#whether he hated or loved or was ambivalent towards her

[fideidefenswhore]

'it is likely that the charges against her were thought to be too abhorrent and indelicate to list out in the presence of such a young man' is a line i see a lot in sections on henry fitzroy's absence from the boleyn trial(s), which is like...but it wasn't thought too 'indelicate' to order him to witness her execution?

[mackenzielovee]

parenthood part twenty: intemperance

a/n: ahhh , this is a long one! but it's a good one (hopefully). happy sunday and i hope you guys have a wonderful week ahead. reblogs are appreciated, as is feedback! thank you! xoxo

warnings: swearing, verbal arguments, complicated family dynamics, alcoholism, vomiting, mentions of pregnancy, birth control, vasectomy, allusion to smut

ambivalence masterlist , parenthood masterlist

     You’re completely still in front of the bathroom mirror as you stare at yourself, listing off the symptoms in your head and connecting the potential dots. 

The nausea. The tender breasts. The bloating. The alert on your phone telling you that your period is five days late. 

Your life plays out before your eyes as you anxiously plan out what another pregnancy means for everyone. Not just you, who already feels defeated and drained at the thought of having to go through another nine months. It also means a baby, a million sleepless nights, and another adjustment to your house. Your family. It changes everything, and it wasn’t anything you planned on. 

Rafe knocks on the bathroom door and you shove the unused pregnancy test back into your vanity, spinning around and giving him a fake smile as he enters. 

“Sorry, forgot my belt,” he tells you, looking handsome as ever as he gets ready for his boys night with Kelce and Topper. 

“You’re fine,” you promise him, “You look handsome.”

He smiles as he buckles his belt, “Thanks, baby.”

You accept his kiss when he offers it, and without another word, he escapes back out to watch the kids. You take one final look at the mirror, then at the drawer concealing your pregnancy test, and walk out behind him.     

     “I can handle it.”

It’s your fifth time saying that statement to Topper, and yet, he still seems hesitant. He clutches Eleanor tightly, as if the thought of separating from her is going to physically rip her from him. You glance over at Rafe, who shakes his head at you. 

“I know you can, I just hate leaving her,” Topper mumbles, his eyes never leaving his daughter. 

“I get that, man, but Y/N’s got this,” Rafe promises him, “A night of no spit-up is exactly what you need.”

Topper, who has spent the last two weeks moving into the guest house while also taking care of Eleanor, truly does need a night out. Kelce and Rafe volunteered the idea of drinks at the Club, and with Maddie out of town, Noah and Julian are with Maddie’s parents. You promised to watch Eleanor so Topper could go, and while he initially agreed, he seems unable to separate. 

“Alright,” Topper declares, stepping toward you, “But, don’t forget that she cries if you take away her pink giraffe. And, she gets fussy around seven, but if you give her the purple pacifier—”

“Topper,” you groan, “I have two. I know. Now, go. Have fun.”

“Fine,” he grumbles, gazing longingly at Eleanor. 

“Alright, kiddos, come give Daddy hugs,” you call over your shoulder. 

Josie hops right up and sprints over to Rafe, who lifts her up with no challenge whatsoever. 

“Wanna bring ice cream home?” Josie grins mischievously.

“Maybe,” Rafe whispers, “Only if you’re good for Mom, okay?”

“Okay, Daddy,” she nods. 

“Alright. I love you, princess.”

“Love you, too,” she replies, hugging him tightly before he sets her down. 

Connor hurries over to Rafe, who kneels and hugs him right away. You smile at the sight, loving their relationship. That smile drops when you think about whether or not adding another would be good for Connor’s sensitivity; what if he can’t understand? What if it’s too much for him, or he feels too disconnected from you or Rafe?

“Be good,” Rafe whispers to him, “Keep an eye on your sister.”

“I will,” Connor promises, “Love you.”

“I love you, too,” Rafe smiles. 

“Uncle Top, you have to give hugs and kisses, too,” Josie demands, holding her arms up in expectation of being picked up. 

“Yes ma’am,” Topper laughs, grabbing her and lifting her up. 

She squeals when he kisses her cheeks repeatedly, then squeezes her tight. Eleanor stirs in your arms, so you rock her back and forth to try and relax her. 

“Best behavior,” Josie lectures Topper.

He chuckles, “I promise, baby. Be good to Ellie, okay?”

“Okay,” she nods. 

Topper kisses Josie once more, then sets her down. Connor steps over and gives Topper a hug, and the kids follow you to the door to wave goodbye to the men. Rafe wraps a gentle arm around you on the porch, then presses his lips to your temple. 

“Call me if you need anything,” he lectures, “I’ll come right home.”

“I’ll be fine,” you promise him, “Have fun with them. Don’t worry about me.”

Rafe steps away, but shakes his head as he starts walking backward down the sidewalk, “I always worry about you, baby. Love me?”

“I love you,” you smile. 

“I love you, too.”

“I love you, three,” Topper calls, “Thanks again, Y/N.”

“Have fun,” you yell, waving as they climb into Topper’s car. 

Once the boys are gone, you corral the kids back inside. Josie, who obsesses over Eleanor, immediately wants to play, while Connor goes back to his puzzle. 

     The evening plays out as successfully as you could’ve hoped, and you’re almost sad when Josie falls asleep beside Eleanor, who is resting soundly in the pack ‘n play you’d set up just for her. 

Connor comes over and crawls up on the couch, not even asking before he sits down in your lap. You welcome it and give him a smile, watching as he returns it. 

“Mama?” he asks, his voice quiet. 

“Yeah?”

“Is Aunt Sarah coming home for Christmas?”

You comb through his hair as you stare into his deep eyes, pursing your lips as you debate how to answer his question. The truth is, you have no idea. You haven't reached out to Sarah after what she’d had to say about you last time she was home, and no part of you wants to. You just hate that it has to impact the kids. 

“I’m not sure, handsome,” you reply softly, “You miss her?”

He nods, “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, leaning down to kiss the top of his head. 

“It’s okay. At least we have baby Ellie.”

You smile, grateful for his big heart, and pull him tighter against you. It doesn’t take long for Connor to fall asleep, with you not far behind him. The worrying combined with babysitting — practicing for when you have to handle three, you try not to think — has exhausted you.

     While you’d never meant to doze off, you also never thought you’d be waking up to someone banging on the front door. Your eyes open in a panic, and you gently remove Connor from your lap before standing up. The uneven banging continues, and you know Rafe and the boys would never do that because of the kids. 

Hesitantly, you stand, hurrying to the foyer out of desperation for the sound to stop. You’re thankful Eleanor hasn’t started crying yet, but you’re sure she will if you don’t stop it. Glancing out the window, you grow frustrated when you realize that it’s Scott on your porch. He’s unbalanced, leaning on the door as he pounds on it. 

Without another second wasted, you swing open the door to stop him. He tumbles forward, having been leaning all his weight on the door, and you have to reach out and grab him so he doesn’t fall to the floor. 

“Oh, shit,” he mutters to himself, then laughs, “Whoops.”

You shut your eyes as Scott grips your hands, steadying himself before standing up straight. You can smell the alcohol on his breath, the shitty bar on his clothes, the cigarette smoke in his hair. 

“Scott—”

“Lost my keys,” he tells you, slurring his words, “Couldn’t get the door open without my keys. Why are you holding my hands?”

You frown, “You’re drunk.”

He shakes his head, but the movement causes him to feel unsteady again, and he stumbles once more. You groan as you attempt to keep him upright, ignoring him when he starts to laugh at himself again. 

“I am not,” he replies, “Just had a few. But I am not a lightweight.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” you mutter to yourself, then shake your head, “Scott, the kids are asleep.”

He chuckles, “I’m not gonna wake ‘em.”

You roll your eyes and debate what to do, trying to remember if the guest room is prepared for anyone to use. Deciding that it has to be, that you have no choice, you sigh. 

“Alright, let’s just get you upstairs,” you say, pulling him toward you. 

“No, wait,” he says, yanking his hands away from you, “Fuck, I lost my phone. I have to call her.”

You don’t bother asking who — given that you already know. You quickly figure out that Scott has done something to ruin his relationship with Mae, which has caused an apparent relapse in his drinking. 

He’d been keeping himself under control for a few months now, and you’d been proud of him. Now, he’s taking three steps back. 

“You can call her in the morning. Please, I don’t want you to wake—”

He attempts to side-step you, resulting in him stumbling, tripping over his own feet, and falling down on the floor. His hands fly out to try and brace himself, but the noise his body makes when he hits the hard wood is loud enough to wake even the best of sleepers. 

You cover your face with your hands as Eleanor starts to cry in the living room, knowing she will also awaken both Josie and Connor. 

“Shit,” Scott mumbles to himself, “You should really put a carpet here.”

He makes no motion to get up from where he lays in the middle of the foyer, and you don’t try to get him up. You take a deep breath and exhale slowly, trying to calm yourself. 

“Mommy?”

You turn around and find Josie standing in the middle of the entryway, her tired eyes moving between you and her uncle. 

“Josie! Hey, baby!” Scott cheers from the floor. 

Confused, Josie looks back up at you. When she doesn’t find any source of direction, given that you feel completely frozen, she starts over to the two of you. 

Instead of allowing her to step any closer, you move over and pick her up. Quickly, you turn her away, running a hand up and down her back to calm her. 

“Let’s go take care of baby Ellie,” you say, giving her a smile, “Will you help me?”

“Sure, Mommy,” she replies, although you don’t miss the way she looks over her shoulder to steal another glance at Scott. 

Connor is awake and standing over the pack ‘n play that Eleanor occupies when you get into the living room. You set Josie down and walk over to him, giving him a smile and a soft ‘thanks’ when he points down to the baby. 

“Is Uncle Scott okay?” Connor asks, glancing heavily toward the foyer. 

You swallow, “He’ll be just fine.”

He nods and watches as you grab Eleanor out, cradling her in your arms as you attempt to coax her back to sleep. You can hear Scott groan and yell for you from his place on the floor, but you pretend not to hear it. 

You feel too many emotions to know how to handle all of them right now. Sure, Scott didn’t know you were watching the baby tonight. And, yes, you’re glad he came to you instead of passing out on the side of the road or in an unsafe situation. But for him to come here and pound on the door, drunk out of his mind, when he knows you have children? Who are both asleep at this hour? It makes you feel angry. Then, you switch to relieved, knowing he’s safe. Then, you decide you’re anxious, because you can’t take care of four people right now. 

Your heart sinks when your mind tells you to call Rafe. You don’t want to — you want to handle it, to let him have his fun and keep Topper’s mind off of all the stress, but you know he will be sad if he comes home to you when you’re overwhelmed and upset and didn’t feel as if he would be of help.

Eleanor falls back to sleep relatively easily, which you’re thankful for. Connor sits down on the couch and Josie follows him, where she ultimately falls asleep with her head in his lap. You kiss Connor’s cheek, then grab your phone from the coffee table. It lights up right then with a new text from Rafe, one that has you letting out a breath of relief. 

How’s everything? Can’t stop thinking about you. 

You smile at the text, and for a brief moment, you want to suck it up. Then, Scott groans once again, and you drop your gaze back to the keyboard, staring at each individual letter as you prepare to let your husband down. 

Can you come home?

Your thumb hovers over the send button for what feels like forever, and the second you press it, a shot of anxiety shoots through you. Even though you know he will with no hesitation, you hate having to ask. You hate being a potential burden. 

He’s typing almost as soon as your test delivers to his screen. 

Of course, baby. Is it urgent or just miss me?

You smile despite the situation, typing back quickly. 

Not urgent but necessary. Scott showed up and woke up the kids. He’s drunk. 

Rafe’s response is quick yet again. 

Be home as soon as I can. Hang tight.

You let out a breath of relief, because you know he’s coming. Connor’s eyes are closed when you look over at him, so you feel comfortable stepping away from the kids to check on Scott. He’s sitting up now; his back is resting against the wall and his head is tipped back, like he’s prepared to sleep there. 

“Scott,” you say softly, inching toward him. 

His eyes open when he hears you, “Y/N, thank God. I’m gonna throw up.”

The mere mention of the action has your stomach turning. You swallow down the impulse, then reach for him. 

“Let’s get you to the bathroom, then,” you try.

“Can’t,” he replies, “Your house is spinning.”

He starts to slide down the wall on his right side, but you don’t try to stop him. Instead, you watch as he collapses, unable to pick himself back up. He lets out a low groan as you turn on your heel, walking into the kitchen and getting an old grocery bag from the pantry for Scott to throw up in if need be. 

Your hand meets your stomach before you leave the kitchen, and you catch yourself hoping that the pregnancy test shows a negative. Your heart sinks at the thought, at the blatant denial of wanting another child. 

With another breath — because breathing seems to be all you can do — you walk back out to Scott and toss the plastic bag in his lap. You stare at him for a moment, and just as he turns his head to the side, you check your phone to find an empty lock screen. 

The sound of Scott relieving his stomach of the alcohol he’d consumed draws you right out of your phone, just in time for you to notice that he doesn’t even bother using the bag you’d given him. 

Your hardwood floors are ruined, you think. 

“Scott—” you groan, but his sound is louder. It’s a mix between a sob and a grunt, but it all sounds sad to you. 

“Fuck,” Scott swears, “Fuckin’ Mae. Why do I have to love her?”

You don’t reply, still too upset about the floor and him, and the kids, and the potential baby growing inside of you.

Scott’s eyes follow you as you step into the living room, checking on the kids. They’re all still sound asleep, which you’re relieved for. 

“I know why,” he continues, “‘Cause she worked her magic on me. I’ll be in love with her forever. Wanna have babies with her. Y/N, should I have babies with Mae?”

You’re not sure if it’s your own anxiety projecting off of you, but when you look at your brother, and the state he’s in, you cross your arms defensively over your chest. 

“No.”

His eyebrows furrow, and the expression that crosses his face borders on anger. You simply shrug, not defending or retracting your answer. 

“Whatever,” Scott mutters, “Sorry I’m not as perfect as you.”

Your chest rises as you take in a steady, deep breath, trying your best not to react to that statement. Just as you open your mouth to speak, to try and defend yourself, you see the headlights on the car bringing your husband home as they reflect off the wall. Without a word to Scott, you walk over to the front door and open it just in time to see Rafe hopping out of his Uber. 

You step out onto the porch, then down onto the sidewalk to get to him faster. His eyes never leave you as he approaches, scanning you for any potential physical issues as he opens his arms. 

“Hey, sweetheart, you okay?” he asks you, his voice soft from the sympathy and alcohol coursing through his veins. 

Tears well up in your eyes the second his familiar scent hits your nose. Between the kids, your anxiety about being pregnant, and Scott, you feel as if the world is crashing down on you. Before you can suck it up, and instead, blaming it on hormones, you accidentally let out a sob into his chest. 

Rafe’s grip tightens around you and he squeezes — not too tight, but tight enough that you feel him trying to put the broken pieces back together. 

“Talk to me,” he whispers into your hair, “I’m right here. I’m sorry I left. Tell me what’s going on in your head.”

“It’s too much, Rafe,” you mumble, trying your best to calm yourself. 

“Okay, hey,” he coaxes you, pulling back and tipping your chin up so you’re looking directly at him, “Look at me. I’ll fix all of it. Just tell me the first thing you want me to handle.”

You pout, because of course he wants to swoop in and save the day. He always does, even if he doesn’t know it. 

“No, I’m sorry,” you say, wiping your eyes, “I didn’t mean to—”

“Don’t you dare apologize to me,” he says, earning a small smile from you. 

You nod in understanding, then sigh, “Scott’s in the middle of our foyer on the floor. He won’t get up, and he was just being kind of rude to me. He woke up all three kids and everything.”

Rafe listens, nodding his head and waiting for you to finish telling him about it. Then, he wraps your hand in his and nods his head toward the house. 

“I’ll handle it. Come on.”

You follow him up the stairs to the porch, a certain peacefulness washing over you just due to Rafe’s presence. 

“We just need to get him upstairs,” you say quietly.

Rafe doesn’t respond to you; instead, he guides you inside the house and releases you so you can close the front door. You watch as he walks over to Scott, who is still laying on his side and pressed against the wall. Rafe glances at the now stained hardwood floor and turns his nose up, but doesn’t say anything. 

He doesn’t bother to hesitate for even one second. He touches his shoe to Scott’s chest and nudges him — not roughly, but not exactly gentle, either. 

“Get up, Scott,” Rafe says loudly, “Don’t make me force you up.”

Scott groans, his eyes glued shut, “Go away.”

Rafe chuckles, but it sounds sarcastic and unforgiving. You draw back, knowing how this will end. Without word or warning, Rafe kneels down in front of Scott. Your brother’s eyes are still closed, so he doesn’t see how Rafe reaches around him and then grabs a fistful of the back collar of Scott’s tee shirt. 

Rafe pulls him upright, eliciting a gasp from Scott’s lips. You watch Scott struggle to get his bearings, but you say nothing. 

“Dude, what the fuck?” Scott exclaims, trying to brush Rafe off. 

“Yeah, what the fuck,” Rafe repeats, “My kids are in this house. My wife is in this house. You think you can pass out on the floor in front of them?”

“Get off me,” Scott demands, but his words are still slurred and his actions are weighed down by the alcohol in his veins. 

“No.”

“Cameron, I’m gonna—” Scott warns, covering his mouth with his hand. 

Rafe rolls his eyes and starts forward, dragging Scott along toward the bathroom. He yanks him inside and closes the door, leaving you out in the living room with the three kids. Not sure of what else you should do, you quickly clean up Scott’s mess, then pick up Connor from his place on the couch and carry him upstairs to his bed. You come back down and do the same with Josie. Both of them are too far asleep to wake up as you do this, which you’re thankful for. 

On your way back downstairs from Josie’s room, you find Rafe pulling Scott up the stairs. Scott refuses to lift his feet, reacting only when Rafe tugs on his shirt again. 

“Come on, Scott, stop fucking around,” Rafe demands. 

“I can’t—” Scott slurs, seeming that after he’s spilled his guts in your downstairs bathroom, he’s too tired to even climb the stairs, “Fuck— I can’t.”

“I’m not carrying you, so you don’t have a choice,” Rafe snaps back. 

“Rafe,” you say quietly, hurrying down the stairs to meet them both. 

Scott looks up at you when you set your hand on his arm, and you can see relief through his tired, drunk eyes. 

“Y/N,” Scott whispers, immediately growing emotional, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m fucked up, I’m so fucked up—”

“Stop,” you demand quietly, letting him fall onto you in a hug, “It’s okay. Let’s just get you upstairs and you can sleep it off. Work with me, okay?”

He nods against you, and with the help of both you and Rafe, Scott makes it all the way up the stairs. You both guide him into the guest room, where he immediately collapses onto the bed without pulling the sheets back. 

Rafe swears under his breath and shakes his head as he stares, while you move forward and untie Scott’s boots. When he starts to snore, you move his head onto the pillow and grab a spare blanket from the closet, then lay it over him. 

“Come on, sweetheart,” Rafe coaxes you gently. 

You stare at your brother for another few seconds, desperately wishing you could change things for him. You wonder what this means — will he apologize and then go back to the same behavior? Is he sick? Would you be a bitch to bring up AA meetings and programs that will help him stay sober? Does he even want to stay sober?

You follow Rafe down the stairs silently. He crosses the living room and checks on Eleanor, who is still sleeping soundly. 

“Topper’s gonna have to crash on the couch,” Rafe says to you, “He and Kelce stayed behind. I didn’t want them to see Scott like that.”

“Thank you,” you whisper. 

His eyes linger on you for far too long, watching you squirm under his gaze. He steps toward you and opens his arms, watching as you practically collapse into him.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

You nod, “Yeah.”

“You sure?”

Choosing not to answer that, you opt to change the subject instead. 

“I’m sorry about tonight. I just—”

“Don’t,” he says gently, “I would’ve been overwhelmed, too.”

“Thank you,” you repeat, needing for him to affirm that you’d done the right thing. 

He squeezes you tighter and lets you cuddle into him for as long as you need to, not making any attempt to move or anything. 

The room falls silent as he holds you. Your mind buzzes with questions, plans, and doubts as you press yourself further into Rafe, as if he can fix this, too. You wonder if you should sneak off and take the test now, or if you should wait until the morning. Above all else, you want to tell him. You want him to know, and you want him to be there when you find out. 

“Rafe,” you say, feeling him shift as he looks down at you. 

“Yeah?”

You swallow, “I have to tell you something.”

He nods his head as you pull back, looking up into his eyes. He doesn’t seem drunk in any capacity. Not even tipsy. You briefly wonder how much he drank tonight, if anything at all. 

“Okay, what is it?”

You take a deep breath, the words leaving your lips right as you hear Topper at the front door, sticking his key in the lock and twisting it open. 

“I think I might be pregnant.”

Rafe’s expression falls to shock as he stares at you, as if assessing your seriousness. His jaw is slack and his eyes are wide, but Topper enters the house and walks through the foyer before either of you can say another word. 

“Hey,” Topper says casually, “How’d she do?”

You turn away from Rafe and give Topper a smile, watching as he leans over the pack ‘n play and smiles at Eleanor. 

“She did great,” you promise him, “Um, Scott showed and kinda woke her up, but I got back to sleep pretty easily. He’s crashing upstairs, so the couch is all yours.”

He nods, “Sounds good to me. Thanks for letting us sleep here.”

“Yeah, of course—”

You stop speaking when Rafe’s hands fall from your waist, and he excuses himself to your bedroom without a word to either of you. Topper shrugs at the action and walks over to the couch, where he pulls out his phone as he gets comfortable. 

You give Eleanor another quick check before whispering a ‘goodnight’ to Topper. Your anxiousness skyrockets as you walk toward your bedroom, not knowing how Rafe will react. You’re sure he’ll make you take the test, but you’re not sure what he wants the result to be. 

When you enter your bedroom, Rafe is seated on the edge of your bed. His lips are parted and his eyes are glazed over as he comprehends what you’ve told him. He doesn’t look up when you enter; he doesn’t even seem to notice until you’re standing in front of him. 

“Did you—” he starts, then stops and looks up at you, “Did you take a test?”

His voice is weak, hoarse, and you’re not used to it. He watches as you shake your head. 

“No. I was going to, but I got nervous.”

He nods in understanding, but doesn’t speak. You’re now standing directly in front of him, but he hasn’t reached for you the way he always does. 

You’re not sure what to say, and apparently, he isn’t either. His eyes are still wide, and you can see his mind going a mile a minute trying to make it all make sense. Desperate for him to vocalize those thoughts, you speak.

“Rafe,” you say softly, “I need you to say something.”

He sucks in a deep breath through his nose, then exhales through his lips. You chew on your bottom lip roughly, but relax a bit when he reaches forward and places his hands on your hips. 

“Do you have a test here?”

You stare at him for a moment, having expected a little more comfort from him. 

“Yes.”

He nods, “A few of them? Sometimes they can be wrong.”

You furrow your brows, unsure of what that means he’s thinking. You swallow and shake your head, struggling to find your voice. 

“I have three. One of them is old, though.”

He nods again, but he seems deep in thought. As if at his mercy, you stand and wait for a response, letting out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding when he squeezes your hip. 

“Okay,” he says slowly, “Let’s go take one.”

He moves to stand, to drop his hands from your hips, but you stop him quickly. 

“Wait,” you blurt, setting your hands on his shoulders, “I just— I’m freaked out, Rafe. You’re not saying anything.”

“What do you want me to say?”

You shake your head, “I don’t know. Something.”

“Okay,” he repeats, squeezing your hip again, “How about this? I love you. And I would like to know if we’re having another baby before I start worrying about if this is what you want, because you look like you’d rather set a match to our house than be pregnant right now.”

You attempt to draw back at his words, but his grip on your hips keeps you completely in place. You stare, wondering what exactly it is about your demeanor that is telling him how you feel without having to verbalize it. 

“I’m scared,” you admit quietly, “We haven’t— I mean, you and me, we didn’t say—”

“I know, baby,” he nods, “Let’s get our answer before we talk about anything else, okay?”

As he takes in your concerned expression, his hands trail up your body slowly. He cups your cheeks in his palms and gives you a reassuring smile — one that seems to calm the deepest anxieties roaming around your chest. 

“Okay,” you agree. 

Rafe nods and leans forward, pressing a firm kiss to your forehead before he takes your hands and leads you to the bathroom. He watches patiently and silently as you retrieve one of the pregnancy tests from the drawer of your vanity, then gives you an encouraging nod and smile before you step over to the toilet. 

He’s seated on the floor of your bathroom when you return with the test, which you promptly set down on the counter. His back is leaned up against the bathtub and he’s anxiously picking at his nails, but when he sees you, he stops and gives you a sympathetic, closed-mouth smile. 

“You don’t want to be pregnant, do you?” he asks, phrasing it in a way that tells you he already knows the answer. 

With a sigh, you sit down on the floor beside him, not surprised at all when he pulls your legs across his lap. 

“Am I horrible if I say I don’t?” you ask quietly. 

He shakes his head, “No. I don’t think that’s horrible at all. In fact, I think that’s very reasonable.”

“What do you want?”

“Easy,” he replies, his hands stroking up and down your bare legs, “I want whatever is best for this family. I want dinners at the table and scrounging up cash to pay babysitters and an empty fridge telling me that my kids’ stomachs are full. I’d do the whole baby thing again in a heartbeat, if it’s what you want. But, I know it’s not, and that’s completely okay.”

“Rafe,” you pout, but he shakes his head. 

“You’re the one who does all the work, so you’re the one who makes the call. Whatever it says, we have options.”

You smile through your emotions and tug him closer, resting your head on his shoulder as he moves to kiss the top of your head. Although you still feel anxious about the result of the test, you no longer feel as if the task is insurmountable. 

“Can you look?” you whisper to him after a few minutes, nodding to the test sitting on the counter. 

“Yeah,” he replies, “Ready?”

You nod, but don’t speak. He gives your leg a gentle squeeze, silently telling you to pull them back so he can stand. You do, and you watch as he takes a deep breath before stepping over and picking up the test. 

He stares at it for a long moment, too long, and you swear you can feel your heart racing in your chest. 

He clears his throat, and his voice is hoarse as he says, “It’s negative.”

You let out a breath — one that holds relief, guilt, and sadness — and finally let the tears fall from your eyes. Rafe stands still, clutching the test, and watches as you brush tears from your cheeks. 

“I should take another,” you say, “They’re not always accurate.”

“Yeah,” he agrees quietly. 

He hands you another test and watches as you escape, letting his eyes fall back onto the negative test. When you emerge a second time, Rafe’s now seated on the floor with the test in his hand, staring at it with zero expression. 

“Are you—” you start, setting the new test down to wait on it, “Are you okay?”

He nods, but his expression doesn’t change, “Yeah.”

Your heart sinks into your stomach as you watch him, unable to read his mind or know exactly what he’s thinking. 

“Are you mad that it’s negative?” you ask weakly. 

His laugh is incredulous, and before you even realize he’s crying, Rafe angrily swipes tears from his cheeks, as if he can't believe they’re there in the first place. 

“No,” he answers, “I’m not mad about anything. I just— I was thinking.”

You sit down beside him once more, but you don’t move to touch him. You let him shift his gaze from the test to you, where you smile sadly. 

“About a third kid?”

“About our two kids,” he corrects, “About our family. About the way we work around each other. Maybe I’m selfish, but I don’t want that to change. And, yeah, I’d welcome a third baby, but I’m also content with what we have. You know what I mean?”

You extend a hand, then another, and soon, you’re pulling your husband into your arms. He comes to you without hesitation; wrapping his arms around you as he brings his head to your chest. 

“Of course I do, Rafe,” you whisper to him, “You’re not selfish. Wanting what’s best for our children is not selfish.”

“You, too,” he says instantly, pulling back and looking up at you, “I want what’s best for you, too, sweetheart.”

You nod and lean down, pressing your lips to his without a second thought. You kiss him for a long minute, then pull back and look up at the counter. 

“My turn to look,” you say, earning a small laugh from him. 

Standing from his lap, you feel calmer as you approach the second test. Knowing that if you hesitate, you’ll stop, you pick it right up and look at it before you can talk yourself out of it. 

You stare at the word for a second too long, letting the adrenaline settle and the ringing in your ears come to a halt before turning back to Rafe. 

“Negative,” you say, letting out a last breath of relief. 

Rafe nods and gives you a small smile, one that tells you that he’s okay, he’s just sorting through things in his mind, and he just needs a moment. 

You toss the test into the trash can under your vanity, and when Rafe waves you over to sit with him one last time, you don’t even think about denying him. 

“So,” he says with a puff of his cheeks once you’re settled in his lap, “What should we do from here?”

You furrow your brows, “What do you mean?”

Rafe lets out a small chuckle and pulls you closer, taking his time raking over your features before he bothers to explain. 

“Well, our current method of birth control just scared the living shit out of you,” he explains, “So, what do you think we should do so that this doesn’t happen again?”

Your current method of birth control — or lack thereof — has always left a little room for error, but you know Rafe’s right. You don’t want to go on hoping that nothing will happen, because the both of you know all too well that things do, indeed, happen. 

“I don’t know,” you shrug, “I could make an appointment and talk about birth control.”

He frowns, “Those hormones mess you up.”

Shrugging again, you try to play it off, “Yeah, but only for a little while. My body will adjust.”

“Or,” he says softly, so softly that he earns your eyes on his, “I could just get a vasectomy.”

Your eyes widen immediately, “A vasectomy?”

“Yeah,” he laughs, “It would take care of everything. You don’t have to pump yourself full of hormones, I don’t have to wear a condom, and we don’t have to worry about being pregnant again. And, it’s reversible if you change your mind.”

“If I change my— Rafe.”

He laughs again, and it’s like the anxiety from the past few hours just melts away. There’s no pregnancy tests, no drunk brother upstairs, no single parent with a baby on your couch. It suddenly feels like just the two of you, in love after years, and tangled together on the floor of your bathroom. 

“I’m serious,” he presses, “It would solve all our problems, and you wouldn’t have to lift a finger.”

“But—” you stumble over your words, trying your best to digest his explanation and come up with a flaw, “Doesn’t that, like, hurt?”

He grins, “I don’t know, sweetheart. I can find out for you.”

“Rafe,” you repeat, eyes still wide. 

He chuckles and kisses your forehead, watching as your mind works in overdrive to figure this all out. 

“Just think about it. I think it’s our best option, but I can do some research on birth control if you’d prefer that route.”

You smile, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he replies, giving you a smile back, “Let’s take a shower and go to bed, okay?”

“Okay.”

Rafe offers his hands to you and helps you stand before moving to stand himself, then peels off his shirt. You do the same, and both of you toss the dirty clothes into your hamper at the same time. 

“I’ve gotta rest before I deal with your brother in the morning,” he mutters, “How do you wanna move forward with that?”

“Josie saw him, Rafe. I could see how confused she was. He can’t—” you shake your head, then look back up to him, “Not around our children.”

He nods in understanding, “I agree. I’ll handle it.”

You pout at him, staring as he unbuckles his belt and starts to remove his pants. He catches your eye and raises a brow, now standing in just his boxers. 

“You don’t have to handle everything, Mister I’ll get a vasectomy.”

Rafe laughs, “I know I don’t. We’ll do it together. Now, take your shorts off.”

You grin and do as you’re told, and when your shorts rest in the hamper with Rafe’s pants, he crosses the bathroom and wraps an arm around your waist, pulling you into him. You giggle and shake your head, watching as he silently questions what’s going on in your mind. 

“A vasectomy,” you repeat, still trying to wrap your head around it. 

He rolls his eyes playfully, “I’m gonna start the water.”

“Have you been thinking about doing that?” you question as he turns on the water. 

He smirks when he turns back to face you, and you already know what he’s going to insinuate. 

“There’s only one thing I’m thinking about doing right now,” he grins, “One person. So, could you get your mind off of the vasectomy and come take a shower with your husband?”

“I suppose,” you tease him, “But, what about—”

He smirks, “I’ll get a condom.”

You giggle and toss your underwear and bra into the hamper, then hurry into the shower. Rafe huffs audibly when he sees your undergarments in the laundry, having not stolen his glance like usual because he was busy riling through your vanity drawers to find a condom. 

“Tease,” he mutters, tossing his boxers right beside your panties before he hops in the shower with you. 

     You wake in the morning with Rafe’s chest pressed against your bare back, his hands tangled in your own, and a smile on your face that you swear you must’ve woken up with. Sunlight streams in through your white curtains, and for a moment, you can’t believe that you both managed to sleep in. That is, until you remember that Topper stayed over, and you’re sure he’s playing babysitter to the kids. 

“Rafe,” you whisper, bringing your tangled hands up to your lips and kissing his knuckles. 

“Hmm,” he hums sleepily. 

You smile, “Good morning.”

Although you can’t see him, you can hear the grin on his face. 

“Good morning, baby,” he rasps, “Might have to hire Top full time if it means I get mornings in bed with you again.”

You laugh, turning around in his arms and facing him. His blue eyes peel open slowly, and the grin on his face only grows when you return his blissful expression. 

“We should probably get out there,” you whisper. 

He groans, “But it’s so warm and quiet in here.”

As if to prove his point, he tugs you closer under your shared comforter, then begins to press kisses down your exposed neck and collarbone. 

“I know, but we have to be responsible parents,” you lecture him. 

He smirks against your skin, “Do we?”

“Yes.”

Rafe laughs and pulls back, nodding you in for a kiss without a word. You comply, and soon, you feel lost in him. 

It isn’t until his hands start to wander, until you feel as if you really could stay in bed with him all day if he asked you to, that you pull back. 

“Alright, fine,” he sighs, “Up you go, baby.”

You smile and sit up, stretching out while Rafe stands from the bed and crosses to the dresser. He slides a pair of boxers on, then grabs one of his shirts and tosses it over to you. Without even being asked, he then steps to your side of the dresser and tosses you a pair of shorts, already knowing you won’t want Scott and Topper to see you in his boxers. 

You dress and climb out of bed, following Rafe into the bathroom. The two of you brush your teeth while he pinches your hips, loving how you squeal and playfully swat him away. You make Rafe wait for you to use the restroom, and he cracks up when you cheer that you did, in fact, get your period overnight. 

The two of you are still giggling like teenagers as you walk out to the living room, finding Topper, Josie, Connor, and Eleanor together on the couch. Topper holds Eleanor in one arm and has the other around Josie, who is cuddled into his side. Connor sits beside his sister, and they all seem content watching TV.

“Morning,” Topper greets.

Rafe chuckles, “Morning, Top.”

“Hi, Daddy,” Josie chirps, “Hi, Mama.”

“Morning, princess,” Rafe replies, raising a brow when she makes no attempt to move from her current seat, “Can I get a hug?”

“I’m comfy,” she answers, cuddling deeper into Topper’s side and earning a laugh from her uncle. 

Connor chuckles at his sister, then gets up off the couch and walks over to you and Rafe. He watches his dad kneel before giving him a hug, then doing the same to you. 

“Hey, Mama,” Connor greets you. 

“Hi, baby.” you smile, “How’d you sleep?”

“Good. Think we could make pancakes for breakfast?”

“We definitely can,” you nod, “Has anyone seen Scott yet?”

Josie looks over, her eyes containing the same hesitance they held last night when she saw him on the floor of the foyer. 

“Is Uncle Scott gonna be weird again?” she asks. 

Rafe’s jaw clenches, and you don’t miss the sight out of the corner of your eye. You plaster a smile on and hold out your hand, signaling for Josie to come with you and Connor. 

“Let’s go start pancakes,” you say, “Top, wanna help?”

“Yeah, of course. Come on, Jo. You can teach Ellie how you like to decorate them.”

Josie smiles and nods happily, following Topper into the kitchen while you guide Connor in. Rafe, looking at you and communicating wordlessly, nods his head toward the stairs, telling you he’s going to deal with Scott. 

Climbing the stairs, Rafe doesn’t even have to think about what he’s going to say. The expression on his daughter's face, coupled with the fact that his wife felt the need to call him home last night, fuels him enough. 

When he reaches the door of his guest room, in his house, he knocks exactly one second before he opens the door. As he expected, Scott is sprawled across the mattress in only his underwear, having apparently stripped in the middle of the night. Rafe shakes his head before he pushes Scott, trying to wake him. 

“Scott, get up,” Rafe demands. 

Scott doesn’t budge. Rafe pushes on him again, watching as he shifts, turning completely on his side. 

With another push, Scott grunts, but Rafe doesn’t give up in the slightest. 

“Scott,” Rafe repeats, “Wake the fuck up.”

“Fuck off, Cameron,” Scott groans, burying his head in his pillow, “Just let me sleep it off.”

“No,” Rafe replies, “I’m not playing around. Sit up.”

“Go away.”

“Sit up.”

“Dude—”

“Sit up, Scott. Now.”

Scott grunts and groans, but when he turns to lay on his back, Rafe relaxes slightly. His hands meet his hips as Scott pushes himself up, resting his bare back against the headboard. 

“Fine,” he snaps, “What the fuck do you want?”

“What do I want?” Rafe questions, laughing incredulously, “I want you to get up and get out of my house. I’m serious. Get up, get dressed, and go. Don’t say anything to the kids, because they’ll ask you to stay. Get out.”

“Y/N’s letting you kick me out?” Scott questions in disbelief. 

“Letting me?” Rafe repeats him again, “Scott, my fucking children saw you drunk off your ass, practically passed out on the floor of our home. You threw up on my fucking floor. My wife had to call me to come home because she was taking care of your ass on top of three children. You crossed a line. You don’t even seem sorry about it.”

“Of course I’m sorry about it, you asshole,” Scott fires back, “I would never want the kids to see me like that. It won’t happen again.”

“You’ve already used that line on me,” Rafe snaps, “You said after Josie’s birthday party that it would never happen again. I don’t want this behavior around my kids. So, get up, and go get some help.”

“What, you want me to check myself into rehab?” Scott chuckles, but Rafe’s expression remains unchanged. 

“If it means you won’t be harming my family with your drinking, yes,” Rafe nods once. 

“Dude, be serious.”

“I am,” Rafe presses, “You were doing so well, man. But this little episode just shows everyone that you can’t control yourself. You’re impulsive and reckless and—”

“An alcoholic,” Scott finishes, narrowing his eyes at Rafe, “I’m not going to rehab.”

Rafe bends down and picks Scott’s jeans off the floor. Without missing a beat, he shrugs and tosses the pants at him, then takes a step toward the door. 

“Then you’re not watching my kids,” Rafe replies, “Now, go.”

Wide eyed, Scott opens his mouth to speak, but Rafe turns and exits the room. He makes it to the top of the stairs before Scott comes bursting out of the guest room with his jeans on, unbuttoned at the top and sagging on his hips because he doesn’t have his belt on. 

“Whoa, Rafe, you can’t just take the kids away from me,” Scott protests, stopping Rafe in his tracks. 

“My kids?” Rafe raises a brow. 

“I love them,” Scott replies, his voice heavy with emotion, “I love those kids and I would never do anything to jeopardize my relationship with them. You should fucking know that by now.”

“They both saw you, Scott!” Rafe exclaims, “They’re too young to understand it. Love has nothing to do with this—”

“Knock it off, Cameron. You’re taking all of Sarah’s bullshit out on me. You can’t keep banning people from seeing the kids—”

“They’re our kids!”

“Guys!” you yell from the bottom of the stairs, giving them wide, angry eyes, “Enough.”

“Y/N,” Scott says, sidestepping Rafe and hurrying down the stairs, a pleading look in his eye, “Please don’t take the kids from me. I messed up, okay, I know, but I’ll go to the AA meetings. I’ll get sober and everything. Just— please.”

You frown, looking between Scott and Rafe in an attempt to figure out how you should respond. Ultimately, you nod to your brother, but raise a pointed finger. 

“Do not make me regret this,” you whisper. 

He nods, “No, I promise.”

Before any of the three of you can say another word, Topper’s voice is heard in the doorway of the kitchen. 

“No, Jo, come on, let’s stay—”

Josie comes running around the corner and through the doorway, where she comes face to face with Scott. For a second, neither of them say anything. Then, Scott sinks to his knees and swallows roughly. 

“Josie, I am so, so sorry—”

She cuts him off by running over to him and diving into his arms, where Scott doesn’t waste a single second pulling her close. You watch as he embraces her, even noticing the tears that have welled up in his eyes.

“Uncle Top says you’re sick,” Josie tells him, “Want me to make you some soup?”

Scott laughs, but his emotion is evident, “No, thank you, lovebug. I am sick, but I’m gonna get better. For you and Connor.”

Josie pulls back and looks him in the eye, clearly taking his words to heart. You silently pray that he doesn’t let her down. 

“Promise?”

“I promise,” Scott replies.

Connor appears in the doorway then, standing behind Topper as you’re sure he was instructed to do when Topper told the kids to stay in the kitchen and let the three of you talk. Scott catches his eye and waves him over, watching as Connor hesitantly listens. 

“Hey, buddy,” Scott greets him, pulling him into a hug, “I’m sorry about last night. I made a mistake. Do you think you can forgive me?”

“Yeah,” Connor replies with a nod. 

Scott smiles, “Thank you. I love both of you so much.”

“Love you, too,” Connor answers. 

“Love you, Uncle Scott,” Josie chirps.

Scott hugs both kids at once, seemingly reluctant to pull back and let them go. 

Rafe, who still seems reluctant, keeps his arms crossed over his chest as he watches the interaction. 

Josie, always the first to bounce back, gives Scott a big smile as she starts to jump up and down. 

“Can you stay for breakfast? I can make you pancakes!” she offers. 

Scott chuckles and looks back at Rafe, who had previously told him that he couldn’t stay to eat. Rafe gives Scott one single head nod, which Scott takes as a win. 

“I’d love to stay for breakfast, lovebug. We can put a thousand chocolate chips in our pancakes, how’s that sound?”

“Amazing!” Josie exclaims, “Let’s go!”

“Alright,” Scott grins, “Come on, Little Cam.”

He scoops up Josie and then reaches out for Connor’s hand, taking both kids into the kitchen. Topper looks between you and Rafe, all three of you communicating wordlessly. Then, he does the one thing that he knows will make you feel better. 

“Wanna hold Ellie for a bit, Cameron?”

Rafe breaks immediately and smiles, “Sure.”

Cradling baby Ellie, Rafe nods his head for you to follow him into the kitchen, where both of you watch your kids cook breakfast with their uncles. Scott makes coffee and passes it out, then wastes no time conspiring with Josie to smuggle more chocolate chips into the pancake batter every time Topper and Connor turn their backs. 

Rafe turns to you after a few minutes, keeping his eyes down. 

“Do you think I was too hard on him?”

You glance over at Scott, who is too busy spraying whipped cream into Josie’s mouth to care about your conversation. 

“Whatever you said, it worked,” you admit, “He seemed serious.”

“I think that’s part of the disease,” Rafe says quietly, his frown evident, “He thinks he can get himself under control. Until something stressful comes up, and he turns back to it.”

You nod in understanding and look at your brother once more, wishing that smile could stay on his face forever. 

“Day by day,” you sigh, “Let’s just take it easy for now. We’ll handle things as they come.”

“Alright. I’m fine with that. But, he slips up again, I’m gonna get your dad involved,” Rafe presses, watching you nod, “And I won’t apologize for it, either.”

“That’s fair.”

Rafe leans over and kisses your temple, then offers you a turn holding Eleanor. As you take her into your arms, you smile, then kiss her tiny forehead. She grins, and the sight makes you smile. 

“Vasectomy, huh?” Rafe whispers, teasing you. 

“Ha ha,” you reply. 

He laughs and pulls you into his chest, careful of the baby. When breakfast is served, complete with more chocolate chips and whipped cream than you could ever imagine, you just smile, because even though you know things are messy, there’s still so much love at your dining room table. That’s all you could have ever hoped for, and you smile because you get to do it all with him.

*i no longer use a tag list. follow @mackupdates for updates! <3 thank you for reading!

[demonskiss]

how would they all react if u were super caring and nice in private but in public acted like u didnt know them/hated them? :3

-🐈

keeping your head afloat

cw: manipulation, threats of rumor spreading

emory fully understands your harshness in front of the other victims. you must’ve seen their one victim, who was so overly friendly with your captor to the point where the others look at him with nothing but disdain, fear too. it’s no wonder you want to be distant from them, it’s for your own safety of course. but a part of them wonders, dreams about the day you would rise and acknowledge yourself as the surgeon’s precious lamb. there’s nothing they could do but watch, and emory will make sure you’re treated as nothing but a step higher than all of the other patients.

blythe cares less than most people. as a college student, you’d be fairly busy dealing with your assignments from your professors, and so is he! the absolute dear is so accommodating to your schedule, but there’s only one issue. he plans his visits to parties conveniently around the same time they’d know you’re free. it’s such a shame isn’t it? now you’ll have to attend these college parties on your own spare time, whether you like it or not you’re coming with him! and there’s no denying your love towards them, after all, they’ve already told the campus you’re madly in love with them, and no one would dare disbelieve them.

violetta is frankly offended, she’s popular for a reason, beloved by the entire school! how dare you ignore her! she’ll mention your name in front of everyone she talks to, so at some point you’ll be forced to confront with your classmates and their confusion. isn’t she such a delight to be around? why would you ignore her or be so cold to her? violetta will still be kind around you in private, and will always bring up your passivity to her around other people. it doesn’t matter if you’re nice to her when alone, she has a lot of say in the school’s reputation after all!

ambrose is quite ambivalent to the situation. of course, you would look like a mad man if you were to tell your guests that you have a ghost living in your house, well, his house technically, especially since they can’t see him. but!! how dare you brush off his ways of getting your attention as the mere wind? it gets on his nerves, especially when you’ll make eye contact, nervously laughing at his presence. the faint shadow sandwiched between the window and curtain bringing a shiver down your spine. shoo that guest away, he wants your attention, now!

they’re all attention whores sorry

[dealbrekker]

For the Album thingy, Mirotic ^^

Y'all I hissed when I saw this ask 😭

I pulled the album up this morning to remind myself what was on it and was like, oh, just all the songs I had on repeat in college cool cool cool.

I'm breaking this into 2 lists. My instinctive choices, and then the revised one after I listened to the album completely on the way home today. Fun fact, it's exactly the length of my commute excluding the second play of Mirotic. Also, I did the regular album version, not the special edition.

Initial ranking without a playthrough (admittedly I didn't remember what some of them actually sounded like because it's been a hot minute):

1. Mirotic

2. Love In the Ice

3. Wrong Number

4. You're My Melody

5. Hey! Don't Bring Me Down

6. Picture of You

7. Are You a Good Girl

8. Crazy Love

9. Rainbow

10. Paradise

11. Forgotten Season

12. Flower Lady

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

After playing, and with explanation:

1. Mirotic (this one I may as well technically exclude from the list because it's its own entity). I know this song is scoffed at lately even by Cassies, but idgaf. It was my first music video of theirs, it's what made me fall in love with them, it was my first look at Yunho and the ruination for my standard for men everywhere. Mirotic means too much to me to ever hate.

2. Love in the Ice. She's my favorite tvxq ballad. She's everything. I slowed down to the speed limit near the end of my drive today so she could finish, that's how much I love her. She never fails to make me sob, and today was no exception. Probably the only tvxq song I don't really want to hear a re-recorded duo version of, and that is saying a ton.

3. Wrong Number: classic, iconic, sexy. Suits!!!!!!! I don't have the Yunho focus mv version saved on a hard drive what are you talking about????.....

4. You're My Melody: this one and Picture of You were in a fight before I even listened to the album, but this one did indeed hit me a little bit more. I think I just connect it more to college days.

5. Hey! Don't Bring Me Down: more iconic moves. I seem to recall camo pants and black tank tops. It was always on my work out playlists back in the day. A jam.

6. Picture of You: I think Hey! beat it out only because I lean more toward upbeat intense songs in general. Still a lovely, nostalgic song

7. Are You a Good Girl: the last one I was right about in my instinct choices. Similar to Hey! in that I want to jam. Diggidumdum.

8. Paradise: This one started and I was like OH RIGHT YESSS and immediately pushed it up in my brain. I think the top 7 are just so intrinsically a part of my kpop awakening and college experience, that that's why the last 5 are where they are. So many tvxq songs are basically written on my bones, though.

9. Forgotten Season: when this one started I was like hmmmm I kind of remember it? But I'm ambivalent. And then I was like, oh okay. Jae solo. And then as usually happens when I listen to Jaejoong sing, he hit a note that made me go OH MY GOD FINNNNEEEE 😭😭😭 and rank it higher. Still one of my fave voices in all of kpop.

10. Flower Lady: I remembered this one better than I thought I would. Very pretty and sweet.

11. Crazy Love: I heard this one for the first time IN AGES the other day, so I thought it would be higher out of nostalgia. But it's just okay for an upbeat song.

12. Rainbow: no shade, bb. I'm a firm believer that tvxq, whether as 5 or 2, don't have a bad song to their name. But this one isn't one of my faves. Pretty standard filler imo.

There it is. The ranking. It HURT but also I'm kind of cool with my instinctive choices being pretty accurate. It's a king of albums situation, and I love it so.

[katnissdoesnotfollowback]

Do you think hijacked Peeta fell out of love with Katniss? Or did he hate her/was afraid of her but still loved her? Is post hijacked Peeta the same Peeta or a new person altogether? Thank you :)

Alright *cracks knuckles* I’ve had this ask for… a little over two weeks according to the time stamp and I’ll confess it’s because I’m not an expert on personality or psychology or any of those things so this is more philosophy based maybe? I could just be pulling it out of my ass, but here are my thoughts. First! A visual aid!

I would categorize Peeta’s feelings for Katniss after the hijacking as a form of ambivalence. He feels a strong hatred and rage towards her which we see manifested in the cruelty of some of the things he says to her, after he’s supposedly started to recover. Things such as “you’re not particularly big or pretty,” which acts a rather personal attack. Or bringing up the fact that “a lot of things should count for something that don’t seem to,” playing on what he seems to instinctively understand… that there’s was a relationship of some form of give and take, but he’s not sure anymore what the give was on her side. In reconstructing his memories of her, she doesn’t come out looking very good. In fact when you strip down to her actions, and remove her inner thoughts, her emotions, Katniss looks like she used him, and played on his feelings for her to keep herself and a few others alive. But that doesn’t seem to erase his strong attraction to her. And I don’t mean a sexual attraction, necessarily. He was still, even after the hijacking, feeling a strong emotional pull towards her. We can see that in the way he almost seems to resent his obsession with her and everyone else’s preoccupation in their relationship post hijacking. Example: the cafeteria scene where he acts like a jealous brat but with painful accuracy. Or the scene when he says it must have been horrible for her going back and forth between wanting to kill him and needing him alive. Those feel like the lashing out words of someone whose been hurt. Badly, and wants the person who hurt them to hurt just as much. Well he’s not in a position at the time to do anything to Snow, so Katniss gets the brunt of his pain and rage.

I wouldn’t call ambivalence a form of love. But I also don’t think that the form of love he and Katniss share in Catching Fire is necessarily one that can withstand rebellion, war, life’s general tendency to shit on people who are already being oppressed… not without some form of growing and maturation on the part of both parties and the relationship itself. I’m not saying that the hijacking was necessary for them to fall in love post MJ, but rather that what they had between them in CF did need to undergo some alterations in order to survive. I do think they could’ve done it, although I don’t think it would’ve been pretty and smooth or perfect, but relationships rarely are. The real question is whether or not their worth the effort. Basically, I’m saying that yes, I think the hijacking altered his feelings for her enough to no longer call it “love” at least not a healthy one… and it changed how they needed to grow to love one another post MJ.

As for the second part of your question, I personally am of the opinion that our personalities are a fluid entity. They can be altered or influenced by an event we experience, even more so if that event is traumatic. Fear being the most difficult emotion to root out and alter, it would have the greatest impact on who we are. BUT just because we change after something happens to us, that doesn’t make us an entirely different person, to my way of thinking. We’re not exactly the same person at twenty that we are ten. Not the same at forty as we were at twenty. And some of that is maturing, growing older, but some of it is influenced by what happens to us, but that doesn’t mean everything about us changes after we’re in say… a terrible accident that makes us act differently in certain situations than we did before.

Identity and image of self are one of the big themes in thg. Katniss goes into the arena with what she thinks is a solid image of who she is and how she fits in the world. She emerges from the arena feeling like a different person but much of what she went in there with remains intact. We see the same thing happen after the Quarter Quell arena. There are slight personality shifts in her even as much of who she is remains.

The hijacking, however, is a sudden and violent alteration, but even then not everything is destroyed, and many of the traits we see Peeta exhibit in the later chapters of Mockingjay, the things that Johanna refers to when she calls him the Mutt version of himself, existed already. He was, when you strip it down to base descriptors, manipulative, insecure, jealous, and capable of violent outbursts before the hijacking. We tend to gloss over those things because of his motives for much of it seem to justify his actions to us — he manipulates a Capitol audience to sway their favor to benefit himself and Katniss and then to give them a glimpse of how awful the Games are and what they destroy, he is insecure because of a lifetime of verbal abuse, he is jealous because he’s a kid whose crush seems to be closer to and to like someone more than him and a lot of us can identify with that feeling from our youths, and also… he smacks a fragile object across a room and shatters it in Catching Fire. He kills Brutus.

He. Kills. Brutus. Don’t underestimate someone who can do that as being a sweet pastry puff. That puff has got some glass hidden in the dough.

My point is that yes, Peeta chooses and tries to be a kind, compassionate, and generous person for the most part. Sometimes to the point of self-sacrificing. But those are not his only personality traits. That’s just what Johanna and Finnick and most of Panem saw, and what Katniss chose to focus on when talking about him. So I don’t think the hijacking changed who he was completely. I think it caused a suppression of the better parts of him and an amplification of the darker parts of him out of a combination of trauma and then an emotional form of self-defense as he recovered. But I think he could’ve eventually been more visibly all those things — bitter, jealous, cruel, manipulative — without the hijacking, given enough shit being piled on him over time.

But even with the hijacking, he still does reach a point where he doesn’t want that to be who he is. Some people think we’re more what our choices and actions are rather than we are what happens to us, and I’m one of those people. So Peeta choosing to fight his way back from the hijacking, and Katniss choosing to help with that fight, says something about who they are and how much of ourselves can be altered and we still be ourselves. Long ramble shortened: yes he’d be different after the hijacking but I don’t think that automatically means he’s a completely different person, not when some of those traits were already there, lurking and waiting to be exploited.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: I enjoyed reading your posts about Napoleon’s death and it’s quite timely given its the 200th anniversary of his death this year in May. I was wondering, because you know a lot about military history (your served right? That’s cool to fly combat helicopters) and you live in France but aren’t French, what your take was on Napoleon and how do the French view him? Do they hail him as a hero or do they like others see him like a Hitler or a Stalin? Do you see him as a hero or a villain of history?

5 May 1821 was a memorable date because Napoleon, one of the most iconic figures in world history, died while in bitter exile on a remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Napoleon Bonaparte, as you know rose from obscure soldier to a kind of new Caesar, and yet he remains a uniquely controversial figure to this day especially in France. You raise interesting questions about Napoleon and his legacy. If I may reframe your questions in another way. Should we think of him as a flawed but essentially heroic visionary who changed Europe for the better? Or was he simply a military dictator, whose cult of personality and lust for power set a template for the likes of Hitler? 

However one chooses to answer this question can we just - to get this out of the way - simply and definitively say that Napoleon was not Hitler. Not even close. No offence intended to you but this is just dumb ahistorical thinking and it’s a lazy lie. This comparison was made by some in the horrid aftermath of the Second World War but only held little currency for only a short time thereafter. Obviously that view didn’t exist before Hitler in the 19th Century and these days I don’t know any serious historian who takes that comparison seriously.

I confess I don’t have a definitive answer if he was a hero or a villain one way or the other because Napoleon has really left a very complicated legacy. It really depends on where you’re coming from.

As a staunch Brit I do take pride in Britain’s victorious war against Napoleonic France - and in a good natured way rubbing it in the noses of French friends at every opportunity I get because it’s in our cultural DNA and it’s bloody good fun (why else would we make Waterloo train station the London terminus of the Eurostar international rail service from its opening in 1994? Or why hang a huge gilded portrait of the Duke of Wellington as the first thing that greets any visitor to the residence of the British ambassador at the British Embassy?). On a personal level I take special pride in knowing my family ancestors did their bit on the battlefield to fight against Napoleon during those tumultuous times. However, as an ex-combat veteran who studied Napoleonic warfare with fan girl enthusiasm, I have huge respect for Napoleon as a brilliant military commander. And to makes things more weird, as a Francophile resident of who loves living and working in France (and my partner is French) I have a grudging but growing regard for Napoleon’s political and cultural legacy, especially when I consider the current dross of political mediocrity on both the political left and the right. So for me it’s a complicated issue how I feel about Napoleon, the man, the soldier, and the political leader.

If it’s not so straightforward for me to answer the for/against Napoleon question then it It’s especially true for the French, who even after 200 years, still have fiercely divided opinions about Napoleon and his legacy - but intriguingly, not always in clear cut ways.

I only have to think about my French neighbours in my apartment building to see how divisive Napoleon the man and his legacy is. Over the past year or so of the Covid lockdown we’ve all gotten to know each other better and we help each other. Over the Covid year we’ve gathered in the inner courtyard for a buffet and just lifted each other spirits up.

One of my neighbours, a crusty old ex-general in the army who has an enviable collection of military history books that I steal, liberate, borrow, often discuss military figures in history like Napoleon over our regular games of chess and a glass of wine. He is from very old aristocracy of the ancien regime and whose family suffered at the hands of ‘madame guillotine’ during the French Revolution. They lost everything. He has mixed emotions about Napoleon himself as an old fashioned monarchist. As a military man he naturally admires the man and the military genius but he despises the secularisation that the French Revolution ushered in as well as the rise of the haute bourgeois as middle managers and bureaucrats by the displacement of the aristocracy.

Another retired widowed neighbour I am close to, and with whom I cook with often and discuss art, is an active arts patron and ex-art gallery owner from a very wealthy family that came from the new Napoleonic aristocracy - ie the aristocracy of the Napoleonic era that Napoleon put in place - but she is dismissive of such titles and baubles. She’s a staunch Republican but is happy to concede she is grateful for Napoleon in bringing order out of chaos. She recognises her own ambivalence when she says she dislikes him for reintroducing slavery in the French colonies but also praises him for firmly supporting Paris’s famed Comédie-Française of which she was a past patron.

Another French neighbour, a senior civil servant in the Elysée, is quite dismissive of Napoleon as a war monger but is grudgingly grateful for civil institutions and schools that Napoleon established and which remain in place today.

My other neighbours - whether they be French families or foreign expats like myself - have similarly divisive and complicated attitudes towards Napoleon.

In 2010 an opinion poll in France asked who was the most important man in French history. Napoleon came second, behind General Charles de Gaulle, who led France from exile during the German occupation in World War II and served as a postwar president.

The split in French opinion is closely mirrored in political circles. The divide is generally down political party lines. On the left, there's the 'black legend' of Bonaparte as an ogre. On the right, there is the 'golden legend' of a strong leader who created durable institutions.

Jacques-Olivier Boudon, a history professor at Paris-Sorbonne University and president of the Napoléon Institute, once explained at a talk I attended that French public opinion has always remained deeply divided over Napoleon, with, on the one hand, those who admire the great man, the conqueror, the military leader and, on the other, those who see him as a bloodthirsty tyrant, the gravedigger of the revolution. Politicians in France, Boudon observed, rarely refer to Napoleon for fear of being accused of authoritarian temptations, or not being good Republicans.

On the left-wing of French politics, former prime minister Lionel Jospin penned a controversial best selling book entitled “the Napoleonic Evil” in which he accused the emperor of “perverting the ideas of the Revolution” and imposing “a form of extreme domination”, “despotism” and “a police state” on the French people. He wrote Napoleon was "an obvious failure" - bad for France and the rest of Europe. When he was booted out into final exile, France was isolated, beaten, occupied, dominated, hated and smaller than before. What's more, Napoleon smothered the forces of emancipation awakened by the French and American revolutions and enabled the survival and restoration of monarchies. Some of the legacies with which Napoleon is credited, including the Civil Code, the comprehensive legal system replacing a hodgepodge of feudal laws, were proposed during the revolution, Jospin argued, though he acknowledges that Napoleon actually delivered them, but up to a point, "He guaranteed some principles of the revolution and, at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it," For instance, Napoleon reintroduced slavery in French colonies, revived a system that allowed the rich to dodge conscription in the military and did nothing to advance gender equality.

At the other end of the spectrum have been former right-wing prime minister Dominique de Villepin, an aristocrat who was once fancied as a future President, a passionate collector of Napoleonic memorabilia, and author of several works on the subject. As a Napoleonic enthusiast he tells a different story. Napoleon was a saviour of France. If there had been no Napoleon, the Republic would not have survived. Advocates like de Villepin point to Napoleon’s undoubted achievements: the Civil Code, the Council of State, the Bank of France, the National Audit office, a centralised and coherent administrative system, lycées, universities, centres of advanced learning known as école normale, chambers of commerce, the metric system, and an honours system based on merit (which France has to this day). He restored the Catholic faith as the state faith but allowed for the freedom of religion for other faiths including Protestantism and Judaism. These were ambitions unachieved during the chaos of the revolution. As it is, these Napoleonic institutions continue to function and underpin French society. Indeed, many were copied in countries conquered by Napoleon, such as Italy, Germany and Poland, and laid the foundations for the modern state.

Back in 2014, French politicians and institutions in particular were nervous in marking the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's exile. My neighbours and other French friends remember that the commemorations centred around the Chateau de Fontainebleau, the traditional home of the kings of France and was the scene where Napoleon said farewell to the Old Guard in the "White Horse Courtyard" (la cour du Cheval Blanc) at the Palace of Fontainebleau. (The courtyard has since been renamed the "Courtyard of Goodbyes".) By all accounts the occasion was very moving. The 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau stripped Napoleon of his powers (but not his title as Emperor of the French) and sent him into exile on Elba. The cost of the Fontainebleau "farewell" and scores of related events over those three weekends was shouldered not by the central government in Paris but by the local château, a historic monument and UNESCO World Heritage site, and the town of Fontainebleau.

While the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution that toppled the monarchy and delivered thousands to death by guillotine was officially celebrated in 1989, Napoleonic anniversaries are neither officially marked nor celebrated. For example, over a decade ago, the president and prime minister - at the time, Jacques Chirac and Dominque de Villepin - boycotted a ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon's greatest military victory. Both men were known admirers of Napoleon and yet political calculation and optics (as media spin doctors say) stopped them from fully honouring Napoleon’s crowning military glory.

Optics is everything. The division of opinion in France is perhaps best reflected in the fact that, in a city not shy of naming squares and streets after historical figures, there is not a single “Boulevard Napoleon” or “Place Napoleon” in Paris. On the streets of Paris, there are just two statues of Napoleon. One stands beneath the clock tower at Les Invalides (a military hospital), the other atop a column in the Place Vendôme. Napoleon's red marble tomb, in a crypt under the Invalides dome, is magnificent, perhaps because his remains were interred there during France's Second Empire, when his nephew, Napoleon III, was on the throne.

There are no squares, nor places, nor boulevards named for Napoleon but as far as I know there is one narrow street, the rue Bonaparte, running from the Luxembourg Gardens to the River Seine in the old Latin Quarter. And, that, too, is thanks to Napoleon III. For many, and I include myself, it’s a poor return by the city to the man who commissioned some of its most famous monuments, including the Arc de Triomphe and the Pont des Arts over the River Seine.

It's almost as if Napoleon Bonaparte is not part of the national story.

How Napoleon fits into that national story is something historians, French and non-French, have been grappling with ever since Napoleon died. The plain fact is Napoleon divides historians, what precisely he represents is deeply ambiguous and his political character is the subject of heated controversy. It’s hard for historians to sift through archival documents to make informed judgements and still struggle to separate the man from the myth.

One proof of this myth is in his immortality. After Hitler’s death, there was mostly an embarrassed silence; after Stalin’s, little but denunciation. But when Napoleon died on St Helena in 1821, much of Europe and the Americas could not help thinking of itself as a post-Napoleonic generation. His presence haunts the pages of Stendhal and Alfred de Vigny. In a striking and prescient phrase, Chateaubriand prophesied the “despotism of his memory”, a despotism of the fantastical that in many ways made Romanticism possible and that continues to this day.

The raw material for the future Napoleon myth was provided by one of his St Helena confidants, the Comte de las Cases, whose account of conversations with the great man came out shortly after his death and ran in repeated editions throughout the century. De las Cases somehow metamorphosed the erstwhile dictator into a herald of liberty, the emperor into a slayer of dynasties rather than the founder of his own. To the “great man” school of history Napoleon was grist to their mill, and his meteoric rise redefined the meaning of heroism in the modern world.

The Marxists, for all their dislike of great men, grappled endlessly with the meaning of the 18th Brumaire; indeed one of France’s most eminent Marxist historians, George Lefebvre, wrote what arguably remains the finest of all biographies of him.

It was on this already vast Napoleon literature, a rich terrain for the scholar of ideas, that the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl was lecturing in 1940 when he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald. There he composed what became one of the classics of historiography, a seminal book entitled Napoleon: For and Against, which charted how generations of intellectuals had happily served up one Napoleon after another. Like those poor souls who crowded the lunatic asylums of mid-19th century France convinced that they were Napoleon, generations of historians and novelists simply could not get him out of their head.

The debate runs on today no less intensely than in the past. Post-Second World War Marxists would argue that he was not, in fact, revolutionary at all. Eric Hobsbawm, a notable British Marxist historian, argued that ‘Most-perhaps all- of his ideas were anticipated by the Revolution’ and that Napoleon’s sole legacy was to twist the ideals of the French Revolution, and make them ‘more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian’.

This contrasts deeply with the view William Doyle holds of Napoleon. Doyle described Bonaparte as ‘the Revolution incarnate’ and saw Bonaparte’s humbling of Europe’s other powers, the ‘Ancien Regimes’, as a necessary precondition for the birth of the modern world. Whatever one thinks of Napoleon’s character, his sharp intellect is difficult to deny. Even Paul Schroeder, one of Napoleon’s most scathing critics, who condemned his conduct of foreign policy as a ‘criminal enterprise’ never denied Napoleon’s intellect. Schroder concluded that Bonaparte ‘had an extraordinary capacity for planning, decision making, memory, work, mastery of detail and leadership’.  The question of whether Napoleon used his genius for the betterment or the detriment of the world, is the heart of the debate which surrounds him.

France's foremost Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard, put forward the thesis that Bonaparte was the architect of modern France. "And I would say also pâtissier [a cake and pastry maker] because of the administrative millefeuille that we inherited." Oddly enough, in North America the multilayered mille-feuille cake is called ‘a napoleon.’ Tulard’s works are essential reading of how French historians have come to tackle the question of Napoleon’s legacy. He takes the view that if Napoleon had not crushed a Royalist rebellion and seized power in 1799, the French monarchy and feudalism would have returned, Tulard has written. "Like Cincinnatus in ancient Rome, Napoleon wanted a dictatorship of public salvation. He gets all the power, and, when the project is finished, he returns to his plough." In the event, the old order was never restored in France. When Louis XVIII became emperor in 1814, he served as a constitutional monarch.

In England, until recently the views on Napoleon have traditionally less charitable and more cynical. Professor Christopher Clark, the notable Cambridge University European historian, has written. "Napoleon was not a French patriot - he was first a Corsican and later an imperial figure, a journey in which he bypassed any deep affiliation with the French nation," Clark believed Napoleon’s relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent.

Did he stabilise the revolutionary state or shut it down mercilessly? Clark believes Napoleon seems to have done both. Napoleon rejected democracy, he suffocated the representative dimension of politics, and he created a culture of courtly display. A month before crowning himself emperor, Napoleon sought approval for establishing an empire from the French in a plebiscite; 3,572,329 voted in favour, 2,567 against. If that landslide resembles an election in North Korea, well, this was no secret ballot. Each ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was recorded, along with the name and address of the voter. Evidently, an overwhelming majority knew which side their baguette was buttered on.

His extravagant coronation in Notre Dame in December 1804 cost 8.5 million francs (€6.5 million or $8.5 million in today's money). He made his brothers, sisters and stepchildren kings, queens, princes and princesses and created a Napoleonic aristocracy numbering 3,500. By any measure, it was a bizarre progression for someone often described as ‘a child of the Revolution.’ By crowning himself emperor, the genuine European kings who surrounded him were not convinced. Always a warrior first, he tried to represent himself as a Caesar, and he wears a Roman toga on the bas-reliefs in his tomb. His coronation crown, a laurel wreath made of gold, sent the same message. His icon, the eagle, was also borrowed from Rome. But Caesar's legitimacy depended on military victories. Ultimately, Napoleon suffered too many defeats.

These days Napoleon the man and his times remain very much in fashion and we are living through something of a new golden age of Napoleonic literature. Those historians who over the past decade or so have had fun denouncing him as the first totalitarian dictator seem to have it all wrong: no angel, to be sure, he ended up doing far more at far less cost than any modern despot. In his widely praised 2014 biography, Napoleon the Great, Andrew Roberts writes: “The ideas that underpin our modern world - meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on - were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman empire.”

Roberts partly bases his historical judgement on newly released historical documents about Napoleon that were only available in the past decade and has proved to be a boon for all Napoleonic scholars. Newly released 33,000 letters Napoleon wrote that still survive are now used extensively to illustrate the astonishing capacity that Napoleon had for compartmentalising his mind - he laid down the rules for a girls’ boarding school on the eve of the battle of Borodino, for example, and the regulations for Paris’s Comédie-Française while camped in the Kremlin. They also show Napoleon’s extraordinary capacity for micromanaging his empire: he would write to the prefect of Genoa telling him not to allow his mistress into his box at the theatre, and to a corporal of the 13th Line regiment warning him not to drink so much.

For me to have my own perspective on Napoleon is tough. The problem is that nothing with Napoleon is simple, and almost every aspect of his personality is a maddening paradox. He was a military genius who led disastrous campaigns. He was a liberal progressive who reinstated slavery in the French colonies. And take the French Revolution, which came just before Napoleon’s rise to power, his relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent. Did he stabilise it or shut it down? I agree with those British and French historians who now believe Napoleon seems to have done both.

On the one hand, Napoleon did bring order to a nation that had been drenched in blood in the years after the Revolution. The French people had endured the crackdown known as the 'Reign of Terror', which saw so many marched to the guillotine, as well as political instability, corruption, riots and general violence. Napoleon’s iron will managed to calm the chaos. But he also rubbished some of the core principles of the Revolution. A nation which had boldly brought down the monarchy had to watch as Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, with more power and pageantry than Louis XVI ever had. He also installed his relatives as royals across Europe, creating a new aristocracy. In the words of French politician and author Lionel Jospin, 'He guaranteed some principles of the Revolution and at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it.'

He also had a feared henchman in the form of Joseph Fouché, who ran a secret police network which instilled dread in the population. Napoleon’s spies were everywhere, stifling political opposition. Dozens of newspapers were suppressed or shut down. Books had to be submitted for approval to the Commission of Revision, which sounds like something straight out of George Orwell. Some would argue Hitler and Stalin followed this playbook perfectly. But here come the contradictions. Napoleon also championed education for all, founding a network of schools. He championed the rights of the Jews. In the territories conquered by Napoleon, laws which kept Jews cooped up in ghettos were abolished. 'I will never accept any proposals that will obligate the Jewish people to leave France,' he once said, 'because to me the Jews are the same as any other citizen in our country.'

He also, crucially, developed the Napoleonic Code, a set of laws which replaced the messy, outdated feudal laws that had been used before. The Napoleonic Code clearly laid out civil laws and due processes, establishing a society based on merit and hard work, rather than privilege. It was rolled out far beyond France, and indisputably helped to modernise Europe. While it certainly had its flaws – women were ignored by its reforms, and were essentially regarded as the property of men – the Napoleonic Code is often brandished as the key evidence for Napoleon’s progressive credentials. In the words of historian Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon the Great, 'the ideas that underpin our modern world… were championed by Napoleon'.

What about Napoleon’s battlefield exploits? If anything earns comparisons with Hitler, it’s Bonaparte’s apparent appetite for conquest. His forces tore down republics across Europe, and plundered works of art, much like the Nazis would later do. A rampant imperialist, Napoleon gleefully grabbed some of the greatest masterpieces of the Renaissance, and allegedly boasted, 'the whole of Rome is in Paris.'

Napoleon has long enjoyed a stellar reputation as a field commander – his capacities as a military strategist, his ability to read a battle, the painstaking detail with which he made sure that he cold muster a larger force than his adversary or took maximum advantage of the lie of the land – these are stuff of the military legend that has built up around him. It is not without its critics, of course, especially among those who have worked intensively on the later imperial campaigns, in the Peninsula, in Russia, or in the final days of the Empire at Waterloo.

Doubts about his judgment, and allegations of rashness, have been raised in the context of some of his victories, too, most notably, perhaps, at Marengo. But overall his reputation remains largely intact, and his military campaigns have been taught in the curricula of military academies from Saint-Cyr to Sandhurst, alongside such great tacticians as Alexander the Great and Hannibal.

Historians may query his own immodest opinion that his presence on the battlefield was worth an extra forty thousand men to his cause, but it is clear that when he was not present (as he was not for most of the campaign in Spain) the French were wont to struggle. Napoleon understood the value of speed and surprise, but also of structures and loyalties. He reformed the army by introducing the corps system, and he understood military aspirations, rewarding his men with medals and honours; all of which helped ensure that he commanded exceptional levels of personal loyalty from his troops.

Yet, I do find it hard to side with the more staunch defenders of Napoleon who say his reputation as a war monger is to some extent due to British propaganda at the time. They will point out that the Napoleonic Wars, far from being Napoleon’s fault, were just a continuation of previous conflicts that arose thanks to the French Revolution. Napoleon, according to this analysis, inherited a messy situation, and his only real crime was to be very good at defeating enemies on the battlefield. I think that is really pushing things too far. I mean deciding to invade Spain and then Russia were his decisions to invade and conquer.

He was, by any measure, a genius of war. Even his nemesis the Duke of Wellington, when asked who the greatest general of his time was, replied: 'In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.'

I will qualify all this and agree that Napoleon’s Russian campaign has been rightly held up as a fatal folly which killed so many of his men, but this blunder – epic as it was – should not be compared to Hitler’s wars of evil aggression. Most historians will agree that comparing the two men is horribly flattering to Hitler - a man fuelled by visceral, genocidal hate - and demeaning to Napoleon, who was a product of Enlightenment thinking and left a legacy that in many ways improved Europe.

Napoleon was, of course, no libertarian, and no pluralist. He would tolerate no opposition to his rule, and though it was politicians and civilians who imposed his reforms, the army was never far behind. But comparisons with twentieth-century dictators are well wide of the mark. While he insisted on obedience from those he administered, his ideology was based not on division or hatred, but on administrative efficiency and submission to the law. And the state he believed in remained stubbornly secular.

In Catholic southern Europe, of course, that was not an approach with which it was easy to acquiesce; and disorder, insurgency and partisan attacks can all be counted among the results. But these were principles on which the Emperor would not and could not give ground. If he had beliefs they were not religious or spiritual beliefs, but the secular creed of a man who never forgot that he owed both his military career and his meteoric political rise to the French Revolution, and who never quite abandoned, amidst the monarchical symbolism and the court pomp of the Empire, the republican dreams of his youth. When he claimed, somewhat ambiguously, after the coup of 18 Brumaire that `the Revolution was over’, he almost certainly meant that the principles of 1789 had at last been consummated, and that the continuous cycle of violence of the 1790s could therefore come to an end.

When the Empire was declared in 1804, the wording, again, might seem curious, the French being informed that the `Republic would henceforth be ruled by an Emperor’. Napoleon might be a dictator, but a part at least of him remained a son of the Enlightenment.

The arguments over Napoleon’s status will continue - and that in itself is a testament to the power of one of the most complex figures ever to straddle the world’s stage.

Will the fascination with Napoleon continue for another 200 years?

In France, at least, enthusiasm looks set to diminish. Napoleon and his exploits are scarcely mentioned in French schools anymore. Stéphane Guégan, curator of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which, among other First Empire artworks, houses a plaster model of Napoleon dressed as a Roman emperor astride a horse, has described France's fascination with him as ‘a national illness.’ He believes that the people who met him were fascinated by his charm. And today, even the most hostile to Napoleon also face this charm. So there is a difficulty to apprehend the duality of this character. As he wrote, “He was born from the revolution, he extended and finished it, and after 1804 he turns into a despot, a dictator.”

In France, Guégan aptly observes, there is a kind of nostalgia, not for dictatorship but for strong leaders. "Our age is suffering a lack of imagination and political utopia,"

Here I think Guégan is onto something. Napoleon’s stock has always risen or fallen according to the vicissitudes of world events and fortunes of France itself.

In the past, history was the study of great men and women. Today the focus of teaching is on trends, issues and movements. France in 1800 is no longer about Louis XVI and Napoleon Bonaparte. It's about the industrial revolution. Man does not make history. History makes men. Or does it? The study of history makes a mug out of those with such simple ideological driven conceits.

For two hundred years on, the French still cannot agree on whether Napoleon was a hero or a villain as he has swung like a pendulum according to the gravitational pull of historical events and forces.

The question I keep asking of myself and also to French friends with whom I discuss such things is what kind of Napoleon does our generation need?

Thanks for your question.

[sullustangin]

The Obi-Wan recap

Spoilers ahoy for the Obi-Wan mini-series.

After I watched the first two episodes, I expressed the concern that the show writers were potentially making Reva the crappy fan fic version of Mace Windu: angry black character that’s unnecessary cruel.  I worried that the Sith were doing a DS 5: Stupid Evil run, when Reva fragged the Grand Inquisitor.

Sometimes, you just need to shut up and watch.

So I did.

Moses Ingram gives Reva Sevander a beautifully tragic turn.  She has played Lady MacDuff, character who feels that her husband has abandoned his family for the sake of power and thus has left them vulnerable.  Indeed, Macbeth orders the death of Macduff’s family, and thus the Lady meets her fate just off-stage.   

As Reva, Ingram plays someone who has lost everything and everyone, yet she manifests the main message of the Star Wars series: hope.  It’s always been hope.  Therefore, the character of Reva undermines the tropes of tragic women such as the Greek Hecuba and Medea, who upon losing their beloved, they kill to serve that same pain to their male oppressors (in the case of Hecuba, she kills the children of her son’s murderer; Medea kills her own children after her husband Jason betrays and abandons both her and the children on several levels).  Lady MacDuff is killed in the act of trying to save her children.

But Reva doesn’t die.  She does not kill. 

Because that would be unsatisfying.  It is unclear as to whether Reva realizes Vader is the father of the boy on Tatooine or if he’s just another Force Sensitive Obi-Wan is protecting.  If she has figured it out, then killing Luke is pointless because Obi-Wan is hiding the boy from his father; Vader won’t hurt if she kills the boy.  If Luke is just some Force-Sensitive kid that Obi-Wan is watching over, then the person being hurt is Obi-Wan. 

Reva’s feelings toward Obi-Wan are complicated and, I think, ambivalent.  She plans to use him to lure Vader and kill him.  I do not know if she ever thought what she wanted to do with him after Vader was dead. Yes, she has anger toward him as Anakin’s master, which is only magnified by his continued affection for him -- or at least the memory of him.  But is it enough to make her want to kill him?  Vader’s death was probably Reva’s event horizon: she could see no further than that point.  She would have had her revenge.  And then what?  She has a Jedi hostage.  Does she kill him?  Rise through the ranks of the Inquisition with this prize?  Does it attract Palpatine’s attention, now that Vader is dead?  All of this is unknown and hypothetical.

When we leave Reva at the end of the series, there is the question : And now what?  She has not become the thing she hates.  At the same time, she doesn’t have a clear path forward in a post-Jedi galaxy -- especially not after being left for dead by the Empire.  She is, as Obi-Wan says, free.  She confronted Vader and lost; she confronted herself and won when she showed the mercy he did not. 

I can’t wait to see Moses Ingram in Star Wars again.  In her last moments on screen, she really did convey herself as someone in her late teens and early 20s; remember that Reva was a youngling 10 years prior, so she cannot be much older than 20 now.  Throughout the series, when she is the Third Sister, she projects almost an indeterminate age, a combination of energy and calculation... but in her final scenes, we see just how young and lost this character actually is, and it is beautiful. 

~~

I sat on my feels for Tala Durith for a little bit, because I wanted to see how “we originally conceived this as a romance, but we decided not to pursue it” panned out.  Indira Varma has said she played Tala as if she was in love with Obi-Wan.  In her performance, she doesn’t play with infatuation -- she does play love, and that love is of a grown woman.  It’s not necessarily a romantic ‘in love’ that’s played here, which I liked.  She knows and sees everything that this man represents.  At the same time, she sees how haunted he is and how painfully mortal he is.  He is unavailable to her.  She loves the man, not the legend.  Tala knows herself and the limits of this fragile galaxy.  It’s a very good, mature take, and how I wish something more like this (not exactly like this, it’s a different dynamic, but that depth and dimension) had manifested in the Anakin/Padme romantic tragedy.  I’d probably enjoy for more than “Across the Stars,” if that was the case. 

I enjoyed so thoroughly how Tala programmed her droid ‘to help.’  And he did, from the moment he didn’t give away her location to picking up Obi-Wan to his final moments with Tala.  Women and droids are lovely things -- just ask Leia Organa and Hera Syndulla.

~~

Good to see Haja again, but... I almost feel as if he was there just as “See!  He’s alive!!”  I didn’t find what he said or did particularly critical in the last two episodes; the role could have been filled by others.  That said, this might be a springboard for the character to appear later.  We’ll see. 

~~

Ewan McGregor has really taken seriously the transition from Episode III Obi Wan to Episode IV Ben Kenobi.  The character is constantly dynamic and in motion, physically and emotionally.  I do think the writing choices for this character were excellently done; he is a traumatized mess, so much to the point he cannot be the person he was trained to be from the age of 3 to the age of 38.  Now in his late 40s, he’s having to ‘grow beyond’ the events ten years prior in a span of about a week.  Obi-Wan does rise to the occasion -- as one should expect.

~~

Hayden Christensen.  I was impressed.  I understand the creative choice not to de-age him back down to 19 in the flashbacks.   I think it’s also a POV choice as to how Vader thinks of himself now, even as the external reality does not match.  Many other people have analyzed the obsession Vader has for Obi-Wan, that mad love. I’ll leave much of the discourse to them; I feel like I would be beating a dead horse over the words “All he’ll see is me” that are so excruciatingly accurate. 

And it is love.  It is the most intense love, so much that it can only be eclipsed by the hate it generates.  I have a more nuanced view of the Obi-Wan and Anakin dynamic that is grounded in how medieval apprenticeships/giving children unto churches worked, so I wouldn’t call it Obikin or a sex/romantic ship... but make no mistake, that love could light a thousand binary suns.

~~

I don’t know if I want season 2.  It’s one of those things where I feel it’s done.  I rather someone leave me wanting more and let my brain go to work in fan fic, rather than let something run a few seasons too long and destroy my interest. 

[princesssarisa]

More thoughts on “Wuthering Heights”

Recent discussions about the nature of Heathcliff and Catherine’s love, especially in @faintingheroine’s posts, have made me think about a topic that I’ve seen a few critics discuss in the past, but not many. Namely that they don’t love each other in precisely the same way. Without denying the soul connection they do share, each one’s individual love has distinctly different nuances.

Cathy is the one who describes her love for Heathcliff in the unique terms that are so often quoted as the description of “their” love: “...he’s more myself than I am,” “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” “I am Heathcliff!” etc. She’s the one who emphasizes their twin souls and insists that Heathcliff is her “own being.” Her love doesn’t care about his looks (she acknowledges that he’s handsome, but only to say that it’s not why she loves him), or whether or not he’s “pleasant to be with,” or the presence of other romantic partners in either of their lives. She feels free to fall in love with Edgar, without it diminishing her deeper love for Heathcliff, and doesn’t think her marriage will change her relationship with Heathcliff at all, because she assumes he understands her perfectly. (She’s sadly wrong in that last regard.) And the same is true in reverse. This might be an unpopular, debatable opinion, but she arguably shows no real jealousy when Isabella falls in love with Heathcliff: she objects to their match because she knows it will drive Edgar to banish Heathcliff from their lives, and because she knows Heathcliff doesn’t love Isabella and will mistreat her, but she says that if Heathcliff had really cared for Isabella, then she would have been willing to let them marry. While each of them straddles the line between lover and sibling for the other, Cathy’s love is the easier of the two to interpret as an intense, codependent platonic love rather than, or in addition to, romantic love.

Heathcliff’s love definitely seems more conventionally romantic. At age thirteen he speaks of Catherine’s “beautiful hair” and “enchanting face” and describes her as “immeasurably superior to everybody on earth.” To the end of his life, Nelly’s narration refers to Cathy as his “idol,” and he calls himself her “slave” – Cathy, on the other hand, sees him as her twin soul, but never idolizes him the way he does her. Nor does he ever have romantic feelings for any other woman, he’s jealous of Edgar’s presence in her life, and he sees her as despising and rejecting him when she accepts Edgar’s proposal even though she doesn’t view it as such herself. By marrying Edgar, he describes her as having “levelled my palace” and erected a “hovel” in its place by expecting him to be content as her friend. At the same time, while he does her call his “life” and “soul,” he never claims to be her, or describes her as “more myself than I am,” or assumes that perfect understanding exists between them. She presumes that they share a deeper degree of sameness and mutual understanding than he ever mentions, while his love has layers of both worship and possessiveness that hers lacks.

This extends into the notorious love-hate aspect of their bond. The inherent ambivalence that critics often attribute to both of them (e.g. “They love each other, but they don’t like each other”) is really more inherent to Catherine than to Heathcliff. She’s the one who describes him as not being a pleasure to her any more than she’s always a pleasure to herself, and who describes her love for him as “a source of little visible delight, but necessary.” She’s the one who freely describes him as “an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation” and “a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man,” even when they’re not at odds with each other. Heathcliff's feelings for her seem less inherently complex; he seems to view her with pure adoration until she befriends the Lintons and his later anger toward her is the more conventional anger of a scorned lover.

Of course part of these differences lie in the class and racial difference between them. She was the privileged daughter of a genteel white family, while he was their poor foundling of a despised race, later reduced to a servant – given the time and place they live in, it makes all too much sense that he should idolize her while she views him as a brute even as she loves him. Although of course it’s complicated, since her father favored Heathcliff above her while he was alive and her wild, unladylike temperament made her a misfit in a different way. Part of Heathcliff’s anger clearly stems from the fact that he and Cathy were once “two outcasts against the world,” so to speak, but then she switched her allegiance to “the world.”

The differences in their loves are interesting, and just as interesting are the different interpretations from the critics I’ve read so far who acknowledge those differences. Some take a more positive view of Heathcliff’s love and a more negative view of Cathy’s, claiming that his more traditional, relatable romantic love is “real” love, while she, narcissist that she is, only loves him as a perceived extension of herself and is so convinced of their inner “sameness” (yet at the same time looking down on him) that she fails to consider his needs as a separate individual. Others take a more positive view of Cathy’s love, seeing the beauty in her vision of a love that features complete mutual understanding and identification with the other, that involves no unrealistic idealizing or idolizing of the partner but is no less deep for that lack, and that transcends social convention and any need to possess. Heathcliff, in this view, is the one who falls short by failing to love her without possessiveness. I think both of those interpretations are valid... I might even agree with both at once.

(Note: This is one of the main reasons why I have no patience for claims that Emily Brontë must have had a secret lover, and even less patience for claims that she must have loved someone who rejected her and used Heathcliff as a mouthpiece for her pain and anger. That hypothesis ignores the fact that some of the book’s most unique expressions of love, most different from any portrayal of love she would have found in books and poems, are Cathy’s descriptions of her love for Heathcliff, not so much vice-versa. And Cathy’s love makes perfect sense as the creation of an author whose main experience of love was familial. A love that has nothing to do with looks and no expectation of sex, where you don’t always “like” the other and sometimes even “hate” them, but you always love them, where no one understands you the way they do, nor does anyone understand them the way you do, and where you can both be more authentic with each other than with anyone else... Doesn’t that sound more like sibling love than conventional romantic love and make sense as having been written by an author with three close siblings but no romantic partner?)

[chainofclovers]

This Way Up season 2 thoughts and feelings

We finished watching the second season of This Way Up last night (watched it in two sittings over Friday and Saturday) and I liked it a lot more than I thought I would though the season did feel uneven at times. The story also made me feel incredibly, incredibly sad, and my brain is so cluttered with thoughts that I'm not sure I'll be able to actually make sense of the show if I don't just go on and share my impressions, as scattered, self-indulgent, and based on the limited memory of a single viewing as they are.

Where was I when I was watching this season of television?

Physically, I was on the couch with my wife, repeatedly remembering and forgetting that the Olympics were happening. And so, interspersed with this deep dive into the mental health and personal and professional challenges of London-based Irish sisters Áine and Shona, I experienced some archery, skateboarding (those bros honestly seem tooooo cool to even want to come to something as embarrassingly earnest as the Olympics, but good for them!), and men's gymnastics.

Mentally, I was contemplating some significant professional (and, yes, personal in their way) life events that are neither here nor there for tumblr dot com. I was also considering the season two premiere of Ted Lasso and my fannish relationship to that show. For it is true--the person I was while watching season 1 of This Way Up is not the same person who watched season 2 this weekend, because in the meantime a 45-year old white man from Kansas (and every person he knows) managed to become my primary media preoccupation, and I am surprisingly chill about how not chill I am about this anxiety-ridden ray of sunshine/football coach (both footballs). But as we all know, being chill does not mean feeling chill. That make sense?

Anyway. This Way Up. It's about to become a mess of spoilers and feelings in here, so venture behind the cut if you dare!

For Obvious Queer Reasons I was extremely curious to find out what happens between Shona and Charlotte and Shona and Vish. As such, while it was uncomfortable to watch, I think my favorite scene in the whole season is when Shona and Vish have video chat sex and Shona has this intrusive memory of sleeping with Charlotte that feels like the ONLY moment in the entire season that she isn't performing or editing herself in some way.

My other favorite moment is when Charlotte talks about how upsetting it is to feel like a "lesson learned" chapter in Shona's autobiography.

I cannot believe I'm about to type these words, but I think the writing on this show might actually put too much trust in viewers to pick up on things. I know, this never happens! This is my dream! Why am I typing this? But hear me out. I think there are a lot of interesting parallels in terms of whether Shona and Vish (established, engaged, committed) and Áine and Richard (new, taboo [but is it really that crazy that she ends up dating the dad of someone she tutors?], exploratory) are truly able to listen to each other and accept each other's needs. It's about honesty or lack thereof, and it's also about what's really happening inside someone's mind. It's such an incredible moment when Richard tells Áine he likes that she's always so "up" and she has this private moment where you can see this heartbreak in her eyes because of course we know that she really struggles with her mental health and with depression. And I like that the show has both Bradley and Charlotte in the position of being on the overlapping outside of those relationships, offering their own wisdom from a place of really, really caring about Áine and Shona. But I just wanted MORE of that. This episodes are so short, and I needed there to be more of a tight story about those parallels, more of a sense that we'd hurtle towards some kind of revelation by episode 6.

I realize this is a thing about UK shows, but these seasons are just too short. The episodes are like 24 minutes long and there are only six of them and I felt that while you could create an effective season of TV with those constraints, this season jumped between scenes too frequently. I wanted to live in the scenes for longer. I didn't want to feel like I was watching the editing and decisions about what to show happen before my eyes.

If season 3 happens, my second biggest dream is that Bradley and Áine can have a conversation following up from the observation that it would be nice to be with someone they're just comfortable with (spoken while they're slumped on the couch together having one of the warmest conversations two characters share all season). My biggest dream is that Shona and Charlotte can have a respectful conversation about how Shona defines her sexuality. I want Shona to be safe explaining if she'd want to use the term bisexual or queer or pan or even lesbian or some combination of those terms. Not because the labels are the most useful thing, but because in this case it would be incredibly useful for her to force herself to choose some words, not in the context of feeling Vish-related pressure. To be brave enough to describe herself, and to be safe enough to know that Charlotte isn't going to make some snide comment about men. It's totally fair that Charlotte is so hurt, but she needs to be able to listen, too.

I do think this season does an incredible job capturing Shona's intense ambivalence about herself, and how she is SCRAMBLING to deflect from that by focusing on her sister, work, family, wedding-planning, the hen do, basically anything but dealing with her own little brain and heart. I mean, when COVID starts to arrive in their lives, it feels like she really wants Vish's asthmatic uncle to be the golden ticket they need to call off the wedding.

I have mixed feelings about how frequently Áine references the feeling of being an actor or the feeling of experiencing things as someone might in a movie or show or the feeling that someone else is treating her as an actor or character rather than as a real person. I think it's an interesting thing to write about, but upon first watch I struggled to figure out if it was a commentary on the other parts of the story or an additional thread Aisling Bea wanted to weave into an already incredibly short season of TV.

It was very jarring to have a COVID plot. The only mainstream media I've seen so far with a COVID plot is--LOL (to quote Áine, who says LOL so many times this season)--the final scene of the Saved By the Bell remake. Again I say LOL!!! I didn't hate it or love it, necessarily, I just thought it felt strange because we're still in the pandemic and everything is strange.

Everything with Tom was so, so, so painful. I don't know if I can even get into it. I just felt visceral devastation and was hurtled into strong memories about people in my own life who died prematurely. (Suicide but not only suicide.) The way the last scene ended felt like--immediate tears just pulled from my eyes without me even realizing what was happening. And God, the way Tom-in-the-flashback calls her a "soppy cunt" (I think?) and we realize Áine used those exact words to jokingly refer to Richard's previous girlfriend who was a human rights lawyer? GOD.

While Áine and Shona don't really engage with each other in the same way my sister and I do, my sister and I are also really, really close and I'm the older sister and watching this show always gives me a lot of emotions about siblings. This is actually part of why the rapid scene cuts and feeling that they both were leaving so much unarticulated stressed me out. Áine nails it at the end when Shona has finally told her about Charlotte and she says Shona needs to tell her more, but I wanted to SEE that conversation happen. I wanted to FEEL Áine's reaction, because Áine's reaction matters more than Vish's or their mother's or anyone else's. It was frustrating!

I dunno, y'all. I really love this show. I think it is exactly what it wants to be. I could not tell you today if I will ever rewatch it even though I (think I) still consider it a favorite. I honor and respect the fundamental messiness and pain and hilarity of this show. What a wild experience.

[jessicajonesrp]

Public warning

Patricia Walker does not do well with lack of control. It’s a tendency passed down from life with Dorothy Walker, easily the most controlling non super-powered person she had ever met. For the first eighteen years of her life, most of Trish’s actions, from her clothes to her work to her every public word and expression, had been chosen for her by Dorothy, and the only real choice she had for herself was whether to give in and make life easier for herself or rebel and suffer Dorothy’s wrath.

 Her desire for the control she had lacked had left her with severe insecurity, eating disorders, and self medication through drugs, all issues she struggled with for a good ten years before channeling her need for control into efforts at bettering herself and helping others. She had finally reached a place where life was stable, heading in a direction Trish could be content with, if not fully satisfied.

 And then Kilgrave happened. First to Jessica only, without Trish having any idea why her best friend had suddenly vanished without contact for eight months, and then with the shattered mess it left her once Trish did know and struggled to support her. Then to Trish herself, when she, against Jessica’s orders and even pleas, involved herself in trying to draw him out and capture him.

 Trish knew she had not suffered anywhere near the level that her sister had from Kilgrave, but it was still enough to make her feel sick and cold when she remembered. She still occasionally had nightmares of his cold, snapping voice, telling her to shoot herself in the head, telling her to kill people she had never met before out on the docks. She still shivered in disgust when she remembered the feeling of his hands on her face, his lips on her skin, the terrible ambivalence of wanting to kiss him, enjoying it, even as every part of her true self screamed out in horror. And she could never forget Simpson’s hands around her throat, choking her nearly to the point of death at Kilgrave’s command.

 She had hated and feared the man from the first moment Jessica managed to stutter out what he had done to her. No, she had hated him before then, when she first saw the unnaturally shocked, broken state of her sister when she finally broke free from his initial control. Anyone who could hurt Jessica so deeply and so permanently earned her hatred without needing to know their identity.

 And now he was back. Again. As much as Trish feared for herself, for being used or even killed in his obsessive pursuit of Jessica, she feared even more that Kilgrave would damage Jessica even more deeply, that he would continue to pile up dead and damaged bodies around himself and place the blame at her feet. Jessica didn’t need this, not again. And if Trish could do anything to help or stop it, it would help her feel just a little bit more of a sense of the control she knew she didn’t really have.

 She made her way to her recording studio after first sending some of Heroes for Hires guards ahead of her to thoroughly check out the studio for any signs of danger from Kilgrave or any of his like, giving them a code phrase to use to insure that they would be able to alert her if he did show up and control them or others.  Trish had already called ahead to insure that all people were thoroughly searched for any possible weapons and passed at least twice through the metal detectors already installed before being allowed entrance. After receiving the all clear, she went, Jessica insisting on accompanying her, via one of Danny’s cars to the studio, passing through the checks put in place and heading straight to her recording studio and instructing the techs to set up for a live broadcast. She was aware of Jessica skulking behind her, hands shoved in her pockets, as Trish rapidly read from the speech she had just finished churning out.

 “Good afternoon New York City and beyond, this is Trish Walker with an urgent report coming to you from Trish Talk, by way of myself and all our associates at Heroes for Hire. Soon, a follow up broadcast will be coming your way via Channel 5 News with more information, but please, listen very carefully to this announcement for your safety and those of your loved ones.”

 Trish paused, swallowing, and snuck a glance back at Jessica’s impassive expression before facing the mic again and continuing. “Most of you may remember the terrible events of last summer, when the man whom called himself Kilgrave provided mass terror and destruction in our city and in far too many of our own lives and homes. It is to my great sorrow that I inform you that Kilgrave is not, as was believed, deceased. Kilgrave has made personal contact with myself and with-“

 Jessica made violent throat slashing motions behind her that Trish saw out the corner of her eye, and Trish edited her intended words smoothly.

 “With myself and my colleagues, and we have evidence to support that this is no hoax. Please be aware of yourself and those you love at all times. Know their whereabouts, establish coded phrases and patterns of behavior in order to test out the level of control the people in your life may have at any given moment. Kilgrave is a white male with a British accent, last known to have short medium brown hair and brown eyes. He tends to dress in a professional manner, especially in dark purple suits and ties, and he is considered a threat of the level of nuclear war. Do not approach him should you see him; instead do all you can to get away and call in our hotline at Trish Talk or Heroes for Hire to report a possible sighting. If you suspect that someone you know may be controlled, treat them in the same manner, do all you can to subdue them without causing permanent harm to them if necessary. Kilgrave’s powers last up to 12 hours, so do not under any circumstances try to reason with anyone you suspect to be controlled. If at all possible, wear ear plugs or head phones or listen to loud music when necessary to go out in public. Kilgrave cannot gain control of those whom are not within his direct path and whom cannot hear his commands. He-“

 “Stop,” a voice suddenly came over the ear, and both Trish and Jessica jumped, recognizing the voice after a moment as not Kilgrave’s, but female and American. Trish quickly identified the voice a second later as belonging to one of her tech support assistants, Chloe Ash. “The information is over.”

 “What the fuck?” Jessica hissed, shooting Chloe a vicious glower and striding towards her quickly. “Will you shut up, even I know to shut the hell up on a live recording, over something this damn important!”

 Trish tried to recover, giving a somewhat forced chuckle and speaking over them. “I apologize, there are some technical difficulties, but if you’ll bear with me I will make sure you all get the information you need. As I was saying, Kilgrave cannot-"

 “This information is too much, this recording is over,” Chloe repeated, more loudly and forcefully, standing up and taking the headphones off of her ears. She fairly shouted out her next few words, speaking loudly enough that Trish’s words were drowned out.

 “Loyal listeners, you will now hear the sound of a suicide by Chloe Ash, Patsy Walker’s employee. More are to follow in the names and as a direct result of the avoidance and rejection of Jessica Jones. Goodbye, loyal listeners, and know that Kilgrave is a patient man.”

 She head butted Jessica in the face when Jessica grabbed for her arm, ducking under her and weaving to the other side of Trish. As Trish leaped up, expecting Chloe to grab or try to harm her, the young woman instead ran to a small cabinet against the walls containing little more than sound equipment and various office supplies. Throwing it open, she grabbed a pair of scissors from its contents, opened the blades wide, and closed them around the front of her throat.

 She made no sound, showed no pain as she dragged the scissor blades more deeply into her skin, sawing back and forth to make as rough and deep a wound as possible. The live recording now picked up the sound of Trish’s horrified scream, her outcries of “Oh god, no, no!” as blood spattered in a wide arc just short of reaching her, and the noisy scuttle of multiple feet moving towards Chloe as others tried to reach her before it was too late.

 Jessica got to her first and wrenched the scissors out of her hand, breaking them in half and throwing them down so Chloe could not get them and use them any further. Tearing off her oversized sweatshirt, she pressed it against the woman’s throat, grimly noting how the blood immediately stained through its thick material and onto her fingers, how it had sprayed hot and thick over her arms and chest before she could touch her at all. The woman didn’t try to speak, likely couldn’t have, but she was losing all color in her face, her eyes already growing glassy and lifeless, and as Trish sputtered and tried not to vomit or pass out in the background, Jessica held onto the almost useless bloodied sweater, as though she could somehow keep the woman alive just by holding on tight enough.

 It didn’t matter. Within another minute the woman was clearly dead, limp and unmoving under Jessica’s hands, and she could hear the shrill noise of sirens in the background. Jessica let her drop to the ground, stumbling back and nearly yelling out loud when she bumped into Trish and felt her hands latch onto her arm.

 “We have to go, now,” she mumbled, giving her sister’s arm a rough tug.” Before someone else of his comes through in the aftermath.”

 Even as she lead Trish out of the room and building, she could still hear the dying woman’s words echo in her mind. More are to follow, as a direct result of the avoidance and rejection of Jessica Jones…

[clairebear1298]

okay, long-winded and rambly essay on sheldon’s sexuality incoming below:

first, let me address the line in the newest young sheldon. ultimately i do find it irritating and incongruous with things said in the past, but here are some ideas that could maybe help it fit in with the previous canon.

     1. keep in mind that adult sheldon is presumably narrating ys to an audience, be it to the public in an autobiography, a series of stories to his children, or something similar. so he could be... not exactly lying about his true feelings so much as omitting certain truths to put forth a certain persona that he wants people to perceive him as? it’s a weak argument, and not one i necessarily agree with, but it’s possible.

     2. when sheldon mentioned the whole “closing his eyes and thinking of science” on his honeymoon, my first thought was of new york when he drags amy to the hotel room. but then i remembered the other canon sexual encounter on their honeymoon, which was back in legoland. this one makes more sense for me that sheldon would maybe behave this way, since it had been about five months since the last time they’d had sex and only their fifth time having sex at all. he’s still not used to it, but the second time on their honeymoon the memory was fresher on what to expect so maybe he was able prepare/enjoy himself more.

     3. sheldon and amy didn’t start (semi) regularly having sex until after they were married, and back then there were six to twelve month gaps between each encounter. it’s entirely possible that sheldon didn’t feel fully comfortable with sex until he started doing it more often and accustoming himself to the act.

     4. sheldon specifically said he felt this way on his honeymoon. he didn’t say that he felt this way every time he’s ever been in bed with amy. so maybe his feelings on sex have evolved since then, or maybe he just had honeymoon jitters, who knows?

     5. i always go back to sheldon’s wedding vows, when he tells amy he’s “overwhelmed” by her. sex is overwhelming to anyone, let alone sheldon who’s extremely sensory and hates feeling out of control. it’s not about amy, it’s about the act itself. it’s scary for him, but he loves amy and wants her to to feel happy and desired and satisfied in their marriage. and amy returns that love by letting him decide when he’s ready to demonstrate that to her.

this leads to a larger conversation on sheldon’s sexuality and what that means to him. pretty much everyone agrees that he sits somewhere on the asexual spectrum, whether demi or not we’ll probably never really know, but as the seasons have gone on it seems that the fandom mostly agrees that he skews more towards full asexuality rather than demi. now there are three subsets to asexuality: sex repulsed, sex neutral, or sex positive. as someone who probably sits somewhere on the demi spectrum (the jury’s still out on that verdict), i find these three subsets to be more of a range than a black and white “this or that” kind of thing. I had kinda figured sheldon sat somewhere along this side of things (the “s” being sheldon):

--------------------l-------------------S-l--------------------

repulsed^                 neutral^                 positive^

but it’s possible he’s more on this side of things:

--------------------l-S-------------------l--------------------

repulsed^                 neutral^                 positive^

i don’t think he’s on the repulsed side of things since, first off, he’s willing to do it at all, but he’s also literally said that he “enjoyed it more than he thought (he) would.” but the level of ambivalence he has for it makes me feel like he doesn’t fall on the positive side either, or at least sits very close to the line. so i think he sits somewhere on the neutral spectrum, and whether he skews more towards liking or disliking sex doesn’t change the fact that he’s ultimately in the neutral zone. like april’s fic on the subject demonstarted, sexuality is a lot more fluid and confusing than people might assume, so maybe sheldon himself slides up and down this spectrum depending on the circumstances.

ultimately this is all conjecture, and could very well be soundly invalidated in future episodes of ys (i wonder if, as sheldon enters his teen years, they start to delve into this subject head-on, which i would LOVE to see). obviously most viewers would not be thinking as in-depth into this as i am, so i do still find it annoying that they chose to distill the entire nuance of this concept into one cheap joke (something they’ve been guilty of in the past, ngl), but the very act of writing this essay has made me feel better about the whole thing, and i hope it does for you, too. 

[kitkatopinions]

Okay, let’s talk about what I think is the biggest problem with Summer Rose. I don’t think it’s unrealistic for Ruby to react the way she has to Summer Rose and information about her from a character standpoint, but there wasn’t enough emphasis on her throughout the show to make me interested in her and specifically in how Ruby feels about her.

A lot of protagonists have at least one dead parent, and it doesn’t always feature prominently in the story they’re in - instead used as an excuse why the kids can do whatever they want without having to worry about parental figures, or backstory for why they’re the way that they are. But when the parents are treated as more significant, it’s better to make them consistently featured. It makes total sense for Ruby to not talk much or even think much about the mother that she lost when she was between the ages of two to four, but starts to talk about her more and be emotional about it once she gets some down time and during a time of personal crisis, especially as she’s learning new knowledge about what happened to Summer. That makes total sense from a character point of view. But as a viewer, I honestly didn’t care at all about Summer Rose past ‘why is Yang acting like Raven is her mom.’ Her grave was seen during the Red trailer, Yang talked about her in V2, and Ruby talked to her grave to start off V3 (which to me read as an ‘easy way to get exposition and remind everyone of some of the RWBY details’ scene.) And that’s it. That’s very little significance, I was given no reason to think she was going to matter to the storyline at all, I was given no reason to think she was going to matter to Ruby at all. If anything, I thought she might maybe matter to Yang, who clearly remembered her and who the story went out of their way to have talk about her, but then Yang didn’t talk about her mom until six seasons after the scene in volume 2. Which again, makes some semblance of sense from a character point of view, but made me think that Summer was unimportant and made me ambivalent to what was a non-character. We didn’t know anything about Summer past ‘good mom’ and ‘dead,’ for six seasons. We didn’t know anything about how Ruby felt about her mom past ‘talking to her grave one time’ and the knowledge that due to her age when Summer died, Ruby likely only has vague memories of her (if she has memories of her at all.)

Compare that to something like Harry Potter. (Quick disclaimer, as always, I’m not endorsing JKR, just comparing stories.) Time was taken out of the first book to establish not only Harry being an orphan, but Harry’s feelings towards it. Him looking in the Mirror of Erised and seeing not only his parents, but his family told us a lot about Harry’s longing for a family and to belong, and his attachment to the idea of his parents and family clearly connected to him (including through physical features that he’s been put down for having by the Dursley’s.) The first book also establishes connections to his parents through others. Hagrid knew his parents and got him a scrapbook of pictures of them, Snape hated his father, Dumbledore gave Harry his father’s invisibility cloak, and discussed the love spell his mother had made when she died, and told him about Snape and James’ ‘rivalry.’ I don’t remember if there was much connection to Harry’s parents in Chamber of Secrets, but in Prisoner of Azkaban, we start the story with Harry reacting defensively and using accidental magic (tied to emotional outbursts) when a relative starts insulting his parents, and then the whole book centers around the man who was framed for helping Voldemort murder Harry’s parents catching the real traitor, Harry meeting his father’s former best friends, getting yet another relic of his father’s, hearing more of the vague memory of his parents’ death when he’s encountered by the Dementors, thinking he had seen his father save him, etc. And the book tells us that Harry’s light based magical guardian Patronus takes the same form his father’s did. Then, in the fourth book, Harry resolves to face Voldemort head on whether he’ll die or not ‘like his father’ and literally sees the spirits of his parents and is able to talk to them briefly even though they’re dead through the use of a spell. In the Order of the Phoenix, Harry sees memories of his parents through Snape’s pensieve memories and his idealized versions of them (but specifically James) is challenged. He’s greatly bothered by this and seeks out advice and reassurance from his father’s friends. In the sixth book, the Half-Blood Prince, Harry gets a potions book with all kinds of recipes and useful spells written in the margins and starts thinking it might be his father’s, still desperate for a stronger connection to his parents, and at the same time, he’s interacting with a teacher who was fond of and talks about his mother. Consistently throughout the whole of the book series, people talk about James and Lily, we see the impact James and Lily had with other characters, we know how Harry feels about them, we know why Harry feels that way, we see his feelings about his parents start to adjust whenever he learns new information, we see the way their actions affect Harry’s actions.

So when Deathly Hallows rolled around and there were all these big significant moments involving Harry’s parents - visiting their graves, seeing their statue, seeing Snape’s memories, summoning their ghost forms to walk him to what he thinks will be his death - viewers might not be particularly attached to their characters, but we’re still invested, we still care about Harry’s arc with his parents, it’s pay off to a storyline that’s been a central part of the whole book series. Imagine if the only things we had heard about Harry’s parents before reading Deathly Hallows was a scene in book two about how his parents death connected to this wider issue (like the scene in Volume 2 with Yang using Summer’s death as establishing details before talking about Raven,) and a scene at the start of Prisoner of Azkaban where Harry like, talks to the pictures in his scrapbook about how he’s excited to go back to Hogwarts and how things are going with Ron and Hermione (like Ruby’s gravestone talk at the start of volume 3,) and then we still had all the significant moments centered around James and Lily in the seventh book.

It just feels like the emotional depth they’re going for with Summer was a wide swing and a miss because she never mattered to the story before. Summer was a passing plot point, and now that they’re trying to involve her more heavily, it feels boring. It feels like wasting time on something that doesn’t matter all that much when things that have been established as significant were put on the back burner (like Ruby’s relationship with Qrow, a mentor figure and parental figure, or even her relationship with Maria, who took over as a mentor figure when MKEK started to seem to want to diminish and put down Qrow’s character.) For six seasons, the audience had barely knew what Summer could possibly look like, Tai doesn’t talk about Summer, Qrow only mentions her in passing to talk about Ruby’s eyes if I remember correctly, Oz doesn’t talk about her, Yang only talks about her for one scene and that’s only to set up Raven, Ruby only talks about her for one scene and that’s to exposition at the start of a season. The only real reason to think Summer Rose would be significant to the plot at all is the Red Like Roses II song, but lots of the Ruby character songs seem a little disjointed like that. Before volume seven, I was wondering why that song even existed since Summer had so little to do with the plot of the show and specifically Ruby’s character (affected much more by Yang, her dad, her uncle, her team, Ozpin, Penny...)

It’s not a bad thing if they wanted Summer Rose to be important, I actually think it could’ve been good. Ruby feels a little stale at times compared to the friends that have bigger backstories that are gone into more, and her character could use some more interest and some more ties to Salem, so having her struggle with having a dead parent she can barely remember who was probably turned into a monster due to having the exact same power Ruby does is a good concept. But like a lot of things in RWBY, it came too little, too late, and with too little groundwork. Now it feels like they’re trying to cram extra unneeded plot into the story instead of working on what they have, now it feels out of left field, now I’m wondering why I’m suddenly being expected to care about Summer, now I’m wondering why there was so little set up for her importance. I would feel much more emotionally connected to this story plot if it had been featured more prominently. If Ruby had been set up from the start to want to be a Huntress like her mom. If Ruby had talked about Summer to Weiss or Jaune or her team, if she’d had a picture of her mom she put on her wall or something, if she’d talked about how the death affected her early on, if Tai had talked about Summer to Yang more, if maybe Ruby had asked Qrow about Summer when he told them about Oz, “Did Mom know any of this?” if maybe Maria had known Summer or something. I don’t know, I’m not a professional, I just know that they failed to write a story where Summer mattered at all until they suddenly wanted us to feel emotionally distraught over her being turned into a Grimm. Instead, I heard about the Silver Eyed Warriors getting turned into a Grimm and thought ‘maybe Mercury does have Silver Eyes and that’s what’ll happen to his character.’

The emotional depth just isn’t there with Summer in my opinion, and it’s made even worse by the fact that there’s very little we can extrapolate from her character based on her appearance. ‘Ruby, but more subdued,’ and ‘boring,’ are the only two things I can even think about her character design, which is a confusing thing for such a design heavy show that places so much emphasis on individual creativity.

[scarlet--wiccan]

(1/?) The MCU is going on a specific direction and might touch Wanda's history of mental illness. Maybe talk about that when you have the time? Wanda was going on a nice direction before all that happened.

Whew! Sorry it’s taken me so long to answer this— I have several super-long message chains like this one in my inbox and they’re hard to parse through and harder still to write a real answer for. I’m gonna try through a couple of these today.

Well, I think you hit all the important points here-- the optics of a mixed-raced family of first- and second- gen Holocaust survivors committing mass acts of terrorism, becoming rulers of a fascist, supremacist regime, and then, finally, committing pseudo-genocide, are, you know, not great. These are complicated characters whose representation can easily swing in either really positive or really, really negative directions, but this goes beyond the pale for me, especially given the proximity to 9/11.

The portrayal of Wanda's mental illness during this time, while not wholly unsympathetic, is wildly inaccurate and generally played as a horror motif. I'm not an expert on schizophrenia, but I think we can all agree that it's high time we moved past exploiting sick and disabled people's experiences for cheap scares. It's especially frustrating because Wanda, as a character, does have ground for poignant stories about mental illness-- she's had numerous traumatic experiences, starting with generational trauma and a lifetime of violent discrimination, and ending, at that point, with the deaths of her young children and the abrupt dissolution of her marriage. Her mental health should be addressed, but not in a way that demonizes illness or characterizes sick people as villains. One thing I appreciate about Robinson's Scarlet Witch is that it represents her mental illness in a very human, matter of fact manner and gives her the power to take control of her own wellness. She has realistic symptoms and pursues realistic treatments, instead of, you know, making hallucination constructs and getting mind-probed by Charles fucking Xavier.

Wanda is simultaneously infantilized and vilified in these stories-- she's denied agency at every turn, and yet, Wolverine and the other "heroes" of this saga view her with unbridled contempt, and most of them are immediately ready to murder her in the name of justice, even before the "no more mutants" spell was cast. You wondered how Bendis was able to inspire such a long lasting hatred of Wanda, and I think the simple answer is that almost every character in House of M hates Wanda. The characters you root for, the characters whose perspectives dictate the tone of the story, direct palpable fury towards her, and even those who aren't out for her blood don't extend any actual empathy towards her-- most are ambivalent to her wellbeing, while Xavier and Strange are incredibly paternalistic.

The final spell, "no more mutants", has baffled me for years. You're spot-on in saying that Wanda here represents a self-hating minority, but it's really hard for me to understand how she could have reached that point. It's not consistent with her previous characterization, nor is it thematically connected to the factors which led to her breakdown. Bendis places the onus of her condition on Erik, alleging that he abandoned and abused his children in his fanatic commitment to the mutant cause, which, besides being a willful misinterpretation of canon, has nothing to do with Wanda's current circumstance-- she's like this because Agatha Harkness altered her memories, because the Avengers continuously gaslit her, and becaue Mephisto killed her kids in the first place. It has nothing to do with Magneto, and Wanda's breakdown has nothing to do with mutant politics. She and Pietro were raised in a loving family until their adoptive parents were killed by racists. Erik didn't knowingly abandon them, and while he did mistreat them during the Brotherhood days, it wasn't parental abuse because he wasn't a father figure to them-- neither party had any idea they were related. Bendis is evoking specific forms of trauma that never actually happened, while ignoring the ones that did, and the effects of the spell itself are vague and seemingly random.

~~~~~

Young Avengers does call back to Wanda's circumstances in Disassembled and HoM, but it doesn't execute the concept of reality-warping in the same way. The driving force in YA is the spell which Billy casts, and Loki tampers with, in the first issue. It is a spell which distorts reality, but it has specific parameters, and neither party is characterized as "crazy" the way Wanda was. The spell was intended to bend space and time so that Billy could pull Teddy's mom from the past, before she was killed, into the present-- it's not dissimilar from how Wanda "retroactively reincarnated" her kids. Due to Loki's interference, however, the spell was hijacked by an interdimensional parasite called Mother. The Mother virus appears primarily as a construct of Teddy's mom, but as her influence over the Earth-616 dimension grows, she's able to create constructs of other dead parents, and even mind-control living adults. All of the ways in which reality is being warped hinge on the specific conditions under which Mother was summoned, and while it is Billy's magic that's fueling these constructs and distortions, they aren't symptoms of psychosis-- Billy doesn't lose control of his magic because he's losing his mind, he loses control because he's too young and inexperienced to protect himself from predatory forces. Those forces do take advantage of his depression and anxiety, but his condition is never the cause.

Loki's magic is wrapped up in the spell, too, but rather than conjuring dead parents, it emerges as a construct of their former best friend, Leah. Loki, in Young Avengers, is a mashup of two personae-- the reincarnated child Loki, and Ikol, a phantom of their past life who is carrying out the previous Loki's evil will even though their heart isn't in it. Ikol has mostly overshadowed Loki, who has been reduced to a ghost that torments Ikol by acting as a constant reminder of their guilt. Ikol is haunted by their past, but it's important that this haunting is a nuanced metaphor and not literal hallucination, as Wanda's condition was in HoM. Because Loki's power is part of the spell, Kid Loki's ghost is able to hijack the reality distortions to summon the construct of Leah, who, in turn, is able to summon the Young Avengers' other exes, the same way that Mother, in the form of Teddy's dead mom, can summon other dead parents.

Loki does raise the question of whether or not Billy might be subconsciously influencing Teddy with his powers, but this is clearly illustrated as a manipulation tactic and disproven several times. Loki's original goal in summoning Mother was to draw out Billy's full magical potential so that they could steal his power for themselves. Driving a wedge between Billy and Teddy, and causing Billy to question his own sanity, were devices to make Billy more susceptible to having his power stolen, and they worked-- Billy is not able to divest his magic from the spell and banish Mother from Earth-616 until he overcomes his self-doubt and start exercising mindfulness. Loki, in turn, is not able to divest their power from the spell and banish Leah and the other exes until they own up to their guilt and admit everything they've done. Both characters are experiencing symptoms of exacerbated mental illness-- Billy's depression and suicidal ideation, Loki's disassociation-- but their mental illness is not the source of their magic, but a challenge which makes it harder for them to live as their fully realized selves... just as it would be for any normal person.

I know that was a long-winded explanation, but I wanted to illustrate what sets Gillen's take on "reality warping" apart from Bendis's. It's based on clearly though-out ideas of how magic works and what defines "reality" in a world populated by parallel universes and living myth-forms. Gillen affords Loki and Billy a degree of sympathy without denying them agency, and Loki is held accountable for their decisions without being painted as a total monster. Bendis, meanwhile, characterizes Wanda's magic as delusion made real, and completely vilifies her for her illness in spite of the fact that she's given no control over her actions.

[ouyangzizhensdad]

I wonder sometimes where the fandom perception of/jokes about Lan Xichen being wangxian’s biggest fan/supporter came from. Because, based only on the events of the novel (disregarding all the potential impact of fan interpretations of cql becoming general fanon applied to the novel), we are shown very clearly that lxc is ambivalent toward their romantic relationship: not against it, but wary of wwx due to his actions in general and, more importantly, how he perceives wwx has acted towards his little brother.

“wasn’t he encouraging their relationship when he invited wwx to come along (waterborn abyss )?”: lxc  had no idea of the depth of lwj’s feelings at the time . He saw that lwj was partial to wwx, and it was his wish that his little brother make friends his age and just open up to others more generally. In fact, up until the moment lwj fights off the 33 elders, we can infer that every time lxc encourages their interactions, it is not because he means to encourage his little brother’s crush/love. A proof within the narrative is that, when they have the conversation about lwj wanting to bring “someone” back to the Cloud Recesses, lxc doesn’t know who he’s talking about--if he knew of lwj’s feelings for wwx, the answer would have been crystal clear.

“but that still means lxc thought lwj being around wwx was a good idea”: but that was before everything that happened during and after buyetian. lxc clearly resents (to a degree--i mean, he’s still lxc!) and holds wwx responsible for lwj hurting his clan members and getting punished. 

Wei Wuxian, “Whip scars?!” He grabbed Lan Xichen again, “Lan-zongzhu, I really don’t know. Please tell me, just how did he get those injuries? How could they possibly be related to me?!?”

Anger could be seen on Lan Xichen’s face, “If it were not related to you, could he have done those to himself without a reason?!” Zewu-jun had always been an extremely patient person, but now that Lan Wangji was involved, he was truly angered. ”

“lxc allowed lwj to bring wwx back to the Cloud Recesses after the whole ordeal at jinlintai bc he was rooting for them”: But he did it not (only) because he wants his little brother to be happy and safe, but because of his own sense of righteousness and justice. He does not know whether wwx is truly guilty or if he’s being framed--but it’s important to note that he’s not just taking wwx at his words, he’s simply offering him an opportunity to prove his claims.

Lan Xichen nodded, “Wei-gongzi, no need to worry. Before the truth is entirely revealed, I will not be partial to either side or reveal your whereabouts. Or else, I would not have allowed Wangji to take you to my Hanshi or helped with your injuries.”

Wei Wuxian, “Lan-zhongzhu, I’m grateful that you gave me this opportunity. The fact that Chifeng-zun’s head is inside of Jin Guangyao’s secret chamber is nothing but true. Not only have I seen it, I’ve seen some other things due to having been affected by its energy of resentment. Maybe this could offer some proof?”

Lan Xichen replied calmly, “Wei-gongzi, perhaps you have seen some things indeed. However, you cannot prove that you saw those things within the secret chamber of Jinlintai.”

“lxc tells wwx about his mother and about how steadfast lwj is!”: Yeah, and if that’s not a “stop messing around with his little brother and please take his feelings seriously” speech, i don’t know what is! He’s also literally telling him: “my understanding of my parents’ relationship is that my dad’s love for my mom, who didn’t love him back, ruined his life and hers”--let’s wonder why he thought that that was a relevant thing to point out to wwx at this moment in the narrative. lxc is not against the idea of lwj and wwx getting together--he’s ambivalent. The same way he is ambivalent about the memory of his mother. 

“My shufu… has always had a frank personality to begin with. Because of how my mother caused my father to destroy his own life, he began to hate those who behaved improperly even more.” 

[...]

“He was still too young to understand what ‘gone’ means. No matter how much others comforted him, how much Shufu scolded him, he would continue to come back here every single month, sit down in the hallway, and wait for someone to open the door for him. When he grew older, he understood that Mother would not come back anymore, that nobody would open the door for him, but he kept on coming here.” 

 Lan Xichen stood up. His dark eyes looked into Wei Wuxian’s, “Wangji has been this stubborn ever since he was young.”

[...]

He spoke, “Lan-furen must’ve been a very gentle woman.” 

Lan Xichen, “In my memories, Mother had indeed been so. I do not know why she did such a thing back then. And, in truth, I…” He took in a deep breath before confessing, “Do not want to know either.” 

After a few moments of silence, Lan Xichen closed his eyes. He took out Liebing. A gust of night wind suddenly sent forth a sobbing note of the xiao. The sound was deep, like a sigh. Wei Wuxian had heard Lan Xichen play Liebing before. Its timbre was just like Lan Xichen himself, as warm and graceful as the breeze and the rain of spring. Yet, now, although his technique was as excellent as ever, the tone evoked a strange mixture of feelings.

“but the whole speech in guanyin temple is about lxc helping wangxian get together”: Is it? Talking of the events after butyetien, he ends up calling wwx the “only mistake” lwj has ever made in his life. I would like to think that means he’s not going to be starting the wangxian fanclub anytime soon. 

“With the ways in which he looked and talked to you when he saved you and hid you in that cave, even someone who was blind or deaf could perceive his feelings, which was why Shufu was in such anger. Wangji was a model for the disciples when he was young, and a prominent cultivator when he grew up. In his whole life he had been honest and righteous and immaculate—you were the only mistake he made!”

but perhaps more importantly, lxc is not saying these things to wwx so that he can make sure wangxian gets together. He’s saying these things because he wants wwx to stop hurting lwj. From his pov, wwx knows of lwj’s feelings, and simplu keep using them to jerk him around

“And you say… And you say you do not know. Wei-gongzi, after you returned in your body, how did you pester him and confess to him? Every night… Every night, you had to… And you say you do not know? If you did not know, why did you do such things?”

TLDR: Lan Xichen is not trying to get wangxian together; he wants his little brother to be happy, and sometimes that means he is wary of wwx and their relationship, and other times that he is open to seeing that their relationship is what lwj wants and makes him happy. His ambivalent understanding of his parents’ relationship further colours the ways in which he is able to contextualize lwj’s and wwx’s actions until they officially become a couple. 

[howimproper]

For Qingming x Boya. Qingming slowly changing Boyas mind about demons

So, this went in an unexpected direction but I can't say I don't love it 😂

A Road Less Travelled

When Qing Ming had contacted him via magic ear to set up a rendezvous, Boya hadn't thought in a million years that it would go this way.

Typically, it's to join forces for a hunt, (Boya is convinced this is no more than an excuse however, because those hunts are always well within Qing Ming's ability) or instances gaining in frequency simply to catch each other up on their lives. To share in a companionship that grew quickly and terrifyingly as easy as breathing. 

Boya is not adverse in either case. 

With the death of the Empress, Boya's life had changed exponentially. His presence in the palace or even Imperial City itself required less and less until he is eventually finding himself sent far and wide. It's not only him, he knows. His sect was created and maintained to protect the palace from the threat of demons and spirits alike, and just because the Evil Serpent housed within the deceased Empress is no more for a time, does not mean other threats do not exist. As the head of the sect and arguably its best warrior, Boya is no stranger to his skills being in constant demand- however his superiors willingness to grant so many requests is...new. 

Boya can't decide if they're trying to get rid of him, or are simply uncertain of what to do with him and his unexpected fame at being one of the main hands that dealt with the rise of the Evil Serpent and, by happenstance, the death of their nations ruler. Do they lord him as a hero, or an unwitting traitor quickly swept under the rug? 

Never mind that the Empress had seen to her own demise. Boya has, and never will, understand nor enjoy politics. He much prefers the simplicity of wandering village to village to city to countryside in search of his next quarry. Less politics, less complication. He has grown used to and learned to embrace the isolation, and emphatically ignores the pangs of loneliness he certainly does not feel when he is surrounded by people who do not know him or his mind. 

He most certainly does not look forward to the warming of the magic ear he had gifted Qing Ming, or the smooth, almost playful cadence of his voice when he is contacted at random for reasons innocuous or intent. And he most definitely does not drop everything he happens to be doing at the time to indulge the other guardians whims. That would be irresponsible of him, not to mention undignified. 

Except sometimes he does and he's not even sorry, what is wrong with him. 

It has only been a handful of short months since the last time he'd dropped everything to find his feet taking him to a quiet lakeside home near a far away mountain. Not long at all since he'd indulged in the tranquillity and ease of the only presence he'd found that did not raise his hackles or feel like the weight of chains on his shoulders. Boya is self aware enough to know that he is not a people person. He has the skills, as all those born amongst the elite do- but he has long since grown too abrasive, too direct from long years spent honing his body instead of his tongue to be comfortable rubbing shoulders with self important nobles or braggart so called intellectuals masquerading as scholars. 

Once, when he was younger and blinder to the truth of the world he dwelt in, he might have been more suited to opulent surroundings and the couth if hollow companionship of the equally sheltered and stupid. But then his mother had been torn from him, and he'd become more austere, rough, jaded. Not consumed, but definitely intent on ideas of revenge and self righteous anger at the being responsible for the death of his innocence. As he'd grown in body, skill and mind however, Boya had honed those qualities into a fine weapon that he aimed mercilessly at not just the one, but the whole of demonkind. 

Boya has hated demons for so long, that when faced with the man who was for all intents and purposes his opposite, he had found the control he sweat and bled for crumbling to dust between his fingers, and he had lashed out. 

He still doesn't know, to this day, what stayed his blade throughout the infancy of that acquaintanceship. Whether it was the presence of his fellows or the weight of the task they all shouldered- until eventually time and exposure had ever so slowly smoothed reflexive hackles, if only enough for him to notice the quiet, sombre air of understanding that permeated often short and prickly interactions. 

Only for those hackles to stand straight back up with every instance of sympathy or outright regard for the beings that exist purely as cruel thorns in Boya's soul. At every sign that this man prefers the company of beasts, kin of half of his blood.

Boya hates demons as surely as the sky is blue and his heart beats within his chest, but against all conceivable reason, Boya can't hate Qing Ming. 

When he tries, Boya just finds that he hates himself. 

Against all logic, it was only the passing of days that tempered him to the man's presence. Barely moments in time that gently uncoiled the tight grip of his ire until he found himself beset with an inexplicable sense of kinship that brought nothing but confusion in its wake and made every attempt at rebuke reflexive and half hearted at best. Until they stopped all together and Boya instead found himself drawn in ways he'd never before experienced. Until for the first time in his life, he'd turned the weapon crafted from the bleeding edges of his stone heart to protect an existence he'd spent longer hating than living. 

At first, he told himself he did it out of duty. There were a great many lives threatened in the City, in the world, and he would fulfil the purpose he'd curved into himself gladly and with a small, quiet relief. But that had only been part of the reason, and it had taken some long months of separation and reflection before he'd realised it. Then some further time spent agonising over the ambivalent nature of the realisation, and a few shameful nights spent trying to drown it. Boya is not known for seeking life's answers at the bottom of a bottle, but if there is one existence that can drive him to it, it is probably Qing Ming's. 

He can't decide if his eventual acceptance of the matter was brought about by lowered inhibitions or the regretful insight one experiences only during the first moments one opens their eyes to a truly magnificent hangover. Mayhaps he simply grew tired of waking up face down on or sprawled half under a drinking table in some out of the way inn room he’d stomped into at some ungodly hour. 

Honestly Boya thinks he probably shouldn’t drink at all. His constitution for it in excess seems to leave much to be desired. He can’t be good at everything, he supposes. A realization he is endlessly glad to have come upon alone. Gods forbid he be prone to acts not of his character whilst sober, (if he had had company Boya is of the mind that he might have bemoaned the sorry state of his life in a most undignified manner and he swears never to drink again. It’s only a short while later that he makes a liar of himself and wakes with the indentation of bamboo and regret pressed into his brow.)

The occasional presence of his dizi on the table leads him to think he might be either a whimsical or maudlin drunk. All the more reason to avoid it, (he hasn’t received any complaints yet, so at least he does it well quietly, aish.) 

He is not pining. He isn’t. 

And if he’d come to an abrupt halt in the middle of a busy street to many startled or annoyed protests the first time the magic ear he’d given to Qing Ming had warmed, no one needed to know, because Boya will take it to his grave. 

It’s a process of years, but it is, regardless, a process. One Boya hadn’t much fought against after those first few nights spent agonising over it with the taste of wine sharp on his tongue. The fact that it came about even without the confusing presence of Qing Ming there to turn his life upside down resigns Boya to the belief that he is indeed quite pathetic, all told. 

Still, he always answers, and still, he always eagerly goes where bid. 

Boya wishes he could hate it. 

Never more especially than the first time he meets a demon picking wildflowers of all things on an overgrown road obviously less travelled, (a small, unwashed slip of a thing in the guise of a child, with eyes too big when they’d met his and small, girlish hands clenching in fright around green stems) and lets it go. 

He’d grasped the hilt of the blade carried at his back, fully intending to draw it when, inexplicably, he’d been taken in by the fear in its- her eyes and felt not like a righteous man, but a demon himself.

What is wrong with him.  

He tells no one, and drinks himself into a stupor the next night. He ignores the wildflowers he finds outside his door the next morning. 

It’s all Qing Ming’s fault. Him with his ridiculous exquisite robes and that stupid fan he hides those mischivous attractive smiles behind. Gods, he’s pathetic. 

“Is this where your friend is waiting, Mr. Boya?” Small hands grasp and tug on the sleeve of his travel cloak, and Boya resigns himself, once again, to the lack of urge to shake them off. 

“Mn.” He grunts in reply, and the little girl trailing at his side like some misshapen duckling beams, wildflowers in her hair. 

How the mighty have fallen, he thinks as he weaves a path through the small village towards the tea house he’d been informed to meet at, freshly washed and happily bouncing demon child following at his heels. He has gone from mercilessly slaying demons to throwing the cute ones at someone always too happy to take them. 

Divine Lord take him, he is so pathetic.  

[equalseleventhirds]

quick disclaimer before fic: this is not meant to excuse or absolve melanie and georgie of outing jon; what they did was wrong and they should not have done it. instead it is an... examination of a character who is Maybe working some things out but, due to Internalized Issues, is harshly rejecting it both for herself and other people. (i’m aware i wrote something with the exact same FUCKING premise back when i was in the sh*rl*ck fandom dear god don’t read that linked fic it is from a deeply shameful time of fandom i only linked it as proof i did the same thing before. almost like i’m still working through the same stuff via writing fanfiction. hm.) (further discussion on THAT in post-fic notes; i wanted to keep it under the cut for personal reasons.)

furthermore: warning for discussion of sex (but not explicit depictions of sex), characters experiencing aphobia both internalized and not, mention of sexism wrt jobs, characters outing other characters without their consent (more than once, and more than just jon), and mention of consensual but unwanted sex (as in, consent was given, but the consenter did not enjoy it, and consented due to expectations).

- - -

It starts with: “I don’t, I, I usually can’t—Lately. I mean. Lately I can’t.” Melanie shuts her eyes so she won’t have to see Georgie, her hand on the sheets, judgment questions in her eyes. “Since I got—shot. It’s more difficult, is all.”

“Melanie—”

“You can still try,” she says, the words falling too fast, too panicked. “If you want, sometimes other people—and it’s fine! I’m always, it’s fine to try. Sometimes I do. I just might not. You know.”

“You might not orgasm,” Georgie finishes for her. It’s hard to tell how she’s feeling about it—until her fingers brush Melanie’s chin, turning her face up.

Reluctantly, Melanie opens her eyes, and then she’s glad she did. Because Georgie’s smiling, not a mocking smile, gentle. And they said this was just, just casual, just between friends (there’s too much going on with ghosts and the Institute and Georgie’s ex sleeping on her couch when he isn’t being kidnapped for it to be more than that), but Melanie’s glad Georgie is smiling.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Georgie says. She’s sitting up now, not lying almost-not-quite between Melanie’s legs anymore. She looks gorgeous, naked and cross-legged on that horrible mattress with a microfiber sheet wrapped around her shoulders, and Melanie wants to curl up in the sheet with her and eat the leftover pizza from earlier and fall asleep together with grease on their hands.

No. Focus. “It’s okay,” Georgie says again, gentler. “If you can’t right now. If you don’t want to. You certainly gave me a lovely orgasm—”

“—or three—”

“—yes, thank you, and if you’d rather just call it there, I’m not pushing it. As long as you enjoyed yourself.” She frowns, suddenly, glancing down at Melanie’s hands. “You… did enjoy yourself? I hope we didn’t—”

“I did!” She always does, when it’s other people coming, when she gets to be touching warm skin and watching someone fall apart. It’s… nice. “It’s just, you know. I got shot.”

(And isn’t that a convenient excuse, she sneers in her own head, and it sounds like Toni refusing to come back to the team, it sounds like the most sarcastic videos about her breakdown, it sounds like Elias. Isn’t it convenient that now you can blame your little problem on blood flow, or nerve endings, or stress. Never mind that you didn’t have those excuses a year ago. Or two years. Or back when you had a real girlfriend, and you always said yes but she got tired before—)

Georgie tucks a strand of hair behind Melanie’s ear. “Okay, good. If we, you know, try this again sometime? If you’re feeling better? Then I can try.” She stops, licks her lips, watches Melanie’s expression. “Or I can… not try, if you’d still prefer that. Later. You know. If.”

“I’m not—” And she’s rushing again, always rushing, she doesn’t even know if she and Georgie will ever—

“No, I know! It’s fine! But like—Look, this isn’t exactly new for me, you know? If that’s something you want. Something you don’t want. Or I, I’m saying it’s not a problem, if you do or don’t want me to make you come in the future, or even if you don’t want to have sex at all, I mean, when we were dating Jon didn’t—”

That’s where Georgie stops, as if talking about Jon is too much, as if she hasn’t been speaking Melanie’s secret insecurities out loud in bed like it’s something they can talk about, as if all of this hasn’t already been too much and too terrifying already.

Melanie stands up, grabs the comforter as a makeshift cloak (because Georgie has the sheet, and suddenly she isn’t sure she wants to share the sheet with her). “Right.”

“I’m just—I have a friend. Who you might talk to, if you wanted to talk about this.”

She steps away from the bed, towards the door. “Sure. Pizza? I’m hungry.”

-

The problem is, Melanie doesn’t much like Jon. He was such a dick about the Youtube thing, and about her statement, and about Sasha. And even though she knows (sort of) that part of it hadn’t been his fault, she still isn’t going to talk over her disinterest in sex with him. It’s mortifying. Even if he wasn’t her boss. And Georgie’s ex. And currently out of the Archives, anyway.

But she wants to talk to somebody, about Georgie’s words running around and around and around her head, about the sheer panic mixing with almost-relief and then the visceral no no no churning low in her stomach that had made it a struggle just to choke down her pizza. She wants to ask someone is this normal, am I allowed, is it even enough to be halfway to ‘not at all’ or should I just suck it up. She wants to talk that out desperately.

It’s just… she doesn’t have many friends left, after her whole fall from Youtube ghost hunter grace. She’s not going to ask Georgie about it, any more than Jon, although for pretty much the opposite reason. Who’s left? Her shiny new coworkers? Tim, who seethes and hates everything and everyone in the Archives? Martin, who’s still upset that Jon so much as spoke to her while he was on the run? Basira?

-

When Melanie met Sasha—the real Sasha, the one apparently no one but her even remembers—she’d been the only woman in the Archives. And Melanie had chatted with her about haunted pubs, and maximizing SEO, and how to talk to people who’d seen a white dog while they were drunk and thought it was a ghost. And about their jobs, of course, which led to both of them scoffing about the sexist bullshit of academia and how someone like Sasha could be just an assistant and the only woman on her team.

And then Elias hired Melanie to replace… the thing that replaced Sasha. Hired another woman to replace the only woman. You learn to see patterns from the kind of person who might say diversity the same way as toilet plunger: something necessary, but distasteful. Melanie was filling a role he needed filled, and she could live with that.

And then Basira.

Who wasn’t there because she wanted to be, of course, but was still there. Was still another woman in the boy’s club of terror they’d apparently signed on for. Could maybe, maybe, be someone Melanie could connect with. Someone she could talk to.

Maybe.

-

“Do you know if he and Jon ever…?”

“No clue, and not interested!” She’s laughing, about to just dismiss it out of hand, but… maybe. She can feel the questions she never asked Georgie, the words sharpening their claws on the edges of her mind. The no, not me, not allowed sinking in her gut.

“Although…” Make it light. Make it interesting. Make it about someone else. How to hook an audience without having a public breakdown and becoming a— “According to Georgie, Jon… doesn’t.”

It feels wrong as soon as she says it. Like she’s dirty. Like she’s lying. Like a thousand eyes are looking at her, watching her, waiting for more. Make it a story. Engage your audience. Like it’s 2013 in a convention hotel room and Pete just told everyone Don’t worry, Mel likes girls actually, and even though they were all fine about it that moment of sharpshock terror in her throat as they all looked—

“Like, at all?”

The one thing she never learned was how to stop talking. “Yeah.”

“Yeah, that does explain some stuff.”

And that’s… it, really. That does explain some stuff. Jon is a dick, has always been a dick, overfocused on work and not on other people, and that does explain some stuff. Right. Yes. Like her last girlfriend had told her, about all you do is work, I can’t even get you off. An explanation, just like she always knew it would be.

It doesn’t really matter. She has a boss to go kill.

-

“I think,” she says, slow, like every word is being dragged out of her, “that I might not like. Sex. As much as, you know, people do.”

“You’re a person,” her therapist says, firm, and she has to bite back a sarcastic laugh.

“Right. ‘Course.”

- - -

post-fic notes: i myself personally have previously identified as: heteroromantic gray-ace, heteroromantic ace, aroace, aro gray-ace, aro bi, bi, arospec bi, aro bi again, and aro bi but sex ambivalent. part of that has been natural progression and change; part of that was bcos some people i considered friends got very into aphobic discourse, and i internalized a lot of what they said. in recent months i have been examining my sex ambivalence (sometimes repulsion) and considering what that means about whether or not i am on the ace spectrum. i’m still thinking about these things. i’m still, deep down inside, afraid of the aphobic people i respected and cared about hearing about this.

in part i wrote this to work through some of My Own Shit regarding this. in part i wrote this bcos i will get my grubby little aspec hands (bcos regardless of anything else, i am aspec, whether that’s ace or aro) on every character i can. yes, even the ones who did an objectively shitty thing to jon, the one canonical ace character. bcos sometimes people (like me) internalize things and make mistakes.