#two of whom he loves insofar as he loves anyone

[stephantom]

I’d need to watch it again to confirm this, but I’m pretty sure that Thomas Becket is the only character who independently initiates touch with Henry?

There are plenty of people whom Henry touches, and it’s almost always possessive or threatening: the villager woman in the first flashback scene, the Saxon peasant girl (and possibly the old man? I think he prods at both of them with his riding crop), Gwendolen (holding her shoulders/neck), the French prostitute (kissing, leaning over, sitting on, slapping her butt), his sons (pushing and kicking them), the bishop (strangling), his barons (clutching onto one, tapping one’s head to indicate his vapidness), and Thomas too—(clasping his shoulders when he realizes Thomas is hurt, holding his hand to put on the chancellor ring).

Interestingly, I don’t think we ever see Henry touch or be touched by his mother or his wife. There’s the moment when he grabs/kicks their needlework, and later on he knocks all the plates off the table, possibly vaguely in their direction—so there are two physical interactions which are violent but still sort of… distant? And still the direction is just Henry to them (in terms of physicality, anyway—verbally, they do initiate conversations/fights with him).

Does anyone touch Henry? There are the monks who whip him in the end, but Henry has ordered them to do it. Likewise, there’s the servant/valet/page who begins to wipe him dry in the bath scene, but again, that’s someone performing a duty. Thomas Becket though, cuts in and takes over the drying, and the dialogue tells us explicitly that he’s not expected to do this, and doesn’t have to (“You’re a nobleman—why do you play at being my valet?”) but Becket seemingly wants to do it, and he knows Henry likes how he does it: enthusiastically, confidently, warmly, and freely (“No one does it like you, Thomas”). He towels Henry’s head, helps Henry put on his boots, and then casually uses Henry’s legs to push himself up to stand.

There’s the scene in Henry’s tent, after the French prostitute has left and the two of them are sitting on the bed: Becket sort of leans in and briefly clasps Henry’s arm where it’s lying in his lap, casually and warmly.

There’s also the getaway horse ride, where Becket is holding onto Henry, arms wrapped around him, and they’re both laughing and smiling. Henry’s shirt actually falls open a little and Becket’s hand winds up on his bare torso.

And then there are the thwarted attempts at touch, after the split: the two scenes where Henry accuses Becket of not loving him. Both times, Becket moves toward Henry and reaches out to touch him, and both times, Henry moves away and tells him to keep his distance.

They’re quick little things, but if they are actually the only instances of anyone touching Henry affectionately (or even of their own volition) that we see over the course of the movie, it does support an impression of Henry as fundamentally isolated—maybe there is truth to his claim that Becket is the only person who’s ever loved him.

What’s tragic is that 1) Henry doesn’t really know how to express love himself (see: Henry expressing nothing but violence and entitlement to everyone else around him, and even to Becket for the most part), and 2) Becket’s love, albeit huge in Henry’s world, is conflicted and unfulfilling—for both of them.

Becket might be the only person who’s dared to reach out to Henry and meet him on something close to a human level, and Henry loves him for it, but why does Becket do it? Part of it may just be an instinct of Becket’s to fulfill a need where he sees one, if he can, and if it benefits him. I think it’s so interesting that Henry seems obsessed with the question of whether Thomas really loves him, when it seems the truth might be that Thomas actually doesn’t know; maybe it’s an unanswerable, even nonsensical question to him. Like, what else could he do? I don’t know. “Insofar as I was capable of love, yes I did [love you].” But the fact that his last words, unwitnessed and private, are, “Poor Henry.” Fuck me up.

Ok, that last paragraph got away from me and now I can’t stop. Tempted to draw comparisons to “Beauty and the Beast” (this is a sad version where no magical transformation happens… unless you take a particular Catholic stance and consider that both of them maybe took real solace and meaning in Thomas being made a saint and that Henry maybe found real absolution through his penance).

I also want to compare all of this to “The Lion in Winter”, where it feels like, rather than a story about one lonely monster in a castle full of people he sees as objects, it’s a whole microcosm of traumatized and power-hungry people, reaching out for power and security and love and stabbing each other in the back, over and over. (Like, of course his mother and wife and kids have complex feelings for him—some of which involve love!) I think that depiction is better and less myopic, more true to life and probably a more accurate portrait of the historical figures involved (even when it comes to Henry and Becket—Becket was of that world too, after all), but I think I’ve rambled enough about all of this, so I’m going to end this post now. I’ll just say that there’s something nevertheless appealing about the boiled-down fairytale melodrama of “no one else ever loved me but you!”

[bestworstcase]

do you think there's any merit to a little prince-and-the-rose metaphor in which Spring is the rose and Ozpin is the prince? and including the poem, Raven is the one who "scatters the petals of the rose" (mercy kills the rose that couldn't protect itself)

the one killing the rose would be the sheep in any case (<- that sound you hear is me bodily wrestling the unhinged SHEEP SUMMER ROSE WHITE QUEEN tangent away from myself. some other time)

but no i’m not convinced there’s any configuration in which it’s sensible to interpret ozpin (or ozma) as the prince to anyone’s rose, if only for the obvious problem of him being jaded and symbolically blind. he is, of course, the stranded pilot to oscar’s prince (<- the prince’s childlike love and wonder clear the eyes of the weary man’s heart, reawakening him to the magic of the world; he’s the blind man lost and searching for his love in the wasteland twice over) and insofar as ozma could be retrofitted to the little prince given his alienness to remnant, the immediate problem that emerges is that salem would in that case have to be his rose and there is no plausible way to argue that because it’s nonsense. 

with ozpin and any maiden the core issue is that he… doesn’t love the maidens and certainly at no point does he seem to have taken care of them (indeed in the fairytale he made of the first four it is they who took care of him); they are, ultimately, quasi-replacement-daughters whom he weaponizes in his war with salem—deeply deeply cynical way to (not) handle his grief. he is retreading the final duel over and over again at global scale.

(if “dancing and fighting aren’t so different; two partners interlocked…” delivered in the gooiest tone ozpin has ever used doesn’t make you SCREAM LAUGH every time you hear it…)

summer is likewise thorny (snrk) in that there is no evidence to suggest ozpin was ever especially close to her or had any kind of parental bond with her (and the distrust evinced by her secret shenanigans with raven would suggest that she didn’t feel especially close to him, as would her decision to jump ship to salem’s cause—see also general jinjur).

generally my thinking as of now on the basis of what we glimpsed in V9 and the temporal dovetailing of spring running away / gretchen rainart dying as a student / raven having some unknown involvement in spring’s death for which she clearly feels guilty is that A) spring was in fact gretchen rainart and B) all of this is about her, and her death, and whatever the fuck happened when she and summer and raven and salem all collided that night. 

it is vaguely interesting to mark that there were four and all of them have significant associations with knowledge (salem: the only character who knows her secrets + hatred of deception + keen interest in the lamp; summer: silver eyes [truth will rise/revealed by mirrored eyes] + the mystery of her disappearance; raven: alludes to the woggle-bug + spy + became maiden of knowledge; gretchen: died as a student + probable spring maiden + symbol of ozpin’s deceit). so on the one hand, it seems… obvious that SOMETHING BIG came out that night; obvious, specifically, that salem decided to talk. the question is to whom and what her audience did with that information. it is also at least notionally possible, if the fourth person was spring, that they used the lamp’s first question (<- i do not think it likely however because ozpin kept her name a secret and habitually swore that the lamp had no questions left.)

on the other rwby doesn’t often pile up singular qualities like that; in the narrative sense it seems inevitable that this ended in calamity because… knowledge/knowledge/knowledge/knowledge is not a balanced configuration. but you know what is? salem offering knowledge, summer making a choice, and gretchen’s death making raven the new maiden: knowledge/choice/destruction/creation. 

everything adds up so strongly to summer joining salem that the missing piece does really feel like it’s actually… what happened to number four. gretchen or whoever else the spring maiden might have been. is it that raven mercy-killed the proverbial first rose of spring? the only things we know FOR SURE are that raven was involved enough to feel like the killer and that she was the one the spring maiden thought of; circumstantially, salem and/or summer were probably there too. tenuously, there is the possible parallelism with jaune and penny (in which case summer probably struck the killing blow, as the proto-cinder).

in… all of this ozpin is fairly irrelevant except insofar as he presumes summer to be dead and spring to be alive (but missing) and is wrong on both counts; which if put into the little prince framing would again make him the pilot, forever wondering and guessing. the prince seeks out the rose, one way or another; for summer that tracks with ruby as the prince, and if the last spring maiden is anyone’s rose—well, gretchen, hazel. obv. though i think that’s tentative at best and the presumptive broadening of allusion is generally not very speculatively sound (<- unless you’re me in V9 hitting 9.8 and going insane but THAT came down to rwby being unusually direct.)

and with the rainart twins there is the much more straightforward allusion to hansel and gretel; gretel outwits the witch, gretchen presumably did not (and in that case bequeathed the maiden of knowledge to a different twin who does outwit the witch—jot that down as another point in favor of summer being the proto-cinder who cut gretchen/spring down.)

rubs head

this is the problem with rwby really it’s too fucking well put together

[francesderwent]

...let us turn again to the mother, and to the meal she prepares for her family. Notice that we always refer spontaneously and warmly to a 'home-cooked' meal, or again, to a dish prepared the way Grandma used to prepare it. Even restaurants characteristically advertise their food in this way: never do they recommend themselves on the grounds that the food they serve is store-packaged and mechanically prepared. What is the difference that is implicitly recognized here? 

An obvious answer is that the mother prepares her family's food with love. But, however true, such an answer remains both vague and question-begging. For it could mean that love adds an intention and otherwise leaves the dinner unchanged in its intrinsic nature or order. But that is just the view I am challenging. My proposal, in other words, is that the love of the mother affects the dinner precisely in its reality as food. A mother builds into the food a distinctive sense of time, space, matter, and motion. She takes time, and she knows that taking time, however burdensome, is necessary for care and attention to detail. She measures with a sense of proportion, but not mechanically and not without some sense of 'extravagance.' She keeps in mind all along the way the health needs and peculiar tastes of these particular familial others--especially the infirm and most helpless--for whom she is making the meal. She prepares and presents the food with a sense of its aesthetics. And so on. 

The mother's love, in brief, is not merely a matter of an intention remaining external to the food. On the contrary, her love takes form in the food, such that the food itself now takes on the form of love--somewhat in the way that John Paul II says that the human body is and must becomes 'nuptial': that the body as body, the body in its very structure and physicality, expresses and is meant to express love for another. 

To take another example, consider the difference between Mother Teresa and a nurse performing her duties primarily for the sake of making money. Both provide health care, but we spontaneously recognize the difference in the way in which the care is ordered. Some of this difference is quantitative in nature: Mother Teresa would certainly do more things for the patient. But the point to which I am drawing attention bears intrinsically on the manner or order of the discrete acts of care themselves. Mother Teresa's very manner of touching the patient, of looking at the patient, of dressing the patient, of arranging the bedding of the patient are all different. The difference is similar to the difference in the case of the mother's home-cooked meal: all of these acts by Mother Teresa are changed in their very form as health- and care-giving acts. Anyone who has spent time in a contemporary hospital knows intuitively the difference to which I am referring here, however much he or she might not be able to articulate with precision the nature of that difference. 

Before attempting myself to characterize that difference, let us consider a third case. Adam Smith has famously asserted that we really do not need to appeal to the beneficence or generosity of the baker if we want good bread. On the contrary, we need merely to appeal to the baker's own self-interest: to point out to him that making good bread is the best way to ensure that he makes a profit. In light of the previous two examples, however, we are able to see that a generous way of making and selling bread will be different in its nature and order from a primarily profit-motivated way of making and selling....The baker, on the reading recommended by Smith, wants his bread-making to embody the qualities of good bread and bread-making not for their own sake, but only insofar as embodying these qualities is necessary for and promotes his profit-making....The baker who works for the sake of love--however much he may or may not conceive of what he is doing explicitly in theoretical terms--approaches the making of bread, the bread made, the other for whom the bread is made, and indeed himself as invested in the process and the thing, as gift. He makes the bread--which is to say, he gratefully gives himself over to the making of the bread--simultaneously for its own sake and for the sake of another. 

....The simple but crucial point I wish to make here, then, is that an economy of love deepens the reality, which is to say, enhances the worth, of everything and everyone involved in the production and exchange of goods: self, thing, and other....the self and things now become deeper and 'better' in their very reality as self and things. Things: because and insofar as the baker bakes the bread for its own sake and not simply as instrument. And the self for the same reason: in acting for the enhancement of the bread as such and of the other as such, he thereby transforms his own self into the gift that he himself was created to be."

--David L. Schindler, from "'Homelessness' and Market Liberalism: Toward an Economic Culture of Gift and Gratitude"

[anghraine]

I am really fond of redemption arcs in general and haven’t encountered many I disliked, but I saw someone go off about how Mansfield Park (which I personally love) could have been Austen’s masterpiece ... if only she had redeemed Henry Crawford.

Not to pull out my old gif collection BUT

[onionjulius]

Do you think germ does a good job with the discussion of beauty for Arya? I feel like he kind of uncritically romanticizes youthful beauty, and the vibe I get with his female characters is that they are all beautiful women but one of them must be the most beautiful and that this is a reasonable comparison to make between them

Hrmm, I think that overall, beauty is an Achilles' heel for Germ the Author (leaving alone Germ the Person whom i don't know). I think he is aware of his romantic tendencies and feels bad about it in the form of sympathy for the not-so-young-and-beautiful. I think also a character like Petyr Baelish certainly reads as a condemnation of sorts (I can't think of the word i really want there) of the tendency to romanticize the young and beautiful, as the character's fixation on youthful beauty manifests in such a creepy way. But he still has it both ways in the text, which is perhaps an inevitable consequence of the story being communicated by subjective characters. But perhaps it isn't? I do think he wants us to feel the allure of beauty, but also the danger of caring so much for it. I feel like GRRM, conveniently for a self-confessed romantic, really vibes with Fitzgerald's appreciation for the ability to hold in your mind two contradictory thoughts.

W.r.t. Arya, honestly I don't recall anything relating to the handling of beauty within context of her character that struck me as critical, so I'm not sure I feel like I can say he did a good job or a bad job. I do wonder, though, if his outlook on youth, beauty, and beautiful young female characters has changed at all over the years. AGOT was written in 1996--there are fans active in this fandom who weren't even alive back then. People mature and societies outgrow certain thought patterns. Also I find it more fruitful to discuss beauty in context of Lyanna rather than Arya per se, but insofar as they look similar and the comparison is purposely drawn, there's maybe something there for the interested.

I will say that I never felt the competitive vibe between the female characters that you do. I feel he sees some characters as more likely than others to be considered beautiful by a random sample of subjective judges. But there's also a definite "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" vibe too. One person's queen of love and beauty is not another's, and average looking people have love and lust all the time without anyone's permission. Not to mention that there are numerous female characters for whom beauty just doesnt matter much narratively at all. I never felt like Martin was leaving them out of some running, for all that he does seem legit hung up on female beauty.

Some people in fandom feel this beauty competition thing very intensely, especially since the TV show. But that's their own thing imo.

[onelungmcclung]

im sorry if you've answered this before im relatively new to the ship hehe but-- how'd mcclung fall for toye? was it in bastogne? before bastogne? in holland? in aldbourne? after the war? what were the circumstances? when did he realize it? and after he'd overcome that high of finding out he's in love, how did he deal with the aftermath once it started to settle in? hehe, i hope this week isnt as rough on you as you're anticipating. sending you much love and strength and calm vibes.

💜💜💜 

ok, firstly, I have not been asked this before; secondly, even if I had no earthly power would stop me from answering it again; and thirdly, obviously no pressure but pls consider coming off anon and being my tumblr friend  

probably everyone is new to this ship lmao

so, I started writing a (probably long) mctoye fic starting in fort bragg or aldbourne and continuing to postwar (enablers always welcome). but for the purposes of this ask, I’m mostly going off character insights revealed to me developed over the course of writing the ask him to dance universe. 

(counterpart to this ask: toye noticing/falling for mcclung)

essentially: mcclung is/would be kind of theoretically ok with the idea of falling for a guy, if it had occurred to him he might fall for anyone right now, but falling for anyone is — for the time being — a concept he has strategically compartmentalised out of his entire thought process. (please clap.)

maybe he’s relatively ok with the possibility falling for a guy because he did not really grow up with white conservatism the way most of the easy co guys did; he’s always been aware of it, and his worldview is not informed by it in the same way. his family is arrow lakes/settler and he has friends & acquaintances among the other confederated tribes. and though he doesn’t take a strong interest in domestic/international politics, he has a more critical attitude towards the us govt and its laws (he’s still quietly angry about the grand coulee dam, constructed during his childhood). he’s never really considered that he might be into men; he likes women and he’s always assumed, without thinking much about it, that he’ll get married at some point; but he’s not particularly homophobic, outwardly or inwardly.

he’s not thinking much about these things when the war comes. he gets drafted into the army, thinks “not with these fucking clowns” and besides the airborne pay is better, and volunteers as a paratrooper. he joins up with easy after he’s completed his jump training.

he is excellent at training, naturally; he’s spent days at a time alone, fishing and hunting, since he was a child. he’s an exceptional sniper and scout. he’s confident in his own abilities. some of the toccoa guys initially assume he won’t be as skilled as them because he didn’t have their training, but in fact he has a headstart on most of them; and he knows it. (if he knew it any better it would probably come off as arrogance, but he’s just very clear on what he’s good at. and if he wasn’t beforehand, the airborne has proved it, to him & everyone else.)

he recognises, of course, that toye is an excellent soldier too (not as good a shot as himself or shifty, but overall one of the best paratroopers in the company), and they’re in the same platoon, so that helps. he never really gets afraid, not while training and not in combat; he just keeps his focus and gets on with it. for the most part, he doesn’t form close friendships until they get into combat.

he has some instinct towards helping and protecting others, but once they’re in a combat zone he realises that’s going to hurt him a lot. while they’re training, he helps some of the guys make their shots by shooting the targets for them; but after they jump into normandy, he avoids befriending the replacements because so many of them are killed early on. it’s — a little — easier that way.

he and toye don’t become close friends before bastogne, but they get familiar with each other’s combat style, and they’re comfortable working together. they trust each other; they’re both good soldiers, and toye is a good nco.

and then of course in bastogne they share a foxhole, and that is (I think for all the other characters as well) an incredibly vital, pivotal relationship. he and toye rely on each other entirely; without that, they’d probably die. they learn each other backwards; there’s no possibility of pretence. he knows what toye’s flaws are (stubbornness, prickliness, a reluctance to accept help), but there’s a lot more about him that mcclung likes, trusts and admires (not that he’d say so), and he knows those things are genuine.

he does his level best to stop toye from developing trench foot when he loses his boots. sure, he pretty much calls toye an idiot for getting into this situation and for refusing to tell the medics, but he does everything he can think of. it hasn’t occurred to him that he cares deeply about toye; it just seems inevitable.

(and he tells smokey to let the medics know. he doesn’t tell toye he’s told smokey, because it’s funnier this way. like everyone else, he’s starved for entertainment.)

but toye gets hit, and they’ve spent months beside each other — sleeping in shifts, keeping each other safe, trying to keep each other warm, kvetching, arguing with each other; he’s put up with toye’s singing and toye’s put up with mcclung talking to himself. a synchronicity and interdependence has developed between them, throughout the war but particularly in bastogne, to the point where it’s almost telepathic. he doesn’t consider what a powerful kind of intimacy this is, both physical and psychological, until it’s gone.

toye gets hit, and mcclung loses him. toye gets hit, and mcclung is blindsided by the enormity of it. you can’t take anyone’s survival for granted, he’s always tried to be careful of that, but losing toye is like losing part of himself.

he’s pretty determinedly unsentimental about everything: he’s not going to fall in love with anyone while he’s fighting a war, and he’s not going to dwell on situations beyond his control, and he’s not going to let himself be distracted by worrying about someone who isn’t here anymore. or at least that’s the attitude he’s internalised, and he takes it so much for granted that he never even considers that he could have fallen for anyone: right here, right now.

but he can’t forget anything that’s happened, even if he’d like to, and there’s no other friendship that can quite replace what had developed between toye and himself. bastogne was when things were at their worst, and toye is the one with whom he survived the worst. without toye, he feels an inescapable sense of wrongness, unevenness.

he’s half aware that he misses joe. he tries not to acknowledge that to himself, because that would mean acknowledging that he may not have any chance to see joe again, that one or both of them may not survive. that’s a line of thought he keeps away from altogether; it’s there, but he won’t look at it.

he knows it’s not his fault toye was injured. sometimes it has nothing to do with being a good soldier; sometimes it’s just luck and timing; he’s nearly been hit himself. he knows that, but deep down inside he wonders if he could have saved joe, by making sure he was in their foxhole before the shelling started. he heard toye and second-guessed himself. he stayed where he was. he thinks he probably did the sensible thing. he still feels guilty about it.

(sidenote: the glaring exception to his “don’t befriend the replacements” rule ends up being babe. after toye, guarnere & compton are taken off the line, he and babe start sharing a foxhole. possibly he could have found someone else, but his protective instinct resurfaces and maybe it helps to take his mind off missing toye. it’s a friendship that comes out of grief and loss.)

he gets through foy, and haguenau, and he focuses on the situation at hand and he doesn’t think about toye.

when they reach austria, mcclung is ordered to hunt animals to feed landsberg’s prisoners, and so he sets up camp alone in the woods. it’s beautiful; it’s peaceful; it’s the first time he’s been truly alone in two years. it’s the first time his mind is able to relax, and the memories come back — prewar life, everything he’s been through since, bastogne, toye — and the thoughts of the future, what he might do after the war.

he’d like to see toye again.

he still hasn’t thought that maybe he has feelings for joe.

and then the war ends, and he has the freedom to decide what to do next. he returns to england, and then ships back to the us. the memory/loss of toye is still a weight on him, and so he tracks toye down and goes to see him. that’s the obvious, logical course of action.

it’s also making him much more nervous than it has any right to.

(for the past year and a half, he’s been compartmentalising very hard because he intuitively understood that as the best way to survive the war. he learnt it early on, and it’s hard to let go of it. he’s convinced he’s handling everything great, very matter of fact and pragmatic, getting the job done, no emotional baggage here, etc etc. this is... not 100% true, but a coping mechanism is a coping mechanism is a coping mechanism. he is doing pretty well; nobody thinks he’s not; so obviously that counts as a roaring success.

but once the war is over, the psychological walls he’s maintained throughout combat — between survival and emotion — begin gradually to disintegrate. he has to let himself become whole again, learn to navigate who he is now, accept that the war has scarred him. he still feels himself to be one of the lucky ones. some of the things he’s been avoiding hit harder than others, and he can’t control that anymore.

insofar as he’s aware of these developments, he considers it extremely unfair.)

but, ensuing stupid panic or no ensuing stupid panic, he commits to meeting up with toye. he figures they’ll catch up, maybe keep in contact, that now he’ll be able to stop wondering how toye’s doing, stop this strange off-balance feeling he’s had since toye got hit.

seeing toye again is actually a lot more than he’d ever anticipated, and he’s forced to acknowledge that maybe there’s more going on here than he’d figured.

he realises he’s attracted to this guy, and he doesn’t know when that started: probably in bastogne, but maybe earlier. it feels new but not new; if he hadn’t pointedly avoided thinking about joe after foy, maybe he’d have figured it out sooner. if they’d made it through the war together, maybe something would have happened between them in europe, but they lost each other too soon for him to know. he’s a little discomfited by these feelings suddenly creeping up on him, but he’s trying hard not to let any of it show: not the attraction, not the unease.

he reasons that his feelings are only a problem if toye doesn’t share them. he thinks he could deal with that, but he is afraid they may not have a friendship anymore, that it was left behind in wartime.

he tells himself he’s not afraid of rejection. but he is. he doesn’t like feeling vulnerable, and suddenly he is.

when he thinks there’s a chance the attraction is mutual, he takes it. it works out for him. they stay together. he accepts that he’s falling in love and he lets it happen.

he falls in love with joe’s courage and honesty and selflessness, and he finds it incredibly hard to actually say that. (this is someone who considers “hanging out with you voluntarily” to be a love language.) he’s moved just by the fact joe wants to be with him, that he’s able to acknowledge that attraction and act on it despite his provincial catholic upbringing lol. he knows that joe’s recovery has been difficult, and he sees how joe is dealing with it, and, like in bastogne, he tries to support him as quietly and simply as possible.

he finds it hard to tell joe he loves him, but he pays attention to what joe does and says, and does whatever he can to make his life better. he never thinks joe needs him there, and he wouldn’t want it that way. he helps joe to adapt their old calisthenics training; they take roadtrips together. they’re still deeply protective of each other, and they still express it via touch, practical acts, and snark. they don’t struggle with physical affection as much as either of them might have worried; they’re a little hesitant at first, but it falls into place.

they’re fumbling their way a little, but they respect each other completely and unconditionally, and they’re kind and careful, and their relationship gets stronger as it goes on. 

and they dance together.

[hamliet]

i'd love to actually see that meta on xue meng and mei hanxue if you ever feel like it! i loved their arcs a lot

Okay okay. Here we go. *rolls up sleeves*

Warning: this is more of a... musing than a strict meta. 

So, first of all, I think Xue Meng and Mei Hanxue have pretty strong subtext that is like, barely subtext, but you do you insofar as interpreting their relationship. But major spoilers under the cut!

Mei Hanxue's support of Xue Meng is extremely important--both Mei Hanxues. One is a direct Mo Ran and Nangong Si foil in personality, and one a Chu Wanning and Ye Wangxi foil. Younger!Mei Hanxue is the one there is subtext with, and much like Nangong Si when he is first introduced, he's kind of an arrogant bastard; additionally, much like Mo Ran when we first meet him, he's licentious and his licentiousness, er, gets him in trouble with Ye Wangxi who is just done with him. But he’s also like NGS not a cruel or bad person. The Elder!Mei Hanxue is much more serious and focused on propriety, like Xue Meng himself, Ye Wangxi, and Chu Wanning as well. 

The thing that I appreciated about the portayal of Elder!Mei Hanxue and Younger!Mei Hanxue is that even though they both have the same name (different characters in Chinese though, I believe) and a similar goal (protecting Xue Meng), they are distinctly not the same person. It struck a good balance between twins being portrayed as clones (which they all too often are, but these two aren't) or being portrayed as good twin/bad twin complete opposites (which these two also are not). It's not perfect in its portrayal, but honestly? It's better than most portrayals of twins. Good job, Meatbun. In terms of their similarities, they are both like Mo Ran, Shi Mei and Song Qiutong: not whom everyone thinks they are. Elder!Mei Hanxue and Younger!Mei Hanxue are good at tricking people into thinking they are one person, when they really aren't. In accordance with this two-face, two-life, dual persona motif, their usage of this deceit is not to harm anyone: it's to protect Xue Meng and themselves (i.e. honestly it's healthier than most of the other examples of the doppelganger motif). This emphasis on deception to protect is foiled with Ye Wangxi's, but whereas Ye Wangxi is told to disguise herself as a man (and we never really know her thoughts on her gender) and the intention is clearly to use and dehumanize her in doing so, Elder!Mei Hanxue and Younger!Mei Hanxue do it of their own free will without any element of self-harm in it. Their desire to protect Xue Meng stems from their parents, yes, much like with Ye Wangxi's, but it isn't forced upon them, and much also like Ye Wangxi's affection for Nangong Si, it is seemingly genuine affection (and perhaps romantic on Younger!Mei Hanxue's part).   Like Ye Wangxi, characters like Xue Meng and Chu Wanning seem to be more "what you see is what you get" at least in terms of personality. However, a deeper look reveals that, just like Ye Wangxi, neither Chu Wanning nor Xue Meng are really what they seem either--but for these two, they are not even whom they think they are. Chu Wanning was quite literally created from a tree and struggles with his humanity as a result. Xue Meng, who prides himself on being the son of a sect leader, is not actually his father's biological son, which he doesn't discover until the last 30ish chapters. When he finds out, he rejects Jiang Xi right away, knowing that Xue Zhengyong loved him as his own and essentially accepting that Xue Zhengyong is his father even if not in blood. However, with Mei Hanxue's help and after a poignant conversation with Xue Meng from the past life, he learns to accept nuance between the two understands, to mend the gap if you will. 

Xue Meng closed his eyes, "Jiang Ye Chen is a hero. I am glad to see that he is still alive in another world. "

Seeing that he didn't say anything, Xue Meng lowered his eyes and said, "You still haven't answered me. How did you get his sword? "

The young man's lips trembled, and he didn't know what to say for a moment. After a long time, he opened his mouth and said, "I …." Another loud noise came from behind, making his bones tingle and his hair stand on end.

They turned around abruptly, only to see that the lightning crack had reached its peak. Ye WangXi and Mei Hanxue were still kneeling on the ground. Jiang Xi was still struggling with his strength, but suddenly coughed out a mouthful of blood.

The young man, Xue Meng, cried out involuntarily, "Jiang Xi …"

What?

Still calling him Jiang Xi?

Or was it Sect Leader Jiang?

He then ran over and handed the snow phoenix to Jiang Xi.

"... Get lost! " Jiang Xi lifted his eyes and saw that it was him. With a pale complexion, he frowned and pushed his martial spirit along with Xue Meng. "Go back to the crevice, don't cause any more trouble!"

After saying that, he coughed up another mouthful of blood.

Both Xue Mengs are him, all Mei Hanxues are Mei Hanxues, and even though in the past life he did not know who Jiang Xi was and Jiang Xi did not know Xue Meng was his son, he still was able to live nobly in some ways. He was able to care even though he failed to care for Madame Wang. People are not fully good nor evil; they simply try their best in this terrible world. In the end, Xue Meng gets to choose what he wants his fate to be, rather than it being determined by blood.

If Nie Tian looked closely, he would more or less be able to discern the shadow of Jiang Xi in that pair of eyes. However, his surname would never be Jiang, and he would never want to be like Jiang Xi.

He might not be the blood son of Xue Zhengyong, but he is still his son and becomes a sect leader. Like his father, he adopts a boy who is not blood-related to him and raises him as his own. We can also see how Xue Zhengyong's goodness and kindness, even though he died unfairly, actually mattered in the end and left a legacy. 

[gascon-en-exil]

Bottom Ten Three Houses Characters

I decided after a while that I couldn’t fulfill an anon request to do a top 10 list for the whole series, because it would overlap too much with ones I’ve already done - lord privilege is a thing that exists, and I’ve ranked those before - and because it’s really difficult to compare so many characters (~600 if we’re being thorough) across so many different games.  Instead I decided to go negative with it, although around 2/3rds of these ought to be totally uncontroversial at least in my corner of the fandom. Starting from the one I dislike least:

(Dis)honorable Mention: Anna, for putting in such a lackluster showing that she doesn’t deserve a spot on this list despite technically being in the playable cast. It’s not only the lack of supports, although that hurts, but also how obvious it is that the writers have no new material for her. Anna’s gimmick worked fined when she was an NPC and perhaps for the space of a single game as a playable character, and Fates originated the meta idea of making her paid DLC so you have to shell out real money to use her, but that’s the extent of her here too. As a unit she’s far from spectacular, and her paralogue isn’t even good for much but a ton of (mostly mediocre) drops and a tiny bit of context for that Pallardó guy from non-CF Chapter 13. Here’s a revolutionary idea: for the next original FE it might be good to have Anna back to being only a wacky dimension-hopping NPC shopkeeper.

#10 Constance - It pains me that she’s on this list, more than anyone else by far. I really wanted to like Constance, and at first glance she’s right up my alley as a haughty impoverished aristocrat coping awkwardly with her diminished status. I like the dark flier class she’s built around, and her default personality is an even louder pre-timeskip Ferdinand whom you know I love. However, it’s that “default personality” bit that sours me on her, because she’s got two of them. What could have been an interesting take on Constance’s struggles with identity and self-esteem in the wake of her family’s disgrace is presented in such an over-the-top comedic manner that it’s impossible to take her very seriously. It’s more reminiscent of FE13′s Noire than anything, and at least she has the excuse of a mother who performed dark magic experiments on her and fractured her psyche. Constance also supports Jeritza and yet somehow they do no more than lightly allude to their personality issues which is as much a missed opportunity as you can get with such a terrible character (see below), opting instead to try softening Jeritza with his fondness for roses. Lovely.

#9 Leonie - Fandom exaggerates her Jeralt fixation, although it does pop up at the worst times (see: her Byleth support right after his death). As I’m not very concerned with Byleth’s nonexistent feelings though this placement more comes down to general indifference. Leonie feels completely disconnected from the rest of the Deer, and although she’s a supposed reflection of the house’s more egalitarian bent there’s nothing connecting her to the politics or larger culture of the Alliance until you learn about her student loan debt. She really is best understood as a Jeralt fangirl first and foremost, which is why perhaps the most surprising thing about her is when reality comes knocking in her endings and it turns out she picked up her mentor’s vices as well. Jeralt himself would be even further down this list were he playable, but as he isn’t I’ll have to settle for side-eyeing all of his adoring fans. Which brings me to....

#8 Alois - Remember that dating sim Dream Daddy that people were talking about a few years ago? The one that willfully misunderstands what the term “daddy” means in gay male spaces to write fluffy dad joke-laden romances intended for a presumably not-gay audience? Alois is the spirit of that game personified as an FE character, which is not something I ever would have thought to know that I didn’t want. He’s got some funny lines here and there, but that’s the most you can say about him when otherwise he’s just passable midgame filler (of a unit type each house including the Wolves already has one of) standing in Jeralt’s imitation Greil shadow. I don’t even mind the platonic S support all that much because it’s still only Byleth, but it occurs to me that just about the only thing that would have made Alois memorable would be if his S support was romantic but he remained married to his wife. I can’t think of a time when this series has allowed the player to indulge in adultery, so even if it had been limited to an option for f!Byleth it would have been a fascinating option.

#7 Cyril - This isn’t about his devotion to Rhea, which is fully understandable given his circumstances. Nor is it about his performance as a unit which in my experience at least is actually rather good for a Donnel/Mozu-style villager archetype. No, what gets me is that he’s a self-righteous workaholic which makes for quite the grating personality trait. I understand that he finds meaning in his work and that he’s got some entertaining supports calling other characters to task for their terrible work ethics or ignorance of the lives of commoners (VW should have really dug more into his back-and-forth with Claude), but the lectures on not interrupting him or telling Byleth to get back to work are as tiresome as they are frequent. It’s petty I know, but one can only hope he grows out of it eventually. At least he doesn’t wear a pot on his head....

#6 Mercedes - Like Constance, she’s the type of character I wanted to like from the start. She’s pious pseudo-Catholic clergy, with a quirky thing with ghosts and some quiet lesbianism with her BFF that I can take or leave but that I know some people really enjoy (and also she’s bi-for-Byleth, but no one talks about that). Unfortunately as I touched on when talking about Marianne in my Top 10 characters list, Mercedes’s appealing points are sharply contrasted against her more annoying ones. The breathy voice acting I can mostly get used to, but her backstory is unnecessarily convoluted - three families and two flavors of evil adoptive father - and as is also true of Constance her association with Jeritza drags her down a fair bit. To this day I still have no idea what we’re meant to make of the Lamine siblings’ dynamic, but Mercedes’s eagerness to overlook her brother’s crimes and unrepentant bloodlust so she can coo over what a sweet boy he is deep down say some pretty odd things about her personal moral code. Maybe it was implied all along with the paranormal fascination that she’s not as orthodox as she appears to be, but the dissonance is real especially in CF where she gets a support line with Jeritza that tries to woobify him and affirms how much she loves him...and meanwhile in monastery exploration she’s wringing her hands over how much she hates the idea of fighting Faerghus and the church. There’s no through line here, and as justification for characters siding with Edelgard go this one is pretty flimsy.

#5 Gilbert - Similar to Cyril, I don’t dislike Gilbert for the reasons that most of the fandom does. Yes, he’s a crappy father, but as I’m pretty indifferent to Annette and to father-child bonding in general I can appreciate the fresh spin he places on the archetype of the devoted knight. In short, he’s a knight who wasn’t devoted and ran away from his duty, and his arc in AM is all about making up for his past failures both to his family and to his liege. This is an angle to knighthood FE doesn’t delve into often, and it makes him an explicit foil of Dedue as explored in their supports. The reason that Gilbert is on this list though in fact has more to do with that opposition, because I am painfully aware that had AM not killed off Dedue by default in service of self-insert romance Gilbert would not have had to be scripted as Dedue’s replacement both as a unit and as a retainer figure. It’s not his “fault” of course, insofar as one can ever blame fictional characters for the actions of their writers, but whenever I’m running AM and have to take those randomized supply run quests from Gilbert instead of the route’s actual retainer I’m reminded of how we were robbed of power couple Dimidue (in AM anyway - CF of all routes delivers on this point). Gilbert could have been father of the year to Annette and freely given Byleth his (grand)daddy dick and it still wouldn’t overwrite the fundamental problem that Byleth screwed over all three AM-exclusive characters in different ways. As to that, well...look at #1.

#4 Raphael - It’s hard to describe just how much wasted potential there is to this guy. Along with Ignatz and Leonie he could have illustrated the greater social mobility of the Alliance and the increased opportunities non-nobles enjoy there, but all three are mostly side characters. He’s repeatedly positive in the face of tragedy and remains motivated by his love for his remaining family, but 90% of his dialogue revolves around either eating or training to the point that he’s arguably the closest FE16 comes to gimmick character writing (something almost every FE is guilty of, but that has come under heavy scrutiny in recent years because of how much Awakening and Fates used it). He has a sweet friendship with Ignatz with even a bit of chemistry that sits in good company with the kind of simply affability he has with almost everyone he supports, but they have a no homo ending involving one of the game’s eternally offscreen characters. He supports Dimitri, but the bara content is thin on the ground and their line stands out as easily the least substantial of the house leaders’ cross-house supports. Even as a unit he’s lackluster, in the same repetitive category as Alois with nothing that makes him really stand out from the other axe-and-brawling guys. Highest HP growth in the game...whee. I’ve seen arguments that Raphael’s simplicity is the source of his charm, and while I can sort of see that he feels like he belongs in a game like the GBA or Tellius titles where characters have a much smaller amount of overall content to their name. In a game like Three Houses the sheer torrent of lines about food and training wear thin quickly.

#3 Bernadetta - see #8 here. To sum up, she’s annoying, her sex appeal falls flat with me and is frankly just kind of confusing, it bugs me that a significant portion of the Ferdibert fandom headcanons her as Hubert’s bestie when the man clearly does not do besties, and the most positive thing I can think to say about is that based on her habit of befriending known murderers among other things she might be a bit of a sociopath. That’s not very flattering, but at least it’s somewhat interesting. Oh yeah, and Edelgard setting her on fire at the Gronder rematch is good for a meme although I suppose that isn’t technically attributable to Bernadetta.

#2 Jeritza - Jeritza sucks. Everyone, apart from the small number of fans into Bylitza for some reason, is aware that he sucks. He’s a bloodthirsty serial killer we’re meant to like because he killed his father to protect his sister and also because he likes ice cream and kittens...and because he’s clearly mentally ill in some way and Edelgard is weaponizing his illness for her war which means all the murder is okay, I guess. Jeritza is like FE7 Karel if he was somewhat important to the plot and that instead of a redemption arc between games he got Karla and some other characters swearing that he’s really sweet deep down and also he can romance the male self-insert - yay. I love the line of thinking sometimes espoused in anti circles that M/M Bylitza is the only non-Problematic™ Byleth ship because he’s their only gay romantic S rank partner who’s not one of their students, a loli, or Rhea who is obviously the most evil character in the game. As I’ve mentioned above Jeritza also makes other characters he supports worse by association, although he’s not quite as bad in that regard as #1. Do I even need to bring up the painfully affected voice acting? It’s ironic that the vocal director for the English localization turns in unquestionably the worst performance among the named cast, and I have to assume he picked the role for himself solely because he sounds like an imposing Death Knight and not because his voice is at all suited to the troubled twunk underneath the armor. Just about the only thing that would have salvaged Jeritza for me would be if he and Hubert got to have an epic competition to determine once and for all which of them is more evil. Hubert would wipe the floor with this poser.

#1 Byleth - see here at the bottom. They fail as a self-insert, they fail to be a properly realized character even more than previous Avatars, they damage other characterizations and arcs all over the place, and Three Houses overall would have been vastly improved if they didn’t exist or at least weren’t the PoV character. In that previous post I listed just two reasons why I still prefer Byleth to Robin as an Avatar, one being that their significance to the plot is set up before the game even begins and the other being that their lack of a voice makes f!Byleth a less obtrusive presence when it came time for me to have her S rank all the guys to fill out the support log...not enough to where I could treat her as a self-insert, but any amount helps. I do however have to add a third small bit of praise for Byleth, in that they apparently drive antis up the wall for the most asinine of reasons which is always entertaining to witness. I recall when this game’s school setting was first revealed that everyone in the fandom nodded their heads and made the easy prediction that there would be teacher/student sex because that’s just how FE rolls, but somehow still there’s outrage over it. Even so, Byleth is horrible by every significant parameter, and it’s a shame we’ll only be able to imagine what FE16 would have been like had the developers not felt the need to write the whole thing around an Avatar.

[kendrixtermina]

It is me or are ppl really sleeping on Dedue?

To the point that ppl seem to shoehorn other characters into that same role/ space while he’s right there. 

Like whatever Rhea’s backstory is she’s been in power and privilege for the last 1000 years, she’s a fantasy creature, and everything about the distant past is subject to unreliable narration as we hear like 5 different versions of it all from biased sources (though I’d say Seteth is probably the most believable one, he was there, and he’s an honest guy)

Whereas Dedue is flat out a survivor of extreme prejudice, no ambiguity, no metaphors, no fantasy magic nor unreliable narration involved, absolutely non-debatable.

If you’re looking for a character who’s totally focussed on their social role/another person because of poor self-esteem and not sufficiently knowing that they matter themselves that’s also Dedue. 

Not Hubert. Like noo guys. Hubert states many times that he follows Edelgard out of conviction and no longer because of the tradition or because his father made him. He has his own reasons for hating corrupt nobles and the church. (Most apparent, I think, in the Byleth A and the Hanneman B support, but he mocks the church and the knights like all the time.). If anything, he’s less scrupulous than her (though I wouldn’t say that he’s completely amoral; He definitely has things that he repudiates (corruption) and outright tells Linny that he wouldn’t be friends with someone who’d abandon a person in need, or tells Byleth that he’s one of those people who can’t bring themselves to believe in a just god because of the evil in the world).

He also does pretty much whatever the fuck he wants, which is also established many, many times. Which Edelgard most certainly knows. She likes this. She listens to him (insofar as she listens to anyone), but she does so because she likes and agrees with his attitude. She chose to make this guy her right-hand advisor. She cares nothing for tradition and would’ve given him the boot and grabbed another advisor/attendant if she didn’t think he was supremely useful, and, as she put it “always right”. She kept him despite the tradition, because she likes intelligent, reason-driven people and he’s the third smartest person in all of Fodlan (numbers one and two are, of course, Claude and Lysithea). Plus he’s an accomplished mage without a crest. He isn’t even the loosest cannon in the imperial arsenal. She cares only about results, whether you’re from a peasant background like Manuela and Dorothea, unconventional/quirky like Linhardt or Bernie, or... whatever you’d call Hubert and Jeritza. So you could say that her leadership style certainly has both advantages and disadvantages. But Hubert himself seems overall pretty content with his position and doesn’t really expect anything else, because, after all, he chose it. Though we certainly have his father’s treahery as a cynism catalyst that lead him to be this super disillusioned cynical irreverent person who’s very slow to trust. 

It also can’t be because Dedue is boring. This is evident when you compare him to say Cyril, who also has the sort of effed-up past that, in RL, would deserve sympathy by default, but in the end this isn’t a charity for real people but fictional entertainment and he’s just not likeable. (likeability being subjective of course - there’s clearly SOME ppl who DO like him, and why shouldn’t they?)

 I mean boringness is subjective but Dedue has a whole load of characterization besides the fucked up backstory. there’s always that protective layer you need to get through (which is only realistic) but if you actually try to get to know him he’s got a lot of traits and hobbies and distinctive attitudes and complexities tragic plots. 

Like on the one hand he and Dimitri are as glued-together as they are because no one else can remotely understand what it means to have all your friends and family massacred in front of you, they’re both people who are naturally nice and peace-loving but wound up with the capacity for ugly desperate actions because of what they’ve been through but there’s also a contrast, they’re both sort of repressed but in different ways (though you could say that both struggle to express anger on their own behalf and thus channel it onto anger on behalf of others), Dimitri’s clumsy and emotionally volatile whereas Dedue is very careful/dexterous and calm, and that’s where the tragic part comes in. 

Because while he’ll go on with whatever Dimitri says cause he owes him his life and has nowhere else to go it’s quite clear that that’s not exactly what he wants (You get support points if you ask him what he wants even if he doesn’t give you a clear answer) - I bet he’d like nothing more than to just go live a peaceful life somewhere together without bothering with the revenge thing. (Though he’s got a better explanation/excuse than the rest of Team Kingdom, among whom no one will tell Dimitri to stop because of their culture’s overemphasis on loyalty. Even Felix doesn’t do much more than complain. It takes Byleth, a more pragmatic, cool-minded outsider to Faerghus, to put a stop to the kamikaze mission. )

He also has really sweet dynamics with Ashe and Flayn (who canonically like him even on other routes), also Mercedes and Sylvain if you did those supports. Because he’s kind of retreated completely into his social role as a vassal cause he has little else left and at this point he’s so used to being scorned that he preemptively tells ppl to keep their distance, but if you put in  the minimum effort to actually get to know him you see this sweet, chill domestic young man who’s still there underneath.  (Again contrast Hubert, whom you can’t really get much personal conversation out of, even Edelgard who’s known him all her life struggles to get him to spill what he’s really thinking, cause he’d just tell her what he thinks it would be useful for her to hear. And with Byleth he plain doesn’t trust them early on. He’s simply committed to being a consummate professional, by deliberate choice, though he definitely does have his own dephts to get to know, like being a bit self-conscious about his ‘scary’ mannerisms or ultimately being motivated by wanting to do something worthwhile and impactful with his short human life)

Ultimately, Dedue is very honorable, community-minded and reputation-conscious which means that he ironically fits in quite well with the Kingdom students, though that also probably makes it a special kind of hell to not only lose his community but to be stereotyped as a dishonorable scoundrel, because he cares quite a bit about his honor and reputation and that of his friends (see the Dimitri, Sylvain and Byleth supports) which puts him in this situation where he feels he can’t really be their friend without tarnishing their honor, there’s a complex mix of feelings where he’s of course as frustrated as any human being would be but has also partially internalized some of the crap from years of constant bombardment. 

The function of anger as an emotion is to ensure just treatment in the group, so for someone to just lie down and take crap like that it shows that they’ve totally given up on getting justice so for me at least this is really a character that I really want to see good things happen to and that makes me cheer every time someone thinks of him or when something good happens to him.

Like in a setting where nearly everyone’s backstory sucked his is quite possibly the worst. Only Jeritza and Lysithea (mostly because of the early death thing) even come remotely close. 

I feel like ppl would be all over this character if he were a bishie or cute girl, like just because of the “hides behind defense mechanisms but you can see his true self if you bother to be halfway decent” thing. Like usually ppl are all over that. 

Like to summarize we have a sad backstory, a tragic loyalty conflict, a frequently misunderstood demeanor that’s the product of a tragic past,  a basically sweet disposition that’s still not without the capacity for darkness, ample potential for wholesome Friendships (or more romantic ‘ships), what’s not to like?

Plus he’s got like one of the sweetest goddess tower events and S-supports. He gives you his jackets and looks at the starts with you etc. Bit too wholesome for my personal tastes [stuffs El, Hubert, Felix and Linhardt paraphernalia back into closet] but objectively loveable. 

tl;dr: Let’s all appreciate Supreme Chef Deddie-pie. 

[thelucyverse]

Part 1

Autumn and winter of 1980 were so busy for me, I barely had a moment of time to breathe. I heard that the order had destroyed several of Voldemorts' Horcruxes without him noticing- the diadem, the locket and the ring (the latter, sadly, without it destroying Dumbledore's hand and future)- and I was desperate to get my hands on one of the items myself to test several theories regarding soul-pieces, but Voldemort had yet to pass the diary to Lucius or the Cup to Bella, at least as far as I was aware. Did he only plan to part with them before moving in to kill the Potter boy, his predicted mortal enemy? Would he even part with them at all, if such an opportunity didn't come to pass?

I did more theoretical research on the topic while also wondering about the actual Horcruxes. Were they significant objects like the ones he used for his own? Objects that somehow showed his followers' status? Did that mean specific items or something like pebbles to show his superiority to them? Or, if the instances he created (or forced the respective followers to create?) the Horcrux were unplanned- and I was quite certain that he hadn't planned it with Bella, he had done it when she was asking about forming a union with me, which must have come as a sincere surprise to him- did he just use some random object in the room, or did he keep something prepared around?

So many questions, no way to answer them.

Instead, I focused on the theory of the research, on whether I would need the objects to bring both soul parts back together or just the person, or just the horcrux, and whether the soul piece within a person actually died if the person was killed or just became diacorporeal... I started to believe (still mere theory, of course) that while it might make it easier, I didn't necessary need the Horcrux if I managed to make the person want to fix their own soul (but I didn't know whether /regret/ would work as a stimulus if the person had never actually /decided/ to make the Horcrux in the first place), that usually someone would die and leave only the Horcrux part of the soul behind as that one can't be pulled from its object- unless the Horcrux partage was bigger than the killed part, which would make the pull stronger towards the Horcrux(es), keeping the last part on the mortal plane. Was that the reason why Voldemort had made so many Horcruxes, was he actually that clever, did he calculate the risk- or did he not understand souls at all and just thought the more the merrier?

Whenever I am alone with Bella, I try to talk to her, really connect to her again, and I believe that this connection to normalcy as well as any positive emotions I can make her feel seem to have a positive effect on at the very least her psyche if not also on her damaged soul.

A damaged soul would cloud someone's mind, making them unable or at the very least less able to feel things the way they used to, making them detached from humanity, less afraid to take human life, not hurt when killing or torturing others... Of course, Voldemort was already deranged before he made any Horcruxes, so I had no idea how much his influences him if at all... And I hadn't known Bella all that closely before she had had her soul split in two, so I couldn't really tell what was her and what was the Horcrux's influence, either. It disturbed me, to know that I didn't truly know the woman I was all but married to for over two years now at all.

In March of 1981, Voldemort handed Bellatrix Hufflepuff's Cup, to place in her vault in Gringotts and keep save there. Had I not been around, had Bellatrix been completely mad from her split soul, she would have done so without question. As it is, however, she went to Gringotts with the cup, placed it into her vault, left, went back immediately, took the cup, brought it to me and asked to be obliviated of all that happened after she first left the bank.

I hated having to do so to her, but I had also never been so proud.

Now, I have the cup, and I don't quite know what to do with it. While I can feel the evil ooze off of it, I can't tell it's shape or consistency, how it would react to tests. I have written Melodenia again with several inquiries about soul magic and how to feel, to /see/ it the way natural aura seers can. While I am afraid that she might have already started to question how theoretic the nature of my inquiries is, I hope she knows that I am genuinely trying to do good, I hope she understands some of my position here, even if I have never told her my full story, not even in enchanted parchment or the few times we have chatted via fireplace.

In May, I receive an invitation to a research Congress by MACUSA, with personal recommendation from one Professor and Master of magical theory, Melodenia of Ilvermorny- and without a name written on it, it is for myself to fill out. She must have known that I was operating under an alias, which of course won't work on such an official function. I decide almost immediately to attend, no matter the consequences: While I cannot wait to talk to her in person, away from prying eyes, I hate the attention it gains me from the Dark Lord and his followers. He knew, of course, that I had an interest in magical theory, but had thought it a little hobby of a Deatheater's wife. Now, however... I am being informed that after that Congress, which I am not to attend alone, I am to share all my findings with him, and use my skills to develop spells suitable for war if I haven't already done so.

I don't know how he managed, but I am accompanied to the States by Severus Snape. Professor Snape, now- twenty-one years old, a double spy for the two most powerful wizards currently alive in Britain, a teacher barely respected by the students in his own house and loathed by everyone else, trying to cling to what authority he has as a professor by being as strict as he possibly can. He is not a pleasant man to be around, still constantly afraid for the life of his friend Lily, whom he has barely seen in the past years. I don't know whether he loves her as a friend or is /in/ love with her, and I can't bring myself to care.

On our way- after making sure that there are no tracking- or monitoring spells by either of our masters left on us or our luggage- we share news on Deatheater and Order business before comparing our research in magical theory and spell-crafting, which is Severus' forte in theoretical magic. I don't know how I had forgotten about it so far- he is always known as a potions master, but I should have remembered all the spells he had been mentioned to have created in the books. He tells me of several dangerous spells, ones newly created by him as well as old ones that had simply come to be forgotten, that the Dark Lord does not yet know of and that the Order already knows the counters for. If Voldemort is going to ask for results of my work, I will be able to deliver. I do not tell Snape about my research in soul magic, not trusting him not to immediately tell Dumbledore, no matter how bad the old man has treated him in the past.

Melodenia is waiting for us at the portkey point. When I indicate to Severus that I would like to be left alone with her, he smirks nastily. "I won't tell anyone" he snarls before disappearing into the crowd with his cloak billowing behind him. I suppose he must think that I cannot stand being with a deatheater and have an affair with Melodenia instead. A laughable idea, even more so considering that Melodenia only seems to be interested in people insofar that they can help her research or carry it on into a new generation. Still- she is a friend, the closest one I have.

"Are you well, my old friend?" Melodenia asks. I wonder if she can see that I am older than I look through the soul-magic, and she laughs when I ask. "I didn't even need to look at that" she says. "but- yes. Now, what /is/ going on on the British Isles that has you in such disarray?" sometimes, she sounds more Properly British than I do- I know English isn't her first language, so I suppose it makes sense that she wouldn't have to have an American accent. Now, what to tell her? I decide to, for once, trust somebody, and go with the truth- the entire truth.

After my speech, Melodenia is quiet for a long moment before pulling me into a hug. "I cannot help you with the problem of your traveling" she explains first. "I can't tell whether you are from a different world or from a different time- although there us something about your aura that does say you do not belong /here/, or have not always belonged here. I can try to find texts on your kind of travelling, but I do not expect to find much, and I do not know how much I could find out from your person when you aren't already travelling away- in which case I would not want to come too near, I need to stay here with my students. Yes, I believe you could take someone with you on your travels" she answers my unasked question. "If you do so- please make sure to ask whether the person wants to leave their universe, and that they understand all that it entails." I nod. Then, Melodenia moves on to the topics current more urgent to me: soul magic, and how to break it. "Fix it, you mean- souls shouldn't be broken."

Over the course of the long weekend, whenever we don't absolutely have to attend a seminar, speech or evening social event, Melodenia teaches me how to manually soul-see, lay and break connections in soul magic (which- hella painful when tested on yourself, which is why we aren't doing it on anyone else), the theory and praxis of soul-healing- "You should try to influence her now even if you do not plan to already bring the soul pieces back together," she says about Bellatrix. "While from what you told me, she does not seem to be in danger of losing connection to the soul-piece entirely, there are other dangers: insanity, effects on the mind that, once completed and left alone for too long, get irreversible even if the soul pieces find back to one another. You must influence her with positivity- any positive emotions, as well as anything reminding her of life prior to the break, is healing for the soul." -, as well as other things she believes might be useful for me in the future, including how to apparate to locations you haven't been to yet: "In 'normal' apparition, the rule is to know exactly where you are going and only focus on this one location, with just slightly emphasis on getting your entire body there, as really, when you only want to go to one place, it automatically takes your entire body there, without splinching. When transporting yourself to an entirely new location or one you can't quite visualize anymore, apparition is more vague location-wise- you might not end up exactly where you want to go, but when you keep your focus on your entire body and to move it to a place, instead of focusing on the place to move to, you will end up somewhere without splinching. It is good to get out of situations when you don't have the power to apparate far and don't know any points in the area, you could just think of a generic secluded ally, a roof, a beach, a field, and end up in any such location you have the power to reach. When you have greater power, of course, you have to make sure not to end up in an entirely different continent."

On Monday, I leave with a newfound understanding of magical theory. I never realised how logical magic really is, when you only look deep enough. There are still things that seem strange to me, but I no longer think that it defies the laws of physics- it merely works with it in ways I hadn't known about. About soul magic, Melodenia ends with the words: "And be careful whom you tell about this. Few people are well-versed in soul magic, and even fewer for the right reasons. Say, are you familiar with the non-magical atom bomb? Yes? It is based on a technology and research completely unrelated to such destruction, but that is still what it was used for. You cannot blame everyone in that field of research for the connection, but that is the stigma they are going to face. It is similar when it comes to soul-magic. It can be used in healing ways, to help with trauma or to connect two people in love. But the only soul-magic many old wizarding families have heard of are dementors, horcruxes and soul-crushers, if they know about soul-magic at all. Be careful- not just regarding what they might do with it, but what they might believe you want to do with it, and what they would do to you to stop you."

When I leave for the portkey point with Snape, once again, as my escort in public, and turn around to wave at Melodenia, I am torn: I'm am sad to leave my friend and our research behind- yet I cannot wait to hold Bellatrix in my arms again.

Part 3

[theadmiringbog]

I had a fragile but agreeable life: a job as an assistant at a small literary agency in Manhattan; a smattering of beloved friends on whom I exercised my social anxiety, primarily by avoiding them.

--

I wanted to make money, because I wanted to feel affirmed, confident, and valued. I wanted to be taken seriously. Mostly, I didn’t want anyone to worry about me.                

--

Conversation with the cofounders had been so easy, and the interviews so much more like coffee dates than the formal, sweaty-blazer interrogations I had experienced elsewhere, that at a certain point I wondered if maybe the three of them just wanted to hang out.                

--

They wore shirts that were always crisp and modestly buttoned to the clavicle. They were in long-term relationships with high-functioning women, women with great hair with whom they exercised and shared meals at restaurants that required reservations. They lived in one-bedroom apartments in downtown Manhattan and had no apparent need for psychotherapy. They shared a vision and a game plan. They weren’t ashamed to talk about it, weren’t ashamed to be openly ambitious. Fresh off impressive positions and prestigious summer internships at large tech corporations in the Bay Area, they spoke about their work like industry veterans, lifelong company men. They were generous with their unsolicited business advice, as though they hadn’t just worked someplace for a year or two but built storied careers. They were aspirational. I wanted, so much, to be like—and liked by—them.                

--

It was thrilling to watch the moving parts of a business come together; to feel that I could contribute.                

--

What I also did not understand at the time was that the founders had all hoped I would make my own job, without deliberate instruction. The mark of a hustler, a true entrepreneurial spirit, was creating the job that you wanted and making it look indispensable, even if it was institutionally unnecessary.                

--

I wasn’t used to having the sort of professional license and latitude that the founders were given. I lacked their confidence, their entitlement. I did not know about startup maxims to experiment and “own” things. I had never heard the common tech incantation Ask forgiveness, not permission.                

--

I had also been spoiled by the speed and open-mindedness of the tech industry, the optimism and sense of possibility. In publishing, no one I knew was ever celebrating a promotion. Nobody my age was excited about what might come next. Tech, by comparison, promised what so few industries or institutions could, at the time: a future.                

--

“How would you explain the tool to your grandmother?” “How would you describe the internet to a medieval farmer?” asked the sales engineer, opening and closing the pearl snaps on his shirt,                

--

Good interface design was like magic, or religion:                

--

The first time I looked at a block of code and understood what was happening, I felt like nothing less than a genius.                

--

Anything an app or website’s users did—tap a button, take a photograph, send a payment, swipe right, enter text—could be recorded in real time, stored, aggregated, and analyzed in those beautiful dashboards. Whenever I explained it to friends, I sounded like a podcast ad.                

--

four-person companies trying to gamify human resources                

--

... how rare the analytics startup was. Ninety-five percent of startups tanked. We weren’t just beating the odds; we were soaring past them.                

--

While I usually spent sleepless nights staring at the ceiling and worrying about my loved ones’ mortality, he worked on programming side projects. Sometimes he just passed the time between midnight and noon playing a long-haul trucking simulator. It was calming, he said. There was a digital CB radio through which he could communicate with other players. I pictured him whispering into it in the dark.                

--

At the start of each meeting, the operations manager distributed packets containing metrics and updates from across the company: sales numbers, new signups, deals closed. We were all privy to high-level details and minutiae, from the names and progress of job candidates to projected revenue. This panoramic view of the business meant individual contributions were noticeable; it felt good to identify and measure our impact.                

--

Was this what it felt like to hurtle through the world in a state of pure confidence, I wondered, pressing my fingers to my temples—was this what it was like to be a man?                

--

I was interested in talking about empathy, a buzzword used to the point of pure abstraction,                

--

The hierarchy was pervasive at the analytics startup, ingrained in the CEO’s dismissal of marketing and insistence that a good product would sell itself.                

--

He just taught himself to code over the summer, I heard myself say of a job candidate one afternoon. It floated out of my mouth with the awe of someone relaying a miracle.                

--

As early employees, we were dangerous. We had experienced an early, more autonomous, unsustainable iteration of the company. We had known it before there were rules. We knew too much about how things worked, and harbored nostalgia and affection for the way things were.                

--

The obsession with meritocracy had always been suspect at a prominent international company that was overwhelmingly white, male, and American, and had fewer than fifteen women in Engineering.                

--

For years, my coworkers explained, the absence of an official org chart had given rise to a secondary, shadow org chart, determined by social relationships and proximity to the founders. Employees who were technically rank-and-file had executive-level power and leverage. Those with the ear of the CEO could influence hiring decisions, internal policies, and the reputational standing of their colleagues. “Flat structure, except for pay and responsibilities,” said an internal tools developer, rolling her eyes. “It’s probably easier to be a furry at this company than a woman.”                

--

“It’s like no one even read ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness,’” said an engineer who had recently read “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.”                

--

Can’t get sexually harassed when you work remotely, we joked, though of course we were wrong.                

--

I was in a million places at once. My mind pooled with strangers’ ideas, each joke or observation or damning polemic as distracting and ephemeral as the next. It wasn’t just me. Everyone I knew was stuck in a feedback loop with themselves. Technology companies stood by, ready to become everyone’s library, memory, personality. I read whatever the other nodes in my social networks were reading. I listened to whatever music the algorithm told me to. Wherever I traveled on the internet, I saw my own data reflected back at me: if a jade face-roller stalked me from news site to news site, I was reminded of my red skin and passive vanity. If the personalized playlists were full of sad singer-songwriters, I could only blame myself for getting the algorithm depressed.                

--

As we left the theater in pursuit of a hamburger, I felt rising frustration and resentment. I was frustrated because I felt stuck, and I was resentful because I was stuck in an industry that was chipping away at so many things I cared about. I did not want to be an ingrate, but I had trouble seeing why writing support emails for a venture-funded startup should offer more economic stability and reward than creative work or civic contributions. None of this was new information—and it was not as if tech had disrupted a golden age of well-compensated artists—but I felt it fresh.                

--

I had never really considered myself someone with a lifestyle, but of course I was, and insofar as I was aware of one now, I liked it. The tech industry was making me a perfect consumer of the world it was creating. It wasn’t just about leisure, the easy access to nice food and private transportation and abundant personal entertainment. It was the work culture, too: what Silicon Valley got right, how it felt to be there. The energy of being surrounded by people who so easily articulated, and satisfied, their desires. The feeling that everything was just within reach.                

--

We wanted to be on the side of human rights, free speech and free expression, creativity and equality. At the same time, it was an international platform, and who among us could have articulated a coherent stance on international human rights? We sat in our apartments tapping on laptops purchased from a consumer-hardware company that touted workplace tenets of diversity and liberalism but manufactured its products in exploitative Chinese factories using copper and cobalt mined in Congo by children. We were all from North America. We were all white, and in our twenties and thirties. These were not individual moral failings, but they didn’t help. We were aware we had blind spots. They were still blind spots. We struggled to draw the lines. We tried to distinguish between a political act and a political view; between praise of violent people and praise of violence; between commentary and intention. We tried to decipher trolls’ tactical irony. We made mistakes.                

--

I did not want two Silicon Valleys. I was starting to think the one we already had was doing enough damage. Or, maybe I did want two, but only if the second one was completely different, an evil twin: Matriarchal Silicon Valley. Separatist-feminist Silicon Valley. Small-scale, well-researched, slow-motion, regulated Silicon Valley—men could hold leadership roles in that one, but only if they never used the word “blitzscale” or referred to business as war.                

--

“Progress is so unusual and so rare, and we’re all out hunting, trying to find El Dorado,” Patrick said. 

“Almost everyone’s going to return empty-handed. Sober, responsible adults aren’t going to quit their jobs and lives to build companies that, in the end, may not even be worth it. It requires, in a visceral way, a sort of self-sacrificing.” 

Only later did I consider that he might have been trying to tell me something.                

--

Abuses were considered edge cases, on the margin—flaws that could be corrected by spam filters, or content moderators, or self-regulation by unpaid community members. No one wanted to admit that abuses were structurally inevitable: indicators that the systems—optimized for stickiness and amplification, endless engagement—were not only healthy, but working exactly as designed.                

--

The SF Bay Area is like Rome or Athens in antiquity, posted a VC. Send your best scholars, learn from the masters and meet the other most eminent people in your generation, and then return home with the knowledge and networks you need. Did they know people could see them?                

--

I couldn’t imagine making millions of dollars every year, then choosing to spend my time stirring shit on social media. There was almost a pathos to their internet addiction. Log off, I thought. Just email each other.                

--

All these people, spending their twenties and thirties in open-plan offices on the campuses of the decade’s most valuable public companies, pouring themselves bowls of free cereal from human bird feeders, crushing empty cans of fruit-tinged water, bored out of their minds but unable to walk away from the direct deposits—it was so unimaginative. There was so much potential in Silicon Valley, and so much of it just pooled around ad tech, the spillway of the internet economy.                

--

Though I did not want what Patrick and his friends wanted, there was still something appealing to me about the lives they had chosen. I envied their focus, their commitment, their ability to know what they wanted, and to say it out loud—the same things I always envied.                

--

I wanted to believe that as generations turned over, those coming into economic and political power would build a different, better, more expansive world, and not just for people like themselves. Later, I would mourn these conceits. Not only because this version of the future was constitutionally impossible—such arbitrary and unaccountable power was, after all, the problem—but also because I was repeating myself. I was looking for stories; I should have seen a system. The young men of Silicon Valley were doing fine. They loved their industry, loved their work, loved solving problems. They had no qualms. They were builders by nature, or so they believed. They saw markets in everything, and only opportunities. They had inexorable faith in their own ideas and their own potential. They were ecstatic about the future. They had power, wealth, and control. The person with the yearning was me.                

--

could have stayed in my job forever, which was how I knew it was time to go. The money and the ease of the lifestyle weren’t enough to mitigate the emotional drag of the work: the burnout, the repetition, the intermittent toxicity. The days did not feel distinct. I felt a widening emptiness, rattling around my studio every morning, rotating in my desk chair. I had the luxury, if not the courage, to do something about it.                

--

As I stood in the guest entrance, waiting for the stock plan administrator to collect the paperwork, I watched my former coworkers chatting happily with one another in the on-site coffee shop and felt, wrenchingly, that leaving had been a huge mistake. Certain unflattering truths: I had felt unassailable behind the walls of power. Society was shifting, and I felt safer inside the empire, inside the machine. It was preferable to be on the side that did the watching than on the side being watched.                 

[dialux]

dawn is coming, open your eyes

Inspired by this picset, from ages and ages ago.

But where, exactly, this story comes from is very strange. It’s... a very long and very winding story into a Percy Weasley after the war, figuring out his demons and fighting past them and learning to be happy in his own skin, which... might or might not hold some personal demons.

Warnings for familial issues! Death also features prominently because it’s immediately post-war! And politics, as per the usual, because this is My BrandTM. Hope y’all enjoy!

...

there is a kind of love so filled with rage that i can’t even look at your face even as it exists in my mind.

...

“Hello Percy,” says Luna.

Your eyes are red. Your cheeks are raw from scrubbing hard enough to scrape away the top layer of skin. Your hands shake, when you think too much; they don’t shake at all when you forget, and somehow that’s worse.

Fred is gone.

It’s not your first thought in the morning when you get up, and that feels like a terrible kind of sacrilege.

“Hello Luna,” you say, and sit down besides her.

...

It isn’t-

It isn’t like that.

But you’re mourning, and you’re learning that you aren’t a quiet mourner. Things tend to explode if you stay still long enough to remember that Fred is- not here. As if he’s passed his love for explosions onto you with his last breath.

Nobody seems to understand, though. Everyone walks around you on eggshells, until you take your wand and a cloak and walk out of the Burrow one morning, skin itching something fierce. You walk and walk, feet blistering in your boots, hands sweating on your wand, eyes streaming with something other than tears.

“Hello Percy,” Luna says, slipping beside you as if nothing were amiss. “How are you today?”

You’d always ignored Luna, more than anything else. It felt kinder than to shout at her for her strangeness.

“Fine,” you grunt. “I’m just- fine.”

“Good,” Luna says, and lifts her wand, reaching out to you. “Because I have a job for you.”

You twist through a tiny, airless tube for endless moments, and finally land on a cold, dreary island before you can say anything more. It takes you a beat to realize, and then you do: it’s Azkaban. Horror clutches at your heart.

“You sent people here,” Luna says, softly, when it’s clear you’re unable to speak. “You-”

“I know what I did.”

“Then you’ll fight back.” She looks harder, brighter, than any Luna that you’ve ever known. You remember, suddenly- she’s lost a father where you’ve lost your brother, but Luna has no other family to hold her, or grieve beside her. “There are cells the Death Eaters sealed, here. Someone has to unseal them.”

“Sealed-” You break off. It’s been weeks since the end of the war; if they sealed them off to only outside influence the people inside might have had a week, at most, what with the lack of water and food. If the Death Eaters also sealed off the air, as most wards tend to do...

“The people inside must be-”

Luna nods. “Dead.”

Then why? You want to ask, before she smiles, sad and small.

“They deserve burials,” she tells you. “Burials in better places than this.” Luna swallows, and there’s a brief glimpse of a girl with sunlight hair in that motion; a girl whom you hadn’t ever loved, a girl you miss, suddenly, with a fierceness that surprises even you. “Flowers and tombstones and grass. Warmth. Wands.”

Oh. Oh, if their wands were taken- they must be-

“Muggleborns,” you whisper.

“Dead,” she repeats. “And you helped send them there.”

Ginny would have flung accusations at you, eyes shining like a hundred swords. Ron would have glared until you gave in, and then acted sanctimonious for all of a few minutes before forgiving you. Fred- he’d have probably painted your face with some week-old blood, trying to make his point and horrify you as always.

Luna doesn’t say anything more, but the undercurrent is clear to you: you can go back home, you can wallow in self-loathing and misery and continue to blow things up whenever someone startles you. Or you can try to fix what you’ve done. You can be of use, and it looks like no one else wants to do this job so it’s not like you’ll have to talk to many people.

You’re a Gryffindor at heart anyway.

“Let’s go,” you say, through gritted teeth.

...

That’s how it starts.

Luna asks, and you accept, and it hurts like you’ve got a splinter the size of a fist digging into your chest; but it feels good, too, in it’s own way.

There are a hundred people in Azkaban whose cells were warded properly when the Death Eaters fled. It was a mix of panic- the Battle of Hogwarts happened so quickly- and idiocy and bureaucratic mix-ups, but of the almost six hundred muggleborns that were locked up in Azkaban over the course of the year, more than five hundred escaped. Those who didn’t were the old, the weak, the quiet; from what you’ve been able to deduce, some people even sacrificed themselves to keep holes in the wards open long enough for others to flee.

It’s not like you’re the best warder Luna could have gotten. Hell, Bill’s better than you by a long shot; this is his actual job- but your mother’s always depended most on Bill and she actually needs him, now, what with- Fred. Charlie’d flunked Ancient Runes in his third year and taken up Divination instead; George might be better than you, now, but he’s too... something.

Broken, you think, and the thought burns inside of you, enough that you hiss out, flick your wand at an innocent bit of stone and watch it explode. Like a clock.

A hand settles on your forearm. “The nimbopaths tend to be stronger here,” she says. “Maybe we should drink some tea?”

“Just- thoughts,” you say, quietly. Nevermind that neither of you have brought tea with you; what’s important is that her hand feels very warm, and there’s something scarily like guilt rising up your throat. “I’ll finish this ward myself, don’t worry. There’s another one in the left hallway, if you want to map it out.”

Luna leaves. You knead your forehead and get back to work, carving runes with both wand and knife, carefully cracking the barrier until you can get to the gaunt corpse behind it.

You don’t scream when you see the bodies.

(You haven’t screamed since you saw Fred die.)

...

Nobody asks where you go, which surprises you more than you’d think. But they just accept that you disappear- even George, who’s been spending the most time with you. It’s regular, at least, insofar as that you leave at dawn and return only past midnight. The only people who see you are Harry and Ron and Hermione, and the three of them are strange enough that they don’t seem to find anything out of the ordinary in your wrinkled clothes or shabby appearance.

Finally, a week- or two, or three- later, Charlie sits you down.

“You need to rest,” he says, quietly. “You’re running yourself into the ground. Kingsley wouldn’t want that.”

I don’t give a damn about Kingsley, is on the tip of your tongue. I’ll run myself into the ground if I want to, is marching right behind it. I deserve this, is what echoes behind it all.

“There’s things I have to do,” you say instead.

Luna’s found a spell that keeps the bodies from decomposing. There’s a long line of them, now, arranged in one of the better-aired corridors of Azkaban; corpses in stasis that you both need to find graves for, names for, wands for. One of them had hair the color of a sunrise, streaked with a dye that sits next to your shaving cream in the store in Diagon Alley. You’d almost broken down three days ago, when you saw that purple box.

When you left that store, there was a box with Wott’s Ever-Changing Dye, Spec. Ed: SUNRISE! emblazoned on it, hidden with your daily supplies.

Maybe in a few months you’ll stop dreaming about your sins.

“I never even see you,” Charlie says. “You’re gone before I wake up, you come back after I fall asleep, you’re looking like a ghost. I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you, Perce, but you’d best stop before you break down. Mum can’t handle you going off your rocker, alright?”

You jerk away. “I’m sorry,” you say, precisely, each word crisp as the apples that grow in fresh spring, new and green and tart enough to draw tears to the eye, “that I am inconveniencing you.”

“Shit,” you hear him mutter, before Charlie launches himself forwards; but it’s too late.

You cross the kitchen’s threshold, and there- sitting, like a fucking mosaic of pieces that, through your tears, looks almost like Fred- is George. George and your mother and your father and the rest of your family, but Fred isn’t there, he isn’t there, he’ll never be there to tease you or frighten you or love you, not anymore.

“I’m fine,” you say, and it’s not a lie, though you can see that nobody believes you. “I’m fine,” you repeat, and Charlie’s behind you and he puts his hand on your shoulder and it’s not fine, but you’re fine, you’re fine and it’s the world that’s not fine at all.

Fred’s gone, and you’ve got a list of sins that you’ll spend the rest of your life scrubbing.

I’m not even twenty-five, you think, and I’ll never do anything great.

“I am,” you say, and this time it is defiant, as foolishly defiant as ever Fred had been, “fine.”

A shrug of your shoulders, and before Charlie can catch you, before anyone can believe that you’re going to do this again, the son who had loved rules more than he’d ever loved family- you’re gone.

...

The cliffside is cold, and you don’t have a cloak or the will to perform a warming charm.

You don’t cry, but when it rains, you don’t wipe your face either.

Your eyes are red.

...

“You haven’t told them?” Luna asks you the next day, when you show up in sodden clothes and hair as tangled as Potter’s on a bad day.

“Three more cells,” you reply. “We’re almost done.”

You reach for the doorknob, but it clicks shut with a finality that makes you whirl back to Luna. She looks back at you with a look in her eyes that makes you want to wince, her wand held high and stiff between you two. It feels like someone’s made you swallow ice.

“And after that we need to find names, and ground to bury them, and wands.” Her lips, already thin, depress further. “This will not end, Percy. Every day there will be something more, and you have to-”

“You don’t get to tell me what I have to do,” you whisper.

It’s nothing but the truth. Luna brought you here, but it’s your decision to actually do something instead of mourn. Your guilt is your own; no one, not Charlie, not George, not Luna- not a single person in the world gets to tell you that this guilt is lessened by coming here. They don’t get to do this to you. And if you want to spend the rest of your life righting the wrongs of a war that you were on the wrong side of, then there is nothing that will stop you.

“You need to tell them what’s happening,” Luna says, reaching out to place a hand on your shoulder. “They’re going to worry. Percy- Fred wouldn’t want you to do this.”

You step away, and slash your wand down, once, twice, thrice. The door falls into pieces, stripped wood, and you step out into the corridor. The wind catches at your cloak and hair, still soaked through. You don’t shiver.

“I signed forty-three documents,” you say softly, watching her, waiting for the inevitable horror, revulsion, hatred. “Did you know that? I signed away forty-three people’s lives. Fred’s the least of my sins.” A breath, and wood crunches under your feet as if they were bones, dried and dead. “You can tell my parents that, if you want to.” The ice in your throat spreads to your arms, to your fingers, to your heart. “But I’m going to break Azkaban’s wards today, and tomorrow I’ll find a burial ground for the dead, and the day after that I’ll find out how to make wands, and you can help me bury these people if you want to but I’m not going to stop, do you hear me?”

...

You’ve always been good with charms. Penelope’s always been good with potions.

The summer of ‘96, you have a long, explosive fight with her. You hadn’t been living together, not exactly; you’re both too independent for that. But you have an extra towel and toothbrush in your bathroom and the particular brand of rough-grain bread that Penelope likes in your kitchen, and it’s the closest you’ve come to sharing your life with anyone else.

She’s afraid.

You’re not just a Gryffindor, she says, blue eyes shining, face earnest, please, come with me- there’s other places you can succeed. It doesn’t have to be here, you-

I’m not going anywhere, you say, and you’re terrified, of course you are, you’re angry and grieving and alone and-

And you have done a lot wrong, in your life, but you haven’t run. At least in some small, aching way, you belong to Gryffindor for reasons other than your blood.

Penelope doesn’t say goodbye.

You find a thin vial resting on your bed that night- black and glittering, like the night sky ground into a liquid. You recognize it, of course. By all rights, you should turn it into the Ministry. By all rights, you should put her name on a list of criminals, for brewing one of the most dangerous potions in the world.

You pocket the vial instead.

...

(Your best subject had been charms.

But you’re even better at paperwork. It’s why Crouch takes you on- they mock you, your brothers, your family, but he took you on and he kept you on because you were good at what you did.

Forty-three people suffer for that.)

...

Azkaban surrenders the last of its sealed cells quietly, and you levitate the last body to the corridor where the rest have been lying for the past fortnight. Luna is there- her hair looks like moonlight-purified water, colorless and pure in the dull darkness.

She has a new wand, one that Ollivander made for her after the Malfoys took hers. It’s too temperamental for your taste; it reacts more to Luna’s emotions than to her words, and the results can be unpredictable. The day after you both uncovered one of the younger victims, it had only released saltwater for the full day, no matter what else Luna tried.

But it also matches Luna’s personality. Like right now: there’s a glittering charm bracelet that she’s woven out of light and some old metal scraps lying on the floor, and it shines around almost twenty people’s wrists and throats, pale blue or sparking purple or glowing yellow, like a strange string of faery lights.

"The stasis spell goes from darkness to darkness,” she says, folding one boy’s fingers open slowly, massaging the cold flesh.

You bite back the first words you think of, the acid bite of your previous meeting still concentrated. “What does that mean?”

“You have another three weeks,” replies Luna, softly. “Then the graves will rise up and swallow them once more.”

The stasis spell will fall, you realize. That’s what she’s trying to say. The spell will last from new moon to new moon, and it will fall soon and the bodies will rot, and that means-

“Graves,” you say. “Wands. We’ll need-”

“No,” says Luna. “Not us.”

You.

It had slipped your mind, but- yes, now you remember, Luna and Ron and Ginny and Ron’s friends- they’re all heading back to Hogwarts. Another week and they’re going to leave, and you’re going to have to do this alone.

Alone.

You know how that feels. You have it scored straight into your bones.

“I’ll handle it,” you say.

...

The Ministry is silent when you enter it.

It’s too early in the morning; fog still lines London’s streets, and the streetlights are still lighting up the city. The tips of your robes are damp. Your footsteps echo on the marble stone.

(The last time you were here, you killed sixteen men.

Yaxley had asked for tea, and you’d felt some shift in the air- you’d nodded docilely, you’d made the tea with careful, even hands, and then, when they were ignoring you, while they were casually discussing some crime on humanity, you’d poured Penny’s black, shining poison straight into the dark liquid.

You’d waited patiently, calmly, as they dropped.

Thirteen men like that- and then you left, quietly, and sealed the door shut. Three more men had chased you, up and down the hallways, and you’d killed two with quick wandwork but the last- the last you’d captured and carved, slowly, with your careful, even wandwork, and you hadn’t stopped until he sputtered out the truth of Hogwarts’ siege.

Nobody knows, of course. You couldn’t stand it if they did. But when you apparated to Hogwarts, it was with the blood of sixteen men on your hands.)

Kingsley’s in his office. It’s not the room where you tortured a man, not even on the same floor, but your hands tremble all the same.

“Minister,” you say, as you enter.

Kingsley looks- drawn. His bones are sharp under his skin, but he burns brighter than you remember from before, as if the pared flesh has revealed some of the fierceness beneath. When he waves you to a seat, it’s a sort of kindness.

“Percy,” he says. “I wondered when I’d see you in here.”

“Ah. I’m...” you think, for a dizzy moment, that you’ll just accept, that you’ll take the opening Kingsley offered and slide back into your old position as if nothing has changed. The nausea that rises with the dizziness clears your head, firms your voice. “I’m afraid I’m not here for the reason you think.”

“Oh?”

You swallow. “Do you know about Azkaban?”

“I read a report on it a few days ago, yes,” says Kingsley, spreading his hand on one of the stacks of papers currently crowding his desk.

I could file that, you think, abruptly seized by a desire for it. I could sort out this mess. I’d be good at it. I could-

You could. You’d reshape the nation. And you’d be scrupulously fair, viciously, steadily, fair. You’d know it, because you’d have all of it in the palm of your hand, you’d be the one doing it.

But there are other ways of doing good.

You know that now.

“Someone from Hogwarts is working on clearing it,” says Kingsley. “It’s going well, according to- ah, yes, I think it was Xeno’s daughter- a good girl, with her head in the air, perhaps, but- she’s smart, and got through a stint in Azkaban herself without breaking. Is there a problem with it?”

“No, no problem,” you reply. “But I’ve been working with her on clearing it.”

The world doesn’t stop turning when you say it out loud.

So you continue.

“We’ve recovered forty bodies. Muggleborn bodies. We’ll need place to bury them, before the stasis spell we’ve put on them starts to breakdown.”

Kingsley pauses. “Ah. I’d wondered- I thought you’d be here the day I entered, you know? But then I remembered your brother. When was his funeral?”

“Months ago,” you say, through clenched teeth, desperately trying to keep yourself from twitching. “A month after the Hogwarts- battle.”

“You’ve been excavating Azkaban all along, Percy?”

The kindness drags along your nerves. You don’t want kindness. You want professionalism, and crisp agreements, and not this- this stupid hurting rage.

“Not for very long,” you say, though, because Kingsley’s being kind while still remaining within the bounds of professionalism. “It’s going faster than I’d expected. But the stasis spell works only from new moon to new moon.”

“Did you have any particular rituals in mind?”

“I had some ideas.” You swallow. “There’s- I think, sunlight. That’s something they deserve.”

“Not something we have a lot of here,” says Kingsley mildly.

“There’s charms for that,” you reply. “And I thought- think- there’s an island. Off of Azkaban. It comes near enough to the anti-muggle wards that we won’t need to do anything complex. It’s abandoned, and...”

Perfect, you think, but don’t say. Nothing’s perfect, is what you’ve learned. It’s all just piece-meal attempts at cobbling together a vision that might, if one squints, look vaguely acceptable. But you’ve visited the island and it’s small and rough and scarred and still: perfect.

“I’ll see what I can do,” says Kingsley.

You force yourself to nod back to him.

“Percy,” he says, when you’ve gathered your coat and almost managed to leave, “your office remains empty. I look forward to seeing it filled soon.”

You freeze. You force air into your lungs. You say, without turning, “I’ll offer you a list of meritorious candidates when I get some time, Minister.”

“I need help,” says Kingsley, and his hand closes on your shoulder. You shudder. “You’re one of the few people from the old Ministry who hasn’t been arrested, you know, and we need the experience.” He pauses. “And you look like you could use the work.”

“I’m fine,” you say automatically. Then, slower, “And I cannot help you, Minister. I would be far greater a burden than an aid.”

“Percy-”

You shy away from the contact. Pull your robes around you. Nod, grimly, politely, and grind out, laboriously: “I thank you for the opportunity, Minister. But I... there are some things that cannot be- undone. Sometimes, people- people cannot be trusted. Not after they’ve- not after what they’ve done.”

“I know where your loyalty lies, son,” says Kingsley, but he doesn’t try to touch your shoulder once more. “We know where you fought when it mattered.”

Your lips twist in a facsimile of a smile. “All of you keep saying that,” you say, in a voice too low for addressing the Minister, but you don’t care. You don’t care. You are not off the rails completely, but you can taste that wildness and it is heady as much as it is frightening. “As if this war’s lasted for all of one battle. There has been a war in our country for three years, Minister Shacklebolt, and there has been a battle waged in every wizarding home within our borders. I know where I stood for too long- and I know that there are things that cannot be forgiven, no matter what else is done after the fact.”

Kingsley looks- old. His face is set in taut, narrow lines, and his eyes shine in the morning light, almost-gold. “I know this war, Percy.”

“It doesn’t feel like it,” you say recklessly, before drawing yourself up. Breathing in. This, at least, you can offer. Advice, if not the work of your hands. “Children died, Minister. Muggleborns. Halfbloods. Purebloods. We all bled for a madman, and the answer that our government has for us is to sit tight. Is it any wonder people sit in their homes and ask when the next Dark Lord will rise?”

“Voldemort is gone.”

“Albus Dumbledore kept secrets,” you say. “And now, so does Harry Potter. History is set to repeat itself, Minister- and it is set to become as we once were, led by Lords and Ladies. Where do we, the common man, lie then? The chattel between lords at best. The victims, at worst. What we lost when we elected to turn our heads and bite our tongues and let a one year old boy become our savior...”

You trail off. Your hands are shaking, now, and your head is aching. There’s a small crowd surrounding the Minister, just a little ways off, but you can see the flash of a pink string quickly moving out of sight. Extendable Ears.

So now your political stance is solidified.

Nausea builds in your gut. You look at Kingsley, and regret swims before you. That he was caught even listening to your near-treasonous words might spell the end to his brief tenure as Minister. It’s quite a shame- you rather like him, even if he’s too willing to return to the status quo.

“I’m sorry,” you breathe, and turn, and flee as quick as you can without actually running.

...

After, you get drunk. Roaringly drunk. As you’ve never done before in your life.

Impotent anger and bitter hatred and caustic self-loathing. It all melts underneath the touch of the- whatever- that the bartender gives you. At least you’d had the knowledge to go into muggle London, where there’s nobody who’ll report you to your mother; otherwise you’d be waking tomorrow to a howler from your mother and a quick, apologetic Hangover Relief from your father.

Only that’s how it might have been, once, for Charlie and Bill.

Now. You doubt your mother would even notice your absence. Even if she did, why would she care about one son drinking away his night when another’s buried six feet under the earth? So. No howler from your mother. No potion from your father either, though, and that’s a shame. Thank Merlin you probably have one stored away in your potions cupboard, just in case.

“One more,” you say to the bartender.

He shakes his head. Anger flashes through you, so hot it hurts. It reminds you of when you were a kid- your accidental magic had only ever come out when you wanted the twins to be silent. Once, you’d managed to silence the entire Burrow for a glorious three hours.

Fred and George had gotten you back for that, with interest; but you hadn’t cared.

“C’mon,” you say, levering yourself up those last few feet. “C’mon, you know I’m good for it, I need-”

The bartender shakes his head one last time, final, and the fragile bridge holding you to- sanity, or normalcy, or maybe just that land of reason that you’ve clutched onto your whole life- shatters. You lunge forwards and drag the bartender closer to you, and something is glowing at your feet so when you look down you realize that it’s not something but it’s you, and that glowing thing is coming from your fingers which are dripping fire.

Then there’s hands around your shoulders, dragging you away from the bartender. Hands that remain firm and tight all the way until you push through the door, and you’re stumbling, you’re choking on all the air you need but aren’t getting.

“Fuckin’ hell,” you hear from what must be the man who’s holding you, “can’t say I’ve ever seen-”

His voice wavers in and out, like a bad connection on the Floo. You vaguely register that it’s familiar; you don’t pay much attention to anything other than the blessedly cold air in your lungs and the rough stone beneath your shins. You feel sick.

“Weasley,” you hear, and it makes your chest want to shrivel up. “Weasley, hey, the fuck’s your name- it was- Percy, yeah, Percy, you hearing me? Up, Merlin, get up, would you? Obliviators’re on the way. Best if we aren’t caught here- Percy, hey- Percy!”

The world goes dark, and you don’t even regret it.

...

You do regret it when you come to the next morning.

Sunlight’s spearing through the butter-yellow curtains straight into your eyes. You make a mush-mouthed sound and flap your hand at it ineffectually. But trying to turn over hurts your head even more; you just flop backwards in the end, and close your eyes.

“Weasley?” you hear from a distant corner.

“Hnngh,” you say.

“Weasley,” sighs the man, entering your line of sight. It’s a man you vaguely remember- you’ve seen him around, though you think he was a Ravenclaw back in Hogwarts. A prefect, you’re fairly certain, below you. His hair’s damp and he’s wearing a loose tracksuit and he looks... unfairly put together for the misery you’re currently feeling. “D’you remember what happened last night?”

“Mmph.” Painfully, you swallow. Then, still aching, you lever yourself upright. Like hell’re you going to speak to a Hogwarts prefect lying down like an invalid. “Kind of. Fire?”

“You were dripping it,” agrees Prefect. “It was a miracle you didn’t burn the pub down.”

You wince. “I. It. I thought.” Then you pause, take in the entirety of your situation- you’ve just crashed on a stranger’s couch because you were too drunk the previous night after spending a full day getting wasted in a muggle pub and trying to burn it down, all because you chewed out the Minister for something that isn’t even his fault. There’s really only one thing you can say. “I was stupid.”

Monumentally stupid.

Unfathomably stupid.

“Mm,” agrees Prefect. He walks away, then comes back with two things: a copy of the paper, and a fizzing blue mug. “Drink that first. And- you are Percy, right? Percy Weasley?”

“Yes,” you agree slowly.

“You’ll want to read that paper, then.” Prefect’s eyes are sharp on your face. “You don’t remember me?”

“Prefect, right? Ravenclaw?” You shrug. “Don’t remember your name.”

“Roger Davies.” Davies nods to the paper. “Read it. And- Weasley?”

“Yeah?”

“Not all of us liked your brothers,” he says evenly. “Not all of us made the right decisions. A lot of us were- not brave. But we survived.” He pauses, and there’s something in his eyes that makes you want to swallow- something bright, and fragile, and perhaps brighter for its fragility. “A leader should know that.”

“‘m no leader,” you say, sighing as you sip the hangover relief. It blazes down the back of your throat. A good hurt, though, so you barely even grimace.

Then you look up, and Davies is frowning at you.

“Shame, that,” is all he says. “Think you’d do a good job at it. Always did.”

“Thanks for the relief,” you tell him, before you rise to your feet.

You shake his hand as firmly as you can manage. Stumble to the fireplace, mumble your address and manage three steps into your home before you collapse from the dizziness. When you open your eyes again, the paper’s crumpled tight in your fists. You let go. Smooth it out.

Your breath is snatched right out of your lungs.

“Fuck,” you whisper. You don’t like to swear, but there isn’t any other way to treat this. “Fucking fuck. Oh my fucking god!”

Hungover or not, you have to go home. You have to make sure your parents know-

Know what?

That you’re not a traitor? That you’re not the radical revolutionary the paper paints you as? That with a two minute speech to the Minister, you’re suddenly not the poster child for change from the top to the dregs of society?

Percy Weasley: Radical or Traditional?

You steel yourself. Get in the shower. Shave. Pick out some crisply folded robes. Comb your hair back. By the end of it, you’ve made your decision. Then you stand in front of your fireplace for a good five minutes, dithering, before you call out, “Roger Davies’ home!”

You don’t walk back into his home, just call and allow him the ability to pick up or decline. He does, after a pause so long your knees start to ache.

“Yeah?” he asks, wandering into view. “Forget something, Weasley?”

“My manners,” you say wryly.

“You said thanks already.”

“I know.” You swallow. You can still back out. But if you say the words, if you give them a voice... you can’t take them back. You can never take them back. “But I told you that I’m no leader. I’m not, you know, not a general. Not a Lord. I’m the normal one.”

“Yeah, I got that,” says Davies.

You tilt your head at him. “I don’t know if I’m the best for this. But... I think I can help you.”

...

You don’t return to the Ministry. But nobody stops you when you start clearing shrubbery to make a proper burial service, so you don’t stop either. You’ve told the Minister your plans, anyhow, and if someone has the temerity enough to attempt to stop you you’ve got his name ready to drop with a flatly insincere smile.

Luna comes to your flat two days later, Ollivander twitchy but at her side. She doesn’t mention the Prophet article, which you’re grateful enough for that you forgive her interference with your family.

(It’s not like you don’t understand, you soothe yourself. Everybody wants a happy ending, all the hurts smoothed away. And for Luna, who’s an only child, who has been such a source of strength to her father- it must seem even stranger, even crueler, for you not to desire with all your body and mind to return to them. Have the Weasleys not suffered enough? Why are you so fucking incapable of kindness?

But war has pared something away in you- worn down those pieces that wanted things with hard desperation, cut away those parts that made you want love or approval or appreciation.

What is left of you now?)

Ollivander hems and haws and looks increasingly insulted at your desire to bury wands with the Azkaban muggleborns; it’s very rare to lose wands like that, and usually done only for people who have nobody else in the world. No family, no friends. Nobody who’ll take or remember these people.

You don’t care.

These people had wands, but they were yanked out of their fists. There’s no way to track that down, now, and the injustice of it bubbles in your chest every time you feel exhaustion dog at your heels.

“The- the waste- it’s unconscionable- how can I-”

“Waste?” you ask mildly.

Luna leans back, starlight-hair glittering. She doesn’t look away from you, eyes level and warm. You straighten your spine and dig out the boy who’d bargained with pureblood supremacists, words cajoling; gaze unflinching.

“Their old wands will sit in some old pureblood vault for decades,” you tell Ollivander. “We cannot retrieve them; those records have been destroyed, or perhaps never maintained in the first place. If ever they see light of day, they will be in the hands of the very people who took them away.” You lean forwards, and take no joy in the subtle flinch of Ollivander’s shoulders. “We are burying wizards and witches, Mr. Ollivander, and they shall be marked as such. They will be given that dignity.”

His pale, silver eyes say everything he’s too polite to say.

Traitor, radical, fool.

Too angry to be any use. Too stupid to be quiet. Too cruel to be part of the Light.

Well, that’s fine. What use have labels been to you anyways?

Why do you care so much? sneers Ollivander, silent, wordless.

And you do not answer: Because I could have blown up the Ministry if I was pushed, and I don’t know why I didn’t push myself. Because I let the war pass me by and my family is made up of people who cannot forget that, even if they will forgive me. Because I am here, and I can, and so I will.

“I cannot make wands for people I do not know,” says Ollivander finally.

“I have their profiles arranged,” you reply, hand resting heavily on a stack of parchment. “Take your best guess.”

“I have not made wands in- months. The process- I cannot- the speed will be too low to-”

“Then I will help you,” you say lowly, and watch the flash of irritable defiance in Ollivander’s face flare and fade out. “Forty wands. We’ll get this done before the month is out.”

It’s going to be a challenge, of course, but you have never shrunk from honest, hard work before, and you won’t start now. Youngest aide to an official in the history of Britain; sharpest Weasley in a family that you had to claw distinction out of; the face of a burgeoning radicalist movement through the nation. You’ve done it all before, and you’ve done it well, and you’ll do this too, properly.

Beautifully.

[nettlestonenell]

If you don’t like Peggy Carter, you don’t like the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Buckle up, Gentle Readers. You may have thought this blog was done vomiting Peggy Carter meta, but you’d be wrong.

It’s still out there, you probably know, this concept that Peggy Carter is [just] Steve Rogers’ girlfriend. It doesn’t even have the sense to lurk in the shadows of the fandom. It’s front and center whenever she’s brought up. And whether that’s because those posting and perpetuating it think the notion weakens whatever/whoever they ship with Cap, or comes from a place where it’s only supposed to be men that matter in fandom/comics/Marvel/the universe at large, it’s simply, aggressively wrong.

If you don’t like Peggy Carter, you don’t like the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Why would I say that? I’m so glad you asked.

Peggy Carter, as portrayed in the MCU (that’s all we’re going to be talking about her representation in, here), was introduced in CA:TFA (we know that, if we’re reading this we know that). That film was not an origin story for her character. She had already originated, and her character came to that film fully-formed (insert Athena reference). 

(and what a form it is)

She had a job, at which she was very good. She had a sense of self and service, she had (as close as anyone could get to it) the respect of Tommy Lee Jones’ character. She already had a moral compass and a mission.

In fact, it could be supported from the narrative that Steve had to take the super-soldier serum to complete his origin so that he could become Peggy’s equal (at least physically) in both the fight and in love. CA:TFA doesn’t show that Peggy needed to change in any way.

And here’s where some people seem to start to feel rubbed the wrong way. Marvel wasn’t finished with her. In fact, Marvel decided that actually, they wanted to take Peggy Carter and craft from her the actual freakin’ bedrock of their cinematic universe.

How many MCU films/series has Peggy been in? Six. (I count Civil War, even though it’s only her picture.) Sure, some of those are merely cameo appearances. Cap scores eight by the same counting, but two of his appearances are cameos. Cap has three films in which he’s the main character (I could debate that in Civil War with you, if you like, but not here), roughly six hours of film. In three Avengers movies he’s one of many characters, we’ll give him two hours (though his screen time is likely far less). We’re up to eight hours. His three cameos account for 15 minutes. So, for Cap The Literally Freakin’ First Avenger, we get 8.25 hours of film with him.

And for Peggy? Her five cameos equal about 30 minutes. Her time in CA:TFA gets her about, 45 minutes (maybe a little less). BUT Marvel, in using her as the foundation of their cinematic universe (Peggy’s existence and skin in the fight pre-dates Cap’s) they gave her a series. It ran two seasons. She was the main character. It started with a short. Add fifteen minutes (we’re up to 1.5 hours, now). The series aired thirteen hours of footage. That’s 14.5 hours on-screen about Peggy Carter. That’s an awful lot to develop and write and shoot and produce to be dismissed as merely fan service, or (as it more frequently is claimed at least on tumblr) to solely try and establish that Steve Rogers is Straight-y McStraighterson b/c Peggy Carter.

Fourteen and a half hours across multiple plot lines and platforms. There’s the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D cameo. (Forgot about that one, didn’t you?) 

Her appearance in Ant-Man. 

Hours and hours and hours of plots and storylines that don’t deal with Steve Rogers at all, in any way. [Caveat: Some of S1 does masterfully deal with the loss of Captain American AND Steve Rogers--for both her and Howard Stark* (*also more than Cap’s boyfriend)]

Do you know who founds S.H.I.E.L.D.? Howard Stark and PEGGY CARTER. Are we gonna argue now that S.H.I.E.L.D. isn’t foundational to the MCU? Are we gonna handwave Coulson and Fury, Maria Hill b/c “they just work for Cap’s girlfriend”? 

Marvel’s Agent Carter spent literally AN ENTIRE SEASON schooling us on the fact that dismissing Peggy Carter, Steve Rogers’ Liaison (she’s his handler, he’s her asset) as ‘Cap’s Girlfriend’ was not only reductive but wrong-headed. Six hours of listening to bonehead boys-club agents at SSR belittling Peggy for being female, claiming her entire professional existence was courtesy Cap.

And yet Peggy is already in the military when she is assigned to Cap’s unit. She’s already giving orders, and working for Tommy Lee Jones—don’t think she wasn’t getting told she was probably sleeping with HIM--(and dealing with idiots who can’t yet dismiss her for being Cap’s girlfriend, so they’re glad to sneer at her for being a female in power). 

Peggy Carter doesn’t work under Steve Rogers, she works for people above him. She’s the one who, as they say in the spy world, ‘brings him in’ by encouraging him to break-up with the USO and use what Dr. Erskine gave him for a greater good. She works alongside Howard Stark, possibly the brightest mind on Earth at the time.

And let’s not forget the fact that Steve and Peggy are not ACTUALLY dating. They’ve never been on a date. Once, she visited a bar where he was, and then left after a short period of time. Alone.

It is actually illegal in the Midwest to leave this dress out of any posts where it can feasibly be used.

They may have spent hours together in work-based situations, but insofar as we’re shown, they never even so much as brushed hands. Yeah, her picture’s in his compass. And they look at each other like they’re ready to make love despite the full room crowd around them, but recall: There’s kissing, and only Tommy Lee Jones there to witness it.

What’s that mean? Well, I doubt it means TLJ’s character was interested enough or indiscreet enough to get that event posted in the base newsletter. What it means is that even if she had not been, Peggy’s sex immediately (long before anything happened between her and Steve) caused people to assume she was Steve’s girlfriend. Her grief following his loss? Not allowed to just be grief for a colleague, a lost asset. Nope, had to be love (even though to those making that qualification of their relationship little evidence existed to reach that conclusion). Peggy had no chance to be seen as other.

And had Steve lived/not crashed—she never, ever would have been able to extricate herself in-story from people assuming and tagging her with that label, negating all her personal triumphs as “Cap’s girlfriend’s” un-earned accomplishments.

But you know what we’re shown instead? Steve on ice—able to save the world later, but Agent Peggy Carter saving the world NOW. She’s ground-zero for dealing with the superpowered. If we’re told Cap’s the First Avenger, then Peggy Carter is the First Avenger’s handler. She writes the textbook for dealing with superpowers, and the supernatural showing up on earth. She builds the agency designed to deal with items like the Tesseract and people like Cap. Gate-keeper of what becomes the MCU.

I just love Dum Dum. Did I need another reason to use this photo?

In fact, there’s only one MCU character with more screen time than Peggy Carter. It’s the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. In his series, where he’s the main character, he clocks about 31 hours of time (roughly twice Peggy’s). And he’s in The Defenders ensemble as well. (I’ll generously award him two hours there, for a total of 33 hours in the MCU). But Matt Murdock stays in Hell’s Kitchen, and his adventures occur there. He’s not been allowed to run around in the broader mythology. He’s contained. Claustrophobic, even.

But Peggy Carter has been deliberately given vast MCU connections, and developed as a thread that runs through every earth-bound MCU journey (save Spider-Man thus far). In addition to her connection to Nick Fury, Black Widow’s Red Room training (via early Widow-prototype Dottie Underwood), SSR/S.H.I.E.L.D., the Howling Commandos, Howard Stark, and the original human Jarvis. She’s even dealt with Zero Matter, a similar entity to Thor’s Aether. She’s connected to Hank Pym, and personally knew Bucky Barnes in WWII. And almost certainly has an unexplored-in-canon connection to Tony Stark.

Arguably, Peggy Carter also wins Most Well-Developed character in the MCU. We’ve been shown Peggy has:

           Parents who have appeared on-screen

           Multiple named friends and acquaintances (many not even there               to advance the plot!)

-          Two significant frenemies (Dottie Underwood, Jack Thompson)

-          Close confidantes with whom she shares multiple scenes

-          A backstory/origin story given in her series that pre-dates her                     appearance in CA:TFA

-          An ongoing narrative that laid the basis for the MCU

-          A funeral attended by lots (a whole church-load) of people

-          A broken-engagement fiance

           Dated a man NOT Cap, following Cap’s ice dive

           A husband

           A brother

-          Children

-          Grandchildren

           A niece

-          A rich, whole, life outside her brief time with Cap

CONCLUSION: You know who dismisses Peggy Carter as Steve Rogers’ girlfriend? (And also suggests that she’s slept with Howard Stark, her former co-worker?) Loser SSR Agent Krzeminski. 

Do you know what happens to him? He gets shot in the head. By a girl. 

Who he probably just thought was some guy’s girlfriend.

[boglog]

Soooo I'm gna get mauled here but tumblr's unquestioning praise of Killing Eve as a progressive, prestige show about womanhood and sexuality is... looking like a problem to me.

This is not to shame people who watch the show or even to guilt people out of enjoying it, especially seeing as I've done both, (unabashedly admiring Phoebe Waller Bridge's distinctly quirky humour and Fiona Shaw's deliveries). This is to say, though, that the Killing Eve franchise is something to think more critically about before we give it more praise, more money. We can be critical of media we like, not limit activism to media criticism and not feel that media criticism in some way robs us of something. In my opinion.

[tw for discussions on sex, rape, pedophilia, violence, death, q slur]

[[more]] <---more --!>

Firstly the generation-wide age gap: Eve's original portrayal in the book is 24, exactly two years Villanelle's senior so the only logical excuse for it be added in the adaptation was bc the crew were desperate for big name actors. And while I love Sandra Oh, it was not worth it to create bizarre sexual tension between a forty year old and a twenty year old. This isn't even the first time Jodie Comer was the on-screen love interest to a middle aged person (see also Dr Foster), which is doubly messed up. Ideally replace Oh with an actor Comer's peer or replace Comer w someone Oh's age. It's not that hard.

Second, the age gap is exasperated by Villanelle's "mental age" which is far below twenty. Honestly the fact that both these problems were added into the adaptation by female actor/writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge makes me wna scream. Book!Villanelle was appropriately mature enough—emotionally, psychologically, intellectually—to warrant her high-ranking status as an assassin. Her behaviour, while still devoid of empathy, manages to be a believable portrayal of an upper-class 20 yr o behaving like a thirty year-old. Phoebe Waller-Bridge (and co)'s reinterpretation has Villanelle being a hyperfeminine, materialist, petty teenager that slowly spirals into impulsive outbursts and a scene where she's crawling around a suburb in a onesie. How do we reconcile Villanelle's lust and her love of violence with this childish persona? How is Eve's attraction to her justified? How do ppl think that's hot? It's comedic shock value flirting with homophobia, pedophilia, and the Born Sexy Yesterday trope. Not to mention the violent little girl trope. Despite all of Luke Jennings' flaws, he at least did not do That and my God is the bar low.

Both book and show heavily overplay Villanelle's sexual promiscuity to the point of being voyeuristic. Villanelle's sociopathy is largely an excuse for her violence, sex life, and lack of empathy to be over-the-top, even comedic, especially in the show adaptation. Villanelle's only true human connection is her infatuation with her language teacher, Anna. Which, rather than explore the show's pedophilic undertones, only serves to justify it via backstory.

The show does handle this way worse though: through Anna's dialogue, we're assured that the attraction was mutual ("She seduced me.") and that they've had sex. Which at the time would be when Oxana (Oksana) was in her late teens as she was still a high school student under Anna's tutelage. In the show, Villanelle murders Anna's husband partially out of revenge and possibly bc she took Anna's joke too literally. Book!Villanelle meanwhile castrates Anna's rapist. The former attempts to draw parallels between Eve and Anna, Nico and Anna's husband, treating the story like a melodramatic Shakespearean love triangle while once more reminding us of Villanelle's immature social skills. Which, again, serves to justify age gap lust. Meanwhile, the book attempts to question Villanelle's warped attempts at human connection via vignettes of violent shock value, it's marginally better than the adaptation but in the overall scheme of things I'm not sure Jennings makes enough commentary on violence against women to warrant this.

Finally sexuality in the franchise is a big question mark. Eve and Villanelle's attraction to each other is explained simply by obsession and lust intermingled with violence. Villanelle and Anna's relationship devolves into much the same in the show. Eve and Nico have a relatively stable yet dispassionate relationship meanwhile Bill is implied to be bisexual with an open marriage, though this is never seen and he's murdered shortly after this confession. A Chinese politician has a hospital fetish and, in the book, a right-wing fascist has a kin/kink for Eva Braun which leads us to a highly disturbing transphobic scene involving an exploding dildo. Notably, Villanelle's on/off frenemy romance with Lara (who is... you know... her age) in the book is cut and replaced Nadia, whom she basically kills as soon as possible.

The relationship between Oxana and Lara is explored more in the book (and it's post-season 1 sequel) though ultimately, Lara dies and Villanelle can't feel remorse let alone love. Both book and show have Villanelle hooking up with various people but the book goes into painstaking detail about her sexual promiscuity being motivated by her desire to manipulate peole. Clearly, Jennings shows that Villanelle's sex life includes all genders yet with little regard for her intimacy and level of attraction for anyone. She is "bisexual" (or "lesbian") only insofar as actual physical sex is concerned. Emotionally, she is attracted to no one. Which let me just say is a capital y Yikes.

And the cherry on top of course is that the show is getting accused of queerbating due to the heavy marketing a nd WLW undertones despite Sandra Oh's denial of any romance btwn her and Jodie Comer's character. 🙄

All of these play heavily into existing homophobic stereotypes. The predatory lesbian. The hypersexual bisexual. The manipulative, hedonistic, childish, lustful qu**rs, who, having foresaken family values to screw anything and everything, are not emotionally mature enough to be first class citizens. From watching the show and reading the book, the writers play with these "dark" themes with little introspection to how these relate historically to LGBT politics, how their use of sociopathy and age gaps has political and sociological significance. There's little real deconstruction or reflection on gender, sexuality, violence etc to be considered satirical and these aspects are largely thrown in for entertainment's sake.

Jennings and Waller-Bridge have both, respectively, made attempts at thematic critiques of wealth and gender. Neither of which in my opinion saw its theme through enough to be satirical. There's something to be said about how PWB converted Jennings' anti-materialist subtext into "empowering" aspects of literally weaponised feminity (i.e. all of Villanelle's weapons are high-end women's products) almost as a critique of cultural dismissal of femininity and it's association with materialism. PWB seemed to want to create a comedic, empoweringly gendered, spy movie but this theme of weaponised femininity nose dives at Villanelle's immaturity not to mention its superficiality. Weaponised femininity directed at whom? The show seems much more fascinated with Villanelle herself than the fact that she's employed by The Twelve, which obscures the importance of who Villanelle is killing, who Villanelle exerts weaponised feminity against and why. Not to mention the concept of the feral, empowered or weaponised woman has always been positively attributed to white women, which to make a long story short is not new or progressive or empowering.

I'm not too puritanical to understand the use of taboo themes in satire. This is not satire. KE's appeal seems to be the sexualisation of its deuteragonists at the expense of nuanced conversations about sex, violence, and gender. PWB was way more fixated on comedy than I think she should have been, and both creators rely most on shock value than anything else in how they construct what they believe be the most entertaining and well-structured narrative. There's little evidence that they regard the responsibility they have in portraying bisexual women in positions of power, in age gap relationships or as violent characters in a political espionage thriller. This is not satire this is a very eclectic comedy with clumsy homophobic caricatures at best.

Lastly, there are essays on why leftist fixation on "representation" is a symptom of our digital hyperreality and at best will never truly address material problems faced by real people. Big ass metas on tumblr is not necessarily activism and as I'm sure you know the revolution will not be televised. But should show runners and co be rewarded for so called groundbreaking dark comedy that in fact seems to support harmful stereotypes? And goddamnit am I tired of people unironically romanticising Villanelle and Eve. Thank you for listening to my TEDtalk.

[statusquoergo]

And we’re back! Everyone will definitely be bringing their A-game after that nice little hiatus, yeah? This episode is going to hit it out of the park for sure.

Well, maybe.

The sexism and misogyny really hit the ground running as Harvey, preparing to accompany Samantha to Pittsburgh to meet her biological father, ambles into the living room to ask Donna if she’s “sure [she’s] okay with [him] going on this trip” because “not a lot of women would want their men doing this.” Fortunately Donna is “not a lot of women,” so Harvey has permission to go hang out with other girls, and without supervision, even! What a lucky guy. Not only that, but Donna points out that while any of them would willingly accompany Samantha, Harvey is uniquely qualified to understand what she’s going through because of his long-term estrangement from his mother, which, I mean, yeah, I guess so. Except then she says she loves him and he replies “Thanks,” which is a huge waste of a perfect opportunity to say “I know,” and then, for the first time this season, he says “I love you too,” smothered under an obnoxious cough into his fist, because he’s a mature adult who’s in touch with his emotions but he’s not too mature and he’s not a girl or anything.

Back at lawyerly headquarters, Louis takes advantage of Harvey’s two-day absence by sitting in his desk chair and contemplating listening to his records, gushing that he “can finally be Harvey Specter, and no one will ever know.” Yeah, there’s definitely no way anyone who works at this firm knows that’s Harvey’s office and might walk by and ask what he’s doing in there, of course not. He then sets off the comedic half of the episode by answering Harvey's phone and sort-of-but-also-not-really-accidentally setting up a meeting with “the Ted Tucker,” who wants a meeting with Harvey and he wants it today. Fortunately for Louis, Tucker has never actually met Harvey, and…you know where this is going.

Harvey pulls up to Samantha’s place in a vintage Ford Mustang (I want to say it’s a 1967) that stirs up some Feelings for her; he offers to take it back to the car club and exchange it, but she says it’s fine because she just wants to get on the road, and here comes the sentimental half: Twenty-five years ago, twelve-year old Samantha was…in a group home? With one other kid? Unclear, but the important part is that she lived in a house with some kid named Adam and their abusive father…figure, Ron. One day Adam and Samantha accidentally broke the tail light on Ron’s brand new car, a Mustang identical to the one Harvey’s driving; Samantha took the blame even though Adam threw the ball that broke the light, and Ron beat her for it, so. Feelings.

Louis shows up at Donna’s office in a truly horrifying wig (he calls it his “Harvey wig,” if you’d like to conjure up that mental image; yeah, kind of, but more chestnut-colored) for some information that’ll let him demonstrate to Tucker that signing him would be a conflict of interest, and to her credit, Donna begs him to take the wig off, but when Louis explains that he just wants to feel like Harvey for one lunch, she agrees to help him even though it’s “a really bad idea.” I’m gonna give her partial credit on this one; good intentions, poor execution.

Except then we actually get to see Louis at the lunch and dear lord, Donna, how could you let this happen? Someone on the writing staff (Korsh) is definitely indulging in one hell of a narcissistic fantasy by way of Louis, who, doing a pretty decent imitation of Harvey’s walk, waltzes into some high-end club or resort or something, passing through an endless gauntlet of waiters and attendants who each usher him toward the inner sanctum with a Stepford smile and a solicitous “Mr. Specter,” until he ends up at a table with Tucker, who informs him that the reason they’re surrounded by a ridiculous number of trays of food is, get this: “Well, I didn’t know what you liked, so I just ordered the entire menu.”

This fucking show, I swear.

Things only go downhill from there (from my perspective, not Louis’s) as Louis boisterously recounts a number of stories from Harvey’s life, including “Life is like this, I like this,” and that time Harvey brought Rachel to pick Mike up from prison in a limo. Tucker grinds the festivities to a screeching halt when he asks if Harvey knew Mike Ross was a fraud when he hired him, but fortunately for Louis, A Few Good Men is Tucker’s favorite movie, so screaming “You can’t handle the truth!” in his face is enough to make everyone forget about that silly question and get right back to their sinful indulgences. These people all have such integrity, it’s amazing.

Turns out a traumatic childhood isn’t Samantha’s only connection to the Mustang; Eric Kaldor also used to drive one, which skeeves Harvey out until Samantha assures him that when Harvey drives it, he does “make it look cool.” This dynamic is weirding me out so much; a week ago, she fucks over Mike Ross, Harvey furiously declares that he doesn’t trust people who lie to his face, Faye (justifiably) fires her, and then suddenly, with zero transition, it’s all hands on deck to get her back at the firm, and now on top of that, Harvey's her biggest cheerleader and also road trip buddy? That whole “I don’t trust you anymore,” was that just a hissy fit or what? I don’t… I don’t know what to do with this, I don’t like it.

Oh, wait, more flashbacks: Samantha and Adam steal Ron’s car to drive off in the middle of the night. Samantha, evidently recounting this story to Harvey, explains that they were pulled over on account of the broken tail light, but she assures him that “it could’ve been worse,” being that she ended up with a new family and neither of them had to go back to their abuser, and also she doesn’t know whatever happened to Adam so I guess he might show up sometime in the next three episodes maybe. I really wish I cared more.

That sounds mean, but hear me out a minute: Samantha was introduced in the beginning of Season 8. In fact, “The Greater Good” (s08e13) gives her her very own expository sub-plot courtesy of Judy O’Brien, through whom we learn…very little about Samantha’s experience in foster care, except who Judy is and what Samantha’s relationship is to her, which doesn’t matter at all because it never comes up again. (Well, it will in a bit, but not in any really important way.) It’s basically a waste of an opportunity to tell us things about Samantha that we don’t already know because all it does is build incrementally on things that we do, but in ways that are irrelevant. All the rest of the hints the show drops throughout the season about her backstory are shadowy and vague and mainly serve to establish her as an enigmatic figure whose mysterious past I guess I’m supposed to be dying to learn about, except that right from the start, “Right-Hand Man” (s08e01) establishes that she lies about her past to suit her own interests, so from the very beginning, I’m inherently suspicious of everything she says about herself, which makes it really hard to empathize with her.

The problem with the way her past is revealed is that it’s not really a running subplot, or a continuous arc; little hints and features are dropped here and there, but only insofar as they relate to a given episode’s broader narrative (i.e., she was a Marine, which is only relevant in “Special Master” [s09e02] for that odious misrepresentation of PTSD), which makes it feel like they’re invented on the spot because hey, we don’t really know much about her, who’s to say this or that didn’t happen? If you pay close attention, you might be able to collect enough clues to piece together a complete story, but with everything else that’s going on in this show, I gotta say, I really can’t be bothered. Especially when I have no idea how much of that story is even true.

Right, so, remember how Samantha knows that Kaldor has a Mustang? Well we seem to have graduated real quick from twelve-year old flashback Samantha to twenty-seven year old flashback Samantha, who reveals that while working a case together, she and Kaldor became…involved.

Ew.

Oh but wait. Out of absolutely fucking nowhere, present day Samantha decides “it’s time [she and Harvey] talk about the elephant in the room.” Not “[her] getting fired because of [him]” (she didn’t, she got fired for fabricating evidence), but “why [she] fabricated that evidence in the first place.” Harvey points out the obvious, that he already knows she did it because she hates to lose, and she asks, if he knows that, why he got so mad at her for doing it. (Oh I don’t know, maybe because she fabricated evidence.) Answer? “Because [he] told Mike [they] wouldn’t cross any lines.” And even though their client wasn’t technically doing anything illegal, “Mike’s always on [him] about doing the right thing, and now he’s out there walking the walk, and the least [Harvey owes] him is to think about right and wrong once in awhile.” (Uh, yeah, did he miss the part in “Promises, Promises” [s08e03] where he got their landlord to pay the maintenance staff a fair wage because he felt bad for the facilities manager? And I quote: “David, all I’m asking is do the right thing.”)

Oh but then.

“You really admire him, don’t you?” “I don’t just admire him, Samantha. He went to prison for me. Talk about someone who’s got your back.”

Okay. So… Okay. Yes, that is a thing that happened. It was a very big deal. Mike and Harvey spent six whole episodes fighting over which of them was going to be the one to take the fall. Except then Season 7 happened, and Mike spent sixteen episodes becoming increasingly distant from and combative with Harvey, culminating in that disastrous farewell at the wedding that Mike didn’t even invite him to. And then “If the Shoe Fits” (s09e05) happened, wherein Mike literally started off the case by promising Harvey not to do anything that could result in either of them being disbarred and finished it by doing exactly that, wrapping up his visit by condemning Harvey for having lost himself because yes, of course, Harvey’s the one who was being a dick that whole time.

Yet apparently, even after all that, Harvey still thinks Mike walks on water. I guess that does kind of help explain his behavior and the exceedingly weird dialogue the last time Mike showed up; Harvey’s got a little hero worship going on, or at the very least, he still has an enormous blind spot where Mike is concerned. On the plus side, there’s my quota of evidence for the episode that Harvey needs to go to therapy like, yesterday.

And about that whole evidence fabrication thing, props to Samantha for admitting that if “[she] could go back and do it all over again, [she] wouldn’t.” Donna could learn a thing or two from her.

Speaking of Donna, Louis hurries in to tell her that his lunch with Tucker was “the greatest lunch of [his] life,” all “because [he’s] Harvey Specter.” But things hit a little snag when he tried to demonstrate that SLWW would have a conflict of interest representing Tucker as well as some company called Reed Communications, because Tucker waived the conflict by buying Reed Communications on the spot, and that’s not even Louis’s only problem because Reed Communications’ in-house counsel is, dun dun dun! Harold Gunderson! Who wants to set up a meeting with Harvey, who knows nothing about any of this. Louis determines that since thinking like Louis got him into this mess, thinking like Harvey is going to get him out of it, and I’m confused, wasn’t the whole point of all this for him to be Harvey? Who’s he been thinking like all day? Way to commit to the role, man, no wonder you’re not an actor.

Filler time: Ten-years-ago Samantha and Kaldor have been together for six months and it’s been “one of the best six months of [his] entire life.” (Seems to me like a weird unit to increment his life by, but hey, man, whatever floats your boat.) In the present day, Harvey suggests stopping for burgers, but Samantha wants to get to their destination before dark, so he’ll settle for some M&M’s at the gas station. Equivalent exchange for the win.

Part II

[crimethinc]

Love, Anarchy, and Drama: The Classical Anarchists’ Adventures and Misadventures in Polyamory

Like many contemporary anarchists, many anarchists of the 19th and 20th centuries maintained relationships with multiple romantic partners, or were involved with partners who did so. Just as it does today, this often precipitated gossip, heartache, jealousy, and interminable emotional processing. A complete history of anarchist polyamory drama would be nearly as ambitious as a comprehensive history of the anarchist movement itself. Here, we’ve limited ourselves to a few poignant anecdotes from the lives of a handful of classical anarchists. There is a great deal more to be told—for example, the love triangle involving Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Johann Most, or Voltairine de Cleyre’s writing about ownership and possessiveness in relationships.

Why revisit all this, you ask? Certainly not just for the salacious thrill of letting the skeletons out of the closet to dance a little on holidays. No, we return to these stories because our antecedents were just like us, flawed and fallible yet capable of greatness. They were responsible for both heroic acts and gross stupidities (let’s not forget Bakunin’s anti-Semitism). In studying their lives, we might recognize some ways to improve ourselves.

A membership card for Emile Armand’s “International Association of Combat against Jealousy and Exclusivity in Love.”

“We want freedom; we want men and women to love and unite freely for no other reason than love, without any legal, economic, or physical violence. But freedom, even though it is the only solution that we can and must offer, does not radically solve the problem, since love, to be satisfied, requires two freedoms that agree, and often they do not agree in any way; and also, the freedom to do what one wants is a phrase devoid of meaning when one does not know how to want something.”

-Errico Malatesta, “Love and Anarchy”

Mikhail and Antonia Bakunin and Carlo Gambuzzi

One of the most influential anarchists of the 19th century, Mikhail Bakunin famously asserted “I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free.” In his Revolutionary Catechism,1 he devoted a section to the abolition of compulsory relationships, marital or otherwise:

Religious and civil marriage to be replaced by free marriage. Adult men and women have the right to unite and separate as they please, nor has society the right to hinder their union or to force them to maintain it. With the abolition of the right of inheritance and the education of children assured by society, all the legal reasons for the irrevocability of marriage will disappear. The union of a man and a woman must be free, for a free choice is the indispensable condition for moral sincerity. In marriage, man and woman must enjoy absolute liberty. Neither violence nor passion nor rights surrendered in the past can justify an invasion by one of the liberty of another, and every such invasion shall be considered a crime.

There was a 24-year age difference between Mikhail’s father and mother; they had become engaged when his mother was 18 and his father was nearly 42. This was not particularly unusual in Russia at the time. Mikhail grew up surrounded by four sisters, from whom he learned a variety of intellectual pursuits and, above all, the importance of women’s autonomy and self-determination. He came of age fighting alongside them against pressure from their parents to get married to men who did not share their philosophical or artistic interests.

When Mikhail was living in exile in Siberia after being sentenced to death in three countries for participating in the revolutions of 1848 and 1849, he met Antonia Kwiatkowki, the daughter of an exiled Polish teacher. When they married, she was 18 and he was 44.

A few years later, Mikhail pulled off a daring escape from Siberia, circumnavigating the globe to arrive in Western Europe, where there was not yet a price on his head. Antonia joined him, and the two lived together in Sweden, Italy, and Switzerland.

At this point, Antonia was in her twenties, while Bakunin was in his fifties, prematurely aged by years chained up in solitary confinement. Antonia began a tempestuous relationship with one of Bakunin’s young Italian comrades. In the following letter to his Russian friend Nikolaj Ogarev, Bakunin describes the considerable challenges that ensued. His complicated feelings will be familiar to anyone who has struggled to set boundaries regarding a partner’s volatile relationship or struggled to balance the demands of two very different relationships.

Mikhail Bakunin.

December 16, 1869 Locarno, Switzerland

Antosja arrived. I went to meet her in Arona, the first Italian city at the end of Lake Maggiore, and I spent two and a half days in great anxiety, expecting her at any moment. Contrary to date on the telegram I had received from Naples, she arrived two whole days late, as a result of the storm in the Mediterranean. She traveled by sea, on account of the low price. The poor woman was quite shaken. Imagine yourself in this situation: alone at sea with an eighteen-month-old child, eight months pregnant and of an ideal disposition for seasickness. She spent days without moving on the boat until Gaeto, despite terrible sea turbulence. She arrived to me exhausted and sick. The child is also sick. I took them to Arona with great difficulty. Antosja took a little rest, the little one as well. But in four, three, or perhaps two weeks, she will deliver. You understand that in these conditions, my head is spinning.

Dear friend, I want once and for all to explain to you my relationship with Antosja and her veritable husband. I did a terribly stupid thing, even more than that, I committed a crime by marrying a young girl almost two and a half times younger than me. I could, to justify myself, invoke many extenuating circumstances, tell you that I pulled her out of a vulgar provincial dump, that if she had not married me, she would have become the wife of a monster, of a Siberian police chief. But a fact is a fact, a mistake a mistake and a crime a crime. Antosja is a kind person and a beautiful soul, I love her as much as a father can love his daughter. I managed to wrest her away from the world of trivial ideas, to help her human development and save her from many vulgar temptations and loves. But when she met true love, I did not believe myself to have the right to enter into a struggle with her, that is to say, against this love. She loved a man who is completely worthy of her, my friend and my son in social-revolutionary doctrine, Carlo Gambuzzi. Two and a half years ago, Antosja came to tell me that she loved him and I gave her my blessing, begging her to see me as a friend and remember that she had no better nor more sure friend than I.

A few months later, at the Congress of Geneva, after a long struggle not only on her part, but also on the part of Gambuzzi, a struggle in which furthermore I did not interfere in any way, that I deliberately ignored, Antosja found herself pregnant. Due to lack of confidence, she hid her pregnancy from me, she endured terrible torments, deceived everyone and, under the pretext of going on a trip, went to give birth in a village near Vevey, exposing herself, as well as the child, to great danger. Informed of this without my knowledge, Gambuzzi arrived and took the child with him to Naples. Antosja recovered; as for me, I still suspected nothing.

One year ago, in October 1868, an incident revealed everything to me. The fact that I did not learn this earlier is not the fault of Antosja but of Gambuzzi. From the beginning, she wanted to tell me everything, but he demanded of her and pleaded with her not to talk to me about anything. In this respect, as in many others, he showed himself to be below her. Raised in the bourgeois world of Italy, he still can’t free himself from the cult of propriety and from the point of honor, and often prefers small winding paths to the long straight road. I will say in his defense that the thought of aggrieving and offending me actually terrified him. He has a filial attachment for me and an undeniably warm friendship.

Anyway, having learned the essence of things, I repeated to Antosja she was entirely free and asked her to decide her own fate, without any consideration of me, in the manner that she believed best: to stay with me as a wife—a wife of course only insofar as the public is concerned—or to separate from me and live in Naples openly as the wife of Gambuzzi. She decided on the first option for the following reasons: above all, she is accustomed to me, and the idea of living apart seemed unbearable to her; second, she feared being a burden for Gambuzzi, feared to put him in a situation that he would not know how to extract himself from with honor, given his social prejudices.

So all three of us decided that everything would remain the same as before. The child would spend the winter in Naples (this decision was made in October 1868) and, in autumn, Antosja would travel to Italy, supposedly with a sick Polish friend who would “die” in the summer and entrust her son to Antosja. This fall, Antosja traveled to Naples with the child, and what happened was what was to be expected and what I had predicted: once again, she became pregnant.

She was in despair. So Gambuzzi proposed that she come to give birth in Naples and leave the new child entirely to his guardianship; renouncing him completely, she would return with me after the birth, with the son, our adopted child of the deceased Polish friend (of course a myth). Antosja rebelled against this proposal and stated categorically that for nothing in the world nor for any consideration whatsoever would she abandon her child. A fight began between her and Gambuzzi. They appealed to me as judge. I took the side of Antosja, of course, and wrote to Gambuzzi that his plan was monstrous, that a mother capable of abandoning her child simply for social considerations would be a monster in my eyes.

So Antosja addressed this entreaty to me: leave Geneva, come to Italy and recognize the two children as my own. I did not reflect on it for long and agreed. I felt obliged to accept, because I could see no other way to save Antosja; and having committed a crime against her, it was my duty to assist her. That took place in July or August of this year, precisely at the moment when I announced to you that I had to leave Geneva.

After the Congress of Basel, Antosja pressured me. I hastened to leave and, as agreed, I went down to Locarno, began looking for a home, a nursemaid, and telegraphed Antosja that she could come, that I was waiting for her. For over two weeks, I received no word of reply to my telegram, nor to letters sent after it. I realized that the struggle was continuing between them; I wrote them a synodic letter in which, while describing our mutual situation to them in its true light, I indicated two options for them and demanded that they choose one or the other, namely: either Antosja, renouncing once and for all the love of Gambuzzi and contenting herself merely with his friendship, return immediately to me with my son and my future child, or else she should remain in Naples as the wife, known to all the world, of Gambuzzi, with the two children of their relationship also recognized by him. I offered my stamp of approval for either decision, but I demanded they choose one or the other without delay and stated that I would only agree again to do the first provided that it come into effect immediately.

Antosja arrived. Gambuzzi offered to stay, but she declined the offer.

Friendly relations on my part, as well as on the part of Antosja, continue with Gambuzzi. Their romantic relationship is over. I adopted the children of Gambuzzi, without denying his incontestable right to take charge of and lead their education alongside Antosja. Life here is inexpensive. He will pay 150 francs per month into the common fund and I will do the same. We will stay together, Antosja and I, as long as the revolution hasn’t called me. Then I will belong only to the revolution and myself.

In fact, after this letter was sent, Antonia maintained a romantic relationship with Carlo Gaumbuzzi and gave birth to a third child with him. Mikhail and Antonia continued to live together, and Mikhail participated in raising all three children as if they were his own. Antonia stood by Mikhail even when political conflicts and financial mismanagement alienated him from many of his other comrades and created considerable difficulties for their household. After his death, she finally moved in with Gambuzzi, and the two had one more daughter together.

Errico Malatesta, Emilia Tronzio-Zanardelli, and Giovanni Defendi

While still a teenager, Malatesta met Mikhail Bakunin and joined him in helping to organize the First International and other early anarchist efforts, including armed uprisings in 1874 and 1877. Targeted by the Italian police forever afterwards, he was compelled to spend a great part of his life in hiding or in exile, especially in London.

Around the same time that he met Bakunin, Malatesta had begun a romantic relationship with the anarchist Emilia Tronzio-Zanardelli. Little is known about their relationship, but they likely began seeing each other as early as 1871,2 as Malatesta was involved alongside her brother in the Mazzinist student movement and then the Neapolitan section of the First International. Emilia followed her brother to London in 1879 and began working as a seamstress.

A comrade of theirs, Giovanni Defendi, had gone to France in 1871 to participate in the defense of the Paris Commune, for which he was imprisoned for eight years. After his release, in 1880, he moved to London. That year, he and Emilia announced that they were entering into a union libre:

The undersigned make it a point to announce to you that, on May 8, 1880, they will enter into a free union, in the presence of some socialist friends invited and gathered simply to receive communication.

The reasons that determined them to dispense with legal marriage, as well as religious marriage, are that they view them as bourgeois institutions created for the sole purpose of settling questions of property and inheritance, not offering any serious guarantee to proletarians of either sex, consecrating the subjugation of women, committing wills and consciences for the future, without taking into account the characters involved, and opposing the dissolubility which is the basis of any contract.

The question of children will be settled later in the manner most in accordance with justice and according to the situation that bourgeois society imposes upon them.

Fraternal greetings.

-Giovanni Defendi, Emilia Tronzio-Zanardelli

Malatesta had already been living with Emilia before this; he joined the couple at their residence in London in 1881. He lived with the Defendis for much of the next four decades. The British police, scandalized, reported that there were rumors that Malatesta was sleeping with Emilia despite her relationship with Giovanni.

Errico Malatesta.

The house and the business of the Defendi couple, where Malatesta lived, 112 High Street in Islington, was a convergence point for everyone that arrived in London. How many stormy and brotherly discussions were had in the little kitchen through the grocery store of the good Defendi family, which served as an Athenaeum!

-Luigi Fabbri’s Life of Malatesta

Emilia had six children, some of whom she may have conceived with Malatesta—including her son Enrico, born in 1883, who accompanied Malatesta when he went to Italy in 1897, and her daughter Adele, born in 1892. When Emilia fell ill in the aftermath of the First World War, Malatesta stayed by her bedside for months, nursing her until she passed away.

In contrast to the dramatic difficulties that beset Mikhail and Antonia Bakunin and Carlo Gambuzzi, the relationships of Errico Malatesta, Emilia Tronzio-Zanardelli, and Giovanni Defendi appear to have been healthy and stable, providing a solid foundation for their decades of political activity. Knowing that Mikhail Bakunin mentored the young Malatesta, we can’t help wondering if the two ever discussed affairs of the heart. Could Malatesta’s graceful conduct in relation to his partner’s marriage have been informed by advice or anecdotes from Bakunin? We know they discussed the political and martial aspects of liberation, but we know less about their discussions regarding its personal aspects, which are just as fundamental to the anarchist project.

Likewise, though Emilia Tronzio-Zanardelli was an important participant in the Italian anarchist movement in diaspora across several decades, we have little documentation with which to understand the substance of her contributions. On the basis of what we do know about her role in organizing, though, we know they were considerable.

“Let’s eliminate the exploitation of man by man, let’s fight the brutal pretention of the male who thinks he owns the female, let’s fight religious, social, and sexual prejudice. In any case, [in the anarchist future] the ones with bad luck in love will procure themselves other pleasures, since it will not be as it is today, when love and alcohol are the only consolations for the majority of humanity.”

-Errico Malatesta, “Love and Anarchy”

América Scarfó, Severino di Giovanni, and Émile Armand

If we don’t know as much as we might wish to about the perspectives of Antonia Bakunin and Emilia Tronzio-Zanardelli, we have a full record of the thoughts of América Scarfó, an Argentine anarchist who began a romantic relationship with a married man while she was still a teenager.

Born in a middle-class immigrant family, América already shared anarchist ideas with her brothers Paulino and Alejandro by the end of her adolescence. Their family rented out a room to an Italian anarchist who had fled with his wife and three children to Argentina on account of the rise of Mussolini. He and América began a vibrant intellectual exchange that blossomed into romance. But then a police raid forced him to go into hiding along with Paulino and Alejandro.

Frustrated by the interference of the state, her parents’ opposition and, worst of all, the criticism of other anarchists, América wrote the following letter across the Atlantic Ocean to Émile Armand, an interanationally known anarchist proponent of “revolutionary sexualism” and camaraderie amoureuse. Armand had revived Zo d’Axa’s individualist anarchist publication L’En-Dehors, largely as a vehicle to promote what today we might call relationship anarchy.

In sending this letter, América was publicly declaring the legitimacy of a relationship not sanctioned by the church, the state, or her parents, just as Giovanni Defendi and Emilia Tronzio-Zanardelli had done before her. But more than that, she was taking revolutionary measures on the terrain that was available to her as a young woman in Buenos Aires: challenging the norms around intimacy, gender, and affective relations in society at large, in her birth family, and in the social circles of her fellow anarchists.

Revolution is not something that the party implements in the parliament or the workers carry out in the factories—it is a project that concerns every single aspect of life, and therefore, every single person, wherever she is situated.

América Scarfó.

Buenos Aires, December 3, 1928 To comrade E. Armand

Dear Comrade,

The purpose of this letter is, first of all, to ask your advice. We have to act, in all moments of our lives, in accord with our own manner of seeing and thinking, in such a way that the reproaches and criticisms of other people find our individuality protected by the healthiest concepts of responsibility and liberty, which form a solid wall weakening their attacks. For this reason, we should act consistently with our ideas.

My case, comrade, is of the amorous order. I am a young student who believes in the new life. I believe that, thanks to our free actions, individual or collective, we can arrive at a future of love, fraternity, and equality. I desire for all just what I desire for myself: the freedom to act, to love, to think. That is, I desire anarchy for all humanity. I believe that in order to achieve this, we should make a social revolution. But I am also of the opinion that in order to arrive at this revolution, it is necessary to free ourselves from all kinds of prejudices, conventionalisms, false moralities, and absurd codes. And, while we wait for this great revolution to break out, we have to carry out this work in all the actions of our existence. And indeed, in order to make this revolution come about, we can’t just content ourselves with waiting, but need to take action in our daily lives. Wherever possible, we should act from the point of view of an anarchist, that is, of a human being.

In love, for example, we will not wait for the revolution, we will unite ourselves freely, paying no regard to the prejudices, barriers, and innumerable lies that oppose us as obstacles. I have come to know a man, a comrade of ideas. According to the laws of the bourgeoisie, he is married. He united himself with a woman as a consequence of a childish circumstance, without love. At that time, he didn’t know our ideas. However, he lived with this woman for a number of years, and they had children. He didn’t experience the satisfaction that he should have felt with a loved one. Life became tedious, the only thing that united these two beings were the children. Still an adolescent, this man came to know our ideas, and a new consciousness was born in him. He turned into a brave militant. He devoted himself to propaganda with ardor and intelligence. All the love that he hadn’t directed to a person, he offered instead to an ideal. In the home, meanwhile, life continued with its monotony relieved only by the happiness of their small children. It happened that circumstances brought us together, at first as companions of ideas. We talked, we sympathized with each other, and we learned to know each other. Thus our love was born. We believed, in the beginning, that it would be impossible. He, who had loved only in dreams, and I, making my entrance into life. Each one of us continued living between doubt and love. Destiny—or, better, love—did the rest. We opened our hearts and our love and our happiness began to intone its song, even in the middle of the struggle, the ideal, which in fact gave us an even greater impulse. And our eyes, our lips, our hearts expressed themselves in the magic conjuring of a first kiss. We idealized love, but we were carrying it into reality. Free love, that knows no barriers, nor obstacles. The creative force that transports two beings through a flowery field, carpeted with roses—and sometimes thorns—but where we find happiness always.

Is it not the case that the whole universe is converted into an Eden when two beings love each other?

América Scarfó in 1929.

His wife also—despite her relative knowledge—sympathizes with our ideas. When it came to it, she gave proofs of her contempt for the hired killers of the bourgeois order as the police began to pursue my friend. That was how the wife of my comrade and I have become friends. She is fully aware of what the man who lived at her side represents to me. The feeling of fraternal affection that existed between them permitted him to confide in her. And he gave her freedom to act as she desired, in the manner of any conscientious anarchist. Until this moment, to tell the truth, we have lived really like in a novel. Our love became every day more intense. We cannot live altogether in common, given the political situation of my friend, and the fact that I have still not finished my studies. We meet, when we can, in different places. Isn’t that perhaps the best way to sublimate love, distancing it from the preoccupations of domestic life? Although I am sure that when it is true love, the most beautiful thing is to live together.

This is what I wanted to explain. Some people here have turned into judges. And these are not to be found so much among common people but in fact among comrades of ideas who see themselves as free of prejudices but who, at bottom, are intolerant. One of these says that our love is a madness; another indicates that the wife of my friend is playing the role of “martyr,” despite the fact that she is aware of everything that concerns us, is the ruler of her own person, and enjoys her freedom. A third raises the ridiculous economic obstacle. I am independent, just as is my friend. In all probability, I will create a personal economic situation for myself that will free me from all worries in this sense.

Also, the question of the children. What do the children have to do with the feelings of our hearts? Why can’t a man who has children love? It is as if to say that the father of a family cannot work for the idea, do propaganda, etc. What makes them believe that those little beings will be forgotten because their father loves me? If the father were to forget his children, he would deserve my contempt and there would exist no more love between us.

Here, in Buenos Aires, certain comrades have a truly meager idea of free love. They imagine that it consists only in cohabiting without being legally married and, meanwhile, in their own homes they carry on practicing all the stupidities and prejudices of ignorant people. This type of union that ignores the civil registrar and the priest also exists in bourgeois society. Is that free love?

Finally, they criticize our difference in age. Just because I am 16 and my friend is 26. Some accuse me of running a commercial operation; others describe me as unwitting. Ah, these pontiffs of anarchism! Making the question of age interfere with love! As if the fact that a brain reasons is not enough for a person to be responsible for their actions! On the other hand, it is my own problem, and if the difference in age means nothing to me, why should it matter to anyone else? That which I cherish and love is youth of the spirit, which is eternal.

There are also those who treat us as degenerates or sick people and other labels of this kind. To all these I say: why? Because we live life in its true sense, because we recognize a free cult of love? Because, just like the birds that bring joy to walkways and gardens, we love without paying any attention to codes or false morals? Because we are faithful to our ideas? I disdain all those who cannot understand what it is to know how to love.

True love is pure. It is the sun whose rays stretch to those who cannot climb to the heights. Life is something we have to live freely. We accord to beauty, to the pleasures of the spirit, to love, the veneration that they deserve.

This is all, comrade. I would like to have your opinion on my case. I know very well what I am doing and I don’t need to be approved or applauded. Just that, having read many of your articles and agreeing with various points of view, it would make me content to know your opinion.

Her letter was printed in L’en dehors on January 20, 1929 under the title “An Experience.” Émile Armand printed his answer alongside it:

“Comrade: My opinion matters little in this matter you send me about what you are doing. Are you or are you not intimately in accord with your personal conception of the anarchist life? If you are, then ignore the comments and insults of others and carry on following your own path. No one has the right to judge your way of conducting yourself, even if it were the case that your friend’s wife be hostile to these relations. Every person united to an anarchist (or vice versa), knows very well that she should not exercise on him, or accept from him, domination of any kind.”

Severino di Giovanni.

The lover that the 16-year-old América Scarfó refers to in this letter was, of course, the anarchist Severino di Giovanni, Argentina’s most wanted criminal. When she sent this letter, he was living underground, accused of carrying out a string of bombings targeting the Italian Consulate, the US embassy, the Ford Motor Company, and a monument to George Washington, among other targets. By the time he was captured in January 1931—along with América and her brother Paulino—he was also accused of the most dramatic robbery in contemporary Argentine history and the shootings of various police officers.

At that point, a military coup had taken place in Argentina, Hitler was headed for power in Germany, and the whole world seemed to be sliding rapidly towards fascism. In such a context, we can understand Severino’s actions as a rational attempt to carry out much-needed revolutionary measures on the terrain that was available to him, just as he and América were doing in their romantic relationship.

When the police captured Severino, they rushed him to a doctor to treat his wounds, so as to be sure he would die at precisely the hour they decreed, after the proper show trial. The police reportedly tortured Severino, but none of the arrestees cooperated with the state by informing against their fellows. After the trial, Severino’s lawyer was arrested, dismissed from his post in the armed forces, imprisoned, and deported.

The novelist Roberto Arlt witnessed the scene of Severino’s execution:

He looks stiffly at his executors. He emanates will. Whether he suffers or not, it is a secret. But he remains like this, static, proud.

Only after the execution did they call over a blacksmith to unfasten his fetters—and another doctor, this time to make sure he was dead. Then they executed Paulino Scarfó, too, for good measure.

They had released América, deeming her unfit to stand trial on account of her age.

Severino di Giovanni under arrest.

On July 28, 1999, after 68 years, the Argentine government finally returned Severino di Giovanni’s letters to América Scarfó. América passed away on August 26, 2006 at the age of 93. Her ashes were buried in the garden beside the headquarters of the Argentine Libertarian Federation in Buenos Aires.

There are many different risks to loving fiercely and outside the prescribed lines. Perhaps the only thing worse than these terrifying risks is the deadly certainty that comes of not daring to love.

“For us, love is a passion that engenders tragedies for itself.”

-Errico Malatesta, “Love and Anarchy”

Further Reading and Viewing

Anarchist Individualism and Amorous Comradeship, Émile Armand

The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880-1917), Pietro di Paola

Anarchism and Violence: Severino di Giovanni in Argentina, 1923-1931, Osvaldo Bayer

Daiana Rosenfeld and Anibal Garisto have produced a documentary about América Scarfó’s relationship with Severino di Giovanni entitled Los ojos de América (“The Eyes of América”).

Thomas Nast cartoon attacking Victoria Woodhull, advocate of free love, member of the First International, associate of anarchists, and, incidentally, the first woman to run for president of the United States.

Bakunin’s Revolutionary Catechism is distinct from Sergey Nechayev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary, which is often mistakenly attributed to Bakunin. In fact, there were serious differences between the politics of the two Russian revolutionists, as Bakunin set forth in this letter to Nechayev. ↩

See Errico Malatesta da Mazzini a Bakunin, la sua formazione giovanile nell’ambiente napoletano (1868-1873) by Misato Toda. ↩