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rpgsandbox · 4 years

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The Gaia Complex is a cyberpunk RPG set on earth in 2119. Towards the end of the 21st century, the third world war, which became known as the Resource War, pushed mankind to the brink of destruction and brought ruin to the Earth’s atmosphere. Small pockets of humanity survived this horrific conflict, eventually forming the eleven metropolises. These incredible mega-cities have since grown and prospered, largely due to developments in atmospheric processing and significant technological advancements. Now cut off from each other, these heaving urban landscapes must each face their own difficulties and hardships. The Gaia Complex focuses on the largest of these metropolises; New Europe, a single sprawling city that covers much of what we currently know as mainland Europe. New Europe is a world of street violence, corporate espionage, vampiric uprisings and an overzealous A.I., known as Gaia, which functions as the city’s governor and the protector of its citizens.

The Gaia Complex is a dystopian world of urban violence, exploring the age of cybernetic enhancement through a vision of Earth that is somehow ‘changed’. This vision of the future injects both vampires and a strange species of people known as ferals, who are able to enter the minds of animals. This is a game of conspiracy and brutality, where players take on the roles of Mercs; former police officers, hackers and street-savvy dealers who are hired to fight back against the system and ultimately unravel the secrets of The Gaia Complex.

Of course we'd love you to back this campaign and be a part of making The Gaia Complex a reality, but before you do, maybe you want to give it a whirl for yourself? Good news - you can do this right now.

While this campaign and the updates throughout will talk about the game setting and rules, our free (well, 'pay what you want', but please, enter £0 and just grab a copy!) 48-page Quick Start for The Gaia Complex is out right now and will allow you to read and play for yourselves. This PDF contains a huge amount of lore surrounding the game, offering an in-depth insight to the world of The Gaia Complex and what it means to be a Merc in 2119. In addition, the booklet is jammed full of gorgeous artwork and gives you a good idea of what to expect from the full core book.

Go and grab your copy of the Quick Start by clicking this link

The cast of playable characters from the Quick Start

The Gaia Complex core book will be 'at least' 256 pages of full-colour hardback beauty - take a look at the Quick Start for a general idea about how it will look. We say 'at least' as we have a whole host of extra content that we might just squeeze in, either through stretch goals, or because we end up deciding certain things just need to be there.

At the time of launch, the core book writing is roughly 90% complete and layout for final proof-reading has already been completed for some chapters - this is a significant strength for this project, having completed so much of the writing ahead of launch. Artwork at this point is around 40% complete and new art is in the pipeline to be finished (and shown off) during the campaign. The art direction for this book is very important and great care is being taken to ensure the visuals support the writing as closely as possible.

The structure of the book is split over 12 chapters, plus an NPC (non-player character) library at the end. We'll go into more detail about the chapters over the coming weeks via the campaign updates, sharing some key information as we go. Alongside the rules, background and resources for playing the game, the book also includes multiple pieces of short fiction that slowly unfold the real story behind The Gaia Complex. These stories, and the characters they describe, lay the foundation for the world in which the game is set and allow us to explore New Europe in 2119 in much more cinematic detail.

The engine behind The Gaia Complex is called 12.3 and can be taken for a test drive in our Quick Start by clicking HERE.

The basis of the system uses 2d12 (that's two twelve sided dice - but you're all roleplayers, so I'm sure you knew that!) to make the majority of tests on a 'roll under' basis. Whenever a test is required, the GM determines a potential difficulty for the test, ranging from 1 (easy for a child to accomplish) to 11 (impossibly hard). A character will compare the difficulty to their relevant statistic and if the stat is equal to or greater than the difficulty, the test is a success - There is an emphasis in the game on keeping the action flowing and not making tests unless they are really needed.

If the character's stat is less than the difficulty, a test is required: the player rolls 2d12, requiring a result that is equal to or less than their relevant stat. An 11 fails (without cybernetic enhancement) and a 12 is a Critical Failure. To pass, a character requires one or both d12s to succeed depending on whether they are skilled or unskilled - The Gaia Complex does not consider 'ranks' in various skills like the majority of RPGs, instead a character either possesses a skill or does not (though becoming a specialist in certain skills is possible).

During combat, d3s are also used to determine damage - you can use funky d3s like the ones available on this campaign, or simply use common d6. The engine for the game uses d3s to enable a more consistant result when rolling multiple dice together and to remove the chance of whiffing a result of a 1 in situations that should always achieve a minium degree of success (thus 3d3+3 damage represents a weapon with more consistent output than one that does 1d12 damage) .

Of course, the game includes many other rules - some core, some optional - covering a huge array of options, but at its root, the game falls back on 12.3 to keep it rolling (pun intended).

During the course of the campaign we'll dedicate a couple of updates to specific areas of the rules and give you a deep dive into them beyond what you can get your hands on in the Quick Start.

Characters in The Gaia Complex are known as Mercs. At their core, Mercs are citizens of New Europe who have chosen to rebel against the system and take up arms by making themselves available on the freelance market. The seedy clubs and bars of NeoMunich are the most common place to find Mercs and while their work is entirely illegal, there is enough anonymity that it isn't worth the expenditure of resources for Gaia or its police force to worry about shutting down the network.

Most Mercs are hired to run jobs against one of the many corporations in the metropolis. From hacking R&D servers to kidnapping, assassinating or Bio Hacking company execs; there are few limits when it comes to taking a job. Ironically, the primary employers are the corporations themselves, all looking to get a leg up over their rivals, employing Mercs to do the dirty work in order to maintain complete deniability. Of course, it's not just the heaving corporations that are the enemy; outsider vampires that lurk in the subway tunnels and outer fringes of the metropolis, the cybernetic police force controlled by the LE1 A.I. subsystem, or even Gaia itself - the all seeing ruler of the metropolis - everyone is a potential mark if the score looks big enough!

The core rules contains a detailed character creation process, allowing players to play either human or feral (a mysterious group of people who can enter the minds of the metropolis' animals) characters from one of ten varied roles, each with their own unique rules, benefits and style. Characters can choose from:

Operator - Former law enforcement, corporate security and guns-for-hire that pack the hottest weapon tech that the black market has to offer.

Core Hacker - Hackers and coders who live their lives in the digital pathways of The Core.

Bio Hacker - A new wave of hacker, dedicated to hacking the cybernetic brains of their targets and inducing 'forced servitude'.

ParaMed - Former TactaMed paramedics who have realised they can earn more money patching up Mercs by being one of them!

CyberDoc - Back-alley hackjob specialists and cybernetic installers. An often riskier, but cheaper approach, to main stream cybernetics clinics.

MilTech - Weapons techs, tinkerers and specialist drone pilots. MilTechs keep the team's gear working and provide invaluable technical support.

Mech - Drivers, pilots and expert mechanics. Mechs keep the metropolis rolling and give Merc teams much needed access to reliable transportation.

Tech Trader - Black market dealers, handling everything from illegal weapons and stolen cybernetics, to narcotics and false credentials.

Data Dealer - Information traffickers and dealers of stolen secrets. If there is something worth knowing, you can probably buy it... for a price.

Handler - Exclusive to ferals. Handlers have dedicated themselves to honing the feral's ability to step into the mind of an animal. This is the feral in their purest form.

We'll be taking a more in-depth look into each of these roles as the campaign unfolds.

Kickstarter campaign ends: Wed, October 7 2020 6:59 PM BST

Website: [The Gaia Complex] [facebook] [twitter]

#RPG #kickstarter #The Gaia Complex #Hansor Publishing

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weepylucifer · 5 years

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Let’s Go in the Garden - Ch. 1

Team Folly takes a call and unearths a bit of past that everyone believed long-buried.

“Aed,” said the fae. “Please, you may call me Aed.”

It was, that much I knew from what had stuck during my leafing through the Folly’s mundane library, one of the lesser known faerie aliases, like Aisling or Myself or Nobody, something for a fae to use in a pinch, and certainly not likely to be this guy’s actual name. But it had been what he’d responded to my inquiry after his legal name - fine, A legal name for our files.

Aed looked like David Bowie and Kurt Cobain had had a lovechild, whom they then abandoned to be raised by a family of raccoons.

He was tall, pale, skinny and he gangled, and everything about him looked… dejected, is what I’m trying to bring across here. Fae have often been observed to dress according to their chosen vocation, or so one of the ancient wizards said who used to record his observations on the demi-monde within the Folly’s records. I’ve certainly also seen this here and there, like Molly’s Edwardian servant dress or Foxglove’s artist getup. This guy seemed like he was trying to play up a role of… hermit, or dumpster-diver.

Aed’s story was this: once upon a time, in some vague past, his… Nightingale says ‘tribe’, I would opt for ‘community’… of fae had had some neighbourly dispute with another one. Before they knew it, dispute became war, there had been a vicious attack, and Aed’s people had been scattered. Far as he knew, he might be the last one standing. Now, unwilling to pass back into the realm in which his type of fae actually dwelt for fear of what might await him there, Aed subsisted in a... it cannot be said any more politely, in a dank cave out on Dartmoor, far from any kind of civilisation save for a few scattered villages around and about. They barely counted, for my part; most of them could barely boast one decent pub.

Sometimes, occasionally, people from these adjoining towns would stumble upon Aed’s dwelling. Purely by accident, you understand, it wasn’t like he was luring anyone out here, or at least so he claimed. Most people, he could simply cause to forget. They would head home and not bother him out here again. But sometimes, people came to him with a wish to make. A bargain to offer. Troubled people, he said. People who, like him, longed for escape. A quiet place, to hide from something, just to get away from it all, and bliss. Oblivion. Respite.

I looked into that gaunt face framed by sad, stringy hair, those long, bony fingers fiddling nervously with the strings of his moss-green hoodie, and understood that Aed actually had thought he was helping. And the disappearances had been too few and far between as to ever rouse the suspicion of the Folly, or much of anyone for that matter. But then, about a week ago, a girl named Lucinda Blaine had gone missing and, what with her being the great-granddaughter of a bloke remotely connected to Hugh Oswald’s gossip mill, we’d gotten a call on the Folly’s ancient landline. Even ancient retired practitioners keep their eyes open, apparently, and people disappearing plus a relatively recently circulated local fairy myth about the area had warranted a call to us. So we’d headed out here because, well, obligation, missing children, all that jazz. This time, Nightingale had tagged along, possibly because he too felt an obligation towards one of his centenarian cohorts and, by extension, their families. Apparently, just after the war, he’d been asked to stand godfather to the spawn of about anyone who’d made it back to England and gotten it in their heads to start procreating. There had been guys trying to name their sons after him. These days, all the hype seemed to have died down: we didn’t often get veterans calling the Folly, and if Nightingale was otherwise in contact with any of them, I’d never noticed, and I got the feeling he preferred this.

“But she approached me with a wish,” Aed was now saying. I was taking his statement right there in the cave, seeing as he couldn’t be persuaded to leave it, and abandon his sleeping charges. “She told me her situation had become untenable. That she longed to escape the torments of her life.”

“Well, she’s eight,” I replied, maybe a bit more sharply than was strictly appropriate. “Eight-year-olds try to run away from home sometimes. Doesn’t mean adults should enable that. Yeah, her parents getting a divorce is causing her a lot of grief right now, but she’ll get better eventually. It for sure doesn’t warrant putting her into a magical sleep forever.”

I looked around the cave. Lucinda was nowhere near the only person asleep here, although we had been quick to find her. The other people resting here in their magical stasis were adults, thank god for small mercies. There were green vines everywhere, making up beds for the sleepers, growing under and above and beyond them; the ones that had evidently been here the longest were all but covered in vegetation. But they were all breathing, and none of them looked worse for wear.

“People have to go and confront their problems,” I said. “What do you think sleeping it off is going to solve? Will they really be happier when they wake up and it’s a hundred years later?”

Aed looked at me, saddened and confused. Here was a guy who had been out here on his own for too long, I thought. He had lived here in his own little world, where making people disappear was justified and good, and now he suddenly had wizards in his home demanding he stop. “Their problem would be gone,” he said softly.

“They’d have other, bigger problems instead.” I shook my head. Sometime soon, we’d have to wake up all these people and get them out of here, preferably into medical care; they would be in shock and needing to be looked at. I had no idea how the folks over in the town would cope with having everyone who disappeared here within the last couple years back at once. Mostly, though, right this moment, I was worried about getting Aed to part with his charges. He didn’t look like he had a lot of fight in him, but with the demi-monde you never know.

It was then that Nightingale tapped me on the shoulder. “Perhaps I should like to have a word with Aed here, outside,” he said. “In the meantime, you’d better start reviving the victims. Getting these plants off of them should do the trick, but try not to have them touch your skin. And see if you can call anybody at the local force, these people are going to be needing medical attention.” Then he gently, but firmly put a hand on Aed’s shoulder and steered him towards the mouth of the cave.

“Now,” I heard him say, “let me tell you, one survivor to another…”

I tried not to strain my ears to listen to what they were discussing. I had work to do, anyway. Through some minor miracle, I had a signal up here, so I called down at the station in one of those arse-end-of-the-world towns and got told that while it would be nigh-impossible to get an ambulance out here, there would at the very least be a team of first responders along soonish. I sighed to myself, already impatient to return to London and civilisation, but there was a job to do first. I put on gloves and started to unravel all the vines.

Nightingale proved to have been right, people began waking up as soon as I got the flora off them. They were fairly out of it, most of them confused, somewhat frightened, especially the eight-year-old. Apparently most of them had not come out here for a bargain with the faerie expecting to be laid to sleep in a cave. I questioned them - gently, you see. There was a group of twenty-somethings here who’d wanted to celebrate some pagan ritual (completely made up). There were some other folks who’d simply angled for a meditative moment, to honor a little local custom, to leave a wish for the faerie, expecting... well, nothing much. After all, the Good Gentlemen of the Hills weren’t real, right - until they were. Some of these people had indeed been here for years. I had my hands full, and the situation was coming precariously close to slipping from me when the first-response-team showed up, dispensing shock blankets and gently corralling everyone to where they’d parked the ambulance.

Just about then, Nightingale came back. He wasn’t terribly wordy, said he had been able to persuade Aed to return home at last, to finally check on his people. I wanted to ask what he said to him but didn’t, a slight bit afraid that he’d had to make threats of some sort or worse, give Aed the Condensed Ettersberg. I imagine suspecting you’re the last one of your people and knowing it makes a bit of a difference, and according to Nightingale, last anyone from the Folly had checked, some of Aed’s tribe had still been extant, so who knows. Maybe there was hope for that guy yet.

“You missed another one back here,” Nightingale said at last, striding deeper into the cave.

There was what remained of Aed’s camp here, a sleeping bag and futon, a portable stovetop, a few bags with odds and ends. Depressing. There was, indeed, also another buried sleeper.

The vines were thickest towards the back of the cave, a verdant green affair that didn’t look quite… real, almost stylized, like vines in a video game rather than real life plants. They were almost as thick as a man’s forearm, and the shape of the last person trapped here was suggested rather than seen. I had trouble pulling them off without potentially injuring the sleeper, so Nightingale said, “Allow me,” and disintegrated them using some at-least-fifth-order spell. I had half an eye on the other sleepers who were all slowly coming to, so I left him to it until he called my name.

“Peter,” he said, and there was a sudden tension to his voice that worried me, “I’m afraid we have another problem.”

He had unearthed the whole man - I have to assume - by now, and was looking at him with a hard-to-read expression. There was almost some disdain in it, certainly a load of dismay.

“Sir?” I asked.

“This is another sort of glamour here, some seducere variant,” he explained, “or another fae. It cannot possibly be what it looks like.”

This surprised me, seeing as I wasn’t feeling anything at all weird - no vestigia, nothing. By the looks of it, this was another ordinary bloke sleeping here, another result of a dodgy deal with the fae. But I decided to defer to Nightingale’s expertise. “How so?” I asked.

“For the sake of convenience,” Nightingale said, “Could you please describe to me what you are seeing here?” He gestured at the sleeping man and there was some undercurrent of something in his voice, something badly repressed there, and my concern and confusion mounted. Still, I obliged.

“I’m seeing a white male, early or mid-fourties by the looks of him,” I started my description. “Dark hair, sort of unkempt, sort of a gaunt look to him. He has a mole or birthmark on his neck, here.” I tapped my own thoat in the corresponding place. “He is wearing what appears to be hiking gear, pretty old, that is to say old-fashioned but well-maintained. He must’ve been laid up here for quite some time. Boots, like army boots, like the pair you have. Grey canvas jacket, or maybe it’s khaki.” Hard to tell in this light.

If anything, my description seemed to surprise Nightingale even more. “Yes, that is… that seems to correspond with what I’m seeing.” He shook his head. “I was expecting for you to be seeing… something else.”

“Like what?” I don’t get impatient with my governor often, but I have to admit I was starting to hate how tongue-tied he was being.

“Probably a woman,” he said cryptically. “Anyway, this cannot be what it appears to be, seeing as I know this person, and he’s been dead for quite awhile.”

Ah. Well, shit. And here I’d been so glad already that this situation had gone over without any fighting. I wanted to ask Nightingale who it was, but he beat me to it before I could so much as open my mouth.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s get it over with. Stand back, I’ll try to wake him.”

Before I could think to argue, or even make up my mind about what alternative action to argue for, Nightingale gripped his staff tightly, got down on one knee and used his free hand to shake the sleeper by the shoulder.

The man was slower to rouse than any of the others we’d found; he murmured something, a hand coming up to swat in the vague direction of Nightingale’s, but after a minute, his heavy eyelids fluttered open.

Voice thick with sleep, the stranger slurred, “Thomas?”

Nightingale straightened, took two steps back and huffed out through his nose. “Don’t even attempt it.”

The stranger blinked, evidently confused, and then, with surprising speed, he lunged to his feet. I admit I flinched.

The stranger’s legs were trembling, he was shaky with the effort of keeping himself upright after laying prone here for god knows how long. Hair fell into his eyes as he leveled a wild-eyed gaze at my governor.

“Get away!” he shouted, his voice hoarse. “You’re that fae again. You’re a shape-changer, aren’t you? How dare you appear to me like this?”

Nightingale raised an eyebrow. “I should be asking you these questions.”

“You’re not Thomas. Thomas fell at Ettersberg.”

“What?” Nightingale crossed his arms; it was almost funny how indignant he sounded. “No, it’s you who died as a result of Ettersberg.”

Jesus Christ, I thought, Ettersberg again. It’s always fucking Ettersberg, isn’t it? Unbelievable, really, how much my life was being affected by a place I’d never been to and had no desire to visit.

“Nonsense,” the stranger ground out harshly. “We… we had no word, there was, there was no way anyone on the ground got out.”

Nightingale was drumming his fingers against the tip of his cane, as much proof of his pique as I’d ever seen him exhibit. “And yet here I am.”

“That’s… no. You’re not Thomas.”

“It is you who isn’t what you profess to be.” I was seeing just how tired Nightingale was growing of this back and forth. Whoever, whatever this was pretending to be one of his old war buddies, it had him careening towards the end of his tether.

“I am exactly what I profess to be,” the stranger claimed. He took a deep breath. “In 1930, in November, I was visiting you while you were staying at the consulate in Lahore. We sat in the gardens, under the stars, and you said to me that you wouldn’t mind if–”

Nightingale cut him off with a sharp wave of his hand. “You could easily pluck that from my memories.”

I had been watching the exchange, I must admit, with my mouth slightly agape. Now I saw an opportune moment to cut in. “Sir,” I said. “He claims to be someone from the old Folly, right?”

“That’s right,” Nightingale replied at the same time as the stranger asked, “Who’s that?” like he was just now noticing me for the first time.

“My apprentice,” Nightingale introduced me. “Whatever you have to say to me can be said in front of him.”

I found that a little bit of an odd thing to say in the moment, but I was also flattered at the show of trust.

“An apprentice?” The stranger snorted. “Yeah, bullshit. My Thomas doesn’t have an apprentice, and no desire to take one either.”

I ignored him for the time being. “Sir, as for proving his identity, one way or the other,” I suggested, “could you recognize his signare? Is it possible to fake that?”

Nightingale looked at me in the way he does when I hit on something he hasn’t considered before. “Not that I know of.” He beckoned towards the stranger and demanded, in one of his rare militaristic tones, “Right. Werelight, please.”

“You too,” the stranger said through clenched teeth.

“While we’re at it,” Nightingale said with a nod and they both held their palms out, and conjured a werelight each.

Now, I’d like to say I’m familiar enough with Nightingale’s signare from all this time spent around him watching him work his magic. The stranger’s was entirely new: like a gust of fresh air through a recently opened window (I thought I could even feel a hint of the curtains blowing in the sudden breeze, white and starched), a hand skimming over cool tiles, the sound of something bubbling in a beaker, and a hint of pine that weirdly seemed to correspond with a component of Nightingale’s own signare, like two pieces of something coming together.

The stranger gaped. “It’s really you. You’re really here, you… you’ve found me.”

I glanced from him to Nightingale, who seemed to have frozen solid. His staff clattered loudly as it hit the ground. And I swear, I have never ever seen this purely indescribable look on my governor’s face.

“David.”

“Hi, Thomas.”

I kind of stared. David is a common name, but somehow I knew exactly which one this was. I knew approximately two things about David Mellenby with a certainty: he’d been very into science, and he was definitely dead. No wonder Nightingale was suspicious. Apart from that… not much. Nightingale had brought him up maybe twice.

“This isn’t possible.” I barely recognized this as Nightingale’s voice, but it was coming out of his mouth, so what else could it be? “You’re… dead, they told me, Hugh Oswald found your body. It about gave his nerves the rest.”

The stranger - David, apparently - twisted his mouth into a discomfited frown. “Hugh Oswald found a body. I’m so sorry.”

“But how…” Nightingale shook his head. He looked as if a train had hit him, and it was a disquieting sight. I was used to Nightingale in control, see, I was used to him being the guy who, well, might not always know right away what to do, but will reliably find out. “What are you doing here?”

“I left… I ran. I had to get away. It got... too much, being in the Folly, with that damnable library there. I don’t know, I barely knew what I was doing. I just wanted to disappear. I had no idea you’d made it out of Ettersberg, Thomas, I would never let you believe I was dead. You must know that. I ran into this fae out here and… I’m not sure what happened then, but I must have talked myself into a right mess.” Mellenby tried for a smile. “But it can’t have been too long, can it? You look good. Did you just get home? You seem to have recovered rather splendidly. Are you… are we alright?”

Nightingale seemed to unfreeze at that. He stepped forward, and then, with unfailing precision, he punched Mellenby in the nose.

Mellenby, still unsteady on his feet, reeled back, stumbled and landed flat on his arse clutching his bloody nose. “Thomas! What on earth–”

“You…” Nightingale was breathing heavily. “You were here the whole time, alive, you ran away, is what you’re telling me? How could you do this to Oswald? How could you do this to me!”

I was seriously starting to worry for everyone’s continued safety here. Nightingale stood rooted to the spot, trembling fists white-knuckled at his sides and let’s be frank, he’s not a guy who hauls off and punches people. I’d thought I’d known what anger looked like on him but boy, did I have no idea. I’d seen him more controlled while actively in a fight with Chorley.

Mellenby stared up at him, his eyes wide. “My songbird…”

“No. You don’t get to… no. I’ve been alone with it all for - eighty years have passed, David!”

There was a dreadful little silence in which Mellenby just blinked. “I… are you saying I slept for eighteen years?”

“Eighty,” I piped up. The both of them turned towards me as if only just remembering I was there.

“Peter.” Nightingale’s voice was leaden. “Hand me my staff, will you? I seem to have dropped it.”

“Sir, may I suggest not doing anything you might regret,” I posited, because ‘my songbird’ was still kind of echoing, if not in the cave then certainly in my mind. I was closest to where his staff had rolled off to, so I did pick it up, but made no move to hand it over.

“Allow me to judge this for myself,” Nightingale said through clenched teeth. He beckoned in my direction without looking at me, his eyes still boring holes into David. “And give me my staff.”

I didn’t know if he wanted to use it for its intended purpose or just as a blunt object, but I couldn’t in good conscience enable either. “Sir, I don’t think–”

“I shan’t repeat myself.”

“Thomas, please, you know I love your little pranks, but this is not the time–” Mellenby started to say, but Nightingale waved his hand in the sharp downward motion that accompanied his more theatrical spells, and Mellenby’s mouth clicked shut.

He stared up at Nightingale in complete disbelief, eyes wide and shining with the onset of tears, unable to get his mouth open. I had seen this once before, and yet again I felt the vast and smooth click-clicking of Nightingale’s magic at work. But it felt different than the usual, disordered, the myriad little gears grinding.

“Sir,” I said, more sharply than I perhaps had intended. Nightingale finally turned to look at me, and slowly, gradually, he slipped back into the 21st century, where we have rules against using our magic on people in anger.

Mellenby crumpled to the floor when he was released from the spell, his head lowered, eyes leaking, cheeks glowing from the strain of trying to open his mouth earlier, some blood still smeared below his nose. Nightingale looked from me to him to me again.

“My apologies,” he said stiffly, to the room in general, and strode for the exit.

#i never started in media res before #david mellenby lives AU #idk if this is... wise to post like idk if this is good and this chapter is mostly exposition and scene-setting but #eh you know what i added some of the drama originally intended for chapter 2 bc hey it felt prudent right this second #posts by me

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redandfranticfeelings · 5 years

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an autistic analysis, lyric by lyric, of ‘i love play rehearsal’

ive been hyperfixating over bmc for the last month and i keep thinking about how autistic the main characters are and christine is so very very very autistic coded to me. so i decided im just going to straight up deconstruct the lyrics of her signature song in the context of her being autistic (and also having adhd, but my experience is mostly in autism)

this is very very rambley and based more on personal experience than research, so i doubt itll be interesting to anybody but me, but i just want to talk about christine, the autistic queen

I love play rehearsal Because its the best! Because it is fun. I love play rehearsal and I get depressed as soon as its done.

it goes without saying that chrstine’s special interest is theater right? the way she treats it as the “highlight of [her] life” and then switches into this song after acting completely awkward and disinterested in jeremy outside of the context of him being engaged in her special interest.

But not depressed as in like kill yourself depressed No, im not into self-harm Dude, I swear, here check my arm!

overexplaining in a way that reads very much like speaking before she thinks, even though bringing up self harm in casual conversation with someone you barely talk to is not exactly proper etiquette. i think this is also an adhd trait? going faster than your own brain. that’s basically this whole song.

See, I just use the word to emphasise a point, Show the passion I have got I am passionate a lot. I have mad, gigantic feelings, Red and frantic feelings, About most everything Like gun control, like spring,

a lot of people assume autistic people are typically emotionless but it’s also very easy for us to get caught up in emotional issues especially when it comes to stuff we love, and it catches us off guard. christine being hyperempathetic is implied later in the show when she has that awful survivors’ guilt over making fun of rich and jake, and it also plays into her being so socially conscious as well.

Like if I’m living up to all I’m meant to be.

being an high school junior is really rough bc of all the decisions that have to be made regarding college and your future as an independent adult, and being autistic just makes it worse bc it can easily lead to burnout to deal with so much at once, if you even can comprehend these things much at all (i had no idea what to do, lol). i doubted my ability to grow up and succeed constantly because i had no idea who to talk to and what questions to ask and how to present myself. that’s something that a lot of people worry about, but having social delays makes it way more of a pressing issue than it is for neurotypicals, i feel.

I also have a touch of ADD. Where was I? Oh, right!

self explanatory and very canon. adhd and autism can be diagnosed simultaneously nowadays and the symptoms overlap a lot, btw.

I love play rehearsal, Cause’ you are equiped with direction and text, Life is easy in rehearsal, You follow a script so you know what comes next. Anywho the point that I’m getting to is sometimes life can’t work out in the way It works out in the play

this part screams autistic culture to me. unpredictability is scary because social situations don’t always go smoothly like in fiction! this is why social scripting is a popular therapy tactic for autistic children- you have to manually study social situations like a script. theater is something meant to be memorized and recited until you’re able to process it and manufacture emotion, but honestly for autistic kids, life feels a lot like that sometimes. remember how miserable she got when one of her favorite plays had the script changed without her permission to make a whole new story she doesn’t know? of course that’s just upsetting on its own, but in the context of her knowing theater so well and being fully prepared for one story only to be forced to learn a new one? ouch.

christine is never shown as comfortable outside her element- she hides in a book during “more than survive” and shrinks into nothing at the party. it’s a recurring theme that she has no idea exactly who she is, struggles with her identity outside of theater, and despite not really caring about how people see her, she does care about her own ability. socializing makes her feel awkward, especially when something totally unexpected happens like jake or jeremy asking her out. if she doesn’t have a plan or routine or, well, a script, then she can’t trust herself to go forward.

Like the only time I get to be the center of attention, Is when I’m Juliet or Blanche DuBois

as an autistic theater kid, i just really do relate to being clueless and dumb in real life but being able to totally thrive on the stage, because you can channel the energy that is usually misplaced in real life social interactions, and transfer it through dialogue and song and dance that someone else laid out nicely for you.

and can I mention? That was really one of my best roles, Did you see that?

an epic combination of letting your mind wander easily without caring about making sense to the person you’re speaking to, and taking every opportunity to infodump. in a lot of productions she even mimics her blanche voice just for fun. jeremy tries to respond here but she doesn’t care because she’s in her own brain where everything only really seems to make sense to her.

And no matter how hard I try, It’s impossible to narrow down the many reasons why, I love play rehearsal. I happiness cry whenever it starts!

if she isn’t being hyperbolic then this plays into my ‘so much emotion it’s hard to control’ thing detailed a bit above. either way, big special interest mood.

It’s just so universal Getting to try playing so many parts. Most humans do one thing for all of their lives, The thought of that gives me hives! I’ve got so many interests I wanna pursue,

it’s a lot easier to lose yourself and connect to your special interest than focus on your very complex, very overwhelming real life issues. escaping into fiction and being able to play in a variety of social situations as a totally different person, yay theater!

in general i just like the idea of christine struggling to visualize who she is and thinking about a lot of hypothetical but being unable to choose which one is most desirable or plausible. idk if that’s autistic or just a fun character trait lol. i know jumping from interest to interest is an adhd thing though.

this little passage is good for at least showing that christine distinguishes herself from ‘most humans’ in a way that isn’t so much ‘not like other girls’ but like ‘life is so much more confusing to me than it seems to be to others’ (which the show proposes isn’t exactly true and is the same closed-mindedness that jeremy has, though christine realizes it sooner; however; the sentiment rings true in that christine, as a neurodiverse young woman, has a lot more hoops to jump through than a neurotypical classmate.)

And why am I telling this to you? Guess there’s a part of me that wants to.

jeremy is also very autistic coded in my eyes, but that’s a separate post. i just like them being drawn to each other through that sort of kinship. also if you interpret her as having an unrealized requited crush on him…well, i think for a lot of us, romantic love is easy to confuse with friend love, if even that, because the specifics of emotions are a mess to unravel. (which also explains her confusion on her relationship with jake)

oh and right after this, she starts squawking just because she had the impulse to do so. vocal stimming, much?

Back to play rehearsal, My brain is like ‘bzzz’ My heart is like 'wow’

my brain is always like bzzz honestly lol. this is generally a pretty good way to describe being hyperfocused.

Because we’re here at play rehearsal, and it’s starting, We’re starting, It’s starting, Sooo-ooon.

it’s been confirmed as a deliberate decision that christine’s songs never end on a rhyme, except when she’s squipped and it isn’t ‘really’ her, because she subverts everyone’s expectations, including jeremy’s. i feel that could make for a nice simplified metaphor for autism, right?

#christine canigula #autistic headcanons #allistics can reblog!#be more chill #bmc #gif #long post #queue are so busted #i might do something like this for loser geek whatever and/or more than survive #or even just bmc songs in general if i cant get enough material from them individually #be more neurodivergent #kin tag

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recentanimenews · 4 years

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The Monsters of In/Spectre Are Everywhere, Even on the Internet

As a kid, I was both enamored with and totally terrified of supernatural monsters. That sentiment primarily came from my religious upgringing, but anime was also a factor, which I'll blame on early exposure to the 80s Vampire Hunter D OVA. Live-action movies played a role, as well. I cowered at the TV any time I stumbled across trailers for Francis Ford Coppolla's Dracula (thanks for the nightmares, Gary Oldman). There was something far more disturbing to me about a vaguely 'realistic' depiction of the supernatural, performed by actual people, more so than any hand-drawn renditions of ghoulish beasts. It amplified my fear that those scary beings might be more real than I wanted to believe, and I was terrified of encountering something demonic.

Unlike my terror-fueled childhood visions on this topic, In/Spectre shows humanity to be far less impotent in this regard. Humans in this series can regulate, create, and destroy the supernatural, and are even capable of becoming (at least partially) mystical creatures themselves. However, In/Spectre is nuanced enough to avoid making this a one-sided narrative gimmick: paranormal beings are not completely helpless or disempowered by humans. Rather, the show depicts an intriguing interplay between humans and the supernatural; a fluid dynamic with checks and balances on both sides. In/Spectre offers a unique depiction of supernatural creatures, which makes for a refreshing and gratifying viewing experience.

Did I mention the show also uses the aforementioned themes to touch upon some important real-life topics too? Wanna know more? Then keep on reading, and be aware there will be spoilers after the first section!

The Basic Premise of Kotoko's Character

The very premise of In/Spectre's protagonist Kotoko offers a unique portrayal of supernatural monsters, and how they connect with humans. Episode one reveals to us that 15-year-old Kotoko lost her right eye and left leg in order to become the Goddess of Wisdom, an intermediary who helps investigate and solve pressing issues faced by spirit beings. Essentially, Kotoko helps regulate the spirit world using her own human intellect. You'd think the realm of the dead would find and choose a ghostly, non-mortal detective to deal with their own problems, right? Nope. In/Spectre provides aficionados of all-things-paranormal a unique, satisfying genre-twist by making spirits seek guidance from a human protagonist, upending the usual narrative trope where humans are the ones looking for preternatural counsel.

As with all things in matters of art, though, it's probably debatable whether or not Kotoko is truly 100% human considering she was granted such a lofty status by the spirit realm. But if she does possess superhuman abilities of some sort, she has yet to display them. One of Kotoko's charms is that she uses her natural brain power to find her way out of dicey situations, even when she's talking to a giant river snake or up against something as fierce as Steel Lady Nanase. And this lack of preternatural powers is what makes Kotoko physically vulnerable to the spiritual creatures she deals with. That's where her more questionably-human 'boyfriend' Kuro comes in as a balancing co–protagonist.

Kuro: To Be (Human), or Not to Be

After being forced by his family to eat both mermaid flesh and a Kudan (a yokai that dies after predicting the future), Kuro Sakuragawa transformed into a hybridized being: at once a person yet also non-human, capable of resurrecting himself after being killed, poisoning yokai with his own body, and seeing and choosing future events. As someone more on the supernatural side of things compared to Kotoko, Kuro makes for a great character contrast to Kotoko's decidedly human intellectual strengths. The multi-episode battle with Steel Lady Nanase serves as as a prime example: Kuro brutally goes toe to toe with the beam-wielding monster, while Kotoko goes online and uses her mental prowess to try to eliminate their ghoulish enemy. In/Spectre certainly knows how to use its two protagonists in complementary and compelling ways.

Another point of interest is how Kuro's family acts intentionally diabolical, in a way that makes them crueler and more fiendish than any monster in the series. The Sakuragawa family's willingness to brutally deceive their closest kin by feeding them yokai flesh stands as a sharp contrast to other recent fantasy-based anime, such as Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, where demons prey on human flesh for sustenance and power. In/Spectre alters that: humans consume demons in the quest for wealth, fame, power, and the ability to predict the future. This thematic alteration also takes shape in how spirits view Kuro. Most of them find Kuro absolutely terrifying for a variety of reasons, a likely one being his ability to poison yokai who eat his flesh. Compare this plot element to most supernatural media, where the humans are usually the ones deathly afraid of demonic spirits/ghosts/fill-in-the-blank.

Kuro and his family add another layer of depth to In/Spectre's narrative repertoire, by making humans a frightful and comparatively crueler presence in contrast to the monsters in the series. In terms of a real life takeaway, the actions of the Sakuragawas offer a stark message: the exploitative pursuit of personal power can transform us into creatures who are far more malevolent, and more demonic, than any supernatural beast or spirit. And now for my final example...

You Can Blame Everything on the Internet

The Steel Lady Nanase arc is In/Spectre's meatiest story thus far. Beginning at episode three, it traces the mysterious alleged death of a controversial popstar named Nanase Karin, who died after a steel beam fell on her one rainy night. A faceless, ghostly version of Nanase Karin appears, and uses a metal beam—similar to the one responsible for her death—as her murder weapon. The internet deems her 'Steel Lady Nanase.' The truly fascinating part about this arc is the explanation behind Steel Lady Nanase's existence. Kotoko reveals that the ghastly creature is a 'monster of the imagination,' created and manifested physically by the collective imagination and will of millions of people (a collective will manipulated all along the way by Rikka, who alters future events just like her cousin Kuro does). More than anywhere else in the show, this is the best example of human reality dictating the supernatural. Spirits seem to exist on their own elsewhere in the series (such as a spirit from a person who died), but Steel Lady Nanase comes into existence primarily through the internet's collective belief in what turns out to be a lie. Plenty of supernatural fiction features beasts who exist and act completely external to—or separate from—human behavior, words, etc. In/Spectre forges its own distinct take on the aforementioned trope by featuring a supernatural monster who is permeable to—and in fact created by—human imagination.

Unfortunately, it turns out that conjuring a murderous monster into existence comes with some problems. The fictive Steel Lady Nanase goes on a rampage and starts killing actual humans, and even though people are fearful of her, the only way to destroy her is by undoing collective belief. It takes Kotoko's sly wit and penchant for fiction to unravel the Internet's certainty of the ghoul's existence. This plot point displays an unfortunate truth pertinent for our current digital age: any Internet lie told convincingly enough and believed by enough people can evolve into 'monsters' that affect the 'real' world (Internet leaks and rumors in all their forms are no trivial matter). It makes the truth about anything difficult and nigh-impossible to uncover when millions of people have access to, and share, countless discussion posts, news articles, memes, and alleged 'facts' without vetting the information first. From the central plot, to the characters, to the way it addresses the Internet itself, In/Spectre tackles the connection between humans and the supernatural with sparkling finesse and originality. Instead of settling into well-worn tropes of how humans and spiritual beings relate, In/Spectre carves its own path and narrative trail to great success. What else about In/Spectre intrigues you when it comes to humans and the supernatural? Let me know in the comments below!

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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newstfionline · 6 years

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For a Moment, Underdog Croatia Basks in World Cup Joy

By Marc Santora, Barbara Surk and James Montague, NY Times, July 14, 2018

DUBROVNIK, Croatia--When Croatia’s national soccer team scored the goal that took it past England and into its first World Cup final, delirious fans lit flares and burned tires outside the towering limestone walls of the old city in Dubrovnik.

The euphoria of the moment lifted the spirits of a nation disillusioned on a number of fronts, like the slow transition into the European Union, a stagnant economy, political deadlock and even the source of its current joy--soccer.

“At this moment, no one is thinking about problems,” said Maroje Burum, a fan. “Man, it’s almost spiritual.”

When the World Cup began a month ago, some Croats initially hesitated to cheer the national team because it has been marred by a corruption scandal and exploited as a symbol of nationalism by the country’s right-wing politicians.

A court case had exposed endemic corruption involving Croatian soccer’s most influential figure--Zdravko Mamic, the former president of one of the country’s most prominent teams, Dinamo Zagreb. He was convicted on tax offenses for skimming huge profits off the transfer fees for Croatia’s top players who joined some of the top soccer clubs in Europe, before he fled to neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he is in hiding.

When Luka Modric, arguably Croatia’s greatest player ever, took the stand during the trial, he claimed to know nothing about it. He was widely mocked and murals of him were defaced across the country.

In May, he was charged with perjury and could face five years in prison. The case turned some Croatians against Mr. Modric and tainted the national team.

But as the team advanced in the World Cup, the court case faded into the background. Mr. Modric, who was allowed to play because he has not yet been convicted, has been one of the top performers at this year’s tournament, and his damaged reputation in the country has been largely rehabilitated.

Soccer in Croatia is so deeply intertwined in the culture, the politics and the war that ravaged the country in the 1990s that the game can be used as a marker for some of the most important moments in recent Croatian history.

In 1990, Yugoslavia was unraveling and the ethnic tensions between the country’s Croats and Serbs, which the state had kept tamped down, were on full display during a match of rival clubs Red Star Belgrade and Croatia’s Dinamo Zagreb. Before the first whistle, rioting broke out at the stadium in Zagreb.

While the match has often been erroneously cited as the first battle of the Croatian war of independence, Mr. Lalic said it did play an important psychological role.

“Yugoslavia stopped existing when the Dinamo-Red Star riot took place,” he said. “If we can’t play football anymore and be in the same terraces anymore, it was impossible to live together anymore.”

By the time the war ended, 20,000 Croats were dead.

Since Croatia joined the EU in 2013, like many of the new member states in East and Central Europe, membership has not brought the economic growth many expected, especially outside the cities and tourist destinations.

Anton Masle, one of the nation’s leading journalists and now the editor-and chief of a local paper in Dubrovnik, said the nation was buffeted by many of the same problems plaguing other European Union countries.

But as a small nation, it was different.

“You know what Italians say when you ask them about their financial situation and the chance of bankruptcy: We are too big to fail,” he said over a glass of wine on the cobblestone street outside Libertas, a famous redoubt for Dubrovnik’s artists and writers. “You know what Croatians say? We are too small to fail.”

When you are small, you have to punch above your weight to be felt. And in this country of less than 4 million people, sports have long played an outsized role in the nation’s psyche, none more than soccer.

But success in sports has not masked other problems, as reflected in the exodus of educated, young people. In 1998, the population here was about 4.6 million. Now it is now less the 4 million.

The ruling party holds a fragile majority that needs the support of minority parties, making it exceedingly difficult to govern.

“Many younger Croatians faced with unemployment and low salaries are questioning the current political and administrative practices and seeking a better fortune in other European countries,” said Aida Vidan, a Croatian-born scholar of South Slavic languages, literature and film at Harvard University.

And the sluggish economy was shaken 17 months ago when Agrokor, a Croatia food and retail concern that had employed 70,000 people and relied on supplies of goods from 240,000 more from across the Balkans, nearly collapsed under huge debts.

As the government committee in charge of the Agrokor bailout negotiated with creditors, the health care system was failing and pension funding was running out.

The victories for Croatia have not come easily, but that has only made its soccer run that much more powerful. And the cheers across the country have been for more than the soccer itself.

“It’s a convenient escape from reality, of course, and a good dose of optimism for all,” said Boris Vlasic, a newspaper columnist at Jutarnji List in Zagreb.

Whatever the final result, Mr. Vlasic said, hard realities can wait.

There is a match to be played.

#Croatia #2018 World Cup

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pollyestergivens · 7 years

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Part 2: Nancy Drew & The Case of the Missing Realism

Balancing Immersion with Puzzles

A wall of text series on how Nancy Drew games largely lost their charm.

A question every game developer must answer is, “How aware should the player be that they are playing a game?”

Games that focus on scoring points, gaining achievements, new & innovative game mechanics, etc. don’t always try to immerse the player in the way story-based games often do--indeed, some narrative based games these days are called “walking simulators” because of the almost complete lack of game mechanics.

What has always been special about the Nancy Drew series is the balance the games often achieve between game play mechanics and storytelling. Interviewing suspects, exploring locations, solving puzzles and collecting clues give the player an active role in unraveling the mystery.

In the early games, largely due to budget and hardware limitations, characters and locations were not exactly photo-realistic, but once they moved onto full-3D characters in the second title, I never felt it was significantly distracting or lessened my ability to get into the game (with the one glaring exception being their almost obsessive desire to slap the HER logo or Nancy’s name on every day objects in the game world, particularly in the earliest titles).

However, the irony is that as HER improved their ability to produce realistic graphics with each title (and moved on to slapping Krolmeister on everything), the content of the games seemed to be increasingly unrealistic, causing the very thing they should have avoided at all costs: breaking immersion.

Mini-Games

Mini-games showed up early in the series, but they were exceedingly rare in the first ten or so titles. Instead, the games were full of largely realistic, detective-style tasks such as dusting for fingerprints, code-breaking, finding and using passwords and locker combinations, etc., alongside important suspect dialogues and general snooping, which made for a pretty balanced-feeling game. Jump ahead to the last ten or so titles, and you’ll find a completely different scenario.

Take the last (and hopefully not final) game, Sea of Darkness. SEA is very nearly nothing but a barrage of mini-games. Whether you’re helping out at the pub “filling orders” or earning money by matching vocabulary words (though very fun for nerds like me), you’re painfully aware that you are playing a game. Many of the various contraptions on the ship (the wheel puzzle) and in the lighthouse (the 2048 clone) also scream “VIDEO GAME.”

Rather than methodically solving a mystery, Nancy is essentially going from mini-game to mini-game, with finding a clue or talking to someone as window dressing. It gives the player the feeling that the point of the game is not so much to feel like a detective or to care about the story, but rather to get a minor dopamine rush from finishing all the puzzles--much like the point of most hidden object games, which rarely take the time to produce a decent story since that’s not what the player is typically there for.

However, I would venture to say that Nancy Drew game players are there for the story and certainly there for the feeling of being a detective. By constantly being made to play mini-games like Aggregation, 2048, nonograms, sudokus, renograms, etc. ad nauseam, I find myself feeling less like a detective and more like I’ve just played a series of unrelated iOS games.

That isn’t to say that these mini-games aren’t fun--I found Aggregation and the wires puzzle from Trail of the Twister to be quite addicting. Nor do I think there were no great story lines in the later games (Shadow at the Water’s Edge and Ghost of Thornton Hall both shined bright in this area).

Rather, they simply break immersion, which gives the game a distinctly different feel from others that focus more on things like snooping through someone’s computer or sending Morse code messages to smugglers.

Sure, you’re usually doing the mini-game while being sleuthy--getting into Gray’s computer in The Deadly Device or getting into the safe in Shadow at the Water’s Edge--but it takes away the realism factor to, in my opinion, an unacceptable degree.

When mini-games are used sparingly, as they once were in the earlier titles, they can bring a fun-factor that only a video game could bring, adding a little variety to the typical adventure game puzzles like “find the key for the lock.”

Implausible Contraptions

However, mini-games are not the only culprit in The Case of the Missing Realism. Many of the games suffer from implausible contraptions made by dead people--sometimes for no apparent reason.

Again, look to Sea of Darkness for some egregious examples. Part of a skeleton holding a box within a secret area of an old ship that has been thoroughly restored yet somehow was not found??? The ship’s wheel has a fucking slider-type puzzle on it???

Was the captain an amazing engineer? No.

Did he hire an amazing engineer? No.

Similar issues abound with Tomb of the Lost Queen. Personally, I found this game and its numerous puzzles (some mini-games, some not) to be fun, but it didn’t feel like a “true” Nancy Drew mystery. The ancient Egyptians obviously were great engineers, but moving columns??? Really??? I found there was an almost mystical feel to the game, which runs quite contrary to the game worlds of previous games.

However, the absolute worst offender is Labyrinth of Lies. While the game designers no doubt had the time of their lives creating all those beautiful set locations, the stage system and all the sundry puzzles it contained made about as much sense as the entirety of The Shattered Medallion: absolutely none.

That coupled with suspects literally spelling out how to solve their own puzzles or find where they hid something made LIE a thoroughly unimmersive game.

We’re asked as players to suspend our disbelief in these sort of situations for the sake of an entertaining game, but again I ask: is simply being entertained really, at core, what Nancy Drew gamers want?

I say no.

I think what drew us in and what we kept hoping to find again as each additional title was released was the feeling of really being a detective. But the more we’re reminded that this is just a game and realism is sacrificed in favor of shoving in as many puzzles as possible, the less we get that feeling.

Perhaps making all the contraptions realistic can pose a creative struggle for the game designers, but past games have proven that an abundance of interesting and challenging puzzles can be included without sacrificing a feeling of awe or simply being interesting.

A few good examples:

Benjamin Hawkins’ hideout in Danger on Deception Island

The monolith in Secret of the Scarlet Hand

Almost all the secret areas in Treasure in the Royal Tower

The elevator shaft puzzle is a particularly clever example

The reveal of each of these places felt exciting and made me feel like secret rooms and hidden chambers can be real--like each of these places could actually exist in the real world. Part of what made them feel real was also that the mechanism which revealed them to us was not outlandish. Stone and jade artifacts were used to open the monolith, not a sudoku puzzle followed by the monolith rocketing off into space or some such feat of implausible engineering (though I won’t defend the bizarre, poetic speech given by the cast when Nancy escapes).

None of this is to say that every bit of the old games was 100% realistic--a little bit of suspension of disbelief is okay. But there is a balance that should be maintained, and sadly it became more and more unbalanced with later releases.

Character Personalities

There is no doubt that the Nancy Drew series contains some amazing and memorable characters. From the older games, we got Professor Hotchkiss, Brady & Simone, the wrong amnesiac, Red Knott, and Ethel, to name a few. And the newer games gave us Big Island Mike, Henry Bolet, Colin Baxter, Yumi & Rentaro, Deirdre, Jamila, and Harper Thornton, among others.

Aside from some “hip” dialogue that missed the mark in Warnings at Waverly Academy and questionable accents in several games, characters generally felt genuine and unique--only occasionally would they say something odd or out of character. But a trend started to appear towards the end: so many of the characters began to sound the same--they were almost all suddenly witty.

Aside from the ever evolving personalities of George, Bess and the Hardy Boys, Yumi and Rentaro were the first exceptionally witty characters I noticed, and at the time it felt quite novel and like a genuine portrayal of funny, young people. But then came Lukas, Marcus, and Karl in The Captive Curse. Then Ryan in The Deadly Device. Then Bridget in the The Silent Spy. Then the entire cast of The Shattered Medallion. Then Niobe in Labyrinth of Lies. Not to mention all the random, out-of-character injections of wit coming from countless others in almost all the last ten games.

I remember loling at some of the quotes from Rentaro and Miwako, and I think their wit and humor lightened up an otherwise dark and grim story line--similar to Harper’s role in Ghost of Thornton Hall. But increasingly in the newest ten titles, it seemed like the humor often fell flat or simply didn’t fit with the character. It started to feel like you weren’t talking to suspects in a mystery, but rather characters all written by the same author.

Sadly, not everyone is a master of wit in the real world, and the overuse of these type of characters can feel jarring. Again: immersion broken.

The Big, Glaring Exception

HER always ends the game with a final culprit-stopping puzzle. They usually involve quick thinking, recalling previous game knowledge and/or high-stakes puzzle solving--and they usually range from implausible to impossible. Sometimes dreadfully combining implausible contraptions with a mini-game, these doozies have been rearing their ugly heads since that alarm sequence at the end of Stay Tuned for Danger.

The famous “fight” in Danger by Design and the Poe-inspired showdown in Warnings at Waverly Academy raised more than a few eyebrows--even on the HER official message boards, where criticism of any game is often tantamount to sin. But they’re far from alone in their bewilderment. From magical platforms in Tomb of the Lost Queen and The Creature of Kapu Cave to a well-trained whale in Danger on Deception Island and the mini-game-to-end-all-mini-games in Labyrinth of Lies, the ending has never quite been the peak of any Nancy Drew game.

Why It Matters

Some evolution of the Nancy Drew game series was perhaps inevitable, given the sheer volume of titles released. In an effort to keep interest up and stay relevant, HER took risks by adding mechanics and trying out new writers and designers over the years. The trouble is, the feel of the games evolved too.

Rather than finding ways to maintain that sense of mystery and realism (and perhaps improve their endgames), they began to drift towards a much more “gamey” feel. Collectible phone charms began to be placed in game scenes (why are there cellphone charms in an ancient Egyptian tomb??? The real mystery of that game). Powering on a lighthouse went from logically deducing the correct light bulb to a round of 2048.

Was it wrong of HER to move in this direction? Of course not. It’s all down to matter of opinion whether these changes made the game more or less fun, and I freely admit that I thoroughly enjoyed many of the newest titles.

But did they feel like “true” Nancy Drew games? Not really.

With Pointless Tasks, mini-games, and unrealistic characters and scenarios around every corner, immersion was constantly being shattered, and I increasingly walked away dissatisfied with the newest installments.

But another culprit shares the blame as well--the topic of Part 3: Nancy Drew & The Vanishing Set Designer.

Read Part 1: Nancy Drew & The Curse of the Pointless Task

#clue crew #nancy drew #her #her interactive #opinions

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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I Care a Lot: Can Professional Guardians and Conservatorships Really Get THAT Bad?

https://ift.tt/3qCWe0N

This article contains I Care a Lot spoilers. You can read our spoiler-free review here.

How odd that in the span of a couple days it seems like everyone is debating the virtues of professional guardianships and what it means to become a legal conservator. Only a week ago, Hulu and The New York Times debuted its social media lightning rod of a documentary, Framing Britney Spears, and now barely more than seven days later, Netflix is debuting J Blakeson’s I Care a Lot, a baroque comedy (or tragedy?) in which Rosamund Pike plays a professional legal guardian who cares. She cares a lot. Just not about her wards.

As becomes queasily apparent early on in I Care a Lot, the things that keep Pike’s Marla Grayson up at night are not the dozens of wards she has a legal responsibility toward, nor necessarily the employees in her company. Rather it’s her clients’ bank accounts where Marla’s interests lie; and she uses them to bill herself hourly rates and underwrites any expenses she incurs while raiding their homes for valuables.

Within the movie’s first 15 minutes, we even see Grayson’s nightmarish con in a nutshell when she has a little old lady named Jennier (Dianne Wiest) declared incompetent because of dementia. Marla shows up on Jennifer’s doorstep with the cops and a court order to lock Jennifer away forever in a nursing home, even though Wiest’s senior has never even seen the inside of a courtroom.

Can something this scandalous and awful actually happen in America? The short answer is yes.

“These stories were horrifying and not uncommon,” Blakeson told The Moveable Fest last September. “So I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole in reading about these various stories happening in various places and thought there was something almost Kafkaesque about somebody knocking on your door and just taking you away for a reason you didn’t think was valid.”

And as has become increasingly publicized in recent weeks, once you get in the system of guardianships/conservatorships, it’s very hard to get out.

Guardianships of course play a pivotal role in modern society. As a legal responsibility created to protect those deemed vulnerable due to a diminished capacity that’s left them “incapacitated” or “incompetent,” guardianship is usually taken up by family members or professionals (mostly lawyers) who agree to manage a vulnerable party’s assets, caring for their estate and possibly their day-to-day person and body. This means a guardian is in charge of their wards’ assets and finances, what doctors they see, what medications they take, where they live, and potentially who they interact with and how they lead their daily lives. One woman in this situation told The New York Times, “It’s worse than incarceration. At least in prison you have rights.”

It’s an arrangement most often used to protect elderly people who cannot care for themselves, but problems can occur when one must decide how to determine someone is “incapacitated” or “incompetent,” and whether a ward needs a guardian in perpetuity. Additionally, just how vulnerable is the position of being a professional guardian itself vulnerable to profit motive?

Most legal guardianships or conservatorships are not egregiously corrupt like Marla Grayson’s racket in I Care a Lot, and many professional guardians will note how difficult it is to manage the affairs of low income individuals who need daily assistance—or how professional guardians are required to step in by the courts when the children of elderly parents enter lawsuits against each other.

However, the details are frustratingly hard to track. The National Center for State Courts estimates the number of people in guardianships is between one and three million in the U.S., but it’s impossible to accurately measure when legal records of guardianships are often sealed and there is no standardized recordkeeping; The Times reported guardianship records are kept separately by each of New York’s individual 62 counties, with no standardized reporting on state or even city totals; and a Government Accountability Office report from 2010 revealed that “we could not locate a single Web site, federal agency, state or local entity, or any other organization that compiles comprehensive information on the issue.”

Rather state by state, and case by case, courts appear to be left to their own devices on how to handle situations—and also uncomfortably relying on what amounts to an honor system regarding professional guardians. As per The Times, the state of New York requires any aspiring professional guardian to only complete a one-day certification course, and according to the aforementioned GAO report, courts require no background checks for aspiring legal guardians. Instead they trust applicants to disclose any previous criminal convictions or recent bankruptcies.

This can create a recipe for abuse and cases as extreme as Pike’s wolfish Marla Grayson showing up at your door with a court order. Famously in New York, Judge John Phillips built a real estate empire in Brooklyn worth $20 million during the 1980s and ‘90s, which included movie theaters that became neighborhood landmarks. Yet after he was diagnosed with dementia and considered incompetent in the early 2000s, he went through a series of legal guardians and somehow was “left to freeze to death in 2008” in a facility unlicensed to treat dementia. While he declined, his guardians had been selling off theaters and various other assets to the tune of millions of dollars.

More recently, and more reminiscent of Marla Grayson, is the case of April Parks, a former Nevada legal guardian who pled guilty in 2018 to six felony charges, including two counts of elder exploitation. The full extent of her abuse, however, was laid bare in 2017 by Rachel Aviv’s harrowing reporting in The New Yorker’s “How the Elderly Lose Their Rights.”

In that piece, Aviv chronicled how Parks amassed more than 400 wards for her guardianship business over 12 years in the state of Nevada—and how each of her wards lost “nearly all of their civil rights.” This is primarily highlighted through the experiences of Rudy and Rennie North, a couple in their 70s who on a fateful Friday morning were greeted at their front door by April Parks and three unnamed associates. Parks was the owner of a company called A Private Professional Guardian—a fact she was so proud about she had her license plate read “CRTGRDN” (court guardian)—and she arrived that day with an order from the Clark County Family Court, which demanded the Norths be removed from their homes immediately.

Unbeknownst to the Norths, Parks had filed an emergency ex-parte petition in the court, which allowed her to claim the Norths posed a “substantial risk for mismanagement of medications, financial loss, and physical harm” without their presence in the court. Indeed, they weren’t even notified the hearing was happening. Parks told the court the elderly couple was at risk due to a rapid decline caused by dementia, as based on a letter from a physician’s assistant Rennie had seen once. Rudy and Rennie had never undergone a single cognitive assessment when the court agreed Parks should move the pair into a nursing home.

It was more than three days before the Norths’ adult daughter Julie Belsche even discovered where they were, with her parents’ home being left empty, causing the daughter to tell her husband she thought “someone kidnapped my parents.”

As soon as the Norths were gone, Parks went through their house with the owner of a company called Caring Transitions, which specialized in estate sales of the assets and belongings of relocated seniors. Raiding the couple’s closets and drawers, in search of paperwork and valuables, had become routine for Parks. Within a month, Parks hired Even Tide Life Transitions to sell off most of the belongings, including two Renoir lithographs valued at $38,000.

The Norths’ case was not unique. As their daughter Julie and The New Yorker eventually unraveled, Parks had wards in nursing homes throughout the county, including 10 in the one that the Norths were relocated to. Many of these seniors were declared in need of legal guardianship in hearings that lasted less than two minutes. Prosecutor Jaclyn O’Malley would later piece together for a grand jury that Parks allegedly built a network of “hospital social workers and medical staff” who helped generate client leads for Parks’ company. In one instance in 2010, the state’s attorney said Parks was “cold-calling” rehabilitation centers in search of a 79-year-old woman who had nearly $700,000 in the bank and no children.

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But all of this was unspooled after years of hardship for the Norths. As per the American Bar Association, guardianship is generally “permanent, leaving no way out… until death do us part,’” and the Norths seemed to face that truth when they couldn’t even hire a lawyer to argue their case.

Their daughter also reported they were “overmedicated to the point where they weren’t really there” in their nursing home.

All these seeming horrors were committed by a sophisticated engine of care that makes I Care a Lot’s Marla Grayson appear like small potatoes. Yet the legal authority of professional guardians is so protected under the cloud of sealed documents that it wasn’t stories of glassy-eyed medication or the lack of due process that actually brought Parks down. The narrowly defined felonies she pled guilty to involved perjury under oath and double dealing in her accounting—like charging her wards $100 each for the hour it took to deliver unsolicited Christmas “gifts” of cheap socks purchased from the nearby department store.

It got Parks a sentence of 16 to 40 years in prison. Still, the most egregious cases are far from the only ones to care about, and in reality there isn’t a Peter Dinklage there to bargain for each senior who may think they don’t need a professional guardian.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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wigurp · 5 years

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PREVIEW 3 - MEMBER GROUPS

as we get closer to handing out our discord link for everyone to join and work hard on finishing up the site, we want to keep sharing previews for you guys! this week are the seven member groups that you will have available to you. two are premium groups and must be purchased, but we may be giving away one or two without cost! you’ll find all our groups explained under the cut.

COMEDY

VIBRANT. POSITIVE. ENTHUSIASTIC. DEPENDENT. INDECISIVE. CREATIVE. SOCIAL. SUPPORTIVE.

FIXING STRAY HAIRS IN A MIRROR, HAPPY FINGERS ADVENTUROUSLY ENTWINED, HAND-WRITTEN NOTES FOLDED TWICE, A GARDEN BUDDING WITH SPRING-FRESH FLOWERS, BUBBLEGUM KISSES, A PLEASANTLY WARM MIDDAY SUN IN THE SPRING, CURLED LIPS THAT HINT AT A LONG-HELD SECRET.

Ever the social butterfly, the Comedy is friendly with just about everyone. They foster close relationships easily due to their genuine, warm natures. They enjoy being around other people, and many times look to social careers. Comedies have a very positive outlook on life and believe that there is a little good in everyone - they are vibrant and enthusiastic, with the ability to make anyone feel special and worthwhile. They are natural centers of attention, and some may see them as shallow or fake - but insincerity or impersonal analysis is something the Comedy can't stand. They prefer honesty, though they're more likely to serve the truth up with a dose of sugar than bluntness.

FANTASY

CONTRADICTORY. RESPONSIBLE. VOLATILE. INTENSE. OBSERVANT. MANIPULATIVE. IDEALISTIC.

AN OVERCAST SKY WITH A PROMISE OF LATER STORMS, THE SOFT SOUNDS OF REALIZATION, CROOKED GRINS, BLURRED PHOTOS IN YOUR PHONE'S CAMERA ROLL, THE ODD SENSE THAT SOMETHING IS OFF, DERISIVE LAUGHTER, VAGUE ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC PLAYING SOFTLY IN THE BACKGROUND.

An interesting character to say the least, the Fantasy type lives in a world full of possibilities. It's safe to say that Fantasies see possibilities in things, people, or situations that most others would overlook: where some would see the mundane, Fantasies see untapped promise. They can find meaning in just about anything, but their stubborn and derisive streaks mean they'll believe nothing until they see for themselves. Trust doesn't come easily to a Fantasy, perhaps because they are so adept at manipulating others themselves. While Fantasies may act outside of what society would consider to be a good and lawful path, they have a strict moral code of their own that they rarely, if ever, stray from. While they may look as though they are directionless and uncertain, they often have deep-seated plans and aspirations that they are sure to see through, due to their committed and tenacious attitudes.

ROMANCE

MELANCHOLIC. DRAMATIC. LAWFUL. CARING. UNCERTAIN. DEPENDABLE. SERIOUS. PESSIMISTIC.

FADED PICTURES TOO SENTIMENTAL TO TOSS OUT, FEELING MONUMENTALLY SMALL UNDERNEATH A SKY OF STARS, GETTING LOST DOWN INTERNET RABBIT HOLES, ANGRY TEARS, SENDING A MESSAGE DESPITE YOUR BETTER JUDGMENT, ROUGH MORNING VOICES, A MESSY SPACE CALLED ORGANIZED CHAOS.

Romance appears to have many different opposing sides, causing disharmony even within themselves by their very nature. A melancholic type, Romance deeply craves close relationships of every sort. They tend to be lonely individuals, no matter how many friendships they have, and are always wanting more of this or that. However, they are also incredibly uncomfortable with vulnerability and have a profound fear of rejection. They also have a difficult time truly understanding the thoughts and feelings of others, making genuinely intimate relationships hard to build. This is a problem for the Romance, who can be very dependent - they are followers, though they may very well believe themselves otherwise. While they regard themselves as innocent connection-seekers, they have a dark side. Wisteria can become harsh when feeling attacked or provoked; they can also become possessive over those they feel close to, or want to be close to.

SCI-FI

SPONTANEOUS. ANALYTICAL. MISCHIEVOUS. FLIGHTY. AMBITIOUS. RECKLESS. LIVELY. EXCESSIVE.

THE SMELL OF GASOLINE, CASUAL COOL STYLE, TAPPING SLY WICKEDLY SHARP NAILS, ROLLING EYES, THE SMACK OF A LOLLIPOP BETWEEN LIPS, SLIPPING UNDER PRIVATE FENCES, COUGHS OF SARCASTIC LAUGHTER, PHONES RINGING IN THE DEAD OF NIGHT.

Sci-Fi types are original and independent - they follow their own eclectic beat, and their lively and fun-filled personalities are impossible to ignore. They live in the moment, drawing in others with their contagious energy and ability to manifest the things they want. Sci-Fis despise the feeling of lacking control, and when they are stifled they can lash out viciously. Despite this, they aren't necessarily drawn to leadership roles. Though they are incredibly self-reliant, they are also great team players, good at following direction - unless they feel the directions to be too misguided, that is - and pulling a group together. They hold grudges easily, and are quick to use their sharp wit to wound - this is typically easy for a Sci-Fi, as their observant and analytical natures make them adept at figuring other people out.

THRILLER

CHAOTIC. UNPREDICTABLE. CHARISMATIC. RESOURCEFUL. RUTHLESS. CLEVER. VISIONARY. FIERCE.

LATE NIGHT ROOFTOP VIEWS, LIMINAL SPACES, IMPULSIVE ROAD TRIPS FOR NO OTHER REASON THAN TO GO, A KISS LIKE A DARE, EYES THAT GO ON FOR MILES, DANCING WITH A STRANGER IN A LOW-LIT CLUB, ABRUPT HOWLS OF LAUGHTER, MIDNIGHT SWIMS, THE FEELING OF BEING THE ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD.

The Thriller type can be incredibly dark; their talent for manipulation and their capability for ruthlessness make for an alarming combination, and their dedication to their selected causes or beliefs make them apt to see through whatever it is they're working towards. And because Thrillers are incredible visionaries, their plans are usually big and bold in nature. Thrillers lean towards chaos over peace; harmony is at odds with their personalities, they're much more at home when things are being shaken up. They revel in the unraveling of the known and typical, and thoroughly enjoy being in the dead center of the pandemonium. Thrillers aren't necessarily evil, or bad people, but their need for turmoil has a tendency to create issues in their personal lives no matter the case.

ACTION - premium member group (requirements: 2,500 points, perks: 2 extra leading canon project roles)

BRAVE. STUBBORN. LEADERS. EXCITABLE. AUDACIOUS. DETERMINED. OUTGOING. PASSIONATE.

BOLD STRETCHING SMILES, THE WORLD FLYING BY ON A DRIVE, A FLEETING TOUCH THAT LEAVES A MILLION THINGS UNSAID, WILD BERRIES, FISTS CLENCHED TO KEEP THEM FROM STRIKING, THE CRACK OF A GUNSHOT, AUTUMN LEAVES OF ORANGE AND RED, A KNOWING WINK.

Action types are full of passionate and motivational energy that can easily inspire those around them when it's properly channeled. Their minds are always working at top speed: formulating ideas, and then plans surrounding those ideas, and then taking those plans and putting them into practical action. The Action is a doer; talking idly about possibilities frustrates them, they want to see results - and if they are at the helm of leadership, they typically do. Because of their ability to formulate solutions and plans quickly, as well as their tendency to think long-term, they have incredibly high standards for both themselves and others, and an inability to keep up on others' behalf can frustrate them.

DRAMA - premium member group (requirements: 5,000 points, perks: 3 extra leading canon project roles, 1 extra canon project addition)

DEVOTED. CONFIDENT. LEADERS. FORCEFUL. INTELLIGENT. DECISIVE. IMPATIENT. DYNAMIC.

THE SHEEN OF A SWORD, HEAVY SLOPED SHOULDERS, THE THUMBING OF CRISP PAGES, WIND WHIPPING YOUR HAIR, EMBERS STILL SMOLDERING IN A FIREPLACE, PRACTICED SMILES GROWING TIGHT UNDER DURESS, A HAND TRAILING LIGHTLY DOWN A STAIRWAY RAILING.

An authoritative, powerful presence, Dramas are natural leaders and often find themselves at the forefront of great responsibility. Fortunately, these confident, devoted types are more than up to the challenge. Dramas are well-informed and well-read - they hate being outsmarted or feeling as though they are out of their element, so they take every measure to lessen the likelihood of that happening. Their voice is strong and assured, and draws other people to listen, making them capable politicians, lawyers, or CEOs. They are quick and decisive, able to make tough decisions others might waver on. While Drama types often have a hard time admitting they're wrong, they are excellent team players, capable of stirring loyalty and motivation in groups they find themselves in - but of course, they tend to take the lead where possible.

#updates

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vieuxnoyesrp · 7 years

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Rogan Jones ⚜ Psychic ⚜ 36 ⚜ Locus Sigilli ⚜ ENTJ

In the midst of chaos...

Son of Fallon Jones—retired J&J detective, Rogan grew up under his father’s shadow. Many who knew his old man claimed that Rogan is Fallon’s carbon copy; in appearance, in character, and virtually all other habits that pass down from father to son either by DNA or exemplary behavior. But that was about as far as the apples fell from the tree. Unlike his predecessor, Rogan was not a conspiracy theorist nor did he have any taste for mysteries. Being born to parents whose very business was the art of sleuthing, Rogan had come to dread them miserably. Having spent an entire childhood having to listen to elaborate and often ridiculous conspiracies that ruined perfectly good conversations at the dinner table, Rogan went out of his way to eliminate both conspiracies and mysteries in his adult life.

Given the fact that there was a lot that he did not see eye to eye on, with his father—his choice of career had been yet another sore topic. Fallon had been extremely disappointed in his son when Rogan had refused to follow in his footsteps. He lacked any interest for paranormal criminal investigations and instead wanted to have an education that would lead to a practical life. One preferably that didn’t involve crime or danger. And a business degree seemed to promise him exactly that—a chance at pursuing a career that offered stability and logic. A line of career that also rather complimented his talent.

While his detective father, had a supernatural gift for pinpointing patterns and trends that made him so successful in his line of work as a detective, Rogan dabbled with a paranormal capacity of a very different kind. It had left his parents scratching their heads in wonder of which lineage of genes in the Jones family had passed down to him of all people the innate ability to wield binding contracts. And not just any contracts. Deals that were bound by paranormal energy and were physically impossible to break. Those that did…well they ended up getting a taste of what it was like to make a deal with the devil. To Rogan’s chagrin though, these contractual elements came into play virtually any time he became involved in an exchanged-based arrangement. His childhood is marked by many such odd occasions where losing even the seemingly harmless of bets turned deadly. Rogan wasn’t quite sure how it worked, but in every situation wherein he gave his word or someone else gave him theirs, the vow is somehow magically sealed. And it took a hell of a lot of trial and error on his part to get the hang of it.

{Sometimes a deal with the devil is better than no deal at all.}

It was around this time in university that he also met Evelyn Ross. A vibrant young woman who attended the same university though as an art student. It was hard to ever find Evelyn without her hands stained with paint or muddied with clay. Despite the fact that they were both pursuing different fields, Rogan found himself intrinsically drawn to her. He supposed it was the fact she lacked any psychical talents that he had found so refreshing. Evelyn was a safe bet—a source of comfort. Luckily, that attraction hadn’t been one sided and so by the time he’d finished his masters, Rogan had proposed to Evelyn after being with her for almost three and a half years.

...there is also opportunity.

To his chagrin however, there was no avoiding mystery and chaos once he took on the seat as head of the Arcane Society after his uncle Zack Jones. A position that was very much thrust upon him by force since his cousin Dixon refused to step up to the plate to succeed his father. There was also the fact that Rogan’s past experience in managerial roles had granted him leadership skills that people believed were important for steering the Arcane Society in a new progressive direction.

The Arcane Society is an organization fraught with disorder and hence Rogan finds his hands full as he tries to tackle the endless list of tasks his uncle Zack left under his succession plan. Revamping the Arcane Museum and hunting down lost artifacts was a difficult task all on its own. But with new plans to establish headquarters in New Orleans, a city crawling with supernatural threats of virtually every kind—from vampires to werewolves, witches and everything in between he was determined to give voice to the human faction. And it is only when he has the entire responsibility of the organization lourded over his head that Rogan finds his moral compass on business ethics being challenged. There are times when he succumbs to underhanded methods to achieve his means. Yet that is not something that sits too heavily on his conscious. In a dog eat dog city like NOLA, one had to be willing to bite if they wished to avoid getting bitten.

Web of Connections:

Marcel Gerard: One couldn’t just establish a secret society in the crescent city without holding diplomatic relations with the King of the quarter. With Marcel he’d made his very first deal in New Orleans—on the simple premise that the Arcane Society would interfere minimally with his dealings. That is, of course if his night-walkers kept themselves in check enough to ensure that the human faction was dealt with fairly. But as always Rogan has a few plans of his own stocked in his back pocket. When the lost relics are once again restored to the Arcane Society, the fangs in this town are going to have to re-evaluate the links on the supernatural food chain.

Kira Yukimura: As a man on a mission, Rogan wasn’t the type to leave any stone un-turned. Reinstating the Arcane Museum to it’s former glory meant acquiring the right resources. Noshiko Yukimura, a woman well endowed with a keen eye for antiques was someone he imagined would be a great asset as a consultant to help him curate supernatural artifacts. In the process, she’d graciously volunteered her daughter Kira to help out at the museum. While he left most of the work pertaining to museum to those he’d employed to manage its upkeep, the few times he’d paid it a visit he’d noticed the young girl emanate a curiosity about existing pieces of artifacts that garnered concern from him. Teenager or not, the girl ought to know that there was some truth to old adage that curiosity killed the cat.

Jenna Sommers: This humble little history teacher had tickled his curiosity when he'd discovered the uncanny resemblance she bore to Alaric's ex-partner. But now that she was living in his great aunt Trula Tallentyre's charming victorian house, she'd truely captured his attention. And not entirely for the right reasons. That property, like many of the others under his family's estate, should've been secured under the Jones' name. How it managed to slip under the radar, is not only a nuisance but may prove costly to the society given how much family memorabilia Trula had hoarded over the years . To make matters worse, Jenna seemed to refuse to cooperate. He'd approached her on numerous occasions with exceptional offers in hopes of buying back the property. But the high-school teacher refuses to cede any offer he's presented her thus far, and has gone as far as threatening him with a restraining order next time he shows up at her house. Not one to give up that easily, Rogan is determined to wear Jenna down.

Finn Mikaelson Conrad Hillier: Upon first impression, this inconspicuous counselor, might've been overlooked as just another node he'd acquired in his ever growing network, thanks to Vic Kloeckler. But Conrad’s interest in a particular artifact - the Serratura, struck Rogan as anything but academic. Nonetheless, Rogan was bent on making the best of this connection knowing that Conrad's extensive knowledge about the item was bound to prove beneficial. While this artifact had never originally been part of the Arcane Museum's collection, how fortuitous would it be if it were to land in their hands. The gleam in Conrad's eyes tell Rogan, however, that this counselor might turn into an adversary in his search for this item, if he doesn't act fast.

Also mentioned in the following bios: Evelyn Jones, Alaric Saltzman, Rain St. Agnes, Vincent Griffith,

Plot Teasers:

While Rogan believes his vision to be twenty twenty in the business and political spheres, on the domestic turf he’s left himself vulnerable to a huge blind spot; one that is bound to rock the foundations of his already fragile marriage.

As many of the society’s most crucial secrets are unravelled, Rogan’s going to find himself struggling to contain them; as secrets tend to have a mind of their own.

On the soundtrack of his life: Richman - Tinpan Orange (x)

FC: Matt Bomer, negotiable.

Fortunately for you, Rogan is O P E N!!

#supernatural rpg #magic roleplay #Matt Bomer #Psychic RP #bio rpg #Matt Bomer FC #Rogan Jones #s: as #cast #t: psychic #open #openm

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sulietsexual · 7 years

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The Appeal of The Idiot Hero - A Closer Look At Paul Ballard

Requested by theproxyfront

Paul Ballard is a character who cops a lot of unwarranted flak, both from the fandom and In-Universe. He is often dismissed as insignificant, useless, overly-obsessive and just downright stupid. His pursuit of the Dollhouse and by extension Echo are both seen as unhealthy and ridiculous and he is often put down by fans and by characters within the show, all of which is a real pity and does a true disservice to his character and his characterisation over the show.

Due to Dollhouse’s short run coupled with its’ ridiculously narrow focus on Echo, there is not a massive amount of background given to the other characters. We know virtually nothing about Paul’s life pre-Pilot, but the little we are told is somewhat revealing. In his first scene, we are informed that Paul was once a good agent, one of the FBI’s best. His life started to unravel when his wife left him, affecting his work and causing his performance to become erratic. It was at this point that the Bureau shunted him into a department which was intended to be a dead-end – the investigation into the Dollhouse.

This is actually a very important point, and one which should be remembered when discussing Paul’s obsession with the Dollhouse (and later with Echo, which I will also touch upon). Paul neither pursued nor discovered the Dollhouse on his own. He was assigned a case which many believed to be a dead end, mostly to get him out of the way and give him something redundant to focus on, where he couldn’t make trouble. However, as Paul discovers, the Dollhouse is very much a reality, a horrifying institution which deals in human trafficking, slavery and potentially murder. And Paul, being a Lawful Good type as well as a genuinely good person, can’t let the investigation go once all of this is discovered. He knows that the Dollhouse exists, he knows that innocent people are being trafficked and abused, and he refuses to let it lie, despite the Bureau’s insistence that he should. Paul’s obsession with the Dollhouse and bringing it down is actually an indicator to the goodness of his character, as opposed to the very negative light it’s usually shown in.

But what of his creepy obsession with Echo, you ask. Well, again, this isn’t your typical stalker-with-a-crush case. Paul isn’t Spike, hanging around Buffy’s house, stealing her panties and acting gross and entitled. As with the Dollhouse investigation, Echo was sent to Paul. Paul had already been investigating the Dollhouse for months when Alpha sent him the photo of Echo, which changed the game significantly for Paul. Whereas before he knew that the Dollhouse was operational, all of its’ victims were nameless and faceless. Once Echo’s picture is sent to him, he suddenly has a real, living, breathing person to focus on, someone whom he can actually save, which is why she becomes such a focal point for him. The Dollhouse is no longer a faceless monster, it is a real place, holding a real person. And once he sees Echo in her Rebecca Miner persona, the reality hits even harder, as Paul now has definitive proof of what is going on behind the closed doors of the Dollhouse.

And it must be noted that Paul fights his obsession. When Joel Miner rightly points out that Paul is indulging in a fantasy, playing the role of the Prince going to rescue the trapped Princess, Paul takes a step back, looks at himself, and decides to focus on the real girl, the one who is flesh and blood and doesn’t stir up his ridiculous hero complex. He turns away from the fantasy and chooses the reality. Which makes it all the more devastating when Mellie is also revealed to be a Doll, shattering Paul’s world again and making it near-impossible for him to separate fantasy and reality anymore, to be a real person involved with a real girl, to lead any semblance of a normal life. The Dollhouse has infiltrated his life, and they will never allow things to return to normal for him.

Now, all this being said, Paul Ballard is not without his flaws. In fact, one of the reasons he is such a great character is because he is deeply flawed. As the title of this piece suggests, he is a classic example of an Idiot Hero, rushing in without thought, charging into the fray without a plan, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs behind him for people to follow. He is arrogant, headstrong and doesn’t often listen to others. He’s got a big, good heart, but he is often ruled by his emotions and has a hard time looking at things outside of his narrow black-and-white view. He also never knows when to quit, which both serves him well and becomes detrimental to his cause.

Despite what I’ve discussed, one of Paul’s biggest flaws is his obsessive nature. While there are valid and obvious reasons for both of his obsessions over the show (the Dollhouse and Echo/Caroline) the degree to which he immerses himself, the lengths he goes to in order to prove his theories and the obsessive nature of his investigation are all alarming at times, and they clearly have a detrimental effect on his personal life, his love life and his work life. He ends the first season with no job and seemingly no prospects. He has proved that the Dollhouse exists but ends up in a Cassandra Truth situation. His obsession has ruled his life for so long, he doesn’t quite know who he is without it, as evidenced by his lack of direction at the start of Season 2 and his uneasy truce with the Dollhouse.

I think one of the more interesting aspects of Paul’s character is that he is truly the only character to never trust the Dollhouse. Even when he joins them, it’s to try to take them down from the inside, to protect Echo and to save Caroline. He never views the Dollhouse in a positive light and is never swayed in his belief that what they are doing is wrong and immoral. He is also the only character to broach the subject of “souls”, to point out that while the Dollhouse may have the technology to “wipe” a person’s original personality, they can’t erase their soul, their true essence, all of which becomes insanely tragic and ironic when Paul himself is imprinted with his own personality. Confronted with the realisation that he is a Doll, Paul must learn to adjust to his new existence, and if Dollhouse hadn’t been cancelled, I think that particular event would have made for some amazing characterisation.

At the end of the day, Paul is actually a really well-written character, with depths that the fandom just doesn’t seem interested in looking into, which is a real pity, because if you can see past the hero complex and obsessive nature, Paul Ballard is a fascinating and endearing character, who – as with everything on this show – had a lot of untapped potential. It’s just a shame that so much of the fandom refuses to see this.

#paul ballard #dollhouseedit #dollhouse meta #whedonverse #theproxyfront #meta #dollhouse #i know this isn't a graphic #but tagging it just 'dollhouse'' puts it in the general dollhouse tag #which is of course full of ACTUAL dollhouses #as opposed to the show #also sorry this took so long!

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neuxue · 7 years

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Wheel of Time liveblogging: The Gathering Storm ch 17

In which Cadsuane and Perrin discover the value of introspection

Chapter 17: Questions of Control

Hello Semirhage.

“You should be more careful,” Sarene said from inside the room. “The Amyrlin seat, we have much influence with her.”

…Really? The first oath allows you to say that? Because um…no, you have virtually no influence with either of the claimants to the Amyrlin Seat at this point.

Also that is never going to work on Semirhage, so you may as well save your breath.

Light only knew what would happen if Semirhage got free.

Oh don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll never find out, and there’s absolutely no reason whatsoever to be concerned…

Cadsuane clearly doesn’t think much of Sarene’s line of questioning either. Nor does she think much of Sarene. Or any of the other Aes Sedai sworn to Rand. But that’s hardly news.

At times, it seemed that half of her allies were only determined to make her job harder.

That goes for pretty much the entire side of the Light, really. They’d do a lot better if they all stopped getting in each other’s way and learned how to cooperate.

Cadsuane herself had yet to address any questions to the Forsaken personally. The other Aes Sedai looked at her as an almost mythic figure, a reputation she had nurtured. She’d stayed away from the White Tower for many decades at a time, ensuring that many would assume she was dead. When she reappeared, it made a stir. She’d gone hunting false Dragons, both because it was necessary and because each man she captured added to her reputation with the other Aes Sedai.

Whatever else she is, Cadsuane is remarkably self-aware. And she makes no apologies for who she is. She tries to see people as they are, and she extends that same scrutiny to herself, and for the most part she’s good at accepting the unvarnished truth. She’s wrong sometimes, but overall she doesn’t lie to herself nearly as much as most.

And this is definitely here to bring back the notion of similarity between Cadsuane and Semirhage. Which is an interesting one to think about – there absolutely are some similarities, but there are some fairly obvious differences as well, and I always enjoy that kind of setup where you can find the common points but also look at where they diverge and why and how.

Also, Moiraine is going to end up with a similar reputation if she comes out of this whole thing alive. Spending long periods of time away from the Tower, torching Forsaken, missing presumed dead but actually in an alternate dimension…oh, and that little thing about finding the Dragon Reborn. Have fun being a legend!

All of her work pointed at these final days.

So there’s one point of difference. Cadsuane may well have started building her reputation purely to satisfy her ego, but she seems now to use it more as another tool in her arsenal as she works towards accomplishing her goals. That’s not to say she doesn’t have an ego, or that that doesn’t still play a part in it, but her focus at least now is on the world, and specifically on the Dragon Reborn. She said as much to Rand, even, constrained by the three oaths: “Whatever I do, it will be for your own good; not mine, not the good of the White Tower, yours.” It’s an opinion statement, so the three oaths don’t guarantee that everything she does will be good for him, but it’s pretty clear on her intentions. She’s not in this primarily for herself. Semirhage, on the other hand, very much is.

She was slowly losing control, thread by thread. Once, something as dramatic as the squabbles at the White Tower would have drawn her immediate attention. But she couldn’t begin to work on that problem. Creation itself was unravelling, and her only way to fight that was to return all her efforts on al’Thor.

And he resisted her every attempt to aid him. Step by step he was becoming a man with insides like stone, unmoving and unable to adapt. A statue with no feelings could not face the Dark One.

Once again she’s spot-on with her assessment of the situation; where she potentially errs is in her approach to addressing the problems she’s identified.

This touches on one of the things that I most enjoy about Cadsuane: she’s a flawed character whose flaws do not render her incompetent or ‘evil’, and yet are not mere token flaws but instead are believable and integral parts of her character. It’s a surprisingly difficult balance to strike with any character, but especially with one as experienced, intelligent, and powerful as Cadsuane is. The balance of partially-antagonistic-but-not-evil is another difficult one to pull off. In combination, it makes her an impressive and rather fascinating character.

Often, in order to create character flaws, drive conflict, and/or make The Hero look good, a character is rendered incompetent (either permanently or momentarily) in a particular area. Too often, this is done in a way that strains suspension of disbelief, or else is just cliché, frustrating, or transparent.

Side characters suffer from this far more often than protagonists – though protagonists are absolutely susceptible – in part because protagonists are a little easier to believably flaw. They’re frequently young, which means things like lack of experience are perfectly believable and legitimate sources of conflict or difficulty. Otherwise, they’re competent in many areas but then dropped into a story they’re wholly unprepared for. They’re also in the spotlight more and often are the primary viewpoint, which can help convey more nuance.

Cadsuane, though, is about as prepared for the Last Battle as anyone of this Age could be. She’s also got a whole host of admirable traits, and knows how to use them. She’s out of her depth only by virtue of the fact that the apocalypse is a little over any non-deity’s paygrade. This, then, all makes her prime villain material – or at the very least, prime antagonist material. Yet she is neither. She leans towards antagonistic at times, but she’s on The Hero’s team and is actively trying to help him, and he respects her even if he doesn’t like her or agree with her.

At this point, if we can’t make her incompetent and we can’t make her evil – or at the very least an obstacle that must be overcome – we have to kill her. She’s the instigator, the Wise Mentor, the ‘there’s the plotroad and here’s the map, now go fuck things up and have an adventure’ character who knows too much and can do too much that they’d break the story if they stick around because what would the heroes do?

Except…she’s not. She’s flawed in such a way that allows her to avoid all of these pitfalls. She’s good at just about everything she does, and she’s good at reading situations and she knows a hell of a lot, but sometimes that’s not enough. Her judgement is sound but her mindset is not perfect, and so you get these interesting situations where her approaches make a great deal of sense, but that doesn’t guarantee that they’ll work, or that she’s made the right choice. And there’s all kinds of conflict that stems from this as well, obviously, especially between her and Rand.

Not to mention the whole issue of morality that comes in where Cadsuane is concerned. It frequently comes down to the question of whether or not the ends justify the means, except then the means only partially succeed, or even fail outright, so it’s more whether or not the aims justify the means.

Anyway, Cadsuane fascinates me as a character. I love characters who inhabit their roles ever so slightly differently than the archetypes say they should, or who raise these sorts of moral questions without necessarily answering them.

Cadsuane itched to go in and confront the woman, but Merise had asked the very questions Cadsuane would have, and she had failed. How long would Cadsuane’s image remain intact if she proved herself as impotent as the others?

It’s a valid question. Again, not purely for selfish purposes, but because Cadsuane’s image is a tool she relies on, and if she breaks it, there would likely be more consequences than simple humiliation.

“Aes Sedai?” Semirhage responded, chuckling. “Don’t you feel ashamed, using that term to describe yourselves? Like a puppy calling itself a wolf!”

“We may not know everything, I admit, but—”

“You know nothing,” Semirhage replied. “You are children playing with your parents’ toys.”

Well she’s not entirely wrong.

She’s not entirely right, true – the Aes Sedai of this Age have discovered some things that were unknown or believed impossible even in Semirhage’s time – but…she’s not entirely wrong.

Cadsuane tapped the side of her tea cup with her index finger. Again, she was struck by the similarities between herself and Semirhage – and again, those similarities made her insides itch.

It’s a really interesting inversion of the classic villain-delivered ‘we’re not so different, you and I’. I really like this whole train of thought, and the way Cadsuane is uncomfortable with it but also forces herself to think about it and figure out how it can be used.

Semirhage throws her food. Semirhage you are three thousand, not three.

They were all so jumpy around the Forsaken. They weren’t deferential, but they did treat Semirhage with a measure of respect. How could they not? She was a legend. One did not enter the presence of such a creature – one of the most evil beings ever to live – and not feel at least a measure of awe.

Measure of awe…

“That’s our mistake,” Cadsuane whispered.

Sorilea all but told you that. Semirhage is human. And if you’re hesitant or visibly afraid or – especially – visibly in awe, the balance of power in the room is virtually never going to be in your favour.

And of course, nearly everyone Cadsuane interacts with regards her with a measure of awe, so she has some experience of how it feels to be on that end of things. That’s certainly something she can use – because one accustomed to being viewed and treated that way may well be shaken by someone who doesn’t treat them so.

It all came back to a single question. How would Cadsuane break herself? The solution was easy, now that it had occurred to her.

Once more with the unflinching self-analysis and self-awareness. How would you break yourself? It’s not a particularly comfortable question to address. Amongst other things, it requires honestly acknowledging vulnerability, which is hard for anyone and especially for someone like Cadsuane, who is regarded as legendary. Not to mention the fact that by acting on any solution, she would be showing others how to break her, should anyone else see the same similarity between them.

“Ah,” Cadsuane said with a no-nonsense attitude. “I see that the child has refused her meal. Sarene, release your weaves.”

Semirhage raised her eyebrows and opened her mouth to scoff, but as Sarene released her weaves of Air, Cadsuane grabbed Semirhage by the hair and –with a casual sweep of her foot – knocked the woman’s legs out from beneath her, dropping her to the floor.

And, at least momentarily, definitely upsetting the balance of power. It’s abrupt and it’s surprising and it’s unlike anything Semirhage has likely experienced from just about anyone.

Prior to now, everyone Semirhage has interacted with – including most of the other Forsaken – has been a little afraid of her, and she knows it. So she can stand here confident in her superiority and secure in the knowledge that none of these Aes Sedai can do anything to her. Except Cadsuane shows up and completely breaks that pattern, introducing at least a moment of doubt or uncertainty. After so long of being able to probably predict fairly accurately how everyone would respond to her, Semirhage may not have even thought to prepare for this sort of approach. Because as far as she’s concerned it isn’t possible, especially in this Age.

In saying that, I’m reminded of Elaida last chapter. So certain of her place and of how things would go that she could be shaken by a well-aimed and entirely unexpected attack.

Cadsuane hasn’t won yet, of course, but she’s changed the game. Now, like Egwene, she has to make sure she presses the advantage before Semirhage can recover.

Cadsuane knelt down with one knee on the woman’s back, then shoved her face forward into the spilled food. “Eat,” she said. “I don’t approve of wasted food, child, particularly during these times.”

Quite literally pressing the advantage, it would seem.

I am intrigued by how this parallels Egwene’s confrontation of Elaida last chapter, but with the small reversal of how ‘child’ is used. Last chapter, Elaida was casually dismissing Egwene as a novice, as ‘child’, as insignificant, and that underestimation became Elaida’s vulnerability. Here, Cadsuane holds the rough analogue of Egwene’s position as far as roles in the confrontation go, but is using ‘child’ and the whole idea of underestimation as a weapon.

Semirhage is…not best pleased. And is swearing up a storm, but sadly Elayne is not there to learn the words.

[Semirhage] didn’t fight back. Cadsuane wouldn’t have either; that would only hurt her image.

I like that Cadsuane is continuing to approach this as she would approach breaking herself. She knows how she would react to certain things, and so that gives her a slight advantage in that she can at least sort of predict what Semirhage will do. And therefore how to proceed.

They had tried all measure of torture available to them under al’Thor’s requirements, but each of those had betrayed esteem. They were treating Semirhage as a dangerous force and a worthy enemy. That would only bolster her ego.

Indeed. And I think it probably goes beyond that; it’s an ego thing, of course, but to be stripped of it is quite likely one of the few things that could potentially frighten Semirhage. Her reputation and the fear and awe and respect accorded to her by everyone else help to make her invincible. And so long as people continue to respond to her that way, she knows she has power over them, and she knows how to play them. But when someone treats her as Cadsuane just has, without showing any trace of fear, I think on some level she might fear why Cadsuane is so comfortable. Why is she not afraid? What does Cadsuane have, or know, that lets her disregard one such as Semirhage? The surprise is part of it, and the…humiliation I guess, is part of it, but I also think the uncertainty Cadsuane’s actions must cause is a part of it as well. If you aren’t sure where you stand, you can’t be sure you’re invulnerable anymore.

“Are you going to eat?” Cadsuane asked.

“I will kill you,” Semirhage said calmly.

OH MAN this is excellent. Ah, what a response. I love her. I love this. Semirhage may have been momentarily shaken by Cadsuane – literally and psychologically – but she’s not going to break quite that easily. Still, while the delivery is calm, it’s not the most creative of Semirhage’s threats. She’s using what she’s used before on all the rest of them, to shake them, but I don’t think that’s going to work on Cadsuane. Not now that Cadsuane has determined to follow through with this approach.

Still, “I will kill you” delivered flatly as a response, especially when in a position of any vulnerability whatsoever, is a Thing that I enjoy. (And yes, if you’ve read Mistborn Secret History and you thought of that one conversation, you’re right, it does indeed kill me every single time).

“I see,” Cadsuane replied. “Sarene, go tell the three Sisters outside to come in.” Cadsuane paused, thoughtful. “Also, I saw some maids cleaning rooms on the other side of the hallway. Fetch them for me as well.”

Does…she want an audience? To completely ignore Semirhage’s reputation herself is one thing, but if she can destroy it in front of everyone else, all the others who previously feared her and looked at her as a legend, all those who play any part in keeping her prisoner…

As they entered, Cadsuane used her threads of Air to turn Semirhage around across her knee. And then she proceeded to spank the Forsaken.

That’s one way to do it, I suppose. It’s certainly not something Semirhage would ever have even thought to expect – though really she should have if she’s read the rest of the series – and it absolutely serves the purpose of demeaning her in front of a crowd of people who once were in awe of her.

Really, I think the only thing keeping me from enjoying this as much as I otherwise might have is the fact that there’s just so much spanking in these books, and sometimes in ways that I find either awkward or uncomfortable. It doesn’t help that I find the whole idea of spanking kind of…weird and vaguely discomfiting – not in the sexual sense; if it’s someone’s kink I can respect that and I’m not judging, but otherwise it’s just…I don’t know. I think in that regard it’s an issue of different times/upbringings/cultural and social contexts/etc between me and Robert Jordan. So, okay.

But in this scene, I can absolutely see the rationale behind it, and as an approach it makes a lot of sense. And sure, there are other ways to accomplish the same effect, but I suppose in the context of this world and story, this probably is the first and most efficient way that would occur to Cadsuane or someone in her position.

Semirhage’s threats turned to howls of outrage and pain. The serving girl with the food returned in the middle of it, adding even more to Semirhage’s shame. The Aes Sedai watched with slack jaws.

So the comparison my brain provided here was Egwene meeting her toh to the Wise Ones. Being spanked in front of a group of onlookers, thus enduring both pain and shame. But in Egwene’s case, it was about restoring her honour and her standing amongst them, and thus was a scene of triumph. This, though it looks almost identical, is exactly the opposite. It’s about humiliation, and about stripping Semirhage of all honour and standing amongst those who watch, and thus is a scene of defeat.

Given my love of parallels and inversions, it should come as no surprise that I really like this notion of two scenes that look almost the same, but serve nearly opposite purposes.

“Now,” Cadsuane said after a few moments, breaking into one of Semirhage’s howls of pain. “Will you eat?”

“I’ll find everyone you’ve ever loved,” the Forsaken said, tears in her eyes, “I’ll feed them to each other while you watch. I’ll—”

If there were an award for most creative and unsettling threats, I think Semirhage would win. Especially if we can add in such statements as “enough to cover the whole Crystal Throne” which may not precisely be a threat but who cares, it’s close enough.

Though. Having said that. She may face some competition from Mazrim “Kneel and swear to the Lord Dragon. Or you will be knelt” Taim. Because you have to award points for shiver-inducing semantics.

The crowd in the room watched in amazed silence. Semirhage began to cry – not from the pain, but from the humiliation. That was the key. Semirhage could not be defeated by pain or by persuasion – but destroying her image, that would be more terrible in her mind than any other punishment. Just as it would have been for Cadsuane.

And Cadsuane has exposed a certain degree of vulnerability in herself by doing this. Not overtly, because you’d have to understand her and also what she’s doing well enough to realise that the same sort of thing would work on her, but she has exposed it. Which takes guts.

As for the rest…yes. It is entirely about humiliation and shame and being made helpless while her reputation as something more – and more terrifying – than merely human is shattered in front of everyone watching. Not just in front of witnesses, but in front of people Semirhage considered so far beneath her as to barely even register. It’s a very long way to fall.

For some reason, though, the image of Semirhage crying tries my suspension of disbelief a bit. I’m not entirely sure why, and I don’t think it would work as well if she didn’t, because the whole point is that Cadsuane is breaking that image and everything that goes with it, but it still feels weird. Maybe I just like Semirhage too much.

Actually no, I think I do know what it is. In which case, it’s just me, carry on.

Cadsuane stilled her hand after a few more minutes, releasing the weaves that held Semirhage motionless. “Will you eat?” she asked.

“I—”

Cadsuane raised her hand, and Semirhage practically leapt off of her lap and scrambled onto the floor, eating the beans.

This feels too abrupt. And yes, I fully acknowledge how ridiculous a statement that is when this is book 12 of 14, but it still feels like it happened a bit too quickly. It feels as if this scene only made it halfway from outline to fully formed chapter, in places.

Oh well. I don’t mind all that much; I’d rather this scene be less than absolutely stellar than other more ‘major’ scenes. And I like a lot of the concepts in this one, particularly the way Cadsuane uses this comparison between herself and Semirhage – she’s not entirely exempt from her own ruthless pragmatism, as it turns out – and how the idea of image and perception is played with here. It’s something the series as a whole has frequently dealt with, in variations, and it’s something I will almost always enjoy.

And now we’re with Perrin. That’s an odd jump, but sure.

Perrin had time. Time to rest, time to limp away, time – he’d hoped – to use gateways to trasnport away most of these refugees.

Time to rest? Perrin. There are two and a half books left. Of fourteen. You’re not going to have time to rest today, or maybe ever.

Thousands upon thousands of people, a nightmare to coordinate and administer to.

I misread that at first as a listing of responsibilities. 1: thousands of people. 2: gotta do some maintenance on that nightmare I’ve been working on.

Why this seemed like a logical reading of that sentence, I have no idea. Thanks, brain.

But Perrin knew he couldn’t push aside his problems for long. Rand pulled him northward. Perrin had to march for the Last Battle. Nothing else mattered.

Nothing else mattered? Where have we heard that before…

Though this time, he’s far closer to being right. Still, it’s perhaps not the greatest attitude to have. Just look at Rand.

(In fairness, in Rand’s case it isn’t just single-minded focus so much as single-minded focus plus a dead man’s memories plus evil stabbings that won’t heal plus (minus?) a missing hand plus being locked in a box plus trusting no one plus that small matter of being responsible for the fate of the world. To name but a few).

And yet, that very single-mindedness in him – ignoring everything but his objective – had been the source of much trouble during his hunt for Faile. He had to find a balance, somehow. He needed to decide for himself if he wanted to lead these people. He needed to make peace with the wolf inside himself, the beast that raged when he went into battle.

HOLY SHIT.

SOMEONE GET THE CONFETTI.

HE’S FIGURED IT OUT.

Yes, Perrin. That’s exactly it. Find a balance, make peace with yourself, accept it, and take that into the Last Battle. Rather than approaching it with that focus that shuts everything else out, approach it as willingly as you can (it’s Armageddon, so ‘willing’ is sort of relative). And he’s finally realising that. Realising that if he tries to use it as essentially an excuse to not think, and to hold everything else at bay, he’s just setting himself up for failure. Instead, he needs to find a balance and open himself up to these things he’s been avoiding or trying to deny. The Last Battle isn’t really something you can do halfheartedly, and single-minded focus doesn’t feel halfhearted, but it’s another side of the same coin in a way. It’s a limitation and a handicap, creating division or barriers when really he’s going to need everything he can possibly get. And for that, he needs to accept what those things are, and who he is. And accept that he can be that person.

Grady is too tired to make gateways. That’s not ideal.

Light, but I used this man too hard, Perrin thought. Him and Neald both. That had been another effect of Perrin’s single-mindedness, as he was beginning to see. What he’d done to Aram, how he’d allowed those around him to go without leadership…I have to fix this.

I love all of this. I don’t mind that it’s happening quickly and fairly bluntly, because actually that’s kind of Perrin’s way. Also, he spent the last several books building to this point by doing exactly what he’s now criticising himself for. And then that task was finished and everything just…stopped, and he didn’t know what to do and tried to find some way to avoid all these thoughts catching up with him. But now they have caught up, and he can’t turn away from it anymore, and this brief pause is both forcing and allowing him to look back on those weeks and understand, with all the wisdom of hindsight, what it was that he was doing and the harm it did to himself and others. And to learn from it.

Ah, character growth. This is so satisfying.

And it’s the sort of thing Rand is going to have to face and recognise as well – perhaps not the same exact idea of balance; that has always seemed to be more Perrin’s struggle, what with the man-versus-wolf, violence-versus-gentleness, strength-versus-caution, axe-versus-hammer dualities he’s had to contend with – because he, too, is hurting himself and others in the way he’s allowing his focus on Tarmon Gai’don to take everything else from him. Including such things as his humanity and the very reason he’s fighting at all.

Oops, Perrin can’t send all the refugees home. And some of them – lots of them? – don’t want to go home or don’t have a home to go to. Looks like your kingdom and army are growing, Perrin. Sorry about that.

He took his enhanced senses for granted, now.

That’s almost acceptance. This is good progress.

To them, Perrin Goldeneyes wasn’t a person to fear, but one to respect

I suppose in this, it’s a fitting companion section to the first half of the chapter. Image and reputation and the realities thereof. Not to mention a rather impressive level of self-analysis from both Perrin and Cadsuane.

Had they forgotten that Perrin had grown up with them? What of the times when Jori had made sport of Perrin’s slow tongue, or the times when he’d stopped by the forge to brag about which girls he’d managed to steal a kiss from?

Here, too, it fits well with the previous section, in that it’s once more an inversion. Semirhage goes from being regarded as a legend, as something more than human, as someone to be feared and respected, to being seen as just another person. Meanwhile this shows how Perrin has gone from being just another person, just another member of the group, to being someone worthy of honour and respect, someone set above the rest.

As for the ‘human’ thing…well, let’s maybe not bring that up around Perrin just now. Don’t want to push it.

Sometimes, Perrin wondered if his senses weren’t actually any better than anyone else’s. He took the time to notice things that others ignored.

… ‘I will remember those who have been forgotten’, Sanderson? ‘I will listen to those who have been ignored’?

I like this, though. It’s very Perrin, and while he does have super special wolf senses, he’s also absolutely right that he takes time to notice things. It’s the gentle, careful, methodical aspect of him. And that’s a part of him regardless of what else he is capable of – balance, again.

His senses were better; his kinship with the wolves had changed him. he hadn’t thought of that kinship in a while – he’d been too focused on Faile. But he’d stopped feeling so self-conscious about his eyes. They were part of him. No use grumbling about them.

*delightedly continues to throw confetti*

And yet, that rage he felt when he fought…that loss of control. It worried him, more and more.

Because that’s something he hasn’t accepted, yet. He fights it still, and so he cannot control it. It goes so counter to how he sees himself, and how he wants to be, that he fears that if he accepts it, it will be at the cost of the rest of himself. But it doesn’t have to be. Balance. He can be both – it’s the hammer and axe thing again. The hammer can be used to build or to destroy, to fight. One form of use does not make the other impossible. He can feel rage when he fights and still be gentle elsewhen.

(Why is ‘elsewhen’ not a word? It would be so useful).

He’d pursued Faile with determination, avoiding the wolf dream as he’d avoided all of his responsibilities.

IS HE—

But he knew that the truth was much more difficult.

IS HE FINALLY GOING TO USE THE WOLF DREAM WILLINGLY? IS HE GOING TO USE HIS SUPERPOWERS FOR REAL? He came close a few times, and in TSR almost got there, but then he stopped again and OH MAN THIS IS SO EXCITING.

He’d focused on Faile because he loved her so much, but – in addition – he’d done so because it had been convenient. Her rescue had been an excuse to avoid things like his discomfort with leadership and the blurred truce between himself and the wolf inside of himself.

YES EXACTLY THIS THANK YOU.

And I don’t even remotely care that this part also reads a little like an outline, because it is so very, very necessary. And so very satisfying, after so long.

It’s a little frustrating, still, that this fits rather neatly into the pattern of ‘woman suffers as plot device to further man’s story and/or character growth’ but I’ve spent enough words and energy on that during those chapters that I’m just going to set it aside, here. Because this – Perrin understanding what he was doing and why, and beginning to see what he needs to do about it, and taking those steps – on its own is something that has been waiting to happen almost since the very beginning, and I’m enjoying every minute of it.

I’m out of confetti now, though.

The answers might lie in his dreams.

It was time to return.

FUCK. YES.

*goes to make more confetti for the sole purpose of celebrating that last line*

Next (TGS ch 18) Previous (TGS ch 16)

#so much self awareness in one chapter are we sure this is WoT #Wheel of Time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #The Gathering Storm

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coachjukeboxx · 7 years

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I’m a pregnant roller derby athlete  Part one: Holy shit this is happening

Warning : I want to start out by saying this is me being honest. This is what I went through. It might not be popular or what other people went through, but this is what happened and how it made me feel and how I handled it. I’m here to share my experience so others don’t feel judged by expectation, so please don’t jump down my throat for my choices. Oh and ps, I also use tons of run-on sentences and speak in a stream of consciousness but here goes nothing. Pregnancy has a million expectations on women and that’s part of what makes it difficult …because its not just the craziness of hormones and body changes, but also the set of parameters of how you should feel because that OH THIS IS ALL WORTH IT CAUSE- BABY. That makes me furious. It ignores my struggles and frustrations like I should be some happy robot housewife from the 50s. So without further ado, here’s my story of learning about my pregnancy.

I took the test shortly after coming back from our offseason. Balls and I always wanted kids, but we didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. Like, immediately quickly. Last weekend I was eating bloody steaks and drinking amazing wine and scrimmaging (not all at once, but you know). Went to the GP the next day- according to them no more of most of my favorite foods, and no more roller derby. It hit me like a train. I didn’t feel a shred of excitement. My identity was skating, it was playing the sport, coaching, and training with my best friends. I was now out of contention to skate at the world cup. (while its not impossible to return, the pressure of competing with that caliber of athletes post-nataly is unrealistic with my timeline and time off playing. I’ll do my best to come back but that pressure is unrealistic when also having a newborn). I felt loss, not only of control of my body but fear about what would happen to my strength, my skills. I work SO hard on skating, on my body, it’s a huge investment. It felt like that would all just unravel based on recommendations for pregnancy activity. I also felt guilt, like I was letting my team down being out so soon in the season. My due date is champs, that also means our coach (Balls) is out. While a baby was something we were looking forward to in our lives, the results of that test made me full of confusion. I felt an array of sadness, guilt, loss, expectation. I felt guilt for feeling sad about my pregnancy. HOW USEFUL IS THAT? In the first day I got my act together and was like ok, this is happening, no turning back now. I told kitty first cause I knew she’d understand. It was hard for her too when she got pregnant. To me having a kid is exciting, but it’s not my main purpose in life, it’s not what I spent much my days thinking about. I wouldn’t say I was even broody. But I’ve heard these same feelings can creep up even when you have been obsessing, trying, and broody. It has never been the most important goal in my life. Maybe I’ll feel differently after the kid is here, but for now, that’s where I’m at. I have loads of aspirations that are just as important to me as parenting will be. I still feel that way. Kitty came over with some flowers and we cried a bit and worked on processing the info. It was nice to not feel alone, and she validated my feelings. She didn’t try to tell me it was all worth it, and that I should just deal with all the negative. We just.. talked about how crazy it all is. I read this article recently by the nytimes that sums it up nicely in this quote. “Becoming a mother is an identity shift, and one of the most significant physical and psychological changes a woman will ever experience… Most of the time, the experience of motherhood is not good or bad, it’s both good and bad. It’s important to learn how to tolerate, and even get comfortable with the discomfort of ambivalence.” Here is the link to that article, I highly recommend it. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/08/well/family/the-birth-of-a-mother.html

While all this was going on Balls got a message from Lexi to leadership that SHE WAS PREGNANT! With my permission he told her about my news and we talked. It was the first joy I felt about it. I was happy for Lexi, and Lexi seemed genuinely excited.... and also I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t disappointing everyone, and if I was, I wasn’t the only one to blame. We gushed about it and decided to tell the team straight away. I still felt pretty disconnected from the idea of this thing inside me, but these were the first glimmers of positive emotions I had. That made it easier to imagine, but it didn’t by any means overshadow everything else I was experiencing.

I decided to take some control after feel so much loss of control in my body and identity. In the next day I researched a million articles on playing in the first trimester of contact sports. Kitty anonymously “asked for a friend” on some of the derby moms groups about the situation and continuing to train. While I waited their response, I found that most of the articles pointed to studies based on car accidents, not actual sports. The info is sparse and generally says - relax, take this time to take it easy. Go for a walk or take a pregnant lady class. GROANNN. (Mind you while this was happening Serena Williams was busy winning the Australian open while pregnant. MY TOTAL HERO) I found that rugby guidelines were against contact, and hockey was ok with it into trimester 1, both were just club policy.

While waiting for the info from Kitty, there was one training session where I coached or just tried to avoid contact, I decided that felt so ridiculous. I didn’t have any morning sickness and was feeling really good - normal even, all things considered and was super keen to keep playing into my first trimester. In the next few days I got a response from an Angel skater that played playoffs 8 weeks pregnant, and continued on till her first trimester. I also heard from a close friend/old teammate from Madison that played through the first trimester for both of her pregnancies. Her midwife had advised her that it’s so small, and so well protected in your pelvis, that really only serious injury would be the thing that made it miscarry. (not normal bumps from skating). She skated (jammed even!) till 12 weeks with one and 9 weeks with the other, the second one she stopped due to fatigue. Seeing as how I had never had or seen anyone with a major uterine injury from playing, I made the choice to play. I made the choice to keep playing, but at this point I was outed with many of my teammates. Balls was really supportive and let it be up to me. He has been really great about that in general, and it helps to have my partner not place any limitations on me. The response from the team was really great. I was really afraid people wouldn’t play with me since I had told them. I gave the option to not pair up with me and checked with people to make sure it was ok, in the end no one refused me. Gaz said something like “women have been doing stuff for thousands of years so if you’re ok with it, go for it” and other people said things along the lines of “your body, your choice”. I continued to play for another 2.5 weeks until I started to just feel so tired and bloated the idea of smashing into people sounded terrible. But those 2+ weeks, it meant so much. I had closure, I had control, I had the choice, and most of all I had SO much fun playing party roller derby with Brawling. I felt ready to partake in this next adventure, take on a new role in the team and in my life. Getting to chose my own risk assessment also was a really big deal for the loss in confidence as being labeled the pregnant lady. It just seems that all of a sudden you’re looked, and supposed to look at yourself, like this fragile flower “in my condition”. That makes me crazy and I’m focused on doing everything I can, pushing myself and smashing this pregnancy at my own personal Birth Champs in Nov.

Im still skating at training, just no contact anymore. The next step in my journey was the whole” fake injury for the rest of the league until my scan”, but I’ll explain more of that experience in my next blog post. Part 2: The “secret” struggle. (Oh and ps - these were my feeling in week 5-7. Things are way different now at week 16.. I have lots of blog posts to catch up on cause those early days prescan were full of hard times. Things are really really good now, but i think it's important to record the journey as it was.)

#pregnantathlete #rollerderby #firsttrimester #jukeboxx #londonrollergirls #usarollerderby #realtalk

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nellie-elizabeth · 8 years

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Supernatural: First Blood (12x09)

This is one of those episodes where the objective quality of the content does not match my actual enjoyment level. In many real ways, this episode was not that great. It had some serious problems. But I, personally, with my brain turned off, really loved it. Let's talk.

Cons:

The reason this episode isn't actually that good, despite some hella awesome acting, action, and one-liners, is because all of the bells and whistles are resting on an extremely weak foundation. We all know it's stupid that Sam and Dean got taken in the first place. Why did they hang around with an unconscious POTUS, again? And then there's the fact that these top-secret government guys take these two men who they believe to have attempted the assassination of the President, and there's no urgency to figure out how they got to the president? They aren't at all concerned with how their security was breached? Their method is to just wait Sam and Dean out. They think the worst torture of all is loneliness.

This is another problem with the episode. We see Sam and Dean being left alone in tiny little rooms for six weeks, but we're not really shown what was so torturous about this to them. Did they start to lose their grip on reality? Did either of them try and talk to the guy who brought them their food? No. But apparently, in Dean's words, the torture of solitary is worse than Hell itself. Is it, though? Is it really? I find it hard to believe that these two would be broken by six weeks alone. If the show wanted to sell me on that, they needed to show, more explicitly, why it was difficult for them. Maybe being left alone with their own thoughts about their mistakes starts to make them unravel? Or maybe instead of being left completely alone, they are given glimpses of authority figures, and hints and suggestions that the other brother is being tortured as they sit there? Anything more than just a terminal case of boredom, which is what it seemed like.

And did Dean not try and pray to Cas? It should have been fairly easy for him to find them, you would think. There was no attempt to explain why it was so difficult for all of these magical beings to track them down. There's even a scene where Cas goes to Crowley for help, and Crowley basically shrugs his shoulders and says that because his police officer contacts aren't important enough, he hasn't heard where Sam and Dean are. I mean... he's a demon. His mother is a witch. A tracking spell? Something? There wasn't even a discussion of using supernatural means to track down the boys, and that seems like a serious oversight.

All of the flaws listed above are with the premise of the episode itself. There is one flaw that I need to mention that goes a little deeper: Billie the Reaper is dead. Now, don't get me wrong, the scene where Cas kills Billie to save the Winchesters is really emotionally affecting. It brought new depth and understanding to Cas' character, something that's definitely sorely needed. But... come on. Have we not learned our lesson about killing off our very few female characters? Not to mention our only living named character of color (unless I'm forgetting somebody... but if I am, it's not somebody with as much screen time even as Billie). I'm about damn tired of this! And from a story perspective, Billie simply never played enough of a role! There were so many cool things you could have done with this whole Death 2.0 thing, but... no. Another fascinating character wasted.

Pros:

You would think after four long paragraphs of flaws, I'd come down pretty hard on this episode. But the fact is, I really loved it.

The plot is really just about Sam and Dean escaping, and Mary and Cas doing everything in their power to find them. It's a simple story, in a lot of ways. It goes back to the promise we got at the beginning of this season that we would be focusing on smaller stories. I mean, a secret government bunker seems like it would be big stakes, but there's no all-powerful being trying to destroy the universe, here. It's just Sam and Dean being trapped, and finding a way to get back to their family. I liked the basic story.

Sam and Dean communicating silently and being on the same page is one of my favorite elements of this show. Since Supernatural is built, naturally, on the conflicts between these two, it's always a special treat when we see how cohesive and competent they are. They trust each other, and they don't need to talk much to know exactly what to do. These soldiers don't stand a chance against them, and it shows in their brutal efficiency. What with all the crazy Big Bads that the Winchesters have had to face, it's sometimes difficult to remember just how bad ass they truly are. This episode is a good reminder of that.

Dean is the one who comes up with a plan to get them out of their prison: Billie will kill them, and when they're taken from their cells, they get to come back to life one more time. The catch? At midnight, one Winchester dies permanently. It's a simple conceit, and it's not as if the boys haven't been in similar situations in the past. The thing that makes it so powerful this time is that Dean doesn't sacrifice himself to save Sam, or vice versa. They both make the deal, knowing full well that they might be giving up their brother to gain their own freedom. Dean knows that Sam would never agree to the deal if he phrased it in such a way that insisted he be the one to die. And since they spend all their time working on a way to escape their pursuers, when the moment of truth arrives, they still haven't discussed who is to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Of course, Mary jumps in and offers to be the one to die, so we never get to see how that conversation would have played out. But I just love the trust that Sam and Dean showed in one another. They were both feeling such dread about this moment, both obviously wanting to take the sacrifice for the other. But they weren't insisting, weren't shutting each other down, weren't falling on their swords without talking it out first. Character development!

On the other side of things, you have Mary and Cas, both looking for Sam and Dean while also trying to continue to hunt, filling the void of the Winchesters' absence. Cas was just... wrecked during this whole episode. Misha really brought his A-game. He was stressed, and tired, and so, so scared. He felt like he had let down his family, and it was so sad to seem him struggling with that. Mary is back to hunting, as she's not sure what else to do with herself while she and Cas both wait for information. I think my favorite moment was when Cas expresses his own inadequacy and failures as a hunter. He tells Mary that he tried to investigate a string of mysterious deaths, but he didn't know who to talk to, or what questions to ask. Mary later takes care of it for him, proving that she still knows how this whole hunting game works. It was a great scene, because it showcased how helpless Cas still is, sometimes, when he's dealing with the human world around him. It also parallels him with Mary, who, despite still feeling a bit like an outsider, is starting to get her head back in the game.

The British Men of Letters are brutal as ever, here. Cas enlists their help in finding Sam and Dean in the woods, and they use satellite imaging technology to pinpoint their location. Mick isn't having much luck in recruiting American hunters, since none of them are happy at the idea of taking orders from bureaucrats. I like that the British MOL is maintaining its presence, and upping the creepy factor. See, Sam and Dean managed to escape without killing anybody. Later, Mick and Mr. Ketch go back and kill everybody who knew about Sam and Dean, leaving a whole wake of ruthlessly murdered bodies in their wake. We're upping their threat factor without making them too much the focus. It's infinitely preferable to all that stuff with the torture-happy chicks from the first few episodes of the season.

And... let's talk about that ending. Holy mother of Chuck. Sam and Dean are facing a terrible decision: who should die? Mary offers herself - she is a Winchester, after all. She holds her gun to her own head, but just as she's about to pull the trigger... Cas stabs Billie with an Angel blade, killing her. And then. Cas gives a speech that makes this whole episode worth it, even if there hadn't been anything else to praise. He talks about how he won't let any of them die, because this sad little world needs every Winchester it can get. "You mean too much to me. To everything." He looks like he's about to burst into tears, and the looks that Sam, Dean, and Mary give him are just devastating. This is obviously going to have ramifications down the road, but from the look on Cas' face, he doesn't care. He'd risk anything to avoid losing a Winchester.

There you have it. This episode can get away with quite a bit, in my eyes, for the simple fact that it focuses on the subtle interplay between Sam and Dean, and it shines a big spotlight on Cas, giving him really meaty material and emotional scenes. That's all too rare in Supernatural, and it's enormously satisfying when it does come around. This damn never-ending show seems as impossible to kill as a Winchester. We've got a Season Thirteen waiting for us after this season wraps up... and I for one will definitely be tuning in.

7/10

#review #supernatural #supernatural review #spn

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majornelson · 5 years

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Coming To Xbox Game Pass For Console: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Untitled Goose Game, Pillars Of Eternity, And More

More games coming to Xbox Game Pass in December. See the list of titles and the dates they’ll be added below and check out our Xbox Game Pass Instagram and Twitter accounts. Also, be sure to check out our Xbox Game Pass mobile app so you can discover and download new games immediately when they become available.

December 17

Untitled Goose Game (ID@Xbox Day One Launch) A slapstick-stealth-sandbox where you’re a goose let loose on an unsuspecting village. Make your way around town, from peoples’ back gardens to the high street to the village green, setting up pranks, stealing hats, honking a lot, and generally ruining everyone’s day.

December 19

Life is Strange 2 Ep. 5 Sean and Daniel have reached the end of the road. The border is close. One last, brutal gauntlet of challenges is all that stands between them and their goal. Caught between responsibility and freedom, can Sean find a way out of an impossible situation? Every decision Sean has made, every lesson Daniel has learned, every friend and foe they’ve met along the way: they’ve all been leading to this.

Pillars of Eternity (ID@Xbox) Adapted for console, this unmissable RPG brings Pillars’ fantastical world, tactical combat, and unforgettable story to fans on a whole new platform. Pillars of Eternity: Complete Edition includes all previously released additional content from the PC version, including all DLC and expansions in a single package.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt A story-driven, next-generation open world role-playing game set in a visually stunning fantasy universe full of meaningful choices and impactful consequences. You are professional monster hunter, Geralt of Rivia, tasked with finding a child of prophecy in a vast world rich with merchant cities, pirate islands, dangerous mountain passes, and forgotten caverns to explore.