#whose never experienced any of those issues in the first place

[letterstotheflre]

my issue with matty healy and the “it’s just a skit! it’s a performance! he’s mocking the people who actually think like that!” excuse his fans are pushing is that… why does he think it’s funny to be a racist and misogynistic asshole in the first place?? why does he think it’s funny to do the nazi salute?? why does he think it’s okay to those awful, real life issues as a perfomance?

[morally-grey-girlbosses]

Alright, I've finished looking into the Mordred situation. The TL;DR is that Mordred (Fate) has been disqualified from the tournament moving forward.

My initial reasoning in allowing characters from across the gender spectrum (i.e. Chara, Nimona, Perihelion/ART) was that "girlboss" is a term some nonbinary and male individuals have applied to themselves, or had applied to them by others that they then accepted. Gender experiences are broad and characters who fail to see themselves as "girls" may still be comfortable seeing themselves as "girlbosses." (Similarly, there are many people who embrace being a girl but reject being a woman, or vice-versa - one of my headmates is among these.

However, the parts of Mordred's story that are commonly read as trans or gender-nonconforming elements seem to reject the idea that "girlboss" is an appropriate label for him. For those unfamiliar with the Fate franchise, here are the bullet points. (Note that I myself am not a Fate fan, so any Fate fans in the audience, correct me if I'm wrong on any of these or missed important points.)

Mordred's description in his Saber form uses he/him pronouns for him in multiple places.

Mordred's description in his Saber form explicitly states that "treating him as a woman" will activate his rage (as will "being too obvious about treating him as a man.")

In the original Japanese, Mordred uses a set of first-person pronouns that, while not explicitly gendered, are usually associated with a masculine adult.

There are multiple instances where Mordred snaps and makes violent threats at other characters for referring to him as a "girl" or "woman."

For the sake of balance, I'll also note the following points against the idea of a transmasculine Mordred:

Mordred's description in Rider form uses she/her pronouns for her, as well as stating (in one translation) that she is avoiding grappling with her identity issues in order to enjoy her time at the beach.

Mordred is listed by the game explicitly in multiple places as being female. Contrast this to other canonically trans or gender nonconforming characters in the franchise, such as the nonbinary-coded Astolfo (whose gender is omitted "at their request") and the canonically transfeminine Leonardo Da Vinci (whose gender is listed as "young girl.")

Other characters use she/her pronouns for Mordred frequently.

I have chosen to exclude Mordred from this tournament because most of the points that support his masculine identity deal with his own image of masculinity, and what terms he self-applies, whereas the points against are generally based in his relationship to others and the frameworks that they put upon him.

In practical terms, this means that Nana Daiba (Revue Starlight) is automatically the winner of Round 1 Match 86 and advancing to the next round regardless of the results of the vote. The loser of Round 1 Match 85, Odin (The Bifrost Incident) vs. Enma Ai (Jigoku Shoujo) will automatically win her first match in the loser's bracket, as there is no longer a loser from Round 1 Match 86 for her to battle. Apologies to the fans of Mordred who read his character as feminine and were rooting for her in this poll. Despite my making this decision, I do not endorse any unkindness to the submitter of Mordred, or those who voted for him.

Finally, I would like to apologize to any transgender or gender nonconforming fans of this poll who were offended by Mordred's inclusion in this poll or felt that it made the poll an unsafe or unaccepting place for them. I was not made aware of the complications surrounding this character's gender prior to the tournament, and had I known I would likely have excluded him on similar grounds. As a plural system in which many members are trans, I hope you will be able to forgive and trust us for this error in judgement and recognize that we are doing our best to moderate a poll involving many franchises with which we are not ourselves familiar. It is never our intention to erase the experiences of any transgender individual or invalidate any transgender representation with which those people identify.

[girl-next-door-writes]

I Don't Care About The Presents Underneath The Christmas Tree

Characters: Steve Rogers x Reader

Summary: Steve accompanies you on a visit to the local Christmas Markets and gets a glimpse of what could be, if only he had the nerve to ask you out.

Word Count: 1350 words

Prompt: #1: Visiting cute little Christmas markets

A/N: For the effervescent @princessmisery666 who is an absolute legend. Also, I am still experiencing laptop issues so I can only apologise for posting this one a little late.

This had been a mistake and there was no way Steve could even begin to convince himself it wasn’t. This was torture in its purest form, and it was his own doing. Why he had agreed to this… well, he knew exactly why he’d said yes, it was because it meant spending time with you and he could never pass up that opportunity. The real problem was that the more time he spent in your presence the harder he was falling and you were blissfully unaware of his affections.

He had walked into the kitchen and interrupted a conversation between you and Bucky. The silence had lain thick in the air as you had frowned at Buck, whose lips had curled up in a smirk when he spotted Steve in the doorway.

“I can’t come with you, doll, but I do know someone who finished their paperwork last night.” Bucky had grinned and Steve wondered if he shouldn’t slowly back out of the room before whatever plan his friend had in mind was put in place. But then you had turned and looked at him with those eyes of yours. Those eyes that enchanted him, made him feel weightless and like he was falling at the same time. Those eyes that held the whole universe of happiness within them. Those eyes had him pinned to the spot as he frantically reminded himself to breathe.

“Hi, Steve.” You had smiled and his heart fluttered, a heat rising up the back of his neck. “Is there any chance you might want to come with me to the Christmas Market? Bucky’s just flaked out of me, and I can’t find Sam. Not that you’re my last choice or anything!” He caught the slight panic cross your face before he chuckled, reassuring you that he wasn’t offended.

So here he was, in the crisp December air, wandering through the incredibly crowded market, glancing at the artisan stalls and trying in vain to hold back his small, dreamy sighs whenever your hand rested on his arm. It was entirely unfair the hold you had on him. Something as simple as you saying his name was like a seismic event, so being the focus of your attention was beyond anything he had experienced.

Steve found his gaze resting on you more often than not, and he had to remind himself that it was unwise of him to stare, not only because you might catch him but also because the more he committed your features and mannerisms to his memory the more it hurt to know you weren’t his. You haunted his daydreams, made his heart ache with longing, and he couldn’t allow himself to truly relax and enjoy this time together because, if he did, it would only fuel his futile hopes. And yet, he couldn’t help himself. You were like a simmering stovetop that his intrusive thoughts encouraged him to touch, needing to feel that burn. Right now, your rejection would be a shallow cut, one that would hurt and sting like a paper cut, but the longer he entertained the fantasy of a life with you’re the deeper that wound would become, so it was better he just pulled away now, right? Safest all round.

“Hey, Steve, you wanna grab a hot chocolate?” The way your hot breath clouded in the cold air distracted him for a moment, and he hadn’t even realized he had nodded until you slipped your arm through his and tugged him towards the small stall boasting Gourmet Hot Chocolate, whatever that was.

Watching your eyes close as you took the first sip of your drink had a smile pulling at Steve’s lips, especially when he noticed the way the whipped cream clung to your top lip. How could you be so adorable and so oblivious? There were a thousand little things that you did that had a whirlwind of emotions careering around inside him, things he could never even hope to describe but that he was certain was love.

Once you had both finished your drinks you had slipped your hand into his, heading back off to explore the stalls. Logically, he knew you were holding his hand so you wouldn’t lose each other in the crowd, but for a fraction of a second he could pretend it was because you wanted to keep him close, that you craved contact with him as much as he craved your touch. He wished he could ignore these thoughts, but he didn’t have the energy to fight it anymore. He knew he was to blame for each stolen glance, for pretending there was something more than a tentative friendship between the two of you, and he reasoned that, at some point, he heat of his feelings for you would burn out and it wouldn’t hurt to be this close to you. Just not yet.

Instead, he spent the day trying on unflattering winter hats, reveling in your giggles. He had carried the growing number of bags from each of your purchases. He had tucked himself behind you as you had stood at the fudge counter and debated which treat Tony would appreciate more. The casual observer would probably have believed he was a dutiful boyfriend, his smiles reflecting you own when you looked up at him, his expression soft and tender when you weren’t.

Steve had lost count of the stalls the two of you had visited, but when you had turned to him and said you thought that was it, he wished there were more, even though the tip of his nose had turned red in the cold and he wasn’t entirely sure he could feel his toes. He was about to ask if you were sure when something caught your eye.

“Okay. I need you to stay right here. I just need to go grab one last thing.” You had flashed him a bright smile and then disappeared into the crowd, leaving him confused and cold in a way he couldn’t put his finger on. His eyes searched the vicinity, hoping to spot you returning to his side, feeling uneasy at your absence, when he spotted a small stall with handmade soaps.

Figuring that it wasn’t really that far from the spot you’d left him, he wandered over and his eyes lit up as he took in the beautiful handcrafted hampers. Steve could list the scents that combined reminded him of you. He knew your shampoo, your bodywash, your favourite scents, and so he asked the elderly lady behind the counter if it was possible to custom make a hamper.

Hiding his purchase in amongst the myriad of bags you had left him with, Steve felt incredibly proud of himself. He had swapped his Secret Santa with Bucky to ensure he had you, and now he had the perfect gift to add to the three other ‘perfect gifts’ he’d already purchased.

“There you are!” He turned and saw your narrow eyes, a look of annoyance which would have been convincing if it wasn’t for the ghost of a smile. “I thought I said that I needed you to stay right where I left you.”

“I’m right here, doll. Right where you need me to be.” He gave you a lopsided smile, unaware of the endearment which had fallen from his lips. Instead, he was taken with the way you tilted your head slightly, the thoughtful look in your eyes sending the cascade of butterflies off in his stomach once more.

“I think what we both need right now is to sit in front of the fire and listen to our idiot friend’s latest argument. I’m sure Sam and Buck will have something on the go by now.” You slipped your arm into his and he fought the urge to lean down and place a kiss to the top of your head.

“Yeah, we should probably go referee their latest argument.” He agreed, although he took his time walking back to the car with you, wanting to cling to these last few moments before you left the magic of the market.

[drifting-pieces-blog-blog]

Breaking down the comics: Doing good (Issue 34)

Moon Knight, Issue # 34: Primal Scream

Written by Tony Isabella and drawn by Bo Hampton. 

And Bonus short: The Vault of Knight

Written by Tony Isabella and drawn by Richard Howell.

Let's stop for a second. Take a little comic history lesson tour. 

This is not written by the usual Moon Knight team. 

Let's get into a little Moench history here and why he left. 

He did not really get along well with the then Marvel Chief editor James Shooter. Understandable. Here’s why: 

James Shooter got his start writing for DC then moved to Marvel. During the 70s and 80s, Marvel was experiencing a huge boom in content and new titles (like Moon Knight!) 

Further more, Stan Lee stepped away from monitoring comics to heading the animation works in LA right when Shooter became the cheif, leaving him fully in charge. 

Many felt that Shooter ran the place like a dictator, but there had been a huge influx of missed deadlines and Shooter put a stop to that. 

Despite keeping things running and overseeing a lot of new and important titles, he also alienated a LOT of long-time Marvel creators. 

Many of the long-time creators, like Moench, left Marvel to join with DC, who had a new editor. (He got to write for Batman!) 

NOTE: Shooter also enforced a policy forbidding the portrayal of Gay Characters in the Marvel Universe. In fact, the ONLY and first portrayal of a gay themed comic was of gay men attempting to rape Bruce Banner in the YMCA (which Shooter himself wrote), thus making Marvel to be widely considered Homophobic throughout Shooter's reign. (You should look into the history of LGBTQ+ in comics. It's a ride.)

I would like to point out that Moench's last issue during this time was about a reporter that was obsessed with making her deadlines and who wrote shitty pieces that were praised but awful and caused harm and eventual death in one character she wrote about. HMMMMM. 

When did he leave? Sources say the end of 1982, but those that understand the publishing timeline will note comic publish dates don't match the date they reach the shelves. 

So what is the official last Moon Knight Comic Moench worked on?

Let me put it this way... We aren't going to see Moench anymore for the 1980s run. 

He DOES come back for a bit later on, but it's short lived for a couple of limited run editions.

(And this is all new knowledge for me, who thought he originally finished the 1980s run and now I'm looking at an earlier review I did out of order because I'm an idiot and realize I've made a grave mistake.... Oh joy.) 

Farewell my sweet writer Doug Moench. Hats off to you. 

Now! That out of the way, let’s take a look at the first step we truly take away from Mr. Moench. 

For some reason, any time a guest writer sits in for early Moon Knight, they feel the need to over explain the character and introduce his past. Almost as if they were trying to explain who they are writing or getting a grasp on it for themselves. 

This is also a special double large edition. Another cause for writers to try to over explain characters as Marvel expects a bigger issue to draw in new fans. 

However, this is an odd story to push on the hopes of new fans. 

Let’s get into it! 

Yep. We open with a fast recap on who these characters are. 

It leaves me wondering what happened when Moench left. Did he have a script written out? Did he have to give notice and they knew he was leaving and this writer was already on the backburner? Or was this done in a hurry to get a planned comic deadline out on time? 

I would ALSO like to point out that when Bill left, he got a send off. Moench did not get a send off. He just disappears from the credits. It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. 

"He was born Marc Spector and Spector wasn't a very nice man...Not so much evil as callous...A mercenary whose concern was reserved solely for himself and his Bankbook. 

That man could never have come to this deserted industrial wasteland on a mission made of equal parts mercy and vengeance." 

I disagree. Marc would be all over vengeance in a deserted wasteland. 

"Steven Grant could have. You've read about Grant... The committed millionaire about town...A pretty defendable guy as the upper crust goes. Still... 

Grant couldn't have found this place without Jake Lockley. Jake is the eyes and ears of Grant and Spector...A cabbie whose heart pulses to the beat of the city." 

Putting a bit on Steven, but he'd want to do good. But a gritty back alley is not really his style. 

"Ready for the kicker? Spector, Grant, and Lockley are all the same man...A man you know better as..." 

(A side note... We see Moon Knight running through a warehouse complaining it smells like a sewer. HE WOULD KNOW. And then he's startled by a cat. This is hilarious to me for so many reasons.) 

And that leads us to the title page where a young man is leaking off the crates above to tackle Moon Knight. 

"Frank? Hate to do this to a hopped-up kid, but the quicker I put him down...the less chance of his getting hurt! Though when I think of what he did to Gena..." 

He tosses Frank across the warehouse. 

Moon Knight again alludes to the damage this kid did to Gena's diner after getting high on some new 'junk'. 

Moon Knight is about to call in to Frenchie to get the medics out to take care of the hopped-up kid when the kid takes off. 

He isn't worried. The fight has been knocked out of him and the police shouldn't have an issue. 

Now we head back to the diner where we find Jake having a cuppa wihth Gena and Crawley. 

Crawley is talking about "The Raiders" which is a young men's social club (read 'Gang'). They are known to be brutal and even the police are afraid of them. 

Gena mentions about how she never raised her boys to run in gangs. Out back, we see Frank leading a group of gang members up to the back door of the diner. 

The gang busts in and attacks the patrons, demanding food. 

Jake isn't about to lay down and let it slide. 

He clocks one of the kids and worries about his friends. 

"Gotta get over to Crawley and Gena fast! They're not used to this kind of action!" 

Jake's heart is made of gold. 

One of the kids jumps Jake, growling and snarling. 

"A for effort, punko, but I've seen a real werewolf up close--And all you've got in common with him are lousy table manners!" And Jake flips the man off. 

Frank jumps on Genna while Jake is preoccupied. He cries out that he's hungry and he bites into her arm. 

Her cries distract Jake and someone bashes him on the back of the head, knocking him out. 

On waking up, Jake immediately asks how Gena is. He finds Gena loading up into an ambulance. 

"His name is Frank... So much for my perfect record. Find him before the police do, Jake." 

"I...Understand. I'll make sure the boy isn't harmed." 

"You don't understand! I want that ungrateful little maggot harmed! I want him harmed so badly he won't ever be able to walk upright again! I treated that boy like family! He treated me like today's hot lunch special! Get him for me, Jake! Bring me his stinkin' head on a platter!" 

Jake's pretty irked about Gena getting hurt, but... 

"But that's not what Moon Knight stands for, is it? I'm the agent of vengeance, not vengeance itself." 

That’s an interesting thought for Jake to have. Jake who so often slips out to let the others handle the Moon Knight mission. He trusts that they can handle things. But what is the difference between being an agent of vengeance and vengeance itself? Perhaps, looking to another comic is where we see that line and the difference between Moon Knight and the Punisher. 

He sets out to find Frank and his gang. He hopes having Frank brought in will help Gena. 

"Because I never want to look into the eyes of someone I care for and see so much hatred and despair there. I've seen it too many times before... Within myself." 

So this issue I’m just going to be crying over Jake the whole time. Okay. Good to know. 

Back at the diner, Gena is out of the hospital and facing her fears. 

Moon Knight is searching the hideout of the Raiders. He fllows the smell till he comes across a delirious woman with some sort of chemical burn blotches all over her. 

Looking around, he realizes, Steven Grant has been here before. An old factory he had been trying to save to create jobs has fallen into ruin. 

The factory is left to rot and all the chemicals inside are left there as well. 

He radios to Frenchie to make sure medical is on standby. These kids have been living in the toxic waste too long. 

He asks if the police got anything out of Frank when they grabbed him. 

Yeah... they didn't get him. He got away. 

And he's still looking for food from Gena. 

Back at the diner, we see Gena trying to clean up on her own. 

She is skittish as she cleans but tries to tell herself that no one's coming for her. 

"Besides, I'm not gonna let anybody or anything chase me away from what's mine!" 

And that's when Frank breaks back into Genas’.

Moon Knight finds one of the kids conscious enough to talk. Alcaide, their leader, didn't let them leave the hideout. He found drums full of a top secret toxic waste that drove people wild and crazy. 

Moon Knight recalls that Grant had learned that the factory used to work for the government. 

"Grant saw that in their public records. But the Spector part of me can't help but wonder if they didn't also do some more discreet research for the feds." 

Bingo bango. He finds the drums, filled with "Primal Project" chemicals. 

Oh! time for a Marc Spector flashback! 

"Spector was working for the feds at the time, escorting a man named Wenzel through a south American jungle..." 

They were heading to meet up with a professor in Manaus (that’s in Brazil!) to shut down the Primal Project. 

"It was supposed to slow a man's thinking process...Make him docile...Easy to handle. Something went wrong." Wenzel talks about the project. 

Marc stops them in their tracks. He hears something stalking them from the trees above. 

A creature leaps at them and Marc fires his gun. 

The beast is hit and lays dead. Deformed and animalistic. 

Marc asks if this is the work of the professor they're heading to see. 

"Spector...That IS the professor." 

They reach the campsite to find men dead across the site and more creatures running around. 

They are attacked adn have to fend off the beasts. They ended up blowing up the site to get rid of the beasts and the remaining chemicals. 

Apparently not all the chemical was destroyed. 

Now, Alcaide, the gang leader, approaches, fully a beast now. 

Back in the diner, Gena fights for her life. 

The cops have arrived at the factory and the paramedics are working on the gang. 

Moon Knight still battles the crazed beast and so does Gena. 

The next day, Jake stops in to see Gena. 

Most of the kids will make a recovery and their lawyers claim they were unter the influence of the Primal toxin. 

Gena is still shaken deeply. 

"I trusted Frank like he was one of my own, Jake...And every time I come in here all the pain comes back. Maybe it wasn't all his fault, but nobody forced him to join that gang. And is it right that I can't walk into my own diner without getting sick?" 

Jake tries to comfort her. Or perhaps, he reaches out to her in a way that he wishes he could with himself and with Marc. Because he knows that it does eat them up. It eats Marc up every day. He isn’t sure if it will ever stop eating them up.

"No. But you're too good a lady to let this eat you up forever." 

"Yeah... I'll work it out."

Poor Gena. 

She shoos them away. She needs to lock up for the night. 

This story is beautiful. This one time special guest writer, Tony Isabella and artist Bo Hampton really did a beautiful job here. 

They manage to keep the usual Moon Knight pace and story feel. We have Jake trying to protect his people. We have Gena facing a kid she helped to raise up, despite him not being her own, joining a violent gang and hurting her, we have Governmental neglect to clean up their mess and doing experimental biochemical weapons on unsuspecting people (a thing that really did happen in ‘Nam), we have economic failure for the factory that lead to the failure to clean up the toxic chemicals, and then we go back to Gena who is now facing trauma. 

No one in this story won. No one goes home feeling good about the day. They just have to pick themselves up again and move on. And they shouldn’t have to. Yet here they are, facing it all alone. 

This moves us to the short story afterwards. "The Vault of Knight." 

This is a weird one. Stranger still is that the short is written by the same person who wrote the main line. That’s pretty rare. Usually the short is done as a commission to be filler or bonus issues. 

Weirder still is the way it’s presented. A commentary on the main storyline! I've seen it done before. It's sort of like the Watcher to the audience. 

We have a strange looking character that addresses the audience. He's dressed like a baseball catcher with a Cubs cap on. Fitting. 

He calls himself "The Score-Keeper". 

And this... Let me tell you....

"Aloha, Adventure-addicts! Was twenty-four pages of gratuitous Do-Gooding enough for you...Or does your Hero-Habit demand even more of (yawn) Moon Knight's exciting escapades? I'm your sinister statistician, The Score-Keeper, and what I wanna know is... 

What is this Turkey in his cowled skivvies accomplishing? Does he really make a difference? Let's add it up. You can't lie to a Scorecard!" 

Interesting. A common question that pops up in Moon Knight comics. 

"Take last story for example. Sure he put ONE gang of teen terrors out of commission, but what's he doing about the rest of the anti-social adolescents in this city?" 

We see Moon Knight on a stakeout, waiting where someone's been hitting the same place for a week. 

The someone is two punks that dress up like werewolves and rob the shops in the area. In fact, they've hit five places in the past week alone! 

They hit a store where an old man cowers in fear....Until Moon Knight swoops in and knocks the thugs out. 

"You...You're that Moon Mensch fella! And you came into MY shop to save me from those Gonifs." 

"It's sort of my job." Moon Knight pauses. 

"Nu? To you, it's maybe a job. To me, if my store gets robbed, maybe I don't eat that night. So I thank you a lot, you and your job." 

"Friend, it was a mechaieh." 

Oh boy oh boy oh boy you have no idea how happy I am to hear Moon Knight say THAT. 

Back to the score-keeper, he's not impressed. "Why can't these heroes ever save Bloomingdales?" 

And the score-keeper starts talking about Gena and the previous issue. 

"What about Gena? One of Moon Knight's own team and he couldn't prevent what happened to her in this issue's other story. I don't think she's over it yet." 

We see Gena's boys Ray and Ricky head into the diner. 

"What did you want to talk to us about?" 

"I...I was talkin' to your uncle Rollie today, the one with the big restaurant out in Houston and he...Well, he kinda offered...I mean..." 

Score-Keeper scoffs. 

"Way to go M.K. While you're brushin' up on your Yiddish, one of your closest friends is bookin' this urban paradise. Maybe we should ask the rest of your little outfit what they think of you..." 

And this cracks me up because we get Frenchie, Marlene, and Crawley. Each one speaks of a different altar. And Frenchie is just SO pissy about it and so protective of Marc... He calls him his friend. Marc could always count on Frenchie back in the day. 

I’m…Not going to get into the “Faces of Eve” thing. It’s… A lot. But it was the big DID story and eventual movie that came out around this time that somewhat inspired a loose input into the creation of Moon Knight having DID. 

"You ask me, you care more about these guys than you care about Moon Knight." 

A misnomer. These people are what makes Moon Knight and keeps him going. In his adventures, helping him, and even when he fails them, they stay with him. 

Score guy jabs at it, noting that Moon Knight hasn't protected any of them. 

Frenchie's girlfriend, Marlene's brother, Crawley's son... 

He moves on to Detective Flint. 

Flint waits for him in a back alley. 

"Something happened --Didn't want you to read about it in the papers first. That Alaide kid you brought in was found dead in his cell an hour ago." 

"Yeah, that would've ruined my Breakfast all right." 

(Honestly, Jake is the one that reads the morning paper and eats breakfast. Jake would have been upset.) 

"Wasn't anybody's fault, guy. You know how crazed the kid was --He strangled himself before anyone could get to him." 

"That supposed to make me feel better?" 

"No...This is. It's the room number of the officer that was injured that night." 

Moon Knight pays the officer a visit. The officer is surprised to see him, thinking that he might not come. 

"Flint tells me that storage drum busted three ribs. I'm sorry. Maybe if I'd moved a little faster..." 

"It's all part of the job. But I don't have to tell you that...

You know, I figure you're pretty much a regular guy under that mask. Weird clothes, but no special 'powers'. I'll be honest... This job scares me a lot, like all the time. I was shaking when I went into that warehouse." 

Sometimes he doesn't see the good he does. 

Sometimes all he can see is the pain he leaves behind. Blaming himself for the pain of his friends. 

Maybe he doesn't really understand why this Daniels is thankful for him. But maybe in this moment he thinks it might be worth it. It might be why he is still trying. 

Back to Score-Keeper. It's time to add up the score. 

"Is Moon Knight doing any good or is he just swinging against the wind?" 

He looks at the results and seems surprised. Ripping up the scorecard, he tells us to figure it out for ourselves and leaves. 

A weird story, but I'm not mad at it. It ties into the main story line, shows the aftermath of what happened, and still shows their friends standing by them. 

It also lets Moon Knight take a moment to feel appreciated. 

And it does ask a question that Moon Knight has asked time and time again. “Am I doing good?” 

Is he causing the harm or is he just shouldering the blame because of his past traumas? The question remains over the years as things become more and more broken for them, and the answer has always been there. It’s just that sometimes it’s hard for them to see it… or accept it. 

[checkoutmybookshelf]

The Polin Fic (Part 1 of 3)

Hello friends! I have written a Polin fic to pass the time between seasons of Bridgerton, and I thought I might share for those of you who also ship. This is arguably safe for work, but anyone with medical/wound/illness triggers may want to give this one a pass.

This is the first of three instalments of the story. It follows largely the show continuity, with the odd bit of book continuity in there.

If she didn’t have to get another edition of Whistledown out this week, Penelope would have feigned illness to avoid attending the queen’s ball. Colin’s proclamation to Fife and the other eligible young men of the ton still rang in her ears. Are you mad? I would never dream of courting Penelope Featherington. Not in your wildest fantasies, Fife. To be in the same ballroom as Colin—not to mention Eloise, whose fury practically radiated from her person to such an extent that Violet Bridgerton had yet to introduce her to any eligible young man that night—was nearly unbearable. And yet Penelope was now secretly the sole earner of her household after Cousin Jack’s betrayal. Which was why she was glued to the wall of the queen’s ballroom near the table filled with refreshments, studiously avoiding looking at Colin or Eloise while she listened to the footmen murmur to each other about the sudden European trip on which one of Miss Goring’s younger sisters had embarked. The poor girl was not even out in society. Pen sighed to herself; this was not something she could print. Eventually, the footmen’s gossip turned to the latest edition of Whistledown, in which she had published Colin’s repudiation of the very idea that he would court her.

They were more or less evenly split in their reactions to Colin’s proclamation, with some repeating the criticisms about her looks and weight that Penelope heard regularly from Cressida Cowper and near daily from Prudence and her own mama and others pitying Penelope, as publication in Whistledown had neatly set her on the shelf. Penelope was used to hearing both criticism and pity; these words fazed her not at all. They were also not, however, immediately useful for her next issue.

Normally, when the footmen failed to offer her something she could print, Penelope would listen into the clusters of young men—invariably, they would brag or complain to their fellows about something scandal-worthy. That, of course, was out of the question now; Colin was trapped among them, which was why Penelope had tucked herself away to listen to the footmen in the first place. Much as she hated to do so, Penelope was going to have to unobtrusively attach herself to the edges of the clutch of matchmaking mamas—including her own—to hear what the ton was gossiping about.

An experienced wallflower, Penelope generally had a keen sense for when people were attempting to listen in on her. She hadn’t been caught unawares at a ball since the beginning of her first season. It could only have been higher levels of distress than she cared to admit to herself, and her focus on avoiding Bridgerton eyelines that had blinded her to the approach of the man behind her. As she turned to track down the cluster of gossipy mamas, she was confronted by a snarling man’s face that was far too close to her own for propriety. Before she could react, the man punched her. She felt his fist skitter off the busk in her corset and trail briefly along her abdomen. Although the busk absorbed much of the force of the blow, it still drove Penelope’s breath from her. The man grabbed her shoulder, leaning in to whisper in her ear.

“Lord Andrew says hello, Lady Whistledown.” Then, the man held her at arm’s length and slapped her across the face. The timing of the slap was incredibly unfortunate for Penelope’s attacker. Although Penelope herself lacked the breath to cry out, the slap landed in the breath of silence between the orchestra completing a song and the general brouhaha of ballroom chatter resuming. The sound of flesh hitting flesh echoed through the room, and every head turned toward the source. Penelope silently cursed the bright yellow of her dress, which made it impossible for her to meld into the background. Then she reached for the wall behind her, swamped by a wave of dizziness and nausea.

The man who had attacked her went pale as he released her, attempting a dash toward the doors. Every young man of the ton moved to stop him, but they were either still on the dance floor or clumped in small groups at the other end of the room—too far away. Too far until Lady Danbury thrust her cane into the man’s path, laying him out flat on the floor. A firm thump between his shoulder blades from the point of the cane kept him on the floor long enough for Anthony and Benedict Bridgerton, accompanied by Lords Lumley and Fife, to apprehend him, with the queen’s footmen hovering behind them, waiting for direction. The whole event had taken perhaps a minute, maybe two, to play out.

“Pen!” The insistent tone told Penelope that this was not the first time someone had called her name. She still had one hand against the wall, supporting herself. Her other hand was in someone’s warm grip, and she looked away from where Anthony and Benedict were searching her attacker up into the vivid blue-green eyes of Colin Bridgerton.

I would never dream of courting Penelope Featherington.

Hearing his words in her head, the fury and fear in his eyes made her already sour stomach roil. How dare he be angry about this; how dare he be afraid for her well-being. He had made it abundantly clear that she was no concern of his. It was entirely unfair that he was the first to her side, that he should presume to perform this mockery of friendship in front of the very members of the ton to whom he had decried her. Where Colin’s emotions were evident in the fire behind his eyes and the flush in his cheeks, Penelope’s fury went cold along with her body. Without appearing to think for even a moment of the impropriety of the action, Colin gently placed two fingers under her chin, gently turning her head to look at the imprint of a hand on her skin.

No. He could not be allowed to do this. Penelope jerked her chin free of his hold and yanked her hand from his.

“Excuse me, Mr. Bridgerton,” she said, tone even but icy. The hand and arm that had been using the wall for support went instinctively around her middle, cupping the place she had been struck first as she took several steps toward where Antony questioned her attacker.

“I will ask this question only once,” hissed Anthony. “Why did you attack Miss Featherington?” Penelope’s foot hit something on the floor as she walked, and an item that seemed to flash crimson went skittering toward Benedict, who stooped to retrieve the item. Behind her, Penelope could hear the swish of skirts that had to herald the impending arrival of her mama, and possibly Violet Bridgerton as well, with whom Penelope had grown close through her friendship with Eloise. The majority of her attention, however, focused on three events that happened in rapid succession.

Benedict’s face went white as he examined the item he had retrieved from the floor. He covered the ground between himself and the man Anthony was questioning in three broad strides and grasped the man’s hand. Anthony’s eyes widened as he looked from the item in Benedict’s hand to the bound hands of the man he had been interrogating. The heads of both Bridgerton men snapped toward Penelope as the captured man growled, “Lord bloody Andrew paid me to take revenge on the Whistledown bitch.”

From the head of the ballroom, behind a wall of guardsmen, the queen’s voice carried clearly. “And what proof does Lord Andrew have that Miss Penelope Featherington, of all people, is Lady Whistledown?” she demanded.

Penelope’s head spun further, and she grew colder. It was not as though she had never imagined being found out as Lady Whistledown; she had even imagined a scenario not dissimilar to the one she found herself in, in which she was outed publicly. But she had never for a moment imagined that the queen would take any such proclamation, particularly one from a man who had just attacked a young lady, seriously. Penelope had, it seemed, underestimated how far she had gotten under the queen’s skin. She could see her error now and recognized the warning that the queen’s suspicion of Eloise had been. The queen suspected a member of the ton, and a young lady at that. She ought to have taken additional precautions to distance herself from the pool of possible suspects when she had stepped in to remove Eloise from it, but she had been distracted by her own near ruination of her best friend. Well, she had best think on her feet now.

“Your Majesty, surely you can see this is ridiculous,” she began, gesturing with both arms. The audible gasp that went up around her and the room swimming before her eyes stopped Penelope’s voice. She was still too cold, but suddenly felt a burning in her abdomen. She looked down to see a red stain spreading across her gown. The moment she paid attention to it, the pain became overwhelming. She collapsed slowly, fighting it all the way down, but nonetheless falling first to her knees, then to one hip. She tried to catch herself as she slid sideways and down, but her silk gloves found no purchase on the floor, and she melted down to the hardwood. The candles in the room were too bright; they overwhelmed her vision.

“What has happened?” Snapped the queen.

“Your Majesty,” said Anthony. “It appears this cad stabbed Miss Featherington; she is bleeding, and we must send for a doctor immediately.”

Closer at hand but somehow feeling very far away, Penelope heard the lighter tone of Benedict’s voice. “Miss Featherington, can you hear me? You must stay with us now, come on.”

“Pen.” For a moment, Penelope did not recognize that anguished voice as Colin’s. Benedict’s tone sharpened as he spoke to his brother.

“Focus,” he snapped. “We must try to stop the bleeding, put pressure on the wound. Help me turn her.”

“You will hurt her!” Even through the haze of pain and sensory overload, Penelope could have slapped him. Surely he understood the basic premise that too great a loss of blood would prove fatal, and some temporary pain now was preferable to the bother of planning a funeral? Penelope wanted to tell Colin off herself, but despite the clarity of her thoughts, her tongue was heavy, and she could not get the words out. Thank goodness that Benedict seemed to share Penelope’s thoughts on the matter.

“If we do nothing, brother, she will die. You may assist me, or you may get out of the way.” Penelope knew Colin well; she could imagine the progression of emotions that crossed his face in the split second before he joined his brother in shifting her so that her own body was no longer hiding the injury. A unique mixture of fury at being called out and chagrin at knowing he was in the wrong would be first, followed by what she privately referred to as “the Bridgerton backbone.” It was a look she had seen every Bridgerton sibling take on in moments of crisis, and it reflected—well, not surety so much as the bone-deep knowledge that they had made a choice and come hell or high water they would see it through.

Penelope cried out as someone—she was unsure whether it was Colin or Benedict—leaned their body weight onto the wound to stop the bleeding. A hand caught hers and squeezed.

“It is all right, Pen. I’m here,” said Colin. “I will look after you. I promised you that, and I will not break that promise.” She desperately wanted to believe him, but she could not—not with the wound of his betrayal so fresh on her heart.

“Your Majesty, please. Let me take Penelope home.” As she breathed into and then through the pain in her core, Penelope slowly became more aware of her surroundings. Turning her head and squinting through the glare of the candles, she could see the queen standing a little way from her, eyes locked on Penelope’s still form with an uncomfortably calculating expression. Dowager Viscountess Bridgerton and Lady Featherington stood near her. Violet was holding Portia up bodily, with one arm around her waist and the other under her forearm. Eloise hovered behind them, on arm looped through a deeply puzzled-looking Prudence’s. Anthony, Lumley, and Fife still had hands on Penelope’s attacker, ensuring that he did not escape. Penelope disliked the look on the queen’s face; it looked as though she had assembled some puzzle pieces and come up with a picture that resembled Penelope.

“Lady Featherington, you cannot imagine I would let Miss Penelope endure a carriage ride across London in this condition. No, she will remain in the palace under the care of my physician. She shall be moved now; the man has already been summoned. In the meantime, I shall assess the evidence surrounding the identity of Lady Whistledown and take whatever further steps I deem necessary.”

“Ma’am,” began Lady Danbury, but she was cut off.

“Enough. I have spoken. Move the girl, so she may be seen to.”

“Surely Miss Featherington may be accompanied by her mama, and a friend or two?” asked Lady Danbury. The queen waved a careless hand over her shoulder as she left the room, formally signaling the end of the ball.  

“What does that mean?” gasped Lady Featherington.

“Stay with me,” said Lady Danbury. “We will not abandon the young Miss Featherington.” Three footmen surrounded Penelope. Benedict drew back of his own volition, but Colin refused to move, even after several polite “My Lords” from the footmen. It took a low, snapped “Colin” from Violet Bridgerton to break his staring match with the footmen, and Benedict still had to pull his brother away. In the shuffle, the footmen failed to keep pressure on Penelope’s wound, and she slipped from consciousness as they left the ballroom. Her final thoughts were, the queen knows it is I and Colin…

Penelope awoke to afternoon sun in an unfamiliar bed with a desperate thirst and a dull but persistent pain in her abdomen. Seated directly in her eyeline was her Majesty, Queen Charlotte, still wearing the calculating look from the ballroom. Meeting Penelope’s barely opened eyes squarely, she said, “I was quite disappointed by Mr. Cosgrove. For all his forward-thinking principles, he has little ability to implement them when there is even the suggestion of a threat to his person. One should think that a person of great ability would choose allies with, perhaps, more fortitude than an overcooked noodle.”

Mr. Cosgrove. Her father’s solicitor, and the man who had connected Penelope with her first Whistledown publisher. If the queen had spoken to him, then Penelope could guess at the sequence of events that had led to her assault and understood that the queen almost certainly had proof that she was Lady Whistledown. Before she could dwell on that, however, she first had to survive this conversation. Swallowing dryly, Penelope took as deep a breath as her injury would allow.

“Her Majesty is in the enviable position of having the time and resources to thoroughly vet her allies and choose only those with the greatest strength of character,” she said, marveling that her voice sounded only slightly creaky. “Women with fewer resources must, on occasion, accept those allies with which they are presented—flaws of character, lack of fortitude, and all. The cleverest of those women know their allies’ flaws and plan around their strengths.” That actually provoked a smile from Queen Charlotte, who rose and walked to a table across the room that held a water and a tea service. As she poured a glass of water and prepared herself a cup of tea, she spoke to Penelope without making eye contact.

“Flat on your back, grievously injured, no time to process, no support, and having lost so much blood that my physician did not believe you would survive the night, and yet your first words to your Queen are both a gentle deflection and riposte. I and the entire ton have underestimated you, Miss Featherington. With, perhaps, the exception of Lady Danbury. It will take her months to forgive me for placing her under guard to ensure she visited neither you nor your sister and mama overnight.” She stalked back across the room, handing Penelope a crystal glass full of water before resuming her seat with her tea.

Both to buy herself time to think and to slake the overwhelming thirst without upsetting her stomach, Penelope sipped her water slowly. As the cotton wool feeling in her mouth subsided, she considered her next move. If the queen wished to level consequences for what Lady Whistledown had written, Penelope would not have awoken in such relatively comfortable surroundings. If the queen were truly incensed with Lady Whistledown, Pen suspected she would simply not have awoken. The queen wanted to talk. And if Eloise’s assertion that her family had been threatened when suspicion fell on her as Lady Whistledown, then the queen wanted Whistledown on her side. There was no more effective lever than family to ensure that a Bridgerton jumped the way you wished them to.

Penelope’s family was a somewhat less effective lever. Even if the queen had discovered the trust Penelope had set up to ensure that her mother and Prudence had a house and food, that trust was entirely disconnected from the Featherington titles and estates and protected from direct crown action by virtue of the fact that the trust itself had been originally established on the continent, and the allowance was transferred quarterly. That money could be discovered, but not seized. The queen could ruin her family socially, but as Penelope well knew, the Featheringtons had borne scandal and disgrace before. Coldhearted as it may seem, that would not sway Pen. Philippa had married a sufficiently well-heeled gentleman that, even if Prudence never married, they would be taken care of, banned from wider ton society or not. She also did not think the queen would harm her family directly. If the queen had discovered her setup, then it would be glaringly obvious that Portia, Philippa, and Prudence had nothing whatsoever to do with Whistledown. Punishing them for something the entire ton would believe they lacked the intelligence to be party to would make the queen intensely unpopular, something she simply could not afford. Not when there were whispers that perhaps one of her sons should be named regent, given the state of the king’s health. Speaking of mamas, however… Pen lowered her water glass.

“Has my mama been to see me? Is she aware I have awoken?” The queen was silent for a moment, face darkening.

            “Do not dream of playing me for a fool, child,” she said. “You heard what I said about Lady Danbury, and you yourself know that only the two of us were here when you woke. Nobody will know how you are until we finish our conversation.”

            Ah, thought Pen. You do not know how this will end any more than I do. Expecting to fail, Pen tried to buy herself some more time.

            “My apologies, your Majesty, I am becoming quite tired. Might I rest before we continue?” That received a royal snort.

            “Miss Featherington, provided you do not faint on me—and I do not believe you will—we shall speak now. Let me be frank. You are Lady Whistledown. However, the number of people who believe and can prove this is still vanishingly small. Provided she works with the crown instead of against it, there is no reason to destroy Lady Whistledown. Think, Miss Featherington. Rather than simply reporting petty gossip and lashing out, Lady Whistledown could be honed and wielded with precision to find a glorious purpose supporting the crown.”

Penelope’s stomach dropped, and she felt as breathless as if the queen had stabbed her all over again. She very nearly dropped the still three-quarters-full crystal glass of water into her lap in her shock. Someone reporting directly to the queen had overheard her conversation with Colin. She had never spoken about finding her purpose with anyone else, and there was no written record of it, either. She kept no journal—she lacked the trust in such a book’s security that Colin had—and had written it in no letters. Pen was unsure whether Lady Whistledown was her purpose or merely a step on the road to finding her purpose, but one thing that Penelope Featherington knew in her heart and soul was that Lady Whistledown was her freedom. Freedom to write and explore her craft, freedom to speak and find her voice, and now financial freedom that did not hinge on an unknown or nonexistent male heir who almost certainly did not have the best interests of the Featherington ladies in mind. Equally, the crown did not have Penelope’s family’s best interests in mind, and Penelope could not imagine sacrificing her voice. And that was the essence of the queen’s proposal. Penelope could keep her craft and her income but at the cost of the freedom to speak with her own voice.

“You wish to draw Lady Whistledown’s teeth from her head,” Pen whispered, feeling green. The queen’s eyes hardened.

“Think carefully about your response, Miss Featherington. I am offering you a choice. I will have Lady Whistledown as a crown asset, but if you will not cooperate, then your tragic death at the hands of a madman, despite the valiant efforts of the young men of the ton and the royal physician, is still a story Lady Whistledown can tell.”

Pen took another sip of water, trying to think of a way to refuse the offer and live. She realized her mistake almost immediately as her stomach rebelled. Twisting to aim for the chamber pot she had noticed by the side of the bed and the muscular action of vomiting caused something to pop viciously in her abdomen, and she felt warmth spread over her stomach. Trying to breathe, Pen put a hand to her abdomen. It came away red with blood, and her head swam. She heard the queen calling for the physician, as blackness irised into her field of vision, dragging her down with it.

“Please, Pen, please come back to me.” Was she dreaming? The hand on her cheek did not quite feel real, nor did the threat of tears in Colin’s voice. “You cannot leave me before I make things right.”

“Quickly, Mr. Bridgerton. We have limited time.” Lady Danbury was many things, but a figment of Pen’s dreams was unlikely to be one of them. Lifting her lids felt like dragging sandpaper over her eyes, but she needed to see what was happening. Deeply shadowed in the light of a single, flickering candle was Colin’s face, mere inches from hers. When her eyes focused on his face, the relieved grin he gave her made her heart flutter. Had she been on her feet, her knees would have been weak despite her ongoing feelings of fury and betrayal.

“Hello there,” he said, quietly. She tried to say his name, but her very dry tongue stuck to the equally dry roof of her mouth, and she couldn’t get the word out. Lady Danbury tapped Colin hard with her cane and offered him a glass of water she had poured.

“She lost blood, she will be dehydrated.” Colin took the glass and supported Pen’s head as she took a few tiny sips of water. He moved back slightly when she pressed her lips together and shook her head.

“Better?” he asked.

“How do you come to be here?” Pen asked. “Her Majesty said no one was to know how I was.”

“Eloise’s maid has a cousin who works in the palace,” Colin said. “Daphne is visiting Lady Featherington, ostensibly to comfort her. I accompanied her, and the maid smuggled Lady Danbury and I here to see how you are and how we might rescue you. Surely the queen cannot believe you are truly Lady Whistledown.” Penelope was furious again, and the lump in her throat suggested that she might be crying were she not dehydrated. He not only thought she was unworthy of courting but also that she could not possibly have the skill to be Whistledown. He had never seen her, not truly. Not in two London seasons, and not in any of the letters she had sent him.

“Colin. I am Lady Whistledown.”

“Pen, please—”

“Colin, you cannot deny reality if you wish to help. The queen has threatened to have me killed if I do not agree to use Whistledown to support the crown.” Thunderheads overtook Colin’s expression, but over his shoulder, Lady Danbury sighed, apparently unsurprised.

“Tell me you are not serious.” Colin’s voice was low, and Penelope could not identify the mix of emotions below it.

Lady Danbury’s sharp “Mr. Bridgerton” was accompanied by the dull thud of walking stick on carpeted floors. “We do not have the time for Miss Featherington to convince you of the gravity of the situation. At any moment, the Duchess will have to leave, and we must be gone as well.” She met Penelope’s eyes. “Have you a plan, Miss Featherington?”

Pen was at a loss for words. For her entire life, her mother, her sisters, and society at large had dictated nearly every facet of her life, leaving her silent and miserable. Lady Whistledown was her voice, and her voice was not something she was willing to sacrifice. But she found that she could not bring herself to say as much in front of Colin. Before the fateful Featherington Ball, and the first time she regretted eavesdropping, she would have explained it to him without hesitation and known in her bones that he would understand. Now, she did not trust him to understand and support her. Pen wasn’t sure how much of her thought process showed on her face, but as she sat silent, staring at Lady Danbury, comprehension bloomed in her eyes.

“Ah,” she said. “Tell me, Penelope. Is it power, or is it the voice? I cannot help you with the former. I am not even sure I can help you with the latter, truth be told, but if it is the voice, I will see what I can do with her Majesty.”

“I must have my voice, Lady Danbury,” said Pen.

Reaching past Colin’s shoulder, Lady Danbury took Penelope’s hand and squeezed, smiling sadly. “Her Majesty may not understand the difference,” she warned.

“I understand,” said Pen.

As Pen and Lady Danbury came to a largely silent understanding, a look of horror had blossomed and grown on Colin’s face.

“I cannot be hearing this, Pen. Surely, a scandal sheet is not worth your life.”

“Colin—”

“Pen, I do not say that you must accept the queen’s offer, but you cannot simply surrender. We could go. We could go to the continent, or Greece, or anywhere, so long as we are gone from England. Men do it after duels. Surely you would allow me to take you away to preserve your life!”

“Keep your voice down,” snapped Lady Danbury, moving to check the hallway.

Penelope pulled back from Colin and dropped her face into her hands. The motion made her wound pull painfully, and she hissed into her palms.

“You are too intelligent to be this foolish, Colin. Men have more liberty than women in general, and duels rarely directly challenge the authority of the crown. Forget for a moment that I am involved. If a female member of the ton publicly and repeatedly challenged the authority of the crown and attempted to leave the country, do you imagine for an instant that she would not be hunted down, dragged back, and made an example of? And I was stabbed, Colin. I could not run now if I wanted to.” Colin growled, stood, and began pacing the room. Lady Danbury was still keeping an eye on the hallway beyond the door.

“Pen, you cannot simply allow Whistledown to destroy you like this! What of your family? Whistledown must be what is supporting them after your father’s and cousin’s schemes.”

“Do you truly think so little of me, Colin?” Oh, she had thought his declaration that she was unworthy of courtship was painful. She had thought being stabbed was painful. It all paled in comparison to his utter lack of understanding in this moment and his assumption that she was selfish.

Men understood choosing a battleground; they did so frequently. Rarely, they even understood choosing a battleground that could not be held but was worth standing and fighting for. Men were permitted to do so. For Colin—Colin, of all people!—to not see that she was choosing a battleground that meant everything to her hurt too deeply for words. And for him to think that she was shortsighted enough not to have considered the possibility that she would have to make this choice and ensured that her mama and Prudence would be looked after simply heaped insult upon injury.

She wanted him to leave. The choice she was making was right, and it was important, but it could not be described as easy. If she was going to go through with it, Penelope needed Colin out of the room. She would have to get rid of him herself, and she knew where the chinks in his armor were.

“Clearly, you have no interest in trying to ameliorate the situation, or in making things right, as you said. Allow Lady Danbury to speak to the queen, and kindly remove yourself from the situation. I will do what I believe is right. I will find my purpose. I would hate to see any consequences fall on the Bridgerton household because you cannot control your emotions.” She was grateful she was too dehydrated to cry. It meant she could look him in the face as she spoke, and no glisten in the candlelight would give lie to her words. “I would like you to leave, Mr. Bridgerton.”

Only once before had she ever seen his face crumple as it did now.

Early in her friendship with Eloise, she had been at Bridgerton House on a playdate. The day had been gray, threatening rain all morning. Antony had been away addressing some Viscount business, Benedict at school, and Daphne calling on a friend of her own, so only Colin, Eloise, and little Francesca had shared the table for luncheon with Lady Bridgerton that day. Gregory and baby Hyacinth were in the nursery, napping. Lady Bridgerton had been quieter and more withdrawn than Penelope was used to, but when the rain began with a thunderclap just as lunch was served, she withdrew. Something unutterably sad crossed her eyes before they simply shuttered. It could not even be said that she simply stared into the middle distance; it was more that her gaze had turned inward. Though her posture did not change, her presence disappeared from the room, as though Penelope watched Galatea reverse from flesh to stone.  

The Bridgerton siblings also noted the change. Francesca’s eyes overflowed, although she continued to eat silently. Eloise’s expression did not change, but she leaned away from her mother, covering the movement by taking and squeezing Francesca’s free hand. Colin’s shoulders set so tense that Pen could almost see them trembling across the table.

Abruptly pushing her chair back from the table, Lady Bridgerton—the most graceful woman Pen had ever seen—trod on her hem as she rose and turned to leave the room. In a flash, Colin was there to catch her, supporting her as she regained her feet. Once Lady Bridgerton was stable, Colin took her hand. His knuckles went red, then white, with how hard he squeezed. Lady Bridgerton seemed not to notice.

“Won’t you stay, Mama, and finish the meal? Please?” His voice cracked on the final question. Without so much as a word or a glance at her son’s face, Violet shook Colin off and bolted from the room. Colin’s face had crumpled then, just as it did now. As Eloise pulled an audibly sobbing Francesca’s face into her shoulder, tears sliding down her own face, Colin remained frozen. One of the nanny’s helpers and a maid entered the room a few moments later. The former took Eloise and Francesca under each arm, and the maid took Penelope by the hand, walking her just across the road to her home, through the rain. Her last memory of the Bridgerton dining room that day was Colin’s face as he stood alone.

The collision between memory and moment that nearly stopped Pen’s heart beating then and there was broken by a soft whisper.

“Lady Danbury, the Duchess’s carriage has been sent for. You and Mr. Bridgerton must make haste.” With difficulty, Pen dragged her eyes from Colin’s face to see the sliver of a maid’s face in the door, and Lady Danbury nodding. Penelope caught the maid’s eye and offered her a small smile.

“Thank you for bringing them here,” she called softly. Looking behind her, the maid stepped into the room and gave Pen a small curtsey.

“My cousin Jane speaks highly of you and Miss Eloise. We are grateful for your kindnesses to her. If there is anything else I can do, I will.” In the back of Penelope’s mind, a desperate idea sprang to life.

“Please, do not place yourself in harm’s way,” she said, “but if you could bring some paper and a quill, I would be most grateful.”

“I’ll see what I can do, miss. My lady, please, we must go.” The maid looked to Lady Danbury as Colin remained stock still in the middle of the room.

“Mr. Bridgerton,” said Lady Danbury, insistently. Her tone seemed to bring Colin back to his surroundings. He dragged a small side table next to Penelope’s bed and left the mostly full glass of water and the pitcher atop it before stalking out of the room. He did not bid Penelope farewell; he did not so much as glance at her face.

“I will do what I can,” said Lady Danbury, one hand on the doorknob to pull it closed behind her. “Hold tight, Miss Featherington.” The click of the door closing left Pen alone in the dark once again.

She was not alone for long. The maid, who introduced herself as Anna when Pen inquired after her name, returned before the glass of water Colin had poured was empty. She was accompanied by a footman bearing a lap desk that contained several sheets of paper, a few quills, and a full bottle of ink. Anna herself had a clean napkin folded around an apple and a few rolls.

“I didn’t imagine you had eaten, miss,” said Anna, as she offered the small bundle to Pen. Smiling, Pen thanked her. “We cannot leave you with the desk and things, miss, we cannot have her Majesty knowing you’ve help in the palace. Thomas—” The footman bowed briefly as he placed the desk across Pen’s lap and took up a lookout position at the door. “Please miss, whatever you need to write, be quick.” Penelope’s first relatively short missive was finished and sealed quickly. Brief notes to her mama and Eloise were also completed and sealed within half an hour. The final note Penelope had thought to write, however, was less simple. She could not think what to say, and any ideas she came up with felt woefully inadequate. She was also finding it difficult to focus; her abdomen was too warm while the rest of her body alternated between chills and overheated. Fog was creeping into the edges of her thoughts, dulling and slowing them. The ink dried on her pen twice as she tried and failed to write to Colin.

“Please, miss,” said Anna, clearly nervous. “We must go soon, or the maids will catch us when they come to light the fires. Where must I direct your letters?”

“Is my mama still in the palace?” Pen asked. Anna nodded.

“This to her, please.” The letter was extended and disappeared into a pocket in Anna’s skirts. “This to Jane, she will see it delivered to Eloise.”

“And the last one?” Penelope took a deep breath.

“There is a print shop in Fleet Street that is accustomed to receiving messages from me. Can you ensure this gets there in time for it to print for noon?” Anna was shaking her head as soon as “Fleet Street” left Pen’s mouth.

“I’m sorry, miss. I can’t get into the city unnoticed. I can barely make it to Mayfair and back of a morning to say hello to Jane.” Penelope nodded, then took another deep breath and tried to shake the fog from her head enough to think of another way to get the next issue of Whistledown to her printer.

“What if I sent it along with the letter to Jane, and she delivered it to your young man?” asked Anna.

“My young—you mean Colin? He is hardly my young man.”

“Of course, miss, my apologies. Only…he certainly seemed like your young man, Lady Whistledown or no. He didn’t have to come here with Lady Danbury and risk her Majesty’s being angry with him. Surely, he would make sure this got where you needed it to go?” Anna was shifting her weight from foot to foot, clearly hoping Penelope made a decision quickly.

Much as she understood Anna’s trepidation, Penelope nevertheless felt immense frustration at having to make in haste a decision upon which her very life hung. Colin had not understood why Pen was committed to keeping Whistledown away from the crown; she could not depend on him to help her with this plan. She swallowed down the lump that formed in her throat as she dismissed the idea of asking Colin’s help. She had no time to mourn just now. To distract herself and return her mind to an analytical state, Penelope reviewed what seeing her father’s and cousin Jack’s downfalls had taught her.

Uncertainties were deadly.

For her father, uncertainty meant that he trusted the wrong people, and they had killed him. Cousin Jack’s plan lacked an endgame, as Pen had discovered when she snooped in his desk the night he had fled to America. Neither possessed trusted allies who knew the plan and could carry it out with the minimum complications and uncertainties. Neither Colin nor even Eloise knew the Whistledown business, and unknown variables could gum up the works. Penelope was quite certain she lacked time for errors; she expected that the next time she saw the queen, she would have to make a choice. Unless she changed the rules of the game the queen was playing, Penelope would lose. She was prepared for that, but she was not prepared to surrender silently with no resistance. There was one person who knew the Whistledown operation and could be trusted to convey a missive without emotional entanglements.

“Genevieve Delacroix,” she said. “She is a modiste with a shop in Mayfair—” Anna nodded and extended her hand for the final letter.

“I know Madame Delacroix’s shop,” Anna said. “I must make haste if I am to deliver all of these without being missed.” Thomas came to take the desk from Penelope’s lap, and she smiled at both of them through worsening chills and mental fog.

“Thank you for your kindness, and your assistance,” she said. “If ever I am in a position to return the favor, I shall.” Thomas merely gave her a brief bow, still silent. Anna’s eyes were worried as she dipped a brief curtsy.

“Whatever your plan is, miss, I hope it works,” she said. Both servants slipped out the door, and Penelope thought perhaps the sky was lightening infinitesimally. She had done all she could to set her plan in motion; now, all she could do was hope as she rested against the pillows behind her.

Although she had intended to watch the sunrise, barely half an hour after Anna and Thomas had left, the chills worsened, and a cold sweat popped over Penelope’s body. Pressing a hand to her abdomen, it felt too hot, stiff, and swollen. Infection, she realized. She had been so focused on keeping Whistledown out of the queen’s hands that she had not accounted for the truth in the woman’s words. The queen may not have to lift a single finger to remove Penelope from the picture. That was Penelope’s last coherent thought, and as she slid into the waiting molasses of fevered unconscious, she fancied that the stars had left the sky and were flitting about the room before her eyes.

Stay tuned for Parts 2 and 3!

[sassy-ahsoka-tano]

DADDY ISSUES - Part Eight: Attention

Character/Fandom: Elvis - Elvis (2022)

Prompt: You finally gather enough courage to speak your mind to Elvis and, oh boy, does he have the perfect solution for you. [ Fem!Reader ]

TW: overstim, i don't wanna ruin it but a vibrator...of sorts, elvis being kind of a dick again (oops)

Rating: M, so very M || Word Count: 4995

A/N: we all know how i feel about the PSA scene so this was very easy to write and i'm now depressed i haven't experienced this personally

Song Rec: attention - charlie puth

This is Part 8 of Daddy Issues. Find the rest of the series here!

[ masterlist | taglist ]

🦋 mila

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Over the next few weeks, you start to settle into a rhythm. You get unpacked and fully settled into your new room, which includes scouting out places that are going to quickly become your favorite restaurants and stores as well as finding ways to potentially make new friends in the area. You find out pretty quickly that you actually really enjoy living in Vegas. The constant nightlife and social buzz give a sense of energy and life to the city which you didn’t always feel back home in the LA neighborhood where you lived.

As for your arrangement with Elvis, things are moving, albeit slowly. After almost two months of more or less the same routine, you’re starting to get pretty bored with your role. It’s always the same. He sends a letter, which now consist of a only few lines where he tells you what time to meet him and any other instructions, like what to wear. There’s hardly anything additional that he ever asks you to do.

You go down each week at your scheduled time and the security guard, whose name is Stanley, lets you in without question. At first, all you had to do was flash the TCB ring. Now, you don't even need to do that. Stanely just knows you.

You make your way to Elvis’ dressing room, knock on the door, and when he opens it, you give him a blowjob. The next day, you receive a package outside of your room with new clothes or jewelry or other little random gifts. You’ve caught on quickly enough to realize that whenever you passingly mention something you want, it inevitably shows up outside of your door.

As long as it’s an object, that is. You’ve tried your best to be assertive, to ask for what you want, but you must not be asking correctly. Any comments or suggestions you’ve made about changing up your arrangement or going out to an adventure in public have been ignored or missed. While Elvis hasn’t said anything explicitly, he’s made it extremely clear that he doesn’t want your relationship to be public knowledge.

It's not that you aren’t grateful. Of course you are. You could never afford any of these lovely things without his financial support and you certainly don’t mind not working for KNBC. But with only meeting Elvis once a week, you found yourself with a lot of free time during the first month. That time was difficult to fill since you had no friends or connections in the area. You did a lot of reading, mostly magazines and books, to try and learn how to be a better sugar baby for him.

But, honestly, you’re bored to tears and you wonder how he could not be. Not to mention that he never pleases you or even asks you if you’re interested in it. You’re getting a bit irritated, to be honest.

Despite all those hardships and the boredom that permeates pretty much every moment of your existence here in Vegas, you have started to break out of your small, lonely circle. Thanks to Max, the stagehand you ran into several weeks ago, you’ve actually begun to do things outside in the city. Things other than Elvis. Not only is Max incredibly handsome, tall, and muscular, but he's also very sweet and respectful. By now, you figure that he must know why you’re here and what you’re actually doing in Elvis’ dressing room. But sweet, sweet Max never mentions it, so you don’t say anything in return.

You usually try to catch Max before or after your meetings with Elvis. Recently, you’ve even started going down a little earlier to see him before he has to get going on setting up all the instruments and props. Not only has Max helped keep you company, but he’s also introduced you to so many of his amazing friends, some of whom work at the International. Thanks to him, you’ve built a decent friend group out here in Vegas.

You’re currently reading a book on the couch in the living room and finishing up your home-cooked dinner when a familiar knock sounds on the door. You trudge over and open it to find a note taped to the outside, just under the peephole. Prying it off, you don’t even bother looking at the script on the outside. You know who it’s from and have a decent idea of what it’s going to say inside.

Princess, 7 p.m. in the blue dress I sent you last week. D

You scoff and crumple the note in your fingers, squeezing it with white knuckles before tossing it into the trash can. The clock reads six p.m. now, which means you barely even have enough time to get ready. Nevertheless, you still manage to get yourself prepped and into the blue dress just as Elvis asked, all before 6:45. Just as you’re about to leave, the telephone in your room rings.

“Hello?” you lift the phone to your ear.

“Y/N? It’s Trixie! I wanted to see how things are going?”

“Oh, Trix! This is actually not the best time. I’m sorry! In fact, I’m about to be late to meet him. Can I call you back later?”

“Oh…” you can’t miss the clear disappointment in Trixie’s voice.

It’s been several weeks since you last talked. You spent almost every night on the phone together after she left but, unfortunately, life has gotten in the way of your long-distance friendship as of late. You didn’t realize how much you were going to miss her when she left. But your new friend group has required a lot of attention and you just don’t have as much time to talk as before. One of Max’s friends in particular reminds you a lot of Trixie and although you’re more than happy to settle into your new friend group, you can feel yourself growing distant. Every time you talk on the phone, it almost hurts too much.

“Yeah, sure! No problem,” Trixie replies. “Have fun and be safe! I’ll talk to you later! Bye Foxie!”

“Bye!”

You click the phone down and rush out of the apartment. Stanley the security guard offers you his usual warm smile when you approach the side stage doors. You pause to chat with him for a few minutes, like you normally do, before he opens the door for you. You pad down the familiar hallway behind the stage, pausing outside of Elvis’ door. You check your wristwatch one more time before wrapping your knuckles, three times as always, on the door with a sigh. Per usual, Elvis opens it, half-dressed and seemingly ready for your meeting to move forward.

On the elevator ride down, you’d decided to bring up your displeasure with him. You’ve grown exceedingly tired of this relationship being so transactional, of pleasing him only to be left unattended to like a slave to his desires.

Elvis opens the door and you enter in silence. As soon as you hear the door click behind you, you speak up.

“Mr. Presley, could we…discuss something?” you ask, nervously and absentmindedly twirling the TCB ring around your knuckle.

You felt so much more confident when you were rehearsing your lines in your head on the elevator. But now, as you stand in front of Elvis and stare up into his sparkling blue eyes and that handsome, almost intimidatingly so, face, you feel your palms starting to grow sweaty and clammy.

“Course, princess. What’s up?”

He plops down into the same red velvet armchair that he usually sits in during your meetings. You step forward to stand in front of him and clear your throat before speaking. You hope that the following few moments of silence will somehow help you to gather more courage to share your true feelings.

“I was just wondering if we could…try something different? I know that you like our arrangements the way they are, but I have some ideas that I think would make our time together more interesting.”

A few moments of silence pass as his eyebrows furrow and you wait tensely for his response.

“You’re unhappy with the arrangement?”

“No. No, I-"

“Because if so, I’ll have no problem finding someone else to fill your place.”

“Excuse me,” you scoff, shaking your head. “That’s not what I said-”

“As I mentioned when I first suggested it to you, there are plenty of willing candi-”

“Stop!” you finally shout, holding your hands up toward him. Not only are you offended by his words, but you’re also frustrated that he insists on interrupting you as you try to speak. 

“I’m just tired of this,” you gesture to the space between you. “It’s transactional. Boring. We do the same damn thing every week and it’s only one time a week. That’s all. It’s monotonous and pointless. You can’t possibly be happy with this arrangement. I’m literally standing here offering to try something different, to do anything you ask, and you’re mocking me. Of course I’m grateful for what you’ve done. I’ve been grateful from the beginning and I’ve repeatedly told you so. But this isn’t what I signed up for.”

You momentarily can’t believe that the words have just slipped out of your mouth. Your heart slams in your chest and your pulse aches in your temples. You curl your arms over your chest as if that will slow it down. You can’t let him see how nervous you really are. You stand strong. His eyebrows raise and he nods slowly, his eyes holding onto yours firmly without budging. You stare back at him with every ounce of strength that you have.

“Alright, princess,” he says coldly. “What do you want?”

You take a deep breath. Ask and it’s yours. With a renewed sense of confidence, you put a voice to your feelings.

“I deserve to feel good, too. I always pleasure you, without fail, but you never pay any attention to me. You don’t even bother asking if I’m interested in it. I just want to be paid attention to. If you won’t do that, then this not a relationship at all. It’s a business transaction. I thought it was intended to be mutual. I’m just asking for some attention, that’s all.”

“I understand,” he says.

You shiver as a mischievous smirk spreads across his handsome face. He stands slowly, his eyes never wavering from yours until he turns around and walks toward a closet in the back left corner of the cluttered room. You watch him in silence, still clutching your fingers onto your crossed arms. He rummages in a drawer for a few moments before pulling something out.

He turns, holding a black velvet box that’s tied with a red ribbon. Your eyebrows furrow as he comes closer. You freeze when he lowers his head to whisper in your ear. Your eyelashes flutter as his cologne wafts into your nose, sweet and intoxicating.

“You wanna be pleasured?” he asks in a voice that’s almost angry, tinged with some venomous undertone that you can’t quite place. It scares you. “Sure thing, princess. Here.”

He gently thrusts the box against your stomach. You hesitate for a moment as you wonder what could be inside. Your fingers flutter with a desire to snatch the gift but your pounding heart tells you to wait.

“Take the box,” he hisses.

At his command, and out of fear, you reach up and close your fingers around the velvet, pulling it into your hands. Elvis leans back, still towering over you but giving you just enough room to breathe. Unraveling the ribbon and popping the box open, you reach into it with confusion. Your shaking fingers hook around the side of something lacy and you lift it from the box. Your eyebrows immediately furrow as you stare down at the exact same pair of deep red panties that you’d thrown across the stage at him during the 1956 concert at Russwood Park. You glance up at him and his expectant expression infuriates you.

“What is this?” you spit. “Are you expecting me to wear these? They’re almost twenty years old…”

“Y’ain’t very bright are ya darlin,” he starts.

“Excuse m-” you huff angrily but he interrupts you.

“These ain’t your panties. They’re the same kind, yeah, but I bought em just last weekend. And I had them specially made for ya. Go ahead. Put em on.”

You shake your head and examine them again. They do look almost brand new,  colorful and bright and clean.

“Whatcha waitin for, doll?” he asks, plopping back down into his chair. “Put. Them. On.”

“What? Here? Now?” you ask incredulously.

“You the one complaining bout how we ain’t interestin enough,” he points to the spot in between his spread legs and with a clenched jaw says, “Put the damn panties on. Slowly. Right here.”

With a sigh, you step forward into the space. This isn’t what you meant, but you decide to play along in case he’s taking you somewhere eventually. You throw the box onto the floor and place the panties on Elvis’ lap while you reach for the bottom of your dress. You slowly curl the fabric up with your fingers, gently tickling it against your skin. You keep your eyes locked onto Elvis. As you pull the dress up, you drag your fingernail up the front of your thigh.

Once the dress reaches the very top of your leg, you lift your foot and place it elegantly on Elvis’ knee. Carefully, you stick your fingers underneath the dress and curl your pointer finger around the band to your panties. You hold the dress up just far enough so he can watch what you’re doing as you start to slowly slide the panties from your thigh. You drag the fabric down and bend over as you pull at the band.

You bend your knee and hold it steady, hovering in the air, while you slip the panties off your toe. After you remove the fabric from your bent leg, it drops with ease down your straight one, pooling by your heel on the ground. You step backward as a smirking Elvis hooks his long, slender finger under the red panties and hands them over to you. You snatch them from his grasp and lean down, making sure that he has a perfect view of your breasts as you slide the fabric over one leg and then the other.

As you pull the fabric up over your ass, you turn your back to Elvis and glance at him over your shoulder. You lift the dress up ever so slightly and pull the fabric up and over your bum, securing it onto your hips. You freeze when you feel something hard contact your folds. 

You had noticed that the panties felt a little heavier than normal ones but you didn’t think twice about it. You just figured you were imagining it. But now as you stand half bent over and frozen as a statue before Elvis, you realize that there is definitely something hard stuffed into the pocket of the panties right below your pussy. You turn around and place your hands on your hips. His face twists into an almost sinister smirk. You scoff.

“What-”

“Don’t you worry your lil head bout it, princess,” he says, hopping up and zipping his jumpsuit all the way up to his chest.

He runs a few fingers through his hair as you try to process what the hell is going on. Before you can formulate a question, the familiar knock comes on the door to tell Elvis that it’s time to go onstage. He really likes to cut your interactions extremely close to his show times, another thing that’s begun to irritate the hell out of you.

“This isn’t what I meant!” you shout as he makes for the door.

You can’t help but shake your head and fold your arms over your chest. He turns back toward you.

“You doin a lot of complainin for somebody who relies on me.”

“I just spent our entire time tonight telling you how frustrated I am that I’m not getting any attention and all you do is have me put on a show for you in panties that I don’t even own and now you’re just gonna leave me again, unsatisfied and alone, like you always do!”

In two quick steps, he’s standing above you, his face so close to yours.

“Oh, am I?”

You feel yourself waver but steel your body the best you can. His fingers wrap firmly around your jaw, digging into your skin. You blink in shock at the discomfort but your heart skips a beat with the excitement of possibilities. He tilts your jaw so that he can whisper into your ear, his lips brushing against the skin. Your breath wavers shakily

“I wouldn’t worry bout that, princess,” he hisses. “You gonna get what y’asked for. If you’re patient. Now, I expect to see ya out there in the audience. That’s a command not a request. Am I understood?”

You clench your jaw, refusing to play his game. He squeezes your jaw harder.

“Am. I. Understood?”

“Yes, Mr. Presley,” you respond begrudgingly, although your whole body is vibrating.

And with that, he releases your face and flies out the door, slamming it behind him. 

You curl your fingers into fists by your sides and release a few heated breaths from your nostrils as you stare at the door. Your heart is beating quickly and you close your eyes as you release a final slow breath to get ahold of your emotions. Then you grasp onto the door handle and fling it open. You huff and readjust your hair and dress before you catch Jerry’s gaze. He smiles and approaches you. You immediately feel your anger dissolve.

“So, how are things going?” he asks with raised eyebrows.

“Fine, I guess,” you reply bluntly.

“Is…something wrong?”

You shake your head.

“No, nothing. We just had a little bit of a misunderstanding about our arrangement, that’s all. We’re resolving it.”

“Hey, Y/N, listen,” he says, gently wrapping his hand around your bicep. “I know Elvis can be a difficult person to work with. If anyone understands that, it’s me. Like I’ve told you before, if you need any help just ask me. I’m here as a resource to you.”

“Why are you saying this?” you ask, letting your distrust get the best of you. “You don’t work for me and we’re not friends.”

“Just because I work for Elvis doesn’t mean I always have to be on his side,” Jerry replies without missing a beat. He throws you a crooked smirk. “And I have to admit that I’m sad to hear you don’t consider us friends.”

“I’m sorry,” you shake your head. “I’m just…frustrated. I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.”

“It’s okay. A word of advice, though? From a friend,” he says quietly and you smile. “Just be patient with him and be direct. Take the lead. If you want something, make it happen. He likes a woman who takes charge.”

You nod, your eyebrows furrowing as you consider his sage advice. When you lift your gaze, a soft smile spreads across your face as you catch a glimpse of Max. He meets your gaze and grins widely, lifting a hand to wave.

“Thank you, Jerry. Excuse me, I’m just gonna go say hello to a friend. Thank you, again, for your advice. I’ll keep it in mind.”

You slip out from behind Jerry and make your way over to Max, doing a little spin as you approach him.

“Hey, Y/N! You look…” he shakes his head in awe.

“Well, thank you. What are you up to today?”

“Just the usual,” he replies, gesturing toward the cluttered set behind the stage where the stagehands work. “Oh hey, are you busy tomorrow night? I was thinking maybe we could grab a drink after the show. Just you and me? What do you say, princess?"

Your head jolts upright and you stare at him incredulously. What? What did he just call you????

“What did you just call me?”

He straightens, his face falling into panic.

“Princess…I can never call you that again if it bothers you or something.”

“No…uh, no,” you shake yourself back to reality. “Sorry, just someone else always used to call me princess.”

“Oh, sorry. I’ll cut it out then.”

“No, please don’t,” you say, a mischievous smile curling into your cheeks. “I like it better when you say it.”

A smile takes over his face. His eyes quickly flick down to your mouth and he bites onto his lower lip, flashing his beautiful straight white teeth. You can’t help but feel your heart flutter at his handsome, charming smile.

Although Elvis will never find out about Max calling you princess, you’re still reveling in the feeling that you’re somehow getting him back, punishing him. You recenter your attention on Max who tilts his head sweetly, the ghost of a smile tracing his beautifully shaped pink lips. His deep brown eyes are like bowls of honey, beautiful and charming, as he stares up at you with such a gentle smile resting on his face. Max always has the slightest blush on his cheeks, for no particular reason, but it gives him a youthful energy that makes you want to be around him even more.

“Well that’s good. Cause I plan on saying it a lot tomorrow night,” he replies, adjusting so that he’s leaning ever so slightly toward you.

“Oh yeah?” you lean in toward him.

Your gut starts to spin in circles, the desire that Elvis cultivated left unsatisfied. You feel your body gravitating closer and closer to Max. It would feel so good just to kiss him one time…

You suddenly jerk back, upright, your mouth popping open as you feel a foreign sensation in your lower stomach. You gulp nervously and clamp your legs together, wondering what the hell it could possibly be. Max’s eyebrows raise in confusion and you try to tell him that you’re fine, but another jolt of vibration makes you clamp your legs together again and stops you mid-sentence. You laugh nervously and wave him off, backing away in fear that you’ll have another episode.

“Tomorrow! I’ll meet you down here, s-s-sound good?” you ask as you rapidly back toward the exit to the showroom.

Although Max’s face is still wracked with confusion, he nods and waves. You keep face until you swing around the corner into the shadow of the hallway leading to the stage doors.

As soon as you’re safe and out of view of the rest of the backstage crew, you fall against the wall, clutching your stomach. You pant through waves of pleasure that are starting to build within your gut. You gently reach down underneath your dress to touch the bottom of your panties. Yep, as you suspected, something is vibrating, literally vibrating. You didn’t even know a device like this existed but it’s currently wreaking havoc on your body. You breathe a sigh of relief when the pleasure stops for a quick moment.

You take that opportunity to rush out of the backstage area and into the audience. Your eyes land immediately on the exit up the walkway but suddenly the panties begin to vibrate again. You grasp with white knuckles on the handrails to keep yourself from falling over. You spot an open seat smack in the middle of the room and carefully migrate towards it, knowing that you can’t make it to the door. You can barely walk while this thing is tingling in your panties, rubbing directly against your core in the most frustratingly perfect way possible.

You plop into the seat at the abandoned table and try to get ahold of your shaky breathing as you watch Elvis on stage. The spotlight happens to be shining directly over your seat onto the stage and you wonder if he can just maybe see you out there. The stage lights are also half on, not all turned off like they’d normally be. He’s singing a song that you’ve never heard before about some plant called polk salad?

Just when you catch your breath, Elvis shifts his gaze and seemingly stares directly at you. You feel your heart flutter with a mix of excitement and fear as he smirks and dances around onstage. Your eyes remain glued to him as he sings and when he riffs during the song, you arch your back as you feel pleasure spiking in your heat. The vibration continues, moving rhythmically against you. You can feel yourself swelling at the pleasure and bite your lip to refrain from making any noises.

You glare up at Elvis when the pleasure subsides, your chest rising and falling heavily with your breaths as you try not to show everyone in the audience what’s going on. He glances down at you and winks before doing some hip thrusts. Suddenly, the sensation is back and you have to grasp at the tablecloth in your fingers to keep from thrusting your hips against the wonderful sensation. You can’t help but close your eyes and pop your lips open in pleasure. You want to give in so badly but your brain stops you. It feels like every single muscle in your body is strained at the exact same time, waiting for you to release the tension.

Your back arches as the pleasure grows, and you noticeably fall back against your chair when it subsides again. Panting, you glance up at Elvis with wide eyes and an open mouth. Although you’re angry at him for embarrassing you like this and putting you through this, you desperately want to finish. You’re incredibly swollen and dripping wet, you can feel the cold liquid on your panties as you sit in the chair. You don’t want him to know how badly you need to cum, but you know that there’s nothing you can do about it and that your facial expression is telling him everything he needs to know, pleading with him, begging him to let you finish.

As he stares across the audience at you, he holds your gaze and his eyes fade to black. He smirks and sings into the microphone. Your eyes can’t help but drop down to his hips which are gyrating rhythmically in time with the music. You bite your lip and grip the tablecloth as your entire body craves climax and everything in you desperately begs to be released.

As the vibrator turns on again, you find that you can’t resist squirming against it. It’s doing wonderful work on you but not quite enough. And with the constant pausing, you’ll never get there without putting in a little bit of work yourself. Your fingers grip hard onto the edge of the table, tangling into the tablecloth and threatening to pull it off as your hips move on the vibrator in time to the music. Your eyes flick down to the ring on your finger as the metal digs into your skin. The juices you’ve already leaked have dried cold on the fabric of your panties and you can feel it against your skin as you move. You clench your jaw and close your eyes tightly as the waves of pleasure build on each other, up and up and up until you finally start to crash down.

As the familiar feeling washes over you, your lips part and you feel your body shuddering. The vibrator continues to stimulate your sensitive bundle of nerves. You can’t help but release a quiet, soft, moan as you come down from your high. Thank god for the music. Your eyes flash open and you glance to the table on your right, where a woman is watching you with her eyebrows raised. You can’t stop the climax now but tear your eyes away from her and squeeze them shut in embarrassment. You will your body to stop enjoying your orgasm so much but the vibrator continues to overstimulate you. In perfecting timing with the song, you come down from your high just a moment after the last note.

You look up at Elvis, who is already glaring back down at you. The sweat glistens on his face and bare chest as he holds your eyes with a lazy crooked smirk pasted on his lips. He licks his top lip with the tip of his tongue and nods toward you. You breathe frustratedly, the euphoric expression on your face fading immediately into one of contempt. You hesitatingly glance at the table to your right to see the woman whispering to the man next to her, both of them giggling.

Of course, you don’t know for sure what they’re discussing. It could be anything, really, but in your heart, you’ve already convinced yourself that they’re gossiping about you. You glance around the audience, wondering just how many people noticed what was going on. Embarrassment floods through you and you feel like crying as you think about the things people could utter about you behind your back. And Max…you can’t have Max finding out about this. What would he think of you?

You gather yourself up and stand, feigning confidence and purposefully avoiding looking at anyone directly. You position your purse so that it rests against your back, hopefully covering up the stain from your fluids if there is one. You hold the bag steady as you try to walk as inconspicuously as possible out of the showroom. You can’t help but wince every time you step, the hard cover of the vibrator brushing against your sensitive folds. The overstimulation and constant vibrations have apparently destroyed you pretty well. With every step you take, your heat is overtaken by soreness. But you manage to make it out of the room and back upstairs, where you crawl into bed.

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[absenthiium]

Re the ask game...1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 (take the noose off, wrap it tight around my hand, which I will never not adore), 12, 13, 14 (for your war is the context (god is a boy) stories that I also adore), 16 (for εἴδωλον), 17, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26 (for παλλακή), 27, 28, 29, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42 (for take the noose off, wrap it tight around my hand and i’ll lay on the floor, touch me ‘till i vomit, again my beloveds), 44, 45, 46 (i’ll lay on the floor, touch me ‘till i vomit, I only feel more insane about that one after starting my Ethel Cain phrase), 47 (for "suffering is nigh, drawing to me" or any Ptolemaea lyric because I feel that is such a Leo song), 48, 49.

(I am so sorry if this feels like too much, please don't feel pressured to answer any of these, but you said you like asks and I love your writing so much, so)

twelve. my very first one was a terrible merge between pandora hearts and dante's inferno, if i remember correctly.

4. definitely angst (and i love post-apocalyptic stories, but i'm yet to include the genre in a fanfiction, i've mostly done so in my original work).

5. i don’t have many, so i’m not sure. but she will talk like a friend (she will kiss like a man) has a special place in my heart (and i really need to continue it!).

6. for those i’ve posted on ao3, maybe my first one? it’s a good omens fic i translated (badly) from italian, it’s very trope-y and not really my thing anymore. 

7. i write whenever the need to strikes, so i’m almost constantly scribbling. but when it comes to writing from start to end, it’s mostly at night (might be ‘cause it’s the time of day i have less to do).

8. a lot of things! most of it comes from music, some from my own state of being or random things i've experienced. plus, books or poetry. sometimes, as i write, i keep a few books close for inspiration (these days, it’s mostly T.S. Eliot's the wasteland, Richard Siken's crush, Beppe Fenoglio's a private affair; plus, and I'm mentioning it mostly since it directly impacted take the noose of, wrap it tight, 4.48 psychosis by Sarah Kane).

9. part xii, the one about medications, was done through a lot of research on topics i’m wholly unfamiliar with, so it was interesting, and quite fun (plus, reading Sarah Kane at night while listening to Ethel Cain which was. something). plus, the last part! i think it’s really representative of the style i’m going for.

12. I go through phases of concentrating on a single character, and at the moment it's Leonardo from TMNT (who would've thought). other characters have been Izzy Hands from our flag means death, Jesse from breaking bad, and Spadino from that shitshow (affectionate) that was Suburra. 

13. i tend to avoid the issue by. not writing them, i guess. but at the moment, maybe Donatello from TMNT. i like him a lot, but i still haven’t figured out how to write him.

14. all the titles come from Norma Jeane baker of Troy by Anne Carson! i really like that book, and it has some chapters focused on explaining a few ancient greek words, while still tying the explanation to the myth of Helen of Troy.

16. it’s actually very much inspired by a concept i’m exploring in an original novel of mine, which follows, among other things, the relationship between the protagonist and his aging father, gone mad after experiencing the death of three of his kids in a war. the novel itself is inspired by the last ronin so i guess the cycle is complete.

17. “the last thing Leo remembers was taking the shovel from Raph’s unsteady hands and digging a grave deep enough to bury a secret - their arms brushed, in passing, and it stung.”

(the WIP in question is, by the way, inspired by your incredible i see things that nobody else sees, that i just adore  too much for my own good).

20. not really, but there are a few things i would've changed in execution.

21. i’m pretty much in awe at a lot of people whose works i’ve read on ao3 (or other places), there’s just so much creativity and sheer talent. oh, and there’s this writer i really admire that writes an incredible range of styles and characters, consistently creating amazing stories, and whose writing has impacted me and my own work a lot. plus, she’s very kind and sends nice asks and, oh, look! it’s you!

23. i listen to music, generally the same song, on repeat, for hours.

24. not my favorite thing. i’m alright with making them not very explicit, otherwise i kind of cringe. not sure why.

25. i don’t think so, but i might if i keep up with the angst (i will).

26. the whole concept was very hard to tackle, because i wanted it to be very raw but not misrepresent the issue. other than that, maybe the final line. it’s just a handful of words, but i rewrote it many times before i got it right.

27. a go with the flow guy! i start with a concept, with a very minimal outline, and than just go until it feels done.

28. i wish i’d been capable of not attaching my stories’ worth to how many hits or kudos they get from the start. obviously i’m glad whenever a story of mine gets attention, but i want to learn to write for myself, mostly, not only to feel rewarded. but i’m getting better at this.

29. not sure, maybe παλλακή? but i do understand it’s based on a concept not many are comfortable reading about. plus, maybe my Suburra fics, but i probably can’t expect much since they are from an almost dead fandom and in italian (and quite untranslatable, since the dialogues are in Rome’s dialect).

33. first things that comes to my mind are some comments i’ve gotten on got a good look and measured my answer. many people told me it made them feel seen at a very visceral level, and, i don’t know, it moved me a lot. 

35. i don’t really talk about my story ideas to people. my cats know all about them, though.

36. i have a few, but for now it’s mostly ideas -but i really wanna try writing something about across the spiderverse.

37. there’s a few fics i’ve improvised (both by writing and recording) with a friend of mine -they were a messy mix of disney characters and tropes. one of those predicted the Queen’s death. funny times.

38. never thought of it, so i don’t have a specific person in mind, but i’d be very interested in trying! i’ve done a collab only once with an irl friend, and i’m definitely open to do one again.

40. a couple of my irl friends do, but they haven’t read anything.

41. i have this pre-canon fic about Eddie Munson (from stranger things) that i’ve been meaning to complete for a while, and i love working on it. very coming-of-age, smalltown queer boy-ish. i hope i’ll finally get around to finish it.

42. a whole ass fixation on Ethel Cain’s music, particularly Family Tree and Inbred. i listen to those two a lot while writing, in general.

44. not from a fic but: “this room’s a narrow place. everyone is talking.”

45. i have many words to say, and i love saying them. not much more, i think.

46. the sequels are, in fact, in the making! (i hope). no spoilers, but it’s a few missing moments from the first two stories and a bit of development on Leo’s state (from very bad to normal bad, i guess).

47. so, so Leo! you’re, as usual, very correct. plus, by mentioning Ptolemea, you’ve kickstarted a whole inspiration process in my brain, and i’m definitely writing something about it. not sure about the specifics, but i’m thinking: some feral behavior; Leo being his usual mother/widow self; someone’s getting eaten alive.

48. is angst a trope? if so, angst. 

49. a mildly explicit Inuyasha fic that involved stalking and divinity. read it on my mom’s phone at a family dinner at about eleven.

(thank you for the questions!)

[malicious-compliance-esq]

Censorship on AO3: A Poisoned Cup

Building on a truly excellent advocacy post by @nomercifulpercival I give you "why I hesitate to publish on AO3" in as concise an explanation as my racing mind can possibly offer. For the time being, I recognize that controlling my own content and the terms by which I share it with the world provides essential support for both my own healing and that of fellow survivors. If that changes, great. But I'm not there now and may never get there.

Almost like the admins at AO3 and other archive sites face intentional choices about how to handle complex social issues and the fraught personal histories that accompany them, wouldn't you say? How absolutely apt. I can only hope these choices get made with thoughtfulness, courage, and most of all humility. Their impact matters tremendously, as do our own voices and agency as survivors.

Shaming intersectionally marginalized people for using imagination and craft to explore difficult social themes and find healing in that process does extensive harm. It reproduces the very things it supposedly seeks to eradicate. Please, in the name of all that truly is good in this world, do not do this to people who are already hurting so much. Do not silence us. Do not demean our own hard-won understanding of what heals us. And do not gaslight us about what we experience in the process. People who do this kind of stuff become abusers themselves, full stop.

To wit: The times I had fingermark bruises and torn tissue and broken bones were always far outpaced by the times I walked around with injuries invisible to any clinical exam. The rending of our minds, the warping of everything we once trusted and held dear, takes much more time and exponentially more effort to heal.

Personally, I don't write live rape scenes in my fiction—fan or otherwise. I do frequently address the lasting impacts of sexual violence on both those who experience it and those who perpetrate it, and explore concepts of restorative justice. The carceral, punitive way we often deal with violence—both sexual and non-sexual—in society does tremendous harm that goes far beyond the initial impacts of an assault.

Having experienced these harms myself, I take interest in fiction that helps me and other survivors envision and realize alternate futures. Sometimes that involves writing directly about rape in-narrative and sometimes it does not. For every author who has my specific experiences, there are authors who approach things differently and find equal healing value in that. Whether or not a person writes rape into the action of their story is not the issue. Rather, the important distinction here is how they incorporate that content and get readers to engage with its implications.

By this point in my own journey as a sexual violence and domestic abuse survivor, I know full well how much it helps me to read stories that explicitly address the origins, dynamics, consequences, and aftermath of these phenomena.

I cannot possibly overstate the value—for myself and more fellow survivors than I can possibly count—how much it uplifts me to feel truly seen by a story. This explains much about why I got so interested in a specific sub-fandom for Outlander in the first place, and absolutely accounts for why I find so much healing and kinship from writing narrative and analysis within that universe. Restorative justice—whose specifics depend on both the people involved and the circumstances of their trauma—is the only thing that has truly helped me heal socially other than creative activity.

But sometimes I have to get my restorative justice through creative activity. I am hardly alone in this. Sometimes we give people every opportunity to make intentional choices to address trauma bonds and pursue different futures, and they demonstrate themselves to be fully capable of making those choices, and then still choose the path of harm out of cowardice and arrogance. This was my life in recent years. Eventually, I saw the writing on the wall and chose to do my own writing instead. And I felt my own future start to open up again.

So I write, and share, and discuss. I explore the multiple forked paths—from the darkly wrenching to the wryly humorous—that traumatized people walk in figuring out how to emerge from the shadows of both their own histories and the harm they have done to others in maladaptive response. In the process, I forge kinship with other survivors that I know I could never replace. Moreover, I examine my own toxic coping behaviors and pursue that same growth within myself, and support my peers in doing the same.

Writing is thinking. Art is healing. And censorship is just plain evil. We know what comes of ostracizing people for "deviance" that statistically and substantively is anything but. It's why I'm one of the only out bisexual faculty members at a university that has plenty of us employed, but often known only to one another. When we get sucked into fighting against one another for not performing survivorship, queerness, kink, craft, or even imagination itself the "right" way, our oppressors win. Because we lose the energy, focus, and solidarity needed to fight back against them.

Fiction addressing disturbing topics is not the enemy. Patriarchy, capitalism, and everything that goes along with them are. Indeed, much of the discussion surrounding so-called "depraved bisexual" characters in fandom centers—as well it should—on how being bisexual in no way makes people automatically depraved or vice versa, and likewise how being oppressed for one's sexuality can produce disastrous consequences including the reproduction of the same harms bigots think that being queer automatically causes.

Don't doubt for a minute that the "groomers" here are the people dipping authors into pots like so many frogs, slowly turning up the heat so that we won't realize fascism has destroyed our found families and our own futures alike. Martin Niemöller had the right of it, as ever: Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.

And if you think it will not happen to you, that fascism will not find you where you hide from your supposed position of moral high ground in silencing survivors...may the odds be ever in your favor. Most every writer gets our start by reading extensively. So we already know—or should, if we have paid attention—where censorship of creative work leads. It can feel so tempting to cling to simplistic childhood ideas of heroes and villains, and envision worlds made right by simply getting rid of the "bad guys" who differ fundamentally from the rest of us good people.

Trust me when I say that absolutely anyone, if pushed too far too many times with too much disregard for their own humanity, will find the villain within themselves. What exactly this looks like can vary tremendously from person to person and situation to situation. But I have stared into that abyss, as many of us have. I have seen its depths and its dimensions, and it has terrified me far more than the complex trauma that got me there ever could.

Writing pulled me back from the brink then. It keeps me moving now towards a truly healthy and liberated future. Every day I traverse more of the path toward that light at the end of this long and dark tunnel I’ve inhabited since having my own inner flame very nearly snuffed out in the fragile nascent years of my adult life. Compared to the horrors I’ve left behind, fighting a few fascists along the way hardly rates.

That said, I would rather create than destroy. I would rather probe the depths of painful accountability and tremulous hope than immerse myself in the mechanics of violence itself. Because I never forget for a moment the villain that lives within me, waiting for a misguided sense of righteousness to draw them out. My origin story has already been written in bruises and blood, in silence and shame, in nightmares that made me fear sleep, in darkness curling around the edges of my compassion for self and others, and most of all in hope lost for better tomorrows.

In exploring similar forked potentialities of trauma and healing through fiction, I quite literally choose to write a different story.

It's fashionable in this modern age to dismiss the idea of good and evil, but there is evil, and it finds purchase in good men by giving sin the sweet taste of ecstasy. The Nazis drank from that poisoned cup, thinking all the while they were slaking their thirst with the sweetest wine… Evil has but one cup. They drank long and deep. Yours was but a sip. Make it your last. Turn away from the darkness that beckons you, and go back into the light.

—Reverend Reginald Wakefield, Outlander

[anonofseasons]

What do your characters look for in a partner romantically? Personality/looks if they have a specific type?

Thank you for the ask! This is a fun and interesting question. :)

I’m not entirely sure which characters you want to hear about most, so I’ll focus on the Liddell kids. I have trouble with tumblr refusing to post anything long (not an issue I had in the past on tumblr, since I’d post chapters of stories on here), so if anyone wants to hear about other characters, I’ll do them in separate posts/asks. ^^

For all of the kids, however, someone “not like Vivian” is important in a partner! ahahaha Answers below cut ;)

I’ll start with Sophie, since she’s actually had romantic partners. She’s been in several relationships, even if Brielle and Rhett are the only two times she’s ever been married. As far as personality, she seeks those who are kind and make her laugh. People she can relax around. Those who enjoy a bit of mystery and things that are whimsical, if only because she’s anxious that revealing she’s a spirit could total the relationship.

For looks, she tends to be one of those “fall in love with the person and start seeing all the beauty of their features even more” people, but she does like pretty eyes and a kind smile to attract her attention first. :)

I’ve mentioned Shannon is aroace before, in that he’s never experienced any sort of arousal or romantic attraction to people. This has nothing to do with his upbringing, although that does affect him having any partners. He might thrive in a queerplatonic polyship someday. For now, I’ll just be grateful he’s warming to his siblings and understanding that Phineas’s other kids are also his found family.

Shannon would require that partners not be anything like Vivian and Graham. That extends to more than personality. Maybe he needs a quiet dork of a partner who enjoys reading by the windows on rainy days, the curtains open wide to let in all the natural light despite the weather. :’)

Shannon will not date humans.

Howie finds “liking nature” attractive. (I feel like spirits in general will gravitate toward those who love nature, who knew? But I bet he dates a lot of people whose favorite season is autumn “coincidentally”.) He does have a preference for redheads. He loves having someone to compete with on racing or climbing, someone who’ll join him on hikes.

As he wants kids eventually, he will seek partners who feel the same about parenting as he does, given his traumatic background. It’s not a spoiler because this takes place well beyond the epilogue, but Howie does have a family and ends up being like… Best Dad Ever.

Howie will date humans, but for long-term partners, he’ll hold preference for fellow spirits.

Bee… has a partner in the epilogue, and saying too much about what he wants is a bit of a spoiler. I’ll just let that relationship speak for itself, and if anyone has further questions, feel free to ask them. I plan to keep asks open for a while after I finish the series, although I’m sure it’ll eventually taper off and just be around for reference to new readers, if I have any. xD

Okay, so El.

El… is attracted more to fictional characters. Particularly monsters. Scales and horns are sexually attractive. I answered another ask about sexualities and briefly mentioned this, but I was a bit self-conscious about going into it at the time. He’s probably aro, but he loves the idea of romance and courtship—at least to make it a significant part of his reading!

And while I’ve been too chickenshit to actually wonder this out loud before, I’ve honestly thought that based on how unhealthy El and Howie’s dynamic is, how many readers have ended up shipping them. No judgment here, obviously it crossed my mind. It has that taboo ripeness for the picking, that’s all? It’s not canon, but I also don’t mind people shipping characters. (I’m old, and some of my earliest fandoms included Clamp works and Spiral Suiri no Kizuna soooo…yeah.)

[evanthenerd83]

“Ceasing Begins”

The Ceasing began elsewhere. This was perfect, as it prevented many from spotting the signs. A majority of news media and medical experts had moved into the City, where there were more potential clients.

And it was perfect how the earliest cases started in isolated communities; farming villages, river settlements, places of low population. Nobody paid any attention to uneducated country bumpkins who cried out miracles. Why would they print warnings if some religious sheep had been the one to spout it?

Stories were shared amongst bar mates and congregations. People had suffered injuries from car crashes, falling down staircases, being shot, stabbed, poisoned, the whole cabal. They found themselves facing their own mortality.

Yet they would always survive. Even when their heads were punched clean through, hearts popped, brains caved in. It didn’t matter how far their flesh had been mangled. They could have been bled dry.

But they would live.

Medical experts in such places related these developments to their comrades. They sought reconcilement or refutation, a way to resolve this error. All they got was ignorance born from privileged knowledge.

They were ignored. Some pressed the issue, demanded that the professors and biologists came and witness this phenomenon. A majority of these would receive brief notices from the higher circles of academia. Credentials were revoked. Positions became vacant.

Evidence was suppressed by powers whose concern laid in maintaining their respectability.

Then the Ceasing came to the City. Slowly at first, with a cautious step here and a reluctant step there. Calls to emergency numbers dropped a staggering ninety-nine percent within the month of November. Politicians easily turned a blind eye towards the phenomenon. Public concern was taken hold by other matters, which were much more believable than the death of Death.

And the news media, ever the puppet of the City, aided in obscuring the problem. Hosts smiling and unblinking would nod along with pre-selected “experts” during interviews. Questions had been approved beforehand, as had the answers.

The threat was minimized within a single breath. Recent developments were repeated, including rising prices, eminent invasion by neighbors, crime rates skyrocketing across the entire nation. It did not matter if victims of those same crimes were still in the hospital; alive yet not alive, dead yet still screaming in agony.

Agony is a generous term to describe what they experienced. There are no names for those affected by the Ceasing, for they defy classification. Many may eagerly ascribe to them the moniker of zombies.

But they do not shamble, like the living dead. And due to their eternal state of pain, they do not hunger for human flesh, or anything. One could destroy their brains, if their brains are still intact, and this will not end their continued animation. Nothing on God's green earth could provide them with relief.

Shadows congratulated themselves behind closed doors, money exchanging hands. The truth was once again buried. No-one cared that hospitals were overflowing with patients whose conditions would never improve. That nurses and doctors—those on the ground floor, in the trenches—were constantly fighting against their own bodily limitations, battling fatigue and frustration. Why would they?

The Ceasing itself would not cease. Cosmic irony.

Months went by. Then years. Lives went on. Agony went on.

We are currently in our fifth year.

Our fifth year.

Want More? 👇🏻

[kameronpkrt875]

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Posted: Thu, 27 Jan 2022 08:00:00 GMT [source]

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[swamp-cats-den]

Now that Thirteen's run is coming to an end, I've figured out what bothered me about those at times enjoyable, but never satisfying seasons the most. For all his attempts to emulate Russell T Davis, Chibnall failed to grasp what made the former showrunner's writing so appealing to many people - the philosophy of the series. Don't get me wrong, I'm not implying that it was perfect during the RTD 's 'golden days', the way he explored ideas could also be flawed, inconsistent and deserving of criticism. But it was always there, and it was very specific. Meanwhile, the Chibnall's era just leaves you with the feeling of gaping void in that regard.

In Season 1-4, we see a broken ex-soldier, who is so traumatized by the war he adopts a very loud anti-violent stance. And often is a total hypocrite whose mercy can be a cruelty. But that's how trauma combined with coming from a very prideful, condescending society works. Being in pain is not a pretty picture, and the Doctor goes through lots of it on a regular basis as he has to make impossibly difficult decisions.

That's where the writing, in my opinion, often shined and that's what used to distinguish Doctor Who from many other similar series or movies. Death and destruction of the enemy were on par, but they rarely if ever felt triumphant. The Doctor would go on a suicide mission to the Sontaran spaceship to give them a warning about setting off the bomb unless they left, knowing, of course, that they wouldn't. That was the behaviour of a person who understood what the consequence of such actions would look like, who'd experienced too much loss to take even the demise of a ruthless enemy lightly.

And that's why I hated Thirteen agreeing to destroy all the Daleks, Sontarans and Cybermen so much. I know lots of people say they deserved to die, but was Doctor Who ever about getting one's just desserts? There's so much wrong with this kind of writing it's hard to even begin to explain. First of all, who the fuck could get so lucky that all their enemies would gather at the same time in one place to be wiped out by an unstoppable force, leaving the hero both with their hands clean and their nemesis crushed? It's the laziest cop-out I've ever seen. For all the talk of morality being the Doctor's strong suit (what kind of morality? what did you mean by morality? who thought that line was a good idea?), she faces no moral dilemmas.

Wiping out all the enemies is bad not because the Doctor isn't a killer (she certainly is), but because there is no gravity behind her choice. Of course, we know all of them will come back, but the characters should feel like the won't. On the other hand, why bother with the demise of some Daleks if Thirteen seems not to give a fuck about losing half the Universe to the Flux. And that's after the villians of the finale have made a whole speech about how her personal philosophy was 'keeping things alive'. Not mention it sounded completely idiotic, can't believe all those talanted actors had to say that nonsense.

I used to complain about Chibnall spoon-feeding the viewer the ideas in his episodes dealing with social problems, but now I think he's likely not to have any strong views regarding those issues and was just incorporating what was popular and talked about at the moment. That's why his takes felt so superficial. His Doctor Who is about nothing. And don't get me started on the imperialism thing, if you want to see some actual exploration of it in the fantasy/sci-fi setting, go read the Baru Cormorant series or something.

For me, RTD's era was about a character who saw the potential for goodness and change in even the worst, and despite their life being painful, never failed to appreciate the beauty of the Universe. The protagonist rediscovered it through the eyes of other people, as it was never just the Doctor showing the world to the companions. Chibnall has shrunk that Universe to one single person, his Timeless child, and, ironically, still has no interest in exploring her depths. His show is about getting from point A to point B, with the protagonist's perfunctory interactions to explain how they'll reach there.

[cancerjupiter]

astrology notes: moon’s origins edition (pt. 2)

moon in libra

libra moons crave the idealized experience of beauty and peace; you seek to co-operate with others, to please, and to establish one-to-one relationships which are mutually gratifying. you also find satisfaction in using your minds, particularly your power of objectivity. a parent who valued you highly and enjoyed pleasing you; who encouraged your aesthetic and intellectual development, and who was willing and able to appreciate your points of view, may have helped you to become attuned to the positive dimensions of a libra moon. 

if, however, your moon is in difficult aspect, or if its trines or sextiles suggest a parent who was only superficially available to you, you may attempt to gain from a partner what you could never experience from our parents. you may become overly dependent upon others, seeking to win their favor by being indispensable and satisfying their every desire. you 're also inclined to avoid confronting our anger and pain, suppressing emotions because you fear any threat to your relationships which might force you to acknowledge your aloneness. these patterns were probably by a parent figure who placed too much emphasis upon appearance or surface harmony, who could not tolerate discord, or who led you to believe that relationship equals subordinating oneself to another. such a mother or father may have brought many unfulfilled needs into parenting, expecting you to compensate for deficiencies he or she experienced in childhood or marriage. 

although your libra moons suggest that your emotional fulfillment requires mutually significant relationships with others, you can only build satisfying connections by first developing a secure relationship with yourselves, accepting as valid your own feelings and needs, and being willing to assert yourselves, even when it means experiencing temporary discord for the sake of more authentic contact. you need to apply your openmindedness and capacity to identify with many points of view in relation to both yourselves, and others - to listen to and affirm each of your internal needs, willingly entering disharmony and imbalance when necessary to create a more enduring harmony and balance which is so vital to you. you need to honor your libran need for beauty and peace, creating environments and relationships which truly soothe and uplift you. 

moon in scorpio

this moon shows you value your privacy; you are capable of considerable emotional intensity and passion; and you need to probe beneath the surface of experience to truly connect with something. when your feelings are denied or your needs unmet, you may easily resort to detrimental scorpio behavior patterns - obsessions with sexuality or money, expressions of revenge or destruction, or demanding and manipulative behaviors. one of the difficulties of a scorpio moon is related to the fear of losing control or surrendering. because of this fear, you may deny or conceal the softer, vulnerable facets of yourselves, preventing yourselves from experiencing the genuine connection you seek. 

you may have internalized messages from your parents which enabled you to develop resourcefulness, endurance and strength of character, and the power to plumb the depths of experience. your sexuality may have been awakened early through the intensity of friendly or family interactions (this doesn’t mean abuse; but sex was one outlet your intense feelings found to let themselves go), so you were forced to come to terms with your own life and death force. a scorpionic parent, however, may have negatively influenced your ability to receive nurturance and to nourish yourselves. perhaps such a parent was hostile and disciplinary, so you developed considerable mistrust and learned to hide your feelings. they may have been dominating, intrusive or sexually provocative, leading you to fear being possessed or overpowered. coldness or stoicism, as manifested in a 'be tough' attitude, may have prevented your internal child from receiving the tenderness and care you needed. sometimes a scorpio moon suggests the premature death of a parent, or a premature confrontation with realities of death or violence. 

you have the power to re-parent yourselves by recovering, accepting and expressing your feelings and emotional needs, not just your sexual desires. you need to contact your core, to possess yourselves rather than others, and to learn how to channel your passion constructively. one task of your scorpionic moon is that of discovering your inner power and drawing upon your own capacities to meet your needs rather than manipulating others to give you what you are unable or unwilling to give yourselves.

moon in sagittarius

if you have a sagittarian moon, you need to be free to expand your boundaries - to discover and actualize possibilities, to travel, and / or to develop your own understanding of things. you have a generous heart and seek to give from your own bounty; you also seek to rise above your difficulties through humor and friendship.

when your real needs aren’t met, or when you come into contact with feelings or desires which threaten you, you may express your sagittarian nature in a defensive or twisted manner - procrastinating or avoiding immediate issues by focusing upon the future, abstract realms or escapism (daydreaming); becoming preoccupied with ideals or goals rather than current tasks; intellectualizing or philosophizing incessantly; joking inappropriately; or moving restlessly from activity to activity or person to person on an endless quest both to escape from responsibility and to fulfill your inner emptiness.

most probably, your mother or significant parent figure provided you with a constructive philosophical framework by which to view life, and imbued you with a love of both internal and external exploration. but such a parent may have been fearful of emotional closeness and taken refuge in themselves rather than responding to your actual needs or feelings or to the difficulties or burdens you experienced. they may have indulged you rather than given you real nourishment. they may have preached rather than gently taught, issuing 'shoulds' or religious principles which may don’t keep up with your own nature and development.

those with moon in sag may need to reparent yourselves by creating your own philosophy and morality apart from your parents and by using your philosophy to help you come to terms with rather than suppress your feelings and needs. your tasks may also include learning to give to yourselves and others, developing the internal freedom capable of existing within limitations and commitments, and discovering and maintaining contact with the god you believe in (if you do), the universe within or whichever internal guiding spirit which leads and inspires you.

moon in capricorn

those of you with a capricorn moon (me!) need the security of organization and structure, and the satisfaction of maintaining commitments and achieving your aims. you take pride in your work and want recognition for your accomplishments. capricorn is the position of the moon's detriment (i know. i know.) and is therefore a particularly difficult position for experiencing emotional nourishment and developing self-nurturing behaviors. when feelings and needs emerge, you may not even allow them fully to enter your consciousness. you may be too afraid of your vulnerability or weakness, and too judgemental of your inner child. repression of the deeper facets of yourselves may lead you to wallow in depression, negativity or self-criticism, to work incessantly, or to isolate yourselves from fulfilling connections with other people. you may continually give ourselves 'be tough' messages which support your self-sufficiency but prevent the real connection with your feelings which makes close relationships possible. 

it is most likely that a parental figure helped you to learn to control your emotions, take responsibility for yourselves and make adult rather than childish decisions; and also provided the consistency and safety you needed to feel secure. however, having a capricorn moon suggests that you could never give free rein to your feelings, and that you probably did not receive much tender nurturance (i did, but it was from another parent; mixed messages can make your feelings even more blurry). your parent may have been cold and rejecting; they may have neglected you or told that your feelings and needs had little value. perhaps they were also a perfectionist you could not satisfy, and whose acceptance was conditional upon notable achievement and success. as a result, you may feel a sense of worth only for what you accomplish, but not for who you are. 

moons in capricorn, you need to create their own standards for yourselves apart from your parents' standards, and to give up compensatory striving which does not meet our genuine needs. your task involves developing an internal source of security and giving yourselves the validation and recognition you may have originally sought from others. you may only experience the fulfillment you seek when, by accepting your feelings and needs and allowing yourselves to be vulnerable, you discover strength and self-sufficiency which embraces rather than denies the sensitivity of your inner child.    

moon in aquarius

your aquarian moon shows that you need to experience and express your individuality, to be free to interact with a wide range of people, and to use your intuitive, inventive and abstract mental capacities, and to contribute meaningfully to society. the energies of aquarius do not mesh easily with the cancerian moon principle. you may have difficulty acknowledging and validating your desires and feelings, and fear closeness and intimacy. when threatened by emerging emotions or needs, you may rationalize or intellectualize, may rebel or loudly proclaim your self-sufficiency, or may become overly preoccupied with meaningless shit. sometimes, moon in aquarius may lead you to make sudden abrupt changes in our lives to overcome the internal suffocation of too much closeness or intimacy with another person and / or lifestyle. cultivating a network of friends, and dedicating yourselves to a cause in which you believe, may fulfill you, but may also be a compensation for unmet personal needs. 

it is most likely that a parent encouraged your aquarian qualities. they may have been intellectual, humanitarian and individualistic, and supported these traits in yourselves. you learned to take pride in your uniqueness and originality, and in your social and mental skills. however, such a parent may also have been emotionally detached or cold, and unable to nurture you physically or emotionally, while remaining responsive to large groups of people and social involvements which were less restrictive and emotionally demanding than ties to you. one or both of your parents may have been erratic when relating to you, so you could not develop trust in stable relationships, and learned at an early age to defend against intimacy. 

you who have aquarian moons need to experience and value your own uniqueness, while simultaneously creating for yourselves your own society of intimates, one in which your emotional needs are respected and met rather than suppressed. you need to develop and trust your intuition, and to use your minds to help you understand your feelings and discover how to meet your needs, rather than escape from them. other tasks of your moon involve cultivating the internal freedom which results from full openness to your emotional natures and learning to be your own friend rather than submerging ourselves in social interactions because of your discomfort with yourselves. you can only have yourself.

moon in pisces

having this placement means that you need space in your lives to drift and to dream, relationships based upon empathic bonds, and openness to sources of inspiration inside and outside yourselves. the water energy of the moon is easily expressed, and sometimes overly emphasized, by a pisces moon. when you experience your feelings and needs, you may even indulge them through long bouts of crying, self-pity, or elicitations of sympathy from other people. with or without awareness, you may seek to escape from yourselves through fantasy or idealization, or through such addictions as alcohol or drugs. many of you with pisces moons may vicariously experience your feelings and satisfy your needs by continually focusing upon the feelings and needs of others and devoting ourselves to their welfare. 

a parent who was a piscean influence most probably responded sensitively and compassionately to you and encouraged your inspirational temperament. however, if your Moon is afflicted, such a parent may also have had a detrimental influence upon you. they may have overindulged you, catering to your aches and pains, or too frequently played the victim, giving to you wholeheartedly but also invoking guilt or seeking complete dedication in return. they may have been hypochondriacal, or of an ethereal nature which could not easily come to terms with physical reality. a piscean parent may have been victim to their own addictions, or tangled in dreams or fantasies and not fully emotionally or physically present. 

moon in pisces may need to learn how to respond constructively to your own feelings and needs, to serve yourselves and give to yourselves rather than attempt to lose yourselves in others. often, because you suffer from a spiritual discontent, you may have difficulty accepting and adapting to the realities of an earthly existence; you need to translate your visions into action, to live those dreams which are viable, forging a link between your practical and spiritual or creative natures. you may seek to experience oneness in close relationships, but you are not likely to know wholly that oneness unless you cultivate your attunement to your own creative and / or spiritual source, and open your hearts to the fullness of both the love and the pain within you.    

[reigenomic-moving]

Wayne's statement on the racist caracatures in last nights stream and the makeship plushie

Image ID's under the cut

hey everybody. last night's stream was a weird one. the things that went down when we tried to play Bullet Roulette were not great. it made us as a team realize that we need to put our foot down and make a statement. about last night, and a lot of other things. what you're about to read is not only my words, but those of the entire team.

the first thing i should get out of the way is this: the caricatures that appeared in Bullet Roulette suck, and we're all disappointed that one of our favorite old VR games has that bullshit in it. we all made the fact that we thought it was shitty as clear as we could last night while we were playing. we tried to reset the lobby 3 times to fix the bug that forcibly made us all be that model. it did not work. we tried to keep playing it for a little while and then give it one last try. which, of course, did not work. what took place afterwards is what we'll be talking about here.

the reaction a small group of you had to these events was disappointing, and in some cases, unacceptable. we are not upset with native americans who were uncomfortable with the caricatures, we are upset with those of you who instantly demonized us for not 'turning off the game immediately'. the reason we as the streamers and the mods repeatedly asked everyone to 'move on' is because we acknowledged what we had just experienced in the game was wrong, and condemned it. we expressed how we felt about the models out loud multiple times. while unproblematic media exists, there is a lot of media that has problematic elements in it. it's not great, but that's the way things are. things are not always black & white. the expectation that the moment an unsavory concept is encountered in something on stream that we drop what we're doing and shut off the program is absolutely unreasonable.

if we run into problematic content, do not assume we automatically endorse it just because we did not remove it from the screen immediately. we can still experience it as a whole while acknowledging what's wrong with it. take LISA, for instance. I loved what I played of that game, and I know a large majority of you guys loved those streams too. LISA has problematic shit in it. early on in those streams we encountered a character that was a racist caricature of a black man. we acknowledged that it fucking sucked, and we kept playing. and both the crew and chat were able to continue maturely while acknowledging that the content was problematic.

while this is only somewhat related, i might as well also address the makeship situation, and those of you who came after me for deleting their initial statement. I deleted it because it was bad. that e-mail was an apology from the worker to me, not meant as a public apology. it didn't approach the situation properly. I was scrambling to get something up to address the concerns while i was in the middle of a 24 hour multi day road trip (one whose existence I had to hide for the stream gag), I just took whatever makeship would give me. when I actually had a little bit of time to sit down and read it, and read what some of you had to say about it, I realized that it didn't actually mean anything. I deleted it, and spoke to my handlers at makeship, and informed them about the biggest issue with that shitty anti-centrism plush: what was essentially a masked swastika next to a star of david. if you look up the original designs of that stupid ball, you can find that it actually had a swastika on it, and the creator hid that fact from team members at makeship by changing it in the concept art he shared with them. it might be hard to believe, but their team genuinely did not know about this. and they did not consider why that plushie was as shitty as it was. after I informed them and talked it over, they removed the plushie from their website completely and decided to not work with that creator going forward. their team thanked our campaign for bringing them to the realization that they need to more properly vet the creators they work with and the origins of their designs. what disappointed me in this scenario were those of you who assumed the worst about me just because i had not made a statement about it while i was doing my best behind the scenes to work things out.

we also know that being publicly accessible artists & entertainers comes with a fair amount of vulnerability through exposure, however the amount of invasions of privacy and harassment a lot of us have experienced in the past year is worth taking note of. we are people. what if you woke up to dms from people saying they found your name and your phone number? what if you got a text from a stranger saying they found your information? how would you feel? these are questions you need to ask yourself as a viewer even if you've never gone that far. these are things that have actually happened to us.

being a fan comes with as much responsibility as being a creator; just because you are consuming what we make does not make this a one way relationship where you're invisible. what you do and say is being felt by actual humans, and the information you share or try to get not only affects us but the people we know. it has at times been so invasive and ridiculous that some of us have considered stopping completely. as a fan and a viewer, your responsibility is to respect us as much as you would respect any other human being; putting us up on pedestals to the point where some of us get treated like objects or things is the absolute opposite of respect and we've mentioned this a few times. we will be taking much stronger action on these matters from here on out; please observe how you view us and ask yourself if you'd look at a friend or family member the same way. if you wouldn't, reconsider your relationship with what we make.

some of you hold me and the crew on a pedestal in a way that makes us deeply uncomfortable. this isn't the first time we've experienced something like last night. it has happened on other team member's streams. the hostility we are met with when we encounter something unsavory on stream is ridiculous. after shutting down the game, seeing a few of you in the chat screaming at us, attacking our characters, invalidating all of our values and past deeds as a team over encountering unexpected bigotry in a game and condemning it, not perpetuating it ourselves, is infuriating. to all of us. you do not have the right to harass us over something like this. coming into our DM's and repeating yourselves, accusing us of lying about values and calling us awful people is harassment. it is extremely immature. and it is behavior we no longer want in this community. we are human. we aren't meant to be your perfect social/political pillars.

when these things happen, you know it sucks, we know it sucks, we all know why it sucks, and while we will always point it out when we see it, the expectation of us to derail our show and explain to you why its bad and apologize for it being on the screen is not an expectation we will meet. acknowledge, and move on. a statement does not always need to be made. going forwards, we'll be increasing moderation measures in regards to the harassment of crew/staff and the mitigation of events like these in the future. thank you for understanding.

- All of Radio TV Solutions & The WRTV Mod Team

[bigskydreaming]

I’m a big believer that Dick’s independence and self-reliance isn’t in any way rooted in him just being stubborn, prideful or self-destructive. I view it as being in his eyes a necessity….because on a deep, fundamental level….Dick doesn’t trust anything to be permanent. 

I’ll always go back to the fact that his character archetype isn’t that of the everyman, because he was of lower class origins compared to Bruce’s extreme upper class background.....but rather that given that Dick Grayson was allegedly exceptional from his debut, a child prodigy capable of feats of acrobatics few in the world could match....he could never actually be classified as an everyman. Rather, his core archetype is that of the fish out of water. The individual taken from the comforts of his original pond and thrust into a limelight of an entirely different nature from the one he grew up in, with the two not at all being interchangeable, and necessitating he change and adapt in dramatic and often unanticipated ways just to keep his footing in his new environs.

Its not incidental that his initial tragedy wasn’t JUST the loss of his parents, but rather the loss of his old routines, extended family, environment, way of life, expectations for the way his future would play out....it ALL vanished on the same night, never to return again. The loss of his parents was tragedy enough all on its own, but its really only one part of what Dick lost that night. He lost his entire footing. His frames of reference. Everything his life had previously prepared him for and everything he could have used as a familiar comfort or source of stability to lean on, if it had been ‘just’ his parents that he lost.

And I fundamentally don’t believe you ever get over THAT loss, no matter what peace you make with the loss of your loved ones or specific elements of that. Once you’ve experienced a shake-up of that size, once you have a bone-deep, visceral awareness of how completely your life can change in the blink of an eye, how you can effectively be set back to zero as though nothing you’ve previously accomplished matters (remember, he went from a kid whose name drew crowds on its OWN merits, based on what HE was capable of due to his own work and skills, the youngest of the Flying Graysons, capable of an acrobatic feat barely anyone else in the world could master......to being a kid who was only ever identified as in the context of Bruce Wayne having taken him in, as though his existence and worth were defined by someone else’s act of compassion rather than based on anything he’d ever done on his own, when the fact of the matter is even by age eight, he’d already accomplished a LOT)....

Like, the point is, you can’t go through a shake-up like that and ever fully FORGET how complete and total a change it was, how big a rewrite of your entire life story. 

That’s a trauma all its own, one that goes largely unacknowledged, and one that I don’t think Bruce and Alfred or anyone else fully realized was even there TO need addressing in the first place. So of course how could they ever fully address it, without realizing a need?

And I think Dick’s constant moves and self-reliance are actually born of that primal awareness that there are no guarantees, that nothing is truly permanent, that anything can be taken away in an instant.

He’s always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for everything to be taken away again - as people have pointed out in other posts, Dick can never seem to have nice things. Even the apartment building he lived in while in Bludhaven….that wasn’t some height of luxury by ANY stretch of the imagination…was lost to him, along with all the friends and neighbors and community he’d built among them, something evidenced by how highly they all spoke of him, even to a total stranger. And that’s not even getting into how even the CITY he sought to establish himself as a guardian over, like, he lost the city itself. The CITY!

Dick, I believe, insists on holding down 9-5 jobs and paying his own way and only touching money that comes from Bruce originally, when like…he has no other option or its to help someone else….just like he’s resistant to ever fully putting down roots, at least none so deep that he can’t uproot himself and quickly relocate without ripping off a piece of himself and leaving it still buried in the ground behind him. 

Because deep down, he’s always bracing for the next seismic event that’ll rip everything away from him, and he wants to be prepared. He WANTS to make sure he never takes anything for granted. That if he loses it all - hell, if he and Bruce fight again and Bruce decides once and for all to take it all away from Dick, cut their ties, something that would very much be a deep-rooted insecurity for a kid with as massive of abandonment issues as Dick must have given his childhood and a number of events after that…

Dick I think needs to trust that he’ll be capable of surviving, of standing on his own two feet, if the worst should ever happen again and he’s left on his own again. His self-reliance and obsessive need for independence aren’t a REJECTION of anyone else or anything Bruce or others have ever done for him.

They’re simply the defense mechanisms of a boy who was once upon a time torn away from everything he knew and in certain origins was then on top of that plunged into hellish circumstances before finding a refuge with Bruce….

And the man that boy grew up to be, who is determined to never be caught in a situation like that again, where his very survival might otherwise require the kindness of a stranger….with Dick knowing better than to count on lightning striking twice there, and him getting lucky a second time.

So in a lot of ways, my core perception of Dick having spent more time growing up in the luxury of Wayne Manor than any of the other kids is that its largely irrelevant to who he grew up to be. Because he was still more than old enough by the time he arrived that he had formative experiences all his own that no amount of time was sufficient to overwrite and exchange for new ones.

His experiences are so extreme in terms of the loss of all forms of stability, that the SHAPE that stability takes in the periods where his life IS stable, is largely unimportant. Because its the absence of stability that’s the defining recurrence in his life. Even the stability offered by his childhood in Wayne Manor eventually gave way to canon where he left the Manor before he was even eighteen, as well as canon where no matter how it was ultimately reversed, he was for a time affected by having the ability to call the Manor his home STRIPPED AWAY FROM HIM. Thus even when Bruce did ultimately welcome him back, there still retained an awareness that even the fact that this had happened in the first place was a reminder that even THIS was something Dick could lose, that no matter how stable his childhood there had been at times, it couldn’t in and of itself be COUNTED as a source of stability due to the simple fact that his ability to call it his home HADN’T turned out to be an irrevocable constant. 

And so this is another of those areas where I think its fundamentally an oversight to have members of the family commenting on Dick’s self-reliance or tendencies to relocate himself, let alone in any kind of critical capacity......

If there’s not going to be an acknowledgment within the family or by the people raising these criticisms like, what kind of a role the family themselves have played in Dick feeling a NEED to have these tendencies in the first place.

If someone doesn’t trust in any place he lives in to ever truly be a constant in his life, truly permanent, that anything can be taken away in the right circumstances....and you yourself have done something that has made him feel or given him reason TO leave a place he’s found stability in at some point in the past....you kiiiiiinda forsake your right to be critical of his inability to see any place as permanent or constant, y’know?

Like, insert Miranda Whatshername gif or Meryl Streep peering down her glasses and going oh I see, you think this has nothing to do with you.

So I’d argue that Dick’s insistence on simulating the average person’s reality of livelihood, even when he has other means and funds available to him….just as his insistence on being as solely responsible for the well-being of the place or people he sees as his responsibilities, being single-minded about relying only on himself for tasks that he sees as ultimately having nothing to do with someone other than himself, etc....

All that is in my opinion BECAUSE he’s so firmly attached to the reality that anything and everything can be taken away, at ANY given moment. That he can be reduced to having nothing and no one he can depend on BEYOND just his own innate skills and experiences, the only things he trusts to be truly unable to be stripped from him by others.

If you ask me, one of the core aspects of Dick’s characterization throughout his adulthood in canon is SPECIFICALLY his fear that everything he cares about, or trusts, or relies on…can be taken away from him or lost. 

And his determination to make sure that he’ll be able to survive even if that should ever happen again.

[geenawrites]

'Black Widow' and undermining Dramatic Intent (II)

[PART ONE]

The 'Civil War' Effect

4): Elements that could’ve made Black Widow Natasha's personal journey are reduced to quick conversational bites told to Natasha instead of experienced by Natasha and the audience first hand.

The film could've built the story around her family selling her off to the government (on some eugenics mess). It could've set the stage for the subplot regarding her mother’s search for her until she was murdered, and Natasha trying to learn about her past pre-assassin.

For all the moments where we simply see her on her own, a lot of that alone time isn't used to explore how she feels, what she's thinking, or a personal throughline. It's just a montage of her looking gloomy and wearing comfy sweatshirts.

The only time Natasha truly feels like she is the emotional center of the movie is the opening act of the film. There, she’s portrayed by Ever (Gabo) Anderson and not Scarlett Johansson.

And as a film touted-as a vehicle for Johansson, that is bad. But also underlines why Florence Pugh’s Yelena was considered the real protagonist of the movie.

Black Widow could've been about Natasha wanting to reclaim her past from the Red Room (her abductors) because she reunites with her sister and parents (her surrogate family), and needed to finally deal with the consequences of killing Antonia (her ghost).

Instead, Black Widow is really Yelena’s story and emotional journey. Yelena justifies the presence of Alexei and Melina more-so than anything in Natasha’s history. As centered as Natasha was in the prologue, it works more as a establishing point for Yelena versus something like Natasha’s lost family or working with Clint Barton in Budapest.

Yelena being tasked to save the Widows (by the elder Widow who created the mind control cure), killing Dreykov, and destroying the Red Room are immediate issues that directly impact her arc and development as a character. Natasha is largely along for the ride, bringing Yelena where she needs to be in each act.

Natasha isn't as centered in her own her film as she should be. Simply compare the structure of her story to the structure in the Captain America (x2), Ant Man (x2), Thor (x3), and Iron Man (x3) films, and how those narratives focus on Steve Rogers, Scott Lang, Thor Odinson, and Tony Stark. Those films are about their emotional journeys while maintaining a healthy supporting cast that don't overshadow them.

Black Widow in comparison feels more like Captain America: Civil War, which is more of an Avengers film than it is a Captain America story. The emotional center of Civil War is Tony Stark and Zemo. Steve and his cast are simply underpinning Stark and Zemo's arcs. It also tries to introduce a new character (Black Panther) with the exact same story beat (revenge) as Stark and Zemo, and a MCU-wide subplot (Sakovia Accords) that ultimately goes nowhere later on.

The consequences of Civil War "Avengering" a solo film are on display in Black Widow in a big way. It's introducing new characters, and trying to tackle a trilogy's worth of storylines (the Red Room, Budapest, the Widow family, Civil War-fallout).

She doesn't even get a decent postmortem send off. The post credits, wherein Yelena mourns Natasha, is turned into a comedic skit and a teaser for the Hawkeye series. It's not allowed to remain a moment of mourning between two sisters separated by literal death.

As an Executive Producer of the film, I know this was not lost on Johansson. She might be an awful person, but she doesn’t strike me as someone so unaware of her environment that she set the stage to be undermined by her co-star. No, I think, given the timing, Johansson knew this was always going to be about setting up her successor.

Wrong Time, Wrong Place

Choosing to set Black Widow after Civil War was just a poor choice on Marvel’s part. Natasha circa 2016 has more or less come-to-terms with her history as a state-sponsored assassin for both Russia and the United States. Her arc as seen throughout the Avengers and Captain America films has come full circle following the events of The Winter Soldier. Now all she has left going forward is the arc dealing with Thanos' genocide and resurrecting everyone.

There is nothing to mine in terms of personal character drama because, at this point, she has laid it all to rest. It's nothing that torments her akin to Bucky trying to square away with his past as an amnesiac assassin.

All of Natasha’s threads are focused on the break-up of the Avengers. At first, seemed like her arc was going to be about not falling back into bad habits (being mistrustful of everyone). That it was going to deal with how she felt let down by the team (after trying to be the reasonable party among everyone), but the film doesn't really commit.

After that one conversation in Budapest, "getting the Avengers back together" isn't even a focal point. We just get awkward callbacks that tell the audience that Natasha isn't on the same level as Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor.

Yelena forgiving her family is used to tack on the sudden parallel idea that Natasha has been convinced she can personally bring the Avengers together again as a surrogate family once things work with her Widow Family.

Again, even in her own film, Natasha is playing the sacrificial matriarch of a Boy’s Club (whose event films she features only as a supporting character. Something I think people are only just realizing). That says to me the MCU never valued her beyond her ties to the male Avenger cast.

”You’re such a mom!” becomes a lot less funny in that context.

If this film was immediately set after The Winter Soldier or even Age of Ultron, wherein all of her history and SHIELD’s was leaked for public record, then there might’ve been a chance for an emotionally resonant story arc.

How would a Natasha scrambling to create new covers, and new ways to protect herself, deal with the sudden public attention of the world knowing that she was a foreign assassin that bought her way into the United States and became a celebrity superhero? How would a post-Winter Soldier solo film deal with Natasha’s past in way that she didn't become overshadowed by her own supporting cast?

How would a post-Age of Ultron solo film handle her past as informed by her nightmare (which stuck closer to her history as a trained dancer in the comics) on top of the events of The Winter Soldier?

But even as a post-Civil War narrative, Black Widow should've really cared to explore how Natasha felt about having to revisit her history with the Red Room, on top of being betrayed by Alexei and Melina. Instead of giving all those emotional beats to Yelena, actually show us Natasha confronting them beyond “it wasn’t real!”

How would the story turn out if parent with the biggest hand in the facilitation of her abuse (Alexei) wasn't turned into a flat comic relief character? What if he actually got chance to really consider her grievances, show remorse for his actions, without being turned into a “ha, ha, he’s do dumb (and fat)!” punchline (after setting him up as the total opposite in the prologue)?

Melina could've been an interesting co-antagonist working with Dreykov, but the film skirts past how she is complicit in the harm that her daughters faced (Yelena especially) with a fake Heel Turn moment that only undermined Dreykov as a threat.

And that’s really the problem with Black Widow. The film, or rather Marvel Studios, doesn’t want to really tackle Natasha’s past or pain like they were willing to do with Steve Rogers in The First Avenger, and The Winter Soldier.

Maybe because that would mean approaching the story with the emotional maturity of The Bourne Identity, a PG-13 film that was plenty violent without being excessive. It was also emotionally resonate by dealing with the fact that Jason Bourne was, pre-amnesia, a US assassin that did awful shit.

Instead we get a plot about mind-control, and magic red dust that can break said mind control (that apparently requires invasive surgery of the brain).

Whedon seemed comfortable with getting close to the actual violence that was asked of Natasha (vs. done to) by the Russian government as a kid. The screenplay for Black Widow can talk past Natasha willingly doing awful things, but doesn’t want to confront that by having her or Yelena deal with an army of assassins who are walking down the same path Natasha did, fighting and killing for another government without any sort of mind control.

This is why Natasha's assassination of “Dreykov’s Daughter” (Antonia) as the thing that happened in Budapest also doesn't land. The movie doesn't want to deal with how Natasha learned to live with murdering a child to buy her freedom into America. They make it so that she didn’t kill her, actually, just gave her a bad case of pizza face. She’s not even the one that pulls the trigger, the film suggests that it was Hawkeye.

Her mustache-twirling villain of a father, who somehow survived the explosion and building collapse with zero burns or broken bones, is the one who does all the truly horrible things to his daughter (turning her into a mindless slave).

The Original Sin that Natasha is defined by is swept under the rug in the same way her history as a killer is blurred by the script. It’s akin to rewriting Xena’s history with Callisto as the killer of her family and village, and deciding, “No, Xena didn’t kill them. They all survived with minor burns! Callisto can now forgive Xena!”

Natasha's Antagonist

Dreykov is a weak antagonist/villain because the screenwriting seems determined to accredit the abuse of the Red Room entirely to him instead of making a systemic issue. What started off as a clandestine organization for the KGB throughout most of the MCU is rewritten in Black Widow as the personal playground of a thinly veiled Harvey Weinstein analogue who puppeteers his personal assassins to do bad things, thus rendering them all innocent of their wrongdoings. It makes them "perfect victims" in way.

(Johansson has gone on record saying that this film was influenced by the #MeToo Movement. Well, celebrification of it, anyway)

Dreykov doesn’t challenge Natasha, or her family. There’s never an immediate danger or stakes being driven by Dreykov. He’s not doing something they have to stop “before time runs out”, he doesn’t have anything on any of the characters that could push their actions.

He takes a backseat to the family hijinks, so the journey to finding and destroying the Red Room has no urgency (Natasha being dead already notwithstanding). As the supposed architect of their misery, he’s about as threatening as Mason (Natasha’s Black Best Friend who buys her things while in hiding).

Dreykov fails like the rest of the MCU’s villains (not named Erik Killmonger) because there's no depth to the character. There's no real loyalty to the character as a demonstration of his power or influence. Again, all his victims are blameless in their violent actions. No one with speaking lines or face time (that isn't a G.I Joe grunt) is working with him because they believe in his goals or ideology.

Complicating that matter is that the script never reveals what his goals or ideologies are besides, "I can create chaos with an army of assassins. I am so evil."

It’s wild to me that so many are rushing to defend the implementation of this sloppily written (and miscast) character because, “he works as a villain because he's a human trafficker” and “he mind controlled his own daughter.”

“He does terrible things”, or a character representing awful things that happen in the real world, isn't enough to make an effective villain. If that was all it took, then 90% the MCU’s villains wouldn’t be so forgetabble.

(He’s not real, I shouldn’t be reading posts like, “he doesn’t deserve screentime b/c he’s an awful human being! He earned his lazy death scene.” Girl, what???)

If you’re gonna tackle human/child trafficking as defined by one antagonist, then really make it part of the story. Make it something that Natasha and Yelena are actively trying to stop. Don’t montage it over a bad Nirvana cover and then shift gears into a G.I. Joe scenario in a floating fortress.

If you're gonna make Dreykov the abuser of so many women, then make it crucial to your protagonist's narrative. Don't add a silly Angry Beavers plot where his stinky musk can control a woman's bodily functions because as a weak analogue to "how men police women's bodies".

Because Natasha has no real conflict with Dreykov, confronting him in the climax goes nowhere. Dreykov is Yelena’s antagonist. It's why Yelena gets to kill him instead of Natasha, so it would've made more sense for her to confront him instead.

The film eventually establishes he's no real threat to Natasha because the writing pulled a Xanatos. The character feels like he exists only so Johansson can sass him, and make a callback to the Loki Interrogation scene (a scene that only worked because of the audience misdirection.)

Dreykov could've been an effective villain if he was anything like the Headmistress characters in the Samee-Waid Black Widow series from 2016.

The Headmistress and Anya (the new Headmistress later on) were characters with emotional connections to Natasha and the Widow children she was trying to save. They taught these girls to believe in the totalitarian philosophy of the ruling class. Natasha and the other Widows couldn't live without them until they were able to escape their influence.

The Headmistresses were women, which makes it plain that women are also perpetrators of abuse. It isn’t just something that men do, which is how this script has approached this subject entirely (Captain Marvel did the same thing as well). Abuse being exclusively a male theater of action.

Antonia's death could've been meaningful in regards to Natasha and Dreykov as characters if Dreykov cared that Antonia was murdered by a Red Room assassin. Natasha admitting that she killed his daughter and regretted it would've made a lot more impact than just having him shrug it off because he's so heartless and so evil.

Or, as other people have said, imagine if it was Antonia who was the antagonist gunning after Natasha because of what she did, not only to her, but her father as well.

It would not only render the mind-control plot pointless, it would re-center the focus on Natasha, and force the writers to do something else with Yelena, Alexei, and Melina (assuming they're even necessary in this scenario). Then, Natasha would have a genuinely threatening antagonist because the stakes are personal on both sides.

It would've been a hellva lot more meaningful than using Taskmasker as a plot-twist (after hyping the character up as the controller of the Red Room and Natasha's personal nemesis).

Callisto’s story as a villain resonates because she cared about what she lost, and Xena knew there was no real forgiveness for what she did to her. Imagine if they approached Natasha’s role in Antonia’s death like that.

(But that's probably asking for too much nuance from Disney and Marvel.)

Conclusions

In story that wants to be about the abused reconciling with their past and family, the film effectively robs the abused of their autonomy by going the extra of mile of making them zombies. In the same way the Star Wars sequel trilogy avoided Finn’s history as an indoctrinated and enslaved Stormtrooper, Black Widow doesn’t want to deal with the ramifications of indoctrination.

How people buy into and protect organizations that strip them of their humanity by making them complicit in violent systems. Oh, sure, they’ll nod and wink at it (as they do with Natasha and Melina’s past), but they won’t go any further than that.

Instead of dealing with how a forced hysterectomy effects Natasha physically and emotionally, we get a joke that isn’t any better than Natasha calling herself a monster, or the “time of the month” joke that got rebuked by the director and the cast.

Instead of reflecting on her time with SHIELD and the United States, the United States is portrayed as "the good-guys who gave her a real family” (ignoring even the half-hearted criticism of the US that The Winter Soldier made), while Russia is still out there doing nefarious Cold War Things and ruining people's families. All of which just feeds into uncritical Russian stereotypes and Red Scare that the film’s foundation is built on.

I enjoyed the film, but the more I think about it, the more I realize Black Widow really does nothing except undermine Natasha's darker elements and self-imposed redemption arc (as written by Whedon).

On top of rewriting key elements about the Red Room (the movies being broken as the comics is a true irony), It minimizes Natasha's violent past to make her into a clean, and boring superhero whose solo film thinks lamp-shading sexism is the same as subverting it.