#this is just one of my characters its a whole infrastructure going back to this

[withfeelingthistime2232]

Von

“He’s a good doctor… I remember him telling me all the trouble he used to get up too during school, rebellious years and so what.. I remember a story he brings up often when the kids complain about tests, how he cheated often but turned around once he got into nursing school. He got drafted into the army during that time. He never told me that before… things make a little sense now..”

“Has he talked to you about his service?”

“Not until recently he’s been so… i-I can’t really explain. I mean, what does it have to do with me? The whole thing is laughable. I’m being patient, but i just want things-”

“Back to normal, I know”

“I’m getting predictable now, am I?”

The therapist smiles knowingly but offers a few words of an underhanded apology, urging them further to continue their same hour long complaining session on their actual patient

Von has been dodging their sessions left and right, leaving The Therapist to rely on second-hand scraps. They’ve been patient, they’ve been kind, but if they can’t get this asshole into their office at least a few more times, they can already see their name being the next file in the drawer…

“He- He’s been complaining about the smell now.. I know he’s been holding back on saying anything, but I can still see his eyes twitch anytime I step into the room.. It’s nice that he’s finally acknowledging me again, but now he’s talking about taking some time apart-”

The babbling brings The Therapist’s thoughts back to them. Running away- that’s not good, they’re already thinking of every place they could potentially run too, maybe they might need to get a little more hands on than they anticipated.. Before they can answer back the little clock on their desk chimes, that’s the end of their session. So they put on their best face and offer some words of… Encouragement….

Patting their rotting hand that’s close to resembling mangled bear meat as they walk them out..

They’re going to have to play this one carefully.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Von makes due on 10 hours of sleep a week at best, farthing their dive into adrenaline junkie hood, from what I’ve gathered so far sleep has never easily come to him, much like being on time to events and knowing what to order at new restaurants. What does come easily to him, however, is death, real or figments of hallutiacions. I’m trying to make sense of the issue still myself, but what Von seems to have a knack for is being the center of a cruel, unjustful joke.  

I didn’t believe him at first and i think they knew he inkling of the doubt that closeted my mind, but after shoving the proof in my face I had to start changing my strategy.

It was fascinating how they stood in my office. A gaping hole in their head, almost breathing like the gills of a fish out of water. The vacant white of their eyes and the skin sluggish and bloated… and how no one else in the office were alarmed at the sight of this man, funnily enough the worried stares were directed to the husband dealing with the loss of the man next to him. 

Apparently, this wasn’t the only tragedy to befall Von, The Incident during his service as seemed to be the event that steamrolled everything. An enemy attack on the camp in order to steal experimental equipment turned bloodier than intended was the official record. A man in half-form broke out from inside the camp and mangled the entire medical staff, everyone except him. 

He says he seems to experience the feeling of death whenever he closes his eyes, strange and cryptic but understandable coming from a man who experienced a great trauma, and the added drug use doesn’t seem to help much but after seeing the husband for what stood in front of me, I now have to take his words with more literal meaning. What has changed him he still doesn’t quite give out, but from other “Non- Fabricated” stories I’ve managed to break out of him comes a confession.

A tragic love story, a man falling apart slowly finds love in another after coming home from war, sleep comes more peacefully and soon a family forms. Love seems to age and gray beautifully, doesn’t it? Of course, not every marriage is reflected. I am a therapist, after all. Some interstructure relationships rock and sway from time to time, especially when fathers come around during holidays.

Vons seems to make a comment on his disdain for his husband’s father on occasion, calling him a “monster” but now I guess I have to take that quite literally now mustn’t I? I would ask him if he ever seemed to show his face. What kind of monster? Does he have teeth several inches long? Does his face fall apart in the same way as your dear Alan? Does he howl at the moon? All jokes aside, this is potentially a very serious manner.

But what needs to be addressed now is the truth, and the truth is all in the details. Is it The Cruel Joke that made you do the things you did, or is it only what it wants you to see? And if so, why can I see it as well? 

It’s believable, marriages fall apart in the blink of an eye if you’re not careful. Maybe they were drifting apart as they thought. I’ve known many couples that grow distant from the stress of money and two kids going to college can cause many imbalances in what builds comfort.

Who’s to say their husband hasn’t been spending their time with a familiar friend? Staying late at their restaurant many nights, coming home later and later. Blowing your husband’s brain out isn’t a healthy coping mechanism, but it’s understandable where the anger is coming from. Trust blasting apart can do many things to a man. 

But did it happen? I can’t say for certain, but all I know is he’s here for a reason and when that note showed up on my desk signed in that sickening cursive and that hard to read ink I know I only have so much time, and this isn’t the time for runners.

[gr1an]

someoje said to come to you over this so. CANNOT get over gemtho. they're literally so cute wtf

its so stupid because like there are a billion reasons why this doesn't work relating to their compatibility and personality and all that shit but at the same time like

???? Im just saying they'd be cute kissing each other in that tunnel and cuddling and etho is so laid back and serene and its the exact opposite of gems frantic energy and they kinda rub off on each other (figuratively) as in etho makes gem more chill when they're both just going about their day or exploring and when gem wants to Commit various felonies and crimes and end up in jail etho will go along with it because he will forever deny it but he imagines a life with her every night when he goes to sleep in his house and in bed in the dark apart they feel a part of them missing so they do their best to walk together in the light

h

ive just realised this is hardly a question. my interminable yapping will not cease but I do still want to get the point across so.... what makes u ship it :3333

i would actually really disagree with the lack of compatibility thing?

i think that gem is outgoing but still introverted, and she really loves talking to people and making a lot of friends, as well as helping out those friends! we see this with skizz’s terraforming, building the pathing infrastructure near cherry mountain, and with her letting etho take whatever he wants from her base! but at the same time that she is helpful, she is not a people pleaser. she’s assertive and funny. she goes up to her friends chests and takes stuff out bc “these are mine now actually” but she has the ability to do that bc she’s so charismatic and easy to love!

and this plays very well with etho’s general awkwardness to the point of nigh agoraphobia at some points. (i hc c!etho as selectively mute bc he just. doesn’t/can’t talk if he feels socially anxious. he accidentally built up a persona of cool and aloof despite being the wettest cat alive.) i am very new here but i think the first time they spoke to each other for an extended period of time was while gem was teaching him how to fight. and bc gem’s charisma comes from being adaptable to situations but still maintaining her personality, she was able to teach etho a lot (counter-critting, stopping sprinting in order to crit, crit combos) and they both very clearly enjoyed it a lot! etho and gem were laughing and talking basically the whole time, and i think that’s where their dynamic of mutually teasing each other as a way to show affection started. gem didn’t treat etho like someone on a pedestal they could never reach, and she also didn’t expect him to be amazing right away. she let him be fallible and we know that all of the ppl etho is close to do the same things. every duo etho is a part of has a strong dynamic of mutual teasing. him and bdubs, him and cleo, him and joel, and more recently him and tango. with tango though that relationship is pretty new and so a lot of their interactions are just focused on redstone.

and i don’t think gem is that feral or frantic? she gets very absorbed into her projects and she likes being silly with it. she also Commits to the Bit. but i don’t think, at least this season, she’s very off-the-wall. again, i’m new here, and i’ve only seen gem’s perspective of her s10 videos and the hide and seek one, so i am still new to her character/persona.

i think one reason ppl may think of her as feral is because of the way she interacts with specifically etho. and also the “geminislay” nickname. but she’s more than that nickname. in all of the clips of them in decked out, she is at max energy and is constantly punching/fighting etho, but they’re both giggling like schoolgirls the entire time. she doesn’t do that to other ppl though, so it’s not just her general personality. it’s her cute aggression instinct. she’s infatuated with etho so naturally her reactions to anything he does are going to be exaggerated and over the top. but she’s not always seized by that cute aggression instinct, she’s absolutely able to hang out with etho while at a lower level of intensity. etho though does sometimes instigate bc he also thinks she’s adorable. he hit her like 6 times as they dug the tunnel, i’m not convinced that all of those were accidental.

and etho isn’t laid back and serene, he’s earnest and silly and intelligent but also very uncomfortable in most social situations. the recent clip of him literally being a wet cat while asking beef for shulkers (he wants them nyeow!!) is a bit of an insight into how he is actually very silly! his little “oh schnappers” is also a good example. he just doesn’t always show it or show that he cares bc he doesn’t know how to do it in a way that isn’t awkward, and the feeling of awkwardness is like his least favorite feeling in the entire world.

sorry all that to say: they are incredibly compatible and i’m making them kiss. sillies.

[freshlybakedspiderbread]

I am sending you Aya Shameimaru. she is here in your ask box now. chirping

..no im kidding, i would never want to repel our pure and honest reporter despite her everything

General opinion/How much I care about them: so theres a strong bias due to the fact that my very first exposure to touhou as a whole was hearing pofv's Wind God Girl back in 2009, and by extension Aya herself was the very first character from the series I came to know. I dont think i immediately came to obsess over her or anything and probably only came to like her for real much later... That said i feel like ive known her my whole life and she's top contender for my single Favourite character. It used to be that she only competed with Seiga for that title but i guess there's a lot of characters i could go just as if not more nuts about given the right time of day...

her schtick as an earnest but kinda shady reporter of the ''''truth''' has never gotten old and im pretty sure she's only gotten even more despicable in her methods over the years, but i love all that about her. the tengu has a whole in gensokyo have gotten a whole lot of expansion but i still consider aya to be our main focal point of that group and its always fun to think about how role as an exceptionally long-lived youkai and her perspective on both tengu society and gensokyo as a whole.

Also how lucky was I that i chose Aya, an actual important recurring character who will reliably keep showing up in canon, as one of my favs? I'd be living so differently if i had latched onto like, Medicine or Yuuka instead 😛 (then again i did mention Seiga above and I kinda dont expect her to ever be relevant again so its a matter of context 😝)

A ship I love: There are a bunch of Aya ships I know of and even like, and the ones I most often think about are probably Hatate and Reimu.

But i'm gonna vary it up and talk instead about Aya/Nemuno, something I wish we got even a little more scrap of back in th16. I mean every other player character got some with their matching season character! I choose to believe that even after that one meeting, Aya still makes regular visits to that cave, having designated Nemuno as her go-to yamamba contact despite Nemuno gripping about their supposed non-interference treaty. But Nemuno doesn't mind that much (since she usually doesnt chase Aya away with a cleaver) and comes to begrudgingly kinda like her, which i guess is the reaction to Aya in every ship of hers?

(I also think she's got complicated layered history with megumu which i talked about a little in an older post!)

A non-romantic relationship that I love: actually maybe i should have talked about reimu or hatate above and then saved nemuno for here. i actually want to say ahead of time for this part of the asks that even if i might not immediately default to romantic in a relationship, it uh... wouldnt take a lot for me to see it that way if needed.

That said, i like the thought that both Marisa and Sanae are regularish visitors to whatever hidden tengu infrastructure is in the mountain. Sanae because shes a neighbour with a pass and Marisa because she goes wherever she pleases. Aya being the tengu closest to humans is typically the one tasked to handle their needs or deal with them, with which Sanae she probably gets along with fine, though with Marisa theres probably more hidden ire going on there with how she's typically intruding (the hypocrisy of how aya's always hanging around the human village is always brought up by marisa in response)

The NOTP: gonna say this regarding this part of all these asks, outside of questoinable stuff like incest or so on, there usually aren't ships that i am Against. At worst, i may just not personally see the appeal or much prefer a different dynamic of the relationship.

so um.... ive never really managed to get excited over Aya/Momiji? Like I think they have a very funny potential back-and-forth, but begrudging tolerance is the usual best i see from Momiji's side and i actually much prefer the angles you cold go with Momiji/Hatate. (aya/hatate/momiji love triangle...? 🤔)

My biggest headcanon about them:

she's Old. 👵 Like, thats not just headcanon to me but is actually vital to her character that she is not just long-lived by youkai standards, but shes one of the few tengu around who lived through their developing history, watched their society and gensokyo changed in real time, and adapted in turn with it all. This goes hand in hand with how she simultaneously has great pride as a tengu yet also holds bitterness towards some of the ways they have changed (or havent changed).

Also after messing enough with kappa-made cameras over the decade, she now also fiddles with custom models with her own self-made modifications 📷

An idea for a fanfiction I would like to write/read about them: Talking about ideas is kinda embarrassing for me because i mean... what if i never actually do any of em? 😅 well whatever gonna try not to let that bother me...

for a story about her specifically, there's probably a neat tale to be had like a few decades prior to her being assigned the odd role of 'reporter' and bitterly taking to it, but then gradually coming to make it into her own passion more than any other crow tengu... Imagine the first time she looked at a particularly nice photo she took and imagined the story it told, and her heart fluttering in a way it had never done so before.

Something that makes me thing of them: every journalist archetype in fiction i've seen since and even before 2009 😄 No but if i say i think of her every time i see like, a camera or newspaper, how insane am i going to sound? girls who only thinks about aya going "getting a lot of aya vibes from this"

[talenlee]

Story Pile: Gideon The Ninth

Story Pile: Gideon The Ninth

Here’s the pitch; it’s a sci-fantasy magi-tech murder mystery story with sword fights and a ripped up muscle lesbian who wears makeup to look like a skull and mirrored sunglasses to look like a skull wearing mirrored sunglasses. Then with that kind of approach you’re left grappling with the question, okay, but how does it pull that off?

And the answer is with bombast and aplomb, two words that I think wouldn’t rate for this book’s love of linguistic particulars.

The first and most significant thing that Gideon The Ninth needs you to meet – well, no, the firs thing it needs you to meet is its protagonist who is introduced in one of the most efficient first paragraphs I’ve ever read that wasn’t cheating – but the next most significant thing is its world. The world of Gideon The Ninth is a vast, sprawling magical world, but the magic in question is necromancy. It’s not a world of fireballs and telepathy, but instead, a world where gristle and bone and tendons form the foundations of the fantastic behaviour. Wars are fought by drop ships deploying troops of meat to fight with swords, and however practical that is or is not is entirely an exercise left to other stories.

Something I like about this depiction of a world is its emptiness. It’s a necromantic galactic empire full of ancient traditions and millenia of infrastructural weight, but it’s also stretched out thin across that space, with a population so small that an entire planet can lose two hundred children in a single year and have it be effectively, an extinction event. While on the one hand, there’s this wonderful treatment of the empire as a corpse, there’s also a very material perspective on the world as a world of corpses. People care about bones and nails and the material resources of skeletons and undeath and souls and there’s a deep consideration for all the different ways in which understanding the dead is treated in magical worlds.

It’s a very clever, well-thought out universe, that by dint of using its thematic space like this, gets to blend together a creaky oldness and a desperate neediness, a respect for death and a clinging to life, all at once, told in the very methods of how people engage with the systems of the empire as a whole. It also means that this vast story gets to be about… like… twenty people.

Those people, then, are going to hold the story on their shoulders, and it is a good thing that Gideon the Ninth, our protagonist, has such amazing shoulders. I can just imagine people reading this book being mad at how she talks, the narrative language used to describe her, and her priorities, and how fantastically I don’t care that it bothers them.

Gideon is an angry young woman stuck in a rotten living environment on the edge of an empire with a friend group consisting of zero friends and one deeply hated enemy. The story starts with her attempting to escape and moves on to the next step of her concocting a new plan to escape that just so happens to involve her pretending to be that deeply hated enemy’s bodyguard and bestie as they’re both thrown into a version of that ‘mansion on a remote island’ mystery, except the island is also on a planet and the mansion is a dilapidated, forgotten ruin that’s been still for millenia.

Gunna level with you: Names in this one were hard for me up front. I appreciate that the book starts with a glossary of names, that’s great, but I also keenly felt how hard it was to flip back to that when I was reading on my phone. It’s a really interesting little material boundary on the way that ebooks and physical books differ, and who knows, I may wind up wanting a physical copy of this book. Lords knows I think it rules. I think the main characters rule. I think the way the plot is executed rules. I think the world rules. And maybe that’s a confluence of extremely specific factors, but I don’t know how to share that engagement without just listing things in the book, lines, quotes, character dynamics.

Everyone in this book is part of a wizard-and-retainer combo pair. A bunch of them are really hot. There’s multiple twists. There’s a point where a librarian headbutts someone. There’s a discussion of different kinds of fighting styles. Tradition gets dismantled. There’s a heartfelt confession of cosmic importance told in ritual circumstances that just happen to be very sexy. There’s even a moment when a character does something incredibly cool, incredibly metal, and incredibly stupid all at once and it saves the day and it sucks and it’s great all at once.

I love the voice of this book. Particularly, I love the way this voice betrays a dialect that is not America, nor is it Britain. It’s a linguistic framework that uses tumblr memes and Homestuck references and IRC repetition jokes (like those IRC repetition jokes), and there’s a point where someone says ‘nice job, dickhead‘ and chockas with ghosts and the hand in the lollies jar and all those things are things that sound, to me, in my head, with the voice of an author from New Zealand, similar to Australia, and dashed about with forums of the 90s and then Tumblr and Homestuck and more than anything else, a voice of an author from the internet, but the New Zealand part of the Internet.

There’s also a delight in demonstrating a particular breadth in language use. There are specific terms rare in their use but deployed for their extremely specific appropriateness here – I know, I had to look a bunch of them up. This is a voice that is not ashamed of how it sounds and it is proud of what it knows, and those things work together to create a voice that I want to fight for. I want to read more books like this. I know I write like old people (I know so keenly), and I know I’m ashamed in many ways of the ways the way I talk lacks legitimacy, and reading this book is like a sweet breath of proud living.

This book is not ashamed of being from where it is.

I wish I could be half as bold, half as perfect.

Thing is, I’m in this book.

Not really, not properly, not actually.

It’s the invisible space around where the author’s notes mention writing Animorphs fanfiction. In that gasp of air around that space, there I am. There I was. For a year or two, I was part of a friend group on the internet the #Animorphs channel supported by the Chee Database that featured Tamsyn Muir. In a way that’s impossible to communicate, that person I knew then was staggeringly important to me. Important in a way that’s hard to really grapple with, because I was also a child, and I haven’t those memories preserved anywhere. Seeing her name on the lips of my friends as they talked about a book that had come out that they loved was like perfumed ice. It’s there in how I read these pages, because I can hear a voice in my head, reading these lines, delivering these lines but they are memories of a voice that has long since passed into being a memory of memory.

I have no fantasy in my mind that I, in any way, influenced or encouraged her. I remember first coming into her orbit when she commented very kindly on my quite bad Animorphs fanfiction. I remembered writing fanfiction with her. I remember her talking about her plans to become a published author, her drive to do it. That was there, and I never doubted it.

I think about how in that space, there was at least a time and a place where I got to be part of encouraging amazing people – plural – to make great things. Even if I didn’t know I was doing it or how I was doing it. There was a time and a place where by accepting someone and listening to them and encouraging them, maybe I helped something good happen, years down the line. And if that space had been more hostile to creative art, especially women’s creative art, who knows how many great books have been knocked off-course by that same impetus by people being silly or cruel or selfish.

This is just a story, of course, a story I tell myself.

It probably isn’t true.

I imagine that Muir, who is a whole adult with a life and struggles and friends and support from all sorts of other directions, would have been just fine without us in our space. Another random group of internet weirdoes would have been there. The prudish boy who didn’t realise he was just out of a cult is maybe a blip in her memory.

Who’s to say? But the lesson I can carry out of this, with these strange, tangled feelings I have of a friendship of someone amazing that I let slip away because I was bad at being a friend, is that it’s always worth it to be kind, and always worth it to encourage people to make things.

This book rules and it rules that it exists and you should check it out if sword-wielding heavy metal album cover lesbian spacefaring necromancers interest you at all.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Media #StoryPile #Animorphs #GideonTheNinth #TheLockedTomb

[incarnateirony]

I think there's an innate misunderstanding all around of who/what I mean/did/whatever in this fandom or under the skin for certain messengers.

Let it be clear. I am not a Friend(TM) to Supernatural. I was a Friend(TM) to the queer battle going on inside the show, but not to Supernatural(TM).

Supernatural was the beginning of the last end for Atlanta. It started before CW became CW, but was the first show to move to Vancouver, and became the model by which Pedowitz wholesale screwed the vestiges of Ted's entertainment crew in the gulf by bulk ordering all the superhero shows out to Vancouver, and then hanging one black character out there and convincing the world it's woke and diverse after nuking a dozen black shows off the planet for their airspace.

I made it clear for many years that my hate of CW went well beyond SPN or Destiel. These were separate issues to me, even if related. Sometimes I also knew other shit in Supernatural. Like racist casting decisions internally as far back as season 4 with Anna. Like people breaking t heir heels clean off on other shows and just getting brushed under the rug by production insurance. Things.

So yeah, nobody cared when it was black entertainers. But an army of angry gays showed up and I'd been grinding an ax REAL SHARP for about a decade. I knew they lost the Netflix deal and were vulnerable. I had the codeex on how to break down their infrastructure that made them the corporate monster they were while seeming untouchable. And nobody thought to ask like. Why? I knew how to do that?

So yeah I got between the cracks in SPN in ways even TPTB probably doesn't totally have a thumb on when half of it runs by a few dozen messengers. Yeah, we pulled stunts. But there's very, very few members of TPTB I consider myself friendly with. The few that made that list I would like to think I've been clear enough about, to those who can read between the lines.

Vancouver was basically enemy territory and you know what, I operated like that the whole time, and it's what made this shit work in a fandom full of vicious dishonest gremlins.

So yeah, i got done what I wanted to do. I ain't owe shit to anyone else. And that includes any real emotional vestment in this fandom and its petty wars and inflationary rhetoric and misinfo blogs spreading rumors they're gonna get clowned on anyway. Like who tf cares guys. There's TV outside of SPN, I have a life outside of this place, and unless anyone wants to give me a salary for my old work, like, what do I genuinely give a fuck, i got what I wanted. we took it.

So yeah enjoy a personal blog of muddled shitposts and the occasional leak or ~spec or meta or whatever, because that's what it is at this point man. There's a new crowmaster. Theyre hot as hell, in your business, and you'll never see them them coming. It ain't my circus and you ain't my monkeys anymore.

[f1]

De Vries encouraged by very positive two races after tough start to season | 2023 Spanish Grand Prix

Nyck de Vries said the last two races marked an improvement for him following the difficulties he encountered in his first events as a full-time F1 driver. After finishing 14th in the first two races, De Vries was taken out of the Australian Grand Prix by Logan Sargeant. He had a particularly tough weekend in Baku where he tangled with his team mate in the sprint race and crashed out of the grand prix on the 10th lap. Miami went little better as he hit Lando Norris at the start and finished 18th. However De Vries said the two most recent races in Monaco and Spain were more encouraging. He was one of few drivers to make a single pit stop in the rain-hit Monaco race, finishing 12th ahead of his team mate Yuki Tsunoda. He produced another clean performance in Spain where he came 14th. “I think the last two races were very positive,” said De Vries. “Monaco was a solid, clean weekend and over the whole Barcelona event we showed a strong performance.” De Vries was left on the back foot in qualifying in Spain after spinning twice at turn 11 which ruined his tyres. “It was a shame I ran out of new tyres for Q2 because I’d have had a good shot at qualifying better, but these things can happen in tricky circumstances. In the race, I had a good start, but my inside line was compromised by two other cars losing time together. “There is still room for improvement, but I can definitely see we have good potential, so I’m continuing to focus on progressing and working the way I have recently been doing.” De Vries is one of two drivers yet to score a point this season, the other being fellow rookie Sargeant. However he believes AlphaTauri, who are ninth in the constructors’ championship thanks to Tsunoda’s two 10th-place finishes, are making progress with their car. “The team has done a great job over the last few races and I can see a clear upward trend as we are getting closer to the top 10. They have put in a lot of time, work and effort into better development of the car and bringing that to the track. It has definitely paid off in terms of competitiveness. “Having said that, the midfield is so tight, I don’t think you can always purely judge the development success on the final result, as you need more than performance to get a result in that midfield group.” This weekend’s race will be the first time he has competed at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. “It’s a very particular track,” said De Vries, “when you just look at the map, it seems like a simple layout but it’s quite tricky. “While most of the circuits we race on are all merging towards the same safety standards, run-off areas, kerbs and even the infrastructure, Canada is a track that is still unique and has its own special character.” Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and go ad-free 2023 F1 season Browse all 2023 F1 season articles via RaceFans - Independent Motorsport Coverage https://www.racefans.net/

[shoppncarticles]

The Magikarp Family

Magikarp could very well be described as the third mascot of the franchise, behind Pikachu and either Meowth or Charizard. Magikarp is absolutely pathetic, flopping harmlessly wherever it goes due to being, well, a fish on land. Even the bland Goldeen fairs much better out of water. Magikarp only ever learns three moves, the completely ineffective Splash, and the weak Tackle and Flail. It’s not like Magikarp is any better in water either, said to be bad at even swimming as well. Isn’t it just the darndest thing you’ve ever seen?

Magikarp itself is a pretty nice fish design, all things considered, though. I like the scaly linings on its body, and the big yellow fins on the top and bottom of its body almost resembling a crown. The mustache is charming too. Fish with staches are good.

I can’t imagine anyone playing Pokemon without knowing about the punchline to Magikarp’s whole worthless carp shtick, but if it did ever catch anyone off guard it was probably quite the surprise.

After going through long, arduous training, Magikarp becomes the terribly destructive and powerful Gyarados. I enjoy it a lot that among the designs that were chosen to include in the first generation, a terrifying sea serpent was one of the few approved, especially one that evolves from the most pitiful, harmless fish you’ve ever seen. In fact, that’s even incorporated into Gyarados’s character, some interpret its ceaseless rage and rampages to be revenge for how poorly it was treated in its youth. It’s even known to decimate coastal cities, razing them to the ground without mercy. Infrastructure has to be a real volatile business in Pokemon.

Gyarados’s design is pretty neat, I love the segmented look of its body, and its facial fins are a neat aquatic touch to its overall look. The white spines across its back also are a good, small touch that help keep Gyarados connected to Magikarp in some way. The mustache too.

Gyarados also resembles a Chinese dragon, and its evolution from Magikarp resembles the legend of the Dragon’s gate, where carp that jump the gate over waterfalls become great dragons. Gyarados is often used by dragon trainers in the games, but it’s actually merely a Water/Flying type. I think that’s pretty neat, honestly, that ‘dragon’ is still a loose term in the Pokemon universe, despite it being used to categorize an element of Pokemon.

That Flying type is even reflected by Gyarados’s design, though, even if it doesn’t look like it. Gyarados bears resemblance to Koinobori, big windsocks that look like fish, hence their name meaning carp streamer. Gyarados may be a giant, all-destructive sea monster, but it’s also an oversized kite at the end of the day.

Once Gyarados undergoes Mega Evolution, one would likely expect it to trade its Flying typing for Dragon proper, but instead it becomes Water/Dark! It doesn’t make Gyarados any less of a kite though, which it even more closely resembles in this form with its bulky body and exaggerated dorsal fins. The red accents along its body are very nice touches, and the new black belly and head crest are good small touches to reflect the new Dark typing. It’s honestly one of my preferred Mega Evolutions, everything intimidating about Gyarados is ramped up to maximum here. It certainly looks like it would be one of the most widely feared Pokemon in the world.

The Pokedex accentuates this, saying the Mega energy coursing through Gyarados has left it with no other thoughts other than to raze everything before it, making Gyarados an absolutely apocalyptic force. It’s a perfect fearsome sea monster to populate Pokemon’s vast oceans. The stuff of legend, really.

Score: 5/5 - PERFECT!

Of course I have to love the pathetic fish and its disastrous older sibling, how could I not?

[Gen 1 Archive]

[auliasbookcorner]

Review: Us Against You (Beartown #2) by Fredrik Backman

Book 17 of 2022

Start Reading Time: 7 November 2022

Finish reading Time: 14 November 2022

Page Count: 448 Pages

TRIGGER WARNINGS: HOMOPHOBIA, RAPE, SUICIDE, DEPRESSION, BULLYING, SEXISM, MISOGYNY

This is the spoiler-free part of the review. I will put up a spoiler alert before going into the review that contains spoilers.

The book is so hard to read... because of the tears. It's hard to read through the tears. I counted every time I cried and it turns out that I cried a total of 14 times this time.

Fredrik Backman was crazy for writing and releasing this book. It's like he just wants his readers to suffer. But... I kinda love it??? If you've been following me and my book reviews, you'll know that some of my favorite books are the ones that destroyed me mentally, and this book series is one of my all time favorites, so it's very fitting that this book made me cry even more than the first book.

Can you believe I survived a little over one whole year without knowing the conclusion to this story, with all of these people in this small town that I have come to love? Because I can't. How did I do it? If it wasn't for awesome fantasy books to distract me maybe I would've gone crazy. But not for long now, as I have officially started reading The Winners now, while making this review. My long and seemingly endless wait has finally come to an end, and I have to brace myself for the ending of this book series. But, for now, let's talk about this book.

When I first read this book, here's the summary of my thoughts and feelings back then:

This book is NOT kind to all of my fave characters but especially Ana, Peter, Leo and Benji. Pretty much everyone got screwed over here, except for Richard Theo, and maybe Alicia. The people of Beartown are really going through it in this book. I couldn't forgive Ana for what she did to Benji.

So fucking tired and fed up with Richard Theo's politics, though I was thankful that he helped rescue Beartown Hockey Club from being closed down.

Not enough hockey games in this book, which was a let down, it made me miss the hockey games in Book 1.

Not enough Alicia, Amat and Bobo. Give these awesome characters their own books.

I have aged a year since the last time I read this book, and I'd like to think that I'm a bit wiser than I was then, and yes I have changed my mind about some of the things mentioned above, which I will explain in the spoilery part of this review. It's so fascinating to see how much you have changed and grown over the years based on your reviews of your favorite books.

Overall, I think this book is so much more brutal and dark than the first book, with so much less hockey games, as it's more about the politics and the violence around the Beartown Hockey Club, but the characters are still as lovable as ever, and the small hockey town itself still has its own charms. It will make you suffer though, if you are as easily attached to a character as I am, as there are a few characters that will die in this book, although it's probably not who you think it is, despite Backman's many misdirection and scary foreshadowing. And I do have more criticisms of this book than I did when I first read it, but I'm still giving the book a 5 stars rating because the good still outweighs the bad in the end, and I still love this book series so much.

Now, here's the brief book summary: The book started out really gloomily and I can feel the anxiety and uncertainty that the townspeople of Beartown feel now that the best players and the coach of the Junior Team of Beartown Ice Hockey have changed clubs to Hed's club. You have to understand, this Junior team was gonna be their A-Team that was supposed to be their champions, their pride and joy, that will bring home victories and that will make their whole town known and get the country's attention and will bring tourists and infrastructure and more jobs to the small town. But then their star player raped the club's GM's daughter, and the team lost the game.

At the start of the book, Kevin was leaving the town to live somewhere and start anew. His parents are getting divorced and they're all leaving Beartown in two separate cars: Kevin with his mom going one direction, and his dad going the opposite direction. After Maya pointed a loaded gun at Kevin and threatened his life, Kevin was never the same man he was before. Kevin's parents are separating and he's going to live abroad with his Mom, who wishes to help her son to get better mentally, and become a better person, while not knowing if she will ever be able to forgive him for what he did to Maya. We don't hear anything more about Kevin and his family in the rest of the book, and the rest of the town acted like Kevin had always been a weirdo, they're fully condemning him and acted like they never knew or liked him at all, because that makes things easier for them.

Now, the coach of the Junior team and almost all of the best players have left Beartown's Ice Hockey Club except for Amat, Benji and Bobo, the fate of the club is not looking good at all. The sponsors are following the players and moving their sponsorship to Hed's Ice Hockey Club, and the club's going bankrupt, and it seems that Beartown Hockey Club will be no more. Except NOT.

What happened, you ask? Richard fucking Theo, that's what happened.

Say hello to one of the most infuriating characters of this book series. He is so infuriating, he makes Maggan Lyt look like a saint in comparison, and she annoyed the fuck out of me in book 1. His name is Richard Theo, and he's a controversial politician, but personally, I like to call him Satan. His whole politics is provocation through manipulation, because when all of the people go one way, he goes the other way and that's how he wins the election. The bastard. And oh man, did he work hard in manipulating multiple people, constantly pulling the strings on all of these people and controlling their actions, making rumors and swaying the public's opinion, all to his own advantage: so he'll win the next election. You just can't help but hate the man.

There is one undeniably good thing that he did, which is that he rescued Beartown Hockey Club from closing down. Therefore, giving Benji, Amat and Bobo a team to fight for and play Hockey with. That is the ONLY good thing this Richard Theo has even done for Beartown and its people.

However, Theo's good deed does not come free. Oh, of course not: it comes with a price, and it's an expensive one. One that would cause a turmoil and war between Beartown and Hed, turning the people of each town against the other town's. It became personal, much more than just about hockey, although hockey has always been so much more than just a sport or a hobby. Now it's about the townspeople's livelihood, their jobs, and their healthcare. Now it's personal. Now, it's a full on war.

Some people are gonna die. Some people will leave Beartown. Some people will come out victorious and some people will be broken. It's me, hi, I'm the "some people" that are broken because of this book, it's me. Nothing will be the same after the events that happened in this book.

🚨SPOILER ALERT🚨

From this point forward in the review, I will mention spoilers, plot twist and the ending. So, if you don’t wish to be spoiled, you can skip the rest of the review and come back to this review once you’ve finished reading this book.

A few things about the book I need to mention...

RICHARD FREAKING THEO. The devil works hard, but Richard Theo works harder. That's why I call him Satan. What he's doing to Beartown Hockey Club is like what those psychics do when they call the families with missing family members, telling them that they could help them find their missing loved one, but at a price, and then just telling them bullshit because their supposed "supernatural power" is so obviously fake. They're manipulating people who are desperate, for their own gain. It's fucking low, lower than the average criminals. To give the desperate people false hopes, when they were actually being manipulated for those awful politicians/psychic's own gains. He makes me gag, honestly. One thing I know for sure is when Richard Theo or people like him offers you something and tell you that he wants to be your friend, you need to run to the other direction as fast as you can, and alert the authorities, and maybe perform an exorcism just in case. Don't make a deal with the devil Satan or you'll get burned.

ELISABETH ZACKELL. I want to like her, I really do. But I just can't like her, especially not after that paintball gun scene. I'll mention it in my criticism of this book.

I forgot how Backman intentionally did not let us know about the gender of Zackell in the beginning, that i have to admit that the first time reading it, I honestly thought Zackell was a man, and I was so pleasantly surprised when it was revealed that Zackell is actually a woman. Made you think about your own gender biases that you unknowingly still have.

I love that Zackell represents the women athletes that are often overlooked or oppressed because of the blatant misogyny in sports. But, I think it's because she values victories over nurturing good human beings with good morals, like David, I can't bring myself to like her, like I just can't like David. I think she's hilarious and quirky, and she's obviously overqualified for the job as she was a really successful hockey player, but we need more than that to be a good hockey coach that will make Beartown Hockey Club a better club than it used to be.

WILLIAM LYT. William, Benji, Bobo, Amat and other players need to have a group therapy session, (not unlike that scene in Mean Girls where Tina Fey gather all the girls and ask them to raise their hands if they feel victimized by Regina George lol) since these boys have been victimized by Kevin so much, I feel like they need therapy to get over it. William and Benji especially.

Man, do I hate him in the beginning of this book. I have so much rage for him, especially when he was beating down Leo. It was so dirty too, he trapped Leo there. Thank God for Jeannette, for saving Leo that day. When she kicked him down, I kid you not, I audibly said "YESSS!!" and fist-pumped. I know, it's wrong and child abuse or whatever, but I could NOT care less, he was beating down someone so physically weaker than him, he trapped him there and he knew what his sister went through, regardless he believes her or not. William is guilty in my book. So I justify Jeannette's kick. I just hope she did it harder to injure him enough to never play hockey ever again. I freaking hate him.

But then! Towards the end, not only Backman made me feel sorry for William, he made me feel sorry for Maggan Lyt too. If only you knew how much I hate that woman in book 1, I made several notations just about how much I hate her. But then this happened...

"Today, more than usual, William watches his parents as they eat and chat. He’s well aware of what people in this town say about his family, that his dad is “so cheap he cries when he takes a shit” and that his mother is a “crazy hockey mom.” That might be true, but there are other things that can be said about them, too. They’ve never had anything handed to them on a plate, they’ve had to fight for everything, and they want to give their children all the things they themselves never had: power over their own lives without having to struggle every day. Maybe they go too far sometimes, but William is only too willing to forgive them. This world isn’t built for kind people. Kind people get exploited and crushed. William just has to look around Beartown to see that. After dinner he watches a cartoon in his sister’s room. When she was born, the doctors said there was something wrong with her. There wasn’t, she’s just special. People keep wanting to describe her using the name of her condition, but William refuses. She is who she is. The kindest person he knows. ... She always worries about her children; whenever William isn’t home she channels her anxieties into making food. “Say what you like about Maggan Lyt, but she’s a good cook!” people say. The fact that they feel the need to preface the sentence with “Say what you like” doesn’t bother her. She knows who she is. She fights for everything she’s got. She ends up making a pasta salad, then some potato salad. “No one can make so many salads out of things that aren’t supposed to be salads as you, Mom—you can make any vegetable unhealthy!” William usually says with a grin. She stays awake until he gets home, worrying the whole time."

Backman, please, I just want to hate this family in peace. Don't make me feel for them. I really want to hate them, but I just can't, not after reading that. Maggan reminds me of my own mom, and I guess that's just how moms are, passionate, a little crazy, but ultimately they love their children and are just trying to take care of their families the best way they can.

Also, how can I go on hating William after I read this...

"William’s smile is heavy with missed opportunities and lost years. “When other people our age talk about their childhoods, they always seem to remember the sun shining the whole time. All I remember is constantly hoping for rain.”"

Oh, and Backman even made me feel sorry for Kevin in the beginning of the book. Whether I'm losing my mind or Backman's writing is just that good.

I guess the only character I can hate in peace now is Richard Theo.

THE PACK. Listen, I hate violence as much as any pacifist would, but I love Teemu, Vidar, Woody and Spider. I mean, yes they're kinda psycho, but they're OUR psycho, so we'll love and protect them no matter what. I imagine Teemu and Spider and Woody to be like Mr. Wrench and Mr. Numbers from Fargo the TV Show, they're so scary and intimidating, but also so calm and subtle.

I lowkey ship Adri (Benji's oldest sister) with Teemu. I feel like they have a lot of chemistry and if Backman makes this canon, I would be over the moon.

LEO. My man is really going through it in this book. In Book 1, it was his parents that were hit so hard with what happened to Maya, and in this book it's Leo's turn, and oh God is it heartbreaking. I think that we often think of family systems along vertical lines, the Mom and Dad influencing their children, but there is actually a lot of horizontal influence too, which is the influence from older siblings to the younger siblings. It's like a sub-family system, consisting of the children and that's totally cut off from the adults of the family. Siblings are oftentimes, our first ever friends, and the relation can even evolve to be best friends, or it can go the other way and they become your arch enemy, but it is undeniably one of the most fundamental relations a man could have. Maya and Leo are so close, and what Maya experienced undoubtedly also impacted Leo greatly, and that's why since the first book I expected to get more Leo, which we didn't get, but in this book we get so much of him and it was heartbreaking to read about him having to deal with this alone and turn to self harm and violence instead.

I think what's happening with Leo in this book is him wanting to get some sense of control back. He felt helpless regarding what happened to Maya, he doesn't know how he should react or help his sister. He felt rage and the need to avenge his sister and family against the rapist and everyone else who made his sister and his family's life hell. He was also in his teenage years, and still finding out what it means to be a man, and so he struggled with masculinity. While he felt like he could not look up to his father because of his non-violent nature, which is caused by the trauma he got from being abused by his own violent father, so Leo felt the need to look elsewhere for a role model. He wanted to be like Benji and Teemu because he saw that these men have power, and people respected as well as feared them, and he wanted that too. I think that if Maya was never raped, Leo would never want to be like Benji or Teemu, maybe he would find his father to be the perfect role model for him, and not having to struggle so much with masculinity, since being non-violent like how his father is doesn't mean being non-masculine, but it's just a different type of masculinity. In another dimension maybe Leo would turn out to be just like his father and be content with it.

That's why I love Benji so much in this scene

"Benji’s chin drops, and a knot in his chest tightens. He can see that Leo is awestruck by his ability to hurt other people. Benji doesn’t know who he hates most for that.

“You haven’t got it in you, Leo,” he says quietly.

The boy snaps. Not just his voice, his whole being. “Kevin raped my sister! What sort of man am I if I don’t—”

Benji hugs the boy and whispers in his ear, “I’ve got sisters, too, and if anyone did to one of them what Kevin did to Maya, I’d be full of hate, too.”

Leo splutters in despair, “If Kevin raped one of your sisters, you’d have killed him!”

Benji knows he’s right. So he tells the truth: “So don’t end up like me, then. Because once you do, it’s too late to change.”"

I love that Benji told him to not be like him, though it's soul crushing to read that because it means that he hates himself for being the way he is. But Benji's right, Leo should not be like him because he is so much more than the things that happen to him, his family or his sister. He should be his own true self, even if he doesn't know who that is yet.

What I don't like is we don't know in the end if he listens to Benji's advice and stops trying to be like him, and stops harming himself, because to me his ending is too ambiguous. Hopefully we'll find out that he'll be alright in The Winners.

PETER. My poor man, I don't think that he had anything good going for him in this book. Sure, he got his club back, and the new A-team won many games this season, but the price was way too high. His life was being threatened, his marriage was falling apart, he was losing his son to violence and his daughter to her PTSD and then her music school, and in the end he even let go of his club. I have to give credit to him, because if it wasn't for him fighting for the club, Amat, Benji, Bobo and Alicia wouldn't have a club and a team to play hockey for. But what does he get in return? Almost nothing. I was so happy and hopeful when in the end he came to his wife asking for a job, because he wants to be a better husband and mend his marriage and his family. I have really high hopes for him in The Winners. He's also someone who deserves a happy ending.

The best things about this book for me are...

SUNE!!! Sune's criminally underrated OMG, he's the best thing Beartown ever had, the man is a treasure. I can't believe that even me, myself, have taken him for granted before this. This time reading the book somehow just made me really see his brilliance, and I just realized now that Sune gives off strong Uncle Iroh's vibe, as they both have the tendency of spitting wise advice, both are adorable, and I love them so freaking much. Now, I'm anxious that he'll be passing away in The Winners, as he was in a poor health condition in this book. I hope not, but then again, you never know with Backman.

BENJAMIN OVICH. Backman gave me, not just one, not just two, but three heart attacks in this book, when he was making me think that Benji's going to take his own life in the forest or getting terribly injured. First when Benji went into the forest after leaving gifts for his niece and nephew, but then turned out he was just getting high, and then again when I thought Benji's legs were gonna be broken so he couldn't play hockey anymore, which didn't happen, and then again with this chapter title: Ch. 32 - Then He Takes the Shotgun and Goes Out into the Forest, AND WHEN BENJI WENT INTO THE FOREST WITH A GUN after he was outed by Ana. DOESN'T BACKMAN KNOW THAT SOME OF US HAVE ANXIETYYYYY???!!!! If I had a heart problem, I would've died already.

But my heart was broken multiple times in this book for Benji. Oh my sweet sweet child, what do we do with you? I want nothing but happiness for him, is that too much to ask?? This man is the kindest and the wildest all at once, he's a hurricane of feelings, and you just can't help but to love him with all of your heart and soul.

He was scared because he felt responsible for his team, and he felt a responsibility to his family to be better than his father, but cursed with the same wild heart as him. He felt responsibility to the pack and everyone who roots for him on the ice to be this straight strong macho guy, when he was actually gay and more sensitive than anyone. I hate that he hates himself and that he thinks it's too late for him to change, and that he is already doomed to end up like his father. I want so desperately for him to see how amazing and precious he is, that there is nothing wrong with him, that he should be true to himself and embrace it, and not care about what others think of him, and to find happiness anywhere he wants to but how do you save someone from themselves? I think that's why so many people root for him, because I think we all know or even have been someone like him, someone who we know deserves to be happy, but the world is unfair and we can't help them.

Benji will forever be one of my favorite characters of all time because of his wild heart and sad eyes. He's truly one of the best characters in this book series, he stood by Maya when most of the people and the club took Kevin's side, he fought and played his heart out during that semi-final game without Kevin, he saved Leo and took him away from the fight when The Pack were fighting the men from Hed, he talked to Leo and told him to not be like him before it's too late to change, he forgave Ana even though she outed him and made his life hell, he bravely faced the town's scrutiny of his sexual orientation and become the inspiration to many to also come out to their family and friends, and he was the best team captain to his hockey team. When he left Beartown at the end of the book, it gave me hope that maybe one day somewhere in the world he can be happy and free, if he feels that he can't be that in Beartown.

My ultimate ship in this book series is Benji with happiness. That's the only ship that matters.

MAYA & HER SONG LYRICS. My little fighter, my survivor queen. The majority of most beautiful things are often born from hardship, struggles and sometimes, even pain, and what Maya does with her music, which is making it into her coping mechanism, since she has a lot of PTSD from the rape, is truly remarkable. I keep getting stuck at the page anytime there's her song lyrics because they are just that beautiful and poignant, I keep reading them over and over again.

When Maya and Ana stopped being friends after Maya found out that it was Ana who took and uploaded the picture of Benji kissing that teacher, my heart broke. But I also understand why Maya did it, I was also furious with Ana, and like I said in my Babel review, friends break up all the time, so I'm glad that Maya and Ana's friendship was depicted realistically in this book. I'm so happy when they finally made up and became friends again. These two are soulmates and I love them and their friendship so freaking much.

I'm so beyond proud of Maya for being so strong and for going after what she wants, which is going to the music school she got into. I know she will still fight her demons some nights, but I also hope that she'll find her own happiness and that she'll have her happy ending in The Winners.

AMAT. WHERE IS HIS BOOK??!!! We get so little of him in this book, I feel so robbed. There are so many times I was frustrated because the hockey game was supposed to be happening, and Amat and Bobo were playing, but we didn't get to know how the game went or how these boys were playing in the game. I have been rooting for Amat and have been his biggest fan since book 1, so to get so very little of him in this book feels like a hate crime to me. But every time he gets a scene it is so iconic. That scene when Lifa and Zacharias gave him an army, when he broke the awkwardness in that locker room when Benji was there for the first time after he was outed by asking Bobo's silly question and mentioning Bobo as his best friend, and that scene when he took Zacharias' parents to see him play esports and made the parents realize how proud they are of Zacharias. This boy is one of a kind and it's such a shame that he's not included in most of the scenes in this book. Here's hoping that we'll get more of him in The Winners.

LIFA AND ZACHARIAS. That scene where they give Amat an army is hands down the best part of the book for me. Truly one of the most memorable and best moments of the book series overall. These boys are really underrated but I'll always hype them up all day every day. We all need best friends like Lifa and Zacharias. And we all need more of Lifa and Zacharias in this book series.

BOBO. The best boy, the best son ever. I thought  he had the best character development in book 1, but his character development was even better in this book. If in book 1 he transformed from being a bully into a stand up guy, in this book he evolved from a good boy and a good son into the best boy and the best son. I feel so sorry for him when his mom died, but he impressed me so much when he stepped up and took care of his siblings, read them Harry Potter at bed time, and he even cooked and cleaned, on top of assisting his father in his workshop. NOT TO MENTION how he asks Zackell to teach him to skate better so he can play for his team better. I love this guy so freaking much.

ANA AND VIDAR. My oasis amid all of these intense hockey and political drama. Was I pissed at Ana for outing Benji? Yes, very much. I was like, we were all rooting for you Ana, why do you have to fuck it all up?! 

But I've grown now and have become more understanding than I was when I first read this book, and I can say that I felt for Ana this second time reading this book. She had too much on her plate and she was doing her best. Yes, she fucked up big time by outing Benji, but she was just human, and a teenage girl who is highly insecure, and she had just got rejected by a guy she liked, and he father is a drunk, so, like Lana Del Rey said, can't a girl just do the best she can? And she also said that people can change, but you don't have to leave her. So I think we need to be more understanding of Ana's situation And I used to hate that Ana ran away crying when she was admitting to Benji that she was the one who outed him, but now I think it just shows how much she regretted it and how embarrassed she was of what she did, and it's worth a thousand sorrys.

Now, I love Ana and Vidar's love story, but I just hoped that we get to know Vidar since much earlier in the book so we could have gotten to know him more and love him longer. Vidar was so special and such an interesting character. I'm no diagnostician, so this may not be true, but I think he has shown some symptoms of ADHD, and reading about him working on controlling himself is so precious, and even more precious when Ana was someone who could keep him focused and controlled. I loved it so much when Ana punched Vidar and told him that she doesn't want him to fight for her or put her on a pedestal because she loved him, and then he came and watched her practice martial arts while sitting on a pedestal. It's one of the sweetest romantic gestures ever. These two just gave me so much joy and they were a source of a much needed serotonin for me while reading this book.

What happened to Vidar was so tragic, but also beautiful because he died saving Ana, who was saving someone from a car that she worried was about to blow up, because that's just the kind of people they are, they save people and not turn their back on people. I also love that no one blamed Ana for Vidar's death because everyone knew it was Vidar's choice to throw himself and save Ana, because they were in crazy love with each other. These two love birds could have been the most powerful couple the town has ever had, there's so much these two could have accomplished together. Too many could have and would have. I'm still so heartbroken for them, but they were so beautiful while it lasted.

KIRA. SHE FINALLY GETS HER OWN FIRM!!! YASSS QUEEN!!!! Well, she co-owns it with her colleague, but you get what I mean. I'm so happy for her, she had waited so long for this, and what's more, Peter is now working for her too. I'm so hopeful that these two will be able to mend their marriage and be a happy family again.

As much as I love this book, I do have some criticisms…

The story of how Benji is actually really smart and knowledgeable, even well versed in classical literary and now even able to quote Friedrich Nietzsche because his mom used to punish him by reading the newspaper comes out of nowhere, and feels like a character trait that Fredrik added last minute for whatever reason (I think it's because his love interest in this book is this guy who's a teacher and seems to be a well-read man), because it's never been told in the first book. I don't know if it's wise to change or add something new to an already well loved character in the 2nd book of a trilogy. I'm not saying that I'm complaining that it makes Benji unlikable, if anything I love him more because of it, but it just feels like so out of nowhere.

I love that scene where Peter is talking to Alicia for the first time;

"Peter sees her bruises. He used to have similar ones. He knows she’ll lie if he asks how she got them; children are so incredibly loyal to their parents. So Peter crouches down and promises her with all the despair of his childhood shaking in his voice, “I can see that you’re used to getting hurt if you make a mistake. But hockey will never treat you like that. Do you understand what I’m saying? Hockey will never hurt you.”"

I love that scene and, yes, I cried, but like... also, please call child protective services? And hockey will never hurt you? Dozens of players getting injured, some with lifelong injuries, and some dead, beg to differ, Peter. Didn't he himself get injured so that he can no longer play in the NHL? In the grand scheme of things, hockey is a violent sport and people get hurt because of it and it decreases their quality of life outside of hockey too.

Also what about other little children who are abused who don't like or want to or are able to play hockey?

That scene when Zackell was firing paintball at Benji. is that not child abuse? HELLOWWW?? I'm so done with these mentors pushing their mentees to their limits, driving them insane, it's so abusive, because life isn't just about one thing that they're pushing these people to be absolutely best at. RE: Terrence Fletcher in Whiplash

IT'S FUCKING CRIMINAL THAT, IN CH. 39, THE FIRST TWO PERIODS OF THE GAME WENT ON AND THE BEARTOWN HOCKEY TEAM WAS DOWN 4-0, AND WE DIDN'T GET TO SEE HOW AMAT AND BOBO PLAY, EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE PLAYING IN IT, BACKMAN SHOULD HAVE GIVEN US THE SCENES IN THE GAME WHERE AMAT AND BOBO PLAY. I GET THAT THE BENJI DRAMA TAKES A LOT OF PAGES AND SCENES, BUT I FEEL SAD THAT WE'RE MISSING AMAT AND BOBO'S SCENES. WHERE IS AMAT AND BOBO'S BOOK?!!! I FEEL ROBBED.

For me personally, there's not enough Alicia scenes in this, and the conclusion that she gets, that the kindergarten was being built inside the ice rink, it just seems so rushed.

We didn't get to know who won the final game between Hed vs Beartown. I get the whole point is that it no longer matters, because for one time these two rivals, despite their differences, come together to honor the lost soul from the tragic accident, but also, I need to know who won. I need to know if Amat and Bobo give it their all and win the cup for their town, even without Benji. Maybe it will be revealed in The Winners? But I think it should be included in this book, though.

The book gave too much away when it revealed that Amat will go Pro in NHL, Zacharias will go pro with his gaming in Esports, and Bobo will be a father. Because in book 1, he already revealed that between Benji, Amat, Zach and Bobo, two will go pro, one will be a father and one will die. I will read The Winners already knowing that Benji will die. I just don't know how or why yet. Not a fun way to start a book, knowing your comfort character's going to die.

How the heck did Zackell get into Ramona's apartment just in time to save her from the fire and the smoke? Is she a superhero or something? "Zackell isn't normal" is just not a logical explanation to me.

Benji challenging William for an "Agni Kai" instead of helping with the fire or going after those Hed guys who did it with the rest of the pack seems so out of his character for me, he's not stupid and should be able to have prioritized helping out or going after the perpetrators first. Like SIR? HELLOWW??? Now is NOT the time for a duel. And the way that scene ended?! They just went their separate ways, both equally injured and bonded over Kevin, but they were not friends or enemies? It's just a little too anticlimactic for me.

The end of the first book mentioned that one young girl will be Beartown's best hockey player, but we get so little of Alicia here. I feel like if we get more of this girl it will be a much welcomed fresh air amid all of this complicated political drama going on in this book. Like Ana and Vidar's love story, their scenes were like an oasis where I feel safe and a break from all of this tense drama, because it's just so much fun reading about these two cute love birds, but it was still too brief and I think adding more of Alicia's lighthearted scenes in there would have made the book a lot better.

Here are my favourite moments from the book:

When Benji "gave" Maya and Ana his and Kevin's Island.

That whole scene where Lifa and Zacharias gave Amat an army, when he didn't have a team.

When Zacharias parents finally see what Zacharias' sport actually is, and felt so proud of him that day, and Amat was there for Zacharias too, be his army for him.

When Benji was saved by Leo when the pack was fighting the men from Hed, and Benji saved Leo.

Every time Ana and Vidar are being cute together.

When Bobo became the best boy and the best son to his parents after his mom told him about her sickness.

When Benji was being interviewed for a job at Bearskin.

When Ana learns martial arts for the first time and the smell of cherry blossom comes off of the pages of this book.

And finally, here are my favorite quotes from the book:

"Because sometimes hating one another is so easy that it seems incomprehensible that we ever do anything else."

"People driving through say that Beartown doesn’t live for anything but hockey, and some days they may be right. Sometimes people have to be allowed to have something to live for in order to survive everything else."

"We’re not mad, we’re not greedy; say what you like about Beartown, but the people here are tough and hardworking. So we built a hockey team that was like us, that we could be proud of, because we weren’t like you. When people from the big cities thought something seemed too hard, we just grinned and said, “It’s supposed to be hard.” Growing up here wasn’t easy; that’s why we did it, not you. We stood tall, no matter the weather. But then something happened, and we fell."

"Sometimes good people do terrible things in the belief that they’re trying to protect what they love."

"A community is the sum of its choices,"

"It is a story about hockey rinks and all the hearts that beat around them, about people and sports and how they sometimes take turns carrying each other. About us, people who dream and fight."

"People we love will die. We will bury our children beneath our most beautiful trees."

"The forest around them is getting drunk on sunlight, the trees sway happily beside the lakes, but the girls’ eyes are restless. This time of year used to be a time of endless adventure for them; they would spend all day out in nature and come home late in the evening with torn clothes and dirty faces, childhood in their eyes. That’s all gone. They’re adults now. For some girls that isn’t something you choose, it’s something that gets forced upon you."

"A mother is standing outside a house. She’s packing her child’s things into a car. How many times does that happen while they’re growing up? How many toys do you pick up from the floor, how many stuffed animals do you have to form search parties for at bedtime, how many mittens do you give up on at preschool? How many times do you think that if nature really does want people to reproduce, then perhaps evolution should have let all parents grow extra sets of arms so they can reach under all the wretched sofas and fridges? How many hours do we spend waiting in hallways for our kids? How many gray hairs do they give us? How many lifetimes do we devote to their single one? What does it take to be a good parent? Not much. Just everything. Absolutely everything."

"No matter how old they get, we never want to cry in front of our children. We’d do anything for them; they never know because they don’t understand the immensity of something that is unconditional. A parent’s love is unbearable, reckless, irresponsible. They’re so small when they sleep in their beds and we sit beside them, shattered to pieces inside. It’s a lifetime of shortcomings, and, feeling guilty, we stick happy pictures up everywhere, but we never show the gaps in the photograph album, where everything that hurts is hidden away. The silent tears in darkened rooms. We lie awake, terrified of all the things that can happen to them, everything they might be subjected to, all the situations in which they could end up victims."

"How many times does a mother make her child giggle? How many times does the child make her laugh out loud? Kids turn us inside out the first time we realize that they’re doing it intentionally, when we discover that they have a sense of humor. When they make jokes, learn to manipulate our feelings. If they love us, they learn to lie shortly after that, to spare our feelings, pretending to be happy. They’re quick to learn what we like. We might tell ourselves that we know them, but they have their own photograph albums, and they grow up in the gaps."

"After four hours of silence in the car, when they’re so far from Beartown that they can’t see any forest, Kevin whispers to his mother, “Do you think it’s possible to become a different person?”

She shakes her head, biting her bottom lip, and blinks so hard she can’t see the road in front of her. “No. But it’s possible to become a better person.” Then he holds out a trembling hand. She holds it as if he were three years old, as if he were dangling over the edge of a cliff. She whispers, “I can’t forgive you, Kevin. But I’ll never abandon you.”"

 "The worst thing we know about other people is that we’re dependent upon them. That their actions affect our lives. Not just the people we choose, the people we like, but all the rest of them: the idiots."

"And what had Leo expected? That everyone would suddenly realize that Kevin was guilty and apologize? That the sponsors and players would come back to Beartown with their heads bowed? Like hell they did. No one bows their heads around here, for the simple reason that many of our worst deeds are the result of our never wanting to admit that we’re wrong. The greater the mistake and the worse the consequences, the more pride we stand to lose if we back down. So no one does."

"That way everyone was able to move far enough away from both perpetrator and victim, so now all Kevin’s former friends can call him a “psychopath” while still calling Maya a “bitch.” Lies are simple; truth is difficult."

"Amat hopes that one day he’s going to be good enough for hockey to take him and his mother away from here. For him sports are a future. Bobo just hopes he can have another season of laughter and no responsibilities, seeing as he knows that every day after that will be like all his dad’s days. For Bobo sports are a last chance for play.

For Alicia, the four-and-a-half-year-old girl firing pucks on a patio? Have you ever been in love? That’s what sports are for her."

 "It’s easy for children to love hockey, because you don’t have time to think when you’re playing it. Memory loss is one of the finest things sports can give us."

"“Brothers and sisters should look out for each other,” that’s what everyone says when you’re growing up. “Don’t argue! Stop fighting! Brothers and sisters should look out for each other!” Leo and Maya were supposed to have a big brother; perhaps he would have been able to protect them. His name was Isak, and he died before they were born of the sort of illness that makes it impossible for Leo to believe that there’s a god. Leo barely understood that Isak had been a real person until he was seven years old and found a photograph album with pictures of him with their parents. They laughed so much in those pictures. Hugged each other so tightly, loved each other so infinitely. Isak taught Leo an unbearable number of things that day, without even existing. He taught him that love isn’t enough. That’s a terrible thing to learn when you’re seven years old. Or at any age."

"Maya goes to the bathroom and throws up. Ana sits on the floor of the hall outside. She has read that support groups for victims of rape call themselves “survivors.” Because that’s what they do each day: they survive what they’ve been subjected to, over and over again. Ana wonders if there’s a word for everyone else, the people who let it happen. People are already prepared to destroy each other’s worlds just to avoid having to admit that many of us bear small portions of a collective guilt for a boy’s actions. It’s easier if you deny it, if you tell yourself that it’s an “isolated incident.” Ana dreams of killing Kevin for what he’s done to her best friend, but most of all she dreams of crushing the whole town for what it’s still putting Maya through."

"The idiots won’t say it was Kevin who killed Beartown Ice Hockey; they’ll say that “the scandal” killed the club. Because their real problem isn’t that Kevin raped someone but that Maya got raped. If she hadn’t existed, it wouldn’t have happened. Women are always the problem in the men’s world."

"Everyone is a hundred different things, but in other people’s eyes we usually get the chance to be only one of them."

"When everything else is collapsing, you throw yourself into the only thing you know you can control, the only place you feel you know what you’re doing. Everything else hurts too much. So you go to work and hide there, the way mountain climbers dig holes in the snow when a storm hits."

"As a child he always loved the summer, when the foliage lets boys hide in trees without being seen from the ground. He’s always had a lot to hide from, as anyone does who’s different in a locker room where everyone learns that you have to be a single unit, a clan, a team, in order to win together. So Benji became what they needed: the wild one. So feared that once, when he was wounded, the coach put him on the bench anyway. He didn’t play a single minute, but the opposing team still didn’t dare lay a finger on Kevin."

"When a child gets a best friend, it’s like a first infatuation; we want to be with them all the time, and if they leave us it’s like an amputation."

"Kevin and Benji came from such different parts of town that they could easily have been different species, but the ice became their dance floor. Kevin had the genius and Benji the violence. It took a decade before everyone realized that there was a bit of genius in Benji, too, and a lot more violence in Kevin."

"If you want to know why people sacrifice everything for love, you have start by asking how they fell in love. Sometimes it doesn’t take anything at all for us to start loving something. Just time."

"Peter Andersson’s mom was ill, and his dad used to get so drunk that he would shout as if his son didn’t have ears and would hit him as if they were complete strangers. Peter grew up with a head full of voices whispering that he was no good at anything, and the first time they fell silent was when he pulled on a pair of skates. You can’t give a boy what he found in hockey classes and then take it away without there being consequences. Summer came, the rink closed, but five-year-old Peter marched around to the home of the A-team coach and banged on the door. “When does hockey start?” he demanded to know.

Sune, the A-team coach smiled. “In the autumn.” He was already an old man, and his stomach was so round that he could talk only in circular arguments. “How long is it until then?” the five-year-old asked. “Till the autumn?” The coach grunted. “I can’t tell time,” the five-year-old said. “It’s several months,” the coach muttered. “Can I wait here?” the five-year-old asked. “Until autumn?” the coach exclaimed. “Is that a long time?” the five-year-old asked. It was the start of a lifelong friendship.

Sune never asked about the bruises, the five-year-old never talked about them, but every blow he received at home was visible in his eyes the first time he learned to shoot a puck in the coach’s small garden. The coach was aware that hockey can’t change a child’s life, but it can offer a different one. A way out and up."

"Sune taught Peter what a club is. It’s not something you blame nor something you demand things of. “Because it’s us, Peter, Beartown Ice Hockey is you and me. The best and worst things it achieves demonstrate the best and worst sides of us.” He taught Peter other things, too, such as standing tall both when you win and when you lose, and that the most talented players have a duty to elevate the weakest because “a great deal is expected of anyone who’s been given a lot.”"

"Benji knows that grief and anger can reprogram a brain like chemicals and drugs do. Maybe there’s a time bomb inside some people’s heads the whole time, just waiting for a switch to be thrown. Maybe his mom’s right, some people are just the sort who start wars."

"She often thinks that Ana is simultaneously the strongest and weakest person she knows. Ana’s dad is drinking again; it’s no one’s fault, that’s just the way it is. Maya wishes she could take the pain away from Ana, but she can no more do that than Ana can take the rape away from Maya. They’re falling into different chasms. Maya has her nightmares, and Ana has her own reasons for not being able to sleep. She sleeps with the dogs on the nights her dad comes home late and rages about in the kitchen like a monster made up of sorrow and unspoken words. The dogs lie in a protective circle around Ana without her asking them. Beloved creatures. Her dad has never, not so much as once, raised his hand against his daughter. But she’s still frightened of him when he’s been drinking. Men don’t know their own weight, they don’t understand the physical terror they can instil in another person simply by tumbling through a door. They’re hurricanes tearing through a forest of saplings as they get up drunkenly from the kitchen table and stumble from room to room without being aware of what they’re trampling on. The next morning they don’t remember anything; the empty bottles have been cleared away and the glasses washed in secret, and the house is silent. No one says anything. They must never see the destruction they’ve left behind them in their children."

"Ana stops and turns around. Maya looks at her and smiles weakly. “God, I love you so much,” she thinks, and Ana knows."

"It takes time to learn to love something but much less to kill it: a single moment will do."

"The best friends of our childhoods are the loves of our lives, and they break our hearts in worse ways."

"Benji walks toward the water, but just before he jumps from the rocks Maya calls after him, “Hey!”

He turns around. Her voice breaks. “I hope you’re one of the people who gets a happy ending, Benji.”

The young man nods quickly and turns away before she has a chance to realize how much that means to him."

"He’s become a man who doesn’t take anything for granted; only children think certain things are self-evident: always having a best friend, for instance. Being allowed to be who we are. Being able to love who we want. Nothing is self-evident to Benji anymore; he just runs deeper into the forest until his brain is gasping for oxygen and he can no longer feel anything. Then he climbs up into a tree. And waits for the wind."

"He pulls up at a pedestrian crossing. A young father is crossing the road with his daughter, eight or nine years old. The father is holding her hand, and the girl is making it very plain that she thinks she’s way too old for that. Peter has to stop himself getting out of the car and shouting at the father to never let go. Never let go! Never!

...

Peter feels like leaping out of the car and shouting at that father, “Never let her out of your sight, never trust anyone, and don’t let her go to that party!”

...

Peter wants to shout at the dad crossing the road, “NEVER LET GO BECAUSE THOSE BASTARDS WILL TAKE YOUR WHOLE LIVES AWAY FROM YOU!”"

"All parents know. It’s not a voluntary process, it’s an emotional assault; you become someone else’s property the first time you hear your child cry. You belong to that little person now. Before everything else. So when something happens to your child, it never stops being your fault."

"Every discussion about sports dissolves sooner or later into a thousand “ifs” and ten thousand “if only that hadn’ts.” Some people’s lives get stuck the same way, year after year passing by with the same story being repeated to strangers at an ever more deserted bar counter: a doomed relationship, a dishonest business partner, an unfair dismissal, ungrateful kids, an accident, a divorce. One single reason why everything went to hell."

"Kevin’s father gave him money and promised to get his mother a better job. If anyone condemns Amat for giving the offer serious consideration, that person has lived a life where morality is easy. It never is. Morality is a luxury."

"Benji. Amat. Bobo. Inside every large story there are always plenty of small ones. While three young men in Beartown thought they were in the process of losing their club, a stranger was already constructing a team with them."

"He can get the people on his side. They call him a populist, but the only difference between him and the other parties is that he doesn’t need flags: they have their offices on the top floor of the council building and play golf with business leaders, whereas Richard Theo has his office on the ground floor. He collects his information from people who have lost their jobs rather than from the people firing them, from the people who are angry instead of the ones who are happy, so he doesn’t need flags to tell him which way the wind is blowing. While all the other politicians are running in the same direction, men like Richard Theo go the other way. And sometimes that’s how they win."

"Richard Theo has the same idea about the hockey clubs, but his goal is to alter the balance. Because political elections are simple: When everything is going well, when people are happy, the establishment wins. But when people are angry and arguing, people like Richard Theo win. Because for an outsider to win power requires a conflict. But if there’s no conflict? You have to create one."

"Ann-Katrin had never traveled, had never seen the world, had never felt the need. “The most beautiful trees are here,” she promised Fatima, adding “And the men aren’t too bad either, if you’re patient.”

Hog and their three children—Bobo is the eldest—have kept Ann-Katrin busy. She gets up early, feeds and clothes them, helps Hog with the paperwork in the workshop, then goes to the hospital and works long shifts full of the worst days in other people’s lives. Then home again, “homework to be done and the house to sort out and tears to be wiped from cheeks from time to time.”

But in the evenings, she told Fatima, Hog creeps through the kitchen more softly than a man of his bulk ought to be able to. And when he holds her, when she turns around close to him and they dance, with her toes on his feet so that he’s carrying her whole weight with every little step, it’s all worth it. It becomes the whole world."

"“I’m not well, Bobo . . . ,” she whispers.

Bobo cries when she tells him, but she cries more. Bobo isn’t the little boy who used to jump up into her arms anymore; he’s big enough now to have space in his chest for the greatest sorrow and tall and strong enough to pick his mother up and carry her home after she’s told him she’s going to die. She whispers against his neck, “You’ve always been the best big brother in the world. You’re going to have to be even better now.”

That evening she hears him read Harry Potter to his little brother and sister. That night Hog makes some weak tea and Bobo comes into the bathroom and holds his mom’s hair when she throws up. When she’s lying on her bed, her son wipes her cheeks and says, “Do you want to hear something silly? You know you’re always telling me I’ll never find a girlfriend because my demands are too high? That’s your fault. Because I want someone who looks at me the way you and Dad look at each other.”

Ann-Katrin presses Bobo’s big, dumb lummox’s head tight to her forehead. She would have loved to see him get married. Become a dad. Life is so damn, damn, damn tough sometimes that it’s almost unbearable. Even if that’s the way it’s supposed to be."

"All sports are silly. All games are ridiculous. Two teams, one ball, sweat and grunting, and for what? So that for a few baffling moments we can pretend that it’s the only thing that matters."

"They kiss for a long time in the hallway. When the man wakes up in bed the next morning, Benji is already gone.

The man finds his book where he dropped it, between the front door and the bedroom. He leafs through it until he finds the quote he’s looking for: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

Some distance away a young man is standing in a cemetery firing pucks at a gravestone. He has scraped knuckles, and worse things are going on inside him. Alain Ovich is dead, and Kevin Erdahl may as well be. Benji is a man who loves men, and he loses everyone he loves.

It’s hard to have more chaos in oneself than that."

"It’s impossible to measure love, but that doesn’t stop us coming up with new ways to try. One of the simplest is space: How much space am I prepared to give the person that you are so that you can become the person you want to become?"

"Kira once made a valiant attempt to discuss this with Peter in terms of ice hockey: “A marriage is like a hockey season, darling, okay? Even the best team can’t be at their best in every game, but they’re good enough to win even when they play badly. A marriage is the same: you don’t measure it by the holiday where you drink wine before lunch and have great sex and your biggest problem is that the sand is too hot and the sun is shining too brightly on the screen when you want to play games on your phone. You measure it from everyday life, at home, at its lowest level, from how you talk to each other and solve problems.”"

"She doesn’t know why, but she’s thinking a lot about her parents this summer. When you’re a teenager, you want them to be sexless, but somewhere along the way the smallest memories of affection between our parents get imprinted on our DNA. Parents who divorce, like Ana’s, can stop a child believing in eternal love. Parents who stick together for a lifetime can make a child take it for granted instead."

"Children notice when their parents lose each other in the very smallest ways, in something as insignificant as a single word, such as “your.” Maya texts them each morning now and pretends it’s to stop them worrying about her, even though it’s actually the reverse. She’s used to them calling each other “Mom” and “Dad.” As in “Mom didn’t really mean you were grounded for a thousand years, darling,” or “Dad didn’t demolish your snowman on purpose, he just tripped, darling.” But suddenly one day, almost incidentally, one of them writes, “Can’t you call your mom, she’s worries so much when you’re not home?” And the other writes, “Remember, your dad and I love you more than anything.” Four letters can reveal the end of a marriage. “Your.” As if they didn’t belong to each other anymore."

"Anyone who devotes his life to being the best at one single thing will be asked, sooner or later, the same question: “Why?” Because if you want to become the best at something, you have to sacrifice everything else."

“Theo nodded and seemed not to take offense: “You’re only an opportunist until you win, then you’re the establishment.” When he saw Peter’s look of distaste, he added, “With all due respect, Peter, politics is about realizing that the world is complicated even though people like you would prefer it to be simple.”

Peter shook his head. “You thrive on discord. Your type of politics creates conflict. Exclusion.” The politician smiled understandingly. “And hockey? What do you think that does to everyone who isn’t on the inside? Do you even remember me from school?” Peter cleared his throat awkwardly and muttered, “You were a few years below me, weren’t you?” Theo shook his head, not angrily, not accusingly, but almost sadly. “We were in the same class, Peter.”"

"The boy goes into his big sister’s room, closes the door, and curls up on the floor. Maya’s notebooks are under the bed, full of poems and song lyrics, and he reads them through different types of tears. Sometimes hers, sometimes his own. Maya was never like other big sisters who yelled and threw their younger siblings out of their rooms. When Leo was younger, he was allowed to come in here. Maya let him sleep in her bed when he was frightened, when they eavesdropped on their parents in the kitchen and heard them fall apart when they talked about Isak. The floor next to Maya’s bed was always Leo’s safest place. But he’s older now, and Maya is spending the whole summer out in the forest with Ana. Leo used to ask Maya’s advice about everything, so he doesn’t know who to ask now, about what a little brother is supposed to do for his big sister when she gets raped. Or what he can do for his parents when they let go of each other. Or what to do with all the hatred."

"“Everything is political. Everyone needs allies.”"

"Tails made the pass, Peter missed the net. Tails may feel that they won silver, but Peter just thinks they lost gold. It was his fault. But Tails wipes his eyes with the back of his hand and says quietly, “If I had a hundred chances to do it again, I’d pass the puck to you every time, Peter. I’d sell all my stores for you. That’s what you do when you have a star in the team: you trust him. You give him the puck.”

Peter stares at the floor. “Where can a man find friends as loyal as you, Tails?”

Tails flushes with pride. “On the ice. Only on the ice.”"

 "Lifa’s eyes are blazing. “We played hockey with you every evening because we could see how crazy good you were, Amat. What you could become.”

“I haven’t even got a team now, I—” Amat whimpers, but Lifa cuts him off.

“Shut up! You’re going to get away from here, and you know why?

Because whether you give up or not, these kids here are going to do what you do. So you need to get training! Because when you’re playing in the NHL and get interviewed on TV, you can say you came from here. You came from the Hollow, and you did something with your life. And every kid in these blocks will know that. And they’ll want to be like you, not me.”

Tears are running down Lifa’s face, but he makes no attempt to hide them. “You selfish bastard! Can’t you see what everyone else here would give to have your talent?”

Amat’s hands are shaking. Lifa walks over and hugs him as though they’re eight years old again. He kisses his hair and whispers, “We’ll come running with you. Every mad sod here will come running with you all summer, if that’s what it takes.”

He’s not joking. Lifa runs up and down along the road beside Amat that night until he collapses, and after Amat has carried his friend home on his back, Zacharias starts running in his place. When he can’t run anymore, others kids show up. Two dozen certifiable lunatics who promise Amat not to smoke and drink as long as he needs someone to train with.

In ten years’ time, when Amat is playing hockey professionally, he won’t have forgotten this. Some of the guys here will have died of overdoses, others will have died violently, some will be in prison, and some will just have made a mess of their lives. But some will have lives—big, proud lives. And they will all know that here, for just one summer, they were running for something. Amat will be interviewed on television in English, and the reporter will ask where he grew up, and he will say, “I’m from the Hollow.” And every single bastard here will know that he remembers them.

 He had no team. So they gave him an army."

"Kira Andersson is sitting on the steps outside the little house. Waiting for a man who never comes. She knows what her colleague would have said: “Men! You know why you can never rely on men? Because they love men! No one loves men as much as men do, Kira! They can’t even watch sports if it’s not being played by men! Sweaty, panting men fighting against other men, with ten thousand men in the stands, that’s what men want. I bet you they’ll soon invent a type of porn featuring nothing but men but aimed at heterosexual men who don’t really get turned on by men but don’t think women are actually capable of having sex properly!”"

"Sune scratches his stomach. As he always says, we only pretend hockey is complicated, because it isn’t really. When you strip away all the nonsense surrounding it, the game is simple: everyone gets a stick; there are two nets, two teams. Us against you."

"Sune’s breathing sounds labored as he replies, “I’ve always known that Beartown Ice Hockey is more than a club. I don’t believe in targets and tables, I believe in signs and symbols. I think it’s more important to nurture human beings than to foster stars. And so do you.""

"“When the hell can you be sure of anything, Peter? All I know is that the bear is supposed to symbolize the best of this town, but there are people around who want to bury it as a symbol of our worst qualities. And if we let those bastards get away with it, if we let them transfer all the money to Hed as soon as it suits their purposes, what signal are we giving the kids in this town then? That we were only a club? That this is what happens if you dare to stand up and tell the truth?”

“In what way is Zackell different from you?” Peter asks.

“She’s a winner,” Sune says."

"The game may be simple, but people never are."

"Politics is an endless series of negotiations and compromises, and even if the processes are often complicated, the foundations are always simple: everyone wants to be paid, one way or another, so most parts of all bureaucratic systems work the same way: give me something, and I’ll give you something. That’s how we build civilizations."

"Politicians need conflict to win elections, but they also need allies. Richard Theo knows only two ways of getting someone who doesn’t like you to fight on your side regardless: a shared enemy or a shared friend."

"There’s a loser in every relationship. We may not like to admit it, but one of us always gets a little more and one of us always gives up a little more readily."

"But what is a marriage if you take away the infatuation? A negotiation. Dear Lord, it’s hard enough for two people to agree what TV program to watch, let alone fashion an entire life together. Someone has to sacrifice something."

"It’s only a hockey club. Only a game. Only pretend. There will always be people who try to tell Alicia that, and obviously she’ll never listen to them, the little brat. She’s four and a half years old, and tomorrow she will knock on Sune’s door again. The old man will teach her to fire hockey pucks harder and harder at the wall of his house. The marks on the wall will be like the grandchildren’s drawings other old men pin up on their fridges: tiny etchings in time to prove that someone we love grew up here."

"“How are you getting on at preschool?” Sune asks.

“The boys are stupid,” the four-and-a-half-year-old says.

“Hit them in the face,” Sune advises.

The four-and-a-half-year-old says she will. You have to keep your promises. But when Sune walks home with her later, he adds, “But you have to be a good friend to the kids who haven’t got any friends. And you have to defend the ones who are weaker. Even when it’s hard, even when you think it’s a nuisance, even when you’re scared. You always have to be a good friend.”

“Why?” the girl asks.

“Because one day you’re going to be the best. And then the coach will make you team captain. And then you have to remember that a great deal is expected of anyone who’s been given a lot.”"

"Every autumn, winter, and spring the whole family lives according to the dictates of hockey, raised up to the heavens when the team wins and tumbling headlong when it loses. Kira doesn’t know if she can bear to put herself through yet another season. But she still stands up and says, “What’s love if we aren’t prepared to make sacrifices?”"

"Kira touches his cheek. “Tails loves you. Oh, how he loves you, darling. There may be people in this town who hate you, and you can’t do anything about that. But there are far more who worship you, and you can’t do anything about that, either. Sometimes I wish you weren’t indispensible to them, that I didn’t have to share you, but I knew when I married you that half your heart belongs to hockey.”

“That’s not true . . . please . . . ask me to resign, and I’ll do it!”

She doesn’t ask him. She spares him from having to reveal that he’s lying. You do that if you love someone. She says, “I’m one of the people who worship you. And I’m on your team, no matter what. Go and save your club.”

His answer is barely audible. “Next year, darling, just give me one more season . . . next year . . .”

Kira hands him the wineglass. It’s either half full or half empty. She kisses her husband on the lips, and he whispers “I love you,” his breath mingling with hers. She replies, “Win, darling. If you’re really going to do this . . . win!”"

"One year? What wouldn’t we give for one more year? A year is an eternity."

"Bobo is crawling about on the floor like an overweight deer. Amat runs over and holds out his hand and together with Benji pulls him to his feet, groaning.

Amat grins. “How can you possibly be so heavy but so easy to knock over?”

Bobo, who isn’t exactly known for his sharp wits, unexpectedly manages to fire back, “My cock affects my center of gravity.”

Amat and Benji’s laughter echoes along the corridor. They’re the only three members of last season’s junior team who are still with Beartown Ice Hockey, and right now that feels as though it might just be enough."

"It’s hard to care about people. Exhausting, in fact, because empathy is a complicated thing. It requires us to accept that everyone else’s lives are also going on the whole time. We have no pause button for when everything gets too much for us to deal with, but then neither does anyone else."

"“Do you remember that little girl, Alicia, who was firing pucks in my garden? She came to the rink today, seven times. She ran away from her preschool to watch the A-team train. I took her back, but she ran away again. She’s going to keep on doing that all autumn.”

“Is it possible to lock children up?” Zackell wonders, possibly not quite understanding the point Sune is trying to make, so Sune clarifies: “Children take all the things they grow up with for granted. After watching you coach the A-team today, Alicia will take it for granted that women do that. When she’s old enough to play on an A-team, there may not be female hockey coaches. Just . . . hockey coaches.”

That means something to Sune. Something important."

"She’s seen this town blossom, but in recent years she’s also seen it take a beating. People in Beartown know how to work, but they need somewhere to do it. They know how to fight, but they need something to fight for.

The only thing you can rely on in all towns, big and small alike, is that there will be broken people. It’s nothing to do with the place, just life; it can beat us up. And if that happens, it’s easy to find your way to a pub; bars can quickly become sad places. Someone who has nowhere else to go can grasp a glass a little too tightly; someone who’s tired of falling can take refuge in the bottom of a bottle, seeing as you can’t fall much further from there."

"Can things ever turn around? Or do we just get used to them?"

"but the worst thing about paranoia is that the only way to prove you’re not paranoid is to be proved right."

"Some children never quite manage to escape their parents; they’re guided by their compass, see through their eyes. When terrible things happen, most people become waves, but some people become rocks. Waves are tossed back and forth when the wind comes, but the rocks just take a beating, immovable, waiting for the storm to blow over."

"Adri was a child, but she took the rifle from her father and sat on a stump holding his hand in hers. Perhaps it was shock, unless she was consciously saying good-bye, both to him and to herself. She became someone different after that. When she stood up and walked back through the forest to Beartown, she didn’t scream for help in panic; she walked purposefully to the homes of the best and strongest hunters, so that they could help her carry the body. When her mother collapsed screaming in the hall, Adri caught her, because the girl had already done her crying. She was ready to be the rock. Has been ever since."

"Zackell has almost finished her meal when Ramona returns to the table and puts a beer down in front of her.

“From the regulars,” Ramona says.

Zackell looks over at the five old men at the bar. “Them?”

Ramona shakes her head. “Their wives.”

In the far corner sit five old women. Gray hair, handbags on the table, wrinkled hands tightly clutching glasses of beer. Several of them have children and grandchildren who work at the factory; some of them worked there themselves. The old women have old bodies but new T-shirts. All the same. Green, with four words written on them, like a war cry:

BEARTOWN

AGAINST

THE

REST"

"There’s no real autumn in Beartown, just a quick blink before winter. The snow doesn’t even have the manners to let the leaves decompose in peace. The darkness comes fast, but at least these months have been full of a lot of light: a club that fought and survived. A grown man who put a reassuring hand on a four-and-a-half-year-old’s shoulder. Hockey that was more than a game. Beer on a stranger’s table. Green T-shirts that said we fight together, no matter what. Boys with the biggest dreams. Friends who formed an army."

"It isn’t fair, but sports isn’t fair. The player who spends the most hours practicing doesn’t always end up being the best, and the player who deserves to be made team captain isn’t always the most suitable. It’s often said that hockey isn’t a contemplative sport: “We just count goals.” That isn’t strictly true, of course. Hockey counts everything, it’s full of statistics, yet it’s impossible to predict. It’s governed too much by things that aren’t visible. One term that is often used to describe talented players, for instance, is “leadership qualities,” even though this is an utterly immeasurable concept seeing that it is based on things that can’t be taught: charisma, authority, love.

When William Lyt was younger and Kevin Erdahl was made team captain, William heard the coach say to Kevin, “You can force people to obey you, but you can never force them to follow you. If you want them to play for you, they have to love you.”"

"People say that leadership is about making difficult decisions, unpalatable and unpopular decisions. “Do your job,” leaders are constantly being told. The impossible part of the job is, of course, that a leader can carry on leading only as long as someone follows him, and people’s reactions to leadership are always the same: if a decision of yours benefits me, you’re fair, and if the same decision harms me, you’re a tyrant. The truth about most people is as simple as it is unbearable: we rarely want what is best for everyone; we mostly want what’s best for ourselves."

"Is David proud of himself? Definitely not. So why doesn’t he just go see Benji and tell him the truth: that he is ashamed of having been such a poor leader that the boy didn’t feel safe enough to tell the truth about himself. Why doesn’t David just apologize? Probably for the same reason that all of us commit all our stupidest mistakes: it’s hard to admit that we’ve been wrong. And the bigger the mistake, the harder it is."

"Kira is sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop; she came home from work early today to cook for the children and do the washing and cleaning. Now she’s working again, but without her bosses seeing: she puts in more hours than any of her colleagues but will soon be known in the office as the woman who always goes home early. Being a mother can be like drying out the foundations of a house or mending a roof: it takes time, sweat, and money, and once it’s done everything looks exactly the same as it did before. It’s not the sort of thing anyone gives you praise for. But spending an extra hour in the office is like hanging up a beautiful painting or a new lamp: everyone notices."

"“When the Devil gets old, he gets religious.”"

"Men are busy, but boys don’t stop growing. Sons want their fathers’ attention until the precise moment when fathers want their sons’. From then on we’re all doomed to wish that we’d fallen asleep beside them more often, while their head could still fit on our chest. That we’d spent more time sitting on the floor while they were playing. Hugged them while they still let us."

"They run only where there are lights. They don’t say anything but are both thinking the same thing: guys never think about light, it just isn’t a problem in their lives. When guys are scared of the dark, they’re scared of ghosts and monsters, but when girls are scared of the dark, they’re scared of guys."

"The girl tricked him; he’s going to carry a lump of black fury in his gut forever to remind him of how he felt when she ran and he realized that they’d planned this and how they must have laughed when they did. And there’s something about violence, about adrenaline, about the different frequencies in some people’s hearts."

"Kira dropped them off outside the concert and made them promise to come straight out the moment it was over, and they promised and laughed, and they were only children but Kira knew she’d lost them, ever so slightly, at that moment. They ran off toward the stage hand in hand, along with hundreds of other screaming girls, and that first taste of freedom is something you can never take away from someone. Music transformed Maya and Ana, and even if they chose completely different styles of music later in life and did nothing but argue about what was “junkie music” and what was “bleep-bleep music,” they still had that in common: music saved something inside them that might otherwise have been lost. Imagination, power, a glowing spark in their chests that always reminded them: “Don’t let the bastards tell you what to be, go your own way, dance badly and sing loudly and become the best!”"

"You try to be a good parent, in every way, but you never know how. It’s not a difficult job. Just impossible. Peter is standing outside his daughter’s room with a pair of drumsticks in his hand. She used to be his little girl, it was his job to protect her, but now he can’t even look her in the eye because he feels so ashamed.

When she was little, they lay together on a bed that was too narrow on one of those nights when it felt as though they were the last two people on Earth. The little child lay asleep against his neck, and he hardly dared breathe. Her heart was beating like a rabbit’s, and his kept pace; he was so happy that he was terrified, so complete that he could think only of the fragments if life shattered again. Children make us vulnerable. That’s the problem with dreams: you can get to the top of the mountain and discover that you’re scared of heights."

"Violence is the easiest and the hardest thing in the world to understand. Some of us are prepared to use it to get power, others only in self-defense, some all the time, others not at all. But then there’s another type, unlike all the others, who seems to fight entirely without purpose. Ask anyone who has looked into a pair of those eyes when they turn dark, and you’ll realize that we belong to different species. No one can really know if those people lack something that other people possess or if it’s the other way around. If something goes out inside them when they clench their fists or if something switches on."

"Leo gets to know Benji that night. Gets to know his fears. Benji isn’t afraid of fighting, he’s not afraid of getting beaten up, not even afraid of dying. But he’s terrified of this: turning around and seeing a twelve-year-old get hurt and feeling responsible. Anyone who feels responsibility isn’t free."

"Benji’s chin drops, and a knot in his chest tightens. He can see that Leo is awestruck by his ability to hurt other people. Benji doesn’t know who he hates most for that.

“You haven’t got it in you, Leo,” he says quietly.

The boy snaps. Not just his voice, his whole being. “Kevin raped my sister! What sort of man am I if I don’t—”

Benji hugs the boy and whispers in his ear, “I’ve got sisters, too, and if anyone did to one of them what Kevin did to Maya, I’d be full of hate, too.”

Leo splutters in despair, “If Kevin raped one of your sisters, you’d have killed him!”

Benji knows he’s right. So he tells the truth: “So don’t end up like me, then. Because once you do, it’s too late to change.”"

"A younger boy stops at a different locker in the same school. Twelve years old. Covered in bruises. Yesterday he grabbed a branch and threw himself into a fight without hesitation in order to smash the legs of someone who was trying to hurt Benjamin Ovich. That sort of thing doesn’t go unnoticed in this town.

Today there’s something hanging from his locker. At first he thinks it’s a trash bag. He couldn’t be more wrong. It’s a black jacket. No logos or emblems or symbols, just a perfectly ordinary black jacket. It doesn’t mean anything. It means everything. It’s far too big for Leo, because they want him to know that he can’t become one of them until he’s much older. But they’ve hung it on his locker so that everyone in his school will get the message.

 He’s got brothers now. You don’t touch him again."

"The men who make up the Pack aren’t extremists; what makes them dangerous is simply the fact that they stick together. Against everything, through everything, for one another. Benji remembers a book he read by some journalist who said on the subject of sport and violence that “every large group you don’t yourself belong to is a threat.”"

"Anxiety is a truly remarkable thing."

"Anxiety. It’s such a peculiar thing. Almost everyone knows what it feels like, yet none of us can describe it. Maya looks at herself in the mirror, wonders why it can’t be seen on the outside. Not even on X-rays—how does that work? How can something that bangs away at us so horribly hard on the inside not show up on the pictures as black scars, scorched into our skeletons? How can the pain she feels not be visible in the mirror?"

"When people talk about rape, they always do so in the past tense. She “was.” She “suffered.” She “went through.”

 But she didn’t go through it, she’s still going through it. She wasn’t raped, she’s still being raped. For Kevin it lasted a matter of minutes, but for her it never ends. It feels as though she’s going to dream about that running track every night of her life. And she kills him there, every time. And wakes up with her nails dug into her hands and a scream in her mouth.

 Anxiety. It’s an invisible ruler."

"That night Maya writes a song she’ll never perform. It is called “Hear Me.”

Every man I know, every father and brother and son,

Always these clenched hands. Where did you get that idea from?

Always this violence, always round holes and a square block,

The absurd idea you were sold, that we want you to fight for us.

If you want to do something for us,

Put a weapon down for me,

Close the maw of hell for me,

Be a friend to me,

Try to be good men for me.

You boast about all you’re going to do for me.

So when are you going to stop ruining things for me?

Do you want to know what you can do for me?

Start by hearing me."

"But there are other things you can’t grow either: parents are a sort of plant you can’t choose, with roots that go deep and catch your feet in a way that only the child of an addict can understand."

"Anxiety. It owns us but leaves no trace."

"Some people just have a core of sadness."

"“Sorry.”

That’s the worst thing. Daughters have no defense against that word."

"“Do you hate Maya?”

“No,” Benji replies.

He doesn’t play stupid, he understands the question, and Ana falls in love with him for that. She clarifies: “I don’t mean, do you hate her for being raped. I mean . . . do you hate her for existing? If she hadn’t been there that night . . . you’d still have everything, your best friend, your team . . . your life was perfect. You had everything. And now—”

Benji replies in a neutral tone of voice, “I ought to hate Kevin if I was going to hate anyone.”

“So do you?”

“No.”

“Who do you hate, then?” Ana asks, but she knows.

Benji hates his own reflection. So does Ana. Because they should have been there. They should have stopped it. Things shouldn’t have gone completely to hell for their friends. It should always have been Ana and Benji. Because they aren’t the kind of people who get happy endings."

"Everyone has moments when her skin’s longing for someone else’s touch becomes unbearable."

"Peter feels as though he’s suffocating. “Why are you so keen to take on the Pack?”

Theo replies, “Because they rule with the help of violence. A democracy can’t allow that. Anyone who becomes powerful because they’ve physically fought their way to the top needs to be opposed. You can always be absolutely certain of one thing when it comes to power, Peter: no one who gets their hands on it ever lets go of it voluntarily.”"

"She’s never felt more alone, and loneliness drives everyone to make bad decisions, but perhaps none more than sixteen-year-olds."

"It’s so easy to think that what we post online is like raising your voice in a living room when it’s actually more like shouting from the rooftops. Our fantasy worlds always have consequences for other people’s realities"

"Our spontaneous reactions are rarely our proudest moments. It’s said that a person’s first thought is the most honest, but that often isn’t true. It’s often just the most stupid. Why else would we have afterthoughts?"

"It’s always the aggressors’ feelings we have to defend. As if they’re the ones who need our understanding."

"It’s only words. Combinations of letters. How can they possibly hurt anyone?"

"“There may be equality on the ice. But the same thing doesn’t apply to the sport in general, Peter.”

“No. And that’s our fault. Yours and mine and everyone else’s.” Peter throws his arms out. “But what are we supposed to do?”

Sune raises an eyebrow. “We see to it that the next kid who says he’s different in some way is met with a shrug of the shoulders. We need to say, ‘So what? That doesn’t matter, does it?’ And one day perhaps there won’t be homosexual hockey players and female coaches. Just hockey players and coaches.”

“The community isn’t that simple,” Peter says.

“The community? We are the community!” Sune replies."

"Peter snaps back in frustration, “So what do you think Benjamin wants us to do, then?”

“Nothing.”

“We have to do something!”

“Do you care about his sexuality? Does it change the way you look at him?”

“Of course not!”

Sune pats Peter on the shoulder. “I’m a silly old man, Peter. I don’t always know what’s right and what’s wrong. But Benjamin has been the cause of a lot of crap outside this ice rink over the years, fighting and smoking dope and God knows what else. But he’s a damn good player, so you and everyone else has said, every time, ‘That has nothing to do with hockey.’ So why should this have anything to do with hockey? Let the boy live his life. Don’t force him to become a figurehead. If we’re uncomfortable with his sexuality, then he’s not the one with the damn problem—we are!”"

"Sune scratches his remaining hair. “Secrets weigh a person down. Can you imagine what it must have been like to carry around that secret about yourself your whole life? Hockey was his refuge. The ice may have been the only place where he felt just the same as everyone else. Don’t take that away from him.”

“So what do I do?”

“Let him earn his place in the team on the strength of his hockey alone, just like everyone else. He’s going to be treated differently everywhere else now. Don’t let that happen to him here.”"

"Maya doesn’t heal inside that barn. She doesn’t build a time machine, she doesn’t change the past, she isn’t blessed with memory loss. But she will come back here every day and learn martial arts, and one day soon she will be standing in the line at the supermarket when a stranger accidentally brushes past her. And she won’t flinch. It’s the greatest of all small events, and no one understands. But she will walk home from the store that day as if she were on her way somewhere. That evening she will come back to train some more. And the next day."

"The first thing Vidar notices is how beautiful her ankles are, as if they weren’t meant for floors but for running through forests and over rocks. The first thing Ana notices is Vidar’s black hair, so thin that it hangs over the skin of his face like raindrops on a windowpane.

 In many years’ time we might say this was a story about violence. But that won’t be true, at least not entirely.

 It’s also a love story."

"“What are you playing?” she asks.

“What?” he mumbles, as if he’s only just noticed her.

She’s not that easily fooled. “You heard.”

He starts to laugh; he does that when he’s nervous. He will soon discover that when Ana gets nervous, she makes sarcastic jokes instead. If they spend their whole lives together, they might become the least suitable couple to encounter at a funeral: one who can’t stop making jokes and one who can’t stop giggling.

Vidar falls head over heels for her, because he’s the type who doesn’t know how to stop himself."

"Most of us don’t know what terrible things we’re capable of. How can we, until someone pushes us far enough? Who has any idea how dangerous we can be until someone threatens our family?"

"Benji is avoiding eye contact. “Are you disappointed in me, too?”

Ramona starts to laugh, coughing up smoke. “Me? Because you want to sleep with men? You sweet boy, I’ve always been very fond of you. I wish you a happy life. So I can only lament the fact that you want to sleep with men, because one thing I can tell you here and now is that it’s impossible to be happy with men. They’re nothing but a load of damn trouble!”"

"Why does anyone love team sports? Because we want to be part of a group? For some people the answer is simply that a team is a family. For anyone who needs an extra one or never had one in the first place."

"Love and hate. Joy and sorrow. Anger and forgiveness. Sports carry the promise that we can have everything tonight. Only sports can do that."

"At some point almost everyone makes a choice. Some of us don’t even notice it happening, most don’t get to plan it in advance, but there’s always a moment when we take one path instead of another that has consequences for the rest of our lives. It determines the people we will become, in other people’s eyes as well as our own. Elisabeth Zackell may have been right when she said that anyone who feels responsibility isn’t free. Because responsibility is a burden. Freedom is a pleasure."

"It’s only a hockey game. An ice rink packed with people, two locker rooms full of players, two teams facing each other. Two men in a basement. Why do we care about that sort of thing?

Perhaps because it clarifies all of our most difficult questions. What makes us shout out loud with joy? What makes us cry? What are our happiest memories, our worst days, our deepest disappointments? Who did we stand alongside? What’s a family? What’s a team?

 How many times in life are we completely happy?

 How many chances do we get to love something that’s almost pointless entirely unconditionally?"

"If he’d had a means of escape right then, he might well have taken it, but there’s only one way out of there. So who does he want to be? Everyone has moments when that’s decided. When we choose.

He wipes his face, unlocks the door, and steps back into the locker room. It’s the smallest of gestures, and all his teammates are still silent when he emerges, but when he gets back to his place, his shoes are full of shaving cream. Not just his. Everyone’s. Every pair of shoes under every bench. Because the men around him want him to know that he’s no different from anyone else. Not in here."

"Amat clears his throat. “You’ve showered with me, so you should be an expert. Am I sexy?”

Before Benji has time to answer, Amat grins. “I’m not asking for myself. I’m asking for my best friend.”

Beside him Bobo jerks as if someone had given him an electric shock. It’s a small thing for one young man to do for another one, but you can handle a lot of things in life if you have a best friend. Even more if you’re allowed to be someone else’s."

"Hockey is simple. It’s both the fairest and the most unfair sport in the world."

"There are so many things Bobo ought to have asked her. Death does that to us, it’s like a phone call, you always remember exactly what you should have said the moment you hang up. Now there’s just an answering machine full of memories at the other end, fragments of a voice that are getting weaker and weaker."

"It’s so easy to place your hope in people. To think that the world can change overnight. We demonstrate after an attack, we donate money after a disaster, we lay our hearts bare online. But for every step forward we take, we take an almost equally large step back. Seen over time, every change is so slow that it’s barely visible when it’s happening."

"All sports are fairy tales, that’s why we lose ourselves in them."

"When Benji opens his locker one morning, there are notes at the bottom, as usual. But one of them is different. Just one word: “Thanks.” The next day there’s another one, in different handwriting, saying “I told my sister I’m bisexual yesterday.” A few days later there’s a third note, again in different handwriting, which says, “I haven’t told anyone else, but when I do I’m not going to say I’m gay, I’m going to say I’m like you!” Then someone sends him an anonymous text: “Everyones talking about u they c u as a symbol I hope u know how important u are to all of us who darent say anything!!!!”

Just a few small notes and messages. Just words. Just anonymous voices who want him to know what he means now."

"When Beartown Ice Hockey plays its next game on the road, the rumors about Benji have reached that town, too. In every town he plays in from now on, there will be people who shout the most disgusting things they can think of to get him off balance. But Benji doesn’t give in, he just scores goals instead. The more they yell, the better he gets. After the game Bobo hugs him and exclaims happily, “If they hate you, you’re doing something right! You’re the best! They’d never hate you this much if you weren’t best!”

Benji tries to smile. Pretend it’s nothing. But he can’t quite stop himself from wondering how long he’s going to have to be the best. How long it’s going to take before anyone just lets him play."

"Sometimes you have to laugh at the crap, that’s how you make it bearable."

"He’s invincibly strong and unbelievably fragile at one and the same time. He reminds Maya a lot of Ana sometimes.

“Why should I forgive her? What she did to you was horrible!” she snaps.

“But you’re like sisters. And sisters forgive each other,” Benji manages to say.

Because he’s got sisters. Maya tilts her head and asks, “Have you forgiven Ana?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because people make mistakes, Maya.”"

"If Ana and Vidar had been an ordinary love story, perhaps they could have lived their whole lives together. Perhaps they would have gotten fed up with each other, broken up, or perhaps they would have kept on falling in love with the same person. An ordinary life is long if you live it together with someone else.

But the thing about being an unusual teenager is that sometimes you just want to be an ordinary teenager."

"Vidar and Ana’s fingertips nudge each other one last time. Theirs is no ordinary love story. They may have loved each other for a shorter time than many of us, but they’ve loved harder than most."

"The path back to normal life is indescribably long once death has swept the feet out from under those of us who are left. Grief is a wild animal that drags us so far out into the darkness that we can’t imagine ever getting home again. Ever laughing again. It hurts in such a way that you can never really figure out if it actually passes or if you just get used to it."

"It’s so easy to get people to hate one another. That’s what makes love so impossible to understand. Hate is so simple that it always ought to win. It’s an uneven fight."

"Life is a weird thing. We spend all our time trying to manage different aspects of it, yet we are still largely shaped by things that happen beyond our control."

"Benji stands outside the ice rink for a long time. He’s smoking in the shade of some trees, his feet deep in the snow. He’s played ice hockey his whole life, for so many different reasons, for so many different people’s sake. Some things demand our all, and choosing this sport is like choosing a classical instrument, it’s too difficult just to be a hobby. No one wakes up one morning and just happens to be a world-class violinist or pianist, and the same applies to hockey players: it takes a lifetime of obsession. It’s the sort of thing that can absorb your entire identity. In the end an eighteen-year-old man is left standing outside an ice rink thinking “Who can I be, if I’m not this?”"

"Hands him a piece of paper containing a brief handwritten text. “I got into music school. I’ll be moving in January. I don’t know if you’ll be back here before then, so I . . . I just wanted to give you this.”

While he reads it, she starts to walk back toward her mom’s car. When he’s finished, he calls after her, “MAYA!”

“WHAT?” she shouts back.

“DON’T LET THE BASTARDS SEE YOU CRY!”

She laughs with tears in her eyes. “NEVER, BENJI! NEVER!”

  Perhaps they will never meet again, but she wrote all the biggest things she feels for him on that scrap of paper:

I wish you courage

I wish you rushing blood

A heart that beats too hard

Feelings that make everything too hard

Love that gets out of control

The most intense adventures

I hope you find your way out

I hope you’re the kind of person

Who gets a happy ending"

"Because it’s a simple game if you strip away all the crap surrounding it and just keep the things that made us love it in the first place.

 Everyone gets a stick. Two nets. Two teams.

 Us against you."

Did you notice that this review is shorter and it feels rushed? That's because it is, because I couldn't wait much longer to start reading The Winners, so I made this review in a hurry, sorry! But I have waited so long for The Winners already, so I hope you'll understand.

But now I'm having a panic attack again because this series is coming an end, as I only have one more book left to read. Please pray for my well being as I brace myself for the ending of all of my beloved characters. I will undoubtedly fall to pieces again. BUT I'M GONNA LOVE IT.

PLOT - ⭐⭐⭐⭐

WRITING STYLE - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

ENTERTAINMENT LEVEL- ❤️❤️❤️

BOOK COVER DESIGN - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

OVERALL BOOK RATING - ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

[gyahyahyahayhahayahyahyahyahyaha]

had a dream i was in the trunk of a minivan or smth with my grandparents my mother and a certain shithead who was driving. i think yuuka kazami and one of those rock ppl from hoseki no kuni was in the car too... maybe

we were driving around and we kept passing bythis like facility forthat had this “heat furnace” which was this like empty and somewhat small square parking garage where all the entryways and walls had these super thick metal closed shutters that could withstand molten temperatures. there was like one entryway from outside and it was... narrow. it had these thick slabs of metal on each side of the entrance with like a meter long gap between each one....

kinda like this i guess

anyways the shithead driving the car like just fully accelerated into the garage area and the instant we passed the entryway i could feel an overwhelming heat. he disappeared. he left us to die. probably to go find the door controls to lock us in himself. i immediately looked behind us to see if we could just bakc out unimpeded and thankfully there was still time to get out. however i also saw the hoseki no kuni character (dont remember whic one maybe phos) and yuuka kazami side by side as they leisurely walked back outside. i thought nothing much of it since my #1 priority is making sure we can still make it out(i was kinda glad i didnt see the shithead that parked us here because if i did i woulda wasted what little precious time we had left running him over with the car). i planked across the seats so i could reachthe steering wheel, wrenched the car into reverse and punched the gas pedal with one hand on the wheel. we got out pretty easy but eveyrone was short of breath from like almost dying of heat exaustion. we were only in there for a few seconds but it was hot enough to kill us from the residual heat alone,. the damn thing wasnt even active it was jsut retaining THAT much fucking heat from its last use. the heat furnace was meant to be able to reduce just about any object into a molten puddle at its highest temperatures in mere seconds.

i dont remember who started driving after that but i sat back down in the bakc of the car and just kept looking out the window. an old friend of mine showed up int he car at some point and we just started driving home. it was like my neighbourhood but most of the entrances to most of the buildings n businesses aroudn on the street were like walled off or covered in these mega electronic billboards. apparently a water park had was doing some “end of summer temporary faire setup” and it was using allt he space occupied by all the buildings surrounding the street but not the street itself. it was all just such an excessive use of water and electricity. the first thing i saw was this megabillboard that was like maybe almost a whole entire mile long, made up out of all these segmented billboards and they were all playing touhou ads. i think it was just yuyuko like. waving her fan around and like singing a song. there were some that also had toyosatomimi no miko doing some shit too. idr what tho.

i guess you could say it was somethign like this. like just led billboards that were so big they kinda looked like lcd billboards

i kept looking at them absolutely bewildered that the local area had the infrastructure availiable that could even run this kind of demand for electricity n all that. as well as like just wondering what the fuck was even beign advertised. there were swome like actual product advertisements too but 90% of the time i was just seeing touhou characters like..... im not even sure they were ads for anything in particular cuz they were just like dancing n singing or wahtever. i was just so out of my mind confused about all this thinking like. i want to see whos responsible for alla this.

we stopped by the only parking lot availiable that wasnt being taken up by the water park’s temporary setup faire thing and into one of the only stores that hadnt been repurposed and still functioned as a store. going down the street i felt like iwas in a labyrinth but the theres only 2 ways to go. backwards or forwards. the store itself however was just a regular labyrinth ig lol. i wandered around a bit, tried a free sampleof sausage? the others went n did some other stuff but then and we left n got bavck n the car, i kept looking at all the billboards, i mena mostly cuz you couldnt look anwwhere from that street without seeing one. most of what was going on with the faire was walled off so you couldnt see from the street except for the REALLY tall structures, and there was just so many bright flashing lights coming from almost every angle except for directly above. it was very cloudy out, the kind of sky youd see almost immediately after sunset when theres still light in the sky but just barely so its all a very dark blueish colour. we kept going until we reached a forest and i saw more billboards. i wanted to blow them all up. and that damn water park too.

[tigger8900]

Goliath, by Tochi Onyebuchi

⭐⭐⭐⭐

It's just a few short decades from now and humanity has moved on from Earth to the stars, leaving those without the means to pick up the pieces planetside. Even as those with privilege begin to colonize space, the people left behind — largely Black and brown — defy their poisoned environment and crumbling infrastructure, banding together to create safe havens. And then the colonists, those who'd once fled, began to return, seeking new experiences and a return to authentic living back on Earth. Featuring an ensemble cast, this novel seeks to explore not just the Earth's demise, but also the story of what comes next…and who stands to inherit that future.

I've often said that speculative fiction is very much of the time it's written. Accordingly, this novel, begun in the mid-2010s and published in early 2022, is very much of our times. And yes, it is very political. How could it not be, with themes including eco crises, mass incarceration, white supremacy, class and racial privilege, healthcare inequality, police brutality, white flight, and gentrification? The job of good speculative fiction is to use a fictional narrative to illuminate something of our own time and place, and in that regard this book is stellar.

The book's biggest strength — its varied cast of characters, painting a picture of the future through several distinct narratives — unfortunately also contributes to its biggest weakness. This is due to the way the story is told, with the narratives fragmented and presented non-linearly. While I believe my sense of the whole is complete, or near enough, I'd honestly struggle to tell you, start to finish, what precisely befell each character in the story. There's nothing quite like seeing a character pop up in a scene and having to pause, confused, and think to yourself: "I thought he was dead by now!" I'm not sure that reading it again would help. I think I'd likely have to break out the index cards and start laying the plot out down the hallway to make complete sense of it. Honestly, some kind of dates on the sections would have helped, but that would have ruined the near-future feel of the disaster so I understand why the author left them out.

I also have to mention that this book frequently calls upon Christian themes, ones that go beyond the David and Goliath reference. It's not terribly surprising, given the historical role of spiritual leaders in community organizing, but based on what blurb you read it's easy to get caught off guard. I will say that the book was never preachy, so this is certainly the better kind of Christian-inspired fiction, but if you're someone who avoids such references for whatever reason you might want to give this title a pass.

On a similar note, there's something about the gay couple in this story that gave me pause. Specifically, it's that the only gay couples are among the colonizers. All of the people who'd been left behind on Earth were depicted, as far as I could tell, pursuing exclusively cis-het relationships. I know I'm prone to paranoid reading when Christianity and queerness meet, so I've spent a fair bit of time turning this over in my mind before I sat down to write this, to try to be as fair as possible about a book that, overall, I enjoyed. Ultimately, I don't see any evidence that the author was attempting to make a point by writing it this way. I'm not mad about it. But that doesn't mean that this doesn't have the potential to be disturbing to some readers, so I wanted to mention it.

Last, but not least…do the horses die? Mild spoilers ahead, stop reading now if you don't want! A handful of wild horses are rescued and adopted as community livestock. These horses later die in a stable fire. Their demise is not narrated in detail, but it's made clear that they don't survive.

[weerd1]

In defense of “Somehow.”

Hi all! I don’t usually go fishing for trouble on Tumblr or in a fairly vitriolic Star Wars Fandom. However, here I am about to try a friendly discussion on “The Rise of Skywalker.” This is a long one, so buckle up.

Let me be very clear up front: Yes, I love a lot of this movie, but like the vast majority of Star Wars content, I can’t say the movie doesn’t have its problems. There are parts that are just sloppy as hell (like TPM and ROTJ before it). The way the film treats Finn and Rose Tico is at times offensive in its disregard for characters I love. There are too many Macguffins and some whole characters and even planets that don’t need to be there.

There are other gripes though that really bug me, not because I think people aren’t allowed to have different opinions from my own,  but because they seem to be willfully ignoring some of the film’s content in order to make the film fit their narrative. I would like to offer a defense of Poe Dameron’s weary, “somehow, Palpatine returned.” 

Look, the meme is funny.  

There are places I see this used and I laugh at it a lot, because I get it. But it does seem to indicate that the film offers NO possible explanations for how this happened, and just uses this line as an excuse for the character to come back. And that simply is not so.

In that very scene, someone asks “how,” and a friendly Hobbit responds with, “Dark science, cloning. Secrets only the Sith knew.” Now, alone even that is a handwave; but those comments are well into the film, and we have already seen:

A variety of machines keeping his mangled corpse alive.

Tanks full of Snokes- failed clones that were at least useful.

Palpatine speaking in Snoke’s voice when he tells Kylo Ren he WAS every voice Kylo ever heard in his head.

An entire planet full of Sith scientists, soldiers, and worshippers following Palpatine’s every wish.

The child OF a Palpatine clone who it turns out there’s a whole trilogy about.

And that’s before we even get to Tired Poe Dameron and the Friendly Hobbit.

Additionally, the movie reminds us that despite interpretation, Palpatine DOES NOT NECESSARILY FALL DOWN A REACTOR in RotJ. His throne room as that movie showed us in 1983 is at the top of a tower rising from the Death Star’s surface. The elevator doesn’t go to the core, it goes to the surface, or at least into the infrastructure where the crew operates. It’s relatively close to the equatorial trench, and Luke drags Vader to a shuttle in those docking bays. Yes, there is a flickery blue light at the bottom of the shaft, but it is poorly defined. Even assuming there is a reactor at the bottom, the release of energy we see is not from a reactor, but rather Palpatine himself who was just shooting blue lightning out of his hands, and as he “dies” there is a bunch of blue lightning released. That makes sense. 

But the question does remain whether this was a clone of Palpatine in TROS or the original body re-animated, because that is honestly possible!  We know his Sith minions have BEEN to the wreckage of the Death Star, because Ochi’s little dagger has a specific map to WHERE on the wreckage the tower is. So, here’s the guy we know was hunting down other Palpatine clones (like Rey’s dad) and had been to the tower. This is pretty easy to read that he HAS recovered the original corpse, the Sith machines are tying to restore it, and they hope the existing clone program can help with that.

“What do you mean existing Clone program?” 

Well, let me first say, this ties to the two fundamental truths about Star Wars: It has NEVER been chronological (we start at Ep 4) and it has never been complete (even at the end of Ep 4, the Empire is standing and the fight goes on).  It was 20 years before Star Wars put out prequels to describe HOW Anakin became Vader. I’ll also remind you that the word “Sith” never appears in the original trilogy. There were two DECADES of Star Wars where there was no official “rule of two.” Where we didn’t even know Palpatine WAS HIMSELF A SITH and not just some other Dark Side dude. So much of the background for the OT that is left unsaid in those films comes in later, non-chronological material, that still leaves an expansive and incomplete picture of the Universe. The Prequels still need the “Clone Wars” cartoon to flesh out many of their tenants as well. We can’t blame Disney for treating Star Wars the way George Lucas treated it from 1977 to 2014. 

So, long aside, but we get the fact Palpatine is playing around with self-perpetuation for years. Even in TCW we have storylines about finding Force sensitive kids and sequestering them away.  In the original expanded universe, the Zahn trilogy tells us Palpatine needed to cycle through clones every few years to stay alive. So even when there was NOTHING to go off of but the OT, writers were playing with this idea, and it bubbles under the surface of the PT and TCW (Sifo Dyas and the cloners of Kamino for instance). 

Other, well regarded modern shows are playing with this too. Look at the fact a Snoke clone shows up in S2 of Mandalorian, with Grogu’s DNA used to try and help create him. The Bad Batch is showing us the Kaminoans sequestered off somewhere under Palpatine’s control right after the Clone War ended. “Oh,” that’s just a retcon,” I hear.

So were the Prequels. So was TCW. Again, this is how Lucas ALWAYS treated Star Wars.

So yes, when “THE DEAD SPEAK” in TROS, it’s a surprise, but it is not a plot device that exists in a vacuum. There is evidence in the film. There is evidence in the pre-Dinsey properties, and there is evidence still being laid out in other associated shows and films. It is not just, “Somehow.”

[bigskydreaming]

x-men comic finished the vault arc synch/laura and darwin went through

darwin's suffering sucked, but wow his evolution was clever.

dissapointed they didn't go god mode with him, and let him go through all that shit int he first place.

Yeah, their continued refusal to categorize Darwin and Synch as omegas is glaring and not cute. Like, bullshit is bullshit. But I do agree that at least Armando's glow-up seems particularly plot relevant....can't help but think his dataform is going to be key to defeating Nimrod, Karima and/or the Phalanx.

I have no strong feelings about Synchverine as a pairing, though I kinda hate it just on the basis of the shit being flung at Ev by racist Laura stans....its like umm you guys are fine shipping her with HELLION but Everett Thomas, you object to? Okay, that's a Choice, alright. (And I say that as someone who LIKES Julian, lmfao, but like. Let's be fucking real here, can we?)

Personally I've always shipped Ev with Monet and I'm always gonna be annoyed the two of them haven't gotten a single scene together since his resurrection, but oh well. And idk if you're familiar with her, but given Ev's age because of the Vault, alternatively if older Laura doesn't stick around (we know this X-office isn't a fan of duplicates so part of my wariness about this ship is I feel like its headed for Angstville in a way that won't do either character any favors), I would loooooove for them to bring back Gaia. She was a reality warping mutant from Gen-X that had a will they/won't they pseudo relationship with Ev back in the day....

Ironically, the reason they never got together was because Gaia left to travel the world because due to comic book typical Shenanigans, she was several centuries old and yet had barely any life experience....and hmmm, who is now also several centuries old and yet limited to a very narrow parameter of life experiences? I'm just saying. HERE'S HOW GAIA/EVERETT CAN STILL WIN!!!

But yeah, I'm kinda tired of the whole Vault thing because it continues to be just a wasted opportunity that they seem to have no interest in using to its fullest narrative potential and just keep coming back to anyway, and its not exactly making any characters look good. Was not a fan of Forge's storyline here, though at least he didn't go full Hank McCoy with Caliban and pulled back before he crossed too many moral thresholds there. I did like Caliban's dynamic with Serafina though, and I'm a big fan of Forge's vision for a future Krakoa.....like.....one of the weakest aspects of Krakoa as a paradigm has been the lazy efforts at nation-building, there's no real infrastructure to it, and I'm not really talking physical infrastructure so much as social, but making Krakoa look more along the lines of what Forge is picturing could go a long way towards breaking writers out of the rut they seem to be in with seeing it as fully formed as-is, when its like.....really, really, not.

But also I just love Cassara's art and worldbuilding so I'm just kinda like....any chance for him to do backgrounds is a Yes Please from me. I think he and Reis have done the best renditions of Krakoa to date, and with Caselli coming over from X-Men Red to do the tie-in Brood storyline issues when the book crosses over with Captain Marvel in a couple months, I would looooooove it if Cassara goes over to X-Men Red for a couple issues too. I wanna see his take on Arakko.

Anyway - the BS with Darwin and Synch remains my biggest pet peeve, tbh. The omega list is waaaaay too white, and there are so many options for omega characters of color. The two of them, Laura Dean aka Pathway from Alpha Flight, Willie Evans Jr., Joseph Calhoun, etc, etc. And with several Great Ring seats up for grabs on Arakko, they're introducing more omegas there, which is good because I don't think there should be any more Krakoans on the Great Ring, Ororo and Roberto are enough as is. But one of the new Arakkii omegas is the old white guy with a beard from the Sins of Sinister promo, his name is Jon Ironfire I think and that's just his design from Year 1000, when we meet him in the present X-Men Red he'll of course be much younger. Still, the point is, they keep making new white omega mutants when......seriously. There are so many characters of color they could be upgrading instead.

[pooma-education]

Group Discussion

24/09/22

Team: UNVolunteers - India

➖

Courtesy: Mrs. Sangeetha, Dr. Raavee, Dr. Sekar srinivasan, Mr S C Vohra, Dr. Balasubramanian, Pastor. Dr. Pablo Puja and Azeez

➖

Topic: The Classroom is a Factory, But What’s the Product?

➖

• Mrs. Sangeetha Thyagarajan: If the classroom is a factory and we all are workers, then we should produce

Ideal future citizens for the world who are:

- Trustworthy

- Knowledgeable

- Society conscious

- Morally responsible

- have high ethical standards

- take responsibilities seriously

- give back to the nation

and finally, have the betterment of society and humanity as their goals along with personal goals.

• AZEEZ: Are we sure that our products are such a characters?

Ideal aim of education is such a products to produce. Worldwide appreciated education system does produce such a product?

• Mrs. Sangeetha Thyagarajan: Sir, This is as a follow-up of your assumption that a classroom is a factory.

A factory can decide what it wants to produce and its contraints, so ( assuming ) we can decide our products, I listed out the desired characteristics our products!!

• AZEEZ: If so, products are based on classroom factories or the factory workers - teachers?

• Mrs. Sangeetha Thyagarajan: Don't both go hand-in-hand? One cannot exist without the other.

• AZEEZ: As it is not going in the direction desired. What could be done?

• Mrs. Sangeetha Thyagarajan: Educate parents and cooperate school administrators about the importance of value-based education.

Numbers, grades, pass percentage, high fees, fancy amenities and great infrastructures DOES NOT MAKE A NATION.

It needs citizens worthy of carrying the nations name forward.

Corporate schools are digging their own graves by creating more profit/money minded individuals who'll inturn bringing business into every walk of life.

Don't be surprised if the next generation hire wives, parents and children

• AZEEZ: Parents too once students in our classrooms. As they knew the value of education, they allow their wards to get education. Are they not not good products produced from earlier day classrooms.

• Mrs. Sangeetha Thyagarajan: Yes, so true!

That's why they behave badly and don't cooperate with schools when they are forced to shell out money and don't see the value in their wards.

• Dr Sekar Seenivasan: My humble doubt is education aims at sublime behavioral change and final destination being self realisation.

The modern educational business entrepreneurship had commercialised the whole system and we are discussing as factory model and products. Really i can't fix it.

Bahuvitham roopam bahuvitham annam. Regards drssekar

• Mr. S. C. Vohra: I wonder whether classroom should be compared to a factory where the products are mass produced on a conveyor belt. No heterogeneity at all like a classroom , completely mechanistic. A classroom at the same time is a lively place where each individual grows at his/ her own pace without any mechanical intervention. Calling students products seems derogatory and demeaning to me. However, crass commercialisation has really reduced them to the level of factories, unwittingly and unfortunately snatching innocent children of their lovely childhood innocence.

• Dr. Raavee: Calling School as factory is not very appropriate.

It's a grooming centre, where students are groomed and prepared to lead a confident life. A confident youth can only make a confident country.

• AZEEZ: Schools mask the child labor with noble mission statements that claim they are producing "life-long learners." But that's just a cover. If it were true, you would expect to see schools where students explored their interests and reflected on their progress as learners.

The actual product of schools is data, and its production is pursued with relentless focus. Distracting subjects that aren't tested, are cut. No time is wasted on "creative" student projects – they don't produce data. And when there's no test to take, students can always get ready with more "test-prep."

Of course, a test data factory is a not pleasant place to work, absenteeism runs high and every year many students quit. But there's a steady supply of new students to take their place. It should be noted that teachers work at the same factories. Conditions are better for them. So they work.

Schools as data factory, produces data as percentage of pass and fail, percentage of reading and writing, percentage of new admission, percentage of hike in fees, tax paid......

Rulers wanted this to issue showcause notice, and adjust or moderate percentage of their failures in hiking national average in everything.

Is there board exam results below 90%, or less than national average in any state or central board of education?

Many of the current reforms in education aim to turn the schoolhouse into that plastic-products factory. .. The machinery heats and molds our children, then stamps, bags, and packages them to a professional uniformity."

Many of the current reforms in education aim to turn the schoolhouse into that paper printing factory. ..false progress report, false mark statements, false in everything.

Only the practising teachers in classroom know well how the egg is. Will it hatch or not?. Still the school has to give testimony that the egg with a crack is good.

Often we hear, students/parents saying this: I never ever thought of passing or scoring this much marks in this board exams. True or not.

Teachers involving in evaluation process know well, how many papers evaluated by them and how many students get truly passed? Still national pass average in examination is above unexpected percentage.

It is the same in all professional high order creative thinking exams.

Everything is data, based on data in education system. What is Mark statement? It is a data. How admission is made? Again data. Which school is good in the city? Again data. How is recruited? Based on data. All these datas are given by schools. Then what does a school mean? Is not a data factory?

So What's the Real Product?

I agree with rulers/stakeholders/parents that schools have been turned into factories. But they don't produce students, they just work there.

The demands of testing have turned schools into factories that harness the labor of students to toil at a "bubble-test" assembly line producing "achievement" data.

Whos suffered because of this change?

Students........do you believe this.

Of course the ones who suffered most were the students. They were forced to spend long hours engaged in an extended exercise in remembering what they were told, then practice it at their desk (or as homework) in preparation for the opportunity to give it back on the test (generally in the same form they had received it). Instead of exploring their interests, students served largely to produce performance statistics that educators could slice into measurable demographic sub groups.

• Dr. Pablo Puja: It's the same story, here in Chile, since many years ago...And the fault comes from standard tests to get national, regional or local rankings...Higher rankings mean more money. It doesn't matter the real product.

The point: Families are not preparing their children for the real life. Schools are not preparing students for real life.

• Dr. Bala Subramanian: Yes sir, very true the suffered were students and parents. As per statistics everything if cannot quantify cannot be analysed. And sadly th data analysts or the top level decision makers or the chairs like to fool the users by making numbers and percentage. If a person don't have a logical reasoning cannot figure out and additionally they keep on give tasks to the conventional workers be busy in activity, don't give time to refresh or to think new dimensions.

Statistics can fool the users/listeners very easily and same time conventional population don't have an alternate.

They keep on repeats even a wrong information in all types of media, make users guilty if not they stick with false news.

Teachers cannot do any/much things against the law makers, perhaps the maximum damage happens for the family

[ranboo5]

Dropping the Ranboo mixtape

Anyway at time of starting to write this post I had two likes and two affirmative replies, which is Good Enough For Me, so here I am :D I was gonna link the YT but on second thought my YT channel is a mess so this is gonna be one of the annoying ones that doesn’t link to one you can actually listen to but 

This is also a running list and currently organized roughly by increasingly hotter takes and it’s under a cut bc it’s 13 songs and I justified all of them 

Everybody Likes You (Lemon Demon) - LISTEN THE ANIMATION MEMES WEREN’T LYING THAT EVERYBODY LIKES YOU CAN RANBOOCORE. The increasingly distorted, incredibly bright repetition of EVERYBODY LIKES YOU EVERYBODY LIKES YOU EVERYBODY LIKES YOU until you can hear it morphing in and out of EVERYBODY LIED TO YOU? Tell Me That’s Not Him In The Spiral Depths 

Tall (Naps the Block on YT) - This is a) literally a theme for the End, b) sounds stumbling and anxious/high-strung, and c) echoes the Pigstep melody in the middle while still very much doing its own thing this is self explanatory 

Dance of Thorns/Old Secret mashup (Tensei and James Roach respectively, feat. woodfur00 on YT) (yes this is Homestuck music) - It’s just the vibes. The energy. The way the elegance of the violin lines of Dance of Thorns sounds almost nervous especially against the almost noir mystery vibes of Old Secret, and the guitar lines of Dance of Thorns add like. Initiative/urgency especially when they underlay the other music it’s so good I don’t think either song alone is Ranboo vibes but this remix definitely is. Just the mix of perseverance and desperation and melancholy and mystery and Class 

Touch-Tone Telephone (Lemon Demon) - This one is old news but tbh it just works. Man decides he’s the correct one in this situation and he’s losing his entire mind that no one is listening to him because he just is not 

2012 (Will Wood) - This one isn’t really clever it’s just about memory loss, derealization, identity, and often self-hatred (“A miserable fuck, but a loud Tao mystical” is a lot). “Did you lose yourself?/It’s always in the last place that you check” sounds so mocking in ways internal monologues like Droice have been and “I might find myself/By retracing my steps” is literally just Ranboo dealing with the Enderwalk; “And not until lobotomy abolished my monotony/Did I applaud autonomy, and modify a lot of me!” works so much for him Dealing With Himself generally, and also “I heard the world would turn to hell/Compared to that, I’m doing well!” is a Him sentiment 

Hand Me My Shovel, I’m Going In! (Will Wood) - Jokes about the three hour mining/grinding streams aside. Not only is the chorus so heavily a spiral/self-evaluation mood, but literally consider his thought processes abt the things he’s done/allegedly done and then consider “My dreams were shattered like a stained-glass window/Jesus in pieces! I believe I through a brick right through Him/But my memory could not be saved!/It just seems unlikely that it’s me who was to blame/So I bookmark my DSM, ‘cause I need to remember my place.” And now with the advent of the “experiments” the second verse’s “Take the road on higher ground, and tell me ‘don’t look down! You’ll fall and break your back’/But that just reminds me how there’s more to be found beneath the black!” is more relevant than ever 

Friends With You (The Scary Jokes) - Oh my god. Oh my fucking god man. This could be on here for “I put myself to bed just halfway through the party/I love all my friends, but I hate when their eyes are on me” alone but the general almost empty saccharine vibe of the song is immensely his vibe; the humorlessly-smiling vocal fry on “don’t know” in “Why do you pretend/You don’t know who’s to blame?” is probably responsible for 80% of this read. Not to mention the first lyrics are literally “How long do I have to wait/’Til my lonely days are over?” which is really the. The waiting it out man the So When Do I Get To Be Okay of it all. Shoutouts also to “And the crumbling infrastructure no one else can see,” the self hatred of “I miss being friends with you/But what can I do/What can I do/But leave you alone?” and to “And I can tell you really love me/Can you tell I’m really sorry?” Just. The mix of hope+affection and dejected cynicism and self-hatred in the lyrics

Saline Solution (none other than Mr Wilbur Soot) - Remember what I said about waiting it out until you get to be okay? Anyway that’s crystallized in “If I could just break one more night/Maybe I could wake up and feel alright” and also this is literally a song about catastrophizing and self-evaluation just,, in general and I will not be highlighting all the lyrics about this but I will highlight the fact that he literally calls himself pragmatic and also the lyric “blurring the facts and the fiction.” Also, the sheer desperate anger-concealing-breakdown vibes of “I think I’ve made my choice” to “I think I’ve found my voice” deserves a mention, as does the culminating end of “saline solution to all your problems” with the tears+now splash water motifs of it all with Ranboo I am going to die 

Funny (The Scary Jokes) - This is actually a softer take but not only does it literally start with the singer pleading with the addressee to look away, it  continues with “I went up in the middle of the night and I climbed right onto the stage/And I raged/And I cried/Oh, what a funny joke am I” disregarding everything as performance, reemphasizes the opening demand with the qualifier “it’s not that I hate you, it’s just that I’m funny these days,” and then kills you with the last couple lines which. Yeah he does care and it does,,, just,,,,, a

Chemical Overreaction (Will Wood) - This is where the mood VIOLENTLY whiplashes because this is where we get unhinged. Anyway “I won’t stop to drop to draw a line in the sand/’Cause I’ll be picked apart to pieces by coyotes!” is LITERALLY the whole “I don’t do well with ‘peer pressure’” thing. “Where the sentimental value of the city around ya/Is deleted obsolete, but still completely will stun ya” is the single most L’Manberg lyric I’ve ever heard, especially from the perspective of a character whom I will repeatedly insist is narratively in the role of someone who’s shown up and seen the status quo as an outsider after it’s been established (hence the eternal New Kid vibes). Chorus very much has vibes of Ranboo Is Seized By The Urge To Do Something, and like. The entire dramatic end part. The last two lines especially (be very careful if you look up the vieo for this by the way it is NOT pretty; cws in the video for flashing, blood, suicide imagery) 

A Mannequin Adrift (The Scary Jokes) - The Bitterness. This song is just fully The Bitterness at the environment he’s stuck in; the saccharine comes back as does the “peer pressure” thematic and just the Having An Awful Time; the sarcastic saccharine comes back too, which is always good I love passive aggression. Honestly the first verse is just everything like just listen to it it immediately makes sense

Poison Ivy Grows (The Scary Jokes) - This is overall a song about having bad brain and not knowing what the hell to do about it; it’s so faintly bitter and distant and melancholy and also so zoned out. Also, it’s not the only lyric that matters here but it is enough to be a full argument on its own: “I used to spend so much time/Wandering around outside/Now I’ve got too much on my mind/Now I’ve got too much on my mind” 

Spring Haze (Tori Amos) - Listen. Do I know what Spring Haze is about? No. Is that gonna stop me from saying it’s about Ranboo? Also no. I just think “You say we’ll never make it there/So all we do is circle it” is so much, the fact that the bridge at the end is just “Why does it always end up like this?” repeated, and that it just feels so much like overall the song feels like a desperate attempt to figure Something out, and the chorus is just inexplicably him? It might be partially influenced by the fact that “Uh-oh, let go, off on my way” and, to a lesser extent, “Uh-oh, way to go” is not only in accordance with character vibes but also vaguely evocative of Ranboo’s speech pattern

[fakecrfan]

Since you very nicely offered to write me a fic:

Your prompt is: A story about a background character or characters dealing with life after the TMA apocalypse.

It can be set in the OG TMA universe in the post-post-apocalypse, or it can also be set in a different universe that was affected by the events of MAG 200.

Both OCs and characters established in-show are allowed.

This one aligned so well with my interests that I am actually tempted to open my inbox, briefly, in case anyone else has questions like “what is X bavjground character doing after the apocalypse?” so I can make a series out of it and expand on my post-post-apocalypse headcanons.

For now, you can read your fic here, on over here on AO3

---

Sarah doesn't know where she is.

England, she has to still be in England, she thinks. But it's not an England she recognizes. Not the cobblestone streets of London, and not the moors she used to visit on her vacations. The ground is barren, as though all blades of grass but a few have shriveled up and died. There are no trees, houses, or landmarks for miles--just scorched remnants of where they might have been before.

For a moment, the emptiness of it all is a relief after the hotel. But everything is the same on all sides, and she doesn't know where she is or where to go. She's starting to get hungry, too. She never got hungry in the hotel, nightmarish as it was.

She has to sit down for a moment, take a few deep breaths, and think.

Get food. Find shelter. Survive.

Find Alex.

(God, why had she left her child in a hotel room? Little twelve year old Alex who was still afraid to sleep without a night light. He'd begged her to stay, she should have--)

With that in mind she gets up. Doesn't know what direction to walk in, so she doesn't concern herself with trying to pick one. There's nothing to do but walk, keep her eyes open, and hope.

So she hopes.

---

None of our old maps match the landscape, anymore.

The world these days it's... not like in the before times, as I suppose we're calling it. Despite our hopes, ending the apocalypse wasn’t like everyone waking up from a nightmare. The land is...

It's scrambled, I guess. There are patches of the world that--well. They're not the same, but still have infrastructure intact. Electricity, running water, air conditioning. No scorched earth or rubble in these areas. Just a bunch of traumatized people living in an intact town, or city.

When I talk to them, they tell me it's not the city they remember, though. Everything has been switched around, houses and stores not where they remember them. Their neighbors aren't the neighbors their remember.

Those are the lucky ones. And then there's, well... the outside.

Some places have rubble everywhere, jagged steel ripped apart and waiting for someone to cut themselves on it. Some are frozen over, still waiting for the ice they were frozen over with in the apocalypse to melt. Some are scorched to dust. No phones out there, or anything that lets you connect back with home base.

I'm going out there. We need to map it out. We need to figure out our new world, understand it--and we need to get as many people out of the wastes as possible.

Melanie, Georgie--I’ll see you soon.

---

Sarah does find water. That's something. She's hungry still, so hungry, but she knows that the water is more important.

She wonders if she should stay there. She doesn't know if there will be more watering holes in the future, after all, and she has no way to carry it with her. She decides to keep moving on, and hope for the best.

She starts to see blades of grass poking up, along with some sort of metal crap strewn about the landscape. She looks at them a moment--it seems to be bits of an old carousel? Eventually, a giant sit in their shade, for a while. There she takes a moment to look at the horizon, and goes cold.

She recognizes the tower on the horizon.

A  scaffolded tower with two legs beneath it. A sight she'd last seen on a postcard from her brother. The Eiffel Tower.

Is she in Paris? No, that can't be it. It's just the tower out here in the wastes. There are none of the buildings that would normally surround it. It's almost as though its been ripped out of the city and transported here.

Does Paris even exist anymore? Does London?

If she even finds Alex, will there be a home for them to go back to?

---

I have a theory, Melanie. I think lots of people got transported to different places in the world based on what fear they belonged to. Like, a bunch of lonely people were put in the same place, a bunch of claustrophobic people were put in the same place, and so on. All away from the people they knew.

I’m in one of the suburban safe areas now. No one here knows each other. I talked to them all, and all of them remember living in the same house before, but none of them recognized the houses near them or the people in them. When I went from house to house, everyone had a different native language. I talked to a German guy and a French guy who spoke English, but a lot of them… couldn’t talk to me at all.

There was a woman who--she saw me and she lit up. She grabbed me and started talking a mile a minute in Arabic, I think. But I couldn’t understand her, and she--when I tried to talk back to her in English, her face just. Fell. And then she started to cry.

My dad refused to speak it at home, you know. He-- Actually, never mind. It’s not important. 

She ended up shoving me away.

---

Sarah makes it to the ruins of a forest. 

There’s nothing but stumps left of it, along with litter everywhere. She finds water again, filthy brackish water, and she drinks it anyway because she’s so thirsty. She starts sifting through all of the garbage strewn about for something edible. She finds stale bread crusts crawling with ant and eats them anyway. 

She finds a can of beans, and almost cries. When she can’t find a can opener, she screams instead.

---

The death count has gotten to me, honestly.

I’ve found dead bodies even in the towns and cities. Some looked like heart attacks. Some suicides. People who woke up but couldn’t bear the agony they’d just gone through. That’s still not… the worst of it.

I passed a whole field of dead bodies today.

Hundreds of people, I think, all of them lying dead in the soil. But there were... trails. They had been walking, before they collapsed. All walking in the same direction, to where you can still see London on the horizon.

They were alive. They were trying to get help. And they just... starved, it looks like. The walk was just too long.

How many people are going to die from it all, Melanie? How many already have, out where we can't see them?

I left as many jugs of clean water and rations along the roads as I could. I put up signs pointing to London, saying how many miles out they were, where I had stashed food. I gave them your number, so they know who to call to get to the shelter.

I hope it means the next group that passes by won't die.

I hope there is a next group.

---

Sarah can see what looks like a city in the distance before she collapses. 

She tries to get up, but can’t. She’s been walking for days now, it feels like, only sporadically drinking and almost never eating.  There just isn’t enough energy left in her to stand.

She tries to think about little Alex again, running around in his Batman cape, hoping some kind of love or maternal instinct will kick in and give her the last burst of adrenaline she needs to get up. It doesn’t work. Maybe she doesn’t love her own son anymore, really. Maybe it’s just been fear and guilt driving her this far, and that source has already been wrung dry. 

She manages to crawl a few feet, before she can’t even do that. With nothing else left to do, she starts to cry out. “Help! Water, please!” 

She doesn’t think anyone will hear, or show up. But against all odds, in her dimming vision she sees a figure come into view. Backpacked, clutching a water bottle. 

“Help,” she croaks out again. 

The figure gets closer, and she starts to be able to make out the details of his face. He’s her age, or older, with worry lines carved into his forehead and wide eyes. His nose looks eerily like her brother’s nose, and the shape of his jaw reminds her of her old boyfriend, the one who left her with--

She blinks. Maybe she’s hallucinating, or maybe she’s somehow run into a long lost cousin. But then, the man’s eye’s widen and his mouth opens.

“Mum?”

No, no it can’t…

“A-alex?”

No, Alex was a little round cheeked boy. This is a thirty year old man, at least, taller than her. It hasn’t been that long. It can’t be, it’s not--

“Mum?” He’s doing a frown that looks so, so familiar. This has to be a dream. “Mum, it’s--no.”

He sniffles. He steps forward, and steps back. He paces, uncertain.

“No, no,” she hears him mutter. “It’s all fake, all fake. It’s a trap. That’s what they want, the monsters and the face stealers. No one is real. Don’t give them what they want--’’

“Please.” she begs. 

But she hears him walk away, sniffling, and shortly thereafter everything goes dark. 

---

I have a confession to make, Melanie. I was going to side with Jon, back then. I could have lived with keeping everyone here suffering to prevent more of it. But when he said he was going to kill the whole world, not just leave it--that’s what made me snap. 

I couldn’t let the whole world die. Genocide of the entire human species? Anything but that. Surely passing along the suffering would be better, as long as it didn’t lead to the extinction of whole worlds. But… 

I keep finding more dead bodies.

I went back to that suburb I talked about, to restock on all my food. It was a lonely domain before, I think. I’d thought everyone there would be fine, you know. They didn’t have any deadly sicknesses, or twisted flesh injuries. They had food and water and shelter. But when I went back… more of them had died. 

Lots of suicides. Some of them snapped, and started to self injure.

The German guy I talked to had started to starve. He had a pantry full of food and he just wouldn’t eat it. I tried to get him to eat, to move in with someone else, but he said talking to people “made him sick.” 

I gave up, and left. I had to. There were too many people, and too much to do, so I left him. He’s probably dead now, or going to die soon. Because he can’t find the will to live, and I don’t know how to help someone with that.

The Lonely is probably one of the least directly harmful entities, right? This domain was just a suburb, probably the most comfortable you could get during the apocalypse. And yet the victims are still all dying. 

How much worse is it in places without food and water? In the corruption domains that still probably have deadly diseases spreading? In war zones, in flesh factories?

I think about that nursing home we found. All of the patients who'd died of heart attacks a few minutes after they'd woken up. The ones left alive screaming for help where no one could hear them, for days after the fact. All of the ones that died in their beds before we found them. 

I think about that field of bodies I found the other day. I think about the ruins of that Circus I found, people refusing to talk to me or each other--refusing to help because they didn’t believe it was over and thought everyone else was a mannequin. 

I think… I think it doesn’t matter that we saved the world. If people can’t find the will to live, ro rebuild, to trust and help each other again… I think we’re going through a mass extinction event anyway. 

---

Sarah’s in a car, she thinks. Not a moving one. She’s propped up against a seat,There’s something plastic pressed to her lips.

“Come on,” says a woman’s deep, level voice. “Come on. I got you. We’re getting to London. All you have to do is drink.”

Sarah opens her eyes. She sees a dark-skinned woman trying to coax her to drink, holding up a water bottle. 

“Just a sip,” the woman says. “Just enough to make it.”

Sarah closes her eyes, and takes a long moment to consider whether she wants to.

[langernameohnebedeutung]

Top five magneto moments from the X-Men movies?

Ohhh...lemme think. (I tried picking from different films. It's not really in any order of preference, just scenes I think are neat.

1. aka the first one. I mean, not the first-first one or the second one or- but the first scene with Charles and Erik being Like That and doing their thing.

There's already at least one pretty popular post about why this scene is so damn good and how it tells us so much about these guys' dynamic without telling us much at all and I just really think it's well-done, well-acted. Especially since in the og movies, Mags and Charles aren't the main-characters so they don't get that much screen-time but this is what we need to know and there is just so much being communicated. I was kind of torn whether to pick this one or the very last one of the film but I chose this one bc I feel like the first one is more about Magneto (we already know he's going to be the villain right here, we learn what motivates him, we get some of the trademark bitchiness Ian McKellen brings to the character. Good stuff. Also when he walks off like: "We're the future, Charles! Not them! They no longer matter!" So much going on here.) while the end-one is more about Professor X. Also, for me the last scene actually elevates this one even further because of the way it makes this exchange frame the entire narrative of the film. You do get the sense that Charles and Erik are two chessplayers moving their pieces with the whole "What are you doing here?" - "Why do you ask questions to which you already know the answers?" and -

Like, you just get the sense that everything that happened between those scenes is just a little bit beneath them. It isn't any major break or change in their lives or relationship, they're the same as before and that also gives you an idea about the kind of history these guys already got to have.

2). Obviously.

Iconic. Show-stopping. Do I even need to say anything? Probably one of my favourite prison-break scenes ever put on screen. Everything about it. The dialogue, the violence, the "never trust a beautiful woman - especially one that's interested in you", the camera movement, the wink, the glass shattering and the cell coming apart, Ian McKellen floating on a metal/blood frisbee. This one has it all. Some physics guy on YouTube actually made a video about how powerful Magneto has to pull this off and apparently, this is a lot more impressive than any of the major property damage we see him cause across films.

3. Ah yes the Villa Gesell scene

Lemme say first: This scene is completely and utterly pointless from a plot-perspective. It's literally just a character moment. And I love character moments. It's just there to show us who Erik is and the film bends over backwards to justify this scene being in it: An entire stack of coincidences that is Shaw's photo hanging on the wall of this pub with the name of his boat clearly visible and he's sitting next to the two Nazis who happen to be sitting in this very pub right there and then and of course one of them has his Nazi knife with him (which is a very weird mixture of a Hitler Youth knife and an SS Honour Dagger and even ignoring that it's a mess bc they even forgot that German capitalises its nouns so why is the inscription all lower case and I'm the most annoying person on the planet to watch movies with but t-)

And the thing is - I actually like this entire scene even more for all of that. Because they could have just had that Swiss banker tell Mags where Shaw is. But instead, his entire trip to Argentinia is in there to let us see Erik kill Nazis and we get an exact sense of what he's doing with his life, who he is, how he is - and also did I mention dead Nazis? - I live for that (and also for a deleted scene where he sees a mother and her kid at the Argentinian airport and has a flashback and 😢).

I also like that it continues the pattern we get in the bank scene where he doesn't confront his targets directly but sets them up to incriminate themselves. We also get the "Frankenstein's Monster"-line which is something I have a lot of thoughts about - especially bc the whole "what makes us human/monsters"-question is a big deal in the movie. Also-also it sets up Charles 'head empty' moment from the finale of the movie where he tells Erik that the people CURRENTLY FIRING FUCKING NUCLEAR MISSILES AT THEM are just 'good innocent men' who are 'just following orders' and you just get the sense of how often Erik has heard this shit (also...thinking about how this film is set in 1962, meaning right after the Eichmann trial). There's just. A lot going on.

4. Oh let's be controversial!

ok I know this is something I know a lot of people hold against Erik and say it's one of his meanest and most unfair moments. but honestly? His anger is at least as earned as Charles' at this point and any take on this scene that is "one of them is right and the other is wrong" is ...boring. Erik once again lost people he cared about, he spent ten years in solitary confinement for a crime he didn't commit, he just learnt that literally everything that he warned about in the last film will happen (already has happened, partially), pretty much word for word ("Identification, that's how it starts. And ends with being rounded up, experimented on, eliminated.) to the point that an actual TIME-TRAVELLER comes back from the fucking future to tell them how bad they all fucked up.

(One of the things I like is that he doesn't make a difference between people who chose his side and people who chose Charles' side - he names Banshee along with Emma, Azazel, Angel. He's just sad about all of them. Generally, I'm still prissy that we never got to see him go full Magneto for any length of time in the prequels so him speaking of 'mutant brothers and sisters' is the closest we get to knowing what he would be like if they didn't always find some new weird between-movies plot for him like prison or starting a family in Poland or starting a leftist commune on an island - although I can kind of respect that one.)

Also anyone who ever had the misfortune of actually hearing me talk about this movie for any lengths of time knows I have...a lot of thoughts about Erik and his time in solitary confinement and I like that the first times we see his powers after he gets out after ten years of no metal, it's a huge mess. Erik as we know him from First Class would probably just wave his hands at those guards in the Pentagon kitchen and kill them with a few well-aimed knives in a blink of an eye - but this time around, he trashes the entire room and hits no one. And in the plane scene we see him lose control completely and almost bring down the plane once he snaps and you really get the sense that after ten years, he's no longer used to having metal around that reacts to his powers.

Also, in that same scene the mutual acknowledgement between him and Logan in the end? I liked that.

5. (almost) all scenes where he's just a giant menace to infrastructure and important landmarks.

Like the fact that he destroyed the Sydney opera house is just such a casual by-note, we don't even talk about that one. It's just how it goes, you know? The only let-down is that he literally went to France without taking down the Eiffel-Tower in DOFP? A giant metal structure? This is a serious oversight by the writers and really cheapens the whole movie-going experience. 2/10.