored. Alec slowed his pace, eyes cutting through the gloom. The ripped tapestries and the leaves and dust that had blown in from broken windows left the whole place feeling rather eerie. He wondered briefly how his fragile mate could stand to be in such a place. Didn’t humans prefer lighter, warmer places? Then again, you had been left in an alleyway for some bizarre reason and Alec had know idea how long you’d been there.

A faint glow came from the room at the end of the corridor, the soft yellow light of a lamp he realised, as he moved closer. He could hear a gentle humming to, the melody building to the lyrics of a song he didn’t recognise drifting through the quiet toward him. He paused in the doorway, taking a moment to stare in awe. Unbeknownst to them, you had turned this abandoned room into your own personal haven, away from the vampires and the rest of the world. The floors were swept clean, the ivy that was creeping through a few other windows stripped away and cut back. The tapestries were removed from the walls and artfully ripped to create overlapping, mismatched pieces for an abstract, faded carpet in one corner. The shelves had been cleaned and polished, Alec recognising some of the books as those that had been provided in your room by them, but there was also a myriad of art supplies he knew hadn’t been. Currently, some of the tapestry was being used to soften the stone beneath your knees as you continued to add to a small, colourful piece in the corner of the curved wall.

It took him a moment to realise you were holding chalks, blending the light and dark to make varying shades for grass. One half of the large expanse of wall opposite the window was dark, in shades of grey and black and white. The one thing that did stand out was vibrant red of a figures eyes, and as Alec looked closer he realised that the blended figures were cloaked, depicting exactly what his mate had seen the night they met. The other half was still taking shape but was clearly supposed to be a brighter image.

“You have incredible talent.” He complimented. You jumped at the sound of his voice, heart jolting and speeding up in your chest as you dropped the chalk. With wide eyes, you stared back at Alec before scrambling to your feet, wiping chalky hands on the cloth protruding from the pocket of your jeans. Swallowing nervously, you glance back at your artwork before dropping your eyes to the floor, scuffing the toe of your shoe against the tapestry carpet. Alec thought you looked quite small like that, like you were embarrassed almost or expecting him to berate you, to laugh, or worse.  

“Thanks.” You mumbled. Alec hadn’t heard your voice sound like this before, the soft tones soothing and mellow, much different to the harsh sounds of screaming the night you’d met.

“May I come in?” he asked. He felt like he was intruding. You had set up plenty of lamps about and cushions on the carpet to make a small seating area, this was their space, not his. Slowly, his mate nodded, and Alec looked back at the chalk art on the wall once more.

“I…can rub it away.” You said, sounding uncertain. Alec immediately shook his head.

“Please don’t. I meant what I said, you have talent.” He lifted his hand without thinking, placing his index finger on a section of white and rubbing softly. Running his thumb over his finger, he marvelled at the slippery feel of the chalk dust between his fingers. “All of this is chalk?” he asked, the surprise in his voice obvious. He had never used chalk before as a medium. You nodded your head, pointing to the bucket of chalks at your feet, they were small and worked to stubs in some cases, but you clearly had made do.

“Did you never draw on the pavement with chalk as a kid?” you asked him. Alec’s lips twitched upward, a hint of mischief glinting in his eyes.

“When I was child, we barely had roads.” He answered. He heard your heartbeat falter a little in your chest, the shock registering on your face. Now he took the time to look you over, he realised you looked quite calm here in your little space. You clearly felt at ease here, your (Y/E/C) eyes soft and open for him to read. Despite that, you were clearly still a little wary of him to, unsure of what to say, what his intentions were in coming here. “How long have you been drawing?” he asked, hating the way the silence grew so easily between you both. You shrugged a shoulder, moving towards your little cushion area and settling yourself cross-legged on the floor, looking up at him curiously. Alec folded his arms, remaining standing. Truthfully, he’d be no more comfortable on the floor than he would be standing, but he also didn’t want to invade your space when you were quite obviously sizing him up.

It was odd to feel like he was intruding in his own home.

“A while, my Mom taught me.” You answered. It was no more and no less than he had asked for. Alec nodded along, uncertain what to say next. How did people make friends? Drawing your knees up to your chest, you dropped your chin on top of your legs, looking up at him. Come to think of it, you hadn’t taken your eyes off of him yet. Alec let his eyes wander once more, taking in the books and supplies scattered about.

“You need some new chalk.” He noted. Maybe he could do something about your passion to try and gain your trust a bit?

“I can make do.” You answered immediately. Alec frowned.

“You’ve barely any left.” He retorted stubbornly. You shrugged at him again, like you didn’t really care much either way. “Well, we can go out tomorrow and get more maybe…or some new books for your shelf, if you like.” He offered. You tilted your head, regarding him like you were watching an interesting experiment through a microscope.

“You don’t have to.” You murmured, looking mildly bewildered by him. Alec got the impression not many people offered to do nice things for you.

“You’ve yet to see the city. I think that should change.” He said, and with a time to pick you up at your room tomorrow he left you be. He wasn’t even half-way down the corridor when he heard the scraping of chalk on the stone once more. Alec wasn’t honestly prepared for just how much time it took. He had thought you had been quite calm and comfortable with him that night he first went to you, but it was weeks before you held a fluent conversation with him, letting him freely know your thoughts without being prompted by questions, some of which you wouldn’t answer. You were clearly not used to trusting others, but over the weeks Alec spent learning to draw from you, reading with you, helping you further decorate your nook of the castle, he couldn’t deny you had developed a strong friendship. He felt complete, calm, happy even. Marcus had been right. Fate had drawn the two of you together not because you were meant to be his missing piece, but rather you were meant to smooth over the cracks and heal one another so that when the person who was meant to fill the gap came along, they got something a little less broken than before.

“Alec? I don’t think I ever said thank you, did I?” you asked, four centuries later while overlooking the Parisian skyline. You were on a mission to eradicate an idiotic nomad with a terrible habit of torturing humans, something Felix was very upset he was missing out on. Alec looked at you with a raised eyebrow.

“Thank you for what?” he questioned. You grinned at him.

“For choosing this little sewer rat to be your best friend.” You poked and prodded his side as you spoke, making him squirm slightly as he tried to bat your hands away. His serious expression faltered, melting into a carefree smile before he laughed and snatched you up, threatening to drop you over the edge. It would have been a lot less terrifying if you weren’t on one of the highest beams the Eiffel Tower had to offer.

“You want to keep trying your luck? Well? Do you?” he demanded, grinning wildly as you squealed, fingers curled tight into his arms. Alec reeled you back in, settling you on the beam beside him so you could go back to swinging your legs back and forth. For a moment the sound of your laughter fading into the night was allowed to settle, drifting away on the breeze as the silence grew between you. It was then Alec spoke. “You don’t have to thank me. I think I did it as much for me as I did for you.” He confessed. He could feel your eyes burning holes in the side of his face and risked a glance sideways, seeing your understanding expression. You knew all of his past, the same way he knew yours. You had both healed each other from a considerable amount of trauma.

“Well then…here’s to us.” You declared, standing to grip the metal beam behind you and you leaned out, chin up high and free hand on your hip in a ridiculous, ostentatious pose. You looked oddly like you were trying to model for a statue pose. Alec snorted.

“I am not doing that.” He said.

“What? No! Come on! You can’t leave me hanging like this!” you protested. Alec stood, shaking his head and starting to climb down.

“Watch me.”

“No!”

“Goodbye, Y/N.”

“Best friends don’t let each other do stupid things alone!”

“You are never alone, I just prefer to watch your stupidity from the side-lines so I can be as affiliated with it as little as possible.”

“I’ll race you then!”

“Y/N don’t you dare jump off of the top of the Eiffel tower! Even we’re not that indestructible.”

“You ruin all my fun.”

[translations-by-aiimee]

Dig a Grave to Dig Out a Ghost - Chapter 26

Original Title: 挖坟挖出鬼

Genres: Drama, Horror, Mystery, Supernatural, Yaoi

This translation is based on multiple MTLs and my own limited knowledge of Chinese characters. If I have made any egregious mistakes, please let me know.

Chapter Index

Chapter 26 - Photograph

From the South Third Ring Road overpass, turn right and cross a small road covered by empress trees to reach Shenjiayuan.

The fragments of low-rise buildings and the chaotic street stalls on both sides of the street were standoffish in such a modern city. However, this was one of the country's famous antique marketplaces, and tens of thousands of people came here every day with lots of money to spend, risking being baked by the sun and getting heatstroke by lingering around each of the stalls, hoping to find one or two hidden treasures stashed away in a corner somewhere. It was an industry gaining some traction. There were many speculators, collectors, tourists, calligraphers, painters, and even gamblers among them. They firmly believe that a city thousands of years old hid unknown wealth somewhere. It was this mentality that gave them a similar look; intoxicated and wild-eyed with a long outstretched tongue, drooling over the crude high antique imitations on the stalls.

This was the place where Lin Yan made countless memories when he was a teenager. The middle school he went to was nearby. After school, he often came here alone with his schoolbag on his back. Back then, there weren't as many people. There was a very polluted river nearby that hadn't been turned into a landfill yet. The air was always filled with the smell of stinky salted fish. The vendors who set up stalls hadn't yet learned to casually laze about while sneaking glances at the faces of customers to judge how much money they could cheat out of them.

The old days were like rolls of yellowed newspapers. A young man in a light blue school uniform walked through it, exchanging his pocket money for a piece of colored glaze from the late Qing Dynasty. He squatted in front of a stall to sift through the options. The old man at the stall was smoking a cigarette while telling the story of Liulichang in the late Qing Dynasty. Lin Yan didn't know why he was only interested in street stalls when kids his age were saving up to buy posters of celebrities. Just like when they were gushing over the Belgian chocolates their relatives brought home, he was still obsessed for years with the pot full of honey hard candy the old lady in front of the school had.

The wood, rice paper, and the dusty rusticity of the old objects held a taste of time, and teenage Lin Yan couldn't help but be immersed in it. Like a lone fish in the stream.

The sun was shining on the ground at 3 o'clock that afternoon. Lin Yan carried a bulging bag in his left hand and a cup of roasted sencha milk tea in his right. He paced slowly in the crowd, the grass green V-neck T-shirt and cotton calf-length pants standing out. He didn't know why antique hunters liked to wear black, the dust on their clothes making them look like they had just crawled out of the ground.

"Here, it's weirdly hot. Do you want a sip?" Lin Yan shook the milk tea, the ice cube hitting the wall of the cup with a soft thud. Onlookers thought he was talking to the air when actually there was an invisible person next to him helping take off some of the weight of the bag. That mean, even though Lin Yan was carrying a lot of things, it didn't take much effort.

Xiao Yu lowered his head and took a sip where Lin Yan had touched. He bit on the straw a few times and turned his head.

Lin Yan wanted to laugh a little, and brought the cup back to the corner of his mouth.

A-Yan said that Xiao Yu might remember more following him around, so Lin Yan took him to the antique market after breakfast, hoping that something from his own time period might bring something back. Who would've guessed that, after going through all these stalls, lots of purchases were made but there was no progress with the ghost's memory. Lin Yan glanced at the bag in his hand. It was stuffed with clothes bought from a well-known Hanfu store in Shenjiayuan. They were well-made and expensive. Most people only bought them to complete a Hanfu set for their collection. For Lin Yan to buy these kinds of clothes on a daily errand, that was really a rare sight. Even the clerk couldn't help but do a double take.

Xiao Yu didn't understand the time they were currently living in, so he stood his ground and refused to adapt his style to the times. Lin Yan rolled his eyes and glared at him bitterly. He thought, you're the boss here making me throw away my money while I'm just your servant who follows behind you and pays.

Right after they left one store, before he could recover from the purchase, Xiao Yu suddenly stopped when he passed a woodworking shop. Lin Yan looked at the store’s gorgeous decorations and pieces of pearwood and red sandalwood furniture, whining that he really couldn't afford this stuff. Xiao Yu ignored him and dragged him inside. Thirty minutes later, Lin Yan swiped his card to check out under the watchful eye of the clerk and bought a beautiful Tongzhi wood guqin.

"Oh great ancestor, what more do you want?" Lin Yan tucked the order slip from the woodworking shop into his pocket and glared daggers at Xiao Yu.

Xiao Yu shook his head nonchalantly.

There were more people on the street. Some of them didn't know the treasures that they had found, and they couldn't hide their excitement, sneaking a peek at what they have just bought. Some of them had grim faces, looking like they had been ripped off. There were also groups of foreign tourists wearing Lei Feng hats gathered at the roadside to buy shadow puppets. Occasionally, they turned around and curiously look at the antique city, which was built in the traditional Chinese-style.

In the market area to the south, there were large ancient buildings imitating Ming and Qing style architecture. The bustling narrow street seemed like scene straight out of the Water Margin. The wooden window on the second floor were pushed up, supported by a short stick. Looking up, he could see customers sipping tea. The shopkeeper was a short man, busily carrying a large teapot back and forth.

The narrow street lead to a large emerald-green stall covered with plastic tarps to offer shade from the sun. Lin Yan and Xiao Yu walked under the shadow of the tarps when they heard a familiar voice yelling loudly.

"Look at how green the colour is and how good the water head* is! You won't be able to find another one at this price anywhere in Shenjiayuan!" The peddler selling jade pieces had a round belly, one foot on the stool, holding up a transparent fortune bracelet, spittle flying everywhere. The plainly dressed middle-aged woman in front of the stall looked hesitant. She took the bracelet and took another look at it.

*(T/N: Water head [水头] refers to how light shines through jade. Kind of like how the light would look if it were shining through water. There's a list of transparencies if you want to look at how jade is graded, but basically the best jade has a vivid colour with even transparency across the whole piece.)

"It's too expensive, lower the price a bit." The woman said sincerely.

"It's so green, so transparent, I can't go any lower. Miss, if you want a lower price, it'll affect my livelihood. Don't waste my time." The peddler grabbed the bracelet, his eyes bulging.

"I wanted to buy it for my daughter as a birthday gift. It's too expensive. It'd be a pity if she dropped it. Give me the lowest you can go."

"Here." The peddler rolled his eyes. He took out his calculator, punched in a few numbers, and showed it to the woman in front of him, "Is this all right? I can't go any lower!"

Lin Yan couldn't help but lean over and glance at the numbers on the screen. He let out a laugh.

The peddler squinted at him.

Lin Yan shook his head. He took the bracelet and said to the woman: "Don't buy this, he's fooling you."

"Hey, hey, what are you trying to say? I'm running an honest business here. If you don't believe me, go around and ask. . ."

Lin Yan smirked. He put the roasted sencha tea cup on the stall and held the bracelet at a different angle. The curved surface reflected the light from the plastic roof. He said to the woman buying the bracelet: "Look at the blurred edges of the reflection. If you look closely, you can see that there are very fine meshes on the surface." Lin Yan raised the bracelet to let the light through. "There is purple fluorescence inside, indicating that the reason this bracelet is so transparent because of acid washing and a glue filling."

"Also, notice how the green is only sitting on the surface and doesn't reach the middle. That means it was dyed after the fact. This thing is worth one or two hundred yuan. Don't buy it."

The peddler's nose and eyes scrunched up. At first glance, they looked like a dried walnut.

"Oh." The middle-aged woman hurriedly stuffed an envelope containing the money back into her bag, repeatedly thanking Lin Yan.

When she left, the peddler huffed. Pissed, he turned his head away, not looking at Lin Yan. Even his swollen belly seemed to be flatter than before.

"What else should I do when I notice that someone with money on the street?"

Lin Yan roughly flicked the peddler's forehead: "Everyone here has money. It's embarrassing to lie like this, there's no skill in it."

Several surrounding stalls burst out laughing. The peddler rolled his eyes back to normal. He grabbed Lin Yan’s milk tea and poured a few mouthfuls out of the plastic lid. He muttered while he crunched on the ice cubes: “I don't fool people in this business. It's not my fault their eyesight is poor. No refunds is the standard."

This much was true. Antique jade sales rely on good eyesight. Figuring out which store has more genuine products than fake depends on the customer. They can't return them either so the shop doesn't have to admit they were fakes. Lin Yan clicked his tongue: "These people don't know what to look for. You're just trying to make your father think you're good at this job."

The peddler rolled his eyes, knowing that he was in a bad position and couldn't say anything.

Lin Yan had been a frequent visitor to this antique market since he was a child. Since choosing his major in university, he preferred to come to the small stalls to practice his appraisal skills when he had nothing else to do. See what was selling for a high price but was bought for a low price. He was also kind and helped others pick out the best items, so many peddlers knew him. For example, Lin Yan first met this guy's father, a very honest old man. He even took out the receipt with the price he paid for it when he bargained with customers. Unfortunately, when Lin Yan graduated from high school, the old man fell ill and his son took over the business. and this was the leeching peddler in from of him.

Lin Yan wasn't polite with him. When he walked around the stall, he took out a copper box from under the table. Inside were piles of Ming and Qing paperweights. These objects were all family heirlooms that the original stall owner received from nearby residents’ homes when he was young. Lin Yan had just remembered this box of objects then dragged Xiao Yu over to look at them. Brass mirrors, jade bracelets, thumb rings, snuff boxes, tobacco pipes; Xiao Yu looked over them all and just shook his head. Lin Yan threw the last piece back into the box and patted the dust on his clothes, a little frustrated.

"That box has been there for ages and no one's ever touched it. What are you looking at it for?" The peddler kept squinting at him and was too curious not to ask about it.

"Looking for Ming Dynasty artifacts for my classes." Lin Yan actually didn't know what he was looking for. He moved on and put the box back.

"Ming Dynasty?" The peddler didn't care about the bracelet anymore. "Old man Liu has lots stashed away."

"No, no, no. . ." Lin Yan hurriedly refused, but he thought about it and sighed, "Forget it. I've been shopping all day and haven't gone there. I'll give it a try."

"Don't say the wrong thing. Good luck." The peddler made a face.

The shop run by old man Liu was quite famous in Shenjiayuan. Not just because he was the only antique peddler to sell only sell antique pictures, but also because he was notoriously grumpy. Every day, he'd leave the shop and hang up his old camera in the park to make money. Whenever he went to the shop to buy something, the owner was never there. Walking down the street, he ran into him wearing an old Mao suit, cursing and waving around. His thin mantis-like face was slanted and a pair of glasses rested on his nose at an angle. Sometimes the lens' were shattered like cobwebs, and sometimes the lens' weren't there at all.

His shop sells old photographs of the old city, hung densely from the floor to the ceiling. Because old photographs were difficult to reprint, they were also very expensive. The sub districts of Qianmen, Dashilan, old gardens in the setting sun in 1872, passers-by in long gowns with thin faces and numb eyes. The TV station came to interview him, but only half the program was filmed. From photographers to reporters, old man Liu chewed them all out without exception. The interview never went anywhere, and the shop still didn't have any business. The old man still walked around outside with his camera everyday.

The shop was in the northwest corner of Shenjiayuan and its location was considered unlucky. There was a symbol meant to ward off evil spirits designed by a famous Feng Shui master hung on the door. Xiao Yu couldn't enter and stood at the door waiting for Lin Yan.

Lin Yan looked at the ominous storefront. For the first time, he felt reluctant to part with Xiao Yu.

Unsurprisingly, Old Man Liu wasn't in the shop. A seven or eight-year-old girl in a red jacket was facing away from him. She was pointing at a photo on the wall and muttering something. When she heard someone enter the door, she turned back and grinned at Lin Yan.

Lin Yan was a little surprised. This little girl was his neighbor. Although he didn’t know where she lived, he often saw her running around in the yard downstairs in a dirty red dress. Sometimes when Lin Yan went out to buy dinner at night, he saw her playing with cats in the yard, no one coming to bring her home. He hadn't seen her often in the past month and he didn't expect to see her here.

Was it possible she was related to that strange old man? No wonder no one cared about her playing outside everyday, Lin Yan thought.

"Why are you here by yourself?" Lin Yan knelt down and asked her in a soft voice.

The little girl was lean, her eyes staring straight at Lin Yan, grinning silently. Lin Yan suddenly felt that the little girl’s smile probably made people feel uncomfortable. It didn’t seem right to call it a smile, but just a casual grin. The corners of her mouth were upturned but her eyes were dull. Wearing such an old jacket in summer, she seemed to be left behind by the times, like the rest of the photos in the room.

Lin Yan hesitated on whether he leave and wait outside for the strange old man.

"What the hell you XX, I XXXX. . ." Lin Yan was distracted, and suddenly there was a thud. Old man Liu hugging his broken camera fell through the front door. He fell on all fours in an extremely embarrassed posture, landing on the only part of the floor that had sunlight hitting it.

"A-Are you okay?" Lin Yan rushed over to help. Unexpectedly, the old man gave him a sour look. He rolled over and sat on the ground, patting the dirt on his knees, and continued his tirade of curses towards the door relentlessly. Lin Yan stood awkwardly off to the side, neither leaving nor staying.

The old man felt he had cursed enough. He grunted and got to his feet. When he turned his head and saw Lin Yan, his eyes widened like he had discovered a whole new world, and said with a quacking voice: "What are you doing here?"

"I came to buy something." Lin Yan didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Shouldn't that be the first thing the shop owner thinks of when he sees a customer in the store?

"Leave. What is there to buy? Young people are clueless." The old man held his stern gaze and walked around behind the counter, irritated: "Why are you still standing there? You have no business being here!"

Lin Yan didn't want to talk nonsense with the old man, so he pat his back and turned to leave.

"Hey! Wait!" The old man yelled. Lin Yan had just reached the door and was so frightened by the voice that he came to a halt.

"You look good, I'll take a picture of you." The old man suddenly walked out from behind the counter with his camera in hand. He grabbed Lin Yan by the collar and pulled him into the room. After couple of pushes, he stood beside the little girl. He squatted down involuntarily, and the shutter sounded with a few clicks. The old man's furrowed face appeared from behind the camera and he smacked his lips with satisfaction.

After the shutter, several photos appeared from the top of the camera. The old man took one in his hand and glanced at it. He pulled one out and shoved it at Lin Yan: "You take it."

Lin Yan was shown the strength of this old man. He turned his face angrily, trying to walk out, rubbing his shoulder: "I don't want to."

"Take it!" The old man yelled in Lin Yan's ear, making his ears ring.

Lin Yan took it and glanced speechlessly. He saw that in the black-and-white picture he stood like a wooden pole, staring expressionlessly at the wall. The background was dimmed, and the entire thing looked like a horror picture people would share online.

What's wrong with. . .

Lin Yan eyes widened and a nerve in his head popped. He couldn't help taking a step back, looking at himself in the photo. When he looked at the spot where he was standing when the picture was taken, it felt like a bucket of ice water was poured over his head.

The little girl who took the picture with him just now wasn't in the photo. He was the only person in the black and white background straight out of a horror movie.

Lin Yan hesitantly looked up. The girl in red was standing where he stood, wearing an out-of-date ragged jacket, grinning at him biting her fingernail.

"Hehe, hehe." The old man held up the camera to his crooked eyes and a piece of the lens fell to the ground. "Perfect, great picture."

Lin Yan crawled out of the house.

The sun was bitterly hot and the bustling street was swarming with people. Xiao Yu was standing casually by the doorway. Lin Yan couldn't say a word, swallowing hard. He rushed over and wrapped him up in a fierce hug.

[pynkhues]

Hi ! I just wanted to say that I love your writing and I wanted to ask how you go about doing research for all your au's. Thanks!

Hi! Thank you so much, anon! And what a fun question! I could talk about researching all day, haha. My undergraduate degree is actually in history too, so research is something that’s sort of fundamental to my education in a lot of ways. 

To talk about researching is kind of hard though, because while the steps are more or less the same, the approach is really different depending on what it is that I’m writing. For instance, the answer’s pretty different if I’m writing a modern day au where I can shorthand certain things because my readers know what I’m talking about vs an historical au where I really have to think pretty deeply about everything if I want to submerge a reader in a storyworld. 

So I thought it might be fun to answer this question using my two biggest au’s as sorts of case studies! This is probably an extremely nerdy answer, I don’t know, haha, and it talks about both researching and incoporating research into the creative process while writing, so I hope that’s okay! 

Generally speaking, all my writing starts with a question: 

What’s the story that I want to tell? 

This is always a process that tends to vary for me, but I rarely actively ask the question to myself prior to getting ready to write it? Usually it ends up as me sort of thinking over a concept then getting to a point where I know I’m going to write it, and it’s only when I really start to think seriously about that that I ask myself that question. 

In both of these cases, it was pretty typical for me, haha: 

And well, then we get to the next question.

What background do I need to know to be able to tell that story? 

While this question might seem AU specific, it’s something that’s actually a step in everything I write. I was working on the second part of the Christmas fic today, which is technically canon divergent, but has made me think a lot about Beth and Rio’s canon cultural backgrounds. 

I’ve always liked the headcanon that Beth and Annie are Jewish, but disconnected from their heritage (Marks is a traditionally Jewish surname, Annie’s used some yiddish slang before), and Rio’s obviously Latino, but of Mexican heritage if we apply Manny’s background, and wears rosary beads on the show which indicate that he’s Catholic. I wanted to embrace both of those things, so I’ve tried to thread them through the story where it’s appropriate to do so. For instance, there's a scene of a Las Posadas celebration at Sainte Anne de Detroit which required a LOT of research on my part and hopefully reads well! 

The point is that those things felt important to me to include in a Christmas fic about Beth and Rio in the C&C ‘verse because the entire series is about their lives entwining and getting to know each other fully. I want to include detail that feels specific to what we know about them and embraces and (with any luck) deepens our connection to the characters in my fic. 

What I’m getting to in a really roundabout way is that once I have a story idea, I start to think about what I’m going to have to understand if I’m going to do the story justice.

In the case of the pornstar and pirate aus, this couldn’t look more different: 

Annnnnd so on, haha. 

As you can see, sometimes that background research is really clear and straight forward, as it was with the pornstar AU. I looked up how it worked, and because I knew that I wanted it to steer clear of the seedy and toxic parts of porn, I basically researched ideal environments and best practice, put those in place, and then focused on how to get Beth from her suburban home into a legitimate studio. 

The pirate AU was extremely different and much more of a mutable process. Without a clear sense of the era from the get-go, I had a much wider scope to explore when and where the story could take place, and when I realised that dating the story would inevitable force me to contend with parts of history I might not want to (i.e. the lead up to The Civil War), it let me re-shape a world around an era, but not feel entirely beholden to it. 

In that sense, the research process for both of them involved me choosing fantasy over reality – I negated certain realities to focus on the things I wanted to write (I highly doubt you will find a porn set anywhere near as ethical as Thank You Ma’am after all) – but if I can’t do that in fanfic, where can I? The aim still is for there to be enough that is real that you feel grounded in the story even if I’ve taken certain creative liberties for the sake of telling the story I want to tell.

That’s the beauty of research. Once you know enough about it, you can make informed choices about what you use to shape your storyworld, and make it feel authentic even as you’re fictionalising it.

The point of that though is that this background research is so fundamental to the DNA of the story itself, that it can’t even begin to exist without it.

Loose plotting

It’s usually around this point that I’ll put together a loose plot. This is generally pretty thin, but I’ll start to put pieces into a bit of an order. 

The pornstar au is, again, a really easy example of this. Three parts felt right for it, the shooting of the porno itself was always going to be in the final part, which gave me two chapters to get Beth there. I knew she was going to submit herself through an amateur talent callout which I’d discovered in my background research, so the question of it was more around why would someone like her sign up? Canon plot points help – Beth needs money! Fantasy kicks in again, haha – because she and Dean are finally divorcing.

On the other hand, the pirate au is pretty much unrecognisable from it’s first loose plot.

In it, I’d pencilled in Beth travelling on a ship with Dean and the children, pirates boarding, and Rio kidnapping Beth as collateral to help him escape. 

My loose plots change a lot and usually grow in detail, evolve and change shape as I start to ask myself why, and there are a lot of reasons why the pirate au changed so much, but I’ll get to that a bit later. 

The point is, once I have a loose plot, I’ll usually throw some more words down, see what I’ve got, and then get to the part of the research process I like to call: 

Question time

With background research done and a loose plot and some draft scenes written, I hit a much more specific part of the research process where I don’t need to know broadstroke background detail, I need to know the answers to really specific stuff. I usually write a list and try to do it all at once so that the writing process isn’t too much stop-start. I bullet point the answers in my creative doc then too, so the information is right there when I need it.

Again, the questions I asked of the pornstar au and pirate au were pretty different (although there were a few similarities, haha). Some of the questions I asked were: 

This is actually a case where the pirate au was, in a lot of ways, easier. History is well documented and fact checked after all, but current porn industry standards are, y’know. Not quite as transparent, haha. I’ve mentioned it before, but I actually started to fill out an amateur porn application (with a false identity of course, haha), so that I could see the full form and get a genuine sense of the questions they ask, which is hilarious, annnd brings us to sources. 

Sources

In researching, there are definitely things I’ll just Google, but I also like to utilise sources pretty widely. In particular, Google’s not really going to give you a great sense of what - say - the life of a pornstar’s like, but there are some great podcast series where performers talk about their lives in their own words. Similarly, Google searches are great for the cliffnotes of an answer, but don’t hold a candle to era-made drawings, letters and newspaper clippings. 

For the two, I’d probably say my sources looked something like this: 

How do the answers to these questions affect the story that I want to tell? 

Annnd of course, the answers to these questions frequently end up re-shaping and re-framing my story, both directly and indirectly. Originally for instance, I wasn’t going to have condoms at all in the pirate au, because I naively assumed they wouldn’t be invented yet in a loose 1800s-set fic, only to discover that some version of a condom has been around since Ancient Rome (it was made using the bladders of animals! Gross!). 

Other times it’s indirect. The idea for instance in the pirate au to have Beth realise the houses that the men had robbed through certain items they were wearing came really from looking a lot at antique store sites and image archives and seeing how much was custom made for families and individuals. That in turn made me think how for someone who’s ability to think on her feet and observe are her strengths, that could really come into play as a plot point. 

Re-Plotting and Writing

It’s usually around this point that everything comes together and I start to really map out a fic in a firmer, more meaningful way, and also just throw myself into the writing of it. I generally feel like I’ve got the tools at this point in the process, and start to talk to the story in a bit more of an informed way. 

It’s also really where I start asking myself why? and what does this mean for the next scenes? a lot. 

Jumping back to the original pirate au plot, this was really where it pivoted as drastically as it did. There were too many tropes in that premise that I didn’t like. I didn’t like that Beth had no agency in the act that connected her to Rio, I didn’t like the trope of the MOC kidnapping a ‘helpless’ white woman, I didn’t like that Beth would be taken from her children by force and how that would impact any connection her and Rio formed and ensure that a major part of the story would have to be devoted to Beth trying to get back to them.

Immediately that made it a case where Beth had to choose to go with Rio, but why would she leave her family? And why would Rio let this upperclass lady onboard his ship? So she snuck on. So she had to, because Dean lost everything again. Okay, but would Beth just leave the kids with Dean after he’d done that? No way, not with the implications of the time, so who would she leave them with? Annie or Ruby - no, I want Ruby on the pirate adventure. Annie. But what on earth could put Annie in a secure enough position that Beth would willingly entrust her children to her? 

Thus the subplot of Greg wanting to legitimise Ben was born! Which I doubly liked, because it kind of mirrors canon, haha. 

In that case, the research really helped me flesh out a story world that let me explore character storylines in a way that I wouldn’t always do, which is insanely fun to me, haha, so I forever am left hoping it’s fun to read too. 

But yes! In a nutshell, that’s my research process. :-) 

[libermachinae]

Fault Lines Under the Living Room

Part III: Watch - Chapter 9: Smog Layer Rolling In

Available on AO3 Chapter Summary: The trio compare notes. Chapter Word Count: 3578

---

Beyond the city, Vitrious was a patchwork of barren plateaus with deep crags of lush valleys between, dense vegetation knotting together until only those adapted for such environments would have any hope of navigating them. Drift set his shuttle down on the flat plain, well within sight of the parked Decepticon craft, and took a moment to vent before he rose from the pilot’s seat and made for the hatch. He checked the cell was secure, catching Grit’s optic as he passed; there was a glare, but no sharp remarks as Drift turned his back on them.

The soil was a hard-packed conglomeration of quartz, granite, and limestone that sparkled even under Vitrious’s perpetually overcast weather, but Drift’s gaze was up as he approached the too-familiar vessel. The hatch was open and Rodimus was sitting on the ramp, Ratchet standing at his left shoulder. They waved but put up their hands, stop, when he started coming closer.

“Sorry,” Rodimus said over comms.

“We don’t know how far the effects extend,” Ratchet explained.

Drift stopped where he was, stance wide and swords glinting.

“Do you really have the Enigma?” he asked.

“It’s not the kind of thing we could make up,” Ratchet said.

“Where did you find it?”

“Another Autobot left it on the Lost Light,” Rodimus said. “Arcee. Don’t know where she got it from, but she hid it on this shuttle and took off. We tried to follow her, but some things—I got us hit with a satellite.”

“A satellite,” Drift repeated.

Rodimus nodded.

Drift raised his two fists and bounced them together.

“Hit you.”

“We’re not going to get very far if that’s where your suspension of disbelief ends,” Ratchet said. “And anyway, we both played a part getting into that mess. I wasn’t the most communicative pilot.”

Rodimus shifted, looking down at his pedes, then grinned. Without making optic contact, Ratchet matched it.

“A lot of things were said, but that’s beside the point.” Rodimus waved his hand. “We lost control of the shuttle and by the time we got it back, Arcee was gone.”

“Why would she do that?” Drift asked. An object that dangerous needed to stay far away from Cybertronian hands, especially anyone aligned with the civil war factions. To abandon it like that was either negligence or malicious, and he found himself glancing at the sky, wondering whether someone else was on their way to retrieve it.

“Didn’t tell us,” Ratchet said. “Didn’t even tell us it was here. Had to find it ourselves.”

“Both of you?”

Ratchet and Rodimus glanced at each other.

“Who else?” Drift pressed.

“What?” Rodimus asked, both their gazes snapping back to him.

“Who else was with you? You can’t form a combiner with just two people.”

“That’s where it gets complicated,” Ratchet said. Unlike Rodimus, who had taken to glancing at the ground again, spoiler twitching to give the illusion his whole frame was in motion, Ratchet’s optics and posture were steady.

“It was just us,” Rodimus said. “I didn’t know what to do. Ratchet had just said he was—“ He froze, looked up at Ratchet, then went on. “He was leaving, and the glowy thing in the wall seemed like a good distraction from that.”

“We were both under immense stress,” Ratchet said, laying a hand on Rodimus’ spoiler. The twitching stopped. “Maybe the Enigma picked up on that. It decided we were a good enough match that it could link us together while it looked for someone else.”

“A holding pattern,” Drift said. The word came up automatically; in reality, his attention was being yanked between Rodimus’ slight smile, Ratchet’s hand, and the fact that the latter had apparently been in the process of deserting. That didn’t sound like the Ratchet he knew.

“Yeah, exactly, that’s what Cyclonus called it,” Rodimus said, oblivious to his internal struggle.

“You’ve heard of it?” Ratchet asked.

“Only briefly, and my sources weren’t that trustworthy.”

“Tell us what they said anyway,” Ratchet said, his hand moving into soothing strokes along Rodimus’ spoiler. Drift found himself looking at the ground. “We still know next to nothing about this thing, beyond that it’s a pain in the aft and poor judge of character.”

Drift shook out his hand and unsheathed his sword, twirling it in front of him in basic patterns. Better to be frank with his restlessness than let it distract him from the matter at hand.

“It’s rare, and terrible,” he said. “Bonded sparks without a physical connection to stabilize them try to overpower each other.” He thrust his sword forward, grimacing at the blunt movement. “The case studies all described once-friends trying to rip each other apart, just for a few minutes’ peace.” There must have been instances of final components being introduced, but he hadn’t bothered to log them to his memory. He’d been looking for horror stories to break up the boredom. Shockwave’s archives had been an indulgence.

“Hasn’t been easy,” Ratchet said, “but it was never that bad.” Even from this far away, his gaze was like a physical touch on Drift’s plating. He tried to ignore it as he moved into his next step in the pattern.

“We did organize an entire shuttle to keep me from frying Ratchet’s circuits,” Rodimus said. “Oh, and meditated!” His spoiler flicked, briefly dislodging Ratchet’s hand before he put it back. Their disturbed looks switched to matching grins again, and Drift now recognized it for what it was: a private joke.

Drift paused to regard them, their easy postures combined with the gentle way they moved around each other. Nothing like what he had filled his head with all those years ago.

“Why did you come?” he asked, sheathing his sword. “You said you need my help.”

Rodimus stood up, creating a gap between them.

“Like Ratchet said, it hasn’t been as bad as what you heard,” he said, “but we can’t live like this forever. Ratchet’s—”

He stopped, optics flashing, and Ratchet closed the distance again, pressing a hand to the back of his neck.

“It’s been a challenge,” Ratchet said. “We can function, but neither of us can fulfill our responsibilities while we’re like this, especially if we’re at risk of pulling someone into it. We need some way to minimize the effects or, ideally, cut it off. Unfortunately, that falls outside my area of expertise.” He dropped his hand.

“But we were thinking: weird spark stuff, bonds between people. That’s kind of what you’re all about, right?” Rodimus stood, the corner of his lips quirked up in a hopeful grin.

Drift stared at it. His hand was frozen, still wrapped around the hilt of his sword.

“Cyclonus suggested Spectralist meditation practices might influences the effects of the Enigma,” Ratchet said with a resigned acceptance that, in another situation, Drift might have prodded at. Ratchet was handing him a free turn in their old game, only it wasn’t a game anymore and Drift found himself with a miserable hand.

“And you want me to…”

They looked at each other, more than a glance this time.

“Well, was he right?” Rodimus asked. “Is there anything you can do?”

Unlike most answers in Drift’s life, this one came with little inner turmoil.

“No. There isn’t.”

Spectralism was a war religion. A subset of Alchemists had felt their belief system had become too tied up in the politics of the war, especially after the Acuity had announced a passive alliance with the Autobots. The Alchemic apostates believed that, by focusing on the body, one could transcend the factional gulfs that divided their species, and named their new movement Spectralism, in reference to the standard spectrum of light emitted by their photonic cores. It was a modern religion designed around the issues of its time. Not ancient long-lost artifacts of questionable ethics.

Rodimus’ spoiler drooped and Ratchet’s optics dimmed. Rodimus straightened up a moment later, brave smile on, but the way Ratchet sunk into his own plating told Drift far more about their shared headspace.

“That’s okay!” Rodimus said. “We can figure something else out. Or not! Ratchet’s been warming up to me. Bet we could make it a few years at least before we—”

His words choked off and Drift had to look away, anger roiling beneath his plating. He hated that he couldn’t just feel sympathy for their situation; wrapped up in it was the knowledge that they had come, not for him, but for something he might provide. He had always been a tool for other mechanisms, from his days on the streets up through his rise in the Decepticons, and hoping for any different after he defected, after the war ended, after he joined Rodimus’ side kept demanding a steeper price.

He was still trying to figure out what he could say that Deadlock would not have when the plasma bolt caught him.

It hit his right shoulder from behind and sent him sprawling. He landed on the hard ground and gasped as pain, numbness, and the tingle of backup sensors raced up his armor in rapid succession. Calibration had not finished before he was trying to get up again.

“Drift!” Ratchet and Rodimus yelled.

He grunted and tried to see who shot him but had to roll away to dodge a second bullet aimed for his helm. He heard a second, quiet shuttle landing beside his own and realized his mistake.

The third shot went wide, expecting him to keep rolling in the same direction, and he took advantage of the lost second to leap to his feet and lunge at Grit’s crewmate, frozen at the edge of the hatch. His left sword came up to block another volley and then he was on the Decepticon, spinning and shoving him to the floor of the hatch with his gun arm pinned behind his back. There was nothing he could do to stop the remote-piloted shuttle, though, already taking off while the other two scrambled aboard. He shoved the Decepticon into the ground, then jumped over him. Someone was shouting, but he didn’t hear the words. If he could catch the underside of the ship—

He missed. The thrusters fired just as he leapt and sent him hurtling, skidding across the plateau. He tumbled end over end, plating banging against the solid ground, until at last he came to a stop on his back, staring at the open sky.

He struggled to sit up. The pain wasn’t bad, but vertigo had him misjudging the weight of his frame. He heard the shuttle flying away before he could see it, followed by gunshots. He started to roll over, a delayed evasive maneuver, before he realized that the blasterfire was coming from the ground. Rodimus and Ratchet had retrieved weapons and were shooting at the retreating shuttle while their own sat idle.

“Go!” Drift shouted. He hoped that was what he’d said. “Don’t let them break atmosphere.” He swayed onto his feet, looking around for the sword that had flown from his grasp.

A pulse flew by his helm, singing the air itself, and he turned around to see the Decepticon crumple to the ground, gun falling out of his hand.

“Not leaving you behind,” Rodimus said.

“Not like we’ve had great luck chasing people off world anyway,” Ratchet added.

Above their heads, the shuttle’s thrusters pulsed as it prepared for the final push to break atmosphere. Already it was receding from view, the planet’s smog layer rolling in to cover its retreat, and Drift knew it would be off his own ship’s sensor range long before he got it airborne. He tried to gauge how far a ship like that could travel before it needed to stop for fuel.

“You okay, Drift?” Rodimus asked.

Drift shut off his comms.

He picked up his sword on his way back to the shuttle. The Decepticon was lying on the ground, clutching his hip; warm energon seeped from between his fingers. Drift doubted he would die from the wound, but the bleeding was enough to make anyone panic, which was exactly what he needed right now. He pointed his blunted weapon at the Decepticon’s throat, allowing the curve of the blade to cut a hair-thin line in the plating housing his central energon line.

“What’s your name?” he asked. “How important are you to Grit?” Voice trembling slightly; good. Most Cybertronians knew the difference between shivers of fear and barely-concealed anger.

“Spur,” the Decepticon squeaked, trying to back away from the sword while keeping both hands on his hip. Drift noted the dent in his helm where Rodimus had shot him earlier. “We were stationed on the same moon. We’re business partners.”

“Are they coming back for you?”

“Yes!” Spur nodded his head, optics bright and wide. “They’re coming back with reinforcements, and they’re going to be mad if something happens to me.”

Drift would have groaned, had he the energy. Even if Spur was lying (most likely) the possibility of Grit reaching out to other rogues put Vitrious in a much riskier situation than it had been in before. Suddenly, it was no longer a matter of stopping a single slave trade operation: now there was information on the line, harder to predict and much more complicated to contain. Once he had the immediate threats neutralized, he was going to have to determine whether the Galactic Council should be tipped off to the vulnerability of this sector, a question of whether safety from Decepticons was worth the Council’s brand of planetary defense.

That was a problem for the future, though, one he was able to brush aside as he sheathed his sword and leaned down, hoisting Spur with his good arm while he used his bad one for balance.

“What? Hey, wh—”

“You know where they’re going,” Drift said. “Give me the coordinates.”

“N-no! What would I—”

“You want to get back together with your crew, right?” Drift asked, dropping Spur back into the ruined cell. “Give me the coordinates and I’ll make sure you’re still online when we drop you off.” It was a bluff, of course, but Drift had always had a talent for making bots think the worst of him.

He received the packet over a broadband comm frequency. After scanning it for viruses, he diverted it to the ship’s navigation system, then popped open one of the panels in the wall and retrieved a pile of stained rags. He crouched beside Spur and dropped the rags so he could catch one of the Con’s desperate hands and pry it away from his wound.

“Wait—”

“Relax,” he commanded, deftly retrieving his cuffs so he could clip one end around Spur’s wrist and the other to the lower frame of the cell where it extended slightly from the floor. It would make for a less comfortable trip, but that was what he got for breaking Drift’s things: Grit had shorted the locking mechanism and brute forced the failsafe. It would be a time-consuming fix, both whatever patch job he could throw together and the eventual repair stop he would have to make at a legitimate mechanic.

Satisfied Spur was secure, he pulled away Spur’s other hand and started to mop up the spilled energon with one of the rags. Already, the flow had slowed, but he wanted to see the damage for himself before he trusted self-repair.

“Here,” he said, pushing the pile to Spur. “Pack the wound with that to slow the bleeding. I’ll take a closer look once we’re airborne.”

Spur stared at the rags like he had no idea what to do with them, which Drift doubted. One did not make it through a war like theirs without learning the tricks to keep a body from dying.

“Why?” he asked.

Drift received a ping from the navicomp and waved off Spur’s question, retreating to the pilot’s console to confirm the flight path. As he had suspected, the destination was not far. Even doubling the computer’s estimated travel time, which had become necessary since the last time he’d wormed his was into the engine, it would still barely be enough time to prepare for a conflict. He hit a button to raise the hatch and input the commands to prepare for takeoff. Faint voices were buzzing through the ship’s comm system, and he entertained the idea of shutting that off, too.

“Gonna get that?” Spur asked, optics angling to the speaker.

“Don’t know,” Drift said, playing with the volume control. The sound dipped so low he might have mistaken it for a piece of his thoughts, too indistinct to even be called nonsense.

“It’s your team, right?”

“No, not really.” He shut it off, the sound of the engine filling the space so immediately he didn’t have time to miss it.

“I would’ve killed you, if it hadn’t been for them.”

Drift glanced back. Spur had taken his suggestion and was packing the wound, and there was defiance in his posture now that he was not stooping to keep himself from bleeding out.

“No, you wouldn’t have,” Drift said. “You were aiming for my helm, right? The finials make me look taller than I really am. Your shot would have missed my cranial casing by less than an inch. A blow like that would knock me down, make it look like you had hit, but I would have received more damage from the fall itself than the gunshot. Provided I landed with my palm down, I would have retaliated before you got your finger back around the trigger.” He turned back to the viewshield. Ratchet and Rodimus had disappeared, the Decepticraft’s hatch was shut, and the engines were coming online.

Spur huffed.

“Autobots are weird.”

“I’m not an Autobot.”

“Nah, but they are.” There was a clink of metal, as though Spur had tried to gesture with his bound hand. “Never seen them give a scrap about a bot like you.”

A notification came up: shuttle primed and ready.

“Listen,” Spur said. “You’ve clearly got some sort of history. I don’t care what. But in my experience, there’s no bigger nuisance in the universe than an Autobot who decides to care about something, especially if it happens to be none of his business and all of yours. So, in the interest of not getting shot again, can you at least make sure you have those two under control?”

Drift leaned his head back to look at the ceiling. He wasn’t an Autobot. Not anymore, Rodimus had seen to that, and he’d never really wanted to be one, anyway. Did he care about things in a fundamentally different way from how Ratchet and Rodimus did? Had the divides in their species been driven down that far? Or had they been the reason for the war in the first place? He didn’t have an answer for that. But maybe Spur had a point. Without looking, he turned the comms back on.

“—on’t go yet, just listen, we—”

“What.”

“Drift!” Rodimus said.

“What’s your fuel pump pressure?” Ratchet asked. “Feel anything loose or out of alignment?”

Drift shook his head. There was a twinge in his shoulder and the usual weight of his body, but those were manageable.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Grit’s collecting reinforcements. I’m going to intercept. You two should head for the nearest Council-aligned planet and wait there; if you hear even a rumor that Cybertronians have started moving in, let the local enforcement division know.” They would alert the Galactic Council security forces, and then Vitrious would be out of their hands.

“We’re coming with you,” Rodimus said, though the tone was all wrong. He sounded like Ratchet.

“No.” Commands had never suited Drift’s voice; even now, it came out sounding like a demand. “I can’t help you, and I sure as slag can’t protect you. What happens if the Decepticons find you? Or worse, get onto the ship and find the—” he glanced back at Spur, “—the you-know-what? Then it’s not just Vitrious: everyone’s problems get so much worse.” His fingers were drumming the console, an anxious non-beat. “I’m sorry that you wasted so much time coming out here and that you’re having to live through this. Really, I am. But I need you to let me do this.” Once Grit was taken care of, he would regroup with them and do what he could to help their situation, what little it was. But his list of debts was long and this one came first.

“We don’t need your help or your protection,” Ratchet said. “Believe it or not, we’re more than capable of taking care of ourselves, and we can recognize when someone else’s problems are more pressing than our own. We’re coming to help you, Drift.”

His hands wrapped around the yoke.

“I’m not going to—”

“We’ve still got a tracker on that shuttle,” Ratchet went on. “So, you can either ping us the coordinates now and let us strategize on the way there, or you can wait for us to catch up in the middle of—of whatever this is. Your call.”

Drift’s engine growled. He heard a hiccup from behind and turned his glare on Spur, who looked inappropriately unrepentant for a mech cuffed to the floor.

“I hope you know I hate you both.”

“Hey!” Rodimus yelped, but Ratchet laughed, and a moment later Rodimus’ nervous chuckle floated through as well.

[bexterbex]

A Soul to Mend His Own | Ch. 68

Warning, PLEASE CHECK TAGS IF YOU SEE SOMETHING YOU DON’T WANT TO READ THEN DON’T READ. Tag lists are closed

Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Will tag as I go along, Will update tags, Slow Burn, Influenced by Star Trek and other Sci-Fi themes, References to We Happy Few, Tons of References and quotes to George Orwells 1984 see if you can find them all, The First Order is the new Big Brother,  but who is really surprised, Blatant Nazi Symbolism, Interrogation Themes, Eventual Smut, Eventual Romance, Really just drawn out Slow Burn, Don’t repost without permission, Torture themes, Suggestive Themes, Execution themes, Disturbing Themes, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Verbal Abuse, Controlling Kylo Ren, Physical Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, Kylo Ren Has Issues, Supreme Leader Kylo Ren, Possessive Kylo Ren, A character shamelessly based on Zelda

A Kylo Ren x Modern! Reader in a soulmate au with canon divergence. —————————————SLOWBURN————————————–

He is already the Supreme leader, searching the universe to find you, his Empress. Your name on his wrist has been the only constant in his life, while you have doubts about his existence and his acceptance of you. He isn’t in the database and why did the name Kylo Ren cover Ben Solo?

MASTERLIST

Chapter 68: Mustafar

The next day Hux had arranged a transport ship to bring you down to the surface. You had ordered no more ships full of ‘troopers to be sent down to Mustafar until you had arrived. You were being guarded by Trudgen, Kuruk, and Captain Phasma. Hux and Mitaka were also escorting you along with a handful of other officers and ‘troopers. You could see the worry on Hux and Mitaka’s faces as you approached the surface. Both of them had their standard-issue blasters equipped to their belts.

You waited as the ship landed, all eyes were on the exiting ramp as it lowered. The surface of the planet was much different than you expected. The air was heavy with a volcanic smell, the trees in the forest looked scorched. Desolate is how you would describe the planet to which your wedding was to be held. You followed the knights out of the ship, Phasma directly to your side and the rest of your company following. You did your best to show no fear, your head held high, your shoulders and back straight. You were not to be messed with.

The Alazemac approached with their guns, spears, axes, and bows. Yelling words that you did not understand. But they halted when they saw the knights. You could hear them speak to one and other as they pointed to Trudgen and Kuruk’s helmets.

You turned around to ask one of the officers behind you, “Is there anyone that speaks their language?” You wanted to know what they were saying. You were hoping that the similarities between the knights and Kylo were working in your favor at the moment.

“The translator droid does.” It stepped forward. You watched as the Alazemac regarded it in a rather hostile manner. You weren’t sure if they were used to any technology of this sort.

“Can you tell me what they are saying,” you asked the rather robotic humanoid droid. You had sort of wished whoever designed it had left the eyepieces out, as they looked rather soulless.  

“They seemed to be debating on whether or not the Knights of Ren’s helmets are related to that of Lord Vader’s,” said the robotic voice of the droid.

One of them seemed to hear the word Vader as they all began to shout his name. You didn’t know whether or not to be excited or scared. You hoped the shouting was a good thing.

“Can you tell them that the grandson of Lord Vader wishes to use the castle?” You really hoped they believed you. Hoping that the knights’ helmets would be just enough to convince them. You really didn’t want an all-out war.

You heard them exchange conversation, the droid turned back to you. “They have agreed.” You could see silence fall over the cultists.  

“Tell them thank you,” you knew you needed to be polite. Basically, it was rule number one in all of your training thus far.

“They do not have a word or phrase for thank you, Lady Ren,” responded the droid with a cocked head. For the first time, you honestly thought it could actually think and not just compute.  

“Then tell them Lord Vader would be pleased, at their allowance for us to use the castle.” You hoped this would translate well, it wasn’t a thank you per se but it should be good enough. Kylo and the knights usually failed to have proper manners, but you were supposed to be a lady. So you needed to have good enough manners for the both of you.  

The droid translated what you said, and you could hear excited chatter from the cultists who ushered you towards the castle in the distance. You were thankful that Adlez picked out a comfortable pair of boots for this visit.

The castle was a large structure that seemed to pierce the sky with its height. It sort of reminded you of something out of a fantasy novel, like Lord of the Rings. But not something the elves or humans would live out of, rather something Sauron would. You approached a river of lava by the entrance. Now you were starting to understand Kylo’s design and fashion influence.

While it was full of symmetry, and clean sharp lines it was dilapidated. Upon entering the ruins of the castle, you felt eerily alone even though you were surrounded by many other people. The heaviness and stillness of the air added to the wariness you felt. Something about this castle felt as if there was more here than just a building.

You watched as Trudgen, and Kuruk seemed to share some sort of silent communication with each other.

“Do you feel it too,” you asked them.

“You feel it? I thought you lacked Force sensitivity,” responded Kuruk, his distorted voice echoing in the large silent chamber. No one had said anything since entering the castle, as if too afraid to disturb what might be there.

“I don’t have the Force, or at least the doctor seems to think so, and the Supreme Leader has yet to say something about it. But I feel…. a heavy darkness in the corners of the castle, but a blanket covering it? And under us is something I do not want to visit.” Something dark seemed to, for a lack of a better word, live under the castle. Something you were afraid of. You could feel the rational part of your brain get worried.

“This place is full of the Force,” responded Trudgen.

“Built using ancient Sith architecture directly over an ancient Sith cave. This place is also filled with Darth Vader’s energy. What you are feeling is the Force. And purely the dark side of the Force,” said Kuruk.

You stepped around some fallen stone as you made your way to the main room that overlooked Mustafar. “The dark side of the Force? The Sith?” You had a million questions stirring in your mind. “It would probably be best if the boss answered those questions. In his next call to you, you should ask,” said Trudgen.

You looked around the room you were in; it felt open but yet closed off from the rest of the galaxy. “This is where the ceremony will take place. I want what can be repaired to be repaired.” You turned to the other officers who seemed to not want to enter the room as far as you did. You then spoke directly to the translator droid. “Let the Alazmac know that we will have ships and technicians brought down to the surface to repair the castle. We want to help restore it, to fulfill Lord Vader’s legacy.”

You then turned back to the large window, gazing at the firey burning planet that you would have to be married on. The lines of lava reminded you of the red lines marring Kylo’s mask. This felt in many ways like it was the place Kylo was meant to be. Not somewhere else in the galaxy fighting for who knows what, but here. You wondered if this was the place that you would eventually rule from, or if he would still choose the Supremacy. But this still didn’t feel like the place in your dreams. No, that place was different. It had a throne, an ancient one. Here it felt too new.

Hux approached you, “M’lady I’ve received a message from the Supreme Leader.” He held out his comlink, and you heard a recording of Kylo’s voice. “The scavenger is dead.”

Your heart stopped for a moment. He was doing it, he was actually killing Ben Solo. His mother would be next. You felt frozen in time, your ears rang before Hux spoke again.

“He also sent word that there will be a transmission of the battle being sent out during the monthly address tomorrow. The one you were supposed to hold together. He wants you to lead it.” The numbness of static was felt all over your body. You were going to have to lead without him, without his help. Your hands started to shake.

“Do not worry, m’lady. Myself and Hux will help you. You are also able to rely on proper staff now. All you should have to do is really introduce the transmission and to conclude it,” said Phasma reassuringly.

For a moment you were jealous of her and the knights. They could hide behind masks. They did not have to mask their emotions on their faces. They had anonymity when they wore them, even if they were recognizable with their armor and helmets. You were vulnerable, and now really for the first time without Kylo by your side.

You didn’t fully register your thank you to her in your mind, but it escaped your mouth, anyway. Your body working on autopilot as you made your way out of the castle and back to the transport shuttle. You hoped Kylo would call you again tonight. You needed him, and you hoped that he could feel that wherever he was in the galaxy.

You disembarked the transport shuttle in the main hanger; you hadn’t said a word to anyone on your ascension back up to the Supremacy. Your mind was going a million miles per hour, and it was completely empty at the same time. You calmly made your way back to your chambers, still running on autopilot, not speaking to or addressing anyone.  You entered your chambers where you were greeted by the rest of your staff and your ladies-in-waiting, “Out.” You gave a simple command. As much as you probably needed to prepare for tomorrow, you needed to be alone right now.

You were by yourself for no more than a few minutes before you received a holocall from Kylo.  You watched as his disheveled image appeared in front of you.

“You’re hurt.” There were a few new gashes littering his face, and from what you could see another on his arm, and what appeared to be a hole in his side.

“I am fine.” His voice was gruff and abrupt. On closer inspection of his image, you could see that they were mostly just angry reds and pinks and not actively bleeding. “She is dead.”

You quickly blinked twice before responding, “Yes. Hux delivered the news to me.”

“Good. How are the preparations coming along?” His voice was rather monotone. His eyes now seemed as cold and hard as steel.

You knew this was probably not the best time to test his anger, “Good. I visited the surface and negotiated with the Alazemac. Repairs should be underway for the castle itself. I have a fitting tomorrow. Everything seems to be coming along.”

“Good.” He just seemed to stare at you, you didn’t know if you should end the call.

“Can you explain to me briefly what the dark side of the Force is and who the Sith are?” You didn’t know if he was in the mood to answer these questions, but you needed to know. At least you weren’t accusing him of not proposing to you.

“The force has three sides, the light, the dark, and the grey. The light side is aligned with calmness and is used for knowledge and defense. The dark side is aligned with passion and is used for strength, power, victory, and above all else freedom. The grey is a mix of the two, a balance. The Sith were the opposite of the Jedi. The Jedi used the light side of the Force whereas the Sith used the dark side.”

“So does the Force have a mind of its own or can you like fully control it?”

“No, I manipulate it, sometimes I let it into my desires when it touches you as it does, that’s me. Usually, I am wanting to do what it’s doing while doing what I am doing.”

“So in my brain, the wanting to take over?” “That wasn’t something I was fully in control of. As the doctor said he believes we are too compatible and so the me that was in you, wanted to replace you. I do admit that I may have gotten carried away exploring your mind. In many ways it is the most intimate thing I can do to you, caress your mind with mine. I want to fill you with myself completely. Once I am done with my task, we can scour the galaxy for ancient texts to see if we can heal you, or strengthen you. So when we would like to be truly as intimate as can be—we can.”

This was the first time in your conversation that it seemed that he had any emotion at all. Only when he was speaking about you. Your eyes softened towards him, you watched as his body relaxed. You wished he was here with you, every particle in your very being craved his presence.

“When do you think you will be home,” you knew you probably wouldn’t get the answer you wanted to hear, but you desperately wanted him home.

“I will be meeting with my mother in two days’ time. She has agreed to surrender herself to me. After that, I will return to you, Kitten. And there shall be nothing that can separate us ever again.” His body hunched forward, closer to you. Oh, how you wished you could kiss his lips, draw him in close, and never let him leave your side.

“I wish you could be with me tomorrow, but I know that you have your duty and that I have mine. But I miss you so much,” a tear made its way down your cheek. Your heart threatening to make you release your ocean.

His voice softened considerably, “Do not cry Kitten, I shall be back to you in three days time. And then you shall be Empress. We will be together for eternity.” You could hear the emotion in his voice, almost as if he was holding back his own tears. His face seemed to reflect this too, and he swallowed back his emotions.

“I should let you go, you need to rest. And you need to follow my orders of coming back to me in one piece.” You wiped another tear that escaped.

You saw him smirk and heard a deep chuckle escape his wide chest. “I shall do that. I need to look my best for my wedding. But you should rest as well, Kitten. I shall see you soon.” And the call ended. Once again you felt rather empty after his image disappeared. But he would be home soon, you would be with him soon.

You mustered all of your strength and energy and got up. You headed to the dressing room to check on your appearance before you called all the staff back in to plan tomorrow’s assembly.  They were in your chambers in a matter of minutes along with the Allegiant General.  

You paced up and down in front of them. Hands-on your hips as you were to on edge about, well, everything. You looked at Lieutenant Amala Graven.

“I need you to send a letter to the orphanage to set back the date of my appearance until after I become Empress.” You hated setting back the date, but there was no time now.

“Do we have any idea when that shall be,” asked Hux.

“The Supreme Leader informed me he believes he will be back in three days’ time. His mother will be handing herself over in two days.” You hoped this to be true, you loathed being apart from him now.

Graven pushed up her glasses before asking, “So the letter will state that you will arrange a visit after you are officially crowned Empress but I shall give no date as to when that shall be?”

“Yes,” you answered simply and continued pacing. “Now, what shall I say at the assembly?” You asked as a general question to them all.

“M’lady you have no need to worry,” reassured Captain Mitaka.  

“Public speaking in front of billions of people isn’t exactly my forte.” And who’s strength was it, really? They weren’t in your shoes, they didn’t have this responsibility—you did.

“Would you like to watch that film again,” asked Hux. You knew he was the only one that had a similar experience to you. He has spoken in front of billions of people, but he was born for this. It was in his blood.

“No, I just need to feel prepared.” You felt as if watching the film might actually give you a stutter you didn’t have. And you wanted to avoid that as much as possible.  

Night fell, and you felt better after planning everything with your staff.  You let your ladies-in-waiting prepare you for bed as they helped do some preparations for tomorrow morning’s prep. Dr. Dabrini came to administer your nightly sleep medication.

“Doctor, is there anything you could give me to ease my anxiety about tomorrow’s assembly?” Nervous and anxious were understatements about how you felt.

“You shall do great tomorrow m’lady I know it, but I can arrange for an anti-anxiety pill with your breakfast tomorrow. But I do not suggest to make it a habit.” His calming voice and understanding eyes gave you a small comfort.

“I don’t want it to be one either, but with the Supreme Leader not being at my side, I feel more anxious than ever,” you confided.

“I understand. I will make the arrangement. I believe a droid should be responsible enough to deliver that medication.” He then left you alone to fall asleep. Thankful that the sleeping pill was so effective as you were sure that the butterflies in your stomach would have kept you up otherwise. Morning came quickly.

Adlez and Olivia-Rose rushed you into the bathroom first thing. Drawing a bath, giving you the works. You felt as soft and as new as a baby when you stepped into the dressing room to get ready. Adlez picked out the perfect dress. It reminded you of Kylo’s uniform and it was a comforting gesture. After all, you were supposed to be a united front for the First Order whether you were with each other or not.

As promised the doctor had sent a pill for you to take with breakfast, something to help calm you down. Your nerves were alive with electricity, your stomach churning so bad that you barely ate your breakfast. You hoped the medication would kick in soon.

You made your way down to the assembly hall, for the second time, but for the first time without Kylo. Trudgen and Kuruk stood before you in front of the double doors of the hall. Waiting for your command to enter. You sent your staff ahead of you. So now you were alone in the hall, with just them, but they were quiet guardian angels. You closed your eyes for a moment, trying to reach out to Kylo. You knew it was impossible, but it made you feel better. “I’m ready.” The doors opened, as did your eyes. You followed your black guardian angels up to the stage. You could feel the anticipation of the room on your tongue. Everyone was on the edge of their seats.

This time the execution had already happened. And now you were to relay this information to them all. You received encouraging nods from the officers on stage. The knights fell back behind you, following you now, being imposing as you stepped up to the podium. All eyes were on you, and not just the ones in the room, but all across the galaxy.

Your voice rang out with confidence, “Yesterday the Supreme Leader won one of the most important battles in the history of the galaxy. A great feat was accomplished. We are currently winning our war against the impure New Republic and their trivial Resistance. He, being the gracious Supreme Leader that he is, has sent us a transmission of the battle that took place. You will now have the honor of watching him fight in battle, like the many great warriors of the Empire before him.”

You stepped back as the transmission played, being broadcasted to all corners of the galaxy. Before you all was the battle between Kylo and the scavenger Rey on what you assume to be the desert planet Pasaana.

You heard her voice first, “You don’t have to do this. I feel the conflict in you. It’s tearing you apart. Ben, I saw your future. Just the shape of it, but solid and clear. You will not bow before the dark side. You will turn. I’ll help you. I saw it.” Her blue lightsaber lit as she was meters apart from him, in a battle stance.

Kylo, sans helmet, let out a menacing laugh. “I saw something, too. Because of what I saw, I know when the moment comes, you will die. You will not stand by me. You are alone. I know what I have to do.” You watched as he ignited his lightsaber. Showing his monster to her, his beast.  

She was holding back tears, “Ben.” But calling out the name of his weaker half only made him angrier

“Let the past die. I’ll kill it if I have to. That’s the only way to become what I am meant to be. It’s time to let old things die. Snoke, Skywalker. The Sith, the Jedi, the Rebels.... let it all die. I will rule with her and bring a new order to the galaxy.” He brought his arm up, taking aim at her as he spread his stance out, getting ready for the attack.

“Don’t do this, Ben. Please don’t go this way.” Her tears were free flowing now. He was breaking her heart.  

“You know the truth. Say it. SAY IT! You have no place in this story. You come from nothing. You’re nothing. You mean nothing to me.” He was practically foaming at the mouth, his eyes wild with anger and destruction.

She let out a cry as he rushed forward. He dominated the battle, striking with such strength and ferocity that you had never seen. You thought his sparing with the knights was impressive, but it paled in comparison to the battle that was unfolding on screen. He was winning until a blaster shot from off-screen grazed his arm. For a split second, he looked back at the person who fired the shot, and while he was distracted she stabbed him with her saber.

You heard a massive gasp roll through the crowd if you didn’t know that Kylo was alright and if the medication wasn’t in your system, you would probably be sobbing at the sight.

You watched as his attention snapped back to her, seemingly unfazed at his own impalement. Between clenched teeth, you heard him say, “Wrong move,” as he sliced her in half with one swift swing of his arm. Her saber deactivating completely, leaving him with a clean, cauterized hole in his abdomen. You watched as he knelt down over her, clenching his wound. “Pathetic,” was the last thing he said before the transmission ended.

You stepped back up to the podium before your brain could fully register what you just saw. You simply said, “Long Live the Supreme Leader.”

A/N: So.... How are we all feeling? Let me know! 

[spartan-officer-brasidas]

It seems like a few of you agreed that Ubisoft mishandled the Gods in more than a few ways, and I’m still mad about it so I just want to go through and explain how they were so poorly represented. I will concede that there are more than a few ‘right’ ways to represent a God and it all comes down to your own interpretation of the Gods and their myths, but I think in general, Ubisoft really fell short. My personal interpretations come from my major in Classics and my worship of the Greek and Roman pantheons, so my opinions on this will reflect those interpretations but feel free to have and share your own!

Let’s start simple. Juno. Juno is a really interesting Goddess, both in religion and in the games. I, personally, don’t do anything special for Hera/Juno/Uni, but I know that she is an incredibly loving Goddess and is remarkably loyal to her husband and those she holds dearly. Now, I think Ubisoft did Juno okay, only because her loving and loyal nature can make her a fierce enemy, and I think Ubisoft showed that well. She, from my knowledge, is a main antagonist in the series, and given that “modern” Rome is a part in Ezio’s story, that makes sense. Juno was NOT a supporter of the foundation of Ancient Rome. She made several attempts to keep Aeneas from getting to Italy and she is openly not a fan of Aeneas, given his Trojan heritage and his role in Rome’s founding. Basically, her being an antagonist makes sense and I don’t think it really devalues her as a Goddess at all.

This is, unfortunately, where the praise ends. I’ll just go in order, so Persephone is next. Persephone is, perhaps, the biggest victim in this mess Ubisoft created. I would like to first clarify a few things regarding Persephone as a Goddess. How you choose to view her relationship with Hades doesn’t really matter to me—that’s something only you can decide, but there are a few aspects that are important to consider. First of all, beyond the initial kidnapping and drama with that, there’s not too much suggesting they had a rocky relationship. There were a few minor hiccups, but nothing major. And two, going on Ancient Greek standards, Hades did nothing wrong. Now, kidnapping is bad, we know this. Except, Hades didn’t really kidnap her, per se. He asked Zeus for her hand in marriage and Zeus agreed. Hades actually did the “right” thing, though in a twisted way that really isn’t acceptable in today’s standards. All that said and done...all I can say is what was Ubisoft thinking? I mean, Persephone is routinely a benefactor for heroes *who come to her* and she is mostly portrayed as incredibly benevolent. The fact that Ubisoft made her a borderline tyrant with a unreasonable desire for total order and control and made her relationship with Hades one of the worst depictions I’ve ever seen is upsetting. It’s tragic, really. I almost feel like I have to personally apologize to Her whenever I think about what they did to her.

I’ll keep Hermes and Hekate short and sweet because they got off a bit easier than Persephone did. All I have to say is both Gods are insultingly shallow in the dlc. Hermes is blinded by his love for Persephone, and while he definitely did pursue her in the myths, he didn’t dwell on the unrequited feelings—he is a powerful God of many things, he doesn’t need to dwell on it. And Hekate was given the short end of the stick between the two and she became the backstabbing friend. We honestly don’t learn much about her at all and she’s made to be extremely unlikable, which is not the aura given from the Goddes Herself. It’s a shame what happened to these two.

Now we will move to Hades. My biggest issue with Hades is actually the whole issue with continuity between Jupiter/Zeus/Tinia being the same but Pluto/Hades/Aita not being the same, but alas, Ubisoft totally butchered his character as well, so I can put aside my grievances about the continuity. Hades is portrayed as this chaotic antagonist who really only has his own benefit in mind which is...an extremely confusing interpretation. I mean, Hades is, IMO, the least chaotic God out there. And even more so, he isn’t a vicious leader like they make him out to be. Sure, he maintains order in the Underworld with an iron fist, but that’s just the issue. The Hades seen in Odyssey is...not that. He doesn’t maintain order at all, and yet he’s doing something with a very aggressive iron fist. He’s power hungry, angry, and violent, and all of that goes unchecked until Kassandra/Alexios rolls around to stop it for the time being. The Hades I worship isn’t like that at all, and I don’t think the Ancient Greeks viewed him that way either, though I can’t say for certain.

Charon is next and I don’t have too much to say about him. He’s just so forgettable in my opinion. Charon is the ferryman of the dead, so I suppose he’s not supposed to leave a lasting impression, but he takes on the role of maneuvering you through the Underworld—a job he, historically, doesn’t have. His job is to take you across the River Styx and then be done with you. It’s a relatively minor complaint really, but I would’ve liked to see his character fleshed out a bit more.

Down to the last three, and Poseidon is up. The issue I have with Poseidon is kind of a personal one. Poseidon, while not one of my primary deities, is one of those that I frequently turn to and worship more frequently, so naturally his rather bland portrayal was disappointing at best and insulting at worst. I personally don’t think he gets much character development at all, which is unfortunate because Poseidon, as a God and in the myths, is incredibly complex. He’s a great asset if he’s on your side, but he can also be a very formidable foe, and they seem to want to show those two sides but they really fall short on both. Now, this could be related to the fact that of the three dlcs, Atlantis truly felt the most rushed. You have hardly any time to really take in the story and the whole thing just seems like one big after thought, and Poseidon, unfortunately, took the hit with that. Also, he just passes judgement and in a way rule over Atlantis over to a mortal, which I get is important to the story, but why? That’s so not how things are done.

Now we have Aita. So for those of you who don’t know or haven’t figured it out by now, Aita is the Etruscan God of the Underworld. I’ve already explained my main issue with him, and how he and Hades should be the same, but honestly, that’s the least of the crimes committed against him. In my opinion, Ubisoft has completely striped Aita of his Godhood. All of the other shown deities have this natural feeling to them that Aita lacks. He seems so lackluster standing next to Juno and he’s reduced to this scientist role, which—don’t get me wrong—is neat and powerful and all, but this is the Etruscan god of the underworld! Why should he linger in the shadows of Juno when he could be an equal to her, all things considered! I know the Etruscan gods/pantheon are not as widely known, but that doesn’t make them less godly, and what they’ve done to him is upsetting to say the least. I would love to see some other Etruscan gods, like Tinia and Uni, and I would like for them to be treated with the respect they deserve. More people could know about this fascinating culture and religion! Is that too much to ask?

Finally, we get to Aletheia. Now, she is a bit different in that I don’t know of many myths surrounding the goddes of truth, and it’s totally possible that she may solely be a representation of truth more so than a character in the myths. Aletheia’s story was...anticlimactic. I honestly don’t think her story got resolved at all. Ubisoft left me feeling like there was more we needed to know about her, and they also implied that she isn’t exactly a good guy. I mostly just want more from her. I think if they play on Juno being related to her, they could really make a very good story, but as it is, Aletheia got put on the back burner, and that? That is unfortunate.

This is already a very long post, so I won’t continue, but I would like to mention that characters like Adonis, the Greek heroes, Elpis, and Atlas received similarly disappointing treatment from Ubisoft. Let me know if you want me to make a post about them! I encourage you guys to share your own thoughts on this! Different perspectives yield different reactions and I’d love to see y’alls, so feel free to share! I will remind you that these are living Gods. Part of why this was so upsetting is because I research these gods as part of my studies and because I actively worship many of Them. Seeing Them reduces to these characters was...not the greatest feeling in the world. It’s important to separate the characters from the myths and even the myths from the Gods themselves, but what Ubisoft did was make a character that loosely relates to the myths—not the Gods Themselves as well. Just as Zeus is so much more than his myths, Persephone is more than the character Ubisoft gave us, so think critically when absorbing content about religious figures. All Gods of all religions are deserving of respect, and Ubisoft did not do a great job with that. I can only hope they will do better for the Viking Gods.

[neostalgia]

Dude mdzs is fiction, stop making it about fetishizing a relationship, religion or real life politics. It's not. It's a work a fiction. Stop ruining it. Because the fandom is actually nice. But well then there are ppl like you. (And I'm not religious at all so that has gotten nothing to do with this shit. Plus what about people being genuinely interested in chinese culture. You wanna seclude your country from the world? Go off but dont bother the fandom with this)

Hi there anon, I’m gonna work off the assumption that you’re talking about my post here. I spoke in very broad terms, so I’ll do my best to shed a little more light on my concerns of the matter. What I wrote on that post operates as a reminder for members of the MDZS fandom to exercise caution lest we continue perpetuating harmful racist and homophobic stereotypes in the content we create, nothing more. I only wish to promote the respectful demonstration of Chinese culture. All types of media, fictional or otherwise, mold real-world mentalities and have real-life consequences. Books are dangerous! That’s why they get banned, and that’s why LWJ and WWX’s relationship was censored by the Chinese government.  

Sure, it’s easy to write MDZS off as an apolitical fantasy novel set in ancient China, but the source material itself is full of socio-political commentary, which debunks the idea that this novel is mere fiction. On a surface level, the novel is about the power dynamics and struggles between five large families: is that not political enough? But if you dig even an inch deeper, it’s very clear that MDZS is rife with anti-Japanese sentiment. That manifests through the Wen Sect, what with their red and white clothing and their association with the sun: MXTX specifically recontextualized a piece of ancient Chinese folklore and grafted its imagery onto the entire Sunshot Campaign in the novel. The name of the Nightless City is likely a reference to a tonally incendiary letter that a Japanese diplomat sent to the Chinese emperor at the time wherein he began with the line: “The Son of Heaven where the sun rises [Japan], to the Son of Heaven where the sun sets [China], may good health be with you.” MXTX was very heavy-handed in using the sun motifs as a means to propagate those anti-Japanese mentalities. 

Regarding homophobic attitudes: what MXTX imbedded into MDZS makes no sense in Chinese historicity. Her choice in vilifying MXY (as seen with other characters’ treatment of him in the novel) holds little historical sway considering that homosexuality was something akin to normal at the time. Moreover, the general attitude of treating WWX as the “wife” in their relationship only further imposes heterosexual standards on a same-sex relationship, which really isn’t great, now, is it? Granted, MXTX did force that standpoint, but it certainly was exacerbated when some translators decided to ignore the gender-neutral term for “married couple” (夫妻 in the original text) and decided to call WWX and LWJ as “husband and wife.”

Religiosity is important, too. I’ve seen a lot of content where the Lan sect is portrayed as Catholic (for which I can see the parallels, considering the Lan’s propensity for repression and extreme punishment) when they are canonically Buddhist: why partake in the erasure of this fact in favor of a colonialist and racist narrative? 

The thing is, I am happy that MDZS has attracted mainstream attention. So far the book and the attention it has garnered––internationally speaking––has promoted the spread of Chinese culture, which is something that has been sidelined in modernity. It’s nice to see people return develop a genuine curiosity for it. That said, navigating the realm of Chinese culture and history is difficult because it is uncharted territory for so many people, which is why I, as a Chinese lesbian who grew up in mainland China, wanted to bring attention to some concerning patterns of behavior I see. I truly mean no ill will, and only hope to educate and discourage laziness within non-Chinese consumers as respectfully as I can. 

I implore of everyone to please listen to Chinese––and Chinese LGBT+ voices––around the discussion of MDZS and anything tangent to Chinese culture. Their voices, opinions, and concerns take precedence.

[sonik-kun]

What?! There's period typical homophobia and sexism in a BOOK SET IN ANCIENT TIMES?! SHOCK! HORROR 😱😱😱😱😱😱

Seriously though stop applying MODERN standards to historic settings in books. You just sound silly.

Learn to separate our standards from the past and you'll appreciate the characters and themes of the book better, I promise.

Unfortunate as it is, the novel's society does have what we consider today as bigoted standards. But to them, homosexuality for example, was not the norm. In MDZS, it was unusual, in fact, hence everyone other than wangxian's reactions towards it. (Even then, WWX had his own confusion and, in a sense, bigotry towards it, which I mentioned in a previous post. And that brings me back to the PERIOD TYPICAL STANDARDS of the book's setting which ALL the characters subscribed to in some way!!)

The characters are therefore acting on the morals OF THAT TIME PERIOD.

As uncomfortable as it is, stop holding characters to our standards. Oh and whilst you're at it, let people interpret characters however they like in FANON.

Would also like to add that even fanon aside, JC himself is 🏳️‍🌈 coded, regardless of what the author says. As such, it is completely understandable how some LGBT fans like and latch onto him and headcannon him as such.

See the jealously he has towards anyone talking to WWX and his zero interest in women. Plus his reaction to seeing WWX with LWJ and the fact he never married.....

Yeah. Makes perfect sense why LGBT headcannons of him would exist, especially if you read into how the gossipers in the book literally described his relationship with WWX.

To act as though the LGBT headcannons of him are nonsensical is, in fact, nonsensical in itself for these reasons. Just admit that you're going by your own bias towards JC and go. Because the LGBT HCs whether he be gay, bisexual, ace or a combination of some isn't as big of a reach as you think it is if you read into the character. And it explains how a lot of ace fans have latched onto his character and those still questioning their sexuality too because they may still be in an environment where it isn't safe or welcoming to come out yet (quite like the setting in MDZS).

Consider internalised homophobia exists, and can apply to some MXTX characters is all I'm saying and ultimately, let people enjoy their headcannons fs. It isn't hurting anyone. But remember that your shitty, biased opinions are!

[simulacrumcfp]

CALL FOR PAPERS: MYTHS

Two mermaids, from Apocalypse, Prophecy of the Tiburtine Sibyl, Harley MS 4972 f. 20r, 1275-1325.

He placed one hand upon my shoulder and, holding me tight, bared my throat with the other, saying as he did so: “First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions. You may as well be quiet; it is not the first time, or the second, that your veins have appeased my thirst!” 

Lucy’s eyes were unclean […], instead of pure.

Poor Lucy finds herself tainted by the bite of Count Dracula, an aristocratic Transylvanian vampire that is thirsty for blood, out to export his barbaric ways to Victorian England. In his Dracula (1897), Bram Stoker utilises the myth of the vampire to warn the Victorian reader of the Eastern threat, by portraying Eastern Europe as a place of backwardness and barbaric – vampiristic – rituals. Myths about vampires have been around since the medieval period, when they were commonly linked to profanity. Stoker’s Dracula is the resurrection of a mythological figure, one that can be guided in all sorts of directions, for what was once the myth of the undead has come to represent the fears and threats of the time in which they are resurrected. 

Since ancient times, myths have spoken of the how’s and why’s located at the limits of human understanding, designating that place where intellect fails. There, where knowers stop knowing, we story. In The World of Myth (1990) David Leeming writes that ‘human beings have traditionally used stories to describe or explain things they could not otherwise,’ pointing to the timeless human tendency to grapple with the unknown through story. The myth functions as the means by which we relate to the unknown, embodying our wonderings of the worlds beyond human ratio. 

These stories are then conveyed through artworks, literature, history, or religion. Myths, however, do not just function as a source of inspiration for the arts, but often find their origin in art, spreading, evolving, and growing with different art forms and styles. The Venus Anadyomene, for example, first emerged from the sea in the Theogony – a poem by Hesiod from the 8th century BC. This specific depiction of Venus, daughter of Jupiter and Dione, as birthed by the sea was then made famous by the painting by Apelles (4th century BC). Although this painting has long been lost, it was described by Pliny in his Naturalis Historia (1st century AD), which served as an iconological guidebook for artists. From the orators who tell and retell their stories throughout generations, to the poets who write them down, to the sculptors who carve them out, stories are kept alive. To this day, Venus is most commonly known as the goddess who rose from the sea. 

In the Danish fairytale Den Lille Havfrue (1837) by Hans Christian Andersen, sea foam is not where love is born, but where love goes to die. In the Walt Disney adaptation of the fairytale, The Little Mermaid (1989), mermaid princess Ariel, daughter of king Triton, falls in love with a human prince and gives up her tail to be with him. In the original, quite grim, fairytale by Andersen, the little mermaid finds her prince lying with another. She refuses to stab the lovers to death, as her sisters urge her to, and as a result of her broken heart she dissolves in the foam of the waves. 

In Japan, ancient folklore is being retold to a modern audience through the films by Hayao Miyazaki. His Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away, 2001) animates kami, spirits, washing themselves in a bathhouse as a result of pollution and human activity. This mirrors the Shinto belief that both gods and nature have to be respected and kept clean, and serves as a modern warning. Their demonic counterparts, the oni, take form in the character of Yubaba, who is based on the archetype of the mountain witch, or yumuaba. By taking Japanese mythology as a starting point, Miyazaki is able to create a fantasy-scape: a place where the unthinkable becomes possible. 

Perhaps our first association with mythology brings us back to Ancient Greece. But for them, μῦθος simply meant a story – whether a true or false one, gossip, a historical tale or one of faeries, even a dream. Mῦθος and λόγος, two seemingly opposite terms, fantasy and reason, come together in mythology: the analysing and explaining of stories. There are several ways in which a myth can be explained, and therefore one can also speak of several mythologies. In Creative Mythology (1968) for example, American mythologist Joseph Campbell describes how literary figures such as Thomas Mann or James Joyce managed to make themselves into “living myths,” by translating individual experiences through the correct signs. Shakespeare, with his plays, even managed to create myths around historical figures such as King Henry IV, attracting audiences that were eager to learn about history. History has made other figures into myths as well, such as Louis XIV, known as the Sun King, or Marie Antoinnete.  

In his Mythologies (1957) Roland Barthes explains the creation and circulation of myths through signs and language. According to Barthes, myths are a societal necessity created on the basis of contemporary social value systems, whereby myth formation should mainly be seen as a semiological process, partly as an ideological one. In the essay “Myth Today,” Barthes examines French bourgeois myths that are deeply rooted in society, yet often go unnoticed or taken as fact. By deconstructing modern myths that are spread through advertisements and propaganda, Barthes is able to get to the core of the societal value system of his time. Most famously, he deconstructs the myths around France’s two national products: steak frites and red wine. Both serve as metaphors for blood which, in French society, equals vitality and virility, which equals masculinity, which equals superiority. Equating France with steak frites and red wine then means equating France with virility, masculinity, superiority. 

In “The Double Standard of Aging” (1972), Susan Sontag tackles another modern myth that is deeply-rooted in society, concerning women and age. In the essay, she explains how and why women “of a certain age” are deemed physically undesirable, noting that this differentiates per country. She explains that urbanised societies allow two standards of male beauty, the man and the boy, but only one of female beauty: the girl. This societal judgement of beauty mirrors the evolutionary myth that the value of women is based on their ability for procreation. As a woman’s fertility decreases with age, so does her societal worth.

As the myth moves beyond the human, outside the world as we know it, it writes a strange universe.  It points to that which is not completely explainable according to our current structures for categorising the world. The enchanted world of the supernatural, with its gods, witches, and vampires, perhaps writes of a darker, less knowable reality. Their magic, spells, and strange rituals trouble the disenchanted story of Enlightenment, which tells of reason, control, and certainty – a myth in itself. But even though these supernatural entities tell of the incredible and unbelievable, they remain somewhat explainable. Vampires, gods, and witches, for example, are familiar figures based on a set of commonly understood fictions, differing ever so slightly from the human. ‘In many ways, a natural phenomenon such as a black hole is more weird than a vampire,’ writes Mark Fisher in The Weird and The Eerie (2016). We understand where to place and how to interpret the vampire as a fictional entity. A black hole actually exists, yet we do not understand its strange ways of bending space and time. Science Fiction balances on this thin line between fiction and reality. Perhaps the biggest myths, strangest entities, and weirdest monsters are not necessarily found within the fictional realm of the supernatural but right here in ‘the natural.’ 

‘Coral reefs are monsters.’ In the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017), Anna Tsing equates this natural phenomenon to the supernatural. Like the mythical chimeras of ancient Greece – beasts made up of the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a snake – coral reefs are made of mismatched parts. They embody a strange species encounter as their polyps grow from both animal, plant, and more. Symbiosis, the interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association, might point to some monstrous truth essential to our current epoch of living with the world. In all our vulnerable entanglements with more than human life – we humans too are monsters. 

There are literary differences to be found between myths, fairy tales, sagas, lores, fables, and legends. Fairy tales, for example, often take place in a fantastical world, in which magical creatures roam, and battles between Good and Evil take place. Myths, on the other hand, often have a basis in religion and tell stories about gods or divine creators. Both contain supernatural elements, sometimes these have a basis in history, sometimes in religion, and sometimes in fantasy. For this issue of Simulacrum, we have therefore chosen to soften the boundaries between these ways of storytelling, in order to be open to multiple mythologies, their meanings, and interpretations.

Fancy yourself a modern mythologist? Write an article of 1.000, 1.400, or 1.800 words for our upcoming issue, Mythologies. The deadline for first drafts is the 15th of November, 2020. Would you rather write a column, an interview, fiction, poetry, or do you know an artist whose work fits with this theme? Email us at info@simulacrum.nl. Please send articles as .doc or .docx and portfolio’s as PDF.

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CALL FOR PAPERS: Mythologieën

Hij legde een hand op mijn schouder, hield me stevig vast, ontblootte mijn keel met de andere en zei daarbij: ‘Eerst een beetje verfrissing om mijn inspanningen te belonen. U kunt net zo goed stil zijn; het is niet de eerste keer, of de tweede, dat je aderen mijn dorst hebben gestild!’

Lucy’s ogen waren onrein [...], in plaats van puur

Lucy wordt gebeten door de bloeddorstige Graaf Dracula, een aristocratische vampier uit Transsylvanië, die er op uit is om zijn zondige en barbaarse levensstijl naar Victoriaans Engeland over te brengen. In zijn roman Dracula (1897) zet Bram Stoker de mythische vampier in om de Victoriaanse lezers te waarschuwen voor de opkomende ‘dreiging van het Oosten’ door Oost-Europa af te schilderen als een plek van barbaarse – vampiristische – rituelen. Mythes over vampieren gaan al rond sinds de middeleeuwen en werden toen vooral gelinkt aan godslastering. Met Dracula wekt Stoker dit mythologische figuur op uit de dood en blaast deze nieuw leven in. De vampier, eens de mythe van de ondoden, vertegenwoordigt voortaan de angsten en bedreigingen van de tijd waarin ze herrijst.

Sinds de oudheid gaan mythen over het hoe en het waarom. Daarmee bevinden ze zich aan de grenzen van het menselijk begrip – daar waar het intellect faalt, wordt er verhaald. In The World of Myth (1990) schrijft David Leeming dat ‘mensen van oudsher verhalen hebben gebruikt om dingen te beschrijven of uit te leggen die ze zonder niet zouden kunnen,’ duidend op een tijdloze menselijke neiging om door middel van verhaal door het onbekende te navigeren. Zo functioneert de mythe als het middel waarmee we ons verhouden tot het onbekende, en belichaamt deze onze verwondering over de werelden buiten de menselijke ratio.

Deze verhalen leven vervolgens door via de kunst, literatuur, geschiedenis of religie. Mythen gelden echter niet alleen als inspiratiebron voor de kunsten, maar vinden ook vaak hun oorsprong in de kunst, en verspreiden, evolueren en groeien met verschillende kunstvormen en -stijlen mee. Zo verrees de Venus Anadyomene voor het eerst uit de zee in de Theogonie - een gedicht van Hesiodus uit de 8e eeuw BC. Deze specifieke weergave van Venus, dochter van Jupiter en Dione, als geboren uit de zee werd vervolgens beroemd gemaakt door het schilderij van Apelles (4e eeuw BC). Hoewel het schilderij verloren is geraakt, werd de Venus Anadyomene door Plinius beschreven in de Naturalis Historia (1e eeuw AD), dat diende als iconologische handboek voor volgende generaties kunstenaars. Van de redenaars die generaties lang hun verhalen vertellen, tot de dichters die ze opschrijven en de beeldhouwers die ze uithakken, worden verhalen levend gehouden. Zo staat Venus tot op de dag van vandaag bekend als de godin die uit de zee verrees.

In het Deense sprookje Den Lille Havfrue (1837) van Hans Christian Andersen is zeeschuim niet waar de liefde wordt geboren, maar waar liefde sterft. In de Walt Disney-bewerking van het sprookje, De Kleine Zeemeermin (1989), wordt zeemeermin prinses Ariel, dochter van koning Triton, verliefd op een menselijke prins en geeft ze haar schubben op om bij hem te zijn. In de originele, aanzienlijk grimmigere versie van Andersen treft de kleine zeemeermin haar beminde in bed bij een ander aan. Ze weigert de twee geliefden dood te steken, zoals haar zussen haar toe aanzetten, en als gevolg van haar gebroken hart lost ze op in het schuim van de golven.

In Japan wordt oude folklore voorgedragen aan een modern publiek door de films van Hayao Miyazaki. De geanimeerde Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (De reis van Chihiro, 2001) brengt kami, geesten, tot leven. Ten gevolge van menselijke vervuiling moeten de kami zich wassen in badhuizen om zichzelf weer schoon te krijgen. Deze moderne interpretatie weerspiegelt het Shinto-geloof dat zowel goden als de natuur moeten worden gerespecteerd door ze schoon te houden. De demonische tegenhangers, de oni, krijgen vorm in het karakter van Yubaba, die is gebaseerd op het archetype van de bergheks, de yumuaba. Door de Japanse mythologie als uitgangspunt te nemen, is Miyazaki in staat een ‘fantasyscape’ te creëren: een plek waar het ondenkbare mogelijk wordt.

Wellicht brengt een eerste associatie met mythologie ons terug naar de Klassieke Oudheid. Voor de Grieken betekende μῦθος echter simpelweg een verhaal – of dit nu een waar of een onwaar verhaal was; roddels, geschiedenis of een sprookje, zelfs dromen werden gezien als mythe. Mῦθος en λόγος, twee ogenschijnlijk tegengestelde termen, de fantasie en de rede, komen samen in de mythologie: het analyseren en verklaren van verhalen. Er zijn verschillende manieren waarop een mythe verklaard kan worden, en daarom kan er ook sprake zijn van meerdere mythologieën. In Creative Mythology (1968) beschrijft de Amerikaanse mytholoog Joseph Campbell bijvoorbeeld hoe literaire figuren als Thomas Mann of James Joyce erin slaagden om 'levende mythen' van zichzelf te maken door individuele ervaringen met de juiste tekens te vertalen. Shakespeare slaagde er met zijn toneelstukken in mythen te creëren rondom historische figuren zoals koning Hendrik IV, en trok daarmee een publiek aan dat graag over de geschiedenis wilde leren. Zo ook zijn andere figuren zoals Lodewijk XIV, beter bekend als de Zonnekoning, of Marie Antoinette, binnen de historie tot mythen geraakt.

In Mythologies (1975) analyseert Roland Barthes het ontstaan en de circulatie van mythen aan de hand van semiotiek en taal. Volgens Barthes zijn mythen onmisbaar in de maatschappij en baseren zij zich op hedendaagse sociale waardesystemen, waarbij de formatie van de mythe voornamelijk gezien moet worden als een semiologisch process en deels ideologisch. In het essay “Myth Today,” onderzoekt Barthes diepgewortelde Franse mythen die nochtans onopgemerkt blijven of als feit worden beschouwd. Door de deconstructie van moderne mythen, verspreid door reclame en propaganda, komt Barthes tot de kern van zijn eigentijdse sociale waardesysteem. Meest bekend is de deconstructie van de mythe rondom twee nationale Franse producten: biefstuk en rode wijn. Beide dienen als metafoor voor bloed, dat in de Franse maatschappij rijmt met vitaliteit en moed, die rijmen met mannelijkheid, dat rijmt met superioriteit. Het gelijkstellen van Frankrijk aan biefstuk en rode wijn betekent het gelijkstellen van Frankrijk aan moed, mannelijkheid en superioriteit.

In The Double Standard of Aging (1972) pakt Susan Sontag een andere diepgewortelde mythe aan, een omtrent vrouwen en leeftijd. In haar essay zet ze uit een hoe en waarom vrouwen vanaf een bepaalde leeftijd fysiek niet begeerbaar worden geacht, en merkt hierbij op dat dit per land verschilt. Ze legt uit dat verstedelijkte samenlevingen twee normen voor mannelijke schoonheid kennen, die van de man en die van de jongen, en maar een voor vrouwen, die van het meisje. Dit maatschappelijke schoonheidsoordeel weerspiegeld de evolutaire mythe die stelt dat de waarde van een vrouw gelijk staat aan haar voortplantingsvermogen. Net zoals de vruchtbaarheid van een vrouw  verminderd naarmate zij verjaard, verminderd ook haar maatschappelijke waarde. 

Naarmate de mythe de mens passeert, buiten de wereld zoals wij haar kennen treedt, schept ze een vreemd universum. Ze wijst naar dat wat we nog niet kunnen verklaren met onze huidige structuren voor het categoriseren van de wereld. Het betoverde rijk van het bovennatuurlijke, met haar goden, heksen en vampiers, schetst wellicht een donkerdere realiteit die zich minder goed laat kennen. Hun magie, spreuken en vreemde rituelen zetten zich af tegen het onttoverde narratief van de verlichting, welk van rede, controle en verstand spreekt – een mythe an sich. Maar hoewel deze bovennatuurlijke entiteiten verhalen vertellen over het ongelofelijke, blijven ze enigszins verklaarbaar. Vampiers, goden en heksen bijvoorbeeld, zijn vertrouwde figuren gebaseerd op een verzameling van collectieve fictie, die net afwijken van het menselijke. ‘In many ways, a natural phenomenon such as a black hole is more weird than a vampire,’ schreef Mark Fisher in The Weird and the Eerie (2016). We begrijpen hoe we vampiers als fictionele entiteit moeten plaatsen en interpreteren. Zwarte gaten bestaan echter wél, terwijl wij hun vreemde manieren in het buigen van tijd en ruimte niet bevatten. Science-fiction balanceert op deze dunne lijn tussen fictie en realiteit. Misschien zijn de grootste mythen, raarste entiteiten en meest vervreemdende monsters wel niet te vinden in het fictionele landschap van het bovennatuurlijke maar juist pal hier in het ‘natuurlijke.’

‘Coral reefs are monsters.’ In Arts of Living on a Dying Planet (2017), stelt Anna Tsing dit natuurlijke fenomeen gelijk aan het bovennatuurlijke. Zoals de mythische chimeras uit de Griekse oudheid – beesten met het hoofd van een leeuw, het lichaam van een geit en de staart van een slang – bestaan koraalriffen uit mismatched onderdelen. Met hun poliepen die zowel dierlijk als plantaardig kunnen zijn, belichamen ze een vreemde ontmoeting tussen de soorten. Symbiose, de interactie tussen twee verschillende organismen die in nauw contact met elkaar leven, wijzen ons wellicht naar een bepaalde, monsterlijke waarheid die essentieel is aan ons huidige tijdperk van leven met de aarde. In al onze kwetsbare verstrengelingen met meer dan menselijk leven, zijn ook wij mensen monsters.

Er zijn literaire verschillen te vinden tussen mythen, sprookjes, sagen, fabels en legenden. Sprookjes, bijvoorbeeld, vinden vaak plaats in een fantasiewereld, waar magische figuren rondzwerven en een strijd tussen goed en kwaad plaatsvindt. Mythes, aan de andere kant, vinden vaak hun oorsprong in religie en vertellen over goden en hemelse scheppers. Beiden bevatten bovennatuurlijke elementen. Soms ligt de basis daarvan in geschiedenis, soms in religie, soms in fantasie. Voor deze uitgave van Simulacrum hebben we er daarom voor gekozen de grenzen tussen deze literaire genres te vervagen, om ons open te stellen voor verschillende mythologieën, hun betekenissen en interpretaties.

Waan je jezelf een moderne mytholoog? Schrijf een artikel van 1.000, 1.400 of 1.800 woorden voor ons komende nummer Mythologieën. De deadline voor de eerste versies is op 15 november 2020. Schrijf je liever een column, interview, fictie of poëzie, of ken je een kunstenaar wiens werk in dit thema ligt? Email naar info@simulacrum.nl. Voeg artikelen s.v.p. bij als .doc of .docx en portfolio’s als PDF.

[chiseler]

THE MYSTERY OF SUNN CLASSIC PICTURES

It was like the positive, life-affirming New Age mysticism of the hippies took a sudden turn for the dark and very strange. In the mid-Seventies, as the country was overwhelmed by a creeping atmosphere of impotent anger, paranoia and existential despair in response to Vietnam, Watergate, race riots, Kent State, the Tate-LaBianca murders, bomb-tossing student radicals, pollution, high-profile assassinations, the oil crisis and the emergence of disco, Americans sought solace in some form by plunging headlong into a collective national obsession with all things Mysterious and Unexplained. Suddenly Bigfoot was all the rage, as was The Loch Ness Monster, The Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, psychic phenomena, near-death experiences, apocalyptic Biblical prophecies, and ancient astronauts. People were desperate to hold onto something, anything, no matter how ridiculous and fanciful, as the whole world seemed to be crumbling and burning around them. If something pointed toward an unseen world, a world outside this stinking mess we were stuck with, or better still promised the complete obliteration of this stinking mess, then at least there was a glimmer of hope. Almost overnight, a cottage industry cropped up, flooding the market with cheap paperbacks, magazines, movies and TV shows—even comic books and board games—devoted to unexplained phenomena of all sorts. Personally I didn’t give a Toss about the state of the world, but I still subscribed to UFO Reporter magazine, had a shelf full of cheap paperbacks with titles like The Search for Bigfoot and From Outer Space, and never missed In Search Of…, the half-hour syndicated series narrated by Leonard Nimoy that  delved into one mystery or another every week. For god sakes, I even had the Bermuda Triangle board game.

But in what may have been the strangest phenomenon of all, far more bizarre than the legends surrounding Area 51 or the Philadelphia Experiment, in 1971 Schick teamed up with the Church of Latter Day Saints to launch a low-budget movie studio that aimed to become the epicenter of High Strangeness culture.

Yes, a razor blade company and the Mormons decided to make movies together. How could the results be anything but unfathomable?

(It’s worth noting before we get too far that in my research into the history of Sunn Classic Pictures, it became clear the indie studio, which still exists in some vague form today, seems to have gone to some great lengths to fog their early history, never once mentioning the Mormons, and in some cases denying there even was a Sunn Classic Pictures prior to 1980. With only a few  rare exceptions, the reasonably small Sunn Classic catalog, now owned by Paramount, never received any kind of home video release, which only adds to the mystery.)

As the official story goes, in 1971, the employees of Schick—a subsidiary if the pharmaceutical company Warner-Lambert—approached Rayland Jensen and asked him to launch a new movie studio. Appalled by all the filth and violence and sex and cursing that infested American movie screens, as well as the so-called “intellectuals” who thought these movies were “good,” they felt real Americans needed a family-friendly alternative. Those Schick employees concluded Jensen was just the man for the job, as a few years earlier he’d handled distribution for a nature picture released by the Utah-based American National Enterprises. The picture had done very well.

Okay, let me stop there. As I said, that’s the official story, as far as it goes and as little sense as it makes. The real story goes more like this.

In 1971, a renegade group of American National Enterprises employees, led by Jensen and inspired by that same disgust with what American movies had become, broke away to form a new production company to release family-friendly, G-rated pictures. Patrick Frawley, the ultraconservative, paranoid, anti-communist conspiracy theorist who also happen to run the Schick razor blade company invested a bundle in the new venture, ensuring he would have some say in the kinds of movies the new company would release.

With headquarters divided between Salt Lake City and Park City, Utah, the newly-christened Sunn Classic Pictures (aka Sunn international, aka Schick Sunn Classic Pictures) set out to Make family-friendly features and documentaries aimed at working class, conservative, God-fearing Americans who didn’t go out to movies very often, likely because of all the above-mentioned filth and sex and violence and cuss words. Moreover, they wanted to make certain these warm-hearted films turned a healthy profit. This involved two basic techniques.

The first was four-walling, a distribution method American National Enterprises helped pioneer. Instead of spending a fortune on all those prints necessary for a massive nationwide theatrical release, Sunn instead rented theaters serving the target demographic, inundated the market with ads and gimmicks, then screened their new film at the selected theater for no more than a week. After that extremely limited run, they packed up and moved the print to another theater far away. It was a tricky ploy. On the upside four-walling a picture allowed the production company to keep all the box office receipts without having to divide them among various middlemen.

If they knew the film was a stinker, it also allowed them to skip town before the bad reviews could do them any damage. On the downside, those limited runs also meant the picture would be there and gone before any positive word of mouth could work its magic. Sunn would try four-walling a new movie for a few months, and if it was making money, they might consider a nationwide release. If not, then they’d start trying to sell it to TV for syndication. It wasn’t a tack that worked all the time, but often enough to make it worthwhile, and it left them more of an escape route than a national release ever would.

So. “Family friendly.” Yes. If you want to make Disney-style pictures but don’t have Disney-style budgets to work with, animated features are out. So are live action films with any kind of special effects. Basically what you’re left with are nature films, right? No expensive sets, very few actors, and as a result very cheap to make. So Sunn began producing wilderness adventure stories.

In those very early days, you can definitely smell Patrick Frawley’s hand in the development process. Films like 1971’s Toklat, in which a man is forced to track down and kill a beloved pet bear after the bear kills a local rancher’s livestock, is a prime example. (As it happens, Toklat was the first Sunn picture I ever saw, Green Bay being a conservative working-class town, and so on Sunn’s demographic map. ) There was something decidedly Nietzschean about those earliest releases. Most of them featured lone individualusts with strong principles who flee the corruption of modern civilization to face the harsh realities of nature alone.

Now, think back and ask yourself honestly” what kid in his right mind has ever liked nature films, Nietzschean or otherwise? Maybe Mormon kids did, but certainly not normal kids. Nature movies are dull as dust, all those endless shots of trees and rivers and shit. Even if it’s supposed to be a true adventure story about some historical frontiersman, so what? Where are the explosions and car chases and monkeys doing funny things? You know who liked nature films? Grandparents! Grandparents loved them because they were wholesome and taught valuable lessons. They insisted on dragging their grandkids to them because they didn’t have to worry about being embarrassed or having to define certain words on the trip home.

The handful of films Sunn Classic released in their first three years—most all of them wilderness adventures about solitary manly sorts learning to dominate nature in one way or another—did okay. They didn’t lose money, but they also didn’t become runaway hits.

In 1974, even after several rewrites, no one at Sunn Classic Pictures had high hopes for the next film on the docket, something called The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. Sure, it was loosely based on an historical figure who again fled the corruption of the modern world to live in the wilderness, befriending a grizzly bear along the way. But the character was not some stalwart and steely-eyed Ubermensch—he was gentle and kind-hearted. What the hell were they going to do with that?

Enter Charles Sellier, and the second technique that would be central to Sunn Classic’s success. Sellier, today considered one of Sunn’s true founders together with Rayland Jensen, was a recently-converted Mormon in his thirties, as well as the author of the 1972 novel upon which Grizzly Adams was based. As Sunn’s new executive producer, he had a different—and eventually hugely influential—approach to marketing films.

Sellier set aside an estimated $85,000 for market research before a new film went into production. This involved targeting the desired demographic with door-to-door and telephone interviews asking housewives and construction workers what kind of movies they would like to see. This also involved screening early rushes from films currently in production for hand-picked test audiences in order to get their reactions and advice. This is, of course, standard operating procedure now, but it was radical back then, and something that mortified directors and screenwriters. In some cases Sellier even had members of the test audience wired to biometric scanners to measure their reactions to the scenes they were being shown, and use those reactions to have a script rewritten more to the test audience liking. If audience pulse rates went up whenever a certain character was on screen, well, they’d build up that role. If a certain animal warmed their hearts, well, maybe they’d make a whole movie about that particular animal.

Sellier’s method of crowd-sourced filmmaking was first tried on The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, and sure enough, the film, starring former viker movie regular Dan Haggerty, became Sunn’s first bona fide international hit, bringing in over $20 million. The film was such a smash among grandparents it quickly spawned a Sunn-produced TV series, which was also a big hit among grandparents. To date, the Grizzly Adams franchise remains Sunn’s biggest cash cow.

But something else happened in 1974 that would help make that iconic Sunn Classic logo as familiar and comforting as the Toho, American International, Shaw Brothers and Troma logos. To some of us, anyway.

In 1968, Erich Von Daniken published Chariots of the Gods?, a book which argued, through some mighty suspect and loosely interpreted archaeological evidence, that aliens had visited Earth thousands of years ago, and among other things helped build the Egyptian and Mexican Pyramids, Stonehenge and the statues on Easter island. It was one of the first major hallmarks of the High Strangeness Culture to come.  Originally published in Germany, the book became an International sensation among those with a very high tolerance for pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and bullshit in general..

In 1970, German director Harald Reinl made a documentary based on von Daniken’s book, and it, too, became a big hit across Europe. As sillyassed as the whole thing was, I’d argue the film was even more effective than the book thanks to the visual presentation of all the supposed evidence.

Well, after seeing how much money Chariots of the Gods? Was pulling in overseas, and interested in such topics himself, American TV producer Alan Landsburg acquired the U.S. rights, re-edited the filmn, brought in Rod Serling to narrate, and broadcast it in 1973 as In Search of Ancient Astronauts. It would be the first of a trilogy of TV documentaries about ancient astronauts produced by Landsburg and narrated by Serling.

Noting the ratings that Landsburg doc brought in, as well as that European box office, Sunn obtained the US theatrical rights to In Search of Ancient Astronauts, changed the title back to Chariots of the Gods? And began four-walling it around the country in 1974. It didn’t matter that by that time countless articles and books had completely debunked all of von Daniken’s claims, nor that critics had savaged the film, in some cases even calling it racist for purporting indigenous people in Mexico, Africa an elsewhere could never have created these wonders by themselves. The picture made money. It may not have been Grizzly Adams money, but enough to leave Sellier and Jensen convinced they might be onto something with these documentaries about weird shit. Documentaries were even cheaper to make than nature films, and the demographic they were aiming at seemed eager to believe in monsters and aliens and conspiracies, so there you go. For the next five years, along with the wilderness adventures and wholesome TV adaptations of Huck Finn and Gulliver’s Travels,  Sunn gave the half-wits like me what we wanted.

In 1975, Sunn picked up the theatrical distrobution rights To The Outer Space Connection, the last of Landsburg’s ancient astronaut trilogy (as well as one of the last things Rod Serling worked on before he died). This final entry argued not only that aliens had visited earth thousands of years ago, but had planted humans here in the first place and had been guiding our evolution ever since. This wasn’t exactly a new idea, and could be traced back, so far as I’m aware, at least to Nigel Kneale’s 1958 BBC miniseries Quatermass and The Pit. But the film, directed by Fred Warshofsky, went several crazy steps beyond Kneale, claiming we know exactly where the aliens came from and why, that the Mayans were themselves aliens, and that these same aliens would return to Earth on Christmas Eve, 2011.

The TV documentaries made enough of a splash for Landsburg that he parlayed them into the above-mentioned weekly In Search Of… series, which began airing in 1977, right around the same time Grizzly Adams hit the airwaves.

Both Chariots of the Gods? And The Outer Space Connection helped cement the template that would define the rest of the Sunn-produced High Strangeness documentaries that would follow, making them so effective on the young, the susceptible, and the merely desperate. The real key, it seems, far beyomd the film’s actual content, was conscripting an authoritative host/narrator who can present the most insane pseudoscientific theories and shaky evidence with a straight face while repeatedly using terms like “indisputable,” “Proven beyond a doubt,” and “scientists agree.”: “It’s an incontrovertible fact these ancient carvings prove alien visitors walked on Earth over five hundred centuries ago.” It was the simplest of carnival sideshow techniques, but one that kept drawing suckers to the theaters.

The same year they released The Outer Space Connection, Sunn also released The Mysterious Monsters, which was less a documentary than a series of vignettes about Bigfoot, the Yeti, and The Loch Ness Monster. Director Robert Guenette had been making what you might call speculative Sunn-style documentaries long before Sunn even existed, so he was in familiar territory. In fact, The Mysterious Monsters includes scenes borrowed from Guenette’s 1974 TV movie, Monsters: Mysteries or Myths?, which coincidentally had been narrated by Rod Serling. The (mostly) new and expanded Sunn production was hosted by Peter Graves, who was as straight-faced as they come. In between shots of Graves and ten other men in cowboy hats wandering the forest on horseback looking for Bigfoot, we get eyewitness accounts from those who claim to have actually seen Bigfoot, Nessie, or the Yeti. Unlike most Bigfoot films of the era (and there were a bunch), The Mysterious Monsters infers a decided fearlessness and hostility on Bigfoot’s part, claiming he not only terrorized innocent victims, but wandered into the suburbs to terrorize them. The recreated Bigfoot encounters here are kind of fun, and in fact the film contains two solid scares, at least if you’re nine. Nessie and the Yeti get short shrift, and those scenes of Graves riding through the forest with that hopeless hunting party are interminable, but the picture was another big hit,arriving at precisely the right time given 1975 was a banner year for Bigfoot cinema. In the end, and where he got his information who the hell knows, Graves announces there is a community of some two hundred Bigfeet living in Northern California, though Graves and the hunting party find none of them.

Another hallmark of Sunn’s documentaries was that most inevitably ended with an outlandish, shocking, unexpected, and wholly unsubstantiated claim. The influence of mondo films—Mondo Cane, Africa ama and the like—on Sunn’s documentaries is undeniable. But while mondo films aimed to shock grindhouse audiences with footage (whether real or created) of bizarre and extreme human behavior, Sunn aimed to leave family audiences womderstruck at the possibilities of a mysterious world of magic and monsters just beyond our perceptions.

In 1976, Sunn followed up The Mysterious Monsters with The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena, also directed by Guenette, this time narrated by Raymond Burr. The film is less a cohesive documentary than another shaggy dog series of vignettes exploring extrasensory perception, astral projection, and telekinesis as well as ghosts and spiritualism, featuring an all-star cast of celebrity psychics including Jeanne Dixon and Uri Geller. Not surprisingly, Burr, who doesn’t seem terribly convinced himself, informs us that there is irrefutable scientific evidence that all these powers are absolutely real and for true.

That same year also saw the release of one of Sunn’s more patently ridiculous outings, In Search of Noah’s ARk, a film which, in many ways, proved a turning point. The film was the first to be hosted/narrated by character actor Brad Crandall, who would go on to narrate most of the remaining Sunn Classic documentaries, as well as appearing in a few of their TV shows. It was directed by James L. Conway, who quickly established himself as Sunn’s go-to in-house director, churning out five or six features and TV movies a year.

Apart from turning to mostly in-house staffers to make their films instead of bringing in outside directors and celebrity hosts, In Search of Noah’s ARk also marked the point at which Sunn further fed their demographic by adding a decidedly fundamentalist Christian focus to many of their films, from Noah’s Ark to their TV series Greatest Heroes of the Bible to two documentaries about near-death experiences to 1979’s (and grammar be damned) In search of Historic Jesus.

In business terms it was a savvy move. To this day, films aimed at a fundamentalist audience, especially if they support a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible, can bring in more money than most Hollywood films. They certainly bring in more than most Mormon themed films, and apparently the more patently ridiculous the involved claims, the better.

The supposed “scientists” who lay out the evidence that the remains of Noah’s honest-to-God ark are still sitting up there on top of Mt. Ararat (should anyone care to take a look) aren’t, um, scientists at all. One, a supposed physics professor, argues there’s a mountain of geological evidence proving the world was deluged by an all-consuming flood, um, five thousand years ago. Another claims the ark was first discovered by a Russian expedition sent by Tsar Nicholas II in 1916, but all the reports and evidence were destroyed by dirty communist revolutionaries, um, two days after the expedition returned. It all goes downhill from there, and you have to feel some pity for the poor gullible fools who believed all this nonsense.

I saw nearly all of Sunn’s documentaries in the theater when I was a kid, and now feel sorry for my mom, dad, and older sister, who I suspect drew straws to see who had to take me whenever a new Sunn picture hit town. When I was ten I bought every last nutty claim. Going back and watching them again four decades later, I find myself blurting, “Wait, what?” Aloud after nearly every scene. They do, however, remain fascinating artifacts and a mirror of a certain psychological makeup. They’re also still fun as hell for all their crazy dumbness, if you keep your critical thinking skills at the ready.

Sunn found themselves in the middle of a shitstorm in 1977 with the release of The Lincoln Conspiracy, also directed by Conway. Historians, critics and the media at large attacked the film for presenting as fact a convoluted conspiracy claiming the assassination of President Lincoln was an inside job, closing, as Oliver Stone’s JFK would years later, with a demand the investigation be reopened. Conway would later claim the film was just a silly speculative docudrama based on a couple recent books, but even the authors of the books denounced the film. Still, a little controversy has never been known to hurt the box office.

Over the next few years Sunn continued to release two or three pseudoscientific documentaries  a year, including Beyond and Back, Beyond Death’s Door, and The Bermuda Triangle, the latter of which claimed all those ships and planes vanished after being zapped by a malfunctioning Atlantean particle bean that was lost somewhere on the ocean floor near Bimini. Bimini? Well, I gotta say, as explanations go, it makes about as much sense as any other.

A personal favorite from the late Sunn era for its sheer nihilistic simplicity was 1979’s Encounter With Disaster, this time directed by Charles Sellier himself. Using his patented market research techniques, he brought a test audience into a theater and showed them dozens of newsreel clips of fires, earthquakes, The Hindenberg, race car crashes and the like, measuring responses to see which were considered the most exciting. He then strung all the most popular disaster footage together and released it as a feature.

Encounter With Disaster was perhaps the one true mondo film Sunn released during their brief heyday, and a definite anomaly. Toward the end, instead of documentary footage, talking heads and manipulative narration, films like The Bermuda Triangle, Beyond Death’s Door and In Search of Historic Jesus cane to rely more on speculative recreations with actors, sets and scripted dialogue. Although a narrator does pop up occasionally to say, in essence, “Yup, this really, really happened!,” the films come off more like splintered docudramas than documentaries, which somehow makes their assorted theses seem even less plausible.

It’s worth pointing out here that In Search of Historic Jesus, as delightfully awful as it is, does, without saying as much, offer a clear case study of the effect Sellier’s marketing machinations could have on a film.

Directed by Sunn’s in-house cinematographer Henning Schellerup (who prior to Sunn had worked on everything from softcore porn to Corman productions) and again narrated by Brad Crandall, Historic Jesus clearly began life as a documentary aiming to present all the independent historical evidence proving the Biblical account of Jesus’ life was accurate. Given there was precious little of that to be found, it became a documentary about the Shroud of Turin. Given there wasn’t really ninety minutes worth of material about the Shroud of Turin, they shot an interview with a fake scientist offering some, um, plausible scientific explanations for the Star of Bethlehem, then plundered some footage from the Noah’s Ark movie (though oddly the data offered in the latter somehow changed between 1976 and 1979). All this left them with a film that was about twenty minutes long.

The film was saved when Sellier gathered a test audience of fundamentalist Christians. After showing them a few scenes, he quickly learned they didn’t need any scientific or historical proof that Jesus really existed. They just wanted to hear more Jesus stories.

Taking their advice, the bulk of the film became a  string of recreations of Jesus’ Greatest Hits acted out by amateur actors playing Jesus, Mary, Herid, Pontius Pilate and assorted disciples. No effort whatsoever is made to prove these recreated scenes actually happened. So instead of a pseudoscientific, pseudohistorical account of the, um, historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth, it became another Sunday School-ready Jesus movie, all primed and ready to be rented to church groups across the country. In short, then, calling the film In Search of Historic Jesus actually makes sense.

By 1979, Sunn’s documentaries seemed to be running out of gas. They were still turning a profit (especially that Historic Jesus thing), but the profits weren’t what they once were, and the films were costing more to make. Also, other production houses had picked up on the Sunn Classic formula and began releasing High Strangeness docs of their own. In 1978, for instance, Amran Films and RCR released The Late Great Planet Earth, based on “Biblical scholar” Hal Lindsey’s massive bestseller which claimed all the prophecies in the Book of Revelation were coming true, and the long-promised Apocalypse would arrive any day now. If I remember correctly, the world was supposed to end in 1986. The film was hosted and narrated by Orson Wells, who had once been asked to narrate a Sunn film, but was so horrified by their marketing practices he turned down the job.

(A few years later in 1981, Welles would also narrate a documentary about Nostradamus’ prophecies, which was directed, coincidentally enough, by Sunn Classic alumnus Robert Guenette. Just to illustrate how influential Sunn’s experiment had been, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow was distributed by goddamn WARNER BROTHERS, of all places.)

What struck the real death knell to Sunn’s hugely successful string of pseudoscientific and pseudo historical extravaganzas was a changing culture. We were own the brink of Morning in America and the Reagan Era. Interest in silly monsters and psychic phenomena was waning as everyone put the ’70s behind them, focusing instead on the stock market, the threat of nuclear war, cocaine, designer clothes and other tangible real world issues.

Charles Sellier

In 1980 Sunn Classic Pictures was bought out by Taft Enterprises, a Cincinnatti-based conglomerate.  The suits in Taft’s entertainment division had a few ideas of their own about what American moviegoers wanted. When they correctly saw that the days of four-walling were about over as the business ties between the major studios and national theater Chains grew stronger, Charles Sellier walked away to continue writing, producing, directing and marketing films on his own terms. In 1984 he directed the notorious holiday slasher film, Silent Night, Deadly Night, a picture remembered more for its ad campaign than anything in the picture itself. Sellier also later converted from Mormonism to evangelical Christianity.

When Taft likewise decided family friendly entertainment was a dead end, that the market for G-rated wilderness adventures simply wasn’t there anymore, that a film had to be rated PG or R if it hoped to make any money, Jensen and a few other original American National Enterprises refugees quit in disgust, and once again formed their own production company to offer honest American families wholesome entertainment options. Their first film was 1981’s Private Lessons, a teen sex comedy starring Sylvia Kristel. It made a lot of money.

Director James Conway stayed with Taft for awhile, helming several pictures, including the monster movie The Boogens . Interestingly, the very first Taft/Sunn release, perhaps formulated to attract Sunn’s core audience, was the Conway-directed Hangar 18, starring Darren McGavin, Robert Vaughn and Gary Collins. It was the perfect transitional picture, a sci-fi conspiracy thriller loosely based on what might well have been the subject of the next Sunn Classic documentary: Roswell and Area 51. Conway later went on to become an executive at Spelling Entertainment, overseeing a mountain of wildly successful crap.

Over the subsequent decades there were more sales and acquisitions, with the various companies overseeing the Sunn Classic brand themselves being gobbled up by even larger faceless corporate entities. Sunn vanished, then reappeared, then vanished again. Today there are vague, mysterious hints that Sunn Classics Pictures has been re-launched after Rayland Jensen teamed up with Lang Elliott, original founder of Tri-Star Pictures. But if Sunn really has risen from the grave, would it matter?

For good or ill, over the course of that five-year stretch between 1974 and 1979, Sunn Classic Pictures illuminated one strange facet of a very strange era, warped millions of impressionable minds (like mine), fully capitalized on a nation’s despair and collective neuroses, and left an indelible mark on the culture. Take even a cursory glance at what’s airing on the History and Discovery Channels, or at how the marketing departments of any movie studio large or small operates today. They simply wouldn’t be what they are In the second decade of the twenty-first century had it not been for Sunn Classic Pictures., and fore that we can thank the Mormons, a right-wing kook, and Bigfoot.

by Jim Knipfel

[gascon-en-exil]

I know people are desperate to make Cuan/Finn happen for whatever reason, but will you really go so far as to interpret Finn as a gay Japanese sex slave in a western medieval setting?

Japanese? No. The point of applying wakashudo to discussions of Quan and Finn’s relationship is that it’s a historical practice with which the game’s developers would have been familiar, and one that aligns just about perfectly with their dynamic. Coincidentally (or not?) there were a number of comparable practices in European history that could be substituted in to match developer notes on the countries of Jugdral and from where each took their influence. As Leonster and northern Thracia generally are meant to represent the city-states of northern Italy it would be more fitting to paint Finn as a catamite (either the ancient Roman version, itself descended from the erastes/eromenos dynamic of Athenian pederastic love, or the early modern equivalent that sometimes incorporated members of the Catholic Church) who’s been taken off to war by his lover and also has blue hair for some reason.

Now, to call any of the younger partners in these types of relationships “sex slaves” completely misses their historical context in a bad faith attempt to modern statutory rape laws to settings in which they were not present. The reason that Athenian pederasy, the Sacred Band of Thebes, the mignons of Henri III, the garçons maquillés of 19th century Paris (from whom I take a good deal of my own presentation, the sex work of New Orleans having been heavily influenced by that of its mother city), and others persisted in the literary imagination for centuries was that they stood as uncommon positive depictions of same-sex relations. I assume wakashudo served a similar function in Japanese queer culture. They live on today in gay/bi male culture as well, through dominant older men we affectionately call daddies which has nothing to do with literal fatherhood *rolls eyes at Dream Daddy* and through the twink aesthetic, the practice among young gay men - mostly bottoms - of trying to look and act like underage or just-legal boys to cultivate a specific type of sex appeal. Neither of these is as clearly defined as a community as, say, the bear community is, and they’re not without controversy (particularly twinks among the masc4masc crowd that has a problem with effeminate men) but they’re more than just categories of guys on porn sites. I don’t know if he comes across as such in Japanese, but Leon in the localized version of Shadows of Valentia is unquestionably an anachronistic twink; he frets about how he’s getting older and how men will no desire him once he’s no longer young and smooth, the current object of his affections is a gruff protective daddy/bear type, and he has some overly idealized notions of love that he clearly hasn’t lost yet despite more than one setback. That he is as such when character profile declares him to be 24 is apparently what makes this morally acceptable, but in my view his actual age just gives him some more appreciable pathos. 

Plus, calling Finn a sex slave ignores the context of the Jugdral games themselves: the man clearly holds Quan up on a pedestal for decades after his death, and at no point does he contemplate whether there was anything inappropriate about their relationship because, in-universe, there really wasn’t. The plot of FE5 would not have happened at all had Finn not been so hell-bent on upholding Quan’s dying dream of a Thracia united under his house (itself an ethically complex issue with no easy answer, without taking anyone’s sexual proclivities into account). If he ever questions all that he went through to put Leif on the throne of the entire peninsula the games never tell us about it; Seliph questions whether the invasion of Thracia is a just war, but Finn and Leif certainly never do. What’s more, take a look around at what else Finn can get up to during normal gameplay, not to mention some other Gen 1 characters:

Finn, the wide-eyed fifteen-year old with no sexual agency, can father two children on any of seven women during his time with Sigurd’s army. It’s implied this happens in a series of one-night stands (or just one in Ayra’s case), at least for him to leave his new family without even a word when he leaves Silesse with Quan and Ethlyn.

Among these women is Lachesis, who is about Finn’s age and more than a little in love with her own brother. The most heavily implied father of at least one of children is a hardened mercenary old enough to have fathered another child on the other side of the continent some years prior.

And then there’s Silvia, the fourteen-year old prostitute/camp follower. She’s introduced immediately following a hookup with a man who is several years older than her and whom we’re meant to consider sympathetic enough for his full character arc to land with the appropriate impact. Oh, and another of her predestined pairings evokes a brother/sister dynamic even if in reality she and Claud are probably just distant cousins.

Also, Dew. We are asked to suspend our disbelief and accept that at some point during the campaign this baby-faced kid hits puberty and is able to father two children.

The original point of bringing up wakashudo and the dynamic between Quan and Finn is that it’s one of many, many contentious issues explicit or implicit within the text of the Jugdral games that would make them very tough to localize faithfully in the current moral climate. You can’t just selectively apply moral outrage to these two alone without coming off as homophobic (and from what I’ve read, per one of the supplementary mangas Ethlyn was only 16 when she gave birth to Altena, so Quan’s sketchy by modern standards with a woman too). I’d like to see remakes that doesn’t scrub away these controversial elements, because it is my opinion that Fire Emblem has always thrived off its unorthodox treatment of sexual content. Whether we ever get Jugdral remakes, and in what condition they’ll leave the original script and what’s between its substantial line gaps, remains to be seen.

Not that I imagine that will stop you from being argumentative. You’re very clearly not a typical Tumblr anti, who would have just left Mark and/or me with an anon declaring us to be pedophiles and called it a day*. You made a new account with nothing on it and an uncreative username just to send me (and possibly others in the fandom) meandering asks purely meant to generate debate. It’s a telling M.O.

*Which I would then publish with a humorous rebuttal, so that my followers might then have a quick laugh over this clear misapplication of an ethically charged term.

[libermachinae]

Fault Lines Under the Living Room

Part II: Breathe - Chapter 5:  Thoughts Expand in Blooms

Also available on AO3! Summary: The consequences of Ratchet and Rodimus' chase become known. Chapter Word Count: 2644

---

“Try again.”

“Yes, sir. Rodimus, come in Rodimus. This is Blaster, coming to you live from the Lost Light command deck. Do you read me? Status and further instruction requested. Over.”

Years of handling the Wreckers’ fluctuating schedules meant it was no effort for Ultra Magnus to resist rubbing his optics as he watched the progress of their three recovery speeders. Siren, Crossblades, and Waverider had launched with minimal deviations from standard procedure (Crossblades would receive a write-up for nonessential helical rotation) and tracked Arcee’s shuttle up to acceptable pursuit range. That was where the chase had stalled, as Rodimus had provided no further instructions and protocol required command from a captain before they could proceed. Either captain.

Protocol fell apart when one refused to leave his hab and the other had stopped answering his comms. Magnus started mentally writing up a proposal for temporary transfer of pursuit command responsibilities while they waited.

The control panel refreshed as the latest information poured in. The speeders were entering upper atmosphere, rotating in pyramid formation in the shuttle’s trail. Acceleration had decreased to the minimum required to maintain orbit and altitude held steady as they sailed through Scarvix’s exosphere.

“Ultra Magnus, I have a visual on Rodimus’ ship,” Bluestreak reported.

“Pull it up.”

The datafeeds compressed to the right of the screen, replaced with the compound live feed from the speeders, displaying the shuttle’s stern, the glow of its thrusters closer to a lightbulb than anything spaceworthy. The engines were keeping it aloft, but there was an unnatural stillness about it, like debris floating through space.

“Again.”

Blaster adjusted settings on the ship’s communications hub and leaned into the mic.

“Rodimus, come in Rodimus. This—”

There was a crackle and buzz as the ship’s receiver finally picked up a signal.

“This is Rodi—ack, Ratchet, this is Ratchet. We read you.”

Blaster’s shoulders relaxed as he transferred primary input to the third in command’s station, but Magnus did not match his relief. Underneath the fritz of the shuttle’s poorly maintained equipment, Ratchet’s voice was shaking.

“Ratchet, this is Ultra Magnus. Report.”

“Report. Report… um, Arcee’s gone. We lost her. Satellite. Crash. Is Cyclonus there?”

“No. What is your—”

“Get him,” Ratchet interrupted.

“Where is Rodimus?” Magnus asked. Ratchet was supposed to be one of the good ones, recognizing his place within the chain of commands. Making demands was out of character for him.

“Here! I’m here,” Rodimus’ voice crackled down the line. “Present. Available. Get Cyclonus.”

Magnus sent the ping and tagged it urgent. Cyclonus had never been known for tardiness, but that put it on the record.

“What is your status?” he asked as he acknowledged Cyclonus’ response.

“Good! Weird? Ratchet is banged up, which is bad. He suffered impact shock in his lower spinal strut, chance there’s a disk… how do I…”

Magnus’ orbital ridge twitched, a coding bug when expression protocols tried to assign a profile to stress of unknown origin. He wiped the cache, regaining his neutral set, and sent a command to have the speeders approach the shuttle. Visual on the command deck would be helpful, but flight integrity was his main concern. If neither Rodimus nor Ratchet was in the right mind to pilot, they would need to engage in emergency grounding maneuvers.

“Ratchet, are you still there? Rodimus sounds incoherent; what is his status?”

“He’s fine.” His voice was briefly drowned out by shuffling and crashing on the other end. “—cessor’s functioning normally. It’s loud, but it’s working.”

“He’s overheating?” Magnus asked.

“Not his fans, his thoughts.”

“Is his comm link malfunctioning?”

“He’s bright like the goddamn sun. I can barely get two words in. Will you shut that off? ”

“Ratchet?” Speeders were closing in.

“Not you.”

“Stop yelling at me!” Rodimus snapped, volume raising and lowering like he was pacing around the microphone. “I heard you the first time.”

“I don’t see how. I can barely hear myself.”

“Aw, poor Rodimus, doesn’t get to hear his own voice.”

“ You’re Rodimus, that’s my line.”

“Rodimus, Ratchet, Waverider is en route to board,” Ultra Magnus interjected. “If you are able, please lower the hatch for arrival, otherwise he will engage emergency stove—”

“No, don’t!”

It wasn’t just that they shouted at the same time, but that Rodimus and Ratchet’s voices matched in pitch, tone, and cadence which caused Magnus, for the third time in his life, to forget what he had been saying.

“Is Cyclonus there?” Rodimus asked.

“There’s something on board,” Ratchet said. “Don’t know what it is, but you can’t let anyone else get near it.”

“It did a weird thing. I’m Rodimus, but also I’m Ratchet? And both?”

“Those sound like the same things, Rodimus,” Magnus said, half distracted as he instructed Waverider to return to position.

“They’re not,” Ratchet said.

“Sir?” Cyclonus’ voice came as a blessing. Magnus gestured him forward.

“Cyclonus just arrived,” he announced. “Cyclonus, Rodimus and Ratchet uncovered something on Arcee’s shuttle. It’s…” He blanked.

“I can feel Ratchet’s processor,” Rodimus said, rushing like it would make any of this comprehensible. “He’s thinking and it’s all really fast and hard, but it’s not rough like you would expect? Like, the feeling of grit in your gears, I thought it would be like that, but it’s more like there’s just a lot of gears and it takes a lot of power to turn them all, and it’s too hard to decide whether to focus on just one or the entire thing. And he keeps thinking about me and my thoughts and how they’re not like that, and I’m thinking about him, and then I get stuck because all the thoughts start to sound the same and I don’t know which ones came from me or which are Ratchet or even which me is me. It’s all a big thought reservoir, a—a thought battle, an entire brain war and I don’t know which side I’m on!”

Cyclonus’ gaze was steady at the screen. Once it was clear that Rodimus was done, he leaned over the microphone.

“Can you send an image of the object?” he asked.

“Sure,” Ratchet said.

Blaster raised his hand.

“Image received.”

Ultra Magnus nodded and the feed of the shuttle was replaced with a still capture, a calamity of wires and light that took his visual center a full millisecond to parse.

“It’s the Enigma of Combination,” Cyclonus said.

“What’s that?” He could differentiate the orbital plating of the object itself and the red dwarf dew drop at its center, but the light it cast on its surroundings made his spark flicker with a disturbing fuzz.

“A plague,” Cyclonus said. “Considered a long-lost relic even in my own time. I would doubt this was the legitimate article, if Rodimus hadn’t so perfectly summarized its less infamous effects.”

“It can do more?” Magnus asked. What it had already done— whatever it had done, he still was not clear on the details—seemed itself too much for a bot to handle. Or two.

Cyclonus hesitated.

“Well, you see…”

“No. No, no, so much no, you’re kidding. Ratchet, tell me they’re kidding!”

“I don’t bloody well know!” he snapped back. He had sunk back into the pilot’s chair while Rodimus paced the bridge. His spark was spinning like a centrifuge, its engine overfed by the deluge of panicked thoughts tumbling through his mind. It was all Cyclonus and shuttle and Arcee and combination and Drift, new threads knocking each other out of the way so nothing could reach a conclusion, just endless half-thoughts pinged repeatedly. Worst was when Rodimus tripped over the junk now scattered across the bridge as it brought everything to a shuddering halt, like a whole expressway’s worth of engines seized up simultaneously.

He pressed his hands to his face and tried to focus on keeping his vents open, ignoring the storm of queries of Is Ratchet overheating? and Drift is going to kill me.

“I can’t be in a combiner with Ratchet!”

He hates me he hates me he hates me rattled around their processors like screws in a box.

“The Enigma has determined otherwise,” Cyclonus said.

So now the damn thing was having its own thoughts?

“It’s thinking ?” Rodimus asked, earning an additional glare from Ratchet.

“No one knows,” Cyclonus said. “It’s ancient technology, built on the same principles that govern sparks.” Principles that even modern science knew so little about. Ratchet was going to say it but froze when he felt Rodimus grab for it, tossing at it a hundred questions he had no answers to: Is that thing a person and Where do sparks come from and Would this stop if we broke it followed by another run of apologies.

“The Enigma has you in a holding pattern,” Cyclonus went on. “There aren’t enough of you to form the combiner, so it’s keeping your sparks connected until it can interface with at least one more Cybertronian.”

Ratchet saw the image that formed in Rodimus’ mind and his glower deepened.

“I don’t have the knowledge or the skills to disconnect something like that,” he said. “Sparks are complicated, Rodimus, and there’s still so much we don’t know about them. I didn’t even think it was possible to maintain a connection of this magnitude without direct contact.” Rodimus’ next idea was even worse. “Have you met your crew? The moment you put it in a box and tell no one to look, Brainstorm, Skids, and Whirl are all going to make breaking into it their personal quest.”

“Isolating the Enigma will not contain its effects,” Cyclonus added. “Because the holding pattern is an open channel, you have become conduits for the Enigma’s energies. If even one of you encounters another compatible component, it will complete the process, regardless of its distance from you.”

Rodimus stilled, then sunk to the floor, his thoughts miserably coalescing into a single thread.

“So, either we drag someone else into this mess, or we’re stuck in this shuttle, trying to think over each other forever?” Forever was steeped in darker emotions that caught Ratchet off-guard, which Rodimus immediately covered up with nonsense branches of observations about the junk on the floor. A negativity storm, Drift would have called it.

From behind, he heard Rodimus chuckle, though his thoughts betrayed little amusement.

“If I may,” Cyclonus said, interrupting no one. “Ratchet, I do respect you as a physician, but modern medicine is not the only source of knowledge concerning the Cybertronian body. Even modern theology, shallow thought it may be, offers insights to the nature of sparks that your specialty lacks.”

“No.” Ratchet scowled and shook his head, though more so at the way he felt Rodimus stirring that observation than the idea itself. “None of the woo-woo nonsense. Drift’s mindfulness agility course was bad enough.”

Unfortunately, his words made Rodimus’s thoughts expand in blooms, accompanied by shuffling as he stood to lean over the pilot’s chair.

“Drift was always trying to get me into his meditation thing,” he said. “He—he talked about the Rossum connection, how the mind impacts the spark and vice-versa. It was mostly, you know, power poses and cool sword moves, but there was more advanced stuff we didn’t get around to.”

“It could be a lead,” Cyclonus said, his grave voice somehow failing to make a dent in Rodimus’ growing enthusiasm. “I know very little about Spectralism, but if it involves manipulation of spark energies, there is a chance it could be used to counteract the effects of the Enigma.”

“Yeah, remember how Drift can see auras?” Rodimus said. “Maybe he can see where we’re tangled and just undo the knot.”

“There is no scientific backing to that kind of pandering—”

But we don’t have any other ideas.

Rodimus drew him up short, his own dearth of creativity reflected back to him as though in a mirror. Loathe though he was to admit it, Rodimus was right: they had nothing else. No leads, no one to fall back on. Cybertron’s history, the ancient mythologies that might have shed light on this technology, was lost to war and time, and all that was left was the third, fourth-hand accounts of people who claimed to know what was lost.

There was a chance Drift would have nothing to offer them, but even the possibility of guidance was an improvement over the helplessness Ratchet felt when he tried to imagine them fixing this on their own.

He received an image burst: Drift, wild and beautifully unhinged, leaping for the chance to care for Ratchet with literally open arms. Rodimus shut it down, distracting himself by counting rivets in the bridge ceiling, but vibrating embarrassment persisted between them.

“Would it be appropriate to call Drift for this?” Ultra Magnus asked, pulling the further from their internal squirming. “The truth about his role in the Overlord plan came out months ago, and since we’ve made no effort to contact him. To approach him now so he can solve this seems exploitative.”

Ratchet caught only the yellow of Rodimus’ hand before the captain vaulted over the back of the pilots’ chair, landing with a solid bang.

“I’ll take the blame,” he said.

“For what?” Ratchet asked, though he could already see it.

“For not fixing this sooner,” Rodimus said. He shrugged, a movement so automatic Ratchet did not pick up who it had been directed to. “I’m the captain. It was my responsibility and I failed. That shouldn’t doom Ratchet to having to live with my mistakes.”

He avoided Ratchet’s optics as he spoke, but Ratchet still caught his expression, the shiver of his spoiler as he spoke. It struck him that the reason Rodimus was so hard to read from an external perspective was because a single look meant so many things: frustration, guilt, grief, and hope piling on top of each other too quickly to discern where any one emotion rooted. His thoughts were going in so many directions all the time, of course it would be a challenge for everyone else to keep up.

“How do you intend to locate Drift?” Ultra Magnus asked, ever pragmatic.

“I have a tracker,” Ratchet said.

“I memorized the specifications for his shuttle,” Rodimus added, his processor spitting out the codes in full.

“And will that ship be adequate? Do you need additional supplies?”

Ratchet turned in the seat, looking around the scattered contents of the bridge, to say nothing of what their collision might have done to the storage down below. Despite the mess, he saw what looked like intact crates of potable energon, and the shuttle’s own systems were not in imminent danger of running dry.

“We’re stocked,” he said, and catching Rodimus’ primary concern, went on, “Unless Cyclonus know how far the Enigma’s effect extends, it’s going to be too risky to dock back in the Lost Light. We’ll make due with what’s here.”

“I’ll have Rewind compile you a list of known energon distributors with minority Cybertronian populations. That will be your best opportunity to refuel without risking exposure, should the need arise.”

Could the Enigma grab non-Cybertronian mechanicals? Rodimus wondered, a query Ratchet did not have the energy to entertain.

“Thanks, Mags,” Rodimus said out loud. “Take care of the place while we’re gone; you know the drill.”

“Of course, Rodimus. Uh, stay safe?”

Rodimus laughed, a sound that Ratchet felt as a golden thread, spun in a ripple through space before vanishing to nothing. He squinted, trying to make sense of what the hell that had been, but Rodimus’ burst of enthusiasm and plans for the coming journey overwhelmed him.

“Don’t worry, Ratchet’s pride will make sure I get back in one piece.”

You—!

It was going to be a long journey to the outer rim. Though Rodimus was grinning cheekily, the tense coil at the center of his thoughts agreed.

[writingfulfillment]

Five Headcanons That Will Change How You View Harry Potter

1. Black Hermione

When reading the books for the first time, some fans imagined Hermione as a black girl while others pictured her as white. The movies came out before I was old enough to read the books, so I imagined her as she was cast: a white girl. However, I think that the idea fits very well as do many other fans. Some prefer the other version, it just depends on how you pictured her. On twitter, Rowling said that she loved the idea of a black Hermione. I’ve read the whole series twice since hearing about this and there is no mention of her skin tone. Only that she had prominent teeth, curly/frizzy hair and was extremely intelligent. There is a lot more meaning behind her persecution as a Muggle-born when you imagine her as black. Her main bully in this area is Draco Malfoy; a rich, white boy from an ancient family. He frequently makes snide comments about her appearance and calls her “Mudblood”. This then implies that the Malfoy’s were racist. Knowing all of the other terrible things that they’ve done and believe in, it’s not much of a stretch.

In the fourth book at the Yule Ball, Hermione is literally unrecognizable, even to her two best friends. She straightens her hair and has shrunk down her front teeth noticeably. And for the first time, Harry realizes that she’s beautiful. In this world we’ve been brought up to believe that European standards of beauty are the only ones. They treasure light skin and straight hair; opposite to what people of African descent possess. It is sad but true to say that many Black women strive to adhere to these standards that exclude them entirely. It makes a lot of sense that a young black Hermione striving to look beautiful would spend hours painstakingly straightening her hair. And why almost no one recognized her when she had finished. She later states that it was fun for a special occasion, but way too much work for an everyday practice. I love her even more for embracing her wild but beautiful hair and her suggested ethnicity.  

2. House Elves Are A Metaphor For Oppressed Women

Some fans hypothesize that the House Elves in Harry Potter are a metaphor for the social limitations of Women. The House Elves are considered to be lesser beings, even though they posses a similar kind of magic to wizards. They are enslaved and receive no pay, let alone benefits or health care. They are meant to stay in the Wizard’s home and perform their domestic duty. This sounds too close for comfort to the job description of women in our society. Fortunately, we’ve gotten past the point of considering women as property of their husbands and fathers, so it’s not subtle slavery any more. But it’s still semi-acceptable for a man to discipline his wife when she displeases him. House Elves are severely punished when they make mistakes. But the issue of equal pay is still very pertinent today. The Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was introduced by Suffragette Alice Paul in 1923, but it was not passed by congress or ratified until 1972. This granted Women all of the same civil rights as men. And yet, in 2013 women earned only 78 cents for every dollar that a man working the same job earned.

By the fourth book there is however, there is one payed House Elf; Dumbledore employs Dobby at Hogwarts. This leads to the discovery that all of the food, fires and laundry are taken care of by the House Elves. This horrifies Hermione and she refuses to eat for a while before deciding to organize the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare. Their goals are to secure wages and sick leave for the House Elves for a start, but she has larger plans for the future which involve changing the laws about the magic that House Elves are allowed to use. I don’t think that it was mistake that J.K. made the proprietor of this organization a woman, even though, it was Harry who freed Dobby. J.K. was a single mother and she struggled to get welfare and a job for many years. She is very familiar with the struggles of modern women and she advocates their rights.

One unexpected struggle that Hermione faced was that she not only needed to convert her fellow wizards and witches to S.P.E.W., but most of the House Elves did not want to be freed. Some women vehemently argued against the Suffrage movement and still today, some women are still against their own rights. For example the women who are against Feminism. (Not the extreme version, just the belief that women are entirely equal to men and are entitled to all of the same things.) The Elves were content with the way that they were living and they did not want to change. Largely for fear of being ostracized. The way that you appear socially is often very important to women, as well as tradition. The House Elves felt very loyal to their masters and had no desire to desert them. Some women feel that they have a duty to their husbands and they are afraid to disappoint or leave them. Rowling also has personal experience with this as her first husband was abusive.

3. The Room of Requirement Was Made By Hufflepuff

The origin of the Room of Requirement is very debatable. Some speculate that it is the collective magical conscious of Hogwarts itself manifested in a room. My favorite theory is that it was created by Helga Hufflepuff. If Slytherin created a secret chamber, who’s to say that the other founders didn’t? It provides the seeker with all that they might be seeking, except for perishable items, and even then it created a passage to Hogsmeade for Neville. It has housed several secret gatherings that we know about and many that we don’t. One thing is for sure, it has been used by teachers and students alike for generations both when they knew what it was, and when they didn’t. This doesn’t fit Ravenclaw’s or Gryffindor’s MO. If Rowena had made a secret room, it would have been full of books. If Godric had made one, it would have probably been full of dangerous things and likely would’ve had a dragon.

All of the founders had criteria for what sort of students they would accept into their house. But Helga just said that she would take all the rest. I have feeling that she was a very maternal character and that she just wanted a wholesome environment for the children to learn in. The fluid nature of the Room of Requirement fits in with this. It  adapts to the needs of the user and can accommodate for almost anything. I also feel that Hufflepuff is a very undervalued house and that Helga was much cleverer than most people give her credit for. She was the peacemaker, the glue of the original four, she was both powerful and peaceful. It make a lot of sense that she would have created the Room of Requirement because it embodies her fluid and caregiving nature.

4. No One Has Only One House.

In the series, everyone is placed in a house and they remain there forever. In the Deathly Hallows, Dumbledore says to Snape, “You know, I sometimes think that we sort too soon.” And I am fervently with him. All you can amount to as a person is not determined by 11 years old. I also think that only having four houses is too limited. There are very few people who can qualify as a true Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff or Slytherin. I theorize that most people have a primary and a secondary house and that there is a way to easily get into Gryffindor. The original trio is a prime example of this. In my opinion, Harry’s secondary house is Slytherin. He is cunning, determined and ambitious. (Gryfferin) All things that Slytherin prizes and are not inherently evil. Hermione’s is clearly Ravenclaw. She loves books and holds the pursuit of knowledge to be the most worthy act. (Gryffinclaw) Ron’s is Hufflepuff. He doesn't really fit into the other two, and he’s a sweetheart.(Gryffinpuff) (House Names*)

The reason that they are all in Gryffindor is because they asked. And that’s a very brave thing for an 11 year old to do. Harry asked because he was afraid that he would be in Slytherin. Hermione asked because she had already decided that it was the best for her. (She says so in the Great Hall.) And Ron, although he didn’t always get along with them, wanted to be with his family.Because of these choices, they made the path that they wanted to take. And they all would’ve had very different stories if they hadn’t been in Gryffindor together. They had some innate qualities already embedded in them as children, but they could have changed given the circumstances. I think that Neville is a great example of this. He chose Gryffindor not because he was brave, but because he wanted to be. In choosing this, he set his path and eventually he was brave. He became a true Gryffindor. He fought alongside Harry in the Department of Mysteries, he lead on Dumbledore’s Army and he pulled out Godric Gryffindor’s sword out of the sorting hat and destroyed the final Horcrux. All because of a choice. A desire, some potential that a little boy had.

But this sorting does not stop these children from changing their decision or their characteristics later. There are two excellent examples of this in the Slytherin House. Regulus Black became a Death Eater and made many poor choices in his youth. But he later decided that he had been wrong and he died trying to correct his mistake. Tell me, does that not sound like something a Gryffindor would do? Another is of course Severus Snape, the bravest man that Harry Potter ever knew. And he was a proud Slytherin. His choices in his youth also could have derailed his life, but he had a good heart that even he didn’t realize was there. He fought and died for the son of the woman that he loved unrequitedly. Again, this level of bravery and loyalty is that of a Gryffindor. The sorting can capture much of these young wizards’ and witches’ essential characteristics, but it cannot, however, account for the nature of their hearts and the change that can be wrought in them.

5. Peter Pettigrew v.s. Neville Longbottom

There are two characters that are completely vital to the story that are incredibly undervalued. These two mirror each other in a curious way, as do their choices. Peter Pettigrew and Neville Longbottom had very similar beginnings. A small, round boy with no particular talents with friends much greater than himself. Who chose Gryffindor House because it was what he aspired to be. This description perfectly fits both of them. Like Harry and Voldemort, what made the difference was not what they were given, but what they did with it. Their choices showed who the truly were. Peter’s case is much sadder than Neville’s. He made many wrong choices. He more fear in his heart and lust for power than Neville did. The reason that Neville didn’t given in was because of his parents. Even though they couldn’t raise him anymore after their torture, they still had a great impact on his life. Voldemort himself offered for Neville to join him, but he vehemently denied him, because of his parents.

Peter always like to be next to the greats (such as James, Sirius and Remus) because he knew that he wasn’t one. When Voldemort’s rise began, he saw it the same way. He was beyond selfish and he gave up the lives of his friends to the favor of his new great. Neville always knew that he wasn’t great, but he aspired to be. He worked incredibly hard to try and make his parents proud. He knew that he had to be good and try to save as many lives as possible because of the lives that were as good as lost. Both of these boys were put in Gryffindor because they asked, although neither embodied the qualities that Godric prized. And one of them grew into a true Gryffindor and other waned into nothing.

Peter Pettigrew was important because he brought Voldemort back and allowed Harry to escape the Malfoy’s Manor. Neville could have been the prophecy child and he raised an army and slew Nagini. Both of these boys choices made them into what they were; although they could have turned out very differently. The one that lusted after fame died in ambiguity, the one who just wanted to be brave lived on as a hero.

*Primary + Secondary = Name

Gryffindor+Ravenclaw= Gryffinclaw

Gryffindor+Hufflepuff= Gryffinpuff

Gryffindor+Slytherin= Gryfferin

Ravenclaw+Gryffindor= Ravendor

Ravenclaw+Hufflepuff= Ravenpuff

Ravenclaw+Slytherin= Raverin

Hufflepuff+Gryffindor= Huffledor

Hufflepuff+Ravenclaw= Huffleclaw

Hufflepuff+Slytherin= Hufflerin

Slytherin+Gryffindor= Slytherdor

Slytherin+Ravenclaw= Slytherclaw

Slytherin+Hufflepuff= Slytherpuff

(If you were wondering, I’m a Gryffinclaw. Comment down below which of these houses you identify with.)

[hamiltimebinches]

Hercules Mulligan x Reader: Night guard

A/n: I have no idea how being a night guard works so I’m just doing whatever the hell I want to with it. So, it’s probably going to be very inaccurate. This is my first story for Herc so if he’s ooc just know that I’m still trying to get ahold of his character.

Timeline: Modern

Warnings: Swearing (should I really put that there anymore, it’s there for almost every single one of my fics.) A very crappy ending. I also got too lazy to edit the whole thing, I only edited the first few paragraphs. That’s it.

Words: 1,602

     Being a night guard at a museum isn’t very fun. It’s probably not anyone’s first choice, but as a girl trying to pay her way through college I’m not going to be really picking and choosing. But hey, I can’t really complain. I don’t have to deal with people and the pay is nice.

     Because it’s such a boring job I don’t really stay in my office. It’s so cramped and stuffy in there and all I can really do is monitor the place through cameras. Therefore, most nights I normally just stop by my office to get rid of my stuff and then just wander around the building. That’s exactly what I’m going to be doing tonight.

     I set my bag down on the office chair and my ice coffee on the desk. I powered on the monitors, sitting down on the very edge of the chair. Swaying back and forth in the chair I stared blankly at the black screens of the monitors, it always takes awhile for them to start up. I don’t understand why the day guard can’t just keep them on, it would only be a few hours until my shift started. But then again these monitors must eat up power and cost a hell of a lot.

     Looking at the clock on the wall, I saw that the little hand was pointing at the twelve and the longer one was pointing at the one. That means it’s 12:05, five minutes past midnight. I have another eight hours to go, seeing that my shift ends at seven am.

     I turned back to the monitors when a familiar blue light shone from them. They were finally on. Now the only thing left to do is log in with the password I’ve been given and turn on the camera viewers. Logging in with the standard all letters and numbers password I opened up the system that would show me what was on the cameras.

     With that being done I stood up from my chair and started fishing through my bag. Finally finding what I was looking for, my flashlight, I grabbed my ice coffee and left the small office. I took a sip from my ice coffee as I made it to the end of the long hallway that shuts the guards off from the main museum.

     I contemplated which way I wanted to go first. Did I want to go through the ancient exhibits and make my way up or did I want to go through the modern exhibits and make my way down to the stone age? It didn’t really matter, either way it was going to be a long night. With another sip of my drink I decided to go through the ancient stuff first, it had more interesting artifacts to look at anyway. Honestly, I just chose the ancient way hoping it would take me to my favorite exhibit fastest, even though it is an equal amount away from both paths. My favorite exhibit? Obviously the American Revolution.

     About an hour later due to my leisurely pace I walked into the American Revolution exhibit. As I walked by I admired every display in the room. My very favorite display had to be of the Battle at Yorktown though and it was at the end of the exhibit.

     I admired the display as I walked by getting ready to continue on with the night. Yet as I went to leave something caught my eye that caused me to do a double take. There was a man sleeping in the Battle of Yorktown display. It definitely was a strange sight but even stranger was what he was wearing. The man was fully dressed in Revolutionary military uniform.

     Unintentionally I let out a scream, my flashlight falling out of my grip and onto the floor. The man was wakened by my scream and he jumped to his feet. Although he started out with a startled look on his face it slowly changed to wonder and confusion. He looked around, observing the room, without even acknowledging me.

     “Um, excuse me, Sir but what do you think you’re doing here? Especially why were you sleeping in the Battle of Yorktown display?” I asked loudly, picking up my flashlight and holding it at my side. The man jumped slightly, turning to look at me before letting out a particularly loud gasp.

     “What are you wearing?” He asked, looking me up and down. I looked down at myself, I was wearing my uniform shirt and a pair of jeans. “What do you mean what am I wearing? What are you wearing?” I asked in offense, there was absolutely nothing wrong or out of the ordinary with what I was wearing. What he was wearing was out of the ordinary.

    “I’m wearing my uniform, but you’re wearing pants. If you can call those pants, what on earth are they made of?” He asked, gesturing to my pants. “Yeah, I’m wearing pants, they’re jeans.” I said slowly, this guy is starting to get on my nerves. What the hell was he even doing here? “You’re a woman, and you’re wearing pants. Women wear dresses not pants, if you can even call those ‘jeans’ pants.” The man said as though it were the most common knowledge out there.

     Okay, it is official this guy has thoroughly pissed me off. “Um, excuse me! This is not the seventeenth or even eighteenth century, it is 2018! It is the very normal for women wear pants or whatever the hell they want, you ass!” I snapped, glaring at the male. No matter how cute he may be he can’t get away with saying shit like that. Wait. Did I seriously just think that?

     The look of confusion that crossed his face certainly confirmed my previous thoughts. “2018? What do you mean? It’s 1781, isn’t it?” He asked. This guy was either being serious or just a very good actor. “Um, no, it is 2018. What? Have you been living under a rock your whole life?” I said, a nervous chuckle escaping past my lips. This guy hasn’t posed himself as a threat, but if he did he could definitely do some damage to me. “Lived under a rock- what?”

     “Um, not important. If you really are from 1781, which I highly doubt, why don’t you tell me something no one else other than a history nerd would know about the Battle of Yorktown? C’mon, you can tell me as I finish my rounds.” I said, waving him over and starting to exit the room. He followed me out of the room silently before starting up.

    Arriving back at my cramped office with my newfound companion I realized that this guy may actually be from the seventeen hundreds. Every time I tried to throw the guy out of his amazing act by showing him something from my time or talking about recent events he genuinely seemed confused or didn’t understand.

    “Holy shit, you really are from the seventeen hundreds aren’t you?” I asked quietly, sitting down on the desk. I placed my empty cup down beside me as the guy inspected the office chair before deciding to sit down on the floor beside it. He eyed the chair warily before answering my question. “Yeah, that’s what I’ve been trying to convince you of this whole time.”

    “Um, sorry for yelling at you earlier about the pants and for calling you an ass. I wouldn’t have said those things if I had known you came from a time where women only ever wore dresses and literally had no rights, unlike now.” I apologized, rubbing the back of my neck.

     “It’s okay Miss- Miss- I’m sorry I never got your name.” The man said a bit awkwardly. “Oh! I suppose you’re right. I’m (Y/n), (Y/n) (L/n).” I introduced myself, sliding from my spot on the desk to on the floor in front of him. I held out my hand for him to shake, but he did differently. He grabbed my hand and placed a soft kiss on my knuckles. My cheeks flushed, and even though I realized that was normal back from when he came I couldn’t help but feel my heart skip a beat or two. “Hercules Mulligan, Miss (Y/n). It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

     “U-Um, yes, it’s a pleasure to meet you too.” I stuttered, gently taking my hand out of his grasp. I looked up at the clock on the wall. It was 2:30 am, I still four and a half hours left of my shift.  “Until we find a way to get you back to your time you’re going to have to live with me. Thank goodness I don’t stay at my college dorms and have my own apartment I live in. It’s also quite lucky that I have a spare room and bed you can use, although I might have to clean it up a bit.” I said, bringing my attention back to Hercules.

     “That’s fine with me, but are you okay with me staying with you?” He asked, placing a hand on my knee. Even though it was just a slight touch that didn’t mean anything I still felt butterflies erupt in my stomach. “Of course I’m fine with it, I wouldn’t have said that if I wasn’t.” I said with a smile. He smiled back at me, and I swear my heart is trying to kill me with how many beats it just skipped. I know it’s selfish but I found myself hoping we never found a way to get him back home. 

[unnursvanablog]

The TV shows I have watched in 2021, part 1.

Shows I finished:

The Uncanny Counter: Exciting, full of humor and heart and found family, and the character is so lovable and pulls very hard on your heartstrings. That is the strongest aspect of that show, for me. There's a lot of talk about human greed and corruption and other things as that is how the demons in the show feeds, which I sometimes felt a little too heavy handed and the shows spend a bit too much time on that aspect of the plot, but the story manages to be pretty fast-paced, does not drag on too much and there is always some tension there to grab you, so I was never bored.

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, s4: This show was so self-aware of itself; both in terms of their flaws and what made them great that they actually managed to be a pretty chill and fun watch. But as the series progressed they somehow lost that spark and the ability, took itself maybe a bit too seriously and yet not serious enough so a part of it was just too silly and some things felt like they were trying to hard to be bold and dark but failed.

Mr. Queen: Shin Hye Sun's amazing performance in the lead role makes Mr. Queen a pretty decent and fun show. It's rather light, funny and exciting. The drama would not be the same without her. It did drag a bit, especially in the beginning, or feel a bit all over the place. A fun, light fusion sageuk.

Signal: I can understand all the praise this show has received and I enjoyed it, but they also never hooked me in the way that I did. But then again this isn't my type of genre and a lot of these types of shows don't manage to do so.

Extraordinary You: At its core, this is a very ordinary teendrama about love and friendship and finding oneself. The drama does a lot of these things incredibly well It's not perfect, but it's so sweet and with a huge heart behind it where you can feel all the emotions the characters are feeling and all of the character, or almost all of them, are so lovable. The concept of it is quite neat, and it does manage to do something new, while also just telling a very standard teendrama story.

Dickinson, s2: It doesn't look or feel like your standard period drama with it's use of modern popmusic and other things are used to make everything a bit surreal and not quite normal. Death comes to visit or someone uses modern slang that pulls you out of the story, but in a good way. It adds to the carm of it. I think the episodes are strangely fun and work well in their absurdity and I hope we get more series of these episodes because I think they just have room to grow.

Merlin, s1-3: The first three series of these episodes are just really good adventure family show. It has this fairytale vibe to it, which I really enjoy. They are never trying to be more than they are, although they sometimes rush through things, but I really do appreciate how light and fun this fantasy show full of adventure and magic is considering how dark and bold some of these new fantasy shows post-GOT all feel. I miss this sort of feel-good fantasy.

The Office, s1-4: It's taking me a while to get me through this show. I do not know if it's out of all these memes I've seen and I feel like I've already seen a lot of these jokes or if that humor isn't really my thing. I like it well enough and often have it on in the background but I am not often in the mood for it. I do not think they are that funny.

Crash Landing on You: I was was not that into this one. The characters were good and I found many things interesting about this drama, but the romance and just the story itself dragged on for such a long time. The episodes were some over an hour long and it did not have enough story for that. So towards the end I was really bored.

Alice in Boarderland: This was a real roller coaster ride and the story is something I espect more from a Japanese movies than dramas (though I may not have seen enough Jdramas). The story was fast and constantly surprising you. Really good, the story was so gripping and full of twists and interesting characters. Bloody and brutal, but in a good way.

Vincenzo: Vincenzo surprised me so much, but I was not expecting this entertainment when I started it. A strange mix of soap opera level drama, comedy and legal drama that works somehow so well together. Very colorful, wacky and fun characters, one of the most entertaining bad guys I have watched in a kdrama in a long time. I was always looking forward to watching the next episode and the story never seemed to drag or drop in intensity or action throughout it's run. Could well end up being my favorite drama of the year. Pure and simple entertainment that I will not easily forget.

Sisyphus: The Myth: I need to stop torturing myself through the Park Shin Hye drama just for Park Shin Hye. This drama had a really great idea behind it and it started of pretty well, but I thought the mystery in the episodes dragged on for a long time and just wasn't that well put together or that exciting to watch. This was more romance than science fiction and I was not feeling the romance here and I found the lead male character so boring.

Age of Samurai - Battle for Japan: At first I thought it would be a drama, but it turned out to be a documentary. Really interesting history which I really immersed myself in.

The Lost Pirate Kingdom: I felt like I knew about a lot of these events that this documentary talked about through the tv show Black Sails that it might have damaged the suspense a bit. Sometimes I felt like I was getting a really detailed recap of that show. Still quite fun.

Wandavision: It was just like I expected a Marvel tv show to be. It was great fun, great action and fun characters. The episodes take advantage of a slightly slower story that TV shows offer compared to movies, but still have this Marvel feel to them. Marvel knows its audience very well.

Lost Cities with Albert Lin: I got Disney+ and enjoyed so many of the documentaries that were on there. I loved learning about all the lost, secret treasures and cultures that history has to offer, that are almost hidden from modern view.

Lost Treasures of the Maya: Albert Lin has some great series on Disney + that are really fun to watch. He's almost like the modern Indiana Jones. I devoured his shows over the course of a few days.

Drain the Oceans: So much fun learning all that's hidden on the ocean floor. I did not watch all the episodes in this series, but I went between the episodes that had more to do with ancient history and things that I'm interested about.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: It went a slightly different route and had more to say than I honestly expected from a Marvel tv show. And while it did have a rather slow start it manage to say everything they needed and wanted to say and manage to build these characters well enough so that this origins story of the new Captain America is well set up and established for the next phase of Marvel cinema. It was very fun and exciting.

Navillera: really heartfelt show that truly did tug at my heartstrings every episode. The story is really emotional and sincere without being too sad or depressing. It never drags you down, but much rather gives you a bit of hope and wholesome vibes.

Not Yet Thirty: Very short but fun stories about three friends. The pacing wasn't the best, it felt a bit rushed, and I didn't think they divided the time between these friends that well, so parts of it felt underdeveloped and boring to watch.

Shadow and Bone: a rather traditional YA fantasy story and maybe a bit lacking in depth here because there was a lot going on and it only had eight episodes to tell it all. But the characters were really fun and there was always a lot of excitement going o.. And thanks to the Crows  there was always something that surprised me at every turn and it was just so fun how they wove it all together. Came out much better than I thought it would and I'm really excited for what's next.

Youth of May: I did not expect much from this drama at first, but it still surprised me how light it was, despite the Gwangju uprising being one of the topics it covered. The story got darker as time went on, but it never got too hard to watch or too sad. It was really well done and the despite how short it was compared to many other kdramas it never felt rushed or anything.

The shows I dropped:

Lovestruck in the City: The characters were just so boring, especially the male lead. And the format that the episodes were trying to have - almost like they were filming a documentary - just did not work for me.

Royal Secret Agent: I love period dramas and I find Myungsoo really cute. But there was just nothing really going on here and the story felt like it was trying to be more clever than it actually was and the characters didn't seem to be going through any type of character development. It was just kinda boring.

My Father is Strange: While cute and cozy, these types of stories aren't really my cup of tea. They just don't seem to hold my attention that well.

Beyound Evil: Might give them another chance, because even though I'm not very fond of crime and murder mysteries like this, I have heard almost nothing but praise for this drama and I'm a huge Yeo Jin Goo fan. The mystery didn't hook me that much though, but maybe I just didn't get far enough into it.

Doom at Your Service: I do not know what it is… but this kind of paranormal romance does not really work on me even though I love fantasy and I like rom-coms. I prefer ghosts and such to these immortal supernatural beings... unless it is the main female character who is supernatural and lonely. The romance of a immortal male and a human female just doesn't seem to work for me.