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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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Paygo, false consciousness and the IRS

John Steinbeck diagnosed an important American pathology in 1966 when he called the US a nation of “temporarily embarrassed capitalists” — people who see themselves as the wealthy-in-waiting and therefore fight policies that reduce the power that comes from wealth.

It’s a restatement of Engels’ idea of “false consciousness,” and it’s the result of a deliberate strategy on the part of wealthy people — many of whom believe that they were literally genetically destined to be wealthy — to convince the rest of us that “anyone can succeed.”

Part of the false consciousness program is the money story that goes like this: the US government takes away “taxpayers’ money” from “makers” to fund “programs,” the bulk of which go to the “lazy takers,” who experience the “moral hazard” of subsidized unemployment.

But of course, that’s not how money works. Money originates with the federal government (and its fiscal agents, the banks). In order for the public to have money to pay off its tax liabilities, the government must first spend that money into existence.

The IRS doesn’t take our tax dollars, pile them up, and give them to Congress to spend on programs. When the IRS taxes our money, they annihilate it, removing it from circulation. When Congress spends, new money comes into existence.

The US government can’t run out of money any more than Apple can run out of Itunes gift cards. It can spend too much money — so much that prices go up because too many dollars are chasing too few goods — but it can’t run out of money.

Fed spending is constrained by resources (what’s for sale in dollars) not money (how many dollars there are). If the ratio of dollars to resources gets out of whack, there’s a risk of inflation.

There are many ways to fix this ratio. For example, the government usually issues T-bills (savings bonds) whenever it spends more than it taxes. When you buy a T-bill, you take dollars that might circulate around the economy, chasing goods and labor, and you sequester them.

A T-bill is just a dollar you’re not allowed to spend. In exchange for surrendering the right to spend your dollars for 1, 5, 10 or more years, the government offers you interest, trickling out that money over a long period.

That way the government can buy things today without bidding against your dollars.

But that’s not the only way to fight inflation while spending new money into existence. The other major way is taxation: simply removing money from the economy and annihilating it.

Taxation fights inflation. When the government runs a deficit, that means that it created more money this year via spending than it destroyed via taxes. The “government deficit” is the “public surplus” — the money left in the economy for all of us to spend on stuff.

Likewise, when the government runs a “surplus” that means it taxes more money out of existence than it spends into existence. In a year where the government runs a surplus, it means that the power of the private sector — you and me — to buy stuff has decreased overall.

This is fine if there was too much money to begin with — if inflation was kicking off — but if there’s not enough money in circulation (e.g. if there’s a recession), it just makes things worse…but not for everyone.

When the economy is starved of money, banks go to work creating new money through loans. These loans pay interest (to rich people like bank shareholders and people who securitize and buy debt).

That’s the one-two punch of spending cuts during a downturn:

I. The real economy is starved of the capital it needs to pay workers and make things for workers to buy;

II. The financial economy grows as desperate real-economy firms borrow from banks to keep the lights on.

Despite all their talk of “spending taxpayers’ money,” the wealthy understand how money works. That’s why they were totally indifferent to the running $1t/year deficits created by the Trump tax-cuts (and likewise about the Obama finance bailouts).

Giving money to rich people causes asset-bubbles (driving up the prices of houses), but not inflation (a sustained rise in the price of all goods). That’s because rich people can’t buy enough stuff (fridges, cars, oranges) to drive up prices.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#payfors

After you’ve bought three houses and three SubZero fridges and filled them with the beef of three Kobe cows and three cases of Moet, there’s still a LOT left over (even if you’re Jeff Bezos and buy a superyacht with its own, smaller superyacht).

Those leftovers go to socially useless things, like buying houses to turn into rent-generating slums (Wall Street is fast becoming America’s biggest landlord, and single family homes are sold for cash to investment funds instead of families).

And they go to influence campaigns designed to make regular people defend massive cuts to the IRS and opposition to public spending on infrastructure, education, health, and other necessities.

This isn’t just about Republicans. For years, the Democratic leadership has supported “balanced budgets” (spending so little that no new money is left in the economy after all taxes are paid).

The “paygo” rule (which requires all new spending to be matched with cuts or tax-hikes) is religion for the likes of Pelosi and Schumer. That’s why the Democratic caucus is mired in stupid arguments about “how we will pay for the stimulus.”

As bad as the paygo rule is, though, Republicans have made it worse, by demonizing and starving the IRS. Paygo means that the US government operates under the artificial constraint of only spending if it can make cuts or raise taxes.

Raises taxes is really unpopular, for obvious reasons.

Now, raising taxes on the 1% — who have a lot of excess money that’s fueling political corruption and asset bubbles — is one way around this.

Theoretically, taxing the 1% should have a 99% approval rating.

But canny Republicans have figured out how exorcise temporarily embarrassed capitalists about the “unfairness” of taxing their bosses, in part by just flat-out lying about who new taxes would implicate.

But there��s yet another way to satisfy paygo’s artificial constraint, without changing the a single word in the tax-code: simply fund the IRS so that it can collect the trillions that the ultra-wealthy illegally avoid in tax-payments every year.

But this strategy is also a bust. The GOP campaign to destroy the IRS has been too successful.

It’s a longrunning campaign, but it achieved liftoff in 2013 when the Tea Party baselessly accused the IRS of discriminating against conservative groups seeking nonprofit status.

The work-the-ref strategy paid off, providing political cover for deep cuts to the IRS and putting IRS staffers on notice so they green lit every dark money group that applied for nonprofit status, no matter how obviously corrupt they were.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/fallout-from-allegations-of-tea-party-targeting-hamper-irs-oversight-of-nonprofits/2017/12/17/6403c1c0-c59e-11e7-a441-3a768c8586f1_story.html

After the cuts, the IRS grew easier to discredit. Understaffed and under siege, the agency’s behavior grew erratic, then indefensible. There were runaway automated processes that sent out erroneous property-seizure notices that no one could rescind:

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/14/irs-shutdown-federal-government-shut-down-irs-asset-seizures/

Then there was the aftermath of the Equifax breach, where the IRS first told Americans that it didn’t matter because they’d already been doxed by other bad companies:

https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/355862-irs-significant-number-of-equifax-victims-already-had-info-accessed-by

Then came news that the IRS couldn’t cancel Equifax’s no-bid, $7.5m anti-fraud contract because it didn’t have the resources to do its own fraud prevention (Equifax eventually lost the contract because it served malware from its anti-fraud site).

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/equifax-irs-data-breach-malware-discovered/

The rich waged a successful all-out war on the IRS. Take the Global High Wealth unit. For every hour an auditor from GHW worked, they brought in $4500 in taxes the super-rich had dodged. Even by the topsy-turvy logic of “government as a business,” this was good business.

After a concerted harassment and political influence campaign, the GHW abandoned the super-rich and switched to the merely wealthy, bringing in less money and pissing off a lot more people.

The other shoe dropped in 2019, when the IRS admitted it had switched to preferentially auditing poor people because it was too politically and legally fraught to audit rich people, even the most flagrant cheaters.

https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-sorry-but-its-just-easier-and-cheaper-to-audit-the-poor

That was the first year that America’s 400 highest earners paid a lower tax rate than the average American worker:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html

The IRS’s transformation into a facilitator of illegal wealth retention by the super-rich and petty harassment of the rest of Americans made them very easy to hate.

To that, add the concerted corporate campaigns to use the IRS to rip off workers.

For example, for 20 years, Intuit lobbied the IRS not to make tax-filing automatic, painless and free, ensuring that Americans would continue to pay billions to send data to the IRS that it already had:

https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-fight-to-stop-americans-from-filing-their-taxes-for-free

Reading the IRS’s internal emails from this battle reveals an agency in retreat, where demoralized and ineffectual government employees simply rolled over for one of the greatest ripoffs in American history:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-tried-to-hide-emails-that-show-tax-industry-influence-over-free-file-program

Intuit wanted to rip us off with taxes. Microsoft, by contrast, just wanted to break the law. Working with KPMG, the convicted monopolist created a “transfer” scheme of breathtaking illegality, using its tax-savings to bankroll its war on the IRS:

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-tough-against-microsoft-microsoft-got-tougher

Which brings us to today, where Democrats are held hostage to the “payfor” rule and trying to figure out how to mobilize the trillions Biden has pledged for infrastructure, health, and care.

Republicans — pushing the big lie of “taxpayer money” — are dogwhistling hard. Senator John Thune, responding to Biden’s proposal for $80b for the IRS, says any tax enforcement efforts “must strike an appropriate balance between taxpayer responsibilities and taxpayer rights.”

Meanwhile Senator Chuck Grassley takes the nonsensical position that funding the IRS won’t help it do its job (“simply throwing money at a problem doesn’t necessarily yield a solution”).

https://thehill.com/policy/finance/553704-lawmakers-bicker-over-how-to-go-after-tax-cheats

Then there’s Rep Kevin Brady, warning that a fully funded IRS would “unleash tens of thousands of new IRS agents on families, farms and businesses.”

But the Democrats own the paygo rule, not the Republicans, and their leadership have added their own special touch to make funding the IRS impossible.

https://prospect.org/politics/infrastructure-at-a-crossroads-biden-public-investment/

According to the rules Congress gives to the Congressional Budget Office (which calculates the cost of government programs), the CBO isn’t allowed to factor in the projected additional revenue from funding the IRS, only the cost of doing so (!).

Which means that they must factor in the salaries that IRS Global High Wealth auditors will draw — but they are forbidden from counting the $4500/hour they generate when they puncture the tissue-thin financial lies of the super-rich.

The payfor and “taxpayer money” are lies.

It’s a shuck sold to the rubes, not economics. Because it’s a shuck, it doesn’t have to make any sense — and it doesn’t. We shouldn’t run government like a business, but if we must, let’s at least count revenues as well as costs.

Image: Mike Licht/notionscapital.com https://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/48857033957/

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic

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hisunshiine · 3 years

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Escape ✈︎ Chapter 6

✈︎ chapter 6: But I Still Want You Pt. 1 | ✈︎ Escape Series — 18+, Mature

✈︎ genre: angst

✈︎ word count: 1898 words

✈︎ pairing: Jin x YN

✈︎ warnings: personal issues with abandonment, YN is a foster child, healthy attachment issues, crying

✈︎ summary: It's time for you to make your decision about the island: stay or go? Some people make the decision harder for you than it should be.

You can’t believe that you won the GA and were invited to Bangtania Island, not to mention that once you arrived here, you were let in on the secret that this is also a secret getaway location for the guys?! You truly love it here, and feel so accepted and appreciated by everyone, like you have a family and friends again. The life you left behind wasn’t much of a life so to say. You worked a basic job, you had no family, having been a foster child your whole life, and you had no real connection with anybody. When you found BTS and Army, that was the closest you ever felt to having family.

Unfortunately, having the life you’ve had, you begin to feel yourself wanting to isolate again. Nobody has actually done anything to make you feel you need to, but you are afraid of being abandoned. You’ve always had that fear, been afraid that people will leave you, so you put up walls so that people don’t get too close. You also tend to run from anybody that tries and gets too close, unsure of their reasons. You weren’t putting out any signs that you wanted people close, so you thought, so you were wary of anyone who tried to breach the walls you had built. It was safer that way. When people made attempts to get closer than you wanted them to, that was your cue to jump ship. It was better to leave them.

You have dated, but as soon as they try to get too intimate, and not in the sexual way, you run away. Sex, that was easy. Growing up with your circumstances, you weren’t ever taught the same ideals about virginity and sex like people who were from ‘loving’ families appeared to be. No mom and dad trying to convince you that sex was sacred, or meant for just one person for your entire life. You had the normal education, very cut and dry, and scientific. Penis, meet vagina: insert here. And as you got older you learned it could also be penis meet anus, or vagina meet vagina, or mouth meet anus, mouth meet penis, and the oh so wonderful mouth meet vagina. So being physical with someone wasn’t deemed as intimate as actually letting people into who you were. What your thoughts and feelings were. It was that level of opening up and letting people in that was scary. You knew this from childhood that it’s a lot less painful when you decide to walk away, versus someone walking away from you.

It’s currently your twelfth day here. And now you only have two more days to decide whether you want to stay or head back to your life of unattached isolation. You have truly enjoyed your time here thus far, there really is the feeling of peace and serenity, able to share in the familiar love with everyone of BTS. That’s a safe area for you. Love for BTS can’t hurt you. At the same time, you still feel a sense of solidarity, like you are surrounded by people yet you still feel alone. You decide you are going to hurry to the restaurant to get something to-go before you head back to your temporary living quarters.

On the way there, you remember the first time you saw Jin in person.

“So here is a map of the island, everything is color-coded and in the map key. I think your first agenda should be to unpack and then meet us down at Jin’s restaurant.” Vanessa hands you your map and copies of your NDA and other rules and regulations to be followed on the island.

Once you unpack your belongings, you take a short detour before heading to the restaurant. You are enchanted by the happiness of everyone that is here, enjoying the private island, and the guys. You haven’t really witnessed any arguments or issues, and that brings you solace, but you still keep your guard up.

When you enter the restaurant, Talia notices you and waves you over to their booth, “Hey! Y/N! Over here! We almost ordered without you.” She laughed, then introduced you to Dahlia and Xael.

You all order your food and carry on with small talk, you ask questions about different activities you saw in your guide for the island, and then you see him. Jin came walking out of the kitchen, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a towel. He was talking to one of the residents that helps him out in the restaurant.

He turned his head and your eyes met, it seemed like an eternity, but it only lasted about 10 seconds. He smiled, you blushed, then he went back into the kitchen.

When your food was ready, Jin made sure to help your waitress bring your food to the table. “Hello ladies,” he said with a gentle smile, blushing when he looks at you. “A new arrival I see. Well I am Seokjin, the Bangtania Island Chef. If you are ever hungry, come to my restaurant, if I’m not here, the you can come to the dorm...I mean, when we have parties, I always cook for that as well. Anyway, enjoy your meals ladies,” he winks at you as he places your plate in front of you.

How could you know that would lead to you eating there everyday, just to steal a glance of him, or have him smile and wink at you. All of the silent and distant flirting, that you feel would never go anywhere, and you want to keep it that way.

You walk into the restaurant and stand at the to-go counter, but it’s pretty quiet. You have been waiting for about 10 minutes, being consumed by your thoughts, until the grumbling in your stomach reminds you that you are waiting to order food. You are surprised that nobody has come to help you, especially since the whole time that you’ve been in Bangtania everyone has been super helpful and attentive. But then you get worried, so you head behind the counter to check the kitchen. Maybe Jin closed early and forgot to lock up, you aren’t sure, you just want to make sure everything is okay.

You open the swinging door to the kitchen, probably with a little too much force in your worried state.

“Whoa, whoa!”

It’s all you hear before the pile of dishes crashes to the floor, causing you to scream.

“Jin-ah I am so sorry! I didn’t mean to frighten you, I was just here to order food to-go, and --”

He cuts you off.

“Frighten me? You were the one who was scared! Hahaha! I was just putting these dishes away and you swung the door into me.”

You feel the tears well up in your eyes, and you try to hold them back but they begin streaming down your face.

“Hey, it’s okay, you don’t have to cry. I’m not mad, we have many more dishes to replace these ones. Just please don’t cry.”

He grabs a clean towel from the shelf and begins to softly blot the tears from your cheeks. He has a look on his face of worry, as if your sudden tears were a shock to him. You reckon they were. You drop your head in embarrassment, though he softly grabs your chin with his thumb and forefinger and lifts your head back up. Your eyes meet his brown ones, taking in the way that his eyebrows are furrowed together, his lips softly parted creating his beautiful look of concern directed towards you.

“I told you, I’m not mad, now clean your face and help me pick this up. Then we can sit and have a meal together. I haven’t eaten since breakfast and that is a long time for me, you know?”

You giggle, because you do know. Jin loves to eat.

After you finish salvaging the dishes that did not break and sweeping up the ones that did, Jin says he has something special to make you. You make your way to a booth in the corner of the restaurant furthest from the windows, the most secluded booth in the whole restaurant. When Jin comes out with a tray, he scans the restaurant for you.

“Y/N?” His voice is loud, trying to find you.

“Did she leave? After I made her this delicious food, she runs off?” You hear him mutter under his breath, but not low enough that you don’t hear him.

When he turns to head back to the kitchen, he sees you sitting in the hidden booth, shoulders bounce from giggling so hard.

“You think that’s funny? I make this food and you have me to believe you left? Oh, hahaha…” He laughs with you as he sets the food on the table. He pulls off his apron and joins you at the booth, you both begin eating in silence. After a while he asks, “Y/N, you’ve been here almost two weeks, what do you think so far?”

You shove a dumpling in your mouth, as you are not ready to answer that question. He smiles encouragingly, his bee-stung lips surrounding his perfect smile, and you feel yourself wanting to open up. But you can’t. You only want to show him your best side. I guess that’s something you have in common with them.

“Oh, it’s great! You guys really spoil us here.”

He nods, happy to hear your positive feedback, not realizing it’s shallow. You want to elaborate. The words are on the tip of your tongue to tell him that yes, they spoil you here and you love it, but a part of you is scared to really fall in love with it, to truly believe you’ve found a place you can call home that has a new family that’s perfect for you already waiting. Who gets that lucky in life? Not you. So you tuck away your fears, and keep it surface level with him.

The rest of your night was lovely; it was easy to tuck away the thoughts that had been so prominent before spending time with Jin. He was someone who tried his best to make sure that everyone was comfortable. You had known this about him since prior to meeting him, watching him on RunBTS and Bon Voyage, he had that caring, nurturing way about him that drew you in, and made everything appear better in the aura he cast out. He made it easy, which you knew would make it that much harder.

That night you lay awake long past the last sounds of your housemate have dissipated and watch as the ceiling fan circles and circles. You always thought that it was safe, that loving BTS was safe. Friends over the internet, they didn’t have to know you completely. You could take days off and come back when you wanted, no one really depending on you. No one actually knows your deepest secrets and thoughts. Those were kept safely tucked away, behind lock and key deep within your heart.

You could have sworn that love for BTS couldn’t hurt you. Hindsight is definitely 20/20, as you lay curled on your side, looking out the window at the reflection of the moon on the ocean, tears streaming down onto your pillow, it hurts.

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anime-and-manga-rants · 3 years

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The Problem with The Promised Neverland’s First Episode (Part 2 of 2)

Once again, let’s start with The Promised Neverland. This time, let’s move on from the opening scene and get further into the first episode (and chapter).

In both the anime and the manga, we get Ray asking Emma: “How old are you again? Five?”

It’s an embarrassingly obvious tactic to get Emma to reveal her age, along with the fact that she’s the same age as Ray and Norman, as she responds with: “I’m eleven! Just like the two of you!”

This is especially stupid considering the fact that the manga already has Emma narrating certain information about the ‘orphanage.’ Here’s one example in the text framed by boxes rather than speech bubbles:

Now, this is more my opinion, but I think narrating basic information in this way is far superior to the awkward dialogue that’s produced when characters are info-dumping for the audience’s sake. At least, in the case of narration like the kind seen in the manga, there’s nothing disrupting the flow of the story. We’re still told rather than shown, which should be avoided in most cases (like this one), but it’s better than blatantly forcing the exposition and ruining the believability of the story.

If the anime couldn’t have done any better, then at least just give us the narration. It wouldn’t interrupt the storytelling nearly as much, and while it’s still undesirable, I think it’s better than telling through dialogue. With narration, the writer is being upfront about his telling, while telling through dialogue is a poor attempt to hide the fact that he’s telling. And it fails. Because everyone sees through it. Whether you’ve heard “show don’t tell” before or not, know how to use it in storytelling or not, it doesn’t matter. The dialogue’s still just... bad.

And, of course, we can’t forget the testing scene:

If the test is going to tell us their ages anyway, why not just use that? It’d be a creative and effective way of showing the audience that Emma, Ray, and Norman are all eleven. All they’d have to do was have the robotic voice of the test say their names and ages while cutting to that person’s face. And, if the anime absolutely needed us to know that they were the oldest, why not have the test call out the names of the children whose character designs appear to be of a similar age? (We can merely look and see that characters like Conny or Phil aren’t as old as Emma, Norman, or Ray.) Or, at the very least, just add the narration that was a part of the manga’s first chapter? Even that would be better than what we get.

Overall, Ray’s question — or rather Emma’s response, as the question itself isn’t unnatural — is just yet another way that TPN fails to follow one of the most basic writing rules in existence. Still, this is only a little grievance I wanted to bring up, solely because it felt wrong to leave it out. Now, however, let’s get into the main point of Part 2.

…

Back to the test scene in the anime. (In the manga, what I’m about to discuss occurs after they play their game of tag, but it’s nearly word-for-word, so this argument holds true for both.)

After they take their test, and Isabella announces that Emma, Ray, and Norman had gotten perfect scores, the others express their amazement. This is all well and good — and the anime should’ve left it at that. It would demonstrate that the three were smarter than the rest, especially when highlighted by the fact that the other kids were impressed to hear Thoma say he might’ve gotten half right. (In the manga, a few of the test questions are shown, and some of them are just evil. Eleven-year-olds solving for a derived equation in 10 seconds? Getting full marks is insanely impressive when we’ve seen some of the questions, so why not show it in the anime?)

Yes, what I just mentioned would only demonstrate that they’re smart. But that’s all that this scene needs to demonstrate. It’s short enough that it doesn’t need to give us any more information, as we’ve still got plenty of time in the episode to learn other vital information necessary for understanding the plot.

It’s when this scene continues, however, that we start to see a real problem.

After they hear their scores, the kids vocalize, solely for the sake of the audience, the basic character descriptions of Emma, Ray, and Norman. They say: “Those three are different, huh? Norman is a genius who has the best brains. And Ray, an intellect who can compete against Norman’s genius. Emma has amazing athletic skills, and her learning ability allows her to stay close to the other two.”

It’s quite the way to take some of the fun out of learning about the characters, isn’t it?

It’s just… why does the anime (and manga) find it necessary to include this? Not only will we probably not remember half of it — which is for the best — but it lessens the impact of us learning about the characters ourselves.

If the characters truly are these things, we’ll see that through their actions and dialogue (which would show their deductive reasoning skills). After all, they are the ones who come up with the escape plan despite all the trials thrown at them. When we see this, we can deduce for ourselves that these kids are not only book-smart (which we learn from their perfect scores) but street-smart, able to solve issues that most eleven-year-olds would never be capable of. Through this alone, we learn most of the information that was told to us during the test scene. And Emma’s athletic skills are demonstrated reasonably well during their game of tag. (If that scene were edited slightly, it would be obvious that Emma is superior to the others in terms of athletic ability. This is a fault in the author’s scene construction.)

And we can’t forget the fact that their younger peers are saying this about them. Even if they knew these things subconsciously, what child would say something like this? They’re all smart, as they’re all high-grade meat, but they’re still kids. Kids don’t tend to break out into character analyses about their friends, especially not without any prompting.

So what’s the point of this telling?

Telling doesn’t serve any purpose, as we won’t believe it until we see it. If Emma, Ray, and Norman failed in their escape attempt because they weren’t smart enough, we wouldn’t believe the telling. But if their smarts are proven through their actions, than what point does the telling serve? Nothing. The only thing it accomplishes is forcing more unnatural dialogue that reminds the audience that they’re watching a show, not living in a story. And that sucks.

(Telling is often a sign of laziness or ineptitude, whether that ineptitude is truly there or the author simply believes they are inept at crafting a good scene. After all, it wouldn’t be needed if the author knew for certain that they had created situations to move the plot along while simultaneously demonstrating the characteristics of his three main characters. This telling could be a sign that TPN’s writer, Kaiu Shirai, didn’t trust himself to accurately portray his characters’ traits. Or maybe he just believed the audience was too unintelligent to understand his characters as he wanted them to be perceived.)

Let’s compare this scene to Attack on Titan’s first episode, where we learn quite a bit about Eren’s personality as Isayama introduces us to the story. All without telling anything about Eren, too.

Let’s use this scene:

Isayama wrote this scene for a reason, and that reason was to reveal Eren’s core beliefs, and he does this through showing. (We’ll have to ignore the telling about Eren’s father and his success as a doctor. Unfortunately, not even Isayama avoided convenient telling completely. But at least the information wasn’t particularly relevant to the story, so it didn’t ruin much other than the flow of the story.)

You see, when Hannes asks why he would ever need to be prepared for a fight, Eren responds with: “If they breached the walls and entered the city!” When Hannes brushes Eren off, Eren yells, telling him to stop calling himself a part of the Garrison and become a member of the Wall Repair Corps. And when Hannes reasons that they’re slacking off is a good thing because it means everyone is safe, Eren says: “Even if we can never leave these walls for our entire lives, as long as we eat and sleep, we’ll survive… but that just makes us like cattle!”

Not only do his words give us a little more information about what threat humanity is up against, but they also reveal so much about Eren’s personality, goals, and beliefs. We learn that he hates being caged in the walls, hates people who are satisfied with living in a cage, wants to go outside, and values living rather than just surviving. All through dialogue that flows and doesn’t slap the watcher in the face with its lack of tact.

Now, this:

A little later, we learn that Eren’s willing to fight for his freedom, as he admits to wanting to join the Survey Corps. And he’s extremely dedicated, we learn, not because the show narrates to us that he’s dedicated (like TPN might do) but because he sees the horrors of the Survey Corps when they return from their mission and yet still wants to join them. After all, when Mikasa tells his parents that he wants to join their ranks, all Eren says is: “I told you not to tell them!” Throughout the rest of the episode, he makes absolutely no indication that he no longer wants to join them. In fact, he acts like he hasn’t been swayed in the slightest.

Not a single thing I’ve just mentioned can be considered telling. No, it’s all showing through dialogue that isn’t forced in any way, shape, or form, and that’s what makes it work. From Eren’s anger to his dialogue to his attitude towards the world and people around him, we learn everything we need to know about our main character without Isayama needing to tell us. Because Isayama does tell us. He just does it through showing, unlike TPN.

And that is the problem with the first episode of The Promised Neverland— while the episode could have been constructed to show everything that the audience needs to know, it wasn’t, and therefore it must rely on unrealistic, forced dialogue that ejects the audience out of the story it’s trying to submerse us in.

#the promised neverland #tpn #tpn emma #tpn ray #tpn norman #attack on titan #shingeki no kyojin #eren yeager #anime analysis #manga analysis #tpn manga

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antoine-roquentin · 4 years

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First, take a look at the very equivocal position of the Democratic leadership. One little noted detail is important. An amendment inserted in the lame-duck legislation that enshrined the “Swaps Pushout” weakening of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in January 2015, made it easier for big donors to funnel much larger sums of money to the national party committees. This has, I think, made it even easier for blocs of big donors to control those committees, even as small contributions sometimes surge. Not only in 2018, but in the 2020 primaries, I think this mattered.

As a result, the Democratic National Committee has not been subordinated to the Biden campaign, at least not yet. The surge in the southern Democratic primaries that destroyed the Sanders boom involved many big Democratic donors along with many black congressmen and women, together with the political and financial networks of former president Barack Obama and the Clintons. It was a coming together of the entire Democratic establishment to stop Sanders. Congressional black leaders were thus heavily identified with the “Stop Sanders” movement, too.

But with the combined economic collapse and the pandemic revealing the bankruptcy of the traditional establishment, the whole top of the party has had to scramble. How they have responded is very interesting. Thanks to the dissemination of so many videos, the realization about the racism that black Americans face — and not just by so many police — is very widespread. The revulsion is deep and real.

In response, the Democratic establishment is taking a leaf from the past — not the late ’60s, when groups highly critical of the Democrats became prominent, but the early ’60s. Joel Rogers and I described the process in our book Right Turn. When the civil rights movement emerged, major foundations, prominent business leaders of major multinationals, and foundations allied to them heavily supported that groundswell. John F. Kennedy famously called Martin Luther King in jail, while prominent Wall Street lawyers flew down south or otherwise helped represent civil rights campaigners who were under legal attack. That’s what’s happening right now, with groups closely allied with the Democratic Party helping to raise money. There will be tensions now, as there were then, between the party and the movement, but that’s the basic direction things are taking.

So how does this play into the election?

I think the basic script each party is following is evident. Democrats are hoping for a repeat of 2008. In that election, policy was hopelessly bungled by the Republican leadership. After Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, nobody in opposition had to say very much. Democrats could just sit and watch John McCain flail helplessly.

Donald Trump, by contrast, is clearly copying the Nixon playbook, though because he’s in power, 1972 is closer to the mark than 1968. His administration’s heavy-handed appeals to “law and order” are obvious, and so are the ways he tries to bait protesters. The “law and order” mantra is looking a bit thin, though, partly because the videos and protests so clearly touch a chord with many members of the public. But it is also apparent that the US military wants no part in quelling domestic protests, so that the best Trump is likely to be able to do is to try to irritate protesters and hope for strong public reactions. Attorney general William Barr is also pitching in, in spectacular fashion.

The other thing the White House is bent on doing is finding a way to levitate the economy. In 1972, Richard Nixon famously relied on Arthur Burns at the Fed to engineer a legendary political business cycle. Today’s Fed certainly reacts to pressures from Trump, but the drastically different world situation severely limits its room for maneuver. It can hardly do more than it has even if it wanted to.

This is why the president and the vice president are trying so desperately to downplay the pandemic. They want to drive people back to work and push up the GDP. Vice president Mike Pence is plainly encouraging state leaders to talk up their successes and downplay bad news, including spiking COVID-19 cases in the South and West. The White House thinks they have to get the economy moving again or Trump will be toast in November.

How different is this from what the administration was doing earlier?

It represents a doubling down on policies that Trump and his camp wanted to promote earlier and did for a while. As the pandemic hit, all over the developed world, prominent business figures and conservative economists warned about the dangers of a long lockdown. Some, including an occasional central banker, even talked sotto voce about how such policies would reduce state pension obligations. In the United States, the UK, and other European countries, advocates talked up the idea of “herd immunity.” Trump’s “kitchen cabinet” of business figures, including prominent private equity managers, were repeatedly cited as pushing the president to take a “go slow” attitude on lockdowns.

After the publication of the Imperial College estimates of the death rates such policies would entail, though, enthusiasm waned. The UK changed policy. The switch definitely affected the Trump administration’s attitudes. It helped, along with the ghastly reality of what was happening on the ground, especially on the East and West coasts of the United States, to force the administration to accept lockdowns and sheltering in place. Both in the United States and in the UK, though, pressures from business groups for rapid reopening remained very strong. Conservative groups have even urged reopening without establishing a viable testing regime, which is exactly what the administration has now done.

Clear camps are forming within business, and those look to be seeping into politics. Many small companies whose business models rest on low wages, along with financiers — meaning private equity first and foremost — whose strategies depend on buying and breaking up firms, continue to plump for rapid reopening.

By contrast, many firms in the rest of finance, and especially in high-tech and capital-intensive industries whose strategies do not rest on low wages, are less heedless of the dangers of quick opening. Many tech firms enthusiastically promote their products as solutions to the problems the pandemic creates — as is obvious with many internet and software companies. Robert Rubin called for joint panels of medical professionals and economists to decide when reopening was feasible and for contact tracing; even robotic assistance has been touted.

Where the rubber meets the road, though, is the critical question of worker safety. Trump gutted the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Not only is the number of inspectors way down, but key appointees are plainly uninterested in regulating on the issue at all.

It seems to me that this is a potentially fateful intersection between the movement growing out of Minneapolis and the Democrats. Calls to reopen quickly are basically demands by affluent white-collar managers who can work at home. They want to send blue-collar workers back to work under conditions the senior executives would not accept for themselves. Many of the blue-collar workers are, it is important to add, black or Latino. Though you would never know from reading any major newspaper, wildcat and other strikes have soared since Minneapolis. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of them, as Mike Elk’s Payday Report website is documenting. It seems clear that the protests have inspired many black and Latino workers to demand safe working conditions.

I don’t have much to say for the classic financial bailouts the United States has pursued — they protect the wealth of those that have it, while the government does something, but not much, to protect the livelihood of average citizens. But it would make a great deal of sense to move onto the national balance sheet the costs of redesigning work to make it safe. That would be a really good use of public resources.

So how does this play out in the election?

Right now, COVID-19 cases are soaring in many Southern and Western states, whose Republican governors had followed the White House lead and pretended the pandemic was over or would somehow never reach them. As a result, you can feel a seismic tremor in Trump’s support: the fabled 40 percent or so base level for him that people thought could never be breached is being broken.

But I remember 1988 very well, when Michael Dukakis was almost 20 points ahead of George H. W. Bush in late summer. A lot can happen to change what looks like an all but insurmountable advantage. One needs to remember that Biden looks good mostly next to Trump; the Democratic candidate doesn’t generate much enthusiasm from voters on his own. How the Biden campaign can tap the energy that fueled Sanders, and, to some extent, Warren, is not clear yet. The terms of trade between the camps are still being worked out, and the effort could fail. If Democratic elites are dumb enough to believe the claims so many have made that 2016 had nothing to do with economics, they could repeat that disaster.

I have a hard time believing that people who are out of work and watching how the government is allowing insurers to slip out of covering the costs of COVID tests will be inspired to vote for Biden without something far stronger than a “public option” for health care instead of Medicare for All, for example.

Plenty else can go wrong, too. Let’s just bracket the possibility of some foreign crisis, especially in the South China Sea, since it’s also clear Trump right now is still hoping that a big trade deal with China might come through. Otherwise, there are the old reliables for the GOP: efforts to hold down voter turnout and giant flows of big money.

This year, though, there’s a wrinkle to the first one. Trump’s campaign against the Post Office may have started out as a fight with Amazon, but right now, it’s clearly turned into something else. Empirical evidence from the Wisconsin primary is clear that voting in person led to several waves of new COVID infections.

As a result, interest in mail balloting is way up. Of course, Republicans are mostly opposed to that, though empirical evidence up to now does not suggest that mail ballots have strong partisan advantages one way or the other. But, of course, a broke Post Office won’t be delivering much of anything. My guess is that you’ll see Trump dig in ever more obdurately on this issue as election day approaches.

Which brings us to the money question. Here, I don’t have much to add to what my colleagues Paul Jorgensen, Jie Chen, and I wrote earlier in the year. In 2016, we found that Trump floated to victory on a big wave of late money from large private equity firms, among others. We also conjectured that the perfect correlation for the first time in American history between Republican success in Senate elections and the outcome of the presidential vote in states was not an accident. That turned out to be true. Trump did a bit better in states with Senate races. We’ve now shown how late money turned around those Senate races, when prospects just weeks before the election looked hopeless. That example is instructive. Democratic candidates who lost elections in those final days have told me how they watched the inflow of money turn around what had seemed a favorable situation. Problems with even counting ballots are, I think, likely to make 2020 very tense, no matter what polls say now or even the day before. Whether we live in a pre- or a post-apocalyptic era might be tested.

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elfrootaddict · 4 years

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SHE IS THE KEY - Chapter 4/5

DESCRIPTION: Solas is desperate to meet the person who survived the explosion at the Conclave. Things certainly didn’t go as planned.

SERIES: Halla & Wolf

VOLUME: 2

Solas is so incredibly tired of at all.

He can feel the stress pressing down onto his chest. His eyes are heavy and his body is aching. He can’t accept any of this is truly happening. How did it go so incredibly wrong? Besides the orb being unlocked, nothing else has gone to plan. Nothing has turned out as it should have. The consequences of his failure gnawing and haunting him.

With the anger and stress overwhelming in, Solas begins to clench his fists so tight that his knuckles turn white that he almost pierces his skin with his nails. He finally releases his hands and decides to finish what he started. He can’t stand being around these humans and this Dalish thief any longer.

Kneeling back down, he finishes healing the laceration on the prisoner’s hand. When it’s finally done he stands back up and holds his staff out in front of him. Normally he would of been able to control the Anchor, without the need of his staff, however with his true abilities still relatively debilitated he needs a bolster his power.

Solas closes his eyes and begins to access his ancient talents. It’s literally been a millennia since he has had to use such an enchantment and Solas is almost trembling in anticipation.

His staff lights up and is surrounded with pale, green energy. It flows and swirls like water in the air, its gentle stream encircling Solas and the prisoner. The exponential rush of the ancient power coursing through his mind and body feels like a cold breeze on a hot summer’s day. The familiar energy filling his lungs and licking his face. The tiny hairs at the back of this neck rise, sending shivers down his spine and he falls into a trance of elated emotions.

Solas takes hold of the magic from the Anchor in the prisoner’s body, releasing its clutches and subdues it into submission. The old magic obeys and falls silent as it is now completely isolated to the prisoner’s left hand. However, with the Breach still in the sky, Solas knows this won’t last long. In fact, the Anchor’s magic will always be killing the prisoner as she is simply a mere mortal. And no mere mortal could ever handle such power that is bestowed by an orb.

All Solas can do for her is delay the inevitable.

Releasing his mind from the trance, the ancient energy dissipates and he is left feeling warm and wholly satisfied with his success. Finally able to take his leave, Solas gathers his things, puts his pack on his back and darts for the door.

But before leaving, he looks over his shoulder and takes another look at the prisoner behind him. Her face still silent, with the only movement coming from her is her chest as it slowly rises and then falls. And without fail, the Anchor fires up again, filling the room with its static energy that Solas can almost taste it.

You have no idea what you have done, do you? But you will. Dirthara-ma.

And then steps out of the room, closing the door behind him and then winds his way back to main hall of Haven’s Chantry. Once outside, Solas takes in a deep breath and fills his lungs to the brim with the cold, crisp winter air. He then looks out towards the horizon and stares at the hole in the sky.

It is beautiful, in its own way. The mighty green storm hovering above as it swirls around its own eye. And from its eye, it trails down and connects to the magnanimous rift in the temple below. It’s so powerful that gigantic boulders of the earth and pieces of the temple are floating in its clutches in a slow, almost hypnotic dance.

With all that has transpired, Solas feels he needs to confide in a friend. He certainly could use some sound advice from Wisdom or even receive a good pep talk from Courage. He then looks at the people of Haven who are running around frantically. Some healing, and others barking orders. This is where the true chaos lies, not in the sky.

The aftermath of the Conclave feels all too familiar to Solas having seen this before in a time that has long since passed. And many times more in the memories lying deep within the Fade.

Solas walks through all the commotion and out of Haven’s main gate. He then takes a right and treads through the forest in thick, freshly fallen snow. After making considerable distance between himself and Haven, he sits down on a rock beneath a frozen tree and rests his head against its rough bark. Once comfortable enough, Solas creates wards around himself for protection as he enters dream state. It doesn’t take him long, as he is more often dreaming than being awake, and his connection to the Fade is old and strong. Once his eyes are closed, his mind is turns black and empty as there is no more visual stimulus of the world around him.

Ever so slowly, the impressionable world of the Fade starts to fill his mind’s eye. It always starts off blurry and in fragments. Eventually, his vision turns clear and crisp. He can see the green haze, warped reality and tiny particle fragments lifting off the ground and into the air all around him.

Nothing makes Solas feel more at home than the Fade. It is his only real connection left to what was once a daily experience for him ages ago. It was as natural to experience the Fade as it is to breathe.

Solas starts to wonder around and tries to find any Spirit that he can engage in, “Wisdom? Courage? Mana. Ma halani. Mir elgar-falon.”

Absolute silence.

Solas’s heart drops and starts to feel a considerable amount of concern for the Spirits he expected to encounter. They always welcome him as he would talk and wonder the Fade for hours with them. He understood them. But more importantly, they understood him.

After wondering for a considerable amount of time without any encounters from his friends, Solas realises this has been for naught.

I hope they are alright and haven’t been twisted.

Solas groans and realises he isn’t going to get any advice or guidance here, and he snaps his mind back into the living world. He lets out a heavy sigh as the waking world can never be what the Fade is to him. Thedas to him, is what the Fade is to Thedas. It’s unfamiliar, frightening and scary.

No one truly dares to discover the Fade’s hidden marvels, wonders and knowledge in this current living world. Not unless they want to use the Fade for nefarious and selfish reasons. And with the help of the Chantry, everyone alive today sees the Fade as this frightening place where only demons and monsters reside. And while that is true, there are also beautiful parts of the Fade and the truly wonderful Spirits that inhabit them. Just like Thedas, there is the pure and the demented. Both sides of the same coin.

Living up to his namesake, Solas decides he alone must fix this mess if there is ever to be peace and order, albeit temporarily, so that he may find his missing orb. He has no faith in Cassandra being able stop the Breach and clearly, she has no faith in him. And who knows if the prisoner might ever wake up.

No, I alone must to do this. I have to try attempt to seal the rifts myself.

Taking great strides through the snow, he finds the path that leads to the destroyed Temple of Sacred Ashes. As he reaches the top of the hill, he sees two guards standing in front of a large stone entrance with its massive, wooden Fereldan doors. As Solas approaches, they remove their swords from their scabbards and try to prevent him from coming through.

Solas exclaims with his hands raised, “Peace! I mean you no harm!” dropping his hands. “Lady Cassandra has explicitly given me permission to help fend off the demons. Please, let me through.”

“How do we know if you are telling the truth, mage?” one of them shouts.

“You don’t. But if I were here with malicious intent, surely I am outnumbered by at least a hundred of you? Therefore, it wouldn’t take long for you to strike me down if you so wished, yes? So then why would I come here if I meant you harm?”

The guards exchange cautious glances.

Solas continues to convince them, “The fact of the matter is, is that this hole in the sky dooms us all. Surely you won’t pass up on any help when it is presented to you so willingly? We all need to band together to defeat this evil, do we not?”

After a considerable amount of silence, they sheath their swords and then open the doors to the bridge, “Very well. You may enter,” says the other. “But we will be confirming your claim with Lady Cassandra.”

“You do that,” smirks Solas. “I am no pretender.”

Once Solas is through and on the bridge, the guards close the mammoth sized doors behind him. And without fail, everyone on the bridge turns to face him. As Solas walks across, he can’t help but see the variety of emotions slapped across their faces. Clearly, they have no shame in hiding their true feelings about his presence. And their reactions always stem from two things; he’s an elf and he’s a mage. The two concoctions damning him wherever he goes.

At least in the Fade this is never an issue. The Spirits care more about what is within than one’s outward appearance.

I am here to save you, and all you can do is mock the knife-ear.

Finally reaching the end of the bridge, Solas winds his way up and through the valley. He eventually crosses a frozen lake with the temple almost within reach. All he needs to do now is to climb a few steep steps and he will be standing amongst the temple’s rubble.

As he reaches the top of the stairs, he hears a rift violently rip a hole in the Veil and demons come pouring out of the Fade in alarming numbers. Their loud, high pitched screeches and cries send shivers down Solas’s spine.

Using his connection to the Fade, Solas instinctively wraps himself with a protective enchantment and runs to hide behind a piece of rubble wall. Before he engages, he needs to see what he is dealing with. It’s been a long time since he’s been in the heat of battle and Solas is not one to do anything without a plan.

Peering over the top of the rubble wall, Solas sees three shade demons and a couple of wraiths. Knowing that they were most likely innocent spirits before being pulled through the rift unwillingly, Solas aches to see them being turned against their very nature. He knows he has no choice but to end their suffering, but first he must try to seal the rift so that no more spirits can come through and suffer the same fate.

With his battle plan now in mind, he stands up from his hiding spot and exposes his position to the demons wondering the rubble below. Using almost all his energy to connect to the Fade, he access the same magic he used ages ago to attempt to seal the rift.

Solas cries out in agony as he reaches the climax of his abilities and realises his magic did nothing in sealing the rift. In fact, all it’s done is announce his presence to the demons below.

“Fenedhis!”

“Maker, did I just see you try to destroy that thing yourself?”

Solas spins around on his heel and is completely dumbfounded to see a dwarven man running up the steps behind him. He is dressed in red rogue armour and is carrying the most peculiar crossbow out in front of him. But most alarmingly of all, is that the split of his tunic opens all the way down his chest, stopping just above his naval.

And because of this, clearly intentional choice of style, it allows his thick, golden and luscious chest hair to burst forth for all the world to see.

Elvish to English Translations:

“Dirthara-ma.” = May you learn (curse)

“Mana. Ma halan. Mir elgar-falon.” = Help me my spirit friend(s)

“Fenedhis!” = shit!

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5

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Halla & Wolf Series

#ElfrootAddict's Halla & Wolf Series #ElfrootAddict's She Is The Key #ElfrootAddict's El'lana Aemma Lavellan #solas #solas dragon age #fen'hare #dread wolf #varric thetras #lavellan #dragon age #dragon age inquisition #fanfic #solavellan

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yukipri · 5 years

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BF OT4 Kids Headcanons

WOWIE kids HCs time! Was in response to this ask meme BUT got really out of hand ^ ^;

Thanks so much for sending me a number~!

43. Would they have any kids? If so, describe.

For my Banana Fish OT4 aka Ash + Shorter + Sing x Eiji <3

Held off on answering this for a while as I tried to solidify my thoughts on this more, and well, as always my feelings may always change but here’s what I got for now!

This...actually isn’t about the kids themselves, but more how Eiji & Mates came to the conclusion that they want kids? Lotsa chara HCs ^ ^

Posted in advance on Patreon and references some other HC posts but still hopefully understandable by itself. Happy Mother’s Day? haha

＊Assuming this is an ABO variation of the BFF/Everyone Lives AU

Alpha!Ash, Alpha!Shorter, Alpha!Sing, Omega!Eiji, established polyamorous relationship.

Nonexplicit mentions of mpreg and canon trauma. LONG POST.

Kids aren’t even remotely on the table for a very, very long time. The three alphas had pretty turbulent childhoods, and they know more than anyone that the streets aren’t kind to children, and that children can be extremely vulnerable.

Eiji knows and respects this, and is content to just be with them, and for them to all slowly heal together. Taking care of themselves is far more important, and something they need to have the time to do before they can even consider intentionally creating tiny humans who will be entirely dependent on them.

While they’re not exactly “their children,” they have Sing and Skip too. Both the kids were always too mature for their age, forced to grow up too fast (and other than Eiji, wasn’t that the case for all of them), and especially in Sing’s case, there really isn’t that much of an age difference between him and the “adults” at all. They’re much less like their children and more like lil brothers, but Shorter’s protectiveness and mentor role with Sing and Ash’s very similar role with Skip made them people to look out for, to care for, and to a certain extent raise.

Eiji, however, didn’t really get that with Sing OR Skip. From that very first day in America, Skip was looking out for him despite being such a young kid, and Sing most certainly was Eiji’s guardian, not the other way around. Eiji takes care of them in his own way, he does for all of them, but they aren’t his protégés like they are for Shorter and Ash.

And, well, a tiny, quiet part of Eiji sorta wishes he had that.

It’s not necessarily about Eiji wanting to mentor someone, or him feeling he has anything of value to teach. There’d been a few calls recently from people interested in him getting a photography apprentice, and while Eiji doesn’t dislike the idea, he doesn’t really know if it could be the same; he doesn’t know if they would be family. It’s most certainly not Eiji hoping for someone even weaker and more vulnerable than him coming into their lives, for the sake of giving him someone even he can protect.

It’s not even about Eiji wanting to become stronger, because Eiji’s never been about that. Yes it can be a little frustrating when all he can do is sit back and hide and have others take care of him, and yes he’s happy when he can do something to help, but at the same time, he’s accepted it. It’s less acceptance of his own weakness, and more trust in his mates, and respect for their need to protect him. Eiji has his own ways of helping.

Eiji’s own feelings are complicated, but as he sees Sing and Skip grow up, influenced so deeply by Shorter and Ash, he feels a weird longing. It’s stupid to think of Sing as Shorter’s legacy when they’re only a few years apart in age, and Shorter is RIGHT HERE beside him, but Eiji feels that even if Shorter was gone (he hopes that’s never the case), he’d still see so much of Shorter in Sing, and in a way would be able to feel him through his successor. Skip’s so different from Ash, but he’s also so clearly the Lynx successor, Eiji knows he’ll always be able to see Ash in him too.

He knows his lovers would hate him for thinking of this, but Eiji’s okay with being realistic, because they don’t know what’ll happen, and any single one of them could suddenly be gone with no warning.

And Eiji wants Ash, Shorter, Sing, everyone he loves, to have someone who irrevocably has a part of Eiji living in them, in the case Eiji has to depart.

Eiji knows his loved ones have lost so much, and how frail especially Ash and Shorter can be at the thought of losing him. In the hopefully unlikely chance of his demise, Eiji wants them to have a reason to live on.

Eiji wonders how all this rather morbid thinking somehow leads him to the answer of children (because really, it clearly has nothing to do with blood), but the more he thinks about it, the more the idea appeals, and the more he feels a gut longing for it.

He knows if he tells anyone, maybe Jessica, the beta woman would joke about his Omega Mothering Instincts calling or something, which would be inaccurate (he hopes). He thinks that if he confided in his sister-in-law and fellow omega Nadia, she would just smile kindly and tell him that he should do what he thinks is right, and to talk to his mates.

It’s an awkward topic to breach, but one night it happens, and the room goes still. Eiji wonders if he should backpedal, but decides to hold firm. If this is completely off the table, then that’s okay, he will always choose his mates. But he thinks if that’s the case, he also wants to know now.

Sing frowns a little bit, not upset, but contemplative, as though the thought hadn’t really crossed his mind before. Shorter’s eyes widen–Eiji suddenly knows that he has thought about this before, but probably never thought it’d be thrown out in the open like this–before Shorter’s gaze flicks to Ash.

Ash is completely expressionless, and Eiji immediately knows he’s thrown up a wall.

Eiji can’t blame Ash, and honestly Ash was part of why Eiji was so hesitant about asking in the first place. Eiji knows that parents, mothers, and the very idea of fatherhood itself is extremely complicated for Ash. Eiji knows that Ash knows that Eiji would never abandon a child of theirs, so that shouldn’t be too big an issue. But so many “father” figures have hurt Ash, tainted his image of the term, his very definition of it, and Eiji gets Ash being hesitant to put himself in a position to take the role himself.

Max, Eiji knows, has been a positive father-like figure to Ash, and Eiji knows that Ash likes visiting that family, and seeing Michael together with his parents, watching a happy childhood that he never got to have. Eiji only hopes that Ash can see it being possible with them.

Shorter and Sing are always oh so careful and respectful of Ash’s past and triggers (they all are; they all need to be, with lives like theirs), and hold off on voicing any opinion for a while. Eiji backs off too. He just wanted them to know it was on his mind.

The answer Ash gives them, after months, is a disappointed, resigned, “I don’t know.” Eiji can see that Ash had struggled with himself, and had tried to bring himself to give a different answer, but just couldn’t.

Eiji knows Ash loves him, loves them, loves their family, and would do anything for them. Ash tells Eiji in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t doubt for a second that Eiji could be an amazing mother, the best in the world. But the idea of Ash as a father…all Ash sees ahead of him is the maze of ways he could fuck up, and horribly, just like he was fucked up.

He doesn’t want to be the father who makes his child lose faith in adults, whose actions indirectly cause his child to run directly into the arms of predators. He doesn’t want any association with the father figure idolized by his community, who secretly hurts children in the shadows of his home. He doesn’t want anything to do with being a Papa, and all the ways that word has been used around him, all those years he fought against saying it himself. And then how his father was officialized and forced on him without his consent, tying his real identity to a man he loathed.

Ash knows his image of fatherhood is fucked, he knows that this isn’t what it’s about and this isn’t what Eiji’s asking him. But Ash knows, has personally experienced far too many examples of the Fucked Up fatherhood. And he just can’t risk it.

Because if Ash fucks up too, this time it won’t be Ash, it won’t even be Eiji, it would be their child who pays the price. And that just isn’t a risk he can possibly take.

Ash isn’t ready. He looks ashamed and that self-loathing that still won’t stop coming back despite his healing flickers all over him. He wishes he could be, for Eiji, but he can’t in any good conscience lie about this. And he doesn’t know if he can ever be ready.

Eiji comforts him, reassures him, and tells him it’s okay. Eiji would never force Ash, would never ask him to try. Ash will always be more important than any hypothetical child, and a child isn’t Eiji’s priority (and Eiji doesn’t think he can really tell them his real priority).

Once things are settled, Ash’s answer found, Shorter steps up next, Sing’s eyes tracking him with calm patience.

Shorter says bluntly that he wants a kid with Eiji.

Does he need one? Absolutely not. But if it’s something that Eiji wants, and ONLY if it’s something Eiji really, really wants, then it’s something that Shorter really, really wants with Eiji. All due respect to Ash.

Shorter doesn’t know if he’ll be a good dad (Sing snorts–it’s not like all the Chinatown street rats didn’t consider Shorter their guardian figure, back in the day–and Shorter playfully smacks him). Shorter repeats that he doesn’t know if he’ll be a good dad, but he’s prepared to give it everything he’s got. And well, it wouldn’t ever be just him and Eiji now would it, or are those two other wedding bands in the room fake. And the way Shorter sees it, a kid being raised by all four of them, and all their friends and family, probably isn’t in shabby hands. If the others are alright with it, he’s happy to take primary responsibility, if they want to see it that way.

Later, more quietly and to just Eiji and Sing because he doesn’t want to pressure Ash, Shorter confesses that he has another reason too. His and Nadia’s parents died while they were young, and Shorter barely remembers them. He loves Nadia, and couldn’t have wished for a better guardian, and knows how hard she worked. But as a kid, he still missed his parents, and even now, he wishes he’d had more time with them.

Shorter confesses that he thinks there’s a chance that he doesn’t have all that much time.

They’re out of any immediate danger now, out of the fighting and daily crises of gang life. But they didn’t get out unscathed. Ash took so much damage on the inside, which showed itself in his decision regarding kids. They all took mental damage, and none as much as Ash.

But Shorter took the most physical damage.

He survived, and Shorter can’t ask for more than that, and he considers every day he has with them a blessing and he wouldn’t trade it for anything. He’s happy as he is now.

But he also a brain that should never have regained consciousness after Banana Fish burned through him, if not for Yut-Lung’s antidote. He has a skull that was cracked, with scars on his head to prove it, and who knows what was done to his brain then too but definitely nothing good. And he has a heart that, while healed, also had a bullet go straight through it.

There’s nothing really physically wrong with him (other than the extreme PTSD, the unpredictable blank outs, the extreme phobias and triggers–), and it may just be Shorter’s paranoia. But, Shorter admits that he’s thought about this a lot, talked to his therapist Blanca about it too, even if this is his first time telling Eiji and Sing. He doesn’t want to tell Ash, at least not yet, because Ash will only blame himself and Shorter doesn’t want that. But Shorter thinks that if all of them live out their current life expectancies without a hitch, he’ll be the first one gone by a long shot. And he’s okay with that.

(It’s most definitely not the main reason, but it’s also part of why he was so adamant that Ash also be Eiji’s partner, and later his pushy encouragement with Sing. He doesn’t want Eiji to be alone when he leaves. He doesn’t want any of them to be alone. Eiji feels something burn in his chest, because he understands, gods he understands.)

Shorter doesn’t know if he’s ready to be a father, but he’s also around thirty now, a far cry from the teenage street rat trying to live on to the next day. He thinks he’s as ready as he’ll ever be. He’s honestly never felt better prepared for anything.

So again, if Eiji wants this, if and only if he genuinely, truly wants this and feels ready himself, and if Ash and Sing are okay with this, then Shorter wants to be a dad. Shorter wants as many years to love his kid as possible. He wants to see them grow up, if he can. He wants his kids to be able to remember him, to never have to doubt that Shorter loved them with his whole heart. He’s not in a rush, but he also isn’t going to hesitate.

But of course, it’s not just about what he wants, and not even what just he and Eiji want. With their family, it’s what all of them want, for a decision like this.

Ash knows he isn’t ready, and Shorter doesn’t want to push him, and doesn’t want Ash to think that he’s somehow holding them all back either. But Shorter has a hunch that maybe, this could be a way to get Ash comfortable with the idea of being a father, without personally feeling that he must carry the title.

Sing speaks up, and he says he gives Shorter his full support, and thinks it’s the right decision. Sing’s had a few years as part of their relationship now, and while he’ll always deeply respect and admire both Shorter and Ash and often lets them lead, he’s no longer the idolizing puppy trailing behind them. He’s smart, calculating, and doesn’t give his support blindly. At the same time, he’s so gentle and warm, leaning into his mentor as the two of them pull Eiji between them.

Sing says that he thinks he also wants to be a father, one day, possibly one day soon. He’s the youngest of them, but he’s prepared to give everything for their family, and he has the strength and confidence now that he knows that that actually means something. But he also thinks that for him and Eiji, maybe the time isn’t quite right yet. Maybe in a few years.

And even if the child is biologically Shorter and Eiji’s, the child would be theirs, at least for Sing. Sing knows that any child of theirs, he’d consider his too, blood be damned. And well, if he’s already going to be a father, then a few years will only prepare him even more, if Eiji ever wants him to father another kid.

Shorter’s so damn proud of his lil bro for really getting at the heart of the matter, and Eiji feels so full he could burst. Because gods, he does want a kid, a baby of their own, and maybe it’s selfish, but Eiji really does want this, for all of them.

All that really remains is Ash.

Ash calmly listens to Shorter and Sing, and promptly says that they should go for it. He supports them.

Shorter reminds him that any kid of theirs would not be a Them but an Us. Ash would be the child’s dad too, if he wants.

Ash is still firm; he’s sure. He supports them, the family, including himself (the if you’ll have me is unsaid but felt, and rejected. Of course Ash is family). He takes Eiji’s hand and apologizes for not being able to take the initiative this time. But he can’t lead this. But he can and will do anything and everything to be there with them, to help, and be a part of the kid’s life. He’ll give them everything, protect them with his life.

And maybe, just maybe, being a father (of sorts) to this kid will help him overcome his own fear too.

Ash confides in Sing, because their relationship has gotten to the point where he can do so easily. He knows Shorter and Eiji think of Ash as a dad for their upcoming kid, just like they thought of him as their husband. But “husband” and “father” are so different for Ash.

Ash is okay with them calling him a “dad” out loud, but on the inside, Ash will probably think of the kid as a little brother. He may not be able to handle being a dad, but he can, and wants to be a big brother and mentor. He can be someone like Griffin, like Nadia, who basically raised them. He can be like Max, a pretend dad, but a dad whose role still means so much. He can even be like Blanca, a mentor figure whose presence is so grounding. Ash can only hope he can be like them, and he hopes that’s alright, and that’s enough.

Sing assures him it will be (but also while thinking that all the figures Ash listed are more certainly more parental than any of Ash’s official dads), but also warns him that the kid might still take him by surprise. It’s Eiji’s, after all.

The child is eventually born, looking so achingly like Eiji but beaming with Shorter’s smile. Sing and Eiji clutch at each other with wet eyes, and Eiji wonders how he could have ever been so focussed on goodbyes, when this is so clearly about new beginnings and greeting a new someone he already loves so much it’s almost unbearable.

Shorter is sobbing the manliest tears ever as the nurse passes him the babe. After a few moments, Shorter passes the tiny bundle into Ash’s arms and says, “Hey look kid, meet your other dad.”

And when Ash looks down at that little life in his arms, someone who came out of Eiji and is the product of love he feels so intimately, he feels something crack in his chest. His eyes feel unexpectedly hot as salty droplets spill down his own cheeks to rival Shorter’s. Ash numbly thinks that this isn’t what he thought he was signing up for, and that he could never have prepared for this–but also wouldn’t, couldn’t give it up for the world.

(A few years later, Sing fathers their family’s second child).

(And a few years after that, Ash fathers the last child).

Marriage/Wedding HCs

Get to know my Shipping Preferences & Ships Ask Meme

#Banana Fish #Shoreiji #Singeiji #Asheiji #Ashoreiji #Headcanons

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timeclonemike · 5 years

Text

Axiom Verge: Setting and Plot Analysis

This has been bouncing around in my head for a while, so I’m going to just put it down for posterity.

Axiom Verge is a side scrolling platformer in the Metroidvania Style. Half of the game is exploring and getting new equipment, then backtracking to try that new equipment on old areas to look for secrets impossible to find earlier. The player controls Trace, a physicist who has his experiment blow up in his face, and then wakes up in an alien world fighting for his life.

I’m dropping a Keep Reading Cut here since the discussion will mention spoilers and lots of them.

There’s three main issues I want to talk about: Simulation Theory, the Alternates, and Trace’s Characterization. There may be other, smaller tangents that will get mentioned in passing.

Simulation Theory: This is a philosophical theory that posits the entire universe and everything in it is the result of a simulation being run on a computer. (I have numerous problems with it myself, but those are not germane to the analysis of this game.) In Axiom Verge, this theory is true, but the “simulation” just happens to be a sidescrolling platformer. Most of Trace’s weapons are deliberately designed to invoke classic console game glitches; a gun that causes enemy behavior to glitch out called the Address Disruptor, a lab coat that lets him noclip through walls, and the counterpart to the High Jump Boots from Metroid is literally a device that changes the local laws of physics so Trace can jump higher. There’s even a device that functions like either a password system or the old game genie / game shark cartridge add ons that let people change the game in different ways, and it’s the only way to get to several secrets and the gear they hide.

About halfway to two thirds of the way through the plot, it’s revealed that all this equipment that Trace has been finding is equipment that Trace originally created. After the lab accident, Trace not only came up with a way to prove Simulation Theory, he managed to design hardware based on the theory. Some of the documents found in the game are from Trace, including an extract / excerpt from his original paper, with a quote that was important enough that it made it into the actual trailer.

Axiom 1(c): Any algorithm giving rise to cognitive entities will be perceived as reality by the entities described.

This, I think, is used to deliberately invoke the idea of the Simulation Theory, and all of the events of the game take that theory to it’s logical extreme; if the universe is a computer program, it can be hacked, it can glitch, and it can crash, which raises two important questions.

Question One: If the universe simulation starts to glitch out or corrupt, what would that look like to the people in that universe? A number of notes found in the game refer to something called the Breach; in game, it looks and sounds like some sort of graphical or audio corruption, and one note calls it “a forced re-linking of the lattices underlying adjacent universes.” The Breach is also responsible for the “Secret Worlds” of Axiom Verge, where assets and set pieces are randomly thrown together with very little internal logic. These Secret Worlds are almost certainly a reference to the “secret worlds” found in the original Metroid game, not just in style, but thematically as well. The Metroid secret worlds were created when the game accidentally started reading its own code as level data. With that as context, the note describing the breach suddenly makes more sense.

Question Two: If the universal simulation should be fatally corrupted or even crash, what happens next? This is only indirectly touched on in two parts of the game, one note describing the backstory of the world of Sudra that Trace is exploring, and the “pathogen” that was released on the world. In the note about old Sudra, it’s said that the people of that world had achieved untold heights of technical and scientific knowledge, but weaponized it and caused untold calamities before they got to the point that they were unwilling, or unable, to continue fighting. Given that they ended up creating at least one weapon that Trace can find, the flamethrower, and hid it in a cave using a literal password system, I think it’s plausible that the Sudrans were actually on the precipice of just such a disaster. In fact, it is entirely possible that they created the Breach itself either as an accidental result of their fighting, or as a deliberate ultimate weapon. This position is supported by the language of the notes referring to the breach and anything related to it with weather terminology; in order to capture the Rusalki, a storm-related machine was activated, and in the events of the game proper the Rusalki can’t get close to the Breach Attractor as long as it is powered on.

There’s also the matter of the “pathogen” that is unleashed on Sudra by the antagonist. If you made a list of synonyms for pathogen, you’d find “Virus” on that list. In light of the Simulation Theory, it’s not even that much of a jump to go from “pathogen” to “computer virus” and this is supported by noted left by the various bosses before they are completely transformed by it; one of them deliberately points out that the algorithm that defines them is itself twisted and corrupted.

The Alternates: One of the big plot twists halfway to two thirds of the way through the game is that the player character Trace isn’t the same Trace that got caught in the lab accident; that’s just where Trace’s memories of Earth stop. The original Trace was left blind and paraplegic by the accident, which didn’t even have anything to do with his physics experiment; a pressure valve froze and that caused an explosion. Trace ended up having a revelation while recovering and developed a revolutionary new theory; the media loved it, but the scientific community ridiculed it and him. They gave him a nickname: Athetos.

Conveniently enough, Athetos is the name of the antagonist of the game, who unleashed all the chaos on Sudra in the backstory.

Trace is actually a clone created from Athetos, as are all of the game bosses. These clones were created by the game’s version of the Save Point, called Rebirth Chambers. The original Trace was completely healed of all injuries from the accident, and there’s a hidden area with his old wheelchair and a note explaining what happened.

The main reason I’m bringing this up is because I saw an explanation video that stated that the Athetos variants created by “Prime Trace” were from alternate universes. The evidence from this was referring to a specific note talking about algorithms across universes, but the problem with this theory is that there is one part of the game where two Rebirth Chambers are actively being used to create more clone variants. So the multiversal theory didn’t even NEED to be invoked, we already have cloning.

However, that note in particular is important because I think it describes the video game phenomena of multiple lives. The relevant test goes “the instances which do not cease carry on for those that do. For most of us this happens without us being any the wiser.” If you’re playing a game and you fuck up and die, you restart at the last checkpoint / save point / level intro / what have you. Again, Axiom Verge explores what a video game reality would look like from the inside.

Trace’s Characterization: If Trace has one defining trait, it is his pacifist nature. He keeps trying to talk his way out of boss fights (which almost works once) and as soon as he realizes that he and Athetos are the same person, he wants to talk to the guy to figure out what the hell is going on and why Athetos has done all these things that Trace would never consider.

This is something that I have NEVER seen fully addressed as far as the plot goes, so I guess I have to do it.

The note next to Trace’s old wheelchair is signed Trace. By the time it was written, Trace had already been healed by the Sudran Rebirth Chambers. However, in the note, while he was impressed with the technology, he understood that it was too dangerous to even try to bring the technology back to Earth in case what happened to Sudra happened to Earth as well.

This is in complete conflict to what Athetos tells Trace at the end of the game before the final boss fight. In that same cutscene, Athetos also says “If I tell you too much, your captors will have to kill you.” (Athetos is referring to the Rusalki, who have control over both the Rebirth Chambers and the “nanogates” inside Trace that allow him to come back to life after dying.) In that context, Athetos making the claim that he just wanted to bring the technology to Earth and was willing to destroy Sudra to do it sounds like a cover story; he couldn’t tell Trace the real reason without putting Trace in danger, but he needed to tell Trace something that both Trace and the Rusalki would believe. (Given that the Rusalki have been lying to Trace since the moment he woke up from the Rebirth Chamber, the can’t really claim the moral high ground here.)

There’s one other important detail about that note found with the wheelchair: “We are going upstream - to the Filter, or whatever lies beyond - for answers.“ Now, upstream could mean several different things. It could refer to an actual stream, implying that Trace arrived at Sudra near a body of water near a Rebirth Chamber, and the stream led to civilization. The word Filter, on the other hand, could refer to a machine called the Power Filter that Trace has to activate in the game and seems to be tied into the power grid for Sudra’s technology, in which case upstream meant following the power supply for all the amazing tech to figure out how it works. Finally, there is the possibility that “upstream” and the “Filter” refer to the Breach Elevator and what lies beyond; Athetos has his main base in the game in this space elevator kind of machine that is implied to pass through the Breach.

Each one of these scenarios is equally plausible until Thomas Happ makes a sequel or officially supports a given theory on social media or something like that. What each of these things has in common, though, is that it raises another question. Whether it was encountering an alien civilization for the first time, or discovering how the Sudran technology worked, or discovering what lies beyond the Breach...

What did Trace find that was so awful that it made a peaceful, pacifist scientist willing to commit genocide?

#axiom verge #analysis

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tenderfootsecurityblog · 5 years

Text

Week 7: Lecture Notes

MID-TERM discussion:

Question 5: Suppose there is a 10 digit pin to arm the country's nuclear weapons …

The correct answer is Type I / Type II error. The biggest problem is that having a 10 digit pin introduces a reasonable mechanism to stop a launch when it shouldn’t launch. When you have a launch that should happen, that is when type I error occurs because he is a single point of failure for their launch.

Question 10: Merkle Puzzle Question

RSA 64, you can crack this very fast. Then Richard realised that non of the answers are correct so we all get full marks in this question. Wow.

Class Content:

Diffie Hellman

This uses the fact of exponentiation, remember that if you raise something to the power and then another power, you get the same value if your do it the other way round (duh). The idea is that if we both think of a secret number and then raise it to the power of each other's secret number, we will have the same number. A hacker cannot observe this because they don’t know the individual numbers. The two now use this as a key.

The difference between this is and RSA is that we have the same key where as in RSA we exchange keys.

Good at establishing confidentiality but not authentication.

Krak des Chevaliers

A very nice castle, has two rings of defence around it (defence in depth). No one could ever breach the inner wall. They then failed to social engineering because of a fake letter from someone

Vulnerability

This is just something that

Software bug

When a software has a mistake in it, it is not always a vulnerability. A collection of bugs can be the main vulnerability

The main types of bugs we are concerned about are:

Memory Corruption: the simplest type of this is a buffer over flow. If the amount of space you need for a buffer is known before run time, you store it in the heap. Attacks to the stack are more diabolical.

How functions are called in C: This is process switching that your operating system does. So function calls and stuff. He went pretty quick.

Integer Overflow: If you keep adding to an integer it will eventually overflow the allotted size. This obviously depends if it is a signed or unsigned int.

Format String:

C has a strange way of printing things with printf. This is a function and expects a variable number of arguments passed into it. The first one is a format string that tells you what to do with the other arguments. We all know this. In the old says you are supposed to do it like this printf("%s", "Hello World!");

This is long so everyone would just do this printf("Hello World!");, everyone would put what they wanted to print out as the format string.

An issue with this is having some string callled name that takes in your name, then calling printf(name);. This is vulnerable because the name could have % in it then you can change the printfs. E.G. if you put in Tom %s into the printf, since C does not check if there are two arguments put in, it just looks somewhere lower in the stack for the %s. So if we put our name then %x %x … %x, this will print out everything in the stack in hex. This is an information gathering attack and could potentially reveal things like stack canaries. %n writes to memory if you do it in the print command. This is very bad.

The Swiss cheese if you have it as a block, it is a solid block of cheese but if you slice it up you get holes in it. This is analogy for bugs in code, sometimes the holes (bugs) will line up and then you get a major vulnerability.

Memory Leak: printf is a way of getting this.

National Vulnerability Database

This is like naming new animals, it is a world wide data base for discovering a new vulnerability, you get to name the number.

Responsible Disclosure

When you find the vulnerability you're supposed to tell the person first then slowly escalade it to higher ups. There are still many debates about this.

Bug Examples:

This is optimising indenting. Lol.

Security Engineering - Assets:

Work out what all the things you should be protecting and their relative value to you. E.G, the Louvre is priceless so destroying it is not worth it at all.

It is easy to protect the wrong thing, dedicate some time to deciding what your assets are.

Regularly surveying the values of people of the involved in what you are protecting. Multiple pairs of eyes is a good asset.

Develop a sensible plan - well designed to tease this information out of them. Humans are generally poor at regurgitating everything they know.

Periodically revise current lists of assets

Think of Coke, the brand is worth more than the actual formula to make the drink.

Authentication:

This is a huge problem, if the computer has been pre-loaded with a shared secret, it can use that but once it has been used once, what happens then? This is a very difficult problem, a computer in a room with no context has to make a decision.

You can have a one sided difficulty, say for example there is a store and you are interacting with them. The store does not care about if you are real or not, they just want your money where as you care if the store is real and legitimate. This is a one way street. You can get destroyed by a man in the middle attack, they intercept the public key and give your own.

Man in the middle attack:

Web of Trust: (PgP) find how this works.

PKI (this is the more dominant one and common one ): This solves the man in the middle problem but creates a whole lot of other problems.

SSL is how we will communicate between each other (TLS is another name I think)

This is kind of like a passport. It is a document that links a photo of me to my name and other information. X509 Certificates links a public key with a domain and maybe some other information. Signed with a public key of specific signers, the padlock that comes up in your browser shows this.

Look up how tls handshake works, find example of when CA were compromised

Bug Bounties presentation:

Hacker 101 has some good tips on bug bounty hunting.

Fuzzing:

This is a technique you use to look for bugs. There are different types of this. You put in some input then mutate it / generation based stuff to see if the output is what to be expected.

You can back door a mac https://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/hacking-macos-configure-backdoor-anyones-macbook-0184637/

Fuck.

Penetration testing:

This is an authorized simulated cyber attack on a computer system to evaluate security risks.

Nmap is fucked lol.

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dorkyungsoowrites · 6 years

Text

Fatal Ties Ch. 4

Pairings: Baekhyun x You

Genre: Angst/Smut/Fluff | Mafia AU

Warnings: None

Word Count: 3.6k

Description: Your first real conversation with Baekhyun, and final negotiations.

| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | The Ending |

The preparations had been done. Jongdae was going to oversee the club as management while you were gone. He had confirmed there was no breach in security and told you Baekhyun had simply walked around the house the night before. Listening to music with headphones. Sometimes sitting down. So how did he know about your affair? It didn't make sense, but you couldn't dwell on it that night. That night was the last meeting before the peace contract was finalized. You had to focus.

"Put the chips down," you drawled. Baekhyun dropped the bag he was holding on the floor. You rolled your eyes, but smirked when he started following you. You walked to the front door. As you put on a jacket he stuck to your heels.

"Where are you going?"

"Dinner with your parents." You faced him and straightened his shirt collar. "You'll behave while we're out, won't you?"

"I'm coming with you?" His bright smile was endearing. He was so excited to be with you. One day away from you and he was like a puppy with seperation issues. It was kind of adorable.

"Get your jacket. It's cold outside. I'll be waiting in the car."

"Y-yes boss."

"Kyungsoo, keep beside him tonight. Make sure he stays in line."

"Do I get a reward if I'm good?" He really was a puppy, you mused. You could entertain the idea of rewarding him at least. New pets needed to get settled and comfortable after all.

"We'll see." Baekhyun did a mini celebration as you walked out the front door. He joined the backseat of the car not long after you and the driver took off. You sighed softly and stared out the tinted windows.

"What's wrong?" Baekhyun questioned quietly.

"Nothing," you lied. "I just like car rides. It's peaceful."

"I've always hated long car rides. You're stuck in a small space for hours."

"Do we have anything in common?" you asked monotonously.

"Sure," he whipped back quickly. "We're both drop dead gorgeous." Through the reflection you saw him smiling at you. He snagged his lip with his teeth, looking away. The smile dimmed. When he spoke again his voice was hushed. "Will you ever not hate me?"

"Maybe. Depends."

"On what?"

"I don't know. Just depends. Right now you're interrupting my only rest time."

"Indulge me. Please?" He pouted. Meeting your eyes in the reflection. You felt a small tug in your chest.

"Sure. What?"

"Well my parents will know something's up if you don't know anything about me. Why don't we talk?"

"I already know about you and your family."

"Then tell me about you. When did you take over the business?"

"Three years ago."

"What's your favorite movie?"

"Don't watch movies." Baekhyun gasped like he was scandalized.

"That's mission number one! Movie nights. Video games?"

"I don't have time."

"Do you do anything for fun?"

"Baking. Sex."

"You have time for sex but not video games?"

"Sex is better."

"Not all the time," he scoffed. "Do you know how much strategy goes into games? The action? It's an adrenaline rush. Have you ever killed an entire horde by yourself?"

"Does a dozen guards count?" Baekhyun looked away.

"Oh...right...you actually...do that."

"Have you ever killed before?"

"N-no..." He was whispering at that point.

"And yet you claim to be the best at espionage in your family."

"I seduce people. I don't have to resort to that. I count that as better. Less mess."

"Had sex so many times it lost its appeal?"

"No," he answered. "And I don't always sleep with my targets. But the foreplay is so boring now and that's half the fun gone."

"You enjoy the chase?"

"Oh yeah. Nothing better than finally cracking someone's walls."

"How long before you give up on mine?"

"You're far too fun. When you finally give in it'll be..." he trailed in thought. Searching for a word in his head to fit best. "Explosive. My magnum opus if you will." You chuckled spitefully.

"You're just a kid."

"I run a quarter of our business," he shot back. "Or, I did, until your contract."

"Do you resent me for that?"

"Truthfully? I hated working for my dad. Coming here was the best assignment that ever happened to me. No brothers, no parents. Just play house with a--" Baekhyun hesitated. "Do you prefer beautiful or handsome?" You turned further to hide the heat rising up your face. He cared enough to ask.

"Either," you replied quietly.

"A beautiful, successful, badass person it is then. I want to learn from you despite what you think. I'm not just here because my parents forced me. No matter what you think, I actually want this marriage. That's why I was upset when you said I'd hardly see you. Sure I could live out my days in my own corner of your manor with anything I could buy, fuck, inject or smoke, but where's the intrigue? Where's the danger? Where's the rush?"

"I don't have time to deal with you. I don't trust your intentions either."

"A smart move, but you should trust me. We'll be married soon. I'll be bound to you by law. When people come after you it'd be good to have someone you can rely on."

"Bound by law," you mocked with a scoff. "I break at least a dozen laws every day. I don't need saving."

"That's not what I said. What if someone infiltrates your security, or a deal gets compromised? Everyone around you could be at your throat. Who will you confide in to get answers?"

"Everyone is always at your throat, Baekhyun," you answered tiredly. "That's the job."

"Then you're doing it wrong."

"Don't you dare tell me how to run my business," you growled. Baekhyun recoiled, staring at his hands in his lap.

"Sorry." You sighed, watching his reflection in the window.

"You give in too easily."

"Aren't I supposed to listen to you?"

"Only me," you confirmed. "Or else people will think you're spineless." A heavy silence came over the car. One you felt the need to break. So you softened your tone. "How's your head?"

"Oh," he perked, touching a hand to the bandage on his temple briefly. "Much better. No headache today."

"Good."

"Thanks."

"For what?"

"Talking to me." You bit back a smile and looked past his reflection in the tinted glass. You were almost to the restaurant.

"Anything I might not have read that I should know about your parents before dinner?" Baekhyun hummed in thought.

"Don't let business be the first conversation. My father is direct, but my mother prefers traditional small talk. Is this the first time you're seeing her face?"

"Yes."

"Then I'm sure she bought a new designer dress of some sort. Try complimenting that."

"Understood."

"She's pretty shallow, but my father is harder to impress. Although whatever you did to get him to agree to this contract already got his attention so don't try too hard. He'll think you're plotting something."

"What if I am?"

"Then...um...don't be obvious?" Glancing, he was blushing and scratching the back of his head. His rosy cheeks staying your gaze a few seconds longer. You bit the inside of your lip. He was rather cute flustered like that.

"You don't care if I'm plotting against your family? The one we're brokering peace with by having this wedding?"

"I care, but...well, whatever it is, they have it coming. We all do."

"Even you?"

"Especially me," he smiled. When he did he raised his eyes and your breath caught in your throat. You had to admit he was handsome. A kind sort of attractiveness that lured people in. Gave them false security. You knew better than his past victims. You knew he was danger. Though you did your best to remain neutral on the outside.

"So if you woke up to a knife at your throat one night what would you do?"

"Depends on who's holding the knife."

"Me."

"Then I'd disarm you and kiss you."

"Good luck with that."

"The fight for the knife or the kiss?"

"We're here, boss." The driver announced. The car came to a stop.

"Thank you Chanyeol," you replied and opened the door. "Enjoy a nice dinner anywhere around here on me. I'll call with enough warning for you later tonight."

"Thanks boss. Enjoy your meal," he grinned broadly. You smiled back. You couldn't help it. He was one of the kindest people you had met in this profession. He was always good to you and went the extra mile without asking. He was loyal and passionate to a fault in getting you around safely every day. He even created a little code for you to use whenever going somewhere that was surprisingly effective. Since you were secretive about the business you conducted it proved useful to warn him without telling him much. If you told him about a 'boring meeting' that meant the destination wasn't hostile. If you knew there would be trouble you would mention allergies. It's saved you quite a few shattered windows and busted tires. Something Chanyeol appreciated considering his affection towards keeping the cars he drove you in immaculate. You felt the need to pamper him a little for his hard work. And he loved being pampered. Buying him fancy food and expensive suits every now and then. Okay, maybe the last car you bought was one he had ranted to you about on a particularly long drive. But it was all to better your business, you shrugged off when he asked. That car was only taken out of the garage on frivolous trips like that one to dinner. It was too sleek and modern to blend in for most missions you went out on.

The two other men followed you inside the restaurant after that. Kyungsoo stuck to Baekhyun's heels as ordered, and Baekhyun to yours like a frightened child. You subtly rolled your eyes and gave your name to the host. If Baekhyun couldn't even find his courage facing his parents how were you supposed to trust him with jobs? He was turning more and more into an accessory on your arm. It was disgusting. A trophy husband. How dull. If you were going to be stuck with someone the rest of your life you'd prefer they at least challenge you on some level. If not bravery or strength then intelligence. Anything. Fate wasn't on your side it seemed. Perhaps you could just lock him away in the back of the manor and buy him new toys every now and then. Keep him on a nice leash so he didn't do anything stupid. Be a good puppy.

A waiter led you to the back of the establishment where a wall of curtained off booths sat. One was opened, waiting for the rest of its party. Three people spotted you and stood to greet you. Two were an older couple. The man had a tuxedo on, the woman a long sequined green and gold dress. Clearly expensive. Clearly on one with bad taste. The yellow made her skin look sickly even under all the layers of make-up. Although she was still beautiful. She didn't look her age. Neither of them did, but she had the same eyebrows as Baekhyun. One glance and you could tell she was the same. No role in the business. A trophy wife. No need to cater to her as Baekhyun stressed. The third person you assumed was a guard like Kyungsoo. Although closer up you realized you were wrong. The wire framed glasses around his intense eyes weren't for show. He had a similar build to Baekhyun except this man clearly worked out every day. His grey suit fit snugly to his frame. Young looking. A sibling? You heard both Baekhyun's siblings were half brothers. Same dad, different moms. Baekhyun was the outlier with his mother in front of you, but a different dad. He was born before they got married. Perhaps that was it. The beginning of his life Baekhyun was raised outside of all of this shady business. It explained why he was more innocent.

"Mom, dad," Baekhyun moved in front of you to bow as the couple did the same. You also bowed. "It's good to see you again."

"Oh, sweetheart let me see your head," his mom worried. As he playfully reassured her you shook hands with the dad. After he released your hand he nodded and ushered everyone to sit down. The mysterious man went on the far side of the horse-shoe booth followed by the mom and dad. Baekhyun took the spot beside the stranger, leaving the two household heads on the end where it was easiest to leave quickly if necessary. Kyungsoo faced away from the table after closing the curtains to be on lookout. Within earshot but out of the conversation.

"Who's he?" you questioned bluntly. The father motioned to the man so he would know to speak.

"My name is Minseok. I'm Baekhyun's older brother and legal consultant for my family. I'll be dealing with the contract being negotiated here tonight." As soon as you had the confirmation you noticed his jawline was the same as his fathers. Knowing he was a lawyer, you needed to antagonize him. Crack the polite mask to get a feel for his personality.

"That's what it was," you realized aloud. "I knew your sharp gaze reminded me of something. That, Baekhyunnie, is what we call a corrupt lawyer with no morals. A pig, if you will." Minseok's eyes narrowed at you while Baekhyun gaped.

"I'm a fair and good lawyer," the older male argued.

"A fair lawyer who deals with the mafia? Ah yes, you must be an angel. My mistake. Don't talk bullshit to me."

"I'd watch your tongue if you want me to defend you or your employees in court one day."

"You don't give a shit if we rot in jail. You wouldn't care if your own parents went to the chair. You're dead inside."

"I've won over thirty cases," he snapped. There was a glint in his dark eyes. A rage he kept tempered under a cold veneer. Voice cutting through your jabs without flinching. "All defending worthless degenerates like you."

"Why not defend someone worthy then?"

"Too easy." You bit your bottom lip and hummed, gaze raking up and down his person. That's what you wanted. Someone with fire and strength. Someone who sought challenge. Those were the people who would do anything to accomplish their goal. The passionate ones. Minseok needed to be yours, you decided. You might need his services if trouble comes up in the future. It was far better than your failsafes at the moment.

"It's okay, sweetie," his mother cooed. "They're just testing you." You smirked. She was a trophy wife, but at least she wasn't an idiot. "Now if you got what you wanted can we please move on to the wedding?"

"Of course," you answered. The waiter came to take orders. Baekhyun put a hand on your thigh and leaned over to whisper while his parents were distracted.

"Baekhyunnie? Are you trying to kill me? And flirting with Minseok? What's your game here?" Your own fingers inched up his thigh before giving a gentle squeeze. He tensed under you.

"Remember to behave for that reward tonight," you whispered back. Both of your hands retracted from the others' leg at the same time. You saw his adams apple bob as he leaned back and nodded submissively. The rest of you ordered and once the waiter was gone Baekhyun's mother pulled out a legal pad and pen. She already had phone numbers and lists mapped out. Clearly she was the only one excited about this wedding. It had been under planning for a week already, but you'd hardly done anything.

"So we have everything ready to set up the ceremony in our backyard and have the reception at one of our hotels. That way we keep it to family and close friends. You know, private. I booked a caterer since we already had some connections. No video on your request, but our cousin offered to take formal photos after the ceremony for traditions sake."

"You're very good at organizing events," you complimented with a practiced, small smile. "I greatly appreciate all your help." She giggled and grinned back.

"Oh, I do it all the time for our hotel guests. Never you mind, dearie. There's only a few things left undone now. The cake? Do you have preferences?"

"I already hired a wonderful baker," you assured.

"Oh good. No worries then. What about flower preferences?"

"For myself or as decoration?"

"Both."

"I suppose I always liked the idea of lillies in a bouquet, and whatever Baekhyun wants elsewhere." His posture straightened beside you at attention while his mom jotted down more notes.

"Oh, um, I-I don't know about flowers," he chuckled nervously. "Anything colorful I guess."

"Don't worry, dear. I'll take care of it. I think I can guess what you like." His mom's reassuring words relaxed him. The waiter came with drinks and dashed off again. "And now, your dress." You picked up your water glass and timed your reply to be just before you sipped.

"I won't be wearing one." All eyes went to you, but his mom seemed to be the only one taken aback. His father kept a cool aloofness to his expressions, and Minseok quirked an eyebrow as if intrigued. "I don't like dresses."

"Well...um...alright, I suppose," she responded slowly. Processing the information. "Not everyone wears dresses these days. A tuxedo then?" She was trying, you had to admit. It was sweet. You smiled warmly across the table.

"I already own one, if that's alright."

"Of course," she chirped. "So long as the ties match."

"Done."

"People will have a hard time deciding which of us is more handsome," Baekhyun joked lightly, laughing.

"What do you mean?" Minseok scoffed, smirking. "Clearly you're the flowery one." Baekhyun did have slightly softer features. You briefly wondered if he ever did drag before. The mother swatted Minseok's shoulder and scolded him to be polite.

"Lastly," she picked back up. "The honeymoon. Obviously you can't go away for too long because of your business. I was thinking a nice weekend in Greece."

"Thank you for the thoughtfulness, but it's highly unnecessary," you replied. "I won't be leaving my work for any length of time."

"Not even a weekend?" she pouted. "How will you celebrate your marriage? Is work all you do?" She seemed to be totally oblivious to the fact you weren't madly in love. There was nothing to celebrate besides the ending of the mindless slaughter between two gangs. You didn't have the temperament to play romance with a man you didn't care anything for.

"Yes."

"Won't you at least consider it? A few days won't hurt any--"

"Enough," you interrupted, clipped. "I said no honeymoon. I don't have time for frivolous travels."

"Well..." The woman pulled back and set the pen down, putting away the notepad dejectedly. "That's that then. Everything on my side is done. Dear, I believe it's your turn to handle them." She was upset, but knew her place at least. You were grateful for that. The perks of marrying into the mafia as opposed to being breed in its culture, you suppose. You were forced to submit quickly. You decided not to wait for the father to speak. This part was more your style. This kind of negotiating you could handle. You loved it, in fact. And this would be a fun challenge since he also had years of experience intimidating others to twist a deal in his favor.

"First, no more animosity towards my people. Once we're married we share territory. We'll be family, after all. I don't want to see any more blood spilled. Second, I want your son Minseok to work for us. Call it insurance. Third, we open distributing lines to all parties. Right now I have buyers that would love to get their hands on your merchandise, but they don't trust you. I'm sure you have the same problem."

"No." It was simple. He was going to be impossible to bargain with. You waited for him to explain himself. Make a counter offer. Minseok had taken out his own notepad and was writing shorthand to keep up with everyone to record the deals being offered. "Our family stays together. Isn't it enough you're taking Baekhyun?"

"Taking?" the man beside you scoffed. "You practically hurdled me at them. You couldn't wait to get rid of me. It was the next best thing to disowning me." His father glared and Baekhyun shrunk away.

"It's okay Baekhyunnie," you responded calmly. "I only meant to share resources. We get use of a capable lawyer for consulting or defense, and you can use my people as well."

"Killers?"

"Cleaning crew," you corrected. "Very skilled, very thorough, cleaning crew."

"Practical or electronic?" So he needed hackers? That was interesting to know.

"Both." His face shifted from a blank expression for the first time that night; a smirk.

"Now we're getting somewhere." That's when you knew you had the upper hand. You were already willing to share resources, but now he thinks he's getting the better end of a bargain. Present obvious conditions no one would disagree to, then sprinkle in the real tools you wanted. Make it appear as though you're stretching your limits to please them so they don't get suspicious. That was your plan, and it was working perfectly. He believed you were compromising. And no one else knew what you were thinking since you never revealed your strategies. The cards were being dealt, but the players failed to see you were the dealer and not one of them.

Let the games begin.

#exo #exo fanfiction #exo scenario #exo scenarios #baekhyun #baekhyun x reader #baekhyun x you #byun baekhyun #chanyeol #minseok #mafia au #mafia!au #angst #fluff

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stuffandnosense · 6 years

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Never Ending: Message in a Bottle (Part 2)

*Thank you so much for reading! I love playing around in this particular sandbox created over at @altean-plance-au . ;) Hope you enjoy it!*

Never Ending (first oneshot) | Message in a Bottle Part 1

The opening on the far side of the shrine looks like it was punched out forcefully, but the splintered ends of the woven structure around the hole point wildly in all directions. It doesn’t seem logical, and it’s impossible to tell whether the impact came from the inside or the outside.

Allura exchanges an anxious glance with Coran, but she goes in first. Because she has to. She has to know. It’s like diving into a tunnel just big enough for a person, and for a moment everything is dark, until she remembers to turn on an external light in her suit to give her a beam to pierce the blackness. Her personal transport craft had been providing the light she needed outside.

She wriggles out of the short tunnel created by the hole through the thick walls of shrine, and her light illuminates a sparkling inverted world.

“Oh…”

Ice sculptures and frozen trees and other foliage ring the inside of the space. Off to the right, a cocoon nest embedded in one wall, surrounded by small fruit trees. Off to the left, a tiny forest of trees and other shapes and sculptures made only of ice. Floating free in the center are single lengths of vine that seem to have once been connected the edge in the middle as handholds to get across the space easily in zero gravity, but most of them have broken over time.

Coran comes out of the tunnel behind her, and she can hear him gasp. “It’s…”

“Beautiful,” Allura says.

The plants are all dead now. Frozen. But the ice has preserved the color of many of the flowers and bioluminescent plants that are embedded in the walls. Even the fruit trees contain spattered ripe fruits, frozen in time. The bioluminescent planets no longer glow, of course, but she recognizes many of them. She knows what colors they glowed when they did. She can almost see this place as it would have been, in her imagination.

It is the closest she has felt to Altea in a long time. The closest she has felt to family since her father’s memories were destroyed.

“Princess...there are no bodies here,” Coran says. “That is encouraging, isn’t it?”

She lets out a breath. “Perhaps. But the breach in the shell concerns me.” Any number of things that were once here, if floating free, could have floated out if it would fit through the opening. She doesn’t want to think about that, but she must.

“I suppose we should see if there’s anything else to be found…” Coran trails. Allura is sure he understands why she’s still hesitating to be positive, and she appreciates that he doesn’t press the issue again. He said his peace outside the walls of this place, and she is glad he did, but that’s all she can take for now.

She engages just enough thrust from her jetpack to give her a push to the nest against the wall. She’s careful not to bump the frozen fruit trees, not wanting to break them.

Inside the nest, piled mats of moss that might have been blankets have frozen to the bottom of the bowl-like shape. Against the wall to one side of the nest, a loosely-woven sack of vines holds picked fruit in place and protected from floating off in the zero-gravity.

Allura can hear her cousin’s laugh in her mind. She closes her eyes and there are memories of fruit flying out of nowhere during childhood games of hide and seek; fruit that didn’t grow where they were playing. That ecstatic laugh echoed in the breeze until she could catch sight of a green dress between the garden bushes or the forest’s trees.

She always pretended she cared about the dresses that were ruined during those games. She didn’t, really. She would give anything for her life to be that simple once again.

She doesn’t realize there are tears on her cheeks until a few of the drops free themselves from her face and float up in front of her eyes inside her helmet. Allura clears her throat and lets her space suited hand fall from the makeshift fruit basket embedded in the wall. She turns and Coran is across the way, looking for anything worth finding among the ice sculptures.

Her light catches something that glints brightly and Allura pauses, searching it out. When she finds it, held in place by frozen vines against the inside of the nest bed, she gasps.

“Coran, look!”

He startles, spinning around with arms flailing as if to fend off whatever dastardly thing might be attacking them. “What is it!”

It sends him careening across the open space and bouncing harmlessly off one of the walls before he uses thrusters from his jetpack to steady himself again. “Don’t mind me! Just...re-familiarizing myself with the old space suit…”

Allura breathes out a laugh as she digs out the ice-caked golden bangle from the vines. “It’s a wrist computer,” she says. It’s one she would recognize anywhere. “Do you think it could be made to work?”

“If not, with any luck I could extract the data to the castle’s computers, at the very least,” he says, coming closer to peer at it. “It doesn’t seem damaged, beyond the fact that it’s been frozen for ten thousand years. We were, and we’re all right.”

She huffs at him, not sure whether to be amused, and hands over the bangle. “We should return to the castle and begin work on it immediately.”

Coran starts off nodding, looking at the small computer in his hands, but slowly he stops and looks at her. “Princess...perhaps we should tell them.”

Allura shakes her head almost immediately. “How, Coran? This is so much larger a secret than that Zarkon was once the black paladin, or other such things that I once kept from them...how can we tell them now, after all this time, that We already knew them when we met them?”

“I believe they would understand. One reason we said nothing, after all, is because we don’t know how it happened.”

“All the more reason not to say anything; it would only confuse them! I care about them too much to do that to them, Corran.”

Coran is quiet for a moment, contemplating, but he isn’t finished. “And I believe they deserve to know. From what you’ve told me of what Lance and Pidge have mentioned about the dreams they’re having, well...it seems they’re already confused. And who’s to say the others haven’t had similar dreams and brushed them off, or simply kept silent?”

“So you’re saying you think we might be helping them, if we said something…”

He shrugs. “Perhaps.”

Allura is quiet for a long while. “I can’t make a decision like that right now, Coran. Let’s see what we can recover from this computer, first. I promise that I will not hide whatever it is from them. If it is anything significant that would require us to tell them, then...we will tell them.”

But before they go she takes several images of the inside of the sphere, as well as samples of several of the frozen plants, and samples of the teal energy from the outside on the way out. When Coran raises an eyebrow at her, she shrugs.

“It will keep them busy long enough enough to give us our privacy until we can retrieve the computer’s data.”

***

Looking at the pictures Allura took, Pidge has the same feeling she had looking at the outside of the sphere. Like it’s familiar. She can’t stop flipping through the short album, even though the sense of deja-vu grows by the minute.

“Wow, that’s...really neat,” Lance says.

He’s leaning over her shoulder, peering at the screen with her. Why does he have to be so close? She can’t tell if she feels warm because of the deja-vu feeling, or because he’s right there, his arm and shoulder brushing up against her.

“Hey, Pidge!” Hunk calls. He’s two tables away, wrapped up in running tests on the plant samples. “These plants are so cool! I mean I don’t know if they would have looked like this under a microscope if they hadn’t been under the influence of magic at some point, but still…”

“Yeah, uh, I’ll be there in a minute,” she says, distracted. She stops on the image of the nest against the wall, and she might be imagining it but she thinks she senses Lance leaning a little closer, pressing more into her shoulder.

“So those two Alteans in the legend...we think they were real now?” he asks.

“You know as much as I do. Allura was being super vague when they came back.”

Allura gave them the samples of the plants and the energy and the images she’d taken, and she and Coran have been holed up in one of the smaller labs on the third level since then. Hours ago. But at least she didn’t seem upset when they saw her. Maybe that’s a good sign.

“The nest, the fruit, the vines that might have been handholds...this sphere is built like a living space,” Pidge musses aloud.

I don’t know why I did this…

The flash comes and goes in an instant. Her own voice, but she doesn’t remember saying it.

“Pidge?” Lance asks.

She blinks. “Nothing…” She gets up from her desk, not wanting to admit she’s a little shaken. Maybe if she does something else…

She casts her eyes over the tables here in Green’s hangar. “Where are those energy samples?” Hunk hears her, pointing wordlessly without looking up from his own work.

Pidge picks up one of the clear vials containing the softly glowing teal energy. If she looks closely, she can see thin streaks of blue and green. The energy is mostly one color, but there are enough of the streaks scattered through the sample to tell her just by sight that it’s made up of energy from two different sources. She didn’t see that before.

“Hey, Lance, look…” She isn't sure why he’s the first one she calls out to.

Well...Hunk is busy. That’s all.

“What’s up?” he asks.

“Look at this energy. It’s not just one color; do you see that? You see the blue and green?”

Lance leans in to peer at it, his eyebrows going up when he sees what she’s talking about. “Whoa.”

“Yeah.”

“That kind of just...fits, doesn’t it? If there were two of them?” He reaches as if to take the vial, or maybe just to hold onto it too, to steady it or bring it closer so he can see better.

But the moment he touches it - the moment they both touch it - the teal glow suddenly brightens.

Lance jumps back with a shout and Pidge yelps, dropping the container. It shatters on the hangar floor and the small cloud of energy spreads out at their feet.

“What was that!” Lance is saying.

She doesn’t have time to answer him before she realizes the energy isn’t just dissipating. It’s seeping into them. She takes a halting couple of steps backwards, but it’s like it follows her. Both of them. Hunk comes around the tables just in time to see the last of the lingering blue-green fog disappear. Pidge's legs are tingling.

“Guys?” Hunk says. His voice goes up a notch in pitch. “What just happened?”

She looks at Lance, and he’s shaking one of his feet out. He saw it too...that the energy didn’t just fade into thin air.

“Pidge!” he says. “Did that stuff just…?”

“I think it did. Do you feel anything?” The tingling is traveling up her legs, and through her torso. It isn’t unpleasant; it’s warm, even. But…

Lance shivers. “I...yeah…”

“Are you guys okay?” Hunk asks, anxious.

Lance rubs at his arms and Pidge pulls in a sharp breath as the strange sensation reaches her head. Flashes of something like her dreams pass before her eyes even though she’s wide awake. That white hair. That teasing smile, blue cheek marks, the blue glow of magic from a hand reaching out to her.

She looks at Lance, and...for a moment it isn’t the Lance she knows. She sees the Altean boy. Man, really. A little older than her Lance. (Hers? What’s that about?) He’s confused like she is, but he looks at her like he knows her.

“Pidge…” He says her name, but there is so much weight behind it. She doesn’t know if it’s all in her head or if Lance really said it. She reaches out and for a moment she can see the gauzy green fabric of the dress from her dreams floating around her arm, and she can almost feel longer hair like she used to have falling over her shoulders, but then it’s gone.

The vison fades. It’s just Lance, standing there. No Altean armor, no white hair, nothing out of the ordinary.

“Lance…? Did you see that?” Pidge whispers. She didn’t mean for it to come out that soft, but anyway. And he’s nodding. He’s gone pale.

Hunk is practically beside himself by now. “Guys, what’s going on! Are you okay? You went all space cadet on me.”

“Buddy, hey, we’re fine,” Lance says, after clearing his throat. “I just...think there’s something Allura isn’t telling us.”

***

“I think we’ve got it. The data should be transferring to the computer now,” Coran says.

Allura releases a pent-up breath. “Finally. I was beginning to worry we wouldn’t recover what was there.”

He studies the files as they transfer. “There are some books and other files - mostly plant magic and project schematics, which I would have expected from her. But also a good number of video logs dated over a several week period…” He blinks at the screen. “The weeks after Altea’s destruction, to be precise.”

“Oh…” Allura lowers herself into a chair beside the consoles they are working from.

“I could pull up the last one…”

“No,” she says quickly. “I...don’t know if I am ready for that.”

“It could be good news.”

“It could be. I hope it is. But please, Coran, just the first one for now...”

When the first log begins to play, the image resolves into a view from inside the nest in the sphere, but instead of being lighted by the uninspired beam of a space suit’s headlamps, the view is tinted green and purple from the bioluminescent plants.

A blue highlight from the computer’s screen brightens the face of the young man holding it - a face Allura still sees every day even now, but different. White hair and Altean ears and cheek markings. And a grin she knows so well.

“ -ou don’t! Give it back!” the first voice exclaims from offscreen. Small hands dart into view, reaching for the computer.

“Pidge, come on; what if there’s still somebody out there who could find this?”

“All the more reason not to record anything.”

“What if we just want something to look back on in our old age once we get out of here?”

“Lance…”

His expression softens as he looks offscreen at her. “What about Allura? If anything survived, the castle did; I’m sure of it. The king would have seen to that.”

A belabored sigh, but after a moment or so more of Lance beckoning a hand reaches out again to take his, and he tugs her gently into view. She settles beside him and squints at the computer.

“Is it already recording?”

“No, of course n—” He stops and looks at it himself. “Oh wait…”

“It is,” she deadpans.

He simply brightens immediately, showing off for the camera. “Hello, and welcome to our log! Surprise! We’re not dead. For now.”

Pidge facepalms. “Allura, if this is you, you’re not surprised…” she mutters.

Her throat has clogged, but Allura can’t help laughing at that. A chime at the door and insistent knocking on the outside of it makes her close the video log before it can get any farther, and she has to clear her throat and swipe at her eyes.

“Allura!” The call comes from out in the corridor. Pidge. The Pidge she knows now.

“We really need to talk to you!” Lance, sounding a little more urgent.

Coran is looking at her questioningly. She nods after a moment, and she’s telling him more than that she’s all right. She’s telling him she understands that it’s time.

She goes to the door to unlock it, and Lance, Pidge, and Hunk all but topple into the room.

“Are you all right?” Allura asks. They look almost frightened.

“They dropped one of the vials of energy from the shrine thing and something really weird happened!” Hunk blurts.

Lance and Pidge glance at each other, then at her.

“Allura...can you explain this?” Lance asks. He holds out a hand, palm up, and Pidge slides one of hers into it. When their hands clasp, a faint version of the teal glow from the sphere radiates from where they touch.

Allura feels her eyebrows climbing, but strangely enough she isn’t really surprised. She sighs. “Yes. I can. And there’s no need to worry; your bodies may have absorbed the energy, but the effects should only be temporary. You can’t maintain the energy without Altean DNA, and it won’t harm you.”

“Okay...” Pidge says, as they release each others’ hands, “but it’s not just this. When we absorbed it...w-we saw things.”

“I...to be quite honest, I’m not surprised by that. I suppose I should have expected it.” Pidge and Lance share a glance that seems to say they expected her to give an answer like that.

“I will explain everything as well as I can. I promise.” She calls for Shiro to come to the lab over the intercom. “Please...sit down. You should all hear this; I’m just sorry that Keith isn’t here at the moment. But...there is something that perhaps I should have told all of you long ago.”

Read Part 3 >>

#plance #altean plance au #pidgeance #pance #altean lance #altean pidge #vld #voltron #vld fanfic #fanfic #fanfiction #au #plance au #I probably love Sailor Moon way too much #What even am I doing

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manifestoonmoralmanlove · 6 years

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Jealousy Rant

Hello you Rotten Folks,

Due to real life stuff I have been posting less frequently but in particular that long-form stuff. So have this big olde rant on jealousy in BL I may or may not edit more, and may or may not make into audio.

Triggers: for discussion on abusive behavior including physical violence, stalking, controlling behavior, and sexual assault.

Why jealousy is a bad trope:

1.) It’s toxic

2.) It’s non-conflict

3.) It doesn’t actually deal with the roots of jealousy

Are you a fan of Fap’s furious fujoshi fumes, but want a meta-analysis of the genre as a whole instead of specific titles?

Oh no it seems literally no one is asking for that…no one except Faps and FUCK YOU I DO WHAT I WANT HAHA!

So that brings me to “Trouble with Tropes” or heh heh TROUPLES!

Anybody who’s ANY fan of romance has had to stare into the unrelenting green eyes of this trouple. I speak of no other than Jealousy. While I think some of what I’m going to say will resonate with how jealousy is used in fiction on a whole, I’m going to focus on how it’s used in BL…which I feel is a very potent and distilled version of it. Also heaven forbid I read about anything beyond nasty gay tonguings.

What better place to start than What IS jealousy?

Jealousy can cover a variety of topics but in the case of romance here I will be talking specifically about romantic and sexual jealousy.

Dictionary.com states that - feeling or showing suspicion of someone's unfaithfulness in a relationship.

Seems to be the one best suited for a romance but I’d argue that the definition that suits BL’s brand of jealousy is more like

fiercely protective or vigilant of one's rights or possessions.

Why do I say this?

Well because sometimes they literally say their partner is a possession. And even if not outright stated, it is heavily implied in the script.

(examples: Cute Devil + lamb project + Radical blood monster + Others)

There’s also the fact that very rarely is infidelity even considered a legitimate thing that would occur. As I said, the jealousy in BL is very, very POTENT and therefore has escalated beyond a suspicion of COULD BE UNFAITHFUL to a PERSON IS MY PROPERTY AND MY PROPERTY IS NOT ALLOWED TO INTERACT WITH OTHER HUMANS!

Getting real

Before I start ripping through this topic like a repressed teenage boy rips through a heavily populated street in Grand theft Auto… allow me to say that jealousy is a valid emotion to experience. When I rip on this trope it is not my intention to invalidate people who do struggle with jealousy in their relationships. However if you experience an emotion it doesn’t give you carte blanche to behave in any way you please. It’s the same as regular old anger. It’s normal to be angry if a partner forgets to let the dog out so the dog pees on the rug. However beating the shit out of that partner is NOT the right way to handle the forgetfulness or your own anger. Same with jealousy, it’s not unusual to get jealous of someone close to their partner. However that person responding to that with physically removing them, and screaming threats at them is SUPER NOT OKAY! Yet that is not uncommon in BL.

One must also maintain an acceptable amount of jealousy in order to maintain a healthy relationship. It’s not wrong to feel really angry or sad when you’re jealous…but if you get these feelings ALL THE TIME and due to things that are not a threat to your relationship, then that’s something to manage rather than something to blame on your partner. Capice?

TOXIC

The main problem is that the jealousy that is common in BL is HELLA TOXIC! Jealousy is regularly tied to deeper issues of personal insecurity yet the fact there is any kind of insecurity is very rarely mentioned in the text or even subtext of the story. Instead of this becoming a problem that one has to deal with on a personal level, it becomes a problem of the other having to obtain unrealistic standards. Sometimes the source of the jealousy is not a feasible such as a TODDLER NEPHEW or the fact that strangers GLANCE AT THEM when in public and sometimes the source of the jealousy isn’t even human. I have seen characters throw jealousy tantrums over pets, work (school or career orientated), and even the vague concept of a SPORT! So if you’re trying to avoid jealousy in a BL make sure you don’t go to school, don’t have a job, don’t own pets, don’t have family, don’t go out in public, and DEAR GOD don’t have hobbies either! Woah faps those things aren’t humans so it’s not like romantic or sexual jealousy. That’s a fair point…but the thing is the romantic/sexual jealousy functions the exact same way in those non-sexual/romantic scenarios. HOW COULD THAT BE???? Well the jealousy that we see here is in part about being left out when a partner does other things but is in large part about dominance. You got no other man to posture against? Well then just posture at a child, a puppy, or at a basketball why not?

Not only does jealousy crop up to unreasonable situations, an unreasonable amount of time (I’d estimate it occurs in 80% of BL mangas) but the way it’s handled is usually problematic as well.

The most common response I’ve seen to jealousy is the seme grabbing the uke by the wrist, dragging him away from the source of jealousy, pinning him to a wall, explaining that the source of jealousy is bad for the uke or that the uke is behaving poorly/stupidly by simply interacting with the source of jealousy, and they a fit of forceful jealousy induced make-outs or sex occurs that range from consensual to downright very non-consensual. Sometimes the uke will protest this treatment or the characterization of the jealousy fodder but this is pointless because it doesn’t become a conversation. It is simply about the seme controlling the uke and asserting his dominance.

Stalking is also extremely common if there is suspected jealousy. Troubling jealousy behavior can range from as tame as going through someone’s phone without permission to drugging, kidnapping, and nearly killing a partner for one of these trespasses.

HEY HEY HEY NOW! You man-hater! Ukes can be super creepy jealous too! …but ukes are men too… THAT’S NOT THE POINT! You’re acting as if only dominant partners experience jealousy!

No, no, no, you’re right. Ukes get jealous too and sometimes to the same batty degree. Yet, as a whole, uke jealousy tends to be less common and less destructive than jealousy of the seme variety. The most common situation where an uke gets jealous of what a seme is doing is, the uke is pushed into a corner to admit he’s jealous. The seme will reassure the uke he’s misunderstood and they make up. On one hand you can argue that this is a much healthier way to settle a jealousy problem. On another hand you may view this as something of a double standard.

If the uke’s jealous…it’s the uke’s fault and it’s nothing to worry about. If the seme’s jealous...it’s the uke’s fault and it’s deadly serious.

This double standard even extends into how we view violent reactions for either side. If a seme hits an uke for a trespass it will usually be framed as serious and scary. If the uke hits the seme for a trespass it will usually be framed as a silly, and harmless outburst of tsundereness.

…Yes that’s right, the patriarchal set up of the seme/uke dynamic doesn’t just take a shit on ukes….though 9 times out of 10 it’s the ukes that do get the short end of the stick here.

Okay but let’s get the root of the problem…why is jealousy used?

If you’re a person who is not a bitter feminist killjoy who says aggravating SJW shit like, “TOXIC MONOGOMY CULTURE OPRRESSES MY GENDER NEUTRAL GENITLES” you may argue that jealousy is romantic. I personally don’t think it is, but you’re fully allowed to view jealousy, as a concept, as a touching display of vulnerability and investment in a relationship.

However if you’re a cynical over-thinking fujoshi brimming with resentment to the genre you’ve mistakeningly dedicated your free time to, you may say the frequent use of jealousy is simply because it’s EASY WRITING!

It’s handy throw-away drama you can use in an established relationship that won’t have deeper ramifications for the relationship even if it’s on-going. You can solve this pretty easily at any given point or decide to reintroduce it despite it previously being wrapped up. You can use this almost TOTALLY regardless of either of the characters’ personalities or back stories. It’s good for a quick antagonist, or to tantalize fans with a different flavor of sexual tension. This is usually dependent on the gender of the jealousy fodder.

Ugh I’ve heard you use the term ~jealousy fodder~ like a billion times. Why do you call it that?

Because these characters rarely have anything going for them besides the fact they’re the conflict du-jour. You’d be hard pressed to learn an interest of the fodder’s outside of “TRYING TO BANG PROTAG!” and they rarely do anything else in the story besides create this shallow drama. Sometimes the jealousy drama is totally auxiliary to the main conflict of the story to boot. If you’re lucky and ONLY if you’re lucky the fodder will be shuffled into another couple. Sometimes you won’t even see this jealousy used in a love triangle way. It’s usually pretty obvious from the beginning that the protag is going to choose even if the other option is an objectively better person and choice for them.

In my years of reading BL I have only encountered 2 instances of a character being jealous and the other character ACTUALLY cheats on him. (Zetsuai Bronze and Totally Captivated.) Now people have different standards of what “cheating” is. Some goes so far as to say that “Thinking about cheating” is CHEATING. Even by that (pretty ridged standard) I would still say only the above.

Despite this low, low number, I see jealousy used in manga 80% of the time. Are you picking up what I’m putting down here? A breach of actual trust is not actually going to happen…99.99% of the time. Oh but what if the jealousy is something a character has to work through to feel less anxious? Excellent idea! I’ve seen that approach FUCKING ONCE! (Café Latte Rhapsody) So if there is no actual threat of trust breaching and it’s not something either of them has to work through on a mental or emotional level….WHAT KIND OF CONFLICT IS THAT?

NON-FUCKING-CONFLICT IS WHAT!

I’d be much more entertained by staring into my own fucking bellybutton….but faps obviously you would since you navel-gaze as if you have a gemstone there. IF I BELIEVE HARD ENOUGH I’LL BECOME I CRYSTAL GEM OKAY!?!?!?!?

Eh-hem!

But you will see jealousy commonly used in one instance of actually plot important drama. And that is the ever, important, cementing of a couple’s relationship. I call the use of jealousy in this instance:

TOY TRUCK CONSUMATION

Da fuck is that? Toy truck consummation is a character will only realize he truly cares romantically for someone because he experiences jealousy. He didn’t want that toy truck until somebody else was going to play with it. Thankfully I don’t see this often outside of high school settings. A grown-ass man who is that fucking blind to his own feelings and childish enough to throw a tantrum out of it, can fuck RIGHT OFF! ….Though honestly teenagers behaving that way is still deeply shitty.

This is not an auspicious beginning to a loving relationship, if it’s formulated over single-mindedly hating a 3rd party, a 3rd party that is typically on good-terms with the target of affection. So, a relationship we’re supposed to root for is predicated on a dude swooping in and ripping a valued person away from them for entirely selfish reasons. I wouldn’t consider it dreamy if a seme threw an uke’s beloved play station 4 out the window because it holds the ukes attention sometimes. I consider it even less dreamy when it’s something even more valued like yanno a friend. (Though of course this can happen from the uke to the seme as well.) While sometimes, this individual is romantically interested in one of our leads…I’d say a good half the time if not more…they’re not at all.

“Why are you losing your mind over someone, you’re not dating, hanging out with their friend? Even if the friend very obviously has 0 romantic or sexual interest in them? Is it because you’re an anal fungus that causes people to shit their pants for no reason? It’s probably because you’re a parasitic ass mushroom that makes people poop uncontrollably”

This, also, is pretty damn lazy. Writing someone coming to grips with a difficult emotion is hard in itself. Writers will usually use 3rd parties to help bounce information back to a struggling individual to help give them insight. And that can be used in this case as well! Interacting with another couple, talking to someone who’s an out LGBTQ person, or even just a friend or relative that can relate! However all of that is harder to pull off as melodramatically as a petty fuck-lord gut-punching a jealousy fodder out of the blue. Hoo boy sonny! We should have a parade in his honor cause golly isn’t that the way to handle your problems!

But what if the jealousy fodder was really after them?

Then I would say the story may feature the trope….

Irrational jealousy magiced into rational jealousy!

What I mean is that there is a dominant that appears to be irrationally jealous. There is no indication in the text the jealousy fodder is not on the up and up and the dominant is not privy to classified documents that make him secretly suspicious. However turns out the harmless friend, acquaintance, co-worker, boss, mail man etc is actually a heartless rapist just trying to lower the submissive’s guard.

This trope makes me foam at the mouth because not only is it cheap, cliché, and annoying but it justifies abusive behavior. It states that No matter what crazy shit that lunatic boyfriend of yours spouts he’s fucking infallible. If he tells you that the atmosphere has become poisonous to you and the only breathable air is in his testicles, you better clamp down on that cocktail wiener like a pit-bull because any damn self-serving nonsense he spews must be followed to the fucking letter. Why? Because he is a mind-reader, a genius, and a clairvoyant with flawless judgment by nature of being born a DOMINANT MAN! TA-DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!

May I just add this is not a trope specific to BL but a trope that makes me want to drink into a stupor each time I see it.

Well if you’re so fucking relationship savy, how would you handle jealousy in stories huh!?

…By actually tackling the causes of jealousy which are very rarely acknowledged in BL. As far as I can tell there are 3 major roots of jealousy.

1.) Insecurity – I am not a good enough partner so my significant other is going to drop me as soon as they find somebody better.

2.) Distrust – My partner does not respect our monogamous agreement and will sleep with other people if they can get away with it.

3.) Missing out - I feel left out if my partner is doing something without me.

I have seen all three roots play a role in fictional jealousy outbursts and they’re usually tied intimately together. However the 1st two are the keys here.

Mistrust is an interesting situation because 99% of the time the mistrust is not that the partner will sleep around given the chance. However the mistrust is shown as more of a, “I cannot trust my partner to avoid situations where they’ll be sexually assaulted.”

While this is framed as a jealousy issue at times, I don’t think it should. Why? If a character is sexually assaulted it is NOT the victims fault. But haha welcome to the 50 foot deep pit of backwards sexual politics that is BL. YOU’RE WELCOME!

Insecurity plays a large role in BL jealousy…but I have only seen it addressed directly as a failing of personal confidence once. (Café Latte Rhapsody)

Most of the time characters that are subtextualy highly insecure are portrayed as powerful and that their jealousy tantrums is just ~how strong men act~ rather than ~they obviously hate themselves and fear their partner would find someone better.~

I’ll be quite frank, a lot of the time…they’re correct the uke could do a lot better than the jerkass seme they’re saddled with. However, instead of changing their negative behavior for the better they just control the uke’s every movements which is yanno not doing the uke OR the seme any favors. Sometimes this functions realistically in a story like in Space Between where Riki is an unwilling sex slave and Iason keeps him under his thumb. However the majority of them treat this like a normal and healthy relationship…but

Wouldn’t it be better if one is not constantly wracked with fear over their partner leaving them?

Wouldn’t it be better if the other can have friends and leave the house?

I’m not saying the two can’t struggle with issues of jealousy…but I mean…can’t we treat jealousy like something they work on together instead of just,

“I can’t believe you talked to them! I DIDN’T MEAN TO!”

That sound clip? Just play it on loop

“WELP LET’S HAVE THIS SAME EXACT PISSING CONTEST FOR THE 90TH FUCKING TIME! IT’S NOT GOING TO BE DIFFERENT NEXT TIME BECAUSE WE’RE NOT GOING TO TREAT IT LIKE ADULTS WOULD!”

So the problem with jealousy as a trope in romance and BL fiction is thus:

1.) It’s toxic, doesn’t treat it as toxic, and sometimes justifies the toxicity.

2.) It’s pathetic, cliché, non-conflict

3.) It doesn’t really even understand what jealousy is.

#trouples #trouble with tropes #rant #my rant #jealousy

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queen-busybee · 6 years

Text

In Happiness or In Trials

words: 2016

rating: T

pairing: Chlonath

Happy (very late) Valentine’s Day @miraculoussideblog ~! I’m a garbage fire and you definitely pulled together the end of this exchange. You’re a good friend and I’m sorry to make you wait!

Shout-out to @this-was-a-terrible-idea for the last minute Beta <3

They had an unspoken rule, a truce of sorts, that they abide by when things get like this.

The world had no right to know their business.

It didn't matter how big the fight was, or what it was about. When it came time for them to make an appearance, together, they feigned happiness. Hollow smiles, wooden hands holding onto each other, empty words and quieted personalities. Anyone who paid attention would know that something was wrong, but they were in a world where people cared more about themselves and the newest gossip than to pick up on the subtleties that Chloe and Nathanael had mastered over the years.

They didn't fight often.

Chloe had long learned the art of compromise and Nathanael was a gentle soul that gave more than he took, but it only seemed to make the real fights that happened, the ones that truces were made for, more volatile and explosive. He was not known for raising his voice, but there have been more than a few times Chloe had pushed him into yelling. She is known more for anger than sadness, but fights caused her to shut down. Uncooperative, unresponsive, utterly frustrating for him. It's impossible to work through a problem if half of the issue won't speak.

Someone's anniversary. They brought a gift, but Chloe couldn’t even remember who they're supposed to be celebrating. There are too many people, milling around and talking, a constant buzz of conversation that doesn't cease; flutes of champagne and wine that she doesn't dare drink. Next to her, Nathanael also stays dry. Another unspoken truce. After their first couple fights, they found alcohol only escalated their fights. Her hands shoving him, his fingers snaring her wrists, shadows of bruises on both of them.

Chloe should have known better. She should have known better for all of this. Her broken record, “You should have known,” played, over and over, skipping, scratched and worn from use. It echoed in her mind as she smiled at the people walking past her.

Because she has seen this before. Repressed memories that breach every time they fight, the echoing of the yelling down the halls of the hotel, the shattering of vases that her mother threw at the wall. Bare feet walking into glass; Chloe, numb, looking at the warm, wet blood between her toes, painting the tile. The pain didn’t register until Jean Jean picked her up and was already coddling her. Big, hot tears rolling down her cheeks as she wailed a harmony to the song her parents were screaming.

She remembered the way that her mother looked at her blood in disgust and the way her father rushed to her, kissing her head as Jean Jean cleaned her feet.

Every word, every fight between her and Nathanael tasted how the glass felt beneath her feet. Angry words that scratched up her throat and cut her tongue, tasted like red poison in her mouth. She felt like she was drowning in the blood, silencing her, thick and sticky, stuck in the back of her throat. His voice like nails scratching her ears.

Chloe smiled at another person who stopped to say hello. Her fingers tightened around his arm and she straightened, trying to seem bigger than she felt when the couple began talking to them. Small talk, dead words, pretending to care. It was easier when Nathanael was present with her. He may be standing next to her, but she could tell that he wasn't with her. They usually gave each other subtle looks and made tongue-in-cheek comments under their breaths, his fingers sliding down her side, caressing her waist, her hip bumping him to keep him in place when his words edged on the line of distasteful.

He stood away from her, close enough that her hand was wrapped around his forearm, but he wasn't beside her--touching her from shoulder to hip, an ever-present identity she relied on and loved.

Emotionless goodbyes; she still couldn't place whose anniversary they were celebrating. Nathanael usually opened the car door for her, mocking playful as people watched from the window.

"They are so in love; why doesn't my husband treat me like that?"

"I bet he cheats on her."

"Chloe was never one to be faithful."

Despite the words whispered behind their backs, they would smile and laugh at each other.

She watched as he walked to his side of the car. Throat closing in on her, she opened her car door and sat down.

Silence never scared Chloe.

Chloe was not afraid of much in life.

The quietness of a room, the intimacy of stillness between her and her partner, she welcomed it, felt safe in the heavy blanket of no expectations of conversations, the lack of judgment, the state of just being with Nathanael.

There were no words exchanged on the ride home. The radio played softly in the background. The steady hum of the car rattled inside of her, vibrations down to her bones.

Chloe was unafraid of silence, but this was something worse.

Nathanael loved Chloe.

He loved her more than he could put into words. So he put it into art. Everything he created was influenced and inspired by her; pieces of her personality he could physically manifest onto a canvas, into a sketch. The cheeky way she would say something, the way her hair fell down her back when she took it out of her ponytail.

He loved her even as she did things he didn't understand.

Fighting was natural. It was normal for people to argue with their spouse or to disagree with them and, he admitted, it didn't seem like they disagreed on much, usually. He couldn't even remember what it was about tonight. Something stupid.

It always was.

Something stupid, yet it mattered because they don't yell at each other over nothing.

His parents had taught him that arguments kept things running smoothing between partners. It was a medium of discussion, that got out steam and relieved tensions.

But it's impossible to argue with someone who won't say a word.

Oh, Chloe has plenty to say at the beginning of the argument. Her words slice in front of his; she's still herself. Angry and loud, brash with harsh words and names he knows she doesn't mean, but in the moment it frustrates him and gets him worked up.

He has never been able to pinpoint the moment that it changes for her.

If he could, then maybe he would know her trigger.

He could find out what she hides in her past that pulls her away from him.

But sometime after the first hour, she falls apart. She no longer responds to him, cannot meet his eyes. The argument unresolved; Chloe no longer cooperating with him to fix the issue.

He can't patch things together without the materials. He's a needle with no thread.

She walked into the house before him, leaving the door open behind her and he trailed, quiet, watching her.

These nights resulted in him sleeping in the guest room. Once, he heard, that the way to a happy marriage is to never go to bed angry or upset and to always sleep in the same bed. It didn't matter if that meant no sleep. It was a sacrifice that had to be made. That would never work for them. A night's sleep usually brought Chloe from her reverie and would open her up to speaking again.

It was an awkward dance until they went to bed. All of his things were in their bedroom and their bathroom, so they would undress the day together, brushing their teeth in silence, standing next to each other, in the mirror with each other. He watched, waiting, ever holding out for her, as she washed her face clean from makeup. Then they moved to the bedroom.

It's like they didn't know each other anymore.

They turned their backs to each other as they dress. He heard her struggle with the zipper on the back of her dress, but she didn't ask for help. There was once a time she had to do it herself and she may need time to remember, but eventually she would.

Forty minutes and there were still no words between them.

They stared at each other from across the room, waiting, like a standoff, for the other to make a move. But Nathanael was already reaching for her. He, emotionally, could not reach out to her anymore. He would do anything for Chloe; he loved Chloe, but there are things he was not capable of doing.

He was exhausted. On any normal day dealing with a party full of people from a social class he had yet to come to understand was tiring and he would take comfort in the laughter and words of his wife. He would savor her kisses and her soft words and her wandering fingers, but this was not a normal night.

So he turned to leave the room.

"Don't..."

Nathanael paused and waited. Her voice cracked, was soft, barely audible. Maybe it was because he hungered for some sort of reaction from her. He was naturally attuned to catch her voice. He turned and looked at her.

She was so small.

Before they got married, Nathanael would have never used the word "small" to describe Chloe. She was larger than life, with a big personality and a loud voice, always taking up the entire room. But she was small when she was like this. Like a child. Fragile and soft, breakable.

"Please don't," she tried again, her voice faltering and she fell quiet for a moment. "Please... just... stay tonight."

He walked towards her, slowly, like he was approaching a skittish animal.

She almost was.

She got into bed first, sliding all the way over onto her side of the bed. Usually, she crowded the middle and complained about how it was cold if she wasn't against him. But when he got in behind her, she didn't move closer. She didn't look at him, either. Stubbornly facing away from him, but tense.

He couldn't just keep reaching for her; this was what he told himself. Yet he looked at the back of her head, of the way she was curling in on herself, and he hesitated.

You're not supposed to go to bed angry.

His ring felt heavy on his finger and his thumb twirled it a little. With the ring came so many compromises and vows, more than he really knew what he was signing up for when he married her.

But it was a symbol of his love for her.

So once more, he would try.

"Chloe," he said softly, reaching out to her, arm sliding over to curve around her waist. "You know I still love you, right?" Her body stiffened under his arm and he felt worry and alarm in his heart. "Chloe, I love you." He wasn't prepared for the tremble that her body gave and the soft sob that escaped her lips.

His arm pulled her against his body and he kissed along the back of her neck. "Oh, Chloe," he whispered. "What are you thinking?"

"I'm sorry," she said emotionally, her voice strained. "I'm sorry. I know I'm not a good wife and I shut down and I'm sorry. Please don't leave me. I love you so much."

Nathanael tightened his arm around her waist, making her fall silent. "You're not a bad wife," he said, slight disbelief in his voice. "I love you, Chloe. You're my wife. I would never leave you because of a fight."

She was silent. Then, softer, quieter, more fragile, "I'm sorry."

This would be all he got tonight, he could tell, but it was a start. It was a breakthrough, all considering. His arm kept her snug against his front and he breathed in the gentle scent of her hair, nuzzling her.

"Dans le bonheur ou dans les épreuves," he murmured into the curve of her neck.

In happiness or in trial.

He had promised in their vows.

#chlonath #chloe bourgeois #nathanael kurtzberg #writing: mine #bee my valentine

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vantagetag · 3 years

Text

A Guide to GPS Car Tracking Systems for Businesses

GPS can be named as one of the most astounding inventions of mankind. This satellite controlled radio navigation system makes use of its 24 satellite and numerous ground station to get information about location related activities of everything dead or living on the earth.

The constellation of satellites always transmits signals for free which can be put to use by anyone who has the technical expertise. This free signal has been accessed by many since a long time. However, the evolution of it s applications has been absolutely amazing. Now we are in an era where GPS is not just meant for location based information.

What is a GPS Car Tracking System and How Does it Work?

A GPS car tracking system allows business owners to track the real time location of their assets and also collect valuable information which can help run their business efficiently.

Car tracking systems have a small device which can be hid anywhere inside your car. It has an antenna which is tuned to capture the high-frequency signals of the satellites circling above us. With the help of complex mathematical calculation and inputs from the satellite, GPS devices are able to track the location of your car.

The GPS satellites circling Earth are arranged in such a way that 3 or 4 will be always on the same plane of rotation and they will be always on top of each and every person on earth. They continuously emit signals to the earth. The device that has been installed inside your car will catch this signal and can exactly compute your speed, the distance you have covered, your destination distance as well as the map.

The computing is done inside your tracking device with the help of mathematical principle, trilateration. In order for this calculation to take place, the device need get certain inputs. As mentioned earlier, three or sometimes four satellites are continuously circling around us and are sending signals. The device needs the distance from you, the satellites and distance between those satellites when it aligned on top of you. By using these as inputs for the trilateration mathematical calculation, the device will be able to provide you the exact location details of your vehicle.

What are the Types of GPS trackers that are Available in the Market Now?

First of all, you need to have an idea about the types of GPS system available in the market now.

1. Hardwired GPS tracking devices: Commonly installed in installed in vehicles, This type of devices use power from the car battery to work. Mostly hidden under the hood of the car these devices sometimes has antennas for accuracy.

2. GPS Loggers: Loggers are usually attached to shipment or a vehicle to record the activities so that later on data can be retrieved manually later.

3. Personal GPS trackers: As the name suggests these type of devices are meant for personal use. They are of very small in size and can be attached either to your body or the bag that you carry. They are mostly used for protection.

4. Real Time GPS Trackers: These type of trackers continuously send data to the receiver so that the location of the vehicle attached to it can be tracked real time. They are the most sophisticated among the types of trackers that are available now.

How Do You Install a GPS Tracking Device in Your Car?

There are indeed plenty of GPS tracking devices available for your car. However, installing them and the criteria that has to be followed are mostly the same.

They are,

1. Location: Purpose of a GPS tracker has to be kept in mind before choosing the location. Since it is meant for the safety of your car, It has to be installed somewhere where it won’t be spotted in a glance. Here are some of the places where often GPS trackers are often installed,

i. Beneath the carpet of the boot or even inside the wall of the boot where it’s sealed of with carpet.

ii. Between the vehicle radiator and the grill.

iii. Under the seat

iv. Concealed under the glove box

v. Under the vehicle

vi. Behind the plastic of panel of the door.

2. Secure the Tracker: GPS tracker inside your car need to have a power source and most of the variant that are available now draws power from your car battery to work.

So it has to be kept in mind that the access between your battery and the device should be of primary concern while fixing the device firmly and also make sure that the tracking device is well secured so that it won’t fall off when the vehicle is on the move.

3. Connecting the tracker to the power source: As mentioned before, there are two types of trackers that are installed in the car. One which is hard wired that draws power from the car battery and another one which has a power source of its own.

i. GPS tracker which has dedicated battery: The biggest issue with these type of tracker is that they can’t be concealed much since the battery which the device uses has to be recharged. However, the biggest advantage of these trackers are that their installation is simple.

ii. Hardwired tracker: It is indeed true that they are a bit hard to install. But the security and the options they offer are in plenty. There are even certain trackers which acts upon the breach of certain criteria.

For instance, If a parent is worried about their child’s safety they can set a speed limit inside the device so that whenever the child exceeds the speed, an alert will be send to the receiver which is in the possession of parents. (Mostly an app in your phone or may be via an SMS).

The procedure for connecting a Hardwired tracker is like this,

1. Tracker transceiver needs a 12V DC wired power source

2. After finding the wire from the power source remove an inch of insulation from it

3. Poke a hole in the wire to create a loop

4. Remove insulation about an inch deep from the red wire that you will find in your tracking device.

5. Put the end of the red wire inside the loop that you created in the power source wire of the car. Squeeze the loop shut and secure it by wrapping it with an insulation tape.

6. There is another white wire in the device. Connect it to the ignition wire of the car.

7. Last but not least ground wire of the vehicle and tracking device should be connected.

4. Software Installation: The data that the tracker send can be accessed via an app or even an SMS. Advanced software which can show you multiple data are now available in the market. With the use of software you can know where your vehicle is at, even in real time.

Benefits of a GPS Car Tracking Device

1. The most important benefit is the security it has to offer. Since vehicle theft is common nowadays installing a GPS tracker is indeed the only viable solution at disposal now.

2. The fuel efficiency of your car can be tracked down with a GPS tracker so that necessary repair or even adjustments can be done.

3. You will be able to access the data of your car even when you are not using it

4. Alerts from the GPS can be accessed via an app and immediate steps can be taken to avoid any danger.

Most Common Queries Regarding Car GPS trackers

1. Can anyone Jam or even tamper with a GPS device?

Since GPS tracking device in your care is mostly concealed. There is only a rare chance that one might spot it. However, it is tamper-able with proper tech knowledge. Fortunately there are variants available which will inform the owner real time if its being tampered.

2. Is it possible for a car GPS tracker device to work without internet?

GPS device use satellite signal for calculating the location as well as the speed of a car. It does not need internet for that. Unfortunately, to send the calculated data to your device they need either internet or even SMS service.

3. What’s SVRS?

Stolen Vehicle Recover System (SVRS) uses both RF(radio frequency) as well as GPS. Due to various reasons, satellite signals won’t reach a GPS device when the car is concealed heavily. In situations like this, RF comes to help.

That is, if your vehicle is taken to a place where satellite signal strength is low, the device will immediately alert you when the signal gets feeble. At that time, RF unit of the device will be activated so that police can track the device with the signal.

4. How much does it cost to buy a GPS car tracking unit?

Considering the use of the device the price is affordable and worth every penny. Different kinds of products are available in the market now with various price. Before you buy a GPS tracker offline compare the price with similar ones online.

5. What should you do when you find out that your car is stolen?

First of all, make sure that your car is stolen. There is a chance that it might be towed away by traffic officers for violation of law. If it is actually stolen go to the next police station and give away the complete access to your GPS tracking software that you have installed on your phone. Do not panic. It is easy to find the car with a GPS tracking device installed inside it.

6. How can I find my car using VIN number?

If the GPS tracker inside your car for some unknown reason has stopped working VIN number is the last resort. VIN (Vehicle Identification Code) is a 17 characteristic code which can be handed over to the police so that they can track your vehicle when an illegal registration of your vehicle happens.

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shirlleycoyle · 3 years

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Everyone Loves Attack on Titan. So Why Does Everyone Hate Attack on Titan?

When the anime Attack on Titan premiered, it was an instant smash hit and quickly became one of the most visible and popular anime series in the world. As time has gone on, though, the anime, manga, and its fandoms have run into issues with the messages in the text itself, which some say is fascist and antisemtitic.

Attack on Titan holds the same cultural space for younger anime fans that a show like Game of Thrones or even a book series like Harry Potter does for people a generation older than them. Its first volume of the manga is still topping the charts on Bookscan 10 years after its release.

"It's hard to overstate how important Attack on Titan is," Geoff Thew, who makes videos about anime on the YouTube channel Mother's Basement, told Motherboard. "It's not just this really good 24 episode action thing. Now it's this full fantasy epic that is coming to its culmination. It's probably the last anime that every anime fan either watched, or had a very strong reason not to watch."

The manga reached its final volume this month, and as fans are saying goodbye to the series, they're also revisiting some uncomfortable, and unresolved conversations about what the story is all about.

When Attack on Titan's anime adaptation came out in the summer of 2012, it was at the beginning of a shift in culture for anime. Prior to that moment, anime wasn't very accessible other than to people well versed in internet piracy, or had enough of a disposable income to buy expensive DVDs if the series they were interested in ended up being licensed in America at all. But by 2012, the world of streaming video had caught up with the world of anime in the west. Crunchyroll, which had begun to air series simultaneously with their schedule in Japan starting in 2008, had already had a hit on its hands that year with Sword Art Online, and Attack on Titan would go even further than that. Attack on Titan would catapult anime into the mainstream in a way few other series have been able to outside of Japan, at least not since Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon would air on cable television in the decades prior.

The premise of Attack on Titan is so enticing that I was completely unsurprised that the show was a smash hit when it premiered. The show takes place in a world where the last of humanity is living in a walled city, surrounded by giant human shaped creatures called Titans who live outside the walls. Titans love to eat humans—not even for sustenance, just for fun—so the people inside the walls live in fear of those walls being breached. In the first episode, they are.

It's one of the best opening episodes of an anime, ever. I remember watching it, and then inviting multiple groups of people over to try to get them to watch it with me too.

Image source: Funimation

The discomfort with the story of Attack on Titan began in earnest when the manga revealed where the Titans come from. When the lead character Eren Yaeger first left home to join the military and fight Titans, his father gave him a key to his basement, saying that he should return to investigate it when it's safe. In the basement there are books that reveal that the outside world isn't uninhabited at all, and that the Eldians, the race to which Eren and his father belong, are being kept in ghettos in a fascist society where they wear armbands to identify themselves amongst their oppressors, the Marleyans.

Although the Eldians are portrayed as being subjugated in the present day, in the past they are presented as oppressors themselves, and for some Eldians, the long term goal of all the Titan nonsense is to create a new world order.

"It should be uncontroversial to say that to a certain degree, Attack on Titan is about fascism because, I mean, they have coded Jewish ghetto," Thew said. "I think, given the resurgence of fascism globally in the real world, you can expect to see elements of that seeping into popular culture."

To some fans, it all feels a little too close to the broad arc of most antisemitic conspiracy theories, which say that the Jews rule the world through an ancient conspiracy. In some variations of the theory, Jewish people already secretly run the world government, just like the Eldian Tybur family does in Marley, where they live as honorary Marleyans and secretly control the other noble families. This aspect of the series has made other parts of Attack on Titan stand out, especially the character of Dot Pixis. According to the artist and writer of the series, Hajime Isamaya, Pixis, a military general in Attack on Titan, was inspired by real world World War II general Akiyama Yoshifuru, who is considered a hero in Japan, but also has committed war crimes against China and Korea.

These themes have been pointed out before, with some even saying that the work itself is fascist and antisemetic. While Attack on Titan boasts a huge audience, it also has a noted and vocal right wing fanbase as well; the New Republic even called it “the Alt-Right’s Favorite Manga.”

Image source: Funimation

Trying to understand the line between the allegory that the manga’s creator Hajime Isayama is playing with and his own personal beliefs is where anime fans have gotten themselves tangled up. If you search "Attack on Titan antisemitism" on Google, the first three results are articles discussing the show's fascist themes. Also on the first page of results is the rant of a frustrated fan on Reddit, complaining about people on Twitter shitting on their favorite show.

The question, then, as the series wraps up, is figuring out how to engage with it, and figuring out whether a show can deal with fascistic themes in the way it does without being fascistic and antisemitic itself. The manga’s creator Hajime Isayama, for his part, told the New Republic that he didn’t want to weigh in on the controversy, stating that “Being a writer, I believe it is impolite to instruct your readers the way of how to read your story.”

A big, recurring controversy in the fandom is figuring out how to discuss or even deal with these issues at all.

As a show, Attack on Titan has taken a position of reverence among anime fans. Even if you don't currently watch the show, or read the manga on which it is based, you've at least seen the iconography from the show, especially its military insignia, in the wild. For a lot of people this was their first anime, and their first introduction to a genre of fiction they love. It's the position that makes it uniquely difficult to criticize. In the case of Attack on Titan, not being able to discuss the issues in its fiction has led to a long simmering, never resolved conflict within the fandom itself.

At first glance, it would be easy just to dismiss Attack on Titan as being unambiguously pro-fascist. The anime plays into the militarism at the heart of the story; the show's first theme, a certified banger and classic meme, opens on the lyric "Are you prey? No, we are the hunters," sung in German.

"It’s important to note that the use of fascistic, war, or even Nazi imagery is not necessarily an endorsement of these ideas or regimes, as strange as it may sound," Joe Yang, who makes videos about anime at the YouTube channel Pause and Select, told Motherboard.

Both Yang and Brian Ruh, author of Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii, suggested that multiple anime and manga series at least seemingly try to separate fascist iconography from the acts the horrifying regime committed. Whether they succeed—and whether this is even possible—is another question altogether. Yang noted that one of Isayama’s biggest influences is a visual novel called MuvLuv and its anime adaptation Schwarzesmarken, whose storyline includes an alternate universe German state that uses fascist imagery in its uniforms and also features a fictional version of the Stasi as characters.

"If you look up Schwarzesmarken and Muv-Luv Alternative, you can find images that are heavily reminiscent of the imagery you’d see in Attack on Titan," Yang said.

Image source: Funimation

Ruh cited the forward to one of Japanese critic Eiji Otsuka's books, Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan. Otsuka writes, "Why do [anime fans] feel that the war machines of Nazi Germany are 'beautiful'? In Japan, as compared to the West, there is a tendency to detatch criticism of Nazism and the Holocaust from the cultural items that they brought about."

"In this way, when something like Attack on Titan makes historical references it may not be with the intent to evoke a full comparison," Ruh said. "Whether it's wise or responsible for a popular artist with a global reach to play with history in such a manner is another matter entirely."

It should not be controversial to suggest that Attack on Titan includes fascist and antisemitic themes. What the fanbase and critics must grapple with is how to talk about them and whether the show is actively causing damage.

Thew told Motherboard that he hadn't totally caught up on Attack on Titan because he was kind of dreading unpacking its controversial politics, especially on his channel. Part of it is because talking about Attack on Titan and its relationship to fascism is so complicated. Another part of it is because the fandom has, by this point, dug in its heels.

"It's because this conversation keeps happening, but it's also not," Thew said. "There's some really good criticism of Attack on Titan, and I think it's important to criticize it, but a lot of people come at it strong and condemn it. That does as much to kill the conversation as people being like, 'shut the up about politics,' because it reinforces the argument that people are just trying to cancel this good show that you like for flimsy reasons."

Image source: Funimation

For a long time, anime fans had no way of knowing what their favorite writers and artists even looked like, let alone what they thought about the world. Because anime was, until recently, a niche culture, and one that has occasionally been unfairly maligned for being pornographic and violent, anime fans in general have avoided talking about the politics of their favorite shows.

"Some Anglophone and American anime fans say that politics in anime is too foreign to comprehend, I think that's a minority position. A lot more people these days seem to have some accurate knowledge about sociocultural politics in Japan, but in my experience they're equally likely to combine a dollop of knowledge about current circumstances in Japan with their own preconceptions about Japan and Japanese society," Andrea Horbinski, an independent scholar with a doctorate in new media studies and history, told Motherboard. "Ironically, while it's never been easier to access cultural and political discussions directly from Japan thanks to the internet, relying on their own preconceptions and only taking on board information that supports them definitely does keep anime fans in this position from appreciating the range of views in anime generally."

This doesn't just affect how fans view shows like Attack on Titan, but also how some anime fans might view shows that deal with feminist themes or LGBT content. According to Horbinski, some right wing fans of anime insist that certain kinds of political themes must be imported from western culture.

"[These fans] insist that feminism and trans people don't exist in Japan and that any anime depicting either is 'woke garbage' or similar. These fans are extremely angry at attempts to discuss the depiction of female characters in anime as something that could often use improvement, or the inclusion of trans characters period." Horbinski said. "They may cite 'evidence' to support their views that is wholly out of context, or they may just insist that their views about Japan are correct because they're correct. Attempts by Japanese feminists and LGBTQ activists to provide corrective information online do not go down well, particularly on Twitter."

Image source: Funimation

Given the global reach of shows like Attack on Titan, framing anime as something that is not, or should not, be influenced by culture outside of Japan doesn't make much sense.

"Anime does come from Japan, but it’s been a global medium for a very long time," Yang said. "The problem with understanding anime as a distinctly Japanese media with Japanese politics is that it makes very specific claims about Japaneseness, that it is only Japanese, that it is only the Japanese who can understand this, and that this somehow absolves the text of its messages."

Shutting down conversation about the inspirations for Attack on Titan, its themes, and how fascist imagery is used, and whether it enhances the story to use it in the way that Isamaya does, means that gaining deeper meaning from the text just stops being possible.

Given its popularity, Attack on Titan clearly resonates with the people who live here beyond just fans of anime who are deeply enmeshed in its culture. The attitudes that some fans of the show have about Japanese culture and its politics have been predominant in the fandom so far, but Attack on Titan is so much bigger than just an anime. It's a sign that anime's space in broader mainstream culture is changing. Maybe it's time for anime fans to put away old ideas about how to read and interpret this text, ideas about Japan just being too foreign to understand. Clearly, hundreds of thousands of Americans have watched Attack on Titan and seen something that they relate to.

"I think it does hold anime fans back, because aside from veering pretty close to Orientalism, it also arms them with excuses on why they don’t need to seriously grapple with the messages that certain texts can convey," Yang said. "If someone presumes a text is sexist simply because 'that’s how Japan is, you wouldn’t get it' not only does it ignore some of the subcultural connotations or history imbued in these signs, but it also speaks volumes about that utterer’s beliefs about an Othered, 'far off' Japan."

Everyone Loves Attack on Titan. So Why Does Everyone Hate Attack on Titan? syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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ruminativerabbi · 6 years

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The Chaplain’s Dismissal

It came as quite a surprise to me the other day when I read that the Rev. Patrick J. Conroy, a Roman Catholic priest, was fired from his position as Chaplain to the House of Representatives by the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan. Why exactly Father Conroy was fired has not been made entirely clear, although the Speaker did insist that religion—and I know how odd this is to say—that religion wasn’t a factor here really and that he, the Speaker, although fully identified with Evangelical Protestant Christianity, was not prompted to act merely because he did not wish to have a Catholic priest as “his” chaplain. (Father Conroy was originally appointed in 2011 by Roman Catholic then-Speaker John A. Boehner.) Another suggestion, widely cited, was that the priest crossed a line—at least as far as the Speaker of the House was concerned—when, during the recent debate about the overhaul of the income tax system, he prayed in public that our lawmakers act to “guarantee that there are not winners and losers under the new tax laws, but [rather] benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.” But it seems to me at best unlikely that such an innocuous prayer could have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. (What should the chaplain have prayed for? That our lawmakers create a new tax code that will only benefit some specific Americans but not the country as a whole?) And it is so that Speaker Ryan took issue with that prayer, admonishing the chaplain for failing to stay above the political fray and apparently for also forgetting that he was in place solely to pray publicly for things so little contentious that no one could possibly care what the prayer said anyway. So maybe that was the reason!

The House itself responded along party lines almost to a person: of the 148 representatives to sign a letter to Speaker Ryan insisting that he reveal the precise reason or reasons that he dismissed Father Conroy, only one sole signatory, North Carolina representative Walter B. Jones, was a Republican. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader in the House, raised the interesting question of whether the Speaker actually had the authority to fire the House Chaplain in the first place. And she also revealed that Speaker Ryan had offered her a specific reason for wishing to be rid of the House Chaplain, one unrelated to that prayer about the tax code: because he had given an interview to The National Journal in which he spoke openly about sexual and workplace harassment issues, and in which he raised the possibility that the entire Congress was in the grip of a spiritual crisis the specific nature of which he did not identify.

I have no specific opinion about Father Conroy’s qualifications, having neither ever met the man nor heard him speak. But it isn’t the specific details regarding his dismissal that intrigue me, although I do have to admit that I’m curious how this will all play itself out. No, naïve citizen that I am, I was surprised to learn that the House of Representatives even has a chaplain hired (and paid a salary) to serve as its spiritual leader. Who knew?

Obviously, the ideal would be to have a House chaplain who has no specific allegiance to any specific religion. But, given that a chaplain is by definition an ordained individual trained in some specific faith tradition, seeking a chaplain who merely represented “religion” but not any specific one of the world’s religions would be something like trying to hire an orator to deliver an address in “language” but not in any specific one of the world’s languages. And yet, given the allegedly iron-clad wall erected by the founders between church and state, isn’t that exactly what we all should want, a chaplain whose allegiance is to “religion” itself, but not to any specific one of them? But wishing for that specific (impossible) thing means assuming Congress wants or needs a chaplain at all.

The first thing to know is that this all goes back a real long ways. After being prodded to action by Samuel Adams, the Second Continental Congress appointed one Jacob Duché, an Anglican priest, as their chaplain on September 5, 1774. There wasn’t even lip-service paid to the concept of nonpartisanship: Father Duché led the Congress in Anglican worship that day and delivered some extemporaneous prayers rooted in his Anglican tradition. Later, after the Constitution called into being a bicameral legislature, Congress resolved that there should be two chaplains, one for the House and one for the Senate. And, indeed, starting in 1789, chaplains were called upon to open both houses of Congress with a prayer. As the years pressed on, chaplains from different Protestant denominations were appointed to both houses of the legislature. This seemed fair to some, but not to all—James Madison, for one, was opposed to the whole practice on the grounds that, since it would be unthinkable to invite a Catholic priest or a Quaker to serve as chaplain, it was not in keeping with the spirit of the Constitution to invite solely Protestant clergy to participate. (Note that Madison was not proposing that the chaplaincy actually be opened up to Catholics or Quakers, just opining that because it was unimaginable to do so the best course forward would be to cancel the whole concept and have no one at all in the position.) I can’t even begin to imagine what people who considered the appointment of a Catholic priest to be inconceivable would have had to say about the notion of a rabbi serving as House chaplain, let alone an imam or a Native American shaman. Or rather, I can. There have, at any rate, been fifty-two different individuals who have served as House Chaplain. All were men. All were Christian. All but one were Protestants. Probably, I should hold onto my day job even if the position is currently vacant.

The Senate chaplaincy has a similar history. The Senate, meeting for the first time in New York in the spring of 1789, selected Reverend Samuel Provoost, the Episcopal Bishop of New York, to serve as its chaplain. This set a pattern and, when the Senate moved to Philadelphia the following year, that city’s Episcopal bishop was appointed chaplain. To date, there have been in total sixty-two chaplains of the Senate. All have been men. All have been Christians, all but one Protestants. The current chaplain of the Senate is Rear Admiral Barry C. Black (Ret.), a Protestant minister and former Chief of Navy Chaplains.

Over the years, there have been regular challenges to the practice. (For a detailed account of those challenges, click here to see an essay on the topic by Christopher C. Lund published in the William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 17:4 and a truly fascinating survey of our nation’s ever-evolving attitudes towards religion.) But none, including one suit that got all the way to the Supreme Court, has been successful. I certainly do not expect any to be successful in the future. But, contrary to what readers might expect, I do not wish that the chaplaincy were more inclusive and that, say, rabbis such as myself were invited to participate along with the clergy of all faiths represented in our American mosaic. If we’re going to have a chaplain serving Congress, I suppose he or she should be chosen from the full spectrum of religions to which Americans adhere. But far better, and far more principled in my opinion, would be the decision to dispense with the chaplaincy entirely.

It is never in the best interests of Jewish Americans—or, for that matter, of any Americans—for the wall between church and state to be breached, and that is so even in when the breach in question appears to be relatively benign and inconsequential. Why should anyone care, after all, if someone stands up when the Senate opens to recite some prayer that the members of the Senate either do or don’t listen to, but which none is obliged to take to heart or even to consider in passing? When considered in that specific light, the issue appears hardly to matter at all. Even I think that!

But when considered in terms of the larger picture, it does indeed matter. Several years ago, I explained in one of my weekly letters why I found the White House seder introduced during the Obama years so irritating. (To revisit those remarks, click here.) I also find the White House Christmas tree inappropriate to the point of almost being vaguely threatening. And I certainly do not, in some peculiar calculus of impropriety, find comfort in the willingness of the last few presidents to host White House Chanukah Menorah lighting ceremonies.

In my ideal version of America, the wall between church and state would truly be impermeable. The President has private quarters in the White House—that is where he or she should celebrate the festivals of his or her faith and where the symbols of those festivals should be displayed and enjoyed, just the same as in anyone’s private home. The Congress, on the other hand, should assert its impartiality by showing no favoritism to any faith at all. And to imagine that the fact that all 114 of our congressional chaplains have been Christian men is not overtly suggestive of precisely the kind of favoritism (and gender bias) our national ethos supposedly derides, discourages, and disdains—that seems to me to be, at best, a fantasy rooted in our desire to be something that we have not yet quite become.

I have no real idea why Speaker Ryan dismissed the House Chaplain, but I wish he would move forward in the wake of that dismissal and suggest that the position itself be abolished along with its parallel in the Senate. Or, at the very least, that it should be filled by someone able to deliver an opening prayer in “language” itself…but not in any specific one.

#Paul Ryan #House Chaplain #Senate Chaplain #Separate of Church and State #First Amendment #Patrick J. Conroy

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