#which depressingly is a lot better than it often is

[esoanem]

Gothmog clearly understands that Someone has Done Some Bullshit to me and I require Affection from her, but sadly does not understand that in doing so is preventing me from taking the necessary response

[mollymauk-teafleak]

Okay I need to know about Charlie owning the twins souls!

And I am desperate to talk about it, thank you very much for asking!

Putting it under a cut because it involves Valentino and his abusive deal with Angel Dust

So. For obvious reasons Angel Dust keeps his pregnancy secret from anyone outside of the hotel for as long as he can, correctly guessing that the first homegrown sinners in hell will attract a Lot of attention. Husk isn't happy about him still having to go to work at the studio but his deal is his deal, he can just make sure he's there to help put him back together after

But of course he can't hide it forever, he's filming a shoot at it's getting violent as it does depressingly often and when a guy is about to land a punch to his stomach, Angel Dust throws him across the room before he can, bringing the shoot to a screeching halt and attracting the attention of Valentino

Angel Dust hides in his dressing room, beyond terrified and seriously considering calling Husk and doing the one thing he promised himself he wouldn't do which is actively pitting his boyfriend against a powerful overlord. But when Val comes in, he's sweet and caring in his fake, sugary way, saying he should have told him, he could have offered his congratulations sooner and of course he would have told his performers to be more gentle with him, with his star performer in such a delicate condition, after all it's /his/ baby he's carrying

Angel Dust goes cold, pulling away from him and snapping that he's got no right to say that, they're Husk's kids. But Val points out that he owns Angel, body and soul so therefore he owns any product of that body, doesn't he? But don't worry, he'll take good care of the little hellspawn and he'll even let you see them...sometimes. Provided you behave. And he'll make sure they know exactly what kind of filth their daddy is

Angel is so angry, he explodes at him and tells him there's no way he'll ever lay a hand on his kids but as soon as Val throws him out of the studio, the despair sinks in and he realises he's right

Husk tracks him down when he doesn't come home, finding him wandering lost and Angel Dust breaks down and tells him and it's Husk, master of long odds, who realises what they can do

So they go to Charlie. If the twins already have their souls under contract, with someone more powerful than Val, he can't touch them. And who better to defend them than their Auntie Charlie? Charlie is of course immediately in floods of tears, hugging them both and thanking them over and over for trusting her with this, promising that she'll never let anything happen to them and also promising that she'll end the deal the moment the twins ask her of their own accord. Husk and Angel sign on their unborn babies' behalf and Angel Dust takes great pleasure in calling Val and telling him the news

And when the babies do arrive, Charlie gets to hold them for the first time and she sees this tiny, thin gold thread connecting her and the little newborns, tied safely around her wrist and theirs. And she kisses their little heads and promises that she won't let them down

[talusnegotiations]

An unusual gait in a familiar place

West End has, far back in my memory, had old, old houses with doors fancy as hell. Some are right on the street, hidden by shrubbery, shade-loving plants, or overgrown ivy. And others, in traditional Queenslander style, have doors visible from afar, across a yard with a waist-high fence (of some kind, be it metal chicken wire or white pickets). The doors stand, an homage to the passing of time.

Of course, as the suburb continues along its gentrification journey, the houses and properties adhere to a homogenous minimalistic, greyish, depressingly treeless fashion (where there are electronic speakers blaring out nondescript but grating music from tiered, tightly manicured garden beds*). But, when walking along the terribly kept, mostly narrow pathways (proverbial weeds; trees, roots sticking out of cracks in the concrete), you can still spot different doors every few houses or so.

-

Walking while disabled

Let me tell you, the newer pathways (corporate-sponsored) are no better for accessibility than the shitty but loveable old, narrow ones which have grown woefully uneven over decades of use.

It is so weird to me, to be the current version of myself, and to be thrust back into such an unsteady walking pattern again. That isn't very clear, is it? Okay.

When I was diagnosed at 4 years old, I was walking on my toes and only my toes. It had taken me a long time to get used to the upright bipedal way of life, but not for lack of trying. Then, as the years went on and I undertook rigorous physical therapy, I also had many operations to improve my gait and stability. There was a lot of physical pain, and a lot of falling onto the ground. I would give you an analogy, but right now that feels like a waste of time. Suffice to say, I always had scraped knees and bruised elbows. My Nonna kept iodine in the kitchen cupboard with the analgesics to disinfect the perpetual wounds on my palms. See, I'd use my hands to break my fall each time, and I had two symmetrical wounds in the hearts of my palms, left and right, like accidental stigmata. Unlike the simpler cuts and bruises, these wounds didn't close up for years, and eventually became infected; I had to go to the doctor for medicine to 'fix' the problem, but the doctor said that as long as I was using my hands to break my fall, it was unlikely that the infection would heal.

The problem was that, because I tripped on my toes a lot, I was always falling forwards, not backwards. And the only way to stop face-planting was to use my hands to break the fall. Childhood lasts a long time, doesn't it?^

Eventually, I was wearing these bulky bandages to cushion my hands during the day, and only took them off at night to sleep. The wounds had time to rest, no longer being directly assaulted by gravel, bitumen, concrete or dirt. Nonna kept the iodine just in case.

-

Oh how the times have changed

Did you know there are no pictures of West End at night (that are free for me to use on this blog)? I would go and take pictures myself, but I'd need a support worker to come with me, and I'd need confidence and maybe a different set of life experiences, but that's just life, isn't it.

As an adult, my walking was so good because of all the work that I'd done, alongside my parents and grandparents, surgeons and treating team, to improve my gait. I didn't fall often. But that's changed, because my ankle had other plans.

-

Grief is a funny thing. If I had a whole lifetime--and I do--there would not be enough time to unpack it.

Where were we? Ah. Yes, the recent days. So, I was in West End the other night for a thing with some friends, and a bunch of acquaintances as well. And, it's been years, literal years, since I have walked the streets of West End. Actually that's a lie. It's been 18 months (but 18 months and a car crash and a broken ankle will get you somewhere completely different to just 18 months and no bloody car crash; you'll feel it).

These friends of mine, they're not faint-hearted people. They've been around a while. We've gone through fashion trends, heartbreaks, dance battles, tragedy, birthdays, deathdays, highlights and lowlights, betrayal, survival, picnics, alcohol-fuelled love affairs etc. Just a lot, okay? But my walking in all those years was not what it is now.

We used to walk the river some days. We'd go all the way from the city across the bridge to South Bank and onto Boundary Street to go to the book store or the pub. We'd walk blocks and blocks of busy Brisbane streets, no worries. We'd walk from my house to the park and back to my house again. We'd go on the back streets to my favourite Vietnamese place, up the steepest incline in the suburb, and, tipsy after dinner or a gig, walk back the way we came. After all my childhood operations and consistent physical therapy and exercise, I'd fall a lot less. And, I'd fall mostly at home and never in front of people, unless I were drunk.

My stride was sure, and I was incredibly confident in my own abilities. And then the car crash. So, a few nights ago, in shoes that didn't feel that great but were incredibly sensible, and in the midst of a semi-cold Brisbane night, we walked along Boundary Street in the dark, with only streetlights and shoplights to guide the way. My steps painfully slow, my voice unsure, and my (well-cursed) thoughts in a pattern of self-recognition, self-hatred, and concentration. I haven't experienced that level of slowness in front of acquaintances in years, and it was the first time, ever, that I'd walked the main street of West End in such a state.

It brings to mind a level of loathing that would probably be hard to fathom for the average person. Indeed, it is hard to articulate (and very rarely acknowledged or understood by those around me when I talk about it openly--why, I don't know). My friends, God bless, are very patient and generous with their time, their support. But, only having met in adulthood, they've never really seen me struggle like this.

-

Get a taxi home or whatever

On the way back home from the evening, I was on the threshold of panic. What was wrong with me? Why was I so upset, embarrassed? The worry of walking, the literal worry, creates in me an anxiety and fear that is easier to conquer when I can have verbal reassurances form others that I'm doing well, that I'm not going to fall, and that they will be there to (literally, physically) help me.

Some months ago, when I was still using a wheelchair to mobilise, I had a lady, a near-stranger, tell me I was brave and sooo good to directly tell people what I needed (because, she said, she could never do that). We were at pottery, and I had asked a fellow student, Jan, if I could borrow her tools, and if she could bring me a mug of water. Everyone at pottery who knew me was explicit in their offers of assistance, but I was new to this group and the stranger (by way of being a stranger) didn't know me at all. I replied to the stranger, explaining that it was neither brave nor, as she put it, an indication of my confidence and 'goodness.' As if asking for things that you need--basic, essential needs--is a skill to be worked on. For me, it is a necessity of life.

When I was a child, my needs were unique in that they were the needs of a child with disability. Meaning that the average adult who hadn't come across a disabled kid had no idea what I needed or wanted. They had no idea why I was crying or if I were in pain. I learned to doggedly request things that I needed. I learned to ask 'why' a lot. I learned to speak loudly and often, because if I didn't, most adults would forget that I was slower, prone to falling, at greater risk of drowning. Some adults (and I won't name the ones I remember, because let's face it, it wasn't some adults; it was most adults) decided that I was asking for things just to be difficult, contrary, or selfishly divert attention away from other, less troublesome children. They actively denied me assistance, not to be cruel, but, as was the way for so many children, to teach me a lesson.

What did they teach me? I'm sure it was many things--too many to satisfy you at present. But, back to this lady at pottery. No, asking for things is not a luxury, I told her. She said she admired my outlook and wished that she could do the same. I didn't tell her that this approach of mine came only after ages of trying other things that failed, at the hand of a great and miserable mystery. That adults, teachers, relatives, and others (much older and stronger than me) went to great and ignorant lengths to reprimand me and publicly humiliate me so that I would learn the lesson.

I ask for things so directly because I need them, simple as that. After years of repeating myself, of being confused, being denied, and feeling ashamed of myself for needing extra things that non-disabled people don't necessarily see or understand, I have a habit of stubbornly ignoring the whitehot shame, guilt and grief I feel at having to ask my closest friends and loved ones for physical assistance. Now, people might tell me not to feel that way anymore, that they 'get me' or that I'm okay now and I'm allowed to have needs. Often they say they could never tell that I was having such a hard time navigating this endlessly inaccessible community (yay, narrow unkempt pathways).

Not enough love is given to the observant people who see that I need help, and do the task without drawing much attention to it. I'd much prefer to do things for myself, just so we're clear. But, when required (which is more often these days), I ask for what I need. Most of the time, it's something little that might seem inconsequential to you. The most obvious one is Can we please slow down? when we are walking together, or Can I hold your arm? when walking on uneven pathways, especially at night.

You might find this jarring and awkward at first. But, please don't. It's not special. It's part of life.

*electronic speakers! buried among plants! what have we come to? what about the plants' own language?

^whoever says they want to go back to being a child probably didn't experience much emotional turmoil when they were little (disclaimer: that's just a guess; i'm not the authority on other people or their life experiences)

[stackofstories]

Congrats, you’re an omega

*Travis/Nico/Connor

Let me tell you about children of Hermes.

More abundant than Apollo’s little rays of sunshine, the children of Hermes are most normal. Normal, as in, they are known to blend seamlessly into mortal world attracting little attention even the monsters still prowling about. The children of Hermes do not make it into histories, unlike the children of Poseidon, Hades, and Zeus.

Though, there are few exceptions. Lucas Castellan is the exception. The villain from many perspectives his actions reverberated throughout, he forced changes to the Gods most abiding law. Down in the pits of Hades, how will the ever fair judges deem Luke I wonder. He embodies his father, the divine trickster. But, it is not him who is the exception who is the exception. I speak of Travis and Connor Stoll. Yes, the pun is realized and the joke has been done.

It is a rare thing for mortals to hold a god’s attention. They fall fast in love like it’s their first time each time, but just as quick as they are to love, they fall out of love… and that is almost always a ruinous affair. I can’t say what attracted Hermes to the Stolls’ mother twice over. She was no exceptional beauty. Curly brown haired and unusual hazel eyes, she belonged to the X tribe close to Las Vegas, Nevada. There she stayed until she migrated to the Deep South, East Coast where she attended the University of Memphis as both a undergrad and grad student in Archeology and Linguistics. It is there I theorize she met a great deal of interesting people, not the least of which one of the Olympians.

She died.

I told you relationships with gods are often ruinous. Her two young children brought up by her trusted mentor, Professor Djheuty and team of baboons and Ibsis behind him. None of that explains the oddity of Travis and Connor Stoll. They are not divine tricksters as Luke though their tongues are silver as their brother‘s, they gained a lesser trait forgotten amongst the trades they never quite master. Psychopomp.

It is a rare god with the ability to pass through the veils of life and death easily. Even rarer still choose to visit Hades, unsmiling. So he is especially during the Spring and Fall. Hermes leads lost souls to the shores of death and Charon ferries them across. Some share kinship with death as in the case of Travis and Connor, they are few that do not shrink from death.

Perhaps, dear reader, that I arrive at my point.

Travis and Connor Stoll are rare for gaining their father’s death abilities, but also seeing the humanity in death.

I shudder to imagine a lonely child of Hades in the world. For it is a terrible thing.

• Chiron, Personal Journal MMMVI (2006) pp. 330-31.

-

Drew Tanaka marched toward Connor and his brother.

Some things to know. Drew was a child of Aphrodite. Children of Aphrodite did not march. They swayed with a swing in their hips, a fire in their eyes, and a honeyed curl to their lips. Easily the most beautiful lot at Camp Half Blood children of Aphrodite attracted would be heroes and those just as dazzling as themselves. Of course that meant no child of Aphrodite had ever so much as swayed or sneered in Connor or his brother’s direction willingly. Until today.

Connor jabbed Travis with his elbow and dodged the sleepy slap from his newly awakened brother. He sandwiched Travis’ face between his hands as the furrow crinkled between his brows, jerking him in the direction of an oncoming Drew. “Have we done…?” Connor ventured and Travis shook his head, his brown curls like fall leaves trembled against his head.

“Not to them,” Travis said. “Not one of ours.”

Connor sighed. Since Luke left with more than half of their cabin following behind him and leadership duties thrust upon them, ideas fizzled and camp had been depressingly quiet. The icing on the cake had been the loss of Annabeth and the temporary stay of the cootie-scared immortal girl clique.

“Maybe she’s realized what a nice guy I am,” Connor said. “Better than the ultimate Chad.”

“I always thought you were better liar than me, Con. I was wrong.”

“I am a better liar than you,” Con said. “But in what world does a girl like Drew want to talk to us?”

Travis frowned and didn’t answer. Drew stopped her march in front of them and Connor let go of Travis’s face. Up close, Drew was probably the prettiest girl he had ever seen. She looked like a princess with her long raven hair and soft pale skin. Looking into her eyes was a different experience altogether, they changed colors fitfully and deliriously before they settled on an unsettling quicksilver grey.

“Uh… hi,” Travis said.

“Hello,” Drew returned with a frown. So, she didn’t want to talk to them.

“Why did you come over here?” Connor asked.

“Dude!” Travis turned a smile stretching at its corners toward him. It looked like it hurt. Still, his brother widened his blue eyes as if he was ruining some sort of one in the lifetime chance. “I’m sorry he’s being so rude. He doesn’t talk much to girls, pretty girls, at that.”

“I don’t care,” Drew said.

“Told you,” Connor muttered under his breath.

“I came over here because you’re in charge of the unclaimed, right?” she asked.

It was a rhetorical question. Before Luke went turncoat, the Hermes cabin was filled with their siblings and demigods that had never been claimed by parent. The Greeks known for their hospitality, that was one of Dad’s many domains, therefore he welcomed all. For years, there hadn’t been enough space for a Pomeranian let alone an unlucky camper that found out dear absent mommy or daddy was a god. Now, there were actual empty beds – not sleeping bags or cots – in their cabin.

“You know we are,” Connor said.

Drew crossed her arms. “You aren’t doing a very good job. You need to watch him.”

“I love the pronoun game,” Connor said with half a smile glancing at his brother. “Does she mean spooky Torrington. No, he left. How about the two little boys Wyn and Victor — they’re quite lucky — maybe you’re talking about Ethan—“

“You think you’re funny.”

“I get a few laughs,” Connor countered.

“Hmm.” Drew squinted at him. Selina’s eyes were kind, Drew’s suspicious. I’m not talking about any of them. I’m referring to the pipsqueak with the motor mouth.”

“Nico,” Travis said. “What about Nico. If you and your stupid harpies are about to curse him—“

“No one’s messing with him,” Drew interrupted. “No one would dare, but, you’ve noticed he’s changed since he’s been here.”

Again, Connor and Travis mirrored blue. For the first two mornings Nico woke bright eyed and bushy -tailed eager to take on the day. Connor wouldn’t have expected it from a kid that slept like the dead and demanded no lights at bedtime. This morning they woke him and he swam in a pool of his own sweat, dark bags raccooned under his eyes. When he spoke it had been a death rattle of a whisper.

“He was slow this morning. Escaping death from boulders and lava gets a little boring.” Travis said diplomatically.

“Have you smelled him lately?”

“Uh?” said Travis ever the wordsmith.

“I thought betas had the superior scent,” Drew wrinkled her delicate alpha nose. “How is it that you never noticed his scent.”

“We don’t have puppy piles.”

The first of many traditions that went out of the door with Luke’s defection. No more nesting time where all of the Hermes came together before lights out, checked in and groomed each other. Luke said it strengthened their cabin. The warmth left with Luke and Connor did not care to try again. Especially their numbers dwindling by the season.

“Sad,” said Drew with a tone that implied anything but.

“Is that what you came to tell us. Nico smells like cyclops dung?”

Drew rolled her eyes. “He smells like before a thunderstorm.”

“And that’s bad.”

Connor waited for her to explain the obvious.

“Di immortales,” Drew cursed. “He doesn’t smell as he usually smells. He’s flushed.”

“A fever, maybe?” Connor opened his hands. “It sounds like he needs a medic not you telling us off. Drag him to Will, you know, he’s eager to get his hands on someone.”

“I heard he’s started to assist Michael in the medic bay,” Travis added in.

All three of them groaned in unison.

“I don’t think it’s a fever,” Drew said.

“If it’s not an urgent medic issue I don’t see how it’s our problem then,” Connor dismissed. “If you’re so worried about him you have enough charm to get blood from a turnip.”

Drew’s eyes were an oil slick black, children of Aphrodite were not crossed easily.

“I could get you to listen,” Drew said.

Connor’s heart thudded against his rib cage. “In our lessons, we learned it only took one word from the most beautiful and worthy of Aphrodite’s children to take the world.”

“And another from a child of Hermes to get it back,” Drew sniffed. “I’m not here to test you, sweetie pie. Keep eyes on the pipsqueak. Both of you.”

She gave them a half hearted wave, her manicured nails pointed like knives. She swayed, a hypnotic left and right, as she walked away the smell of pine and nutmeg trailing strong after her.

“So?” asked Connor.

Travis rested on the table. “How long has Drew been at Camp?”

“She came a little more than a month after us. We were the awful middle children always made to watch over the little ones… Annabeth, Drew and Beckendorf,” Connor said.

Travis snorted. Connor matched his smile. He and Connor were nine and ten respectively pushed to played with seven-year-old’s because they were too young to run with Luke and his crowd of adolescents. It had been them against the world. Well, Annabeth was the bridge… Luke listened to Annabeth and Annabeth did whatever Luke said.

“She was an entitled brat,” Travis said, then in high pitched squeak. “My daddy owns the largest funeral and wedding companies in the world. If you cross me you won’t have a wedding, and you’ll be lucky to be buried on Hart Island.”

Connor laughed.

“Drew’s never given a single shit about this life, about anyone from here. Except for Lena.”

Connor nodded. The only camper able to handle Drew Tanaka and Clarisse La Rue. “And Nico,” Connor added. “And Nico.”

“And Nico,” Travis echoed.

“We should go check up on him.” Travis pushed off the bench stretching and cracking limbs. “C’mon. Let’s get going.”

On a normal year, Connor enjoyed the winter holidays. Most everybody living beyond the borders of Camp came flooding back. Mr. D always in good cheer when Chiron broke out the nutmeg this he allowed the weather to change to a winter wonderland. He and Travis were often charged with raiding the camp stores and working with Beckendorf to decorate all eleven cabins and areas with bulbs of warm fire. The rules were so much more lax.

Instead of unclaimed cabiners following Hermes’ camp schedule, there was a lot of free time. As long as Nico showed at the Hermes table for his meals and ended up in their cabin by nightfall, he was free to do as he wished.

Full of warm lights and snow Camp lacked its usual cheer. Connor hated to be reminded of it.

“Where did Nico say he was going this morning?”

“Arts and crafts,” Travis said.

Connor hummed. “I hope he’s better than craft making than we were. Remember when you tried to make an Cleopatra’s Needle. It looked like –“

“Washington‘s Monument,” Travis said with a sullen smile. He waved to Beckendorf as they passed the great forges, an Aphrodite shadow at his side; the Big House looming large the pinochle board and big stuffed chair empty.

They treaded a familiar path. Connor kicked up the footprints of the snow replacing them with his.

“What’s happening over there?” Travis nodded to their right.

“What else. A fight in the pits.”

“But there’s a lot of people over there.”

Connor shrugged. “It must be a very interesting fight. A real alpha to alpha blowout.

“The Huntresses are over there.”

Connor scowled. “What do I care about those ugly cows.”

“Still fuming over that capture the flag game. It was two days ago,” Travis said with a side eye.

“It was a good helmet and now I owe Beckendorf a favor.”

“We had our revenge,” Travis said. “You hold grudges like a child of Athena.”

Connor shrugged. He didn’t see it as an insult. “Whatever, let’s go peek at your fight, then get back to finding Nico.”

Travis flashed him a wide smile. He hurried to the side and Connor trudged after him. Together, they pushed through the crowd of people to the front. Glancing over his shoulder, it seemed more than half of camp plus the hunters were here more than he expected for a regular mock battle.

“Ooh,” Connor said mashing with brother’s outcry, “What in Tartarus. Nico!”

Connor fenced his brother back with an arm. “Don’t.”

Travis pushed his arm away. “He hasn’t gotten any sword training,” he hissed. “Or have you forgotten we lost the best swordsman in three hundred years and the best swordsman in an age has mysteriously disappeared as well.”

“I remember,” Connor said. “But–”

“He’s going to get hurt.”

Connor tried hard to contain his eye roll. Nico was really working wonders here. First he thawed the icy heart of Drew Tanaka, and now, his brother appeared to have developed a complex. Nico had been with them for less than seventy-two hours.

“He’s not going to get hurt. This isn’t a game of capture the flag in the forest. A couple of bruises and maybe some hurt feelings after his first loss, but nothing that ambrosia and some hot chocolate at dinner won’t fix.”

“He’s only ten.”

“Relax,” Connor said. “Maybe he won’t be the one with the bruises. Would you relax for a second and look at what’s happening in front of you.” He pointed.

It would have been an educated guess to choose anyone on Nico. Especially in a camp full of veteran demigods. Connor recognized Summer Graine, an alpha son of Persephone with a short sword. Graine was a decent swordsman neither the best or the worst, he had knocked Connor down on his butt a few times. Nico was keeping up with him. He was an orange blur, on the offensive as he slashed forward with “is that a dagger?”

Most demigods preferred a sword or bow. Annabeth used a dagger. Annabeth was not most demigod. Each time she beat her opponent, she boasted with her metal of weapon glimmering in the sun her eyes as sharp as the tip of her dagger. “Only the fastest and cleverest demigods use knives.”

“It’s a kukri,” said a huntress. Her dark eyes pierced him. “He’s a little boy not strong enough to lift a metal sword and defend himself.” She patted her empty pouch brown as her skin. “I gave it to him.”

“All huntresses hate boys.”

Her eyes flashed. “Only the terrible ones. I heard what you did to my sister.”

The repeated clanging against the metal shield tore their attention to the battle pit. Nico was pushed by forward thrust. He stumbled a few steps regaining his feet narrowly escaping another strike when Summer took the opportunity to close the distance. Summer caught him, jabbing Nico hard into the chest.

Connor winced as Travis bristled.

“He shouldn’t push so hard.”

“D’you think the monsters out there be all understanding because he’s a kid.”

“But he’s not out there.”

“And you give him too little credit.”

“He’ll be a fine alpha one day,” the hunter said.

Will he? The buoyancy and aggressive attitude suggested it. He’d grow hungry, horny, and other if he had happened to get his rut or a face full of acne, mysterious body pain and hair in weird places with enhanced senses (the Spiderman as Connor called it) if he were a beta. It would be years at his earliest before Nico’s secondary sex revealed itself.

“Nico‘s smaller than average. A shrimp,” Travis said.

“I’ve seen alphas of all shapes and sizes,” the hunter said. “He has the hot blood.”

That was for sure. Nico had jumped to his feet beginning his onslaught once more. It looked like he was dancing.

“And the delicacy,” Travis said.

Connor side-eyed his brother.

“Yield!” Summer called out. “I yield!”

Summer’s shield was cast of the side in a show of dust and snow. His sword laid limp in his hand. Nico sat painfully on Summer’s gut. The kukri pressed on Summer’s neck.

Nico breathed hard. “ I want to fight more. Say you will pick up your sword again.”

“I yield.”

“Best two out of three.”

“No! I’m done, get off of me.”

The ground sang beneath Nico. “You are the strongest, aren’t you. You told me you were the strongest. I want to fight more.”

“T–“

“Nico,” Travis said.

Connor laughed with Nico’s snap of his head. His amusement dried with the pink flush gashed on his cheek and the bridge of his nose.

“Nico, it is done,” Connor said. “Let’s go.”

“I don’t want too.”

“Nico,” Travis said. “It’s over.”

Connor recognized the tone in his brother’s voice. He knew better than to argue and Nico had the same instinct. In a flash he moved off of Summer, braking in front of them. Travis grasped the back of Nico’s neck, the pink on his cheek resembled less flamingo feathers and more cherries.

“Are you feeling okay?” asked Travis.

“Yes.” Nico nodded. The curls of black twisted around his ears. “I feel fine.” Connor didn’t need his inner lie detector to tell him Nico fudged his words.

“I’d be tired after that,” Connor cajoled. “Let’s go to the medic bay to get some ambrosia then a mid noon nap.”

Nico shook his head. “I don’t want to go to sleep,” he said. “How long do quests take.”

“It depends. Sometimes days, sometimes months.” Years. The Athena cabin apparently had an ongoing quest to retrieve an old statute.

“Are quests dangerous. Do people die?”

It was clear as glass Nico was worried about his sister. She had been hand picked to go on her first quest by the ancient one. A stupid decision by all accounts. Not everyone was like Percy Jackson son of Seafood born under a lucky star. Untrained and untested by all accounts he should have been monster bait, but he survived victorious through every trial. Even with the chilling new prophecy where two were foretold to die, Connor had a gut feeling Percy would come back to them unscathed.

Not everyone was Percy.

“All the time,” Connor said. “They aren’t trips to Disney World.”

Nico squirmed. They waited him for him to find his courage or fall back. “My sister is an alpha. She was the strongest alpha I knew even before the dance until I saw Percy fight Dr. Thorn and what he looked like when the blonde girl fell.” His wide brown eyes glittered. “He wasn’t supposed to go on the trip, I was, but he stopped me. I let him go because he promised to keep my sister safe. Percy promised.”

What an awful thing to promise Connor thought.

“Percy’s strong?” Nico asked.

“Yes,” Travis answered.

“Does Percy lie?”

“Everyone lies,” Connor answered. “Some are good and some are not. Percy is not half bad but he is not a liar.”

Nico nodded. “He’ll keep his promise, then.”

Connor laid a hand atop Nico’s black hair wet with sweat. “He’ll try his best.”

Nico shook him and Travis off shoving past them. He stopped to hand the kukri back to the hunter, then went on his way. His hands crammed deep into his pockets.

With sundown most of the campers made their way to the dining pavilion. Connor put the last of the bows back on their hooks, then hurried to dinner. It was a skeleton crew at Camp, thirteen hunters — well, twelve hunters as the one he poisoned was still in the medic bay scratching her skin off – and another thirty regular campers making their way down a well-trodden road. Travis and Katie Gardner were near the front their heads knocked together and Connor smiled to think this was the excuse his brother came up when they parted ways this afternoon.

He let them have their moment figuring come bedtime he pester him for details.

“Let’s show Mr. D and Chiron we know how to line up.” Connor clapped his hands.

Seniority was easier these days. There were huge lulls between campers. Connor and Travis when he was done flirting started in the beginning, then came the rest with Nico, the little caboose.

Catching his eyes, Connor waved a little and pouted when Nico gave him a half hearted wave back. “Maybe he’s still embarrassed,” Connor muttered to himself, the brushing it off.

Satyrs scampered from the forest. The thick fur coats lined in white snow. Naiads emerged from the river and Nymphs bled from the trees. Despite the chilly weather, they kept their clothes of the summer flowing dresses. Hestia was already at the brazier, it hard to see her as she blended well with the great fire.

The Gathering could take anywhere fifteen minutes. Like Chiron said the rules were lax in the winter. When it looked like everywhere had joined in, Chiron raised his glass in the air and Mr. D followed with his filled with milky nutmeg.

“To the Gods!” Chiron said.

“To the Gods,” Connor said, the reflex gut deep.

Free to sit down, Connor grabbed by his sleeve and pulled him down to his right. He elbowed an unclaimed camper down one and left room for Travis to sit on the other side of Nico. He laughed at Travis’s flushed face and his pink ears.

“What?” demanded Travis.

“Nothing,” Connor laughed. “I just saw a snake in Katie’s personal garden.”

“Shut up.”

“Ah.” Connor lifted his eyebrows. “Remember no mating marks.”

“Shut up about it. All right, shut up.”

“Mating marks?” Nico frowned. “You’ve already found your mate, Travis?”

Connor coughed to hide the bark of laughter as Travis navigated between glaring over Nico’s head at him, then blushing and struggling for his words as he met Nico’s inquisitive gaze. There was something about the kid that made it impossible to lie.

Wood nymphs saved the day. The put down golden platters of food. For most of the year they were served a more Mediterranean diet consisting of strawberries, apples, oranges, garlic, onions, tomatoes and olives (lots and lots of olives), cheeses, and yogurts. If they wanted meat fish and other seafood were served. In the winter, they are heartier foods like pot pie, thick soups and stews, and meat casseroles.

Connor would have killed for some kushari.

“Koshary with a side milk and sugar,” Connor said to his goblet. It wasn’t the traditional meal he had wanted but he had the tea. It was a small victory, he brought his cup closer and watched the tea leaves settle at the bottom.

“Let’s go make our offerings before the line gets too long.”

Nico was herded in front of them, Connor behind them, and Travis last all of them carried a plate. For about six years, Connor had been stingy with his best food offered to the gods despite Luke’s early warnings to take it seriously. Gods did not eat. He did. Tonight was different. Nico scrapped nearly all of his food into the roaring fire, his small head bowed for long time before he moved along. Connor watched him, then it was his turn.

Parting ways with the fish and best pieces of bread, he attempted to do something he hadn’t done in a long awhile: he prayed: whoever is the parent of nico, watch over your kids. he’s struggling and he needs your guidance, please.

Connor jumped when the flames reacted to him. It did not smell as usually did a sunshine, strawberries, rain, old scrolls, Memphis barbecue. This was a small clean smell, freshly upturned ground, coldness and the reek of death.

He stared into the flames. The orange and red shimmered to show a man on throne encrusted in gleaming jewels and black metal. Incredibly uncomfortable on his heinie aside, it was obvious he was a king. Long and sharp as sword, Connor tried to puzzle him gasping when the king looked up at him with glittering obsidian eyes.

A hand touched his shoulder. Connor jumped tearing from the fire.

“Connor?” Travis asked, the concern thick in his voice.

“I zoned out,” Connor said, “more tired than I realized.” He made a quick exit back to his table. No doubt Travis was going to grill him later on, which was fine, but he didn’t need the rest of the camp to know he was coo-coo-bananas.

The rest of dinner happened without fanfare. There weren’t any announcements for group activities such as capture the flag or chariot racing. After everyone was done eating Mr. D and Chiron dismissed them to the amphitheater.

Nico stayed between them despite sending longing glances to the Aphrodite section. Drew had sent them a total of one casual glance and flick of her hair over her shoulder, then they were off to bed. Well. Sort of.

“Come sit with us.” Connor patted the spot on the bed.

Predictably, Nico’s face told all. He was unsure. Connor understood. It was quickly established that and his brother’s room, the biggest of the room in the Hermes cabin, was their territory and they did not keep an open door policy despite being counselors.

“What’s that?” Nico asked pointing at the headrest where a pillow would have laid.

“It’s an enchanted headrest,” Travis said, “It keeps our dreams safe. Who knows who could be watching.”

“Cool!” Nico exclaimed.

Connor blinked. “I guess it is cool since it keeps us from getting eaten by dream demons and regular demons.”

“Or having Clovis accidentally wander into dreams,” Travis said.

Connor nodded. The kid was a powerful sleeper.

“We’ve been wanting to talk to you, Nico,” Travis broached, “Have you been groomed?”

“Only by Bianca,” Nico said playing with his hands. “Last time she did it was before the dance…”

“Until the quest is over, do you want us to do it?” Connor added in.

Their plan had been a hodgepodge of ideas before Travis needed an excuse to go to see Katie. They meant to check in with Nico before bed. The easiest way to get a little kid like Nico to open up, grooming. Despite the suggestion, it felt awkward to invite another into their fold. Even in their puppy piles day they kept on the fringes never allowing anyone to close.

“Okay,” Nico said small.

“You can say no, Nico,” Travis said, “our feelings won’t be hurt.”

“Yeah, it’s no big deal,” Connor said.

Nico glanced between them. He blew out swinging his legs. “I want too.”

Connor nodded. “How does Bianca groom you?”

Nico showed them via dive balling on them. The ten-year-old was a lot heavier than expected. Still he laid on them kneeing them in the gut a few times and stabbing them in the eye a few times as Nico struggled to find a good position. When he put them throughly the ringer he strewn across their laps, his head in Connor’s lap, a leg thrown into Travis’ and a glowing boy in between.

“Some nights Bianca combs my hair.” Nico told them. “She mostly just… I don’t know… leans on me like a weeping willow.” His lip bottom sucked into his mouth. “Sometimes we practice our Venetian, she wants to make sure I don’t forget it.”

“You’re Italian?” Connor asked.

Nico nodded. “Bianca and I were born in Venice. We came here…” his forehead creased as he stared off into the distance. “Not here here but Washington D.C. I think because something bad was happening back at home.”

“What was bad?” Connor asked.

“I don’t know,” Nico said slowly, “I think it had something to do with the fighting.”

“Uh-huh,” Connor said. Well that was vague and unhelpful. Fighting in history. Not exactly well versed in world history he couldn’t come up with a single fight within the last decade or so that would merit an escape from the county. Sighing, Connor put it behind him. Tonight, he focused on Nico and making sure he slept enough that Drew Tanaka wouldn’t march on them.

Travis made the first move. He put long arms on Nico’s pajama clad legs grasping over them to reach a book – a comic book – on the other side resting it atop of Nico. Connor was cautious. He combed through Nico’s dark hair pushing sections out and around his ears, small and paler than the natural olive of the boy’s skin.

At that, Nico relaxed. He turned his cheek and head in Connor’s lap. He paused and slowed his stroke hanging onto the strands with the wave at its hand, bewitched as Nico fought sleep. He had never watched someone fall asleep as Nico did. He yawned and yawned, stretching his mouth as if the more air he consumed the more alert he’d become. But it wasn’t so. Each time he yawned the brightness in his eyes dimmed and his eyelids brushed up and down. By the fourth eyelid brush down, Nico lost. He was asleep.

“I didn’t think that would work,” Connor said.

Travis scoffed. “He’s a scared kid. Of course, this work.”

“We were scared kids once,” Connor said.

“Not like the others,” Travis said.

Connor frowned at him. He and Travis were not like the others shored into Camp Half Blood. It was an old hurt to remember they had once been kids with raised in a different world with different Gods told to forget about it all and keep quiet. “You’re right, we had each other and an eye for bullshit,” Connor said.

“What did you see?” Travis asked.

“Who did you pray for tonight?”

“Not who. What,” Travis said, “I prayed for the same: money, more time with Katie, a car.”

Connor hummed. “Try again.”

“For us to get us through this war,” Travis said. “Good barbecue.”

“The barbecue they serve here is bland as hell,” Connor acknowledged.

“Why are we talking about barbecue, Con?”

Drew Tanaka had been right. He known him since she was eight-year-old. Eight-year-ok’d with a gaze that told her she was looked down at them so mightily she was actually looking up. Until she turned her heavenly stare downwards and for a few moments they were on the same level. Nico was the linchpin. “He does smell different. When I scrapped my food into fire I had forgotten that Nico smells like death.”

“Appealing,” Travis noted.

“Remember Percy when he was crammed in here and how everybody stayed away from him because he smelt of salt and rage.”

Travis wrinkled his nose.

“And then he went on and his father ended up being Aquaman,” Connor continued. “I stared into these flames tonight and I was given a vision of Nico’s dad. I know who he is.”

“Who is it?”

“Hades, god of the underworld and all which rests under our feet,” Connor said, he was careful in his wording. It was one thing to piss off Zeus and Poseidon but quite another to do it to a god with control over your after life.

Travis gave him a blank stare. “I’m not falling for it.”

“Well, good for you. I didn’t lie about this, Travis. Nico’s really Hades’ kid.”

“No,” Travis insisted as if saying the word alone made it untrue. “We learned this in Demigod World 101. After the World War Two, the Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades all agreed they would have no more children and let me finish, I know Zeus broke his promise with Thalia and I know Poseidon broke his promise with Percy, but Hades? The River Styx is in his domain. He is the keeper of oaths… he wouldn’t break a promise.”

Connor gave him a helpless shrug. “I agree with you. It doesn’t make sense, but I feel it in my gut, Nico is his son and Bianca his daughter.”

His brother scowled fiercely. His eyes burned as he held his comic pages open so tightly they tore at the seams. “There are eleven cabins none for Hades.”

“I know.”

“If people find out they might shun him.”

“I know.”

“He might be the child of the prophecy.”

“I know.”

“He’ll be ours to protect.”

Travis laid next to Nico. The grip on his comic book loosened and he dared to reach out to touch Nico’s chubby cheek. He leaned into the warm touch, sinking further into Connor’s lap.

“I know.”

And that’s the end of that.

_

The deafening rumble of the earth startled Connor, and he paused on his bedding. He twisted to his brother and saw the same question mirrored in his eyes. What was that? An earthquake seemed unlikely, from first grade science he knew New York City wasn’t on any major fault lines and what was more, this was protected land. The great earth shaker, god of Seafood and Shamu, kept his black moods to other parts of the world. He sat up, imagining what might have caused the rumble. A stampede from the forest of death. Maybe a swarm of giants decided to invade camp halfblood? The rock wall was on the fritz. There seemed a million possibilities and not one of them fit. He got to his feet, noticed it was dark. And quiet. How could it be so quiet when there was rumbling, this time the ground shook beneath him. He held onto the windowsill and saw the clouds, a dark forbode mixture.

“Connor!” called Travis just as the door to their room pushed open. Drew took a single gulping breath, her hands clenched bone white and it was the closest to the scared she had ever looked.

“You two!” she growled despite the wet shine in her eyes. “We need to go now.”

“What are you talking about Drew. There’s an earthquake, I don’t have time for your games, you need to go to your cabin and I need to gather mi—“

“It’s no earthquake,” she snapped. “It’s Nico. I saw him in the forest with Percy, Annabeth, and Grover.”

“His sister. The huntresses that went on the quest?” Travis asked. “Did you see them too.”

There was a sinking feeling in the pit of his belly. The sharp pinch of reality known to demigods. There’s was a short and dangerous life. And Bianca should have never been sent on that quest.

“God’s dammit,” cursed Connor. Another monstrous rumble from the ground and they all collectively wobbled clinging to whatever they found sturdiest until it ebbed. Then, they ran into the dark cloud of forest, fighting pine needles and hidden branches. Nimble, Drew led them back to the clearing, the black of her hair stuck to her forehead.

Who knew Aphrodite girls sweat, he thought blinking at her then facing the damage.

“You promised!” Nico yelled.

He hadn’t noticed them entering the clearing. But Connor could see him clearly, the marks of exhaustion as he trembled in place, his pale face twisted with a shaking rage barely hissing the grief found in his red-rimmed eyes. He crushed something in his hands and Travis moved. But Connor caught the tail of his shirt.

“Don’t,” said Connor.

For real, Travis’s face twisted—

“I shouldn’t have trusted you.” Nico looked small. He was small. Ten years old. Had been a week or less since he arrived in Camp Half Blood, so joyful upon his acceptance he played two rounds of poker and won against them without knowing the rules, shooting of questions to everyone he met. But that Nico died in the proceeding. He was small. “You lied to me. My nightmares were right.”

Oh those nightmares. The reason why Nico slept between them in a fitful sleep. The dark bags under his eyes arose by the day and brushed off despite cajoling. Nothing was wrong, he lied to them. And one day, he woke up in a fit of blubbering, gasping tears. Had then been when Bianca died?

“She’s dead.” He closed his eyes and Travis struggled in his hold.

“Let go,” Travis said. “He needs us. This has got to stop.”

“He has to say his piece to Percy,” Connor argued. “This is between them.”

“No it isn’t–“

“I should have known it earlier. She’s in the Fields of Asphodel, standing before the judges, being evaluated. I can feel it.”

“What do you mean you can feel it?” Percy and his group were freaked out.

“See, I told you,” Connor said. “He’s the son of Hades.”

Travis didn’t have the time to chide him. A hissing, clattering dres their attention and Connor’s breath caught. There were none soldiers with swords raised high, advancing on them as if they were in a real life Jason and the Argonauts.

“You’re trying to kill me!” Nico yelled. “You brought these things.”

Ok. It was time to step in. Connor let go off Travis and he pushed ahead into the fray of the empty pavilion. Percy whirled and slashed the zombie monsters and Nico was more grief stricken. Even Drew jumped into the fray pairing herself up with Percy.

“Stop it! Stop it, boneheads!” she screamed and they all froze unable to move their limbs. Drew rolled his eyes.

“Oh, for the love – Percy, Nico, and Stolls, y’all can unfreeze – idiots!” she was back to staring at them from so down, she was actually staring up.

“Nico,” Connor said as he took the left and Travis the right. “I know what you’re feeling really, really bad right now. But Percy’s not too blame.”

“No!” Nico shook his head and pressed his hands to his ears. “You don’t understand. He promised me. He broke his promise. He said, he promised, Bianca would be safe.”

“I’m sorry, man,” Percy cried. “I tried. I shouldn’t have –“

“No!” power bled into Nico’s voice, he pushed them aside. “Go away. I don’t want to see you anymore, go away.”

The air turned bitter cold. Frost and shadow crept on the ground and Percy took a choking step back, his sword clattered on the ground. “I hate you,” Nico spat. “You’re the one that should be dead.”

The ground rumbled underneath all the more fiercely. Nico seemed to take on a hold new strength while the great Percy Jackson dwindled before their eyes. Becoming more transparent by the second. Was Nico doing that?

“Stop it,” Travis said. “Stop it right now, Nico.”

“What’s that smell?” asked Connor.

Disorientated, it took him a beat to recognize the bittersweet tang in the air. Nico. His cheeks were flushed and his breathing hard and Drew laughed, the skeletal battalion still frozen behind her. “He’s an omega. And he’s gone berserk.”

Connor and Travis stood together, Oercy disappearing by the second and Nico high off his own power, watching. What should they do. Connor heard of berserk omegas, of course, who hadn’t heard of the great Achilles and his indomitable rage. Somehow this was scarier than Achilles’ rage because he was eventually taken down how would they stop a child of Hades who was not ready to hear reason.

“Give him the mating mark,” Drew said. “It will be enough to exhaust him. Calm him.”

“He’s a child,” Connor said.

“He’ll kill Percy and continue on.” Drew Tanaka did not mince words.

“ you stop him.”

“Sorry sweetie pie that’s not how my voice works,” she said, “I’ve already exerted myself with this army.” Her face screwed.

Connor and Travis looked at each. We’re they doing this? They were doing this. They hadn’t a choice. If Nico hated the, he hated them, but at least there would be no blood on their hands. In unison, they leaned down and but Nico’s neck.

He screamed.

Percy survived.

[niniane17]

This is an answer to @lives4lovesworld 's question on my Stannis vs Dany's meta:

(Sorry for the screenshot, but I'm on my phone with no access to the laptop)

In my experience, that happens very often with Daenerys. There is a huge, huge tendency in the fandom to take things away from her and give them to other characters. I've lost the count of how many times I saw metas/speculations/fanfictions which are basically "what if X had Dany's plotline?".

Setting aside the (depressingly widespread) misogyny that motivates this tendency, I think it all comes down to the fact that, whether we like it or not, Daenerys is the hero of the story. She is tied to most of ASOIAF's themes, if not all: war vs peace, ruling vs conquering, hard power vs soft power, the intersection of gender and class, free will vs biological destiny, abusive family dynamics, politics, money and, of course, magic and prophecies.

(Lol that looks like a laundry list of dark AO3 tags)

Most of the time they don't even realize they are giving Dany's plotline to other characters: they just want their faves or even their OC/self-inserts to be special, and to be special in the ASOIAF world means to be more like Daenerys, to have the same things she does. And, you know, I understand it. Not everyone has to like the things I do! If some readers think that it would be a better story if, say, Arya, Young Griff or Robert's hypothetical trueborn son were Azor Ahai, more power to them.

What I don't understand is instisting that Daenerys' story line is irrelevant at best or evil at worst, and that either way she is bound to die to make things smoother for other characters. This is like writing a "Neville Longbottom is the Boy Who Lived AU" but claiming that, in canon, Harry is not the Boy who Lived or he is secretly Voldemort. It just doesn't make sense to me.

As for Stannis vs Daenerys specifically, I think it's because a lot of people identify with Stannis and his awkwardness, and want him to win. In his own way, Stannis is also a subversion, given that he's a good Macbeth who sincerely thinks he's doing the best for Westeros and who doesn't push his claim out of ambition but rather a sense of duty. I do feel personal reasons of disappointment towards his brother do play a role in all this as well (see whole "I am the messiah of a foreign religion because this woman says so" thing. I mean, that is definitely an emotional decision), but he certainly isn't a greedy, ambitious bastard. In fact, he is right when he says he is the legitimate heir of the Baratheon line.

That is bound to reasonate with readers, and create interest, for multiple reasons. I suspect that a non-insignificant part of his fandom just want to see the Macbeth trope subverted, which I absolutely get. I myself consider Daenerys as the subversion of a very (in)famous trope: the pyromaniac madwoman, a concept so prevalent that is embodied by the books' main female villain.

Ultimately, though, I believe Stannis is a sympathetic but straightforward example of the tragic hero turned villain. There is a lot of beauty in this idea, however, and I suspect this is why they give his story line to Daenerys. This way, she gets to be the protagonist AND the villain, which I admit it's better than making her discount Cersei or discount Aerys.

While I don't recommend reading ASOIAF solely in terms of "which trope is going to be subverted" (this is how you get crazy stuff like Political!Jon), I do think that, when it comes to the Dany-Stannis conflict, it's indeed a question of whose story is a subversion and why, at least partially. In my opinion, Daenerys represents something far more important, and her story needs to end in a non-tragic way to have some meaning at all. Not because "women need role models in fantasy!" (and what's wrong with that, anyway? So many men take Aragorn or Luke Skywalker as role models and nobody makes fun of them) but because narratively, thematically, even artistically it has to.

What would be ASOIAF if Daenerys, the fire of Ice and Fire, ended up dying a tragic villain, consumed by madness? A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In my opinion, this is the perfect description of Game of Thrones' finale.

[darkwood-sleddog]

Do you think huskies suffer from their popularity and are becoming less "well-bred"? Like a lot of huskies nowadays look too big-boned.

Certainly, but I mean this isn't a problem that is unique to huskies, literally any popular breed has this problem (Dalmations in the 1960's and 1970s, GSD and Golden Retrievers, huge majority of designer dogs etc). Large population usually does not = a large well-bred population because human beings are creatures of immediate gratification and want a puppy NOW who cares where it comes from right? Responsibly bred dogs take time and money and a majority of people aren't willing to put their money where their mouth in and pay and wait for that well-bred dog. I phrase I often seen parroted is "I'm just looking for a pet so it doesn't need fancy titled parents" or whatever, not understanding the crucial work that goes into breeding dogs responsibly (nor caring if you try and talk to them).

Now for huskies specifically I think that their popularity has been a pretty big negative for them as a breed. The general populace has no idea was a correct Siberian Husky is supposed to look like, they're shocked to see how small and dainty they are. The popularity of the husky and these less than well bred individuals also means that a wide majority of huskies will not have Siberian Husky Standard Temperaments and while this is a problem that can plague any popular breed, for working breeds it's pretty disastrous. Huskies and northern breed mixes are depressingly common in the shelter system and people vastly and i mean VASTLY underestimate what these dogs require leading to a large population of understimulated, underexcercised, mentally unstable dogs that are genetically unhealthy. Their popularity also ensures that their poor behavior is seen more often by the public, creating a polarized opinion of the breed which is often based on behaviors that are not necessarily breed standard in well-bred individuals.

But I don't think it's accurate to say a breed has gone downhill because they are plagued by these popularity issues. There are more responsibly bred dogs now more than ever I feel and additionally we know more about health testing and dog genetics than we ever have before. Do I often wax poetic about the dogs of years past? Certainly, I think ring trends have changed and not necessarily for the better, but I'd be lying to myself to think that the dogs of 1930s are 'better' than that of today. They didn't have access to health testing, genetic testing. Conformation wasn't as well understood and dogs often lacked structurally, close linebreeding was MUCH more common and we knew very little about the effects of such at the time.

Overall I think dogs are better today than they were in the past because of the knowledge we know about their health in vast majority (with exceptions for really unhealthy breeds...which were probably just as sick 20, 30, 50 years ago etc). I think that human beings need to get their heads out of their ass and learn more about dogs/breeding in general before they pull the trigger and buy that furry little immediate gratification puppy. I wish people thought more about the dogs they were bringing into their lives and their individual breed traits.

[lolbatty]

Just a quick blurb about some of the stuff I’ve been feeling and struggling with lately about my slowly ending toxic relationship and other stuff..

So far the worst part for me has been convincing my childhood abandonment trauma brain that it’s OKAY to let this person go... that because of many valid actual damn reasons I witnessed they were not a great person for me to spend time with or put energy into.  They didn’t listen to me when I was speaking, did things for me only out of guilt, refused to introduce me to any of their friends or family, continually minimized my feelings, and lied to me constantly about their intentions for the relationship.

I think one of the more nefarious things about the relationship was that another person was involved that I didn’t know about at the beginning, an ex that they were still super close with.  I was trying so hard to be understanding, so scared that I was just being jealous or overbearing when I felt the fear grip me inside after discovering their relationship.  At one point this person even moved into their house, and I wasn’t allowed to come over anymore because ‘they’d get jealous’.  I believed badly tailored lies to keep me around because I was too scared to let them go, especially during the full-swing of the pandemic when I had no one else to be close to. I really valued this person.  I really wanted to believe that relationships are just complicated and messy and it wasn’t them still being in love with this other person, prioritizing them over me, but every instinct inside of me was screaming and every friend I talked to about it looked at me like I was crazy for trying not to be upset or suspicious.  I ignored my intuition, figuring that I was just overreacting.   Even now that we’ve broken up and are slowly drifting apart this other person is still a big part of their life, while their interactions with me are dwindling to nothing (a good thing obviously, but still painful for that inner child).  I should be happy, but part of me is insanely envious of this connection they have, even a little furious.  It triggers a very primal wound from my earliest years.

When I was growing up (4-11yrs) my I worshiped my Dad but he always had a lot of girlfriends, when I spent time with him in the summers I often had to ‘compete’ with these full grown women for his attention because he prioritized his relationships with them over his relationship with me.  It was heart breaking, and gave me a very unhealthy idea of what was expected of XX bodied people to attract and keep attention.  It also gave me a very DEEP and abiding wound centered around jealousy and envy which is haunting me the most right now with my current healing process.  Old, untouched parts of me are churning beneath the surface of my consciousness, altering my ability to regulate my emotions and think logically about how much better off I am not having this crap in my life.  I am SO PISSED OFF that this other person was -chosen- over me.  And even though I never met them, I always hear this ancient voice inside my head wondering.. what do they have that I don’t?  Why wasn’t I good enough?

It’s not that I want this destructive thing in my life, logically I know I should be singing and fucking dancing, howling at the damn moon because I escaped this invalidating cycle of bread crumbing, lying, gaslighting and back burnering.  I know I deserve better.  I want so badly to have better.  But there is so much pain inside of me from these deep old traumas, and I have a lot of really old scars that need to be re-examined and addressed.  In some ways I am grateful for this horrible experience because of everything I’ve learned about my anxious attachment, childhood trauma, complex PTSD and how it relates to my inability to have normal, healthy relationships. 

But I’m also pretty mad about the last two years of my life being an emotionally damaging experience, in the midst of a pandemic, shortly after the sudden and depressingly tragic death of my alcoholic, narcissistic father.

I’ve changed.  I don’t even remember what it was like to be me before 2018.  I don’t draw anymore.  I don’t post anymore.  Commissions are a struggle.  I miss the days of endless artwork and music and fandoms.. cruising tumblr and getting occasionally yelled at for making semi problematic statements because of my own personal growth.  I often find myself wondering about the artists I used to follow who also disappeared.  Where have they gone?  Are their lives getting better?  Worse?  Are they still with us?  I miss them the way I miss the old version of myself.

The years have not been cruel, but they have not been kind either.  This latest battle has been an eyeopening experience.  At almost 35 years I am just now learning I’ve been operating from these cornerstone hangups as if it were normal, like they were something that would get better or change over time if I ‘found the right person’.  But now I know I never will find the right person, not until I find myself, because I will always push away the people who love me and self sabotage anything good.  It’s too uncomfortable, too unfamiliar.  I wanted to get married one day, start a family and build a future for my loved ones, but right now it feels like I’m still clawing my way up to ground zero.

From everything I have seen about attachment disorders, there is definitely hope, but I will need a lot of counseling.  I have to change my relationship with myself before I can stop seeking out this same bullshit situation I’ve once again found myself breaking free from.  As of now, I’m finally understanding why I keep finding myself here.

To anyone else also dealing with childhood PTSD and attachment problems... this wound can be healed.  It takes time and understanding and a lot of hard personal work but it can be done.  Don’t give up on yourself, don’t give up on love.  Get help.  Learn stuff.  Stay the course.  Short term pleasure is not worth the long term pain.  Sit on your throne, let people approach, maintain boundaries.  Give those people time to show you how they are going to behave towards you, how they are going to treat you.  I know it’s hard but it’s worth it.  Avoid jumping into physical intimacy quickly, it’s especially toxic when you have attachment disorders.  Don’t let people walk all over you, NO ONE is cool enough, accomplished enough or attractive enough to be allowed to get away with treating you like shit.  Not ever.  And if someone shows up who genuinely likes you, DO NOT search for reasons to prove them wrong.. I know it feels creepy or scary to be loved but they don’t want anything from you other than your heart, and that’s a good thing.  Embrace it. 

If you’re still here, thanks for reading.

[occidentaltourist]

The Unbearable Whiteness of (Comics) Beings

An excellent thread by Gene Demby, correspondent and co-host of NPR’s Code Switch podcast, on the deeply embedded whiteness of Marvel and DC comics characters.

From Droll Embiid.@GeeDee215:

A quick thing about Isaiah on The Falcon and The Winter Soldier.

About a decade ago, I interviewed Robert Morales, who invented that character for Marvel in 2001. The result was "Truth: Red, White, And Black" which recast the story of Captain America's origins as part of a Tuskegee Syphillis Study-like plot.

In Robert's story, the US rounded up hundreds of Black GIs in a segregated battalion during WWII to use as guinea pigs. The US is trying to re-create the procedure used to turn Steve Rogers into Cap.

They get it wrong — a lot. Almost all of the Black men they round up die.

Only five of the 300 Black men subjected to the super-soldier experiments survive the process; of that five, Isaiah is the only Black super-soldier who survives the war, and he is thrown in prison for decades.

"It was so depressing I didn't think they would approve it," Robert told me. ""But it was depressingly realistic. And *likely.*

"Robert died in 2013. But his revision of the Cap story was part of a wider on-page reckoning w/ the whiteness of the stories in the mainline MCU/DCU.

The Kents of Smallville, as one example, were reimagined as radical abolitionists — Free-Staters who settled in Kansas to oppose the state from becoming a slave state. Clark Kent, then, would be directly downstream from the principles of his forebears.

It's a very liberal inclination — positioning the Kents on the side of justice for a century-plus before the space-ship landed on their farm.

but it skips over some bigger, more important question about race and power: like how is it that whiteness was literally so universal that both a Kansan *and* a Kryptonian might possess it?

Much more under the cut.

Black mainline comics writers kept playing with these premises. The legendary Dwayne McDuffie, wrote his Black superman analogue Icon as having become Black upon imprinting on the enslaved Black woman in the American south who found and adopted it.*

*why this character was still -male- is...yeah.

anyway, a lot of mainstream superheroes, in their reimaginings, have to nod to the oppression in this country. (There was an aside in one of the Nolan Batman jawns that positioned the Batcave as originally a hideout the Waynes used for fugitives on the Underground Railroad.)

And i think that speaks to how deeply embedded the whiteness of these characters is.

The Green Lantern's power ring had to scan the earth for the bravest person in a world of billions of people and...decided that its rightful bearer was a white fighter pilot from the Midwest?

anyway, more later!

okay, so young Kal-El rocketed across the cosmos as a baby in a spaceship before crash-landing in a field in Kansas. He was Kryptonian but also, somehow, a white boy. Which brings us back to this question upthread: whiteness could literally span the cosmos?

in those Silver Age days, that's literally how they explained it: he could be a white American because there were white Kryptonians.

This was underscored by the fact that they created distinctly *Black* Kryptonians — who lived in a place called Vathlo Island.

Vathlo Island "retained its independence throughout history and did not join the planetary federation, though good relations were maintained."

Kryptonian Wakanda, I guess.(Yes, I know i'm mixing universes to make that metaphor work. calm down, nerds.)

Not long after that first (and one of the only) references to Vathlo Island in 1971, Neal Adams, a white artist at DC, asked his editor a q: what happens if Hal Jordan — the Green Lantern —  dies? The editor told him that there would then be a backup Lantern.

The backup Green Lantern they had in mind was a white gym teacher who used to play Big 10 football.

Again: the bravest person in the world was a white USian dude.

Adams eventually pushed back, and along w/ Dennis O'Neil, created a Black character to take over the GL mantle: an ex-Marine named John Stewart.

(Adams told me his editor originally wanted to name the character Lincoln Washington, but he talked him out of it. Phew.)

Again, y'all see the problems here — the bravest person in the world is still a male, a USian and a member of the US, military? — but as representation went, Stewart was better than a lot of the other Black superheroes that DC tried their hands at.

In the 70s, DC created Black Lightning (who was black and electrical), Black Goliath (black and a giant), and Nubia ( black...and Wonder Woman). And at Marvel there was Luke Cage, who, in his earliest pre-dab incarnations, was a jive-talking powerhouse in butterfly collars.

Anyway, the upshot here is that John Stewart taking over the Green Lantern mantle...stuck with Dwayne McDuffie, who created the Milestone comics imprint under DC in the 1990s, featuring all characters of color.

(Milestone's Superman analogue, Icon, mentioned upthread, became a way to embody and critique a certain kind of ascendent respectability politics; he was, after all, essentially a Black cop. Milestone was already playing with chewier ideas around race than mainline DC.)

McDuffie would eventually become a the principal player in the DC Animated Universe. When they were creating the Justice League animated series, underlined that there way that the show could have a team in which everyone — even the aliens Kal-El and Hawkgirl! — were white.so instead of Hal Jordan, the original Green Lantern, taking his traditional place as at the Justice League table , the animated series launched with John Stewart in that role.

The show debuted in 2001 and became a huge hit. McDuffie often pointed out that, as a result, a generation of younger fans who were introduced to the character through the animated series had only ever known a Black Green Lantern.

(There were a lot of reasons the 2011 Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern movie failed, and the "who tf is THIS guy?" factor probably played some role in it.)

There's a lot more, obviously. But some of these IPs — Batman and Superman and Captain America, in particular — are 80+ years old. They're holdovers from a pre-Civil Rights Act America, a pre-Stonewall America, etc. They represent a bunch of stuff that is ever harder to update.

And it will be interesting to watch how that chafes against the the fact that they are more valuable and popular than they've ever been. Could a critique of the premises of the Cap origin story, like Robert Morales', even happen today?

[serinemolecule]

Not to harp on the obvious, but the discussion feels hollow without it: the only reason some people - not all, maybe not most, but definitely some - push for "equality" and "inclusiveness" and etc. in tech is because it's seen as a desirable and powerful position. No one's been belly-aching about it back when it was fashionable to tell nerds to stop being fat and ugly and what a bunch of losers they are. It's only up for discussion now that there's something to be gained from it. It's hypocrisy.

(context: a lot of women-in-tech discourse)

I mean, I was belly-aching about it.

I like to say I was a feminist until I met other feminists. I definitely saw plenty of things nerds could be doing better for equality. But then the first time I met other feminists, they were harassing nerds and writing long essays about how nerds were even worse than average men (which still seems to me like an absolutely insane position).

That was... a really big crisis of faith there. I spent years reading feminist literature, trying to understand their point. And the crazy thing was, a lot of the principles and concepts do appeal to me. But then the way they’d apply it, talking about how privileged nerds were, or just using it as an excuse to be assholes to people, that’s always seemed wrong to me.

My approach at the time was just to try to understand it better in private, and never talk about it in public. This lasted until I read the SSC essays on social justice which I entirely agreed on, then I joined Tumblr to hit on Scott, and since then I started getting more comfortable with writing out my thoughts, but also the really bad SJ of the early 2010s just mostly faded away from the spaces I’m in. I still hear insane stories from other places (like the New York Times! wtf!) but it no longer feels like a crisis afflicting my own community, so I never wrote anything out.

Part of it’s that my community is the rats, now. SJWs may still exist here, but they don’t have a social power to turn us against each other. Whatever effect Topher’s tweet had on the rest of the world, it means he’s no longer welcome among rats anymore. We dismiss them with equanimity using the ancient proverb, “Haters gonna hate”.

Anyway, I suppose now’s as good a time as any for me to talk about what I think about feminist theory.

I get the impression that Scott is embarrassed by his old posts on gender politics, but I still endorse every word. Even the words people like to criticize the most, I endorse as an angry expression of “Why don’t you care about how many people your ideology is hurting?” That said:

Privilege theory – I remember encountering privilege theory and thinking “yes, this totally fits the model that normies are privileged and nerds are marginalized”, until I got to the part where they started talking about how privileged nerds were. I think the theory is still pretty good, and of course the practice about writing privilege checklists and using it to silence people is incredibly fucked up.

Patriarchy theory – Fortunately, no one talks about patriarchy theory anymore. It came from the radfems and it always seemed horrible to me. It's uncontroversially true that ruling class is mostly male, but patriarchy theory seems to just equivocate between that and insane conspiracy theories.

For example, “culture is built for the benefit of men at the expense of women” requires you to just dismiss everything that hurts men and helps women, to excuse that fashion policing is nearly solely perpetuated by other women, and even if it’s true, the fact that it is perpetuated by everyone means pointing the finger at a specific group will not help fix the problem. Did Kamala Harris exercise “girl power” when she kept black prisoners in jail past their release date? 

Cultural appropriation – The usual steelman I hear for this is “it sucks when white people take your culture for themselves, and yet still call it cringe when you practice your own culture” – but the only objectionable part is the latter! Stop objecting to the former part! There’s nothing wrong with culture mixing and it is in fact one of the most beautiful things in the world!

Part of it’s that I’m a first-gen immigrant, and cultural appropriation attitudes often come from insecurities second-gen immigrants have. Cultural appropriation just means I’m now an expert on your new culture and you’re not allowed to stop me from infodumping on it.

The other steelman is “misusing religious artifacts is bad” and I think to the extent that it’s bad, it’s bad whether you’re doing it to your own culture or to other cultures.

In general I think Halloween was, among other things, a great celebration of diversity that did not need to be cancelled, and I don’t think any costume was offensive to the majority of any culture.

Intersectionality – This word confused me for so long. People kept explaining it as “black women often have problems specific to their group that neither women’s groups nor black groups themselves are equipped to fight” which just seemed obviously true and didn’t seem like we needed a word for it.

Over the years, I’ve seen it be used as a reminder of “don’t forget how your activism affects other marginalized groups”, so it’s probably a useful concept to keep around.

Microaggressions – I think being oblivious to microaggressions is an autism thing, but I still think it’s insane to make them a political issue. Sure, you can vent about them, but acting like they’re on par with actual aggressions just seems like a losing cause.

On second thought, I don’t think I have a problem with making them a political issue in general. I think the whole tactic of SJWs being a hateful harassment mob makes the microaggressions thing just come off as especially petty.

I also think there’s a lot of competing access needs here. I actually really like infodumping about what kind of Asian I am to anyone willing to listen, and I think acting like the question is the root of all evil is really unfair, especially since literally everyone who’s ever asked has been happy to learn about the finer points about Chinese ethnic groups.

Isms as prejudice + power – People have mostly stopped discoursing about this, which is good. Language policing always seemed bad to me.

Objectification – SSC says everything I feel on the topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/17/my-objections-to-objectification/

The last time this came up in Discord, people said that objectification is more than the straw-man being criticized in this article, that it’s about people being entitled to your body or whatever. But I think the article does address that: “This is obviously a legitimate complaint. It’s just not a complaint about objectification.”

I got exposed to objectification as a criticism of hot girls in video games. And I just can’t see hot girls in video games as a bad thing.

Rape culture – [cw rape] This is an incredibly sensitive subject so I’m going to give you some time to stop reading here.

Our culture has a serious problem with rape. I think it’s important to understand that it’s usually committed by friends and family, that it’s depressingly common and has nearly definitely happened to people you know, that it’s usually committed by people who don’t think of what they’re doing as rape, and that all the discourse on it is really fucked up.

I also think that calling this “rape culture” entirely misses the point. I’m sympathetic that SSC doesn’t understand it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/19/i-do-not-understand-rape-culture/

Our problem isn’t that we glorify rape. Our problem is that we consider it a special kind of evil so bad that of course no normal person would ever do it, and this makes it easy to rationalize that whatever this normal person did couldn’t have been rape, which causes huge harms.

I don’t have answers, but I think it’s incredibly clear that calling it “rape culture” doesn’t help.

In general, I don’t think feminist activism on the topic of rape goes in the right direction. The smug “consent is like tea” video has the exact same problem. People don’t need to hear more “normal people would never rape” messaging.

[tealin]

Did Cherry really say that women scared him and that a happy married life just wasn't for him? Apparently he said this to Lillie. This question comes from a goodreads review on Sarah wheelers Cherry biography. sorry, lame question and Cherry is long dead just the review questions wheeler's ignorance on his male friendships while implying something themselves.

Short answer: If you are curious about Cherry’s inner life, I do recommend you read the Wheeler.  It is stupendously researched, and what’s more, she talked in depth with Cherry’s widow, who probably knew him better than anyone, so there’s an inside glimpse that goes well beyond what was written down.

Long answer: It has been over a year since I last read the Wheeler, but my impression is that this reviewer is conflating two separate things to find what they want to find. IIRC, the statement about a happily married life was part of a conversation with George Bernard Shaw, and was more to do with Cherry’s own perceived character flaws making him unsuitable as a husband, a cause of some regret.  As for women scaring him, he was without question a shy and nervous man, but in less intimidating social situations he did take his chances, and there is plenty about that in the book.

Reviewers and fangirls alike are, unfortunately, ignorant of just how vastly different the sexual landscape was around the turn of the 20th century.  Boys of Cherry’s class were removed from the family at a very young age and sent to single-sex boarding schools, and they lived in a strictly homosocial environment for most of the rest of their lives.  They quite simply never learned to talk to girls, which of course makes the prospect intimidating, especially for someone who is naturally reserved and anxious.  People look at letters between men who bonded intensely over a traumatic two years, see a suggestion of emotional intimacy, and shout ‘Gay!’, when all there is is the sort of open friendship that women have always had, and that men today are forbidden from having lest they appear gay, much to the detriment of their mental and emotional health.

The boundaries of sex and gender were also drawn in very different places and often rather lightly – behaviour many would see today as irrefutably gay was perfectly ordinary, and the genders, occupying mostly segregated worlds, had broader spectra than they do now. We shouldn’t project our current definitions of sexuality on the past and say definitively that someone was either this or that, any more than a Victorian missionary should go to Samoa and tell a fa’afafine which of two genders they definitely are.  Moderns love to lord it over the backwards sorts in bygone times, but we could learn a lot from them about  relationships beyond sexual ones.  Ours is a depressingly flattened world of human connection, by comparison.

[jams-sims]

#Hisoilluweek! @illumiszoldycks

Aug 16: Marriage. I really struggled with whether to make this serious or funny. So I decided on a nice medium. Somewhat canon in topic and then a lot of not canon in all of it. I may actually write more than one who knows. A little rough but i'll make a updated one on A03.

Tittle: Will You Marry Me

When Hisoka asked him to marry him, Illumi believed it to be a joke. Another thing to add to the laundry list of Hisoka eccentric topic. Used only to try and wedge himself into Illumi life more than he already had. Illumi mental fortitude was basically a fortified door that now had a hole in it where he could amusingly watch Hisoka try and fit his hand through.

He looked over the rim of his glass at Hisoka. It was as dull and passive as it ever had been. His evening had been going great, before Hisoka had open his mouth. To think he was going to let the subject slid by not dignifying Hisoka with an answer. Until he spoke again and this time it made him sit his glass down in barely disguised frustration.

"I haven't heard a no yet, are you considering it Illu-chan~"

"The lack of answer should already be a good enough no for you Hisoka."

Illumi hadn't been considering it, until Hisoka made that assumption. His family had long ago abandoned the idea of him bearing a heir to the family. When he was the eldest child, before Killua. It was something his mother talk about often. How he would be a father one day, get married to a beautiful women to bore powerful children just like his father. The small dates, if you could even call them dates, his mother would set up between nen family's. The awkward tension as the girls had been informed to just endure it for the family. Not like he had made it any easier, he would just stare at them for the first few "dates". Things became much more complicated as he got older and the women became bolder.

"Hisoka." Illumi started slowly as he lean back in his chair arms folded over his chest.

" I barely know your real name and you are disgustingly obsessed with fighting my father. What benefits do I gain from uniting with you?" Now he was considering it-

"It'll be fun, besides your father isn't the only one I wish to fight~." Hisoka lips curled into a twisted long smile. Shame on Illumi into thinking Hisoka would take his own proposal seriously.

Before illumi can cut in rendering the conversation done and over with. Hisoka added, "Besides you know half of my real name, Morrow does mean something right?"

Illumi desperately wanted to roll his eyes because even that sounded like bullshit.

"What do you expect to gain? Money from my family-"

"You know I don't want money Illu~chan" Hisoka made a show of his eyes wandering his body before locking those amber eyes on his face once more. He would be lying if he said a slight shudder hadn't gone down his spine. But that what he was good at.

"Besides its not like your family would care."

That has struck a chord inside of Illumi, Hisoka was right to an extent. Since Killuas birth, his mother attention had focused in on Killua. The "dates" had become less and less. He was expected to get married it was just no longer a priority.

His head tilted to the side as he looked across the table at Hisoka. Hisoka body was leaning forward. His head resting on his hand, his eyes were hoodie. The dark lighting of the bar made him look even more like a predator. That lazy smile that bordered between lustful and manic.

Illumi got up from his seat, Hisoka only leaning back to look up from his position still seated at the table.

"Try harder." Illumi simply said, as his gracefully left his drink on the table. Along with the bill for Hisoka to pay, he couldn't help but hear the small sound of a chuckle as he left.

Attempt #2??

Illumi had assumed after that conversation months ago. Hisoka would have dropped it. But Illumi should have known better than to challenge a bull wearing armor. Illumi had set out to ignore him, Hisoka would get bored and let it go. Illumi entertain Hisoka job offers if only to fill the time between family jobs. Those quickly ran it course and Illumi had stopped responding.

Illumi shouldn't have entertain Hisoka, it was a dangerous game and he was paying for it now. Hisoka had employed a tactic which Illumi had long forgotten with his youth to grab his attention. Killing his targets, It was like a game of hide and seek but with a lot more blood. Hisoka was petty, he would even goes as far as crushing the target head. Making it even more difficult to get paid. Illumi had assumed at first that he was going to have to track Hisoka down. But as he enter his apartment. A cool breeze wash cross his skin, along with the strong smell of blood.

"Oh illu~chan your home, welcome bac-" needles speed like lighting speed into his arm. Illumi didn't grace him with a reply, his annoyance had been building for sometime. And it quickly became a brawl, when his apartment was satisfactorily destroyed. Hisoka had sat upon his chest pinning him. That did nothing to settle the rage inside of him.

"Come now Illumi~ calm down you'll get wrinkles if you keep frowning like that." Illumi his his face was pensively dull and he wouldn't let the anger broach the surface.

"Get off me Hisoka."

"Calm down first~"

"I will not."

"Then I guess we'll be here a while huh?" As Illumi wen't silent refusing to engage in conversation with Hisoka. It was now he realized he was laying in a bed of broken glass. Nice sharp pieces were digging into his shoulders. He was going to break both of Hisoka arms.

Attempt#???

Illumi prides himself on his restraint, he was his mothers pride and joy. Hollow from the inside out but no, Illumi was assuming she must have missed some. Because being frustratedly fucked into the mattress wasn't something he normally did. Than again, dealing with Hisoka anything can happen. He just had a special way to get under his skin and into his bed. Illumi eyes wander to the other end of the bed. Hisoka looked way too satisfied for his own good.

"Will you marry me yet?"

"I refuse."

It was satisfying to watch all the hot air rush out of Hisoka with a pout. He had his pride to think about and it still wasn’t good enough.

When its good enough

It happens when he drenched in blood, when his bones are rottenly weak, and he can feel himself slipping into that deep dark void. Where his hair became that sea of black, as if it were life forum of its own. While it twisted and churned like black crows stuck in tar. He would not say it out loud, but he was grateful for Hisoka help. Although he would have been fine without it. But he knew it wouldn’t have been great for him to return home in such a state. The adrenaline rushed through his veins and he could piratically feel the bloodlust rushing off his counterpart. He could feel Hisoka eyes burning holes into the back of his head. When he turned toe face the annoying man, he realized he had not notice when Hisoka had gotten so close. His hands were entangled in his hair, those sharp fingers brough the inky black strains up to his lips. 

And for once Illumi had not said anything, with Hisoka face covered in blood and his hair hung lossy around his neck. All Illumi could do was tilt his head, of course Hisoka smile grew more and with a flourish with his free hand. He pushed his hair back into its natural state of being slicked back and spiked. They did not have a conversation that day, Hisoka simply left after Illumi confirmed his mission was complete.    It hadn’t mattered to Illumi at the time, he was not returning home to his apartment but back to the family home. Yet there was something that left him uneasy when the jester did not speak. It could mean several things and none of them were good nor good for his blood pressure. When he returned home, graciously greeted by the butlers and was directed to the nearest bath and dinner. He returned to his room he had spent the past 20 something years living in. It was depressingly bland, but he only needed the bare minimum. He found it odd his window had been open. The faint scent of blood lingered in the room and Illumi reflexively smelled his hands. It wasn’t coming from him, but then maybe something had died in the forest close to the manor. He walked over to the window when he noticed something sitting on his pillow. A golden wedding band it wasn’t expensive looking at all, no diamonds laid embedded in the gold. The more Illumi looked it over the less sure he became that the gold was real at all. It looked like someone had polished it recently, or taken great care of it, at the very least it had a touched up before giving it to him. Illumi sat upon his bed, twisting the ring around in his hand. He grabbed his phone and without much fanfare. He unblocked, hisoka number and simply texted.

“Fine.”

[firelxdykatara]

Hi, heavensweetheart in an ask mentioned you’ve written meta on adults writing about teen sex and told me I should ask you about it. I was wondering if you could give your thoughts on this in the context of ATLA, in fanfic and the Suki and Sokka tent scene. Some teens are having a meltdown over that scene saying it’s immoral for 16 y/o to have sex and imply that and I’m so confused. When did teens suddenly become allergic to sex? It wasn’t like that when I was one not long ago?

I’ll probably have follow up questions, but I’ll save those for now. Unless you say you don’t wanna talk on that anymore, which I totally respect. I’m just so confused as to why teens now are rioting against the Sokka and Suki scene, and even the *slight* implication that Zuko and Mai had sex too. They sound like church moms rather than teens and that’s jarring shift in culture in just a few years

I COMPLETELY understand teens wanting to avoid sex and stuff in their own lives or the media they choose to consume on personal levels but don’t know why they’re waging war against it

they’re complaining about that scene now too???? idk why i’m so surprised, considering everything else i’ve seen ppl getting up in arms about in the fandom it was only a matter of time, but jfc

listen, here’s an inconvenient factoid that fans--adult and minor alike--need to bear in mind before they go off half-cocked: underage teens have sex. it’s not like there’s some magical switch that gets flipped the instant someone turns 18 that unlocks their Raging Hormones where before they were Completely Sexless Beings. that’s not how it works. (i’m not bringing asexuality into this because ace ppl can have sex and even decent sex drives, libido and sexuality are not the same thing, and sexual awakenings can happen at just about any age post-puberty.) furthermore, coming-of-age tales (which often involve blossoming sexuality, as that is frequently a part of such narratives) are always going to be published and written by adults.

adults are, by and large, the ones with the resources and time to create finished and polished pieces of fiction and pitch them and get them into publishing houses and sold. teenagers who manage this are the exception to the rule, and the only one i can think of off the top of my head (christopher paolini, who started writing eragon when he was fifteen) was still an adult (at 19) by the time he actually managed to get published. adults are also, sorry to say, going to have a better understanding and perspective on what it was like to be a teenager--because they not only lived through it, but they have distance and a better ability to look at it objectively than someone still in the throes of massive hormonal changes and struggling through high school.

this doesn’t always work to our advantage--’adults forgot what it was like to be kids’ is a major theme in a lot of media for a reason--and sometimes it’s depressingly obvious just when any given author actually experienced being a teenager, because regardless of the setting their characters and plot points and tropes are incredibly dated--but it does typically mean that when an adult author is writing about teenagers having sex, or experiencing a sexual awakening, having a first love and everything that comes with that as a teenager, they aren’t acting like some voyeur watching teens gettin’ it on from the outside, but rather drawing on their own lived and remembered experiences and using those to inform their writing. (or experiences they wish they could have hand, like many queer authors who weren’t able to safely come out as teens and so get to experience being a kid and being able to be queer through their own writing in a way that was denied them in their own lives.)

i’ve done ‘first kiss’ and ‘first time’ type stories, now, as i am, as an adult, and i was never thinking about it as some outside observer perving on teenage characters--i was remembering what it was like when i was that age, and channeling that into my writing. no one is obligated to read or enjoy the things i write, of course, but trying to tell me that i’m not allowed to write about the things i felt as a teenager, just because i’m an adult now? that’s a quick way to get told in no uncertain terms to fuck off.

now, that being said, it’s absolutely flat ridiculous to me that people are complaining about the idea that suki and sokka were having sex, when they were child soldiers in a goddamn war. why is it more acceptable that they were preparing to fight and possibly die in a fierce battle, but gods fucking forbid they be implied to have a sexual relationship with each other before-hand? why is it more acceptable that children fight and die and kill (and yes, the gaang had a bodycount to their names, even aang), but the idea that mid- and older teens having sex is so taboo? nothing was even shown! it was all but spelled out, but in that scene we didn’t even see them kiss, it just immediately cut away after sokka called suki back to his tent!

what this tells me is that people are having a meltdown over the mere suggestion that these fifteen and sixteen-year-olds were sexually active, and considering that by the time i graduated high school (over a decade ago) i knew five girls personally who’d gotten pregnant and either dropped out or been homeschooled for a few months to have their kids before coming back to finish out their classes, i’m having trouble with this idea that even thinking of the fact that teenagers have sex should be so virulently anathema.

teens have sex with each other. sometimes teens get pregnant. sometimes these things find their way into YA fiction, and that is a genre that is almost 100% written by adults. (i’m sure some started writing as teens and maybe even got their early fiction reworked and polished, but the vast vast majority are at least adults, if not totally out of their teens, by the time they are officially published.) sometimes these things find their way even into narratives aimed at a younger audience, because there are always going to be elements that children won’t understand but the adults watching will get a kick out of--think of all the jokes in Shrek that you didn’t understand if you saw it for the first time as a kid, which seem even more hilarious once you’re an adult and have context for them.

no seven-year-old kid is gonna look at the scene of zuko walking in on sokka and the latter inhaling a rose he was holding between his lips as he waited for suki and think ‘OMG HE WAS EXPECTING HIS GIRLFRIEND AND THEY WERE GONNA HAVE SEX’--not unless something else was going on in that household, and at that point its not the show’s fault by any metric. but adults or even older teens are probably gonna get a chuckle, understanding the wink and the nudge that younger kids won’t get cause they don’t have context for that kind of romantic/sexual coding. and that’s ok!!!! the fact that people won’t get it unless they already have context for that sort of behavior is exactly why it works as a subtle joke!

and, again, the fact that a kid was killed on-screen and the fact that the main characters are all effectively child soldiers in a war, and these are somehow not topics that are too mature for the audience at which the show is aimed, but implications (which the target audience won’t understand, but older people who enjoy the show will) that teenagers are having sex is somehow beyond the pale???? (sure sokka might die tomorrow, but at least he wasn’t having -gasp- SEX before he did!!!!! that’s how they sound and it’s fucking ridiculous)

i genuinely do not understand that attitude, and i don’t think i ever will.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Trudeau promises massive covid stimulus

Canadian Prime Ministers have a fun gambit: when things start to go really badly for them, they "prorogue" (suspend) Parliament, which dissolves all committees, inquiries, etc, until such time as they are ready to reconvene, with a tabula rasa.

Most egregiously, the far-right asshole and climate criminal Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament in the middle of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis in order to avoid a no-confidence vote that would have triggered new elections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%932009_Canadian_parliamentary_dispute

While this DID save Harper's bacon, it also left Canada without a legislature during a global crisis that threatened the nation's entire future. It was a crazed, reckless thing to do.

Canada has a safeguard to prevent this kind of gambit: as a constitutional monarchy, Canadian parliamentary manoeuvres have to receive the Crown's blessing, in the form of assent from the Governor General, the Queen's rep to Canada.

This is the sober, apolitical adult supervision that fans of constitutional monarchies are always banging on about, and then-Governor General Michaëlle Jean completely failed to do her fucking job, leaving Canada without a Parliament during the GFC. She literally had one job.

Proroguing Parliament didn't just save Harper from a no-confidence vote: it also dissolved all the Parliamentary inquiries underway at the time, including the "Afghan detainee transfer" affair, which was investigating Canadian forces' complicity in the torture-murder of POWs.

In many ways, Trudeau is the anti-Harper: a charismatic Liberal who tells refugees they're welcome in Canada, marches with Greta Thunberg, and appoints the first-ever First Nations person to serve as Attorney General .

Truly, there is no policy so progressive that Trudeau won't endorse it...provided he doesn't actually have to make it into policy. Because many of his policies are indistinguishable from Harperism, albeit with a better haircut.

This started before he won the election, when Trudeau (whose father once declared martial law!) whipped his MPs to vote for a human-rights-denying mass surveillance bill, C-51.

Trudeau did so while insisting that the bill was a massive overreach and totally unacceptable, but claiming that the "loyal opposition" should still back it so as not to be accused of being soft on terrorism in the coming election. He promised to repeal it after.

Of course, he didn't.

Trudeau is often compared to Obama, a young and charismatic fellow who makes compromises, sure, but comes through in the clutch.

Tell that to pipeline protesters.

After the Obama administration killed the Transmountain Pipeline - the continent-spanning tube that would make filthy, planet-destroying tar sands profitable enough to bring to market - Trudeau bailed it out, spending billions of federal dollars to keep it alive.

Then, Trudeau - who campaigned on nation-to-nation truth and reconciliation with First Nations - announced that he would shove this toxic tar-sand tube through unceded treaty lands across the breadth of the naiton.

And then he had the AUDACITY to march with Greta Thunberg at the head of a climate march, demanding a change to policies that would see billions dead in the coming century.

HIS OWN policies.

I mean, Trudeau's boosters have a point - Harper NEVER could have pulled that off.

The Harper years were a Trumpian orgy of blatant self-dealing and cronyism.

The Trudeau years, on the other hand...

One of Trudeau's major donors is SNC Lavalin, a crime syndicate masquerading as a global engineering firm (think Halliburton with less morals).

SNC Lavalin had done so much crime that it was on its final notice with the Canadian legal sysem, a probation that it must not violate on penalty of real, big boy federal criminal prosecutions.

Then it did more crimes.

Remember Trudeau's historic appointment of a First Nations woman to the Attorney General's seat? Now was AG Jody Wilson-Raybould's moment to shine.

As Wilson-Raybould began aggressively pursuing these corporate criminals, she started getting calls from Trudeau's office.

For avoidance of doubt, these were not calls of support. They were demands to drop the case and let the SNC Lavalin crime syndicate get off scot-free. Eventually the PM himself called her and demanded that she give his cronies a pass on their repeated criminal actions.

Wilson-Raybould went public, decrying political meddling in the justice system. Trudeau denied everything and began to smear her (Harper had tons of scandals like this, BTW, only the counterpart was usually a rich old white guy, not a First Nations woman).

But Wilson-Raybould had recorded the conversations, and she released the recordings, and proved that Trudeau had lied about the whole thing. Trudeau fired her and kicked her out of the party.

But at least he's not Trump, right? He's the anti-Trump! (Well, except for the pipeline and that time he announced "No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there").

Remember the Muslim Ban? As Trump was tormenting refugees at the US border, Trudeau tweeted "To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada."

Yes, that was awesome. There is no policy so progressive that Trudeau won't endorse it...provided that he never has to do anything to make it happen.

Canada and the US have a "Safe Third Country Agreement" that says that asylum-seekers turned away from the US border can't try again in Canada. To make #WelcomeToCanada more than a hashtag, Trudeau's government would have to suspend that agreement.

Instead, Trudeau's government insisted that under Trump, "the conditions of the Safe Third Country Agreement continued to be met" and thus they would not suspend the agreement and give hearings to those turned away by Trump's border guards.

But at least Trudeau handled the pandemic better than Harper handled the Great Financial Crisis.

No, really, he did!

Mostly.

I mean, unless you were in a nursing home or on a First Nations reservation.

https://www.canadalandshow.com/podcast/an-emergency-season-pandemic/

But still, Trudeau's government did a MUCH better job than the Trump government, or Boris Johnson's Tories. Neither Liberals nor Conservatives will really fight cronyism, climate change or authoritarianism, but there are still substantive differences between them.

But in some ways, they are depressingly similar.

Take corruption.

Long before the plague struck, Canadaland was publishing damning reports on We Charity, a massive, beloved Canadian charitable institution nominally devoted to ending child slavery.

Canadaland's initial reporting on the charity focused on its partnerships with companies that were using child slaves to make their products, but the investigations mushroomed after the charity sent dire legal threats to the news organisation over its coverage.

And then Canadaland founder Jesse Brown found himself smeared by a US dirty-tricks organization that got its start working for GOP politicians, who got a contract to plant editorials criticizing Canadaland's We coverage in small-town US newspapers.

Private eyes started following Brown around, even keeping tabs on his small children. Rather than being intimidated, Brown kept up the pressure on We, which prompted whistleblowers to leak him even more details about the charity's activities.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/03/turnkey-authoritarianism/#we-charity

These included massive, mysterious real-estate holdings, hard-to-excuse criminal investigations of its Kenyan activities, and (here's where I've been going with this all along) GIANT CASH PAYMENTS to Trudeau's family, as well as valuable gifts to his Finance Minister.

And, as with the Wilson-Reybould affair, Trudeau's initial response to this was to simply deny it, calling his accusers liars. But then the scandal kept unspooling, his Finance Minister quit in disgrace, the charity (sort of) folded up and shut down, and Trudeau...

Well, Trudeau prorogued Parliament, shutting down Canada's government in the midst of a crisis that was - unimaginably - even worse than the 2008 crisis that Harper had left the nation rudderless through to avoid his own scandal.

(Again, for constitutional monarchy fans, that's two entirely political proroguings in the midsts of global crises, signed off on by the Queen's supposedly apolitical and sober check on reckless activity)

Shutting down Parliament seems to have rescued Trudeau's government from snap elections, which may well have been won by the Tories, who have resolved their longstanding racist and plutocratic tensions with a new ghoulish nightmare leader:

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/09/canada-erin-otoole-conservative-party-cpc/

And, as Trudeau has reconvened Parliament, he's promised something genuinely amazing: a massive, national stimulus package meant to keep families, workers and small businesses afloat through the looming second pandemic wave.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-canada-economy/canada-bets-the-farm-on-big-spending-as-second-wave-threatens-economic-recovery-idUSKCN26F1NF

This is something Canada - and the US, for that matter - desperately needs. Canada is monetarily sovereign: it issues its own currency and its debt is in the same currency, meaning it can never run out of money (no more than Apple could ever run out of Itunes gift cards).

The Canadian DOES face constraints on its spending, but they're just not MONETARY constraints - they're RESOURCE constraints. If the Canadian government creates money to buy the same things the private sector is shopping for, there'll be a bidding war, AKA inflation.

But as a new wave of lockdowns and mass illness looms over the country, there's going to be a hell of a lot of things the private sector isn't trying to buy - notably, the labour of the Canadian workforce, millions of whom will be locked indoors through the winter.

An analyst warns that Trudeau's proposal is likely to add CAD30B to the deficit, which is a completely irrelevant fact unless that new money is going to be chasing the same goods that Canadian business and citizens are seeking to buy.

Trudeau has promised to create a national prescription drug plan (a longstanding hole in Canada's national health care system), as well as universal childcare, and he's denounced austerity as a response to the crisis.

There's a part of me that is very glad to see this. My family and friends are in Canada, after all, and if Trudeau lives up to his promise, he will shield them from the collapse we're seeing in the USA.

But that is a BIG if. Trudeau isn't Harper. He's more charismatic, he's got better hair, and he says much, much better things than Harper.

However, when the chips are down, Trudeau out-Harpers Harper.

Mass surveillance legislation. Corruption scandals. Lying about corruption scandals. Bailing out the pipeline. "No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there." Abandoning asylum-seekers to Trump's lawless regime.

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action." It would be pretty naive to assume that merely because Trudeau has promised to do the right thing, that he will do the right thing.

Indeed, if history is any indicator, the best way to predict what Trudeau will do is to assume that it will be the OPPOSITE of whatever he promises.

I won't lie. I felt a spark of hope when I read Trudeau's words.

But hope is all I've got - and it's a far cry from confidence.

Or relief.

[alexstrick]

Getting Out of the Intermediate Language Plateau: Arabic Edition / Principles

[This is part of a series on getting out of a language-learning plateau at the intermediate-advanced level. Check out the other parts here.]

Seasoned language learners are familiar with the concept of the 'language plateau'. If you're learning a second language for the first time, you will inevitably reach a point in your studies where your progress seems to flatten. You will find this place and period extremely frustrating.

When you are in your plateau, it's hard to improve because you're already at a point of (some kind of) self-sufficiency. You can express yourself. You understand most of what is going on in a conversation or TV series you watch. You can write things and people will understand what you're saying. You could (and many do) stop your studies at this point and still be 'functional' in the language.

Getting out of this flat, dead zone is what I want to talk about today. It's hard, but it's by no means impossible, and making this kind of progress is possibly the most valuable work you'll do in your language studies, because all of it will be specifically tailored to your needs.

The starting point, though, is to identify your current status. What can you do? You don't (necessarily) need to take a formal language certification test to get a grade, though that can sometimes be useful. The kind of measurements you want to take are more subjective. You want to take stock of your capacity in certain situations, what level you are able to achieve in different contexts (your skills in reading will be different from writing vs listening or speaking, for example) and you want also to assess your experience on the cultural level as well -- i.e. how much experience do you have navigating all the unspoken parts of culture, whether that is body language, or behaviours and so on.

Principles of Skill Acquisition

Now a slight detour into some more general principles of skill acquisition. Some of this is derived from my own personal experience, other parts from interviews with experts in this field (such as my conversation with K. Anders Ericsson, who more or less invented the field of expert performance studies), and other parts still from reading a bunch of books on the subject.

Three things are relevant here:

1) Stretch

When you're learning a new skill, you want to step outside your comfort zone. This is usually difficult work, and work that is mentally (and possibly emotionally) taxing. Thus, if you want to get better at speaking in Arabic, you'll need to speak more, but at the beginning this practice (i.e. talking with other people) will feel pretty horrible, simply because you're not used to doing it. It's a paradox that you need to do the thing to get better at doing the thing. It is this difficulty, pushing yourself a little past what you're capable of doing, that allows for personal growth. (I wrote about this in an entirely different context a few weeks ago with respect to my attempts to get better at climbing.)

2) Lots of practice coupled with speedy feedback

These two parts (practice and feedback) go together. It isn't practice alone that will allow you to improve, but rather the combination of making efforts to use new skills alongside getting some kind of feedback that tells you when you're getting it wrong vs when you're not. An implication of this, too, is the reality that this kind of practice is going to involve you making lots of mistakes. This can feel crappy, especially when you're getting immediate feedback on exactly when this is happening. You need to adopt a flexible mindset, if possible, in which you see the mistakes as indicators of growth rather than as any kind of personal or intellectual failures on your part.

3) Know what you're practicing and focus on that

This is basically Ericsson's principle of "deliberate practice":

"Rather than chilling out in the comfort of skills you've already acquired, as an expert-to-be, you're relentless about heading to the frontier of your abilities. The practice shouldn't be so difficult that it overwhelms you—that would be depressingly demotivating, but not so easy that you're unconsciously languishing. In other words, you're arranging for flow, that space where you're right at the boundary of your abilities."

See also this summary of the routines that 'experts' tend to have around deliberate practice:

They can only engage in practice without rest for around an hour. They practice in the morning with a fresh mind. They practice the same amount every day, including on weekends. They only have four to five hours of deliberate practice a day. If they don't get enough rest, they can get overtraining injuries or burnout.

If you're hoping that 'using the language' in a general and non-specific way will get you out of your plateau, you'll be disappointed. It's perfectly possible to exist in the plateau zone without improvement ad infinitum. If you want to improve at a certain skill, you'll need to isolate that element and focus on it in a targeted way. This can be vocabulary, or speaking about a certain topic, or even something as small as 'using conditional sentences'. Whatever it is, you'll only get better if you concentrate your efforts.

Customisation & Your Individual Needs

Learning languages at the post-intermediate level will be a different experience from what you are used to in the early stages. Early on, you're doing a great deal of necessary-but-boring work to learn basic patterns, vocabulary and grammar.

Once you have mastered that, and you can explain yourself in most basic contexts, you reach the point where you have to customise. There's a great deal of science and research behind this claim. Check out this talk, by the always stimulating Alexander Arguelles, for an overview of some of that research.

You'll need to pick which areas you're most interested in. This is the hard work of advanced language studies -- you pick one area or context, conquer it, and then pick another area and repeat. This fulfils the princicle of focus that I mentioned above.

To give an example from my own studies. My current big push for Arabic is to be able to read serious fiction (i.e. short stories and novels written for native speakers). I've written previously that this was a personal goal, but various realities of how modern literature is written really make it hard to take the leap into complex native-reader-level fiction (especially novels). Arab writers like to use many synonyms (for poetic effect, or perhaps as an attempt at pretension?) for words, so when reading I often find myself stuck referring to dictionaries the whole time. Fortunately, a new textbook offering graded literature at just that 'stretch' level was released recently, which is allowing me an entry point into that world. None of the texts are simplified, and the language is hard and the number of unknown words is pretty large, but it's not too far down the scale of difficulty.

On Making a Self-Study Plan

My next post will cover and offer a host of suggestions for resources you can use to get out of this plateau / dead zone. Before you start reading through and diving into things that seem interesting, I'd strongly advise you take the time to figure out your specific goals. "Improve my Arabic" is not a useful goal. It's too unspecific. Even "improve my spoken Arabic" may not be particularly useful at the intermediate-advanced level. Once you figure out your goal, write it down somewhere. Maybe stick it to your wall or on the inside of your notebook. It's good to be reminded why we're doing the work.

Once you have your goal, then you want to set yourself small targeted bursts or challenges to push out into your stretch zone. You don't want these challenges to feel like you're straining against the limits of what you are capable. You want it to be just challenging enough that you feel uncomfortable, but not so much that you are constantly questioning yourself and your abilities in any kind of fundamental sense.

The scale of these challenges will be pretty variable, so examples will span a range of tasks from taking a week to learn and read deeply in a niche topic, to something more longer-term (over six months, perhaps) like my modern literature challenge. The characteristic that you need to look for, however, is that you'll be able to tell when you're finished with the challenge. Part of defining the goal is finding a specific (and somewhat measurable) definition of what it means to have achieved what you want.

Then the rest of the trick is basically keeping moving, tracking your progress and achievements along the way. There are various ways of doing this, some of which will depend on what else you have done in this regard. You can add in things like Beeminder to encourage compliance and regularity, or you can do that in other ways.

When I work with people 1-on-1 to learn a language, a lot of what we do is figuring out this kind of ongoing goal setting and progress assessment. (If you want to learn more about this, click here and read through what I offer).

The next posts will offer a roadmap to the different resources available to the intermediate student of Arabic and some of the ways you can utilise these resources. It won't be exhaustive, but I'm pretty sure that most will find something of use in them. Feel free to get in touch if you have specific things you want me to tackle in terms of skill development in Arabic.

[aion-rsa]

The Suicide Squad: Amanda Waller Is The Greatest DCEU Villain

https://ift.tt/3Ah2KyD

This article contains The Suicide Squad spoilers.

If you’ve spent any time in the last few years among comic book fans, be it socially or online, then it’s easy to remember one of the most repeated criticisms leveled at the tangled madness we call the DCEU: The villains are terrible. This critique is not without merit. 

Despite DC Comics being home to some of the greatest villains of comicdom—who have in turn inspired some of the greatest movie baddies like Heath Ledger’s Joker, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman, and Terence Stamp’s General Zod—Warner Brothers’ more recent DC Extended Universe has struggled to live up to that legacy. The studio’s helter skelter efforts started serviceably enough with Michael Shannon’s take on Zod in Man of Steel, but it quickly derailed with whatever bad advice Jesse Eisenberg was getting for his version of Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. And the less said about CG oddities like Doomsday and Steppenwolf, the better.

Even 2016’s Suicide Squad seemed to struggle with this problem despite being a movie populated only with supervillains. With the exception of Margot Robbie’s fantabulous Harley Quinn (who is more antihero than villain), few of the bad guys worked in that film, with actual heavies like Cara Delevingne’s Enchantress and Jared Leto’s hammy Joker falling completely flat.

What irony it is then that it took James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad to reveal five years later that the franchise and larger DCEU has had a great villain this whole time. Viola Davis did not originate the role of Amanda Waller in this weekend’s R-rated superhero sequel, but she certainly perfected it. What was already a formidable screen presence in an otherwise cluttered mess of a movie a half-decade ago has come into chilling focus here, and Davis has revealed she can give the scariest of performances within only a handful of scenes. Despite Gunn’s semi-sequel/semi-reboot being full of laughs, there’s nothing smirking about Davis’ constantly simmering ferocity.

In 2016’s Suicide Squad, Davis had more screen time and ostensibly more “badass” moments than she would in Gunn’s movie. In the final cut of that earlier film—which it should be noted is a version director David Ayer has more or less disowned—Davis gets the pre-title cards’ biggest entrance, with the soundtrack unimaginatively playing “Sympathy for the Devil” as she walks into close-up toward the screen. She also factors much more centrally to that movie’s plot, including in a scene where she is shown to murder her own technical engineers and assistants in the hope of covering up her culpability in that film’s messy plot.

Nevertheless, all of these moments intended to highlight her as a scary presence are as ham-fisted as the “damaged” tattoo on the forehead of Leto’s Joker. Davis, a powerhouse performer and one of the best actors of her generation, will always give a hundred percent on screen, but the characterization of her government mastermind always seemed underserved by the script’s broad characterization back then.

In The Suicide Squad, Davis plays the same shady lady: a morally ambiguous figure who finds different ways to blackmail incarcerated supervillains into going on suicide missions to “save the world.” Yet despite being far less central in this movie’s plot, Davis comes to dominate it as the true ultimate big bad. To be sure, there’s also a giant starfish called Starro the Conqueror, who acts like a cross between Godzilla and the facehugger in Alien. And yet, that creature is largely a physical menace in the end, and one that Gunn’s screenplay even sympathizes with. Starro ultimately comes off like an intergalactic King Kong who’s been kidnapped by humans to perform in the big bad city.

But Waller? She isn’t empathized with once by Gunn, and she is given ample opportunities to reveal a utilitarian cruelty that feels grotesquely real. It’s all fun and games at first in the opening sequence where Task Force X’s A-team is sent to be butchered on the shores of the Corto Maltese beachhead. When poor, dimwitted Savant (Michael Rooker) attempts to run away from the slaughter, Gunn’s camera almost fetishizes Waller’s power as she detonates the bomb in his neck, splattering his brain matter across the waves.

A sequence like that is expected in a movie like The Suicide Squad, and the coldness of her choice to pull the trigger on one of her own men is almost a gleeful confirmation that this movie will be going much harder than the 2016 version. However, as the picture progresses, the absolute indifference toward human life Davis embodies stops being a laughing matter.

Early on, the script does a lot of that heavy-lifting when we learn that Waller’s ace for blackmailing Bloodsport (Idris Elba) into working for her is that she’ll lean on the courts to have his daughter tried as an adult for shoplifting—thereby getting her sent to a maximum security prison where she wouldn’t last a day. It’s a vicious moment. But where Davis really brings the callousness out is at the end of the movie when we learn the story’s whole mission is not about destroying Starro, but erasing the records which prove the U.S. government is complicit in Corto Maltese’s experiments on the alien, which has resulted in the murders of thousands of civilians, including the children of dissidents.

When Starro inevitably breaks free and starts running amok, Waller doesn’t ask her team of supervillain rejects to save the day; she tells them to come home. Starro destabilizing a nation that’s become antagonistic to the United States will be good for strengthening U.S. influence in Central America, and if this alien kaiju has to kill a million people to do it, all the better.

There is a creepy cynicism to this plot twist, and it rings with an uncomfortable authenticity after a century of American foreign policy in the western hemisphere. Is it heavy-handed in a film where a giant starfish ends up battling an army of rats? Sure. But in a world where an American administration sanctioned the funneling of Iranian arms to Nicaragua in order to destabilize that country—and the said presidential administration which did this would go on to be lionized for decades to come by one of America’s two major political parties—it feels depressingly believable.

And Davis plays it all with the relentless conviction of a bureaucrat who’s seen it all and doesn’t really give a damn what anyone else in the room thinks. In fact, for most of the movie, the most compelling and unnerving thing about her Waller is how still and immobile she appears. She’s a rock for all the nuttiness of this film’s sea of supervillains to impotently crash against.

Read more

Movies

The Suicide Squad Review: The Most James Gunn Superhero Movie Ever

By David Crow

Movies

How The Suicide Squad is Different from Guardians of the Galaxy

By Mike Cecchini

The only time she ever raises her performance above a monotone is when Elba, Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, and the rest disobey her orders. In that moment, the actor who won an Oscar for wrestling a film away from Denzel Washington in Fences lets the fireworks fly. The loss of control turns Davis’ Waller into a monster far more fearsome than anything to do with starfish. She overwhelms the screen like a D.C. beltway variation of the Red Queen bellowing “off with their heads.” Her rage so consumes the screen that for the briefest of moments, it seems like the film could really end with her killing off the rest of the “good guys.”

Of course it does not go that way, and Waller is taken out of commission by her own minions in a nondescript control room for the rest of the climax—and her overlooking this blatant act of insubordination is probably the most absurd thing in The Suicide Squad. Even so, Waller remains undiminished and unchastened when the credits roll.

And that’s the most satisfying thing about Davis’ villain: unlike giant starfish or magical witches, she can’t be defeated or toppled. At best her type of realpolitik power can be merely evaded or sidestepped for a time. She doesn’t have any grandiloquent speech about gods and devils, or communion with CG beasties that lead her to babbling about “bells being rung.” She is simply a brutally efficient administrator whose effectiveness is actually a drag on the entire world around her—including the hapless antiheroes she will continue to force into suicide missions.

In a world where blockbuster antagonists more often run together in their search for MacGuffins and the ambitions to conquer the world, Davis’ Waller stands all the starker because you realize she achieved that domination long ago.

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from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/2VvC4el

[quirklove]

I beg of you- some soft Tomura, Compress, and Setsuno headcanons, please. I’m on my simp shit rn

aw, you don’t have to beg!! I’m constantly on simp mode for these babes

soft soft soft soft!!!!

ATSUHIRO

Is always humming something or other when he’s around his S/O. It might be an old nursery rhyme that’s stuck in his head, it might be some catchy pop tune that he keeps hearing on the radio, it might even be their favorite song. He’s nearly always an outgoing personality, but his S/O makes him so happy it puts that extra little spring in his step.

He’s a man of culture, (Name)! Somewhere he has a small stash of money from his past that he can draw on, so every once in a while, he likes to treat his friends and his S/O. (Most of the time, that cash goes to making sure they all actually have enough to eat or emergency supplies, and it’s obviously not too much money, so he doesn’t do this horribly often.) If anyone else will join him in disguise, he might be inclined to go with his S/O to a play or musical… perhaps even a ballet if the tickets are affordable enough. If no one else comes, ah, that’s alright; he’ll go with (Name) anyway, then bring back a slightly nicer dinner than normal for everyone else so that they aren’t left out. Maybe once or twice a year he does this, so everyone better enjoy it!

Noooo, he doesn’t wear the balaclava when he goes to bed, nor is it the first thing he puts on in the morning. He loves those times ― lying down to sleep and waking up. He gets to feel so vulnerable and exposed with his S/O, having them stare at him with his entire face uncovered, feeling their hands run through his hair like only ever allows in private. Plus, the fact that their gorgeous face is the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes in the morning? God. He’s gone soft. At least that softness is only for them, otherwise he might have a problem.

He likes to play cards with his friends and S/O if they’re not busy. No missions means he’s at the bar playing poker with Kurogiri, or war with Dabi, or… well, all Tomura ever plays is let me turn the cards to dust because fuck your games, Compress. What a brat!! One can practically see his face light up behind whatever mask he has on when (Name) asks him to teach them a game.

No matter what, he makes the extremely conscious effort to always give his S/O some gesture of affection before he goes off on a mission. Whether it’s tipping his mask to lovingly kiss their cheek, giving their fingers a passionate squeeze, or pulling them close for a gentle hug, he won’t leave without doing it. It’s a subtle way of saying goodbye, just in case things might go sideways. He acknowledges that the League’s affairs are incredibly dangerous and illegal; they could all die on any mission. He wants his beloved’s potential last memory of him to be something good. If he ends up dead, he doesn’t want them left with any doubt as to the fact that whatever else is true, he adores them very, very much and wants them to be happy.

TOMURA

Nightmares are a frequent thing with him, unfortunately. Sometimes it takes the form of memories, remembering the night his Quirk activated, leaving him with the image of crying in the middle of a circle made of his family’s corpses. Sometimes it’s a horrifying scenario in which Decay works on him, where he wraps his arms around himself and feels himself disintegrate piece by piece. Sometimes it’s his literal worst nightmare, a scene where he touches his friends or his S/O and they turn to dust in his fingers. Sometimes he wakes up screaming, his hands balled into fists so hard his nails are digging crescents into his palms and drawing blood, just so he can’t hurt anyone he cares about. Having his S/O take him in their arms and hold him close, kissing his face, whispering that he’s safe, reminding him that they’re here for him… he might not get back to sleep, but he finds comfort enough to stop crying within an hour.

There is one lone, solitary, singular way (Name) can get him to wear lip balm. That would be… to apply a surplus of it to their own lips, and proceed to give him as many kisses as he’ll allow them to in one go. Sure, the chapped lips aren’t unattractive ― but they’ve gotta hurt like hell. Just let your loving S/O lessen your pain a little, Tomura, you gigantic baby!! Also, they should pick a novelty flavor when they do this. It increases the number of kisses he’ll accept when their lips taste like vanilla frosting or Dr. Pepper.

Is like… the worst at any kind of self-care. He forgets to wash/comb his hair, he definitely doesn’t shower quite enough, he’s had at least one infection from not taking care of the wounds on his neck. The only reason he isn’t dead is Kurogiri, and later gains another reason; his S/O, obviously. Whenever he’s not working on his and All For One’s plans, he’s playing video games, and trying to get him away from that is like pulling teeth. However, his S/O has turned out to be very good at doing that. They can easily entice him with a warm shower together, and he’s pretty sure he’s never felt something as amazing as their fingers massaging his scalp as they wash his hair. Even though the ointment they want to put on his neck smells like medicine, he tolerates it simply because it feels nice when they rub it on. They’re always so gentle with him, and it just about breaks the poor man.

When encouraged and left in a non-stressful environment, Tomura is actually not terrible with children. He’s awkward, sure, he’s grumpy, sure, he doesn’t suffer brats, sure, but all things being equal, he does alright. Most of the time he’s not too scary around kids, or at least doesn’t act scary. (His appearance freaking some of them out, ah… that’s another story.) Though he’d have to do a lot of preparation, he might actually put an incredible amount of effort into learning if he found out he was going to be a father. How the man can’t manage to muster up the motivation needed to wash his clothes before wearing them a second time, yet can summon the will to read a ton of different parenting books, the world will never know. The point stands ― having a child combined with his love for his S/O would be a huge catalyst for his realizing that he doesn’t hate everything and everyone, and the world isn’t all bad.

Whenever he wants to touch his S/O in a sweet, intimate way but doesn’t feel comfortable or safe using most of his hand, he’ll use one finger. He might curl his fingers in to run his thumb gingerly over their cheek, or trace his knuckle down the side of their arm, or use the tip of his index finger to draw down their spine so he can see them arch their back. Tomura has never, ever had this before. Despite knowing he has to be careful, that he wants to be careful with them, there’s something endlessly fascinating to him about seeing how they react pleasantly to his touch when all his touch has ever done before is destroy. This also works in reverse; he wants to experience every possible touch of theirs that they’re willing to afford him.

TOYA

When he sleeps with his S/O, he really, really loves to be the little spoon. (He’s pretty well convinced that anyone who says they don’t, at least from time to time, is a liar!) It makes him feel safe and secure, like everything’s okay, like his S/O cares about him and wants to protect him. If he’s not being the little spoon, and sometimes when he’s the little spoon but facing them, he tends to cling in his sleep. His arms wrap tightly around their waist, his head buried in their chest or their neck or their back. It’s a product of his depressingly possessive nature; he loves them so much, they’re the best thing in his life, and he just… doesn’t want to lose them. Even while he’s asleep, he never wants to let go.

There are times Toya thinks about letting his hair grow out a little longer, to his shoulders maybe. The biggest thing that stops him is that he doesn’t know how he’d look with long hair. He isn’t sure he’d look that great or that he has the face for it! He’s a little afraid that with his more delicate features, having hair longer than it is now would lead to him being mistaken for a woman. If he mentions it to (Name), he might be a little startled by their enthusiastic, “Oh, that would look so charming on you!” coupled with a reassurance that they love his appearance no matter what he decides to do with his look. As far as they’re concerned, even if he ends up not doing it, they’re still going to think he’s the most handsome man ever. Knowing they’d support it, though, makes him think about actually doing it.

He rambles a lot, particularly when he’s feeling anxious. He rambles a lot. That goes along with his hands fidgeting and sometimes his leg bouncing a bit if he’s sitting down. For some reason he finds it hard to sit still or be quiet. He feels the need to fill the silence with something. So he talks, about anything and everything and occasionally about nothing at all. Most of the time only his S/O (or sometimes a friend) placing a hand over his, threading their fingers together, can calm him slightly. Often a gentle kiss when he’s doing the motormouth thing will get his mind to slow down and focus… at least to the point where he kisses back, and happily drowns in them for a while.

While not ‘on the job’, Toya… is usually kind of unsure what to do with his time. He reads, he watches TV a lot, he… sleeps. God, he sleeps. He seems to spend his life in a weird state of either being asleep or seeming wired as hell. There’s not really an in-between for him, at least not for a long time. He has trouble finding balance, especially since he’s so depressed. It seems to other people that he’s got too much energy and doesn’t fit the profile of what many people think a depressed person looks like. In truth, this is probably more accurate than people would like to think ― he hides the fact that he feels numb or sad by masking it with upbeat, happy, sometimes crazed behavior. Thankfully, he can sometimes find real happiness with his S/O, and it’s because of them that he might seek any kind of treatment so that he can feel better more often. Good thing, too, because not only will he be chasing a healthy life… his smile, genuine, painless, unaltered by any kind of forced joy? His true smile is the most beautiful thing.

Okay, but the man… has a serious sweet tooth. Most of the Hassaikai have their own room, and they can fill it however they choose. Toya’s cabinets are filled with nothing but sugary snacks. Even though he does eat regular meals, or at least tries to, he has to have something with sugar nearby to eat between. Chocolate is his favorite; he’ll eat almost any kind of candy, pastry, or even fruit snacks. If his S/O is very lucky, he will share! Pro tip: playing the pocky game with him is guaranteed to end in a cute, maybe steamy makeout session. And kissing any leftover chocolate that gets stuck to his lips? Oh, he’ll blush so hard.